It's fathers and sons, mothers, sisters, and a child on Now Is the Time, Saturday, January 11th at 9 pm Eastern on the all-classical stream at wrti.org and WRTI-HD2. Jeremy Beck's String Quartet No. 2 has two movements—I. Fathers, and II. Sons—that regard affinity and opposition in warm and dramatic music. Jerome Kitzke bangs on a toy piano and chants wildly in The Animist Child, a passionate, beguiling work he wrote to celebrate a birth. In Sacred Sisters, Victoria Bond uses ancient chant to celebrate heroines of the Bible: Esther, Ruth, Judith.
Marc Satterwhite looks at the tragedies visited by Chile's Pinochet regime on its citizens, by focusing on The Widows of Calama, who searched the Atacama Desert for the bodies of the missing. Originally for contrabassoon and piano, Satterwhite reworked it for bass clarinet, and the show closes with another wind instrument, the Northumbrian smallpipes. Dick Hensold, in his medley of dances that include Dad's Fantastic! Jig, always seems to walk that edge between poignancy and joy.
PROGRAM:
Jeremy Beck: String Quartet No. 2, “Fathers and Sons”
Jerome Kitzke: The Animist Child
Victoria Bond: Sacred Sisters
Marc Satterwhite: Las Viudas de Calama (The Widows of Calama)
Dick Hensold: Dad’s Fantastic! Jig / Winnifred Foley’s / Bruce Bowers / Dad’s Fantastic! Jig
Every Saturday night at 9 Eastern, Kile Smith brings you Now Is the Time, all styles of contemporary concert music by living American composers on WRTI's all-classical stream (just go to wrti.org and click on the Listen: Classical button at the top of any page). Here are the recording details and complete schedule. In the Philadelphia area with an HD radio? Dial us up at 90.1 FM-HD2, or find all the frequencies here, depending on where you are, from the Shore to the Poconos to Harrisburg to Dover. Thanks for supporting American contemporary music on WRTI!