Alex Arbaugh (Sun-Dried Opossum) will pull into Offbeat Roadhouse Friday night, January 21, for a concert which will also be broadcast on WTJU. This is a free event, open to all. Masks are required for all attendees.  You can also listen to Offbeat Roadhouse on the radio (91.1 FM) or on-line, and even video stream it at WTJU’s Facebook […]

For January 2022 the Classics a Day Team decided to go back a century. The challenge this month is to post classical works associated with the year 1922. It can be a composition that was completed,  published, or premiered that year. It can even be a work recorded for the first time in 1922. It […]

The two things I like best about this release are 1) Sharon Kam’s playing, and 2) the program. The playing — Sharon Kam is a world-class performer. Listening to her play is always a joy. Her clarinet has a rich, dark tone that’s never muddy in the lower register. And her upper register is equally […]

Musically, Marianna Martines was always in good company. She took keyboard lessons from Haydn. Metastasio — opera librettist and Poet Laureate of the Austrian Empire — was a close family friend. She played four-hand piano sonatas with Mozart. In her lifetime, she was highly regarded as a pianist, a singer, and a composer. This release […]

Johann Wilhelm Hertel is classed today as a transitional composer. He was active in the mid-1700s and wrote in the Empfindsamer Stil. The idea behind this “emotional style” was to express natural emotion. This was a departure from the formalized — and focussed — emotional expression of the Baroque. From the Empfindsamer Stil, Classical Era composers would go […]

This release completes Naxos’ cycle of Mieczyslaw Weinberg Chamber Symphonies. The East-West Chamber ORchestra released Nos. 1 and 3 back in 2019. They conclude with Nos. 2 and 4. The level of musicianship in the East-West Chamber Orchestra is quite high. Its members are an international group of concertmasters and soloists. In my review of […]