Most of you that have stumbled onto this blog are probably aware of my endless gripes about Los Angeles and its culture (or lack thereof). Sure, there is plenty of great stuff around this city to enrich our lives, but finding it is not always easy. Also, I'm mostly speaking on a day to day basis, and how starved I often feel for that East Coast culture.
However, there is one thing that I love about this city, and that is its classical music station. Now the commercial classical station went off the air about a year or so ago, but the public broadcasting station, KUSC (affiliated with the university) is alive and kicking. This classical station is the best I have heard ever, in any city, and I am so thankful it's on the air. It has great radio hosts, NO commercials, and they play works in their entirety, something that is not possible on commercial stations. The musical selections are great too. You can hear plenty of the standard masterpieces, but also many new things to broaden your horizons (pardon the cliche).
My favorite host is Jim Svejda, a guy who speaks with a superiority complex/nasally sounding voice (which I used to find annoying, but now enjoy) and knows more about more topics than you could imagine. And he is not afraid to criticize performances and pieces, which I also find refreshing. They frequently host great interviews with performers (pianist Leon Fleischer) and even current movie composers (Dario Marianelli of Pride and Prejudice)
Tonight I heard on the station a piece written by one of the radio announcers, Alan Chapman. He wrote a piece called Peter and Mr. Wolf, which you might notice, sounds a lot like Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. Peter and the Wolf is a cute (but also very well written) children's piece that features a narrator and that uses different instruments of the orchestra to tell a story, each instrument representing a different animal. This piece by Alan Chapman was surprisingly great, taking his cue from the Prokofiev piece but featuring Mr. Wolf as a mean spirited 8th grade science teacher. This is just an example of why we are so fortunate to have a station like KUSC when many cities are losing their classical stations.
If you live in a city which has no classical station, you can go to KUSC's website and listen live to its streaming broadcast. Hurray for technology! Just click on this link HERE and choose your media player. You can also click the programming tab and view complete playlists. Enjoy the music!
