Classical Music

All day, all night (daily playlist) (Beethoven Satellite overnight playlist)

Classical 88.7 features a stellar collection of music from throughout the ages, presented by hosts with backgrounds deeply rooted in the music of the masters. Program hosts include Pat Alexander, Steve Blatt, Dan Drayer, David Rutherford, Charlie Samson, Monika Vischer, and Stephanie Wendt. Our overnight host is Peter Van De Graaff from WFMT's Beethoven Satellite Network.

Exploring Music

Weekdays, noon - 1:00 p.m. (program schedule)

Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin will enlighten, educate and entertain you, enriching your listening experience. Peabody Award winning host, Bill McGlaughlin with his in-depth knowledge of and deep passion for classical music along with his enthusiasm, imagination and spontaneity, guides you through a new musical theme each week, devoting five days to a single topic. Bill has been everything in music, from educator, performer, conductor, and music director, to broadcast host and his most challenging career of all, that of composer.

Performance Today

Weekdays & Saturday, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. (program schedule)

"Classical music is a living, breathing art form with meaning and resonance for our lives today — something always changing and evolving and astounding and, at its best, revolutionary," says Performance Today host Fred Child. This award-winning radio program features the finest live contemporary performances from around the nation and makes the concert hall experience immediate and accessible for well over one million Americans.

Chicago Symphony

Monday, 8:00 - 10:00 p.m. (symphony website)

From Symphony Center, the home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Lisa Simeone presents this program of unique format and engaging and lively content. Gain deeper insight into the music and programmatic themes found within the CSO's concert season; hear interviews with CSO musicians, guest artists, and composers; and hear the stories behind the CSO's rich heritage of recordings and the Orchestra's illustrious history in Chicago.

Jerusalem Symphony

Tuesday, 8:00 - 10:00 p.m. (symphony website)

Now in its 70th season, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra has, since its inception, performed a wide repertoire of works, balancing masterpieces of the past with the most exciting modern musical compositions; repertoire ranging from the baroque and the classical periods, through the romantic period and reaching our times. The orchestra has always encouraged Israeli composers, in particular, by commissioning and performing their works.

“In the new ‘Musical Discoveries’ series of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, conductor Leon Botstein aims to acquaint the audience with unfamiliar, little-known works. This approach is a welcome and refreshing change from the conventional repertoire, and the orchestra, obviously intrigued by Botstein’s novel ideas of programming, took the performance of these unfamiliar works as a challenge and rendered them in an amazingly impressive as well as accurate way.” - a music critic for the Jerusalem Post

Live! At the Concertgebouw

Wednesday, 8:00 - 10:00 p.m. (program schedule)

Each year, the Committee for the Concertgebouw Foundation organizes some 400 concerts in the Main Hall and the Recital Hall of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Programs feature both Dutch and international musicians and a wide array of performances by world famous symphony orchestras to concerts for children, contemporary music, vocal concerts and world music.

Hans Haffmans and Cynthia Wilson of Radio Netherlands present phenomenal performances by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductors include Mariss Jansons, Bernard Haitink, Valery Gergiev and Sir Simon Rattle. Soloists include pianists Nikolai Lugansky and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, violinists Leonidas Kavakos and Frank Peter Zimmermann and mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena.

Music Mountain

Thursday, 8:00 - 10:00 p.m. (festival website)

Music Mountain is the oldest continuing summer chamber music festival in the United States, celebrating its 78th year from Gordon Hall in Connecticut. Built by Sears Roebuck in 1930, Gordon Hall is considered one of the truly great concert halls in the United States. Gordon Hall is lush and rich with splendid acoustics, providing resonant sound to every seat, and on the lawn where listeners can savor the music and nature at the same time. Music Mountain's mission, then and now, is education and performance of chamber music: more specifically, the string quartet.

Each year, Music Mountain presents the great quartet and quintet masterpieces by leading performers before a public audience by performers from many different nations around the world. The New York Times has written: "For string quartets, Music Mountain is the place to be." The Hartford Current has described Music Mountain as "...the string quartet capital of the universe."

La Jolla SummerFest

Friday, 8:00 - 9:00 p.m. (festival website)

The La Jolla Music Society is heir to a distinguished tradition reaching back to the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla founded in 1941 by Nikolai Sokoloff. In 1968, the present La Jolla Chamber Music Society was established, with the mission of presenting the finest classical music and musicians in the world. In its first seasons, the Society sponsored the La Jolla Chamber Orchestra and presented a few soloists; it has now evolved as the major presenter of classical music in Dan Diego County and a leading presenter in the West. San Diego's preeminent presenter of the performing arts and producer of the acclaimed SummerFest Chamber Music Festival enhance the understanding and appreciation of the performing arts through world-class performances and enriching education and outreach programs.

Santa Fe Chamber Festival

Friday, 9:00 - 10:00 p.m. (program schedule)

One of the world's leading performing arts festivals, The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival is known for its enduring commitment to tradition, artistic excellence, innovation, and vision. Music heard each week reflects the Festival's varied repertoire. In addition to presenting the great classics of the chamber music repertoire, the series will also include some outstanding though lesser known works, as well as commissions by Mangus Lindberg and Leon Kirschner.

Performers include Pinchas Zukerman, Anne Sofie von Otter, Yefim Bronfman, Eric Kim, Ida Kavafian, Yuja Wang, and the Orion String Quartet, along with numerous other world-class musicians. Many of these exceptional artists are regulars at this annual summer music festival. Each concert was recorded by Grammy award-winning engineer, Matt Snyder. The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival Artistic Director, Marc Neikrug, and WFMT program host, Kerry Frumkin, hosts this dynamic series.

LA Opera

Saturday, 12:00 - 4:00 p.m. (program schedule)

In just 22 seasons, Los Angeles Opera has become, under the leadership of The Eli and Edythe Broad General Director Plácido Domingo, the United States' fourth largest opera company and now "...stands out as a newly important force in American Opera." (Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times).

The 2007-08 season includes LA Opera's premiere of Beethoven's Fidelio, with Anja Kampe as Leonore and Klaus Florian Vogt as Florestan; Janáek's intensely dramatic and deeply moving Jenufa, with Karita Mattila as Jenufa, a second LA Opera premiere; Mozart's Don Giovanni starring Erwin Schrott as Don Giovanni; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, featuring John Treleaven as Tristan and Susan Foster as Isolde; Puccini's La Rondine, with Patricia Pacette as Magda and Marcus Haddock as Ruggero and the long forgotten masterpieces suppressed by the Nazis titled Recovered Voices, which comprises of two exceptional one-act operas: LA Opera and the U.S. premiere of Viktor Ullman's The Broken Jug and a new production of Alexander Zemlinsky's The Dwarf.

The LA Opera is one of four national opera companies heard during the spring and summer months on Classical 88.7. During Fall and Winter, The Metropolitan Opera season is presented, rounding out KWTU's commitment to bring you the finest in opera 52 weeks a year.

SymphonyCast

Saturday, 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. (program schedule)

Each week SymphonyCast presents a full-length concert by a national or international symphony orchestra. Concerts are drawn from Europe’s leading ensembles, along with U.S. orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra and The Cleveland Orchestra. SymphonyCast is currently heard on more than 90 public radio stations across the county each week. Host Brian Newhouse won a Peabody Award in May 2000 for writing "The Mississippi: River of Song," a seven-part music documentary distributed by Public Radio International.

Saint Paul Sunday

Sunday, noon - 1:00 p.m. (program schedule)

Each week for over 20 years, Saint Paul Sunday host Bill McGlaughlin has invited listeners into the studio where he brings musical performances of the highest order down to earth for all who tune in. Unafraid to ask the most basic questions, Bill reflects and cajoles, translates and turns pages - anything to illuminate the music - making that takes place each week on the program. "If I had been able to imagine this program as a kid," he says, "I think I would have been in ecstasy at the idea of having the whole wide world of music to run around in, and best of everything, to be able to bring my friends along."

New York Philharmonic

Sunday, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m. (program schedule)

This concert broadcast represents virtually the Orchestra's entire 2007-08 season. The New York Philharmonic is by far the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, and one of the oldest in the world. Founded in 1842 by a group of local musicians led by American-born Ureli Corelli Hill, the Orchestra currently plays some 180 concerts a year. On December 18, 2004, the Philharmonic gave its 14,000th concert - a milestone unmatched by any other orchestra in the world.

American conductor Lorin Maazel began his tenure as Music Director at the beginning of the 2002-03 season, 60 years after making his debut with the orchestra at the age of 12 at Lewisohn Stadium in New York, then the orchestra's summer venue. A second-generation American, born in 1930 in Paris, Mr. Maazel was raised and educated in the United States. He has conducted throughout Europe, Australia, North and South America, Japan, the former Soviet Union, and at most international festivals and opera houses, and has appeared with all the major symphony orchestras. His numerous recordings include complete symphonic cycles of Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky, as well as extensive operatic repertoire. He was the first American to appear at Bayreuth (in 1960), and was inducted into the American Classic Music Hall of Fame in 2002.

From The Top

Sunday, 6:00 - 7:00 p.m. (program schedule)

From the Top, with host Christopher O'Riley, is a weekly radio series that showcases the nation's most outstanding young classical musicians. Each one-hour program presents pre-collegiate musicians whose stunning individual performances are combined with lively interviews, unique pre-produced segments, lighthearted sketches and musical games. (program website)

The MTT Files

Sunday, 7:00 - 8:00 p.m. (program schedule)

Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) is acclaimed for his work as a conductor, composer and as one of the great communicators about music in the world today. In The MTT Files, MTT metaphorically pulls out some of his "files" - files full of ideas about music and art, and reminiscences of the legendary artists he has known throughout his career – to create eight very original and personal one-hour radio programs. The "house band" for The MTT Files is the San Francisco Symphony, with music throughout the episodes drawn from live recordings during the 12 years MTT has been Music Director of the Orchestra. Singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega joins MTT in hosting this radio series.

The MTT Files are part of the San Francisco Symphony's acclaimed Keeping Score project, which includes a national PBS television series, public radio series, interactive websites, and K-12 Education and Community programs, all designed to make classical music more accessible to people of all ages and musical backgrounds.

San Francisco Symphony

Sunday, 8:00 - 10:00 p.m. (symphony website)

Since its beginning in 1911, the San Francisco Symphony has been known for innovative programs that offer a spectrum of traditional repertory and new music. Today, the Orchestra's artistic vitality, recordings, and groundbreaking multimedia educational projects, carry its impact throughout American musical life.

"At a time when America's major orchestras are struggling to define their missions and maintain audiences, the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas is an exception." - The New York Times

The San Francisco Symphony has grown in stature and acclaim under such distinguished music directors as Henry Hadley, Alfred Hertz, the legendary Pierre Monteux, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart and Herbert Blomstedt, who continues as Conductor. Current Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas assumed the post in 1995. Together, he and the San Francisco Symphony have formed a musical partnership hailed as "one of the most inspiring and adventurous in the country." Maestro Tilson Thomas and the Orchestra have also been praised by the critics for their musicianship, for their innovative programming, for bringing the works of American composers to the fore, and for bringing new audiences into Davies Symphony Hall.