Concerts from The Library of Congress
In 2009, the Library of Congress Music Division and CD Syndications will be launching the second year of a new classical music radio series to air nationwide. Bill McGlaughlin, hosts "Concerts from the Library of Congress," featuring performances held in the Library's historic Coolidge Auditorium.
Kicking off the series in 2009 on 100 stations around the country will be a terrific lineup of artists, including legacy performances by Leonard Bernstein and the Beaux Arts Trio, and performances by Europa Galante, Jennifer Larmore, Ensemble Matheus, Lynn Harrell, the Borromeo Quartet, Iva Bittova and the Skampa Quartet, Concerto Copenhagen, Quatuor Ysaye, the Holloway-Linden-Mortensen Trio, the Orion Quartet, David Krakauer, the Floristan Trio, The Pacifica String Quartet, the Del Sol Quartet, the St. Petersburg Quartet, Michael Tree, the Imani Winds and many others.
In it's second year, this new series marks a return to the Library's distinguished broadcasting tradition of more than eight decades. Concerts of the 1925 Coolidge Auditorium season were broadcast by the Naval Broadcasting Service. In 1930, the five-year-old National Broadcasting Company began trial broadcasts for the Library from its studios in New York. With the 1933 season, Library concerts were aired regularly over the NBC and CBS networks, drawing a national audience for chamber music and beginning a remarkable run of weekly broadcasts that would last more than 60 years. “Concerts from the Library of Congress” aired internationally during the 1990s, with syndication by Radio France, Radio Netherlands, Italy's RAI Tre and national networks in Australia, New Zealand and Russia.
Listeners will also have the chance to visit the treasure vaults of the Library's Music Division in a special online series of companion packages created for each program. Original manuscripts and sketches by J. S.Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Bernstein, Gershwin and many others, as well as letters, photographs and memorabilia, will be accessible via the Library's Web site at www.loc.gov/radioconcerts. Offering unique documents and artifacts, such as Paganini's private pocket diary and a handwritten 1765 account of an eyewitness interview with a 9-year-old Mozart and a rediscovered piece of Rossini, Library curators capture a glimpse of the Music Division's vast collections. With more than 22 million individual items, it is the world's largest music archive. Audio and video excerpts of the concerts will be included, as well as podcasts for selected programs from the Library's site at http://www.loc.gov/radioconcerts/.
Producers for the radio series are Vic Muentzer from CD Syndications and Anne McLean from the Library of Congress.