The New York Philharmonic on the air

Synopsis

If, on today’s date in the year 1930, you happened to be flipping through the pages of the New York Times, you would have seen several ads for radios, including one that argued that purchasing a radio was a good investment.

Just one year after the infamous 1929 stock market crash, New Yorkers might have been a little leery of investing in anything, and disposable income for most Americans was severely limited during the Great Depression that followed.

Still, that same October 5th edition of the Times announced that the New York Philharmonic would commence live nation-wide broadcasts of its Sunday afternoon concerts that very day. Music by Weber, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky would be featured, with the visiting German conducting Erich Kleiber leading the orchestra.

And that wasn’t all: the rest of the Philharmonic’s 1930-31 season, led by the orchestra’s new music director, Arturo Toscanini, would also be broadcast live on subsequent Sunday afternoons.

For music lovers, that radio purchase started to look like a pretty good investment after all.

And so, thanks to the Philharmonic broadcasts, in addition to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, radio audiences coast-to-coast were introduced as well to some of the new works of young American composers like Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

In recent years, archive recordings of many of those famous New York Philharmonic broadcasts have even been released as compact disc sets sold to benefit the Philharmonic’s current activities and programs.

Music Played in Today's Program

Wolfgang Mozart (1756 – 1791) Symphony No. 39 New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, cond. Sony 60973

Roy Harris (1898 – 1979) Symphony No. 3 New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, cond. Sony 60594

On This Day

Births

• 1875 - British composer and organist Cyril Bradley Rootham, in Bristol;

• 1962 - American composer and pianist Ken Noda, in New York City;

Deaths

• 1880 - French composer Jacques Offenbach, age 61, in Paris;

• 1940 - Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, age 40, in Mexico City;

Premieres

• 1762 - Gluck: opera, "Orfeo ed Euridice" (1st version in Italian), in Vienna at the Kaiserliches Hoftheater;

• 1898 - Elgar: cantata, "Caractacus," at the Leeds Festival.

• 1972 - Argento: "A Ring of Time," by the Minneapolis Symphony, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting;

• 1973 - Havergal Brian: Symphony No. 28, by the New Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting;

• 1988 - Daniel Pinkham: "Sonata da Camera" (Chamber Sonata) for flute (alternating alto flute) and viola, at Jordan Hall of the New England Conservatory in Boston, by flutist Fenwick Smith and violist Burton Fine;

• 2001 - Stephen Paulus: "A Place for Hope" for chorus and chamber ensemble, at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., by members of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra with the Choral Arts Ensemble of Rochester, Minn., conducted by Andreas Delfs;

Others

• 1867 - The British musicologist George Grove (of Grove Dictionary fame) and the British composer Arthur Sullivan (of later Gilbert & Sullivan fame) arrive in Vienna, seeking lost works of Schubert;

• 1930 - The New York Philharmonic begins its famous series of weekly Sunday afternoon national broadcasts with a program from Carnegie Hall conducted by Erich Kleiber; The first-ever radio broadcast of the New York Philharmonic had occurred on August 12, 1922, when a summer-time concert from Lewisohn Stadium conducted by Willem van Hoogstraten was relayed locally over WJZ in New York.