Not what they are know for:

Okay, I suspect I'm reaching for it here, but suppose the world knew John Lennon only as "a victim of an assassin". If you look for information about him, all you would find about him is the date of death, the location, the assassin, the assassin's punishment, etc. Nothing about what he did prior to the bullet.

Now image the same thing about a composer. You want to hear music by him, but what do you get?

Take poor old Vincenzo Bellini! I noticed that someone checked on his broadcasts on the 8 major FM classical music stations I monitor. I looked too and discovered that his most popular piece is the Oboe Concerto in E flat. So old Mr. Bellini is an oboe composer. Great! Now I do seem to remember that he wrote something called "Norma". And "La Sonnambla". And "il Puritani" and "il Pirati". They must be small pieces for woodwinds or something. Were he still alive, I suspect he would be shut himself into a closet and say "I give up! My music isn't appreciated in this silly century!"

Opera isn't an art form on the commercial FM radio stations anymore -- they take too long.

What about opera?

In most of my posts, I complain about the lack of broadcasts of lengthier works. Mahler, Bruckner, Beetoven's Ninth, "Symphony Fantastique" just aren't broadcast over the FM stations I've been monitoring. Well opera falls into the "don't bother with it" syndrome --- except for the live from the Metropolitan opera on Saturdays during the Met's season.

My local station KVOD, when it was a commercial station, would broadcast "Sunday night at the opera" around 8 pm each Sunday. With some good commentary, often with comments from the local Opera Colorado performers and officials, you could depend on listening to an entire opera.

KVOD was tranformed from a commercial station to part of a public radio duo. KVOD broadcast classical music 24 hours each day, with an "In-depth News" talk radio on KCFR with "All Things Considered" and similar programs. With this switch, opera was deep-sixed. The Sunday program disappeared, the local support of Opera Colorado diminished and opera lovers were sent to their CD collections.

Clearly masters like Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccinni -- you know who I mean, are only worthy of fragments from their works. Sad, sad, sad.

"Fantastique" slights

Berlioz's Symphony "Fantastique" is another one of the longer pieces in the standard classical repetoire. It's a fairly long symphony, typically lasting nearly 58 minutes. It has 5 movements, "Reveries", "A Ball", "Scenes in the Country", "March to the Scaffold" and "Dreams of a Witches Sabbath". It's one of the early examples of program music, where the composer intends the listener to "hear" the story. Berlioz wrote his own program for it, leaving his audience the hints about his own passions. See
http://www.hberlioz.com/Scores/sfantastique.htm for more details.

Why bother to look at this? Well, it's another example of where the classical broadcasters are chopping up a masterpiece to fit their own time schedules. Sure it's long, but it's worth it and it's a grand listening experience. I just heard two performances by the Colorado Music Festival orchestra under Michael Christie. It involved a large orchestra, 100+ musicians, with 2 tympany and 2 bass drums. So what does the poor FM radio listener get to here for this work? Very little.

Here is a table showing broadcast this year. There are two columns about broadcasts, the first showing the number of complete performances and the second broadcasts of an individual movement.

Station	Full	Partial
KUSC Los Angeles	2	1
CL24 Minnesota	0	11
KCME Colorado Springs, CO	5	4
KING Seattle, WA	4	2
WBMH Birminham, AL	3	0
WGUC Cincinatti, OH	2	12
WQXR New York, NY	5	17
KVOD Denver, CO	2	1

Sad isn't it! Why can't these stations leave art alone? If a composer wants to compose 5 movements, then play 5 movements. And it if is a masterpiece like "Fantastique" let us hear it occasionally, not just a few times each year.