It’s an all-Mozart-opera Valentine’s Day coming up tomorrow. On Philadelphia’s WRTI-FM at 1:00 pm Eastern time, you can enjoy a 1986 Metropolitan Opera production of Idomeneo, featuring Frederica von Stade and Hildegard Behrens and conducted by Jeffrey Tate. A hour later on Vienna’s radio klassik Stephansdom at 2:00 pm, Richard Schmitz will review a variety of productions of La Clemenza di Tito, featuring interpretations by conductors such as René Jacobs, Charles Mackerras, Pinchas Steinberg, Christopher Hogwood, and John Eliot Gardiner. A new production of Tito is coming up next month at the Wiener Staatsoper, so it’s a good time to revisit what’s been done with it in the past. Both broadcasts are available for the streaming.
Today is also UNESCO’s World Radio Day. “It is a Day to thank broadcasters for the news they deliver, the voices they amplify and the stories they share,” reads the Web site, and although they’re looking at the heinous use of AI in the medium, it still provides food for thought. I’ve been a radio enthusiast since I built my first crystal radio set as a kid, and in high school I hosted a few “High School Hours” that ran on WAZL, the local AM station. (I was told by the DJ who was running the show, Scott McAndrews, that I had a very good voice for radio — something I’ve often been told since then — which makes me think I may have missed my calling.) I also spent a year as the president of my college radio station, and in the early 1990s, when I lived in Central Europe, the BBC World Service and especially ÖRF’s late, lamented English-language broadcast Blue Danube Radio on shortwave got me through more than a few evenings.
Although television beat out radio as the most popular broadcast medium many years ago, and podcasts have revived the form somewhat, I still retain a weakness for it. Like many kids my age, I enjoyed tuning in to distant radio stations on my small transistor radio when I was 10 or 11 or so, and I think what is best about it is the sense of connection that it engenders between the broadcasters and their listeners, especially when the broadcast is live. First, of course, is the feeling that you’re one of many people listening to the same broadcast in real time, a feeling of community. But second, and maybe just as important, is the sense that there’s a personal relationship between the DJ or radio personality and the individual listener, however many dozens, hundreds, or thousands of miles may be separating you in distance — in time, you’re somehow listening to the same things together. The great radio personalities like Jean Shepherd exploited this personal connection in a way that no podcast or television show could emulate, which testifies to the uniqueness of the medium.
So I lift my glass to radio today. I’m not sure anybody else is celebrating, but if they are, I hope they’re listening with me.
