Jeanine Tesori: That was my nautical period, Manny. I was nautical.

[music]

Manny Ax: From WQXR and Carnegie Hall, this is Classical Music Happy Hour, hosted by me, pianist Manny Ax. Each episode, we'll speak with a special guest about their lives, listen to some of their favorite musical gems, play music-inspired games, and answer questions from you, our listeners. The New York Times said that my guest today can take apart music and put it back together, as well as any composer who's put note to paper.

She's a two-time Tony Award winner, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and in 2024, she became the first woman to open the Metropolitan Opera season in its 139-year history. Composer of Broadway favorites like Kimberly Akimbo, Fun Home, and operas like Blue and Grounded. Jeanine Tesori, what an honor to welcome you to the show.

Jeanine Tesori: It's an honor to be here, truly.

Manny Ax: Now, you started as a pianist, and probably studying, like the rest of us, regular music, right?

Jeanine Tesori: It's interesting, my teacher recognized that I was antsy. Of course, when we all started, there was that pedal for the pedal, that when your legs are too short, you have a pedal that's higher. We all had that. He introduced the circle of fifths. We talked about all of the techniques, but he knew that I loved to play by ear, so we did everything in different keys. He had me listen to all different kinds of music at a very early age, a lot of world music.

As I was learning what I considered incredibly boring things, he knew that I loved rhythm and anything that had a beat with it. I loved classical music, but I really loved rhythm. It fed both those things that I was listening to with my sisters. I grew up with three sisters at all of the musical. All the things we were listening to, and then we would play Mozart and Bach and Kabalevsky, Bartók. He was very helpful in having me respect the rhythm inside classical music, that everything wasn't lyrical. I had a very hard time with Chopin because I didn't understand that as a young person, the lyrical line, but something with rhythm, I could really grab a hold of and play way too quickly.

Manny Ax: I guess for all of us, ideally, rhythm is the base of music anyway. I suppose from the heartbeat on.

Jeanine Tesori: Yes, I feel like we are built on counterpoint and that idea that there's something rumbling underneath that we want to move to. It was just very helpful for me as a portal this way in.

Manny Ax: You went to college. You were pre-med, I believe.

Jeanine Tesori: I was pre-med.

Manny Ax: Wow.

Jeanine Tesori: I studied piano for a very long time, and my parents, with all great intentions, and a friend of theirs, thought it was time to really get serious. I went into Manhattan, auditioned for the Gifted & Talented, whatever program they had. I started studying, and I really lost my way because it just wasn't right for me at that point.

Manny Ax: Were you still working on standard piano repertoire?

Jeanine Tesori: That's the point where all of the experimental work of improv and those fun parts that were my reward, that all went away, and it all became concerto work and very, very serious, and I really rebelled. When I was 14, I was with yet another pianist because I kept switching teachers because I became a "problem." It never stops. Then she turned to me once and said, "You are a problem." I thought, "I really am."

Manny Ax: [laughs]

Jeanine Tesori: I'm a problem. The next day, I quit, and I didn't play for four years.

Manny Ax: Wow.

Jeanine Tesori: I was like, "I'll show you a problem."

Manny Ax: [laughs] Amazing.

Jeanine Tesori: I went into science.

Manny Ax: Were you really intending to be a doctor? Were you okay with actually blood and bodies and so forth? Was that all right?

Jeanine Tesori: There's so many bodies in musical theater and opera-

Manny Ax: [laughs]

Jeanine Tesori: -that I really just align this thing with them. My father was a doctor. He had his office, so people often went to the wrong door. You open the bing bong, and there'd be someone holding their own thumb, and I think, "Dad, someone's here for you." My sisters and I used to play this game because there was this magazine called J-A-M-A, JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association, something like that. You had to keep your eyes open when we turned the page. If you closed your eyes, you had to put in a quarter.

Manny Ax: Oh, I see.

Jeanine Tesori: There was a pot. Then if there was something gruesome, you had to keep your eyes open.

Manny Ax: Oh, God.

Jeanine Tesori: I got a lot of money. It's how I paid for school, that game.

Manny Ax: Oh, [laughs] amazing.

Jeanine Tesori: I got very used to it.

Manny Ax: You did not get a medical degree, though.

Jeanine Tesori: I didn't. I was there. I studied very hard. I was especially interested in bio and physics. Then I moved to the city when I was 17, 1979, and the city was so alive and so dangerous. Inside, there was a lot of danger in all of the art that people were making, and you could just feel it. That was my way back to music on my own terms. I went back to my parents and said, "I'm going back into this." My father said, "Well, you'll have to make your way. I think you should get an education degree with it." I said, "No, I don't want anything to fall back on." I also remember saying to him, "what would I teach? I have nothing to teach, all this stuff to learn." That was it.

[music]

Manny Ax: Can you please explain what you were doing in a lighthouse all by yourself in 1992? Were you collaborating on guiding some ships?

Jeanine Tesori: That was my nautical period, Manny. I was nautical. It was 1993. I had made a lot of unfortunate choices, and I was playing in pits with people I loved in an industry that I didn't understand. There was a director who was quite cruel and blackballed me from the business, and I thought, "If I'm not going to work, I guess I have to find something else to do." I left for a little while. I had gotten the rights with Brian Crawley to the short story by Doris Betts. It just seemed logical to me to go live in isolation for a while.

I am a semi-hermit. I need a lot of time alone. It's how I operate the energy if I'm too around people, so New York City is a perfect place for me.

[laughter]

Manny Ax: Why a lighthouse? My goodness, it sounds [laughs] [unintelligible 00:07:28].

Jeanine Tesori: I know. The drama. I wasn't on Craigslist looking for a lighthouse. I knew that I wanted to go away. I knew the Adirondacks very well because I had done a lot of hiking there. I knew the town. I had a couple people who I knew. I thought, "I'm going to go climb a lot of mountains. I'm going to be very quiet. I'll have a piano there and lots of books, laser discs that dates me of conductors," because I was still conducting then. I'm not a good conductor. I ended up writing, and I came back to New York with most of musical

Manny Ax: Wow. Have they put a plaque in the lighthouse yet?

Jeanine Tesori: It's so funny. I did The Moth, and I've done it twice. Once was at the Met and once was at Symphony Space. Unbeknownst to me, the owner of the lighthouse was in the audience. She didn't know that I was one of the storytellers, and I didn't know that she was there. I haven't seen her since 1993, Meredith. We felt it was unbelievable. That place was really the idea of what being alone really means. I was never lonely. I was never scared, and it can be a really scary place.

Manny Ax: I bet.

Jeanine Tesori: When I went up there, I was afraid of heights. When I left, I was not. I just made sure to go up to the widow's walk every day, legs shaking, but by the end, I was just like, "Wee," because I just thought, "You can do this. You are capable. You can do this. You just have to be resilient and find it."

Manny Ax: It's absolutely amazing. Which musical did you come back with?

Jeanine Tesori: That was Violet. That was the very first real musical that I did from the ground up.

Manny Ax: Fabulous. I just think it's having adventures in life that I can't conceive of. It's fabulous.

Jeanine Tesori: Yes. There are adventures, and then there's the recapturing of what it's like to be there without having to leave. That's the secret to me now. It was a wonderful time. It was so interesting that my parents, they were very strict to me. My father was a strict Sicilian doctor. He didn't bat an eye when I said, "I'm going to go live in a lighthouse and write." He FedExed to me a hunting knife with a little note: "Use this just in case." I'm like, "Use this just in--? Okay." I kept it by my bedside.

Manny Ax: Incredible. [laughs]

Jeanine Tesori: Oh, the "just in case."

Manny Ax: Yes, the "just in case" part is--

[music]

Manny Ax: Jeanine, I'm hoping that you can help me answer some questions about classical music from our WQXR listeners. We've invited them to submit their queries, and we're going to do our best to answer them. As usual, since I don't know very many of the answers, I will make up whatever I feel like.

Jeanine Tesori: [laughs] That's my whole career.

Manny Ax: Here's a question from Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Jack: Hi. I'm Jack. I love listening to you all. I'd like to know how pianists with small hands, like Alicia de Larrocha, handled the really big pieces that need big hands. Thank you very much.

Manny Ax: Okay. I think that's a wonderful question, because I also would love to know how Alicia de Larrocha played all that music. She played all of Goyescas by Albéniz. She played the Rachmaninoff Third. She played both Brahms concertos, and she never had any issues with getting all the notes perfectly. I guess, according to Alicia de Larrocha, you don't need big hands to play the piano.

Jeanine Tesori: I think, unlike the cello, where small hands are really hard for the positions, I wonder sometimes if a small hand is not the same as the wingspan of the pinky to the thumb and the flexibility. Like I have a solid octave and a step, I have to break up a tenth, probably with my left hand, but I have small hands. I wonder if it's flexibility and mobility, not just the actual size of the hands, but what the reach is.

Manny Ax: I think that's a really good point. I think actually the more flexible your hands are and the more your pinky is angled away from the hand, the better it is. Maybe Alicia de Larrocha had a pinky that really was angled away and she could do it, but whatever she did, she managed very easily. This seems to not matter so much, but I think it's a great question.

Jeanine Tesori: It's a great question.

Manny Ax: Thank you, Jack.

[music]

Manny Ax: Do you always start with text?

Jeanine Tesori: Always.

Manny Ax: Always with text.

Jeanine Tesori: Always

Manny Ax: Then the music is inspired by the text.

Jeanine Tesori: Oh, always. I love working with playwrights. I will ask them to read their words to me many times to hear their cadence. I've worked with so many different: Tony Kushner, David Lindsay-Abaire, Dick Scanlan, J.D. McClatchy. There's already a baked-in musicality in there. We're doing it together, but the first part of writing for me is in the design of listening to what is this language telling me? What does it need? What's the shape of it? What is the mapping, the silhouette of this? It really is like a 3D map, and that comes from every word, every punctuation.

Manny Ax: Do you start with a smaller idea and then orchestrate, or do you write right away on the whole score?

Jeanine Tesori: What I tend to do is I sit with a libretto for a long time, and I've never had someone present a libretto to me that I set. That's not everybody's cup of tea. I've told people, "If we're going to write together, I want you to know that you're not going to send this to me, and I'm not going to just write it. If there are things that need to be cut, we'll have to cut it." That's not for everybody. It's malleable. It's really an oil paint for a very long time. I sit with a libretto, and I'll sit with a playwright because I've done so much story work to say, what are the contours? What are these moments? What are the events, the choices? What is the time? What does that look like? It takes a lot of design.

Manny Ax: Do you start on the piano and then think about a trio or a quartet or a quintet and then orchestrate, or do you actually see the orchestral palette in front of you, as it were?

Jeanine Tesori: When I first started out, it was all piano. Earl Redd used to say, "Oh, you're making paw music." I'm like, "Paw music?" "Yes, where your paws go down." He was like, "Who's going to play that? The orchestra does not operate like a piano. The orchestra does not have a sustain pedal. The orchestra cannot possibly play those arpeggios. You have to get to know and respect every single instrument." That's taken me a very long time. I love players because I was one. I was in pits.

I love finding out what they can do with their instruments and what they worry about, and oh my God, the reed making. Every section has its own worries and its own joys. It's what do they do really well? When I'm at the piano and I'm writing, I always hear Earl saying, "Who is going to play that?"

Manny Ax: It's hard for me to visualize conceiving so many different sounds.

Jeanine Tesori: I've studied so many orchestrations, and that now what I do is, this sounds so silly, I've never told anybody, I draw and doodle over everything. I actually write out the orchestra as people on a large sheet, people where they're sitting, because you have to really remember how close players are sitting, what the configuration of this orchestra is, and if they're going to be able to play in tune and how many horns you have and where they are. I look at them, and I think of them as a cast, like the people on the first level, and think of them as players as opposed to on a grid, on a score page, and it's really helped.

[music]

Manny Ax: This is Classical Music Happy Hour. I'm Manny Ax. We'll return in just a moment.

[music]

Manny Ax: I'm Manny Ax, and this is Classical Music Happy Hour. Jeanine Tesori was speaking to us before the break. Let's hear a little more of that conversation. This show is called Classical Music Happy Hour. What is your favorite drink after a long day?

Jeanine Tesori: It used to be what is called ranch water. I don't know if you're aware of it. It's my favorite drink. It's tequila and lime juice and any kind of Mexican club soda. Oh, it is so delicious. I broke my shoulder. When we started Grounded, I was in a giant sling and I felt very sorry for myself, but all kinds of people opened doors for me. The usher helped me put my hair up. It was very humbling. Because of some medication, I've had to stop drinking for a little while, so I really miss it. Now, it's non-alcoholic beer, which I've just discovered.

Manny Ax: Oh, which is really good, I think.

Jeanine Tesori: It really is good. Now I'm like comparing.

Manny Ax: You almost can't tell the alcohol's missing.

Jeanine Tesori: It's true. Your brain gets tricked into thinking you're having a much better time than you really are.

Manny Ax: Yes, and the calories are still there.

Jeanine Tesori: Yes. That's the beautiful thing about carbohydrates. They last.

Manny Ax: What do you drink that's non-alcoholic aside from non-alcoholic beer?

Jeanine Tesori: I have such a coffee problem. That's the first thing. I think it's one of the things that, really, when I think about, and this is absolutely true, when I go to bed at night, I think, "Well, at least tomorrow morning, there will be coffee."

[laughter]

Jeanine Tesori: Espresso, I have at least three or four, and then an iced coffee. Then I feel like I can open up The New York Times and read.

Manny Ax: Sounds wonderful. Sounds like a great morning.

[laughter]

Manny Ax: What's the best book you've ever read about music?

Jeanine Tesori: Oh my gosh. Oh, wow. Seiji Ozawa and--

Manny Ax: Haruki Murakami.

Jeanine Tesori: Yes. That book about music, I've read it three times. It moved me so deeply. The conversation. There was something about two friends, two people, masters of their own artistic practice, talking about music in that way. Oh, it wasn't just about the musical insight. It was the value that they held for each other. I absolutely loved that book.

Manny Ax: I loved it, too. I thought it was beautiful. You thought we should hear the three movements from Petrushka.

[music]

Jeanine Tesori: Yes, I love Petrushka. I love Stravinsky. When I was conducting, one of the pieces I conducted was Dumbarton Oaks, which was just really thrilling. I went to every concert of the Stravinsky Festival at the New York Phil, every single one. There was something about the piano playing the Russian dance that I returned to it again and again.

[music]

Jeanine Tesori: I think the first movement is the one that I particularly love. The exuberance, the parallel nature of the chords. The speed with which you switch in a parallel movement, there's no evidence that it's difficult. It just doesn't wear its process, and that was everything that is a core memory of listening to something.

Manny Ax: I was so fascinated by both the operas you wrote. When you write an aria, and there's going to be applause--

Jeanine Tesori: One would hope. [laughs]

Manny Ax: Well, one would hope. Do you ever worry about the applause covering your next music?

Jeanine Tesori: Oh, that's a good question.

Manny Ax: Because there are parts, for example, in Bizet's Carmen, that I've actually never heard in the opera house, because there's so much applause after the aria that when the orchestra plays the next bit, I never catch it.

[music]

Manny Ax: I wonder if that ever entered your mind.

Jeanine Tesori: I used to be when I started out. Oh my God, I was such a little snot. I remember, because I was mentored by someone named Buryl Red, wonderful composer, student of Elliott Carter. When I started out, I was writing, and I thought, "I don't understand applause or buttons. What are these buttons? That's absurd." He just nodded. He was so much older. He's like, "Yes, I think you will maybe someday feel differently." I was like, "I will never feel differently. Cut to button, button, button, button." What I learned was so much of composition for me is tension and release, and sometimes an audience needs to release. They just need it.

Manny Ax: 100%. I can't imagine not applauding Leontyne Price in Act III of Aida.

Jeanine Tesori: Right.

Manny Ax: You've got to. There's no way to help it.

Jeanine Tesori: That's right. There's a response, a give and take. That is the beauty of something being live.

Manny Ax: I believe that something like Nessun dorma, this aria from Turandot.

[music]

Manny Ax: I think they've actually written a different ending for the aria. You kind of stop and add a chord because there's going to be applause, and then you find a way to segue into the next bit.

Jeanine Tesori: That's a beautiful example of not fighting what is. I think the engineering of something, usually, it's at the crest of applause that you think, "I'm going to ease back." This music is meant to be felt, not heard. The audience will feel something.

Manny Ax: Definitely a better problem to have than no applause, where the music is right there, and you can hear everything.

Jeanine Tesori: Oh my gosh. I have written something and you hear, and you just think, "Oh my God, I'm going to go to grad school, not for music. Acme Plumbing."

[music]

Manny Ax: One of the things that was great about the end of Grounded is the fabulous audience reaction it got.

Jeanine Tesori: Oh, I loved doing it. Man, the critics hated it. It was so amazing, because for me, it was really the first time that people were mad at me. I thought, "Wow, this is interesting. This is a kind of test of your belief system, of who you write for. You have to take it, tough skin." The language used, I was like, "Wow, you called it silly? That's really something." When we had people in the audience, people who had never been to the opera, many people in theater who came, and vets who came, the response about being seen, that was like dayenu for me. That was really enough. It was the greatest lesson of why we do what we do. It was a hard lesson, but a necessary one.

[music]

Manny Ax: Alan from Manhattan has a question about Ravel.

Alan: I'm wondering what happens if the drummer messes up in Ravel's Boléro?

[laughter]

Jeanine Tesori: Oh my god, what a nightmare question that is. Just hearing that question made my tummy go, "Bloop."

[music]

Manny Ax: What do you think? I wonder how you mess up.

Jeanine Tesori: It's the same pattern over and over. What does messing up look like in the Boléro?

[music]

Manny Ax: I would imagine that if you get the first couple of bars right, you just repeat. I suppose you can't really lose your place.

Jeanine Tesori: No.

Manny Ax: It's a matter of not losing one of the sticks.

Jeanine Tesori: Not losing one of the sticks or getting-- That's interesting. The hypnotic feeling about it, maybe if the piece ends, and you just keep going.

[laughter]

Manny Ax: I have so many chances to mess up in what I do. I think the drummer in Boléro probably is more secure.

Jeanine Tesori: Yes.

Manny Ax: Alan, I would worry a lot more about me than about him.

Jeanine Tesori: I think those repeating patterns, it reminds me of there's a trance-like nature to it, and maybe you can get lost, that you stop looking or-- It's interesting what messing up might be in that situation. The pressure is you really are conducting the piece. I guess that's almost like a temp that you're becoming the metronome for the orchestra. I can't imagine what that part might be. I shudder.

Manny Ax: Well, look, if he messes up, he's just a dead duck. Let's put it that way. That's what happens.

[music]

Manny Ax: You like sports. You follow sports.

Jeanine Tesori: Oh, I love sports.

Manny Ax: I do too. I'm a huge tennis fan.

Jeanine Tesori: Oh my gosh.

Manny Ax: Both my wife and I are tennis fanatics.

Jeanine Tesori: Yes. How fun.

Manny Ax: We love it very deeply, but the thing that interests me is that I, who know nothing about tennis, am perfectly happy to sit there and yell at the screen and tell Roger Federer what he should have done on the last point.

Jeanine Tesori: Yes, but we know so much more than Roger Federer.

Manny Ax: Exactly. [laughs]

Jeanine Tesori: Because we are in the stands.

[laughter]

Manny Ax: Do you feel there's a connection between tennis tactics and focusing on the tactics of writing an opera?

Jeanine Tesori: Oh, that's such a great question.

Manny Ax: I know. That may be a very silly question.

Jeanine Tesori: I don't think it's silly at all. When I left music, I played sports.

Manny Ax: Oh.

Jeanine Tesori: Anything with something that could harm another girl, I played.

Manny Ax: Oh, I see. [laughs]

Jeanine Tesori: Something with a stick, anything like that, that I could hit someone. I grew to appreciate being part of a group, this understanding that you can't do it alone. It's much less fun to do something alone. The idea of a community, and from the way that I was raised, I needed community. I've said that to so many people when they're saying, "What do you really feel like is very helpful?" I always think, "Be on a team."

Manny Ax: I see.

Jeanine Tesori: Even if you're a soloist, be on a team, because it is one thing to come out. Yes, I'm at the scorepad alone. That has its own demons, but at the end of the day, that connection, like what you were saying when you were applauding in the third act of Aida, it's just a sense that we just aren't by ourselves, because I feel like the world is asking us to feel that way so often. You're alone in this. We're really not.

Manny Ax: Is the fact that you like to be part of a team is what attracts you to Broadway opera as opposed to playing the piano where you sit most of the time alone practicing?

Jeanine Tesori: I don't know how you do it. I know I've heard you speak about practicing. I was at Aspen. I was studying with George Tsontakis. I would go to those cabin-y things, and there were students who would go in in the morning, and they would come out at night. I thought, "Oh, that's not my relationship with this instrument." I love sitting at the piano, but the piano is a means to another end. I'm simply not good enough, and never was. I just love the instrument so much. I feel like I've gotten to know it. I love listening to people play, especially on the keyboard side.

I was just at a concert, Thomas Bartlett was playing, and the language, especially what he would do with his body, and it's an astonishing instrument, but that was not me. I thought it was, and people around me thought it was, but it was actually something that had a greater range than the orchestra. The team playing, for me, it's incredibly important. It really makes you check your ego, too. There are things that I do, my ego is very solid, but you are only as great as the way that someone in the room feels when they're at their worst. That kind of feeling comes from being on a team.

[music]

Manny Ax: This is our game. It's called Fake or Flop. We'll give you the plot of a musical, and you have to tell us if it's a made-up production or a real musical that flopped on Broadway.

Jeanine Tesori: Okay. I like this. I'm ready.

Manny Ax: Here we go. Number one. Based on a famous horror novel, a teenager discovers that she has telekinetic abilities. She uses them to exact deadly revenge on the people who have wronged her. Is this a fake, or was this a flop?

Jeanine Tesori: Flop.

Manny Ax: Okay.

Jeanine Tesori: Carrie.

Manny Ax: Oh, yes. You not only got it right, you got the actual show.

Jeanine Tesori: [laughs]

Manny Ax: In 1988, the musical Carrie premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon, of all places, co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Despite middling reviews and dangerous technical problems, they moved to Broadway. Even though it had an $8 million budget, it closed after 16 previews and 5 performances, with one critic saying Stephen King's horror movie has been turned into a horror of a Broadway musical. The only thing terrifying about Carrie is that there is a second act.

Jeanine Tesori: I want to add to it that recently, they had an off-Broadway version that did quite well.

Manny Ax: Yes, it has since been revived in an off-Broadway production in 2012 and has attracted a cult following. Question number two. A young woman agrees to marry a prince she doesn't love after she believes her true love has been killed by pirates. After many misadventures, she learns that cruel wave conquers all. Is this a fake, or was it a flop?

Jeanine Tesori: God, I don't know. Is it The Pirate Queen? The flop? No.

Manny Ax: No. Shall I read the answer?

Jeanine Tesori: Yes.

Manny Ax: Although The Princess Bride has been both an acclaimed novel and a movie, it hasn't made its way to Broadway yet. Although one has been in redevelopment since 2019, I can't wait for the number about the rats of unusual size. Number three. Set over 900 years in the future, a space garbageman rejects the strict conformity of Earth to find community with a group of outcasts seeking to board a spaceship and start their own civilization on a distant planet. Fake or flop?

Jeanine Tesori: Flop.

Manny Ax: Wow. Can you identify the musical?

Jeanine Tesori: Oh my gosh. It was in the '70s, right?

Manny Ax: It is from the '70s.

Jeanine Tesori: It's a very famous flop, but I can't remember the name.

Manny Ax: You've done so brilliantly. It's the sci-fi musical Via Galactica.

Jeanine Tesori: Galactica, right.

Manny Ax: Closed after seven performances and was the first show to lose $1 million. Wow. While the plot of the musical was difficult for audiences to follow, it was also plagued by technical problems. Sets and actors frequently fell through the trampoline flooring. One of the actors was stuck dangling over the orchestra for 20 minutes due to a rigging mishap, and the wireless microphones picked up one of the local police precincts mid-show, broadcasting arrests in Midtown to unsuspecting audiences. My goodness.

Jeanine Tesori: That part was entertaining.

Manny Ax: That's more mistakes than I made in my last recital. Wow. Okay. You are a champ in every way: writing music, giving quiz answers. What more can you ask for? It's fabulous.

Jeanine Tesori: I made everybody a plate of gluten-free chocolate chip cookies.

Manny Ax: That's fantastic.

Jeanine Tesori: They're outside the studio, so yes, I do it all.

Manny Ax: I just want to say, Jeanine Tesori, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a real privilege.

Jeanine Tesori: Wow, this is so fun. Everything that classical music should be is happening right here.

[music]

Manny Ax: I'm Manny Ax, and this is Classical Music Happy Hour. Classical Music Happy Hour is supported in part by the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation and by Linda Nelson. Our production team includes Lauren Purcell-Joiner, Eileen Delahunty, Laura Boyman, Elizabeth Nonamaker, David Norville, Christine Herskovits, and Ed Yim. Our engineering team includes George Wellington, Irene Trudel, and Chase Culpon. Classical Music Happy Hour is produced by WQXR in partnership with Carnegie Hall.

 

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