CASUAL LISTENERS APPRECIATE THE CLASSIC COMPOSERS

Walter Ladden

DESCRIPTION: In this series we will illuminate the lives and works of famous and lesser-known composers through interactive discussion, anecdotes and recordings. Each week of this 4-week series, a different composer will be featured, and Mr. Ladden will inform the audience who the composer’s teachers were, who they taught, and who their contemporaries and rivals were. Using an extensive library of classical music CDs (approximately 3,000), Ladden will give examples of each composer’s work. Musical presentations will be augmented with humorous anecdotes about both composers and performers, all leading to an enjoyment of what Leonard Bernstein called the “Joy of Music.”

FOUR LECTURES:

1. Wolfgang Mozart - A child prodigy who fulfilled his early promise
2. Beethoven - His triumph over deafness and his debt to powerful patrons
3. Dvorák - The burst of Bohemian (and American) creativity
4. Tchaikovsky - His uneasy relationship with “The Mighty Handful”
   

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION: Walter Ladden has a BA from Columbia College and has had a sixty-year passion for classical music. He has given music appreciation classes for Nova Southeastern University (Lifelong program), Florida International University (Osher program), Broward County Library and the Music Club of Hollywood (FL). Before retiring, he did similar classes in Clifton and Nutley, NJ.