One of the country’s largest classical music radio stations is going to broadcast the Tucson Desert Song Festival’s “Bernstein At 100” concerts to the world in August.
WFMT of Chicago will air five hourlong programs devoted to the 2018 Tucson festival, which kicks off this week and runs through Feb. 4, on its popular “Exploring Music” show with host Bill McGlaughlin. The show is syndicated throughout North America, Europe and Asia and reaches hundreds of thousands of listeners, according to WFMT data.
“It will be broadcast to all of the countries of the English-speaking world including Australia and New Zealand,” said Tucson Desert Song Festival President Jeannette Segel.
In Tucson, McGlaughlin’s show airs at 7 p.m. weeknights on KUAT 90.5 FM.
Segel is underwriting the WFMT venture with song festival founder Jack Forsythe, who said the national exposure puts Tucson in the company of such prestigious festivals as the Sante Fe Opera.
“One of the things we said was when you get national radio coverage, people announce you — ‘That was from the Tucson Desert Song Festival’ — and then you would know you arrived,” he said.
“We’re not the Santa Fe Opera, but … I think we are right on track to be eventually like Santa Fe, and maybe we will get there quicker than Santa Fe,” he said. “We are looking much better than anyone thought we would” at this point.
The five WFMT programs will include performances of some of the bigger song festival events including Tucson Symphony Orchestra’s “Kaddish” Symphony this weekend and “Trouble in Tahiti” on closing weekend Feb. 2-4; and Arizona Opera’s company premiere of “Candide” and True Concord Voices & Orchestra’s Bernstein’s Mass, both next weekend. The programs will air around the 100th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth on Aug. 25; he died in 1990 at the age of 72.
Segel said McGlaughlin, who in the early 1980s was TSO’s music director for five years, will spend two weeks in Tucson beginning Saturday, interviewing artists and organizers and attending festival events. His interviews will be part of the August programs.
Forsythe said the WFMT deal, finalized early this week, was in the works for a couple years, sparked by a casual conversation he had with a WFMT executive who lived in his apartment building in Chicago. After a number of conversations with stations officials and personalities, WFMT agreed to broadcast the festival programs through McGlaughlin’s syndicated show that reaches hundreds of thousands of listeners around the globe.
The Tucson Desert Song Festival broadcasts will not be the first time Arizona has taken the spotlight on the Chicago radio station; Arizona Opera’s early 2017 world premiere of “Riders of the Purple Sage” was broadcast last November.
The sixth annual Tucson Desert Song Festival is largely sponsored by Tucson arts patron Dorothy Dyer Vanek, who in 2015 announced a $150,000 donation to make the “Bernstein At 100” festival a reality.
