I'm almost midway through hosting a radio show on WRUW-FM. Go here and tune in for the last hour!

The show (called “Anything But Pachelbel”) is regularly done by another guy, but he can't make it this week. I subbed for him before, a few years ago, and really enjoyed it. The approximate theme of the pieces I selected for today's show, in deference to Case students who are madly studying for finals, is “going insane”: the first few pieces were almost pastorally pretty, the last few have been a bit darker, and everything from here on out is a thorough physical and emotional workout for the listener (not to mention performer).

The piece I just started up is the first movement of a famous Beethoven piano concerto, except that the entire score has been transcribed for just the one piano. On top of the obvious difficulty of pretending to be a complete orchestra plus soloist using only two hands and the occasional foot, the transcriber (the French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan) then wrote a thoroughly modern and characteristic cadenza, itself somewhat technically demanding. To the music enthusiast, it's also fairly amusing in its excesses. I remember when I had Peter listen to it in the parking lot outside the bowling alley at Deerbrook Mall. Early in the cadenza, he just burst out laughing!

Pedro: the radio station is required to read various public service announcements during the course of the day. I prevailed upon to my cohost to leave the chess one for later and read the one about manatees. Manatee awareness in Cleveland is at an all-time high.