Classical Music Happy Hour

Violinist and social media guru Ray Chen wraps up this season of Classical Music Happy Hour with an in-studio live performance. He chats with Manny about video games, performance anxiety, and his practice app Tonic. In our game, he joins Manny in our game called Is It a Composer or Is it Cheese?

Pianist Yefim Bronfman, “Fima,” chats with Manny about their decades-long friendship, their love of sports, their surprising anxiety around live broadcast performances. They’ll answer listeners’ questions about recovering from injuries and picking repertoire, even the stuff no one heard of! Fima and Manny work together in our Newly Dead game to identify odd ways composers have died.

On the island of Molokaʻi in Hawaii, we trace the spiritual power of mana, from a sacred grove to the Kalaupapa colony, where music, story, and Yo-Yo Ma’s performance honor the resilience and memory of those who came before.

This episode begins in Fairbanks, AK. Yo-Yo Ma is at a house concert with drag queen environmentalist Pattie Gonia, singer/songwriter Quinn Christopherson and Princess Daazhraii Johnson, a writer and filmmaker from the Gwich’in Nation. They were all performing to help their communities process the negative effects of climate change in Alaska.

A cave can hold secrets. Louisville Orchestra conductor Teddy Abrams knows that, which is why he wrote a piece for symphony orchestra to be performed entirely underground. Yo-Yo joins the orchestra as a soloist in a performance within Mammoth Cave that unlocks centuries of stories preserved by the caves' seemingly endless walls.

When the world stopped in 2020, cellist Yo-Yo Ma started thinking about how music can reconnect people to the natural world. In this limited podcast series, Yo-Yo travels around the country to make music and meet people who have deep connections to the earth. Host Ana González joins him to uncover the ways that culture binds us to nature, from Maine to Appalachia and Hawaii.