Theme & Variations introduces a new topic each week, presenting a wide range of music associated with that theme. Drawn from a millennium of Western classical music, the selections are an eclectic mix of familiar favorites and rarities. Theme and Variations is produced locally in Discover Classical's studios by host Joe Law.
To begin a new year, you’ll hear music that might be thought to represent beginnings: overtures by Leonard Bernstein, Franz Berwald, François Adrien Boieldieu, Hjalmar Borgstrøm, Antonín Dvořák, Nicolas Flagello, Antônio Carlos Gomes, Heinrich Marschner, Carl Nielsen, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Johann Strauss II, Giuseppe Verdi and William Vincent Walace.
This week brings you the first of two programs paying tribute to some of the composers and performers who died in 2025: Luigi Alva, Leon Bates, Enrique Bátiz, Christoph von Dohnányi, Sofia Gubaidulina, Bernhard Klee, Edith Mathis, Per Nørgård, Roger Norrington, Lalo Schifrin, Peter Seiffert, Klaus Thumemann and Maria Tipo.
To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, you’ll hear American music every month this year, beginning with selections from nineteenth-century composers: Amy Beach, John Bray, George Frederick Bristow, George Whitefield Chadwick, William Henry Fry, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Edward MacDowell, John Knowles Paine and Thomas Wiggins.
