WFMT-FM (Chicago, IL)

Many of this week’s new releases center on the music of American women composers. The Grammy-nominated duo of soprano Laura Strickling and pianist Joy Schreier present the first installment in a new series of recordings celebrating women as storytellers and bearers of cultural memory.

Winners of the 2025 Naumburg Chamber Music Competition and prizewinners at the 2025 Bordeaux and Wigmore Hall International Quartet Competitions, the Terra String Quartet presents three quartets by American composer Greg Sandow. The album heralds Sandow’s turn to full-time composing after a distinguished career as a critic, consultant, and teacher at Juilliard, Eastman, and Peabody.

A plethora of audience favorites have ventured forth with new releases in the height of summer. Two of the world’s most distinctive vocal ensembles — VOCES8 and the Swedish barbershop champions Ringmasters — join forces for a program that moves effortlessly from Renaissance polyphony and Romantic choral works to folk song, contemporary composition, and iconic popular repertoire. Legendary pianist Mitsuko Uchida presents Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas, Opp.

Bach in the City ensemble. (Photo: Igor Dymo) Bach in the City will return for its second season with three concerts celebrating the breadth of Johann Sebastian Bach's music. Each concert will be performed on period instruments at venues across Chicago. The series opens October 4 with a program exploring the Stylus Fantasticus, the highly improvisatory and theatrical Baroque style that influenced Bach's earliest works.

Peter van de Graaff. (Photo: Liz Markel) Peter van de Graaff has spent more than three decades as one of the defining voices of WFMT. Best known as the longtime host of Through the Night, he has become a familiar presence to generations of listeners, known for his deep knowledge of classical music and thoughtful, approachable style.

The program America in Weimar: On the Margins was part of Carnegie Hall’s Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, a citywide festival in 2024 exploring the thriving creative period in Germany between World War I and World War II. Led by conductor and pianist Rei Hotoda, the American Composers Orchestra (ACO) present a recording of that program featuring George Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony, Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady and Solitude (arr.

Bill McGlaughlin, the Peabody Award-winning musician, educator, composer, conductor, and founding host of WFMT’s internationally syndicated radio series Exploring Music, has died, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy that transformed how generations of listeners discover and appreciate classical music. For more than two decades, McGlaughlin’s voice was synonymous with curiosity, storytelling, and musical discovery through Exploring Music.

In 17th-century Venice, music underwent a series of profound transformations. It was a time of splendor, marked both by the development of musical writing and by advances in instrument making, with the rise of the violin and the recorder, experimentation with continuo without bass or keyboard, and the golden age of the sackbut.

Learn about sponsorship opportunities. The WFMT presentation of Ravinia Festival concerts is made possible, in part, through the generous support of Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker. Kerry is a regular host of live concert broadcasts including Live from WFMT, concerts from the Ravinia Festival, and WFMT’s premiere visiting artist series, Impromptu. Kerry hosts many WFMT Radio Network broadcasts from such locations as the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and the Salzburg Festival.

The 2026 Summer Night Concert Vienna Philharmonic, Bryn Terfel, Lorenzo Viotti See this release Sony Classical presents the Vienna Philharmonic’s 2026 Summer Night Concert recorded June 19, 2026 before an audience of 50,000 enthusiastic fans. This open-air concert has been held annually since 2008 on the grounds of the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Schönbrunn Palace.