Love For Music National Public Radio’s Martin Goldsmith Will Speak At A Kpbx Thank-You Concert

KPBX Underwriters Thank-You Concert 7:30 p.m. Thursday, The Met

Martin Goldsmith grew up to the sound of music the classical music he still loves and plays weekdays for listeners of National Public Radio’s “Performance Today.”

He’ll take a day off Thursday from his duties as host of the show and join local musicians at The Met in a thank-you concert for programming underwriters for KPBX, the station that carries “Performance Today” locally.

The Spokane String Quartet, pianist Kendall Feeney and string bass virtuoso Roma Vayspapir will play music by Schubert. Goldsmith will do the thing he does best on radio - talk.

This time, Goldsmith’s talk, titled “Numbers and Things Unseen,” is not just about music, he says, but about music and money.

The event is open to the public.

“Both my parents were symphony musicians,” Goldsmith says. “My father was a flutist and my mother a violist.

“Some of my earliest memories are of hearing my mother and her friends playing Beethoven string quartets down the hall as I was falling asleep.”

His parents met playing in the Kulturbund Orchestra, a showcase ensemble of Jewish musicians created by the Nazis to prove that Jews could still have their own culture in the Third Reich. The Goldsmith family escaped to America in 1941 just ahead of the worst of the Holocaust.

“It was an interesting and romantic story I keep intending to turn into a novel,” Goldsmith says. He took “the requisite piano lessons” as a child and then switched to French horn in junior high school.

“I liked baseball and goofing off more. By the time I realized I really loved music,” he says, “it was too late to pursue a performing career.”

In 1971, when he was 19, Goldsmith got a summer job in radio at Cleveland’s classical music station.

“I hadn’t really thought of radio as a career,” he says, “but 26 years later, I’m still doing it.”

Goldsmith describes himself as “one of the original conspirators” who founded “Performance Today” while he was an announcer and producer at WETA, the public radio station in Washington, D.C.

“The show originally tried to cover all the arts,” he says. “After being on the air two years, we decided that the show was a bit too scattered, and in the fall of 1989 the focus was narrowed to classical music and I became host of the show.”

The show’s two-hour format is made up of recordings of live performances given around the country, interviews with personalities from the world of classical music, record recommendations, and discussions of complexities of musical jargon. The format has remained unchanged.

“Performance Today” is carried by 217 stations nationwide and reaches an audience of 1.6 million each week. Locally it airs Monday through Thursday from 2-4 p.m. on KPBX-FM, 91.1.

Goldsmith says the interviews on “Performance Today” give listeners a chance to get to know musicians as people and communicators verbally as well as musically.

“The show has given me the terrific good fortune to speak with some of the most interesting and passionate people I know, people who make music for a living - people I deeply admire,” Goldsmith says.

Tickets for the KPBX Underwriter Thank-You Concert are $12 ($8 for KPBX members), available by calling 328-5729 or (800) 328-5729.

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