We made a big deal a while back of KUSF-FM coming to the rescue of opera
fans by becoming the only FM station to carry Metropolitan Opera broadcasts
in the Bay Area. All went well for the season-opening "Fidelio," followed
by the re-introduction on the USF station of Doug Pledger's "Pledger
Plays the Classics," the most delightfully mispronounced program about
opera in the Western world. By the second Saturday, however, on Dec. 14,
there was no Met broadcast on 90.3 FM.

Inaccessible as ever by phone, Web or e-mail, KUSF further complicated
the picture by an announcement that the broadcast was cancelled "because
of technical difficulties." While there was a storm during the period,
the Met feed went out and KUSF kept broadcasting when "Il Trovatore"
should have been heard, so "technical difficulties" might have been
caused by somebody not punching the right button. Even more puzzling is
that the station program on the Website did not mention the Met mid-day
Saturday (or any other time), listing during the time slot other programs,
including "Havaye Tazeh" (dedicated to Persian poetry) and the
much-anticipated TBA ("to be announced").

Making a last attempt on Monday, SFCV managed to reach a live (and very
helpful) person at the station. She said that neither the manager nor
the program director were available, in fact, nobody else was in the
office at all. Would she happen to know why the Met broadcast didn't go
out? Sure. The wind changed the position of the satellite dish, the feed
could not be picked up, and over the weekend, no one could be reached
to fix the problem, which, it is hoped, will be handled soon. What about
the Website silence about the Met? That's an old page and the information
has not been updated yet. Even though it's been two months since the
announcement? Yep.

So, the good news is that this college station operating on a shoestring
and a prayer (appropriate for a Jesuit institution) may yet step up to
the challenge to provide the only opera broadcast available to a
million-listener market of our sophisticated metropolitan area.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
[log in to unmask]