By WDAV Staff

The pilot phase of WDAV’s Concierto – America’s first bilingual (Spanish-English) classical music service – continues to gather strength. This fall, the two-hour pilot program has been carried on Saturday evenings at 10 PM by WDAV (Charlotte, NC) and KPBS (San Diego, CA). Both stations report good gains among Hispanic listeners on Saturday evenings – KPBS has seen its Hispanic listenership double!

In other “growth” news, five new stations will begin carrying Concierto this month: KVPR (Fresno/Bakersfield, CA); WNED (Buffalo/Toronto); WHMT (Albany/Schenectady, NY); WFCR (Amherst, MA) and WSMC (Collegedale, TN) and WUCF-HD2 (Orlando, FL). At this point, the Concierto pilot stations have a combined estimated weekly Hispanic audience of more than 1,700,000. WDAV has created a website of resources where program directors from pilot stations can ask questions and share their experiences using Concierto as an outreach tool to Spanish-speaking listeners in their markets.

On the marketing front, WDAV partnered with NPRMusic.org in Fall 2010 to create a Concierto edition of “The Mix” – an online stream of selections featuring the artists and composers heard weekly on Concierto. NPRMusic.org and “The Mix” are introducing thousands of listeners to Concierto.

WDAV has begun to approach a select number of Spanish-speaking cultural leaders to serve on a National Advisory Council for Concierto. We have received enthusiastically positive responses from our first two requests: Spanish tenor Jose Carreras and Cuban-born guitarist Manuel Barrueco have agreed to lend their names, insights and ideas to the Concierto effort.