The latest episode of my Music for a While offers an eclectic program. It has a Shostakovich overture, a spiritual, a Broadway song, a French organ classic. There is also Aretha Franklin, from 1985: “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?”

I have said that this ought to be the theme song of the lockdown. But did ’retha mean teleconferencing? No, she meant flirting, making eyes at, checking out. “Scoping.” That was “zooming,” back then.

In this episode, I share a letter from a reader. I would like to print it now:

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Mr. Nordlinger,

I recently stumbled upon your Music for a While podcast and I must say, one episode brought me to tears.

I was flooded with memories of my Neapolitan grandmother, who told me about the song “Once upon a Dream,” from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. The music, she said, was by Tchaikovsky: from his ballet, Sleeping Beauty. I spent hours listening to records with her and learnt to dance a waltz!

My Nonna is 91 now and suffering from dementia. We can hardly communicate, as she speaks only in her native dialect. But we can still sit and enjoy these timeless pieces together.

On the podcast, I of course play Tchaikovsky’s waltz (known as the “Garland Waltz”).

I also discuss Karel Ancerl, one of my favorite conductors, and under-known. He was born in Bohemia in 1908. From 1950 to 1968, he was the music director of the Czech Philharmonic. In ’68, after the Soviet invasion, he emigrated to Toronto, where he was music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, until he died in 1973.

I have skipped the war, and the Holocaust. Ancerl was Jewish. He survived Auschwitz. His wife, Valy, and their son, Jan, did not.

To end my latest episode, I have Ancerl conducting the Czech Phil in the last several minutes of the Symphony No. 9 by the conductor’s fellow Bohemian Jew, Gustav Mahler. The most famous Ninth, of course, is Beethoven’s. But the Mahler Ninth is also one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed.

Anyway, my strange, eclectic program is, again, here.