Surrounded by Music

Former host of WXXI’s midday classical music program, Julia Figueras reflects on 40-plus-year career

By Mike Costanza

Julia Figueras remembers how it felt in 1980, when she hosted a radio program for the first time.

“When you turn on the mic, you’re a magic person,” the 69-year-old Irondequoit resident said. “You’re having a conversation with people you may well never meet.”

That experience led to a career in radio broadcasting that spanned more than four decades.

Figueras hosted and sometimes produced, jazz, rock and classical music programs, interviewed rock stars, renowned classical musicians and members of the Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, wrote for a music magazine and even hosted a television program.

Though her first paid gig was with a Boston-area rock station, she spent most of her career at WXXI, Rochester’s NPR radio station, where she was the music director, a producer and the host of the station’s midday classical music program.

“To many of our afternoon listeners, Julia was WXXI,” said Norm Silverstein, the station’s president.

After being with WXXI for more than 26 years, Figueras retired on June 30, 2023.

Figueras grew up in Greece. After graduating from Greece Arcadia High School, she headed off to Bard College, intent upon becoming an actress.

“They had a beautiful old theater,” Figueras said. “I fell in love with that building.”

The building burned down the summer before she started classes and Figueras found the college too small and isolated to be a good fit. She then transferred to Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Though she was much more comfortable on that campus, the stage was another matter.

“I developed stage fright,” Figueras said. “If I were cast in a play, it was guaranteed I would drop 10 to 15 pounds before opening night just from being freaked out.”

She switched her major to stage management, but by the time she’d graduated cum laude, she’d decided a life in the theater wasn’t for her.

“I wasn’t crazy about the whole social scene of the theater — people who would walk around tossing their hair and saying ‘I don’t know who’s in the Super Bowl and I’m proud of that,’” Figueras said. “It was very insular to me.”

While trying to figure out her next step, Figueras waited tables and listened to the radio, particularly a little NPR station in Worchester, Massachusetts. She eventually began volunteering for WICN and experienced a kind of epiphany.

“I realized I’m waiting tables so I can pay for radio,” Figueras said. “That’s when I really understood this was where I had to be.”

In those days, DJs spun records for their audiences — remember turntables? Commercials, interviews and other material were recorded on magnetic tape and either played as-is or cut up, edited and spliced together for broadcasting. With the help of friends in broadcasting, Figueras learned how to talk on the air, spin records, splice tape and conduct interviews, along with other important skills. Her early on-the-air experiences told her she was on the right career path.

“I could be surrounded with what I loved a lot — which is music,” Figueras said. “I could meet and interview really interesting people from the rock world.”

Boston was a hot music scene back then. Figueras played tunes by the Butthole Surfers, The Cure, the J. Giles Band and other groups and interviewed musicians for broadcast. When Duran Duran appeared at a Boston nightclub while on a promotional tour for their second album, “Rio,” she spent an hour interviewing Simon Le Bon, the band’s lead singer, in the club’s parking lot.

At the time, Figueras had a raging sunburn. After the concert, she went backstage to meet the rest of the band.

“The very striking and handsome bass player, John Taylor, put his arm around me and I said ‘Don’t touch, sunburn!’” Figueras said. “I was probably the first woman to tell him ‘Don’t touch me.’”

Taylor apologized and took away his arm. Duran Duran went on to become a smash hit and returned to Boston a few years later to play what was then the Worchester Centrum, a huge indoor arena. The band invited Figueras and a friend backstage after the concert.

“John ‘don’t touch me sunburn’ Taylor said to me … ‘Whoa, you let your hair grow out. I love that style on you,’” Figueras said. “It blew me away that a year-and-a-half had passed and this guy remembered me and remembered my haircut. We had a lovely chat.”

During the eight years Figueras volunteered at WICN, she worked her way up to being the station’s music director. While in that position, she was also a staff writer for the now-defunct magazine “Boston Rock,” which focused on local music and indie rock.

Other parts of Figueras’ career did not go as smoothly. A brief stint as night announcer for a commercial alternative rock station in Boston ended when the owner changed the format. According to Figueras, he was hoping to lose money in order to gain a tax write-off.

“We were doing modern rock with an almost completely female staff … and we tripled the billing in three weeks with no promotional [costs] at all,” she said. “Way too successful and he fired us all.”

Figueras moved on and eventually ended up as the assistant music director and host of a classical music program at New Hampshire Public Radio. Unfortunately, that station changed its format and after more than six years there she was again out of a job.

By that time, Figueras was going through a contentious divorce. The mother of two small children knew she needed to make a change and sent resumes to three NPR stations, including WXXI. All three responded positively, but she knew where she wanted to go.

“My life sucked personally and I knew I was meant to come home,” she said.

After a brief stint at WXXI as the host of an evening radio program, Figueras became the station’s music director and the host of WXXI Classical’s midday program. Each weekday, she conveyed her love and knowledge of classical music to her listeners in her own special style.

“The way I was taught and what I developed was a conversation between me and whoever’s on the other side of that mic,” she said. “Welcome to my apartment. My apartment is filled with really good music. Let’s listen to some.”

When WXXI’s management approached her in 2007 about producing and hosting a live show about musicians and their works, she jumped at the chance. “Backstage Pass,” a live interview and performance radio program, was born.

“The show was meant to be a view behind the curtain, a chance to meet the people behind the music,” Figueras said.

Each month, Figueras spent an hour interviewing local and internationally known musicians and hosting them as they played their music.

Renowned violinist Tai Murray and famous lutenist and Eastman School of Music professor Paul O’Dette appeared on the show, along with such famous groups as the Cantus vocal ensemble and the Gateways Brass Collective, whose performances are the highlight of Rochester’s annual Gateways Music Festival. Figueras particularly enjoyed doing shows with the Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra.

“That was amazing, to have 104 kids in your studio playing their hearts out,” she said.

Figueras won awards from New York Festivals for her work on “Backstage Pass,” and ran the show until COVID-19 led to its demise. She also hosted “OnStage,” WXXI’s televised, rock-oriented spin-off of the radio show, for two of its three years on the air.

In addition to enjoying such experiences, Figueras was able to gain more personal benefits from working at WXXI. It was there that she was able to get to know Peter Iglinski, who was the news director for WXXI-AM from 1998 to 2010. They married in 2003. (see “Just a Phone Call” below)

New chapter

By 2023, Figueras was ready to leave full-time radio broadcasting.

“I’d been doing radio in one form or another for 43 years,” she said. “I wanted to be able to go places without having to get my shifts covered.”

Though Figueras found the experience of leaving the station to be easier than she thought it would be, it was a bit painful to sign off the air for the last time.

“There were lots of people outside the [studio’s] window staring at me, so I refused to break,” she said.

Silverstein praised Figueras for her contributions to the work of WXXI and service to its listeners.

“As the mid day host and music director, Julia was devoted to inspiring, educating and engaging her audience through her carefully curated play lists and her gift for sharing interesting stories about the pieces, composers and musicians,” he said.

Though she’s no longer broadcasting, Figueras has remained active in the music community.

She sits on the board of the William Warfield Scholarship Fund and hosts pre-concert chats for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Mounting the stage before a concert, she spends half an hour chatting live before the audience with the maestro and if possible, the featured soloist, about the music to be performed that evening.

In addition, Figueras enjoys working in her garden, reading and taking trips with Iglinski, who is now a University of Rochester communications officer. Right after she retired, the couple traveled to New York City to watch a concert in a Brooklyn crypt.

“It was in the Green-Wood Cemetery, from a series called ‘Death of Classical,’” Figueras said.

She and her husband also share a love of food, visiting new restaurants and traveling to New York City for Broadway shows and are staunch Red Sox fans.

“That question comes up ‘If you could change anything in your life, what would it be?’” she said.  “My answer is always the same, which is ‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’”

 

Things You May Not Know About Julia Figueras

Julia Figueras, who is 5 feet, 1.5 inches tall, didn’t sound on the air the way she is in real life.

“I actually had somebody once say ‘You sound much taller on the air,’” she said.

Her grandfather, John Figueras, was a violinist in Spain and came to the US in 1906 with two other Spanish musicians. He intended to travel on to Cuba, but changed direction after arriving in New York City and eventually made his way to Rochester.

There, John Figueras became the music director of a local movie theater. After a time, he was recruited to play in the newly created Rochester Civic Orchestra, which eventually became the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.

Figueras still remembers the pain of getting fired from a Boston-area commercial radio station without warning in the 1980s. “It was brutal,” she said. “Basically, you’re not coming in tonight for your shift.”

She also remembers how it felt to watch her beloved Boston Red Sox win the 2004 World Series. “It was the most beautiful thing in the whole wide world,” she said.

 

Just a Phone Call

You might say that a phone call and a chance encounter helped bring Julia Figueras and Peter Iglinski together.

Iglinski was a chemistry major at SUNY Cortland when he took a weekend shift for his roommate, who was a DJ at the college’s radio station. While he was spinning disks, a female student called to say she really liked his show.

“Of course, what she meant was ‘I like the music you’re playing,’” Iglinski said.  “What I heard was ‘I like your show’ and that’s the only reason I got into radio.”

His career took him to the position of news director at WSKG, a Binghamton NPR station. While attending a gathering of NPR program directors in Denver, Colorado, he ran into Figueras, who was the music director at WXXI, Rochester’s NPR station.

“We were taking a bus tour to the Rockies and we were on separate buses, so it was very brief,” he said.

She remembers his laugh.

“He’s this tall, handsome guy with a ponytail and the best laugh I’d ever heard,” Figueras said.

In 1998, Iglinski signed up as WXXI’s news director. He and Figueras subsequently became friends and married in 2003. Nowadays, the two share a wealth of interests, including their political views — both are liberals and feminists — and a love of music, Broadway shows, birding and food. For 13 years, they anonymously wrote “He Ate, She Ate,” a restaurant review column for the now-defunct “Rochester Magazine.”

“The actual review was written as a dialogue between ‘he’ and ‘she,’” Figueras said. “No one ever knew who ‘he’ and ‘she’ were.”

Iglinski also shared the raising of his wife’s two daughters, Molly and Maggie.

“He took these kids on and has been an incredibly good father for them,” Figueras said.

The couple might never have shared music, Broadway shows, parenting and the other pleasures of life if Iglinski hadn’t picked up the phone that day in SUNY Cortland’s radio station.