Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

John Williams Piano Concerto Premiere NYC

It’s that time of year again. All the musical arts organizations have been sending out emails to announce their 2025-26 seasons, hoping to entice us to subscribe. In fact, I get so many of these, I often just wind up scrolling quickly through them or putting them aside for later and then forgetting all about them. Catalogues and brochures that show up in the actual, honest-to-goodness U.S. Post receive closer scrutiny.

For me, computer screens are just so claustrophobic. And inconvenient. I hate having to scroll up and down and click through endless links while trying to compile a fantasy subscription season. I especially dislike when marketers reduce otherwise interesting programs to yawn-inducing teasers such as “Mitsuko Uchida Plays Mozart.” And then you have to click on the link to see if there’s anything else actually worth hearing. Because if you don’t, you just know it’s going to be some opulent, hour-long, fin-de-siècle symphonic poem that will only get programmed once in a lifetime.

For the big orchestras that offer some 130 concerts a season, the whole online process is infuriatingly inconvenient. It’s a waste of my time and it’s not good for my blood pressure.

But I digress. With a quick flash of the middle finger to the marketers, I now move on to the exciting news that it looks like John Williams finally finished his Piano Concerto for Emanuel Ax, as it will be performed by the New York Philharmonic on a series of concerts, February 27 – March 3, 2026, not long after the composer’s 94th birthday (on February 8 ). Ax is slated to give the work its world premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in July.

Why it’s taken Williams so long to get around to writing a concerto for his own instrument is anyone’s guess. Over the past 50 years, he’s written concertos for violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, French horn, tuba, and maybe a few others I’m forgetting, since the works are not always titled “concerto.”

The New York Philharmonic program will also include Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Symphony No. 5. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla will conduct. The whole prospect is so thrilling that I don’t know how I’m supposed to wait an entire year!

How do the marketers drain all the excitement out of it? They’re titling it “Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla & Emanuel Ax.” That’s guaranteed to get butts in the seats.

Despite their best efforts to keep me away, I will be there.

https://www.nyphil.org/concerts-tickets/2526/mirga-grazinyte-tyla-and-emanuel-ax/

March 30, 2025
Karlowicz & Mlynarski: Polish Romanticism

This week on “The Lost Chord,” you might say it’s Poland spring. We’ll polish up on our Polish music with works by Mieczyslaw Karlowicz and Emil Mlynarski.

Karlowicz, by all accounts one of the gloomiest of composers, embraced an outlook and philosophy that might well be described as pessimism leavened with pantheism. In this melancholy world, all love is unfulfilled or doomed, all existence leads to tragedy and destruction. The only place the composer seemed to find solace was in his beloved Tatras. He once noted, “Atop a high mountain, I become one with the surrounding space. I cease to feel individual. I can feel the mighty, everlasting breath of eternal being.”

It is perhaps a kind of poetic justice that a life spent cultivating suicidal despair, and raising it to a level of high art, would be cut short, when Karlowicz was killed in an avalanche in 1909, aged only 32 years – a most fitting end for an orophile with fatalistic tendencies.

We’ll hear one of the six symphonic poems upon which Karlowicz’s reputation, in large part, is based. “Stanislaw and Anna Oswiecim,” inspired by a painting of Stanislaw Bergmann, evokes a tale of forbidden love between brother and sister, ending in inevitable tragedy.

Then it’s romance of different sort, with a violin concerto by Mlynarski. Mlynarski was recognized both at home and abroad as a staunch champion of Polish musical causes. He directed the Warsaw Opera and spearheaded the drive to build Warsaw Philharmonic Hall. He conducted festivals of Polish music in Paris, commissioned Sir Edward Elgar to write “Polonia” for a wartime Polish Relief Concert, and conducted the world premiere of Karol Szymanowski’s opera “King Roger.” He was, in fact, voted Poland’s most popular conductor. (Parenthetically, he also became the father-in-law of Artur Rubinstein.)

Among his other achievements, he toured with the London Symphony Orchestra, became permanent conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra, shared concerts with Sir Thomas Beecham, and for a time was dean of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

He was also an outstanding violinist. He studied with Leopold Auer, toured widely, and won a major composition award with his First Violin Concerto.

Violinist Nigel Kennedy first encountered his music when he was handed a tape of Mlynarski’s Violin Concerto No. 2 by an anonymous Polish fan following a concert. Kennedy went on to make his own recording of the work. I think you’ll agree, it’s a very beautiful discovery.

It will be a bird’s-eye view as we clear the bar, with an hour of Polish music, on “Pole Vault,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

PHOTO: Mieczyslaw Karlowicz, man of destiny

March 29, 2025
Renaissance Dances on KWAX Radio Spring Rebirth

Spring is a time of rebirth – a renaissance, if you will – so I thought it might be fun, this week “Sweetness and Light,” to round out Early Music Month with an hour of Renaissance dances. Most of these will be reimagined by 20th century composers – though with a couple of notable exceptions – and in the case of Ralph Vaughan Williams, we’ll hear a wholly original work employing early instruments. (When’s the last time you heard RVW’s “Suite for Pipes?”)

It will be venison and peacock for breakfast. Put your hands up for a program of courtly and rustic dances on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

March 29, 2025
Movie Concertos Beyond the Warsaw Concerto

The craze for the romantic movie concerto likely achieved its delirious apotheosis with the “Warsaw Concerto” from the film “Dangerous Moonlight,” a 1941 potboiler about a fictional pianist who escapes Nazi-occupied Poland, enlists in the RAF and, while suffering from amnesia, attains glory as a fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain.

Richard Addinsell’s showstopper (arranged by Roy Douglas and performed on the soundtrack by Louis Kentner) is said to have yielded over 100 recordings. It certainly spawned numerous imitators.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll hear five other movie concertos, including three for piano, one for cello, and a virtuosic showpiece for violin and orchestra.

Tune in for the “Cornish Rhapsody” from “Love Story” (1944) by Hubert Bath; “Symphonie Moderne” from “Four Wives” (1939) by Max Steiner; and the “Concerto Macabre” from “Hangover Square” (1945) by Bernard Herrmann; also the Cello Concerto in C from “Deception” (1946) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and the “Carmen Fantasy” for violin and orchestra from “Humoresque” (1946) by Franz Waxman.

Enjoy these concerted efforts for the silver screen, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

Bait-and-switch trailer for “Deception”

PHOTO: Laird Cregar burning down the house in “Hangover Square”

March 28, 2025
Martinů Biography Rediscovered Bard Music Festival

This arrived in the mail the other day, as I continue to ramp up my preparations for this summer’s Bard Music Festival, to be devoted to the still undervalued Czech master Bohuslav Martinů.

This is the first Martinů biography in English, written by the composer’s friend, Miloš Šafránek. While I expect it to be fairly authoritative, then, it is certainly not the last word on the subject, as the book was published in 1944, when the composer was still very much alive. (He died in 1959.) Not only does it NOT take in his entire career (he’d only written two of his six symphonies up to that point), surely there’s a mountain of information amassed by scholars over the intervening decades. So our knowledge of the man and our perspective and assessment of the composer’s accomplishments are bound to be quite different. Still, it will be interesting to read this first-hand account.

It’s also a fun piece of history, as there’s a printed apology from the publisher in the front, explaining that wartime paper shortages have led to the decision to decrease the actual number of pages by increasing the number of words per page. The lean 127-page volume is illustrated with musical examples and glossy black-and-white photos and bolstered by a list of the composer’s “chief works,” a bibliography, and an index. So really, the text fills only about 120 pages.

I had this book in my inventory back in the 1990s, but I sold it to cellist Steven Isserlis. What goes around comes around, and in February – some 30 years later – I heard Isserlis perform Martinů’s Cello Sonata No. 1, with pianist Connie Shih, on a concert of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society!

The Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” will be held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, over two weekends, August 8-17.

For more information, follow the link.

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/

And in case you missed my article on Martinů and Einstein in Princeton:

https://www.communitynews.org/towns/princeton-echo/relatively-musical-albert-einstein-and-bohuslav-martin/article_64f724c8-f840-11ef-81f3-77d946927c50.html

Fisher Center at Bard

March 27, 2025

Tag Cloud

RECENT POSTS