Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

  • Olympic Music Anthems & Brazil on WPRB

    Olympic Music Anthems & Brazil on WPRB

    The City of Philadelphia, I’m sure, is only too happy to have the media spotlight shift to Rio de Janeiro for what must be the only city on the planet even more unprepared to host an event of significant magnitude.

    Tomorrow morning on WPRB, we’ll look past the mosquito-borne viruses, raw sewage, and kidnappings to celebrate the 2016 Summer Olympics. We’ll hear Olympic music composed by Leo Arnaud, Angelo Badalamenti, Robin Frost, Philip Glass, Basil Poledouris, Richard Strauss (his notorious “Olympic Hymn” for the 1936 Berlin games), Mikis Theodorakis, and of course John Williams.

    We’ll also hear works by Brazilian composers Antônio Carlos Gomes , Camargo Guarnieri and Heitor Villa-Lobos, along with music inspired by Brazil, written by visitors Darius Milhaud, Ottorino Respighi, Martin Butler and David Gunn.

    It’s a little-known fact that arts competitions were part of the Olympic Games from 1912 to 1948. Categories included architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, and music. The competitions were discontinued because of concerns about the artists being professionals, in contrast to the amateur status of the athletes. A non-competitive art and cultural festival has been presented in conjunction with the games since 1952.

    Tomorrow morning, we’ll hear probably the best-known piece of music to emerge from the competitions, “Toward a New Life,” by Josef Suk, a former pupil and son-in-law of Antonin Dvořák. Suk was the recipient of a Silver Medal in 1932. (No Gold or Bronze medals were awarded that year.) We’ll also hear the Bronze medal winner from 1928, the Symphony No. 2 “Hellas,” by the Danish composer Rudolph Simonsen.

    Also featured will be Michael Torke’s “Javelin,” commissioned by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for performance in 1996; John Harbison’s “Olympic Dances;” and Lee Holdridge’s score for the 1986 documentary, “16 Days of Glory.”

    We carry the torch for Rio tomorrow morning, from 6 to 11 EDT on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com. It will be way more fun than getting a Brazilian wax, on Classic Ross Amico.

  • Elgar’s Symphony No 3 Celebrated Today

    Elgar’s Symphony No 3 Celebrated Today

    No Payne, no gain!

    I hope you’ll join me this afternoon, as we celebrate the 80th birthday of composer and musicologist Anthony Payne. Payne did an uncanny job channeling the spirit of one of England’s most celebrated composers in bringing about the completion of sketches for Sir Edward Elgar’s Symphony No. 3. The resultant work, judiciously titled “Edward Elgar: Sketches for the Symphony No. 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne,” will be heard in the 1:00 hour.

    We’ll also honor a former Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Arthur Bliss, on his birthday, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if music by Karl Amadeus Hartmann will turn up at some point, as well.

    Hartmann was an anti-fascist German composer who played the dangerous game of remaining in Nazi Germany during World War II. He withdrew completely from musical life there and refused to allow his works to be performed. However, his symphonies continued to be championed abroad. Though still very much underrated, Hartmann was one of the great composers of the 20th century. We’ll be listening to his Symphony No. 6.

    Experience these and more today, when you tune in from noon to 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.

    PHOTOS: Elgar (top) and Payne

  • Moross’s Western Soundscapes Celebrated

    Moross’s Western Soundscapes Celebrated

    When “Porgy and Bess” concluded its New York run in 1935, George Gershwin invited Jerome Moross to join the show, on tour, as a pianist. It was on a bus trip to Los Angeles to participate in “Porgy’s” west coast premiere that the 23 year-old composer made a stop in Albuquerque.

    “[A]s we hit the Plains I got so excited,” Moross recollected. “. . .[T]he next day I got to the edge of town and then walked out onto the flat land with a marvelous feeling of being alone in the vastness, with the mountains cutting off the horizon. The whole thing was just too much for me . . . it was marvelous, and I just fell in love with it.”

    The experience served him well, as some of his most famous music, the Academy Award-nominated score for “The Big Country,” enshrines that sense of excitement in the face of sweeping vistas. Western high-spirits and American jazz color most of Moross’ output, whether for the silver screen, musical theater, or concert hall.

    We’ll celebrate the composer’s birthday this afternoon, with selections from all three, during my air shift, from 4 to 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.

    Also listen for selections by Enrique Granados and Ernst von Dohnányi, left over from last Wednesday, when my car broke down on the way to the station. Get a horse!

  • Czech Composers Love and Masterpieces

    Czech Composers Love and Masterpieces

    Anyone at all acquainted with the life story of Leoš Janáček knows about his relationship with Kamila Stasslova. Stasslova was the married woman, 38 years Janáček’s junior, who was the recipient of his “intimate letters” (hence, the subtitle of his autobiographical String Quartet No. 2). Though the relationship was chaste one, she instilled in the composer an ardor which propelled him into the creation of a series of masterworks that spanned his final decade. This is the music which essentially made Janáček’s reputation.

    This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have two more examples of Czech extramarital love that resulted in flowering creativity. Vitězslava Kaprálová undoubtedly would be much better known had she not died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. The brilliant Kaprálová seemed poised to become the best-known woman composer and conductor in Europe. Her teachers included Vitězslav Novák, Václav Talich, Charles Munch, Nadia Boulanger and Bohuslav Martinů.

    Her relationship with Martinů deepened into one of romantic love, which fueled some of the older composer’s most powerful works, as he grappled with his emotional turmoil, caught as he was between his wife and an irresistible attraction to his star pupil.

    Kaprálová reciprocated, producing a number of pieces under Martinů’s influence, generally submitting them for his approval. One such work was the “Partita for Piano and String Orchestra,” composed in 1938 and 1939. Martinů is said to have made a substantial contribution to its final version.

    The idea for this particular thesis came from a consideration of Zdeněk Fibich, the unsung Czech master who was roughly nine years younger than Dvořák. Fibich led something of a turbulent emotional life. When his first wife was about to give birth to twins, one of her sisters came to help out with the delivery. The sister and one of the newborns fell ill and died. They were followed within two years by the other child and Fibich’s wife.

    Fibich promptly married another of his wife’s sisters, only to abandon her and the son she bore him, in favor of one of his pupils, Anežka Schulzová. He documented the affair, musically, in his collection of piano pieces, “Moods, Impressions and Reminiscences,” composed between 1892 and 1899. He referenced material therein in a number of works written during the last decade of his life.

    One of these was the Symphony No. 2, which incorporates the musical reminiscence about the day he declared his love to Schulzová. This occurs in the second movement of the symphony, with another full-blown statement in the finale.

    Join me for this hour of unbalanced Czechs – “Bohemian Lifestyle: Illicit Love in Czech Music” – this Sunday night at 10 EDT on WWFM – The Classical Network; or listen to it later as a webcast, at wwfm.org.

    PHOTOS: The woman who stole Martinů’s heart gets her own postage stamp (top); and Zedněk Fibich, lady killer

  • Jón Leifs Icelandic Heroism in Music

    Jón Leifs Icelandic Heroism in Music

    Jón Leifs’ music can be austere to the Nth degree, its severity reflective of the unforgiving yet sublime Icelandic landscape and the stoicism of the heroes of the Icelandic sagas. His is a wholly unique voice in 20th century music, which deserves to be much better known.

    Leifs, who studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, was caught in Nazi Germany through much of World War II. On the surface, his celebration of Norse heroism should have been just the thing to endear him to the National Socialists. However two things worked against him: the modernistic language of his music, and the fact that his wife and children were Jewish.

    Performances of Leifs’ music were derided or discouraged. This, apparently, he took in his stride, delighting in re-reading the Icelandic Sagas and living vicariously through the exploits of their heroes. Because of his family’s precarious safety, Leifs tried not to draw a lot of attention to himself. He was still useful for propaganda purposes in Germany’s relations with Scandinavia.

    For the record: despite their shared interest in Nordic themes, Leifs found Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” repellent, feeling that Wagner had completely misunderstood the essence and artistic tradition of the North. In fact, he went so far as to state that much of his output was written as a specific protest against Wagner.

    Leifs finally managed to obtain permission to leave Germany in 1944. His family temporarily settled in Sweden. He and his wife divorced, and Leifs returned to Iceland, where he found himself regarded with suspicion for his “Nazi assocations.”

    It didn’t help that much of his music was conceived on such a gargantuan scale – and scored for such outlandish instruments – there was no way it could be practically performed. A lot of it simply went unheard in his lifetime.

    His works are notable for their sparsity, their passages of stasis, and for their unconventional use of wooden hammers, tree stumps, chains, anvils, shields and Viking long horns.

    Leifs had a tendency to write on a scale worthy of his subject matter: the heroism of the Norse sagas and the grandeur of the Icelandic landscape, with its geysers, waterfalls and volcanoes. His orchestral work “Hekla,” about a volcanic eruption, has the reputation of being the loudest piece of orchestral music ever written. Here it is:

    Happy birthday, Jon Leifs (1899-1968).

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