Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Black Oak Ensemble Plays Princeton

For whatever reason, the second half of the concert season always turns out to be especially busy for me. I don’t know if it’s the allure of the repertoire, the irresistible discount offers, or the madness of spring, but since the pandemic, anyway, every year, March and April have turned out to be crazy concert months. Surely the madness peaks at the end of April, when I will be hearing Yuja Wang and Yo-Yo Ma on the same day (!), but I’ll be running it close with a concert of rarely-heard music from the 1920s (including John Alden Carpenter’s “Skyscrapers”) at Lincoln Center with the American Symphony Orchestra this weekend and Jake Heggie’s “Moby Dick” at the Met later in the week.

Despite the fact that my dance card is full, I’ll definitely make room for this one, which totally snuck up on me: tomorrow night, Thursday, at 7:00, the BLACK OAK Ensemble will perform works for string trio at Trinity Church, 33 Mercer Street in Princeton, NJ.

The program is Classic Ross Amico catnip, including music by Gideon Klein, Jean Cras, and Henri Tomasi. Also some guy named Johann Sebastian Bach (to be played, as it turns out, on the eve of his birthday anniversary).

The Czech pianist and composer Gideon Klein (1919-1945) was one of a number of major musical figures to be interned at Terezin, or Theresienstadt, the model “artists’ camp” set up by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. Basically, it was an antechamber to Auschwitz. When there were no camera crews or Red Cross representatives to bear witness, Klein was deported and killed with the rest.

Jean Cras (1879-1932) was a career navy officer from Brittany, who composed a fair amount of his music shipboard. His opera, “Polyphème,” about the lovelorn cyclops Polyphemus, is a great wallow.

French composer Henri Tomasi (1901-1971) found steady work as a conductor, beginning in the early days of radio. In the 1940s, he established the contemporary music group Triton with Sergei Prokofiev, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, and Francis Poulenc.

The program will conclude with some ersatz Romani music, Vittorio Monti’s “Csárdás” from 1904. (You know it, even if you think you don’t.)

The concert is the latest in a chamber music series featuring visiting ensembles presented by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. If it lures me out on a Thursday evening during such a busy month, it’s got to be something special. For tickets, visit princetonsymphony.org.

To learn more about the Black Oak Ensemble, look here: https://www.blackoakensemble.com/about

March 19, 2025
Edward Everett Horton Birthday Tribute

I note that today is the birthday of character actor Edward Everett Horton. Horton’s screen career began in the silents, where he started out as a comic lead. By the time of the talkies, he settled into supporting roles as the Nervous Nellie best friend (playing second banana to Fred Astaire, among others). His characters often appear with self-absorbed smirks on their faces, gliding obliviously through life. But security is fleeting, and time and again their faith in the status quo is abruptly undermined. When the rug is yanked out from under, surprise, anxiety, and frustration are registered in a trademark double-take.

Earlier experience on the stage, in vaudeville and on Broadway, allowed Horton to hone his comic timing. He was the ne plus ultra of flustered, fidgety fussbudgets. Over a 50-year career, he would appear in some 130 movies.

To anyone who grew up in the era of classic television or its reruns, Horton will be recognized as the voice of the narrator in Rocky and Bullwinkle’s “Fractured Fairy Tales,” as Roaring Chicken on “F Troop,” or as Chief Screaming Chicken (alongside Vincent Price’s Egghead) on “Batman.” Furthermore, I have seen no confirmation of this, but surely the character of C-3PO owes a thing or two to Horton. Without knowing anything of his romantic proclivities (in real life he sold himself as a bachelor), on screen, alongside Franklin Pangborn and Eric Blore, he was ever the coded “gay” character.

While Horton was an indispensable presence during the TCM-era of comfort food comedies, the primary reason I mention him is because decades ago I heard a recording of him on the radio, narrating Ernst Bacon’s “Fables.” It was a live performance, likely borrowed from an archive (possibly the Fleisher Collection?) and probably not available commercially. At any rate, I have never been able to locate it. Until now. Or an excerpt anyway, posted on YouTube. Today I share this movement with Horton narrating “The Lion and the Sheep.”

Bacon, who was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships and a Pulitzer Scholarship in 1932 for his Symphony No. 2, is remembered primarily for his vast output of art song, having set poetry by Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, A. E. Housman, Nikolaus Lenau, Herman Melville, Carl Sandburg, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sara Teasdale, and Walt Whitman, among others.

I’m amused to learn that Horton was kicked out of Oberlin College (where he majored in German) after he climbed to the top of a building and, to the horror of a gathering crowd, threw a dummy off the roof. That’s the kind of prank I could really get behind.

Happy birthday, Edward Everett Horton!

Horton and Eric Blore in “Shall We Dance” with Fred Astaire

“Fractured Fairy Tales”

Ernst Bacon, Symphony No. 2

Four Poems of Emily Dickinson

March 18, 2025
Danny Boy Romeo Cascarino St Patricks Day

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In case you missed “Sweetness and Light” on Saturday, here’s Philadelphia composer Romeo Cascarino’s arrangement of “Danny Boy.” It’s part of a recent release of that also includes “Pathways of Love,” eight songs on texts by Sara Teasdale, Eugene Field, Robert Frost, and others, now available as digital downloads. A composer of the name Romeo Cascarino might not be the first you would associate with this best-known of traditional Irish melodies, but a good, public domain folk tune belongs to the world – and Cascarino brings something special to it. Sample it now on YouTube.

March 17, 2025
Joyce Stephens & St Patricks Day

On the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, here’s a second chance to have a look at an under-viewed post from my early days on Facebook, in which I speak of wrangling with James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and sing the praises of the neglected James Stephens and one of my favorite books, “The Crock of Gold.”

March 16, 2025
Irish Music on The Lost Chord for St Patricks Day

This week on “The Lost Chord,” we anticipate St. Patrick’s Day, with two contrasting works with ties to the Emerald Isle.

John Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1932. He combined composition with a career in music administration until 1988, when he left his position as Head of Music at RTE, Ireland’s national broadcasting organization.

As a composer, he was influenced by contemporary trends in the European avant-garde, until 1977. Then, following the completion of his String Quartet No. 3, he wrote nothing for a period of 18 months. He emerged from this self-imposed silence a renewed artist, crafting wholly tonal works of great beauty and integrity. Since then, he has completed eleven symphonies, a second violin concerto, a cello concerto, a fourth string quartet, and various other works.

Kinsella’s Symphony No. 3 was composed in 1989-1990. The work falls into two substantial movements, framed by a brief Prologue and Epilogue, and separated by an Intermezzo, all of which return to material stated in the symphony’s opening bars. The movements are performed without break.

Although it is not a programmatic work, the composer dedicated the symphony, with gratitude, to his parents. He intended the piece as a personal expression of certain aspects of the joy of life. Hence, the subtitle, “Joie de vivre.”

More overtly folk-inflected is “Laments and Dances from the Irish,” after melodies by Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738). Philadelphia-born composer Arnold Black was afflicted with cerebral palsy from birth, resulting in limited mobility on his right side. Yet he managed to become a master of the violin. So successful was he on his instrument that following graduation from the Juilliard School, he was hired as assistant concertmaster of the Baltimore Symphony, and ultimately concertmaster of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC.

Black’s “Laments and Dances” was commissioned by the Newman and Oltman Guitar Duo. Michael Newman and Laura Oltman reside along the Delaware River in Warren County, NJ. Together or between them, they have taught or been guitarists-in-residence at the Mannes College of Music in New York City, Princeton University, The College of New Jersey, and Lafayette College in Easton, PA. They are also directors of the Raritan River Music Festival, held in historic venues in Central Jersey throughout the month of May. The duo is joined in this recording by the Turtle Island String Quartet.

Pour yourself a pint of stout and find your bliss. We laugh and weep along with the Irish, on “Airs from Erin,” 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/

March 15, 2025

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