Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Happy Birthday Stravinsky & June Composers on WPRB

Happy Birthday, Igor Stravinsky!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNDbsj5zlV8

I hope you’ll join me tomorrow morning on WPRB, as we enjoy some of Stravinsky’s music, alongside that of the week’s other birthday celebrants, Edvard Grieg (born 6/15), Paul Gilson (6/15), Einar Englund (6/17), Charles Gounod (6/18), Manuel Rosenthal (6/18), Paul McCartney (6/18, by way of Leo Brouwer), Alfredo Catalani (6/19) and maybe even Jacques Offenbach (6/20). If I could find the time to plan more thoroughly, I would know for sure! The emphasis will be on lesser-played works and/or notable performances.

In addition, I’ll be joined on microphone by Melissa Bohl of Princeton University Summer Chamber Concerts. PUSCC will present four free events at Richardson Auditorium, beginning tomorrow night at 7:30. The Aeolus Quartet will perform music by Haydn, Bartók and Dvořák. The doors will open at 7, but you’ll want to get there extra early in order to ensure that you’ll get a seat, since everybody loves “free.” More information on the series may be found at http://www.princetonsummerchamberconcerts.org/.

As always, every aspect of the broadcast is extremely subject to change, dependent on my clouded brain, as I gaze, bleary-eyed, into my cabinet of wonders.

Tune in tomorrow from 6 to 11 a.m. to WPRB 103.3 FM, or listen online at wprb.com, and keep it classy with Classic Ross Amico.

Stravinsky rehearsing “Pulcinella”:

PHOTO: No applause, please, just throw money

June 17, 2015
Bloomsday With a Side of “Ulysses” Skepticism

June 16 is Bloomsday, the date on which the events in James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” are supposed to have taken place in 1904. The day is marked by celebrations world-wide, as Joyceans get together to reenact, eat, play music, drink and of course read.

A year or two ago, I semi-secretly worked my way through Joyce’s magnum opus. I say semi-secretly, because I always found “Ulysses” to be an extraordinarily pretentious book, and I’d rather walk around with it in a brown paper bag than come across as the kind of person who would flaunt that he is reading “Ulysses.”

Joyce inspires in me, as I’m sure he does in many, an uncomfortable mix of admiration and annoyance. Do I think he was a genius, as many assert? No. Do I think he was an extraordinarily clever man, who worked very hard to achieve his vision? Yes – though I don’t claim to be an authority on the matter. There’s no questioning his talent.

I always wondered, how could Joyce betray the exquisite prose he produced in “Dubliners,” with its achingly beautiful story, “The Dead,” for the inscrutable hieroglyphs of his later work? “Ulysses” is very impressive, no doubt, but the truth is, for me anyway, it is not very compelling. There is nothing in it to make you want to pick it up again, beyond the undeniable fascination in seeing someone change the course of literary history.

So how do you get through it? I won’t get into why you should read “Ulysses” (and I’m not saying you should), but if it is on your bucket list (and how I hate the term), here are a few suggestions:

(1) It’s helpful to have a reference guide on-hand, but don’t become too reliant on it. You’re never going to get everything out of it on a first read. If you try, you will lose the thread and you’ll die exhausted in the labyrinth. If you read the beginning, you may scoff at the notion – the book is difficult but not impenetrable – but trust me, you’ll be looking for a shoal to rest your weary legs by the time you get to “Proteus” (Chapter 3).

(2) If you’re lucky enough to find a good “Ulysses” reading group, the battle will be half won. You’ll have peers to urge you on. Avoid if possible the kind of readers you think you might want to throttle. If you’re lucky enough to be in the Philadelphia area, consider taking a “Ulysses” course at the Rosenbach Museum (which houses the actual manuscript). If you can take the one with Carol Loeb Shloss, who is also on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, you will find it vastly rewarding. Even if in the end you don’t wind up loving the book, you are guaranteed to gain a new respect for it.

(3) Whenever you hit a rough patch, try reading the book aloud. It really does help. Marilyn Monroe understood this instinctively. Joyce was Irish, and even though he did his damnedest to dismantle the language of Empire, he couldn’t help but love the sound of words.

Of course, every Bloomsday the Rosenbach pulls out all the stops, with a full day of readings from the book by local celebrities and enthusiasts. This year, the museum is hosting a week’s worth of related events. Today is the last day, but you can find a full description here:

https://www.rosenbach.org/learn/events/bloomsday-festival-2015

Here’s how Bloomsday is being celebrated around around the world:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/15/bloomsday-fans-around-the-world-celebrating-james-joyces-ulysses

One final note: as music-lovers, you may be interested to know that Joyce’s work is overflowing with musical references. Even his structures, in some instances, are influenced by musical forms. There is no shortage of information to be found on the internet, but I’m linking in this site, since it mentions a number of works by composers inspired by Joyce:

http://www.spotifyclassical.com/2011/08/music-from-works-of-james-joyce.html

Hope your day is a Bloomin’ good one.

PHOTO: Sing it, Sunny Jim

June 16, 2015
Paul Gilson: Celebrating Belgium’s Overlooked Composer

You know, I adore Grieg (who was born on this date in 1843). But I can’t ignore Paul Gilson on the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Gilson was born in Brussels in 1865. He received his formal musical training there, at the Brussels Conservatory. However, prior to that, he was already composing works for orchestra and chorus. In 1889, he became a recipient of a Belgian Prix de Rome, which allowed him to travel to Bayreuth, Paris and Italy. You can hear the influence of Wagner in his music. He was also fond of the Russians.

He later taught at the conservatory, and in Antwerp. He resigned his professorships when he was appointed inspector of music education, a post he held for over two decades. He began to diversify by the age of 40 (about four years before his appointment). He composed less and wrote more ABOUT music. Still, over the course of his career, he managed to amass some 500 scores.

He is probably best known for his symphonic sketches known as “De Zee” (or, often, “La mer”). Gilson’s work predated Debussy’s masterpiece by a decade. Did Debussy know Gilson’s work? He had to. Follow the link, then click on the openings of the third and fourth movements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjyorpKlqcg&list=PLfvNU__5CDp2824kFI_xzJYkRl9kTRyG3

There’s no question who created the stronger piece. Still, it’s an instructive reminder that masterworks are not created in a vacuum, and that even lesser composers often have more to contribute than may be at first perceived.

Happy birthday, Paul Gilson!

PHOTO: Okay at composing; terrible at tying ties

June 15, 2015
Musical Wonder Cabinets: “Curiouser and Curiouser”

Cabinets of curiosities, also sometimes referred to as “wonder rooms,” were small collections of extraordinary objects, strange and often fanciful precursors of today’s museums, which attempted to categorize and explain oddities of the natural world. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have three examples of musical equivalents.

Princeton University professor Dmitri Tymoczko’s “Typecase Treasury” recalls a small table his parents acquired, made from a typecase subdivided into a hundred little compartments. “Each had been filled with a tiny mineralogical curiosity,” he writes, “a strange crystal, a piece of iron pyrite, a shark’s tooth, or a fossilized tribolyte.” He found it a useful metaphor for a multi-movement collection of short pieces, in which he attempts to produce “a sense of form through juxtaposition.”

Grammy Award-winner Michael Colina is perhaps best known for his jazz and Latin projects. However, Colina was classically trained, having studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and then abroad, at the Chigiana Academy, in Sienna, Italy. We’ll hear his Violin Concerto, subtitled “Three Cabinets of Wonder,” a work inspired by Fanny Mendelssohn, the Buddha, and an Amazonian nature spirit.

Finally, we’ll sample just a bit from “Cabinet of Curiosities” by Philadelphia-based composer Robert Moran, who’s something of a wonder himself. “The Habsburg Kunstkammer” employs graphic notation and is scored for marimba, hairbrush, aluminum foil, bells played with fingers, finger cymbals, telephone bell, vibraphone, rubber ball, celesta and harpsichord.

I hope you’ll join me for “Curiouser and Curiouser,” a tour of musical wonder cabinets, tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

More about cabinets of curiosities here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_curiosities

PHOTO: Just like my apartment

June 14, 2015
Carlos Chávez Mexican Musical Innovator

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, Carlos Chávez (1899-1978) appeared like Quetzalcoatl, the creator-deity of Aztec lore, to forge a distinctive sound in Mexican music.

Chávez was regarded as the foremost Mexican composer and conductor. He became director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Mexicana, the country’s first permanent symphony orchestra. He was appointed director of the National Conservatory of Music. Later, he served as director-general of the National Institute of Fine Arts. At the same time, he formed the National Symphony Orchestra, which supplanted the old OSM.

In 1937, he conducted the world premiere of “El Salón México,” the work which essentially launched Aaron Copland into the mainstream.

Chávez himself was one of the first exponents of Mexican nationalism in music, writing ballets on Aztec themes. His most famous work is probably the Symphony No. 2, composed in 1935-36. Known as the “Sinfonia India,” it is based on melodies by indigenous tribes of northern Mexico.

The percussion section originally included a large number of traditional Mexican instruments, including the jicara de agua (half of a gourd inverted and partly submerged in a basin of water, struck with sticks), güiro, cascabeles (a pellet rattle), tenabari (a string of butterfly cocoons), a pair of teponaxtles, tlapanhuéhuetl, and grijutian (a string of deer hooves).

However, when the score was published, the composer sensibly substituted the nearest equivalents commonly used by most orchestras, though he requested that the originals be employed wherever possible.

Here is Chávez’s recording of the “Sinfonia India”:

Everyone else seems to take it a tad slower. Here’s a spirited live performance with the SCM Symphony Orchestra (Sydney Conservatorium of Music), under the direction of Mexican conductor Eduardo Diazmuñoz:

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Carlos Chávez!

June 13, 2015

Tag Cloud

RECENT POSTS