Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Tyrannical Sea Captains Movie Music

This week on “Picture Perfect,” take the lash and prepare to be keelhauled. We’ll have music from movies featuring tyrannical sea captains.

Tyranny and sadism are common ingredients in nautical adventure films, where hard-bitten sea captains find it better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.

At least that’s the mantra of Wolf Larsen, who does his best to uphold the philosophy of Milton’s Satan, in Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf.” Larsen is a tough Norwegian sea captain who presides over his ship, the Ghost, through strength and brutality.

Edward G. Robinson plays Larsen in the 1941 film version. John Garfield is the working class seaman who opposes him. And Ida Lupino is the castaway with a past, with whom he falls in love in spite of himself. The score is by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who provided the music for some of the memorable seafaring adventures of Errol Flynn.

Captain Ahab is a familiar enough figure that he requires little introduction. Everyone knows about his ivory leg and his obsessive quest for the White Whale. Gregory Peck played Ahab in a 1956 film adaptation (with a screenplay by Ray Bradbury) of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” which was directed by John Huston. The score was by English composer Philip Sainton.

Humphrey Bogart was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as Lieutenant Commander Phillip Francis Queeg, in the big screen adaptation of Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny,” in 1954. Queeg, in charge of a U.S. Navy destroyer-minesweeper, is pushed over the edge by his obsession for strawberries pilfered from the officers’ mess. Max Steiner’s upbeat, patriotic theme provides a nice counterpoint to the interpersonal turmoil aboard the Caine.

Finally, the most iconic of tyrannical sea captains, Captain Bligh, will be represented with “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Historical novelists Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall make hay from the 1789 insurrection aboard the HMS Bounty.

The classic film version from 1935 starred Charles Laughton as Bligh and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. The 1962 remake featured Trevor Howard as Bligh, with Marlon Brando envisioning Christian as a kind of high seas dandy.

It’s said that Brando essentially directed all his own scenes himself. The film was colossal failure, earning back only $13 million of its $19 million budget. Nonetheless, it managed to inspire Bronislau Kaper to compose one of his most monumental scores.

Take a bucket of salt water with your stripes, you dog! It’s tyrannical sea captains on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies – this Friday evening at 6, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6; or listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.

August 6, 2015
Fairy Tale Music on WPRB This Week

Once upon a time (yesterday), I decided it might be fun to do a show of fairy tale music and music inspired by nursery rhymes. This is the kind of thing I often did for Mother’s Day, back when I had my regular weekend air shifts. But a lazy August morning seems as good a time as any to spend with the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault and others.

To this end, we’ll hear music by Havergal Brian, Daniel Dorff, Paul Hindemith, Gustav Holst, William Hurlstone, Nikolai Medtner, Robert McBride, Robert Moran, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Ernst Toch, Siegfried Wagner, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Alexander Zemlinsky (or variations thereof).

Musical subjects will include Pinocchio, Snow White, Old King Cole, The Little Mermaid, Three Blind Mice, and Beauty and the Beast.

Fall under the enchantment tomorrow from 6 to 11 a.m. ET, on WPRB 103.3 FM or at wprb.com. Awake to a musical kiss from Classic Ross Amico.

August 5, 2015
David Raksin Laura’s Composer Remembered

There are a number of interesting birthday anniversaries today, including those of Jean-Baptiste Lully, William Schuman and Louis Armstrong (who believed he was born on July 4).

However, I’m going to focus on David Raksin, the Philadelphia-born film composer, who attained immortality with his music for “Laura” (1944), which, with the addition of lyrics by Johnny Mercer, went on to become a popular standard. In fact, it’s said that in Raksin’s lifetime “Laura” was recorded more than any other song, save Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.”

Raksin worked on over 100 films and 300 television shows. One of the earliest was Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936). While Chaplin was an amateur violinist who “composed” all of his own scores, it was people like Raksin who really did the heavy lifting, filling out the harmony and the orchestration and so forth. Their work together led to some friction, with the demanding Chaplin firing Raksin at least once, but the two wound up fast friends, full of mutual respect.

Despite decades of fine work, Raksin never attained the status of composers like Max Steiner or Erich Wolfgang Korngold. However, film historians and classic movie fans owe Raksin much, since he lived long enough (he was 92 when he died in 2004) and possessed a sharp enough memory that he was able to recount many, many interesting anecdotes about colleagues who had since passed on into legend.

Some thumbnails are posted on the website of the American Composers Orchestra, so that it’s possible to enjoy a few of Raksin’s recollections of Steiner, Korngold, Bernard Herrmann and the rest. You can find them by clicking here:

http://www.americancomposers.org/raksin_intro.htm

Happy birthday, David Raksin!

Raksin conducts “Laura”:

August 4, 2015
Australian Music & Indigenous Instruments

G’day, mate!

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” the focus is on Australian music that incorporates authentic instruments of the indigenous peoples.

It’s possible that no composer has embraced the didgeridoo to quite the extent of Peter Sculthorpe, who lived from 1929 to 2104. Sculthorpe, in his maturity Australia’s most prominent composer, was occupied with environmental concerns, such as preservation of wildlands and climate change, and possessed an overt sympathy with aboriginal culture.

He composed 18 string quartets. Four of them have a part for didgeridoo. His String Quartet No. 12, completed in 1994, is inspired by Ubirr, a large rocky outcrop in Kakadu National Park in northern Australia, which houses some of the best and most varied aboriginal rock paintings in the country.

John Antill’s ballet, “Corroboree,” from 1944, was one of the first attempts to incorporate authentic aboriginal elements into modern classical music. Corroboree is the anglicized word for an aboriginal ceremony involving singing and dancing, in order to communicate “dreaming stories” about journeys and actions of ancestral beings which will continue to have consequences in the future.

Antill attended one of these sacred ceremonies in Botany Bay in 1913, the same year as the debut of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Antill later denied any previous knowledge of Stravinsky’s ballet, even at the point he came to write the work 30 years later.

In addition to the use of the didgeridoo, the orchestration also includes a part for bullroarer, a kind of blade on a long cord that when swung in a large circle makes a roaring vibrato sound.

“Corroboree” received its first complete recording on the Naxos label in 2008. That’s the version we’ll hear, though in terms of unbridled primitivism, it’s difficult to match the suite, as recorded by Sir Eugene Goossens and the London Symphony Orchestra, back in 1958. If you like what you hear, definitely seek that one out.

I hope you’ll join me for this musical walkabout through the Australian outback. “Didya Hear the One About the Didgeridoo?” Tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.

To get you in the mood, here’s ten hours of didgeridoo music:

And a demonstration of the bullroarer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ODGE2f7gLQ

August 2, 2015
“The Golden Apple” Complete Recording Review

Virtually just in time for Jerome Moross’ 102nd birthday anniversary (which is today), I received a new, 2-CD set – the first complete recording – of the composer’s ebullient Broadway show, “The Golden Apple.”

Moross, of course, wrote one of the great, big screen western scores, that for “The Big Country” (1958). Prior to that, he was a protégé of Aaron Copland and a friend of Bernard Herrmann (with whom he used to sneak into rehearsals of the New York Philharmonic.)

“The Golden Apple” (1954) is a witty mash-up of Americana and Greek mythology, the scenario loosely based on elements from Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” The marriage of libretto and music nimbly expands the boundaries of popular entertainment, prefiguring by several decades through-composed musical theater hits like “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables.”

The music is quintessential Moross. There is a touch of “The Big Country” in just about everything he wrote, and if you are a fan of that score, you will likely find much to enjoy in “The Golden Apple.” The composer stitches together an infectious crazy quilt of ballads, cakewalks, marches and music hall-type numbers. Philadelphia-born Hershy Kay expertly assists with the lush orchestrations.

While it was met with critical acclaim at the time of its opening, the musical failed to find the audience it deserved. Instead, crowds flocked to “The Pajama Game.” Despite the show’s unjust neglect, one of the numbers in particular quickly became a popular standard, the bluesy ballad “Lazy Afternoon” – though others, like “It’s the Going Home Together” and “Windflowers,” are equally deserving.

The new recording, from PS Classics, is taken from a 2014 production mounted by Lyric Stage of Irving, TX, featuring a 38-piece orchestra and a 43-member cast. The texts are well-enunciated by the singers – essential for comprehension of the plot, certainly, but also a joy in itself for the wit of John Latouche’s lyrics, which tickle both the funny bone and the brain – and the recorded balance of voice and music is well-judged. Even so, the booklet contains a luxury so often sadly missing in these days of no-frills packaging: a full libretto.

A superb recording featuring the original cast was issued in 1954, but only a fraction of the show’s numbers were represented, and many of those in truncated form. Also, the sound on compact disc reissue is beginning to show its age, tinny and a tad harsh.

At last “The Golden Apple” can be heard and enjoyed as it was originally intended, with almost 90 minutes of previously unrecorded material. The release is very reasonably priced, essentially two discs for the price of one. There are periodic outbursts of applause revealing the recording’s live origins. However, these are few and largely unobtrusive. If you are a fan of Moross’ music and can tolerate musical theater, I encourage you to give it a shot.

You can find a few sound clips here:

http://www.psclassics.com/cd_goldenapple.html

“Lazy Afternoon,” sung by Kaye Ballard from the 1954 original cast recording:

August 1, 2015

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