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
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.
“A musician who has not experienced… the necessity for the dodecaphonic language is USELESS!”
“From Schoenberg’s pen flows a stream of infuriating clichés!”
“The Paris opera is full of dust and crap! Operatic tourists make me want to vomit!”
Pierre Boulez could be provocative and full of contradictions. Is it any wonder there’s been so much blowback against him and what he came to represent? This gadfly of the avant-garde was born 100 years ago today.
As a composer and polemicist, he was ever the rebel angel, the archnemesis of tonality and tradition. He studied under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory, but in his advocacy of the abstruse, Boulez froze his teacher out. (Boulez characterized Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” as “brothel music.”) He idolized the Igor Stravinsky of “The Rite of Spring;” but in 1945, when Stravinsky unveiled his “Four Norwegian Moods,” a neoclassical pastiche in the style of Edvard Grieg, of all people, Boulez and his classmates booed vigorously.
As a conductor, he could be a persuasive interpreter of Mahler, Debussy, and Ravel. He enjoyed particular success with a landmark centenary production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” directed by Patrice Chéreau – a triumph scored in one of those very opera houses he was so eager to have destroyed. In his later years, he found value even in the music of Strauss and Bruckner.
But for the most part, the composers he championed were those who were perceived as revolutionary in their own time and who, as Liszt so memorably put it, had hurled their lances into the future.
In contemporary music, Boulez was a master. You’re on pretty safe ground if Boulez is conducting Webern, Xenakis, or himself. He even came around to grasping the value of his old mentor, Messiaen.
It’s as a composer that his reputation hangs in the balance. There’s been a lot of vituperation launched against Boulez’s aesthetic, but it’s hard to deny that he brought it on himself. Passionate acolytes remain, though they live like anchorites in the wilderness, in hovels and on barren cliff-faces, with no friends outside internet chat groups, or perhaps, depending on how closely they emulate the rhetoric of their idol, not even there.
Myself, I tend to be a little more moderate in my views, at least in this regard. Depending on my mood, I can put on a Boulez record and just go with it. His chamber cantata “Le Marteau sans maître” (1955), which I’ve played on the radio a few times over the years, is a good example of that. I understand what he’s up to, because I’ve done my homework, but it’s not to say I can hear everything any more than I can in any other serial score. But it sure does make some fascinating sounds. Actually, I find it his most approachable piece.
That’s about as good as it gets, folks. Later in life, when speaking of his “Structures, Book I” for two pianos (1951-52), Boulez described it as a work in which “the responsibility of the composer is practically absent. Had computers existed at that time I would have put the data through them and made the piece that way. But I did it by hand… It was a demonstration through the absurd.” Asked whether it should still be listened to as music, Boulez replied, “I am not terribly eager to listen to it. But for me it was an experiment that was absolutely necessary.”
Sometimes you have to push hard in order to find equilibrium. Ironically, Boulez makes such a show of breaking with tradition, yet he’s still caught within the tradition.
Boulez might not be to everyone’s taste, either as a composer or a conductor, but if he did one thing well it was to force everyone to think – about music, about progress, and about the reasons we value the things we hold sacred.
Boulez once proclaimed, “A civilization that conserves is one that will decay!” Even so, I’m glad we have his records.
Happy 100th, you mad prodigal.
Maurizio Pollini plays Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (1948)
Serial for breakfast: “Le Marteau sans maître” (1955)
There was a time when Arturo Toscanini was likely the most famous conductor in the United States. In fact, he was one of the most celebrated conductors of the 20th century. His intensity, perfectionism, and alleged fidelity to the score have been enshrined in legend. And when the legend becomes fact, I print the legend.
Toscanini served as music director of La Scala, Milan, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. He conducted first performances of Puccini’s “La bohème,” Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” Respighi’s “Feste Romane,” and Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” As a cellist, he played in the world premiere of Verdi’s “Otello.”
From 1937 to 1954, he reached millions of Americans via his weekly broadcast concerts on NBC radio. These originated at Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8-H, now the home of “Saturday Night Live.”
Toscanini was vehemently anti-fascist. He despised Hitler, and vowed never to conduct in Germany as long as “the Führer” remained in power. In Italy, he was beaten up by brownshirts and had his passport confiscated for refusing to conduct “Giovinezza,” the fascist anthem. He also worked closely with violinist Bronislaw Huberman in support of the Palestine Orchestra, made up of Jewish exiles from fascist Europe. He once confided to a friend, “If I were capable of killing a man, I would kill Mussolini.”
Il Duce really caught a break when Toscanini emigrated to America. It sounds to me as if the Maestro could have been borderline more than once. Ironically, for someone who hated dictators, he sure could dish out an autocratic tirade.
Happy birthday, Arturo Toscanini.
Conducting Verdi, “La Forza del Destino Overture” (on film, 1944)
Can one of the great masters of modern music really have been born 144 years ago? I can remember hearing Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, his most popular work, on the first Philadelphia Orchestra concert I ever attended, at the Mann Music Center in the summer of 1984, and at the time, he was dead not even 40 years. He was still regarded by many as a “contemporary” composer.
But I’m not really here to talk about that. Instead I’m going to talk about his ballets.
Of the two, “The Miraculous Mandarin” (1918-24) enjoys all the notoriety, for its decadent scenario and harrowing music. After all, the story essentially involves two hoods who coerce a young woman into luring men to an abandoned room so they can beat and rob them. One of these is the mandarin of the title, who they attempt to suffocate, stab, and hang, but Rasputin-like he stubbornly refuses to die. He finds release only in the woman’s embrace. At last, his wounds begin to bleed, and he passes. This was pretty scandalous stuff, back in the day, and the work was banned on moral grounds. Now it’s one of Bartók’s most-frequently programmed works, though generally shorn of its action.
For the weak of heart, I offer as an alternative the composer’s other, earlier essay in the form, the ballet-pantomime “The Wooden Prince” (1914-17). This time instead of going for the jugular, Bartók opts to anesthetize everyone with a ponderous fairy tale about true love deferred. Not that I don’t enjoy ponderous fairy tales.
An ill-natured fairy throws up impediments to the fulfillment of the love of a prince for a princess, turning forest and stream against him and ultimately animating a wooden effigy of the prince the young man has constructed, complete with crown and locks of his own hair, to attract the princess’ attention. When the princess falls for the wooden prince, his flesh-and-blood counterpart falls into despair. The fairy takes pity on him as he sleeps, sets everything to right, and they all live happily ever after.
Much less frequently performed than Bartók’s subsequent succès de scandale, this fantastic tale for large orchestra bears the influences of Debussy and Strauss, and yes, Wagner too. Never understood why it’s not heard more often. Just because it doesn’t have quite the bite of the composer’s mature masterworks doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile.
On the eve of the centenary of the birth of Pierre Boulez, here he is, at the links, conducting both ballets. I cut my teeth on Boulez’s earlier recording of “The Wooden Prince,” with the New York Philharmonic, but there’s no question the sonics on his remake with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are superior.
“The Miraculous Mandarin” (Boulez live)
“The Wooden Prince” (DG recording)
Happy 100th (almost), Pierre Boulez, and happy 144th, Béla Bartók!
1937 production of “The Wooden Prince,” with Gyula Harangozó and Karola Szalay0
