Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Anderson & Herrmann American Music Legends

Today marks the birthday anniversaries of two composers who, in their own individual ways, gained fame through their invaluable contributions to American popular culture. Interestingly, both died 40 years ago.

Leroy Anderson (1908-1975), whose fluency in foreign languages (especially those of Scandinavia) made him an asset to the U.S. Army during the Second World War, was more or less staff composer for the Boston Pops.

His early work for the Pops was as an arranger. It was Arthur Fiedler who recognized his talent and began requesting original work. Good call. Anderson turned out to be the Irving Berlin of American light orchestral music, producing hit after hit after hit: “Blue Tango,” “The Typewriter,” and “Plink! Plank! Plunk!” among them. Johnny Mathis scored a gargantuan success with his vocal rendition of “Sleigh-Ride,” for over half a century a holiday staple. Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock,” a favorite from the start, became further entrenched in the popular consciousness as the theme music for “The Late Show,” the late night movie, shown on CBS.

Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) was staff conductor on CBS radio. In this role, he introduced American audiences to an impressive array of comparatively arcane music for the era, including works by Charles Ives, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Edmund Rubbra, and Richard Arnell (Classical Discoveries’ Marvin Rosen!).

He fell in with Orson Welles, with whom he worked on radio shows like “Mercury Theatre on the Air.” When Welles went to Hollywood, he brought Herrmann with him to write the music for “Citizen Kane.” This led to decades of finely-crafted film scores, always orchestrated by Herrmann himself (an unusual practice in Hollywood) and always perfectly suited to the images on screen, or their psychological underpinnings.

Of course, Herrmann is best-known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, but he also wrote top-notch, ear-opening scores for producer Charles Schneer and special effects artist Ray Harryhausen (including that for “Jason and the Argonauts”). Amazingly, he won only a single Oscar, for his work on “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in 1941. Herrmann died of a heart attack shortly after conducting the recording sessions for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” in 1975.

Happy birthday, gentlemen! Thanks for the music.

June 29, 2015
Gunther Schuller A Third Stream Pioneer

He was a composer, a performer, a conductor, an educator, and an administrator. At 15, he played French horn professionally with the American Ballet Theatre. The next year, he became principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony. Then he joined the Metropolitan Orchestra, where he played for well over a decade.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was president of the New England Conservatory. He was also involved with Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony, for over 20 years, serving as its artistic director from 1970 to 1984.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1994.

In addition, he cofounded the Modern Jazz Society. He recorded with Miles Davis. He edited and gave the premiere of Charles Mingus’ final work. He wrote two major books on the history of jazz. To describe what he saw as “a new genre of music, located about halfway between classical music and jazz,” he coined the term “Third Stream.”

An American polymath, he was clearly a man who just loved music.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we honor Gunther Schuller, who died on June 21, at the age of 89.

We’ll hear his Bassoon Concerto from 1982. The work, more of a five-movement suite, manages to synthesize atonality, lyricism, blues and Baroque, with some sly quotations from “The Magic Flute,” “The Rite of Spring” and “Peter and the Wolf” along the way.

Schuller also loved the music of Scott Joplin and did much to contribute to the Joplin revival of the 1970s. He founded the New England Ragtime Ensemble, with which he recorded some bestselling albums of Joplin rags. We’ll hear highlights from Joplin’s opera , “Treemonisha,” which Schuller orchestrated for a revival at Houston Grand Opera.

I hope you’ll join me as we salute Third Stream artist Gunther Schuller, on “A Midsummer Night’s Stream,” 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.

June 28, 2015
George Walker Pulitzer Winner & More

I wonder if George Walker – born on this date in 1922 – ever gets tired of reading that he was the first African American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music? It is generally the first thing we read about him. What makes it especially remarkable is that it occurred as recently as 1996. But Walker is so much more than a statistic.

The composer, who makes his home in Montclair, NJ, was recognized by the Pulitzer committee for “Lilacs,” four songs for soprano and orchestra, after the poetry of Walt Whitman. The work was given its premiere by Faye Robinson and the Boston Symphony, under the direction of Seiji Ozawa.

60 years earlier, he gave his first public performance as a pianist, at the age of 14. He studied piano at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. He also studied composition there with Rosario Scalero. Later, he went to Paris for additional studies with Robert Casadesus and Nadia Boulanger. He was good enough a pianist that he performed the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Walker has produced an impressive body of work, over a career which has spanned nearly 80 years. The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of his Sinfonia No. 4, “Strands,” as part of its 2011-12 season. In 2009-10, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the world premiere of his Violin Concerto, with the composer’s son, Gregory, as the soloist. On a separate series of concerts, the orchestra also performed “Lilacs.”

However, it is for a work Walker composed while still a student at Curtis that he is probably best-known. The “Lyric for Strings,” dedicated to the memory of the composer’s grandmother, is touching in its simplicity. It deserves to be as widely played as Barber’s “Adagio,” although Walker’s is quite a different piece. The tender recollection manages to be moving without all the hand wringing and angst.

In an interview given in 2012, Walker commented, “I’ve always thought in universal terms, not just what is black or what is American, but simply what has quality.”

Happy birthday, George Walker!

“Lyric,” in its original version for string quartet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W17alPNaVfY

“Lilacs,” with Faye Robinson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ScgQUzMqhg&list=PLdBmNPZATi4xJ-5iSf7vNLfmErvsoOsP1

Brief 2012 documentary on Walker, in which he is interviewed, for the occasion of his 90th birthday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYnEXI3WyRQ

An interview he gave with the Detroit Free Press earlier this year: http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/03/03/george-walker-classical-roots-dso/24332241/

June 27, 2015
Ocean Grove NJ’s Grand Summer Music Series

If you like the organ, the beach, or outsized halls left over from the era of the Third Great Awakening, you might consider the summer classical music series at Ocean Grove, NJ.

Musicians have traditionally been attracted to churches, usually as an affordable means to reach local audiences. The Great Auditorium is not your neighborhood church. Ocean Grove does everything on a grand scale – 6,250 seats, 25 ton organ and a visiting chorus of 1000 voices. The hall’s enormous capacity and uncanny acoustical properties have attracted such luminaries as Enrico Caruso, Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Fox.

Sure, there’s a whiff of vulgarity about the venue, with its large wooden American flag studded with flashing light bulbs and enormous illuminated signs that flank the stage proclaiming “Holiness to the Lord” and “So be ye holy,” but really it makes it all the more perfect as a setting to celebrate America’s independence.

Read the complete rundown of the summer’s musical events in my article in today’s Trenton Times:

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/06/classical_music_series_of_reci.html

PHOTO: Understatement was never its strong suit

June 26, 2015
Goat of Mendes Devil Rides Out Christopher Lee Tribute

“The Goat of Mendes… THE DEVIL HIMSELF!”

James Bernard’s music for “The Devil Rides Out” will be one of four scores that we’ll be sampling as part of a Christopher Lee tribute on “Picture Perfect,” this evening at 6 ET, with a repeat tomorrow morning at 6. You can listen to it then, or save it for later, after it’s posted as a webcast, at http://www.wwfm.org.

June 26, 2015

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