Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

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
Princeton Festival’s Incendiary Figaro

Its source material was considered incendiary in its day. Performances of the original play were banned in France for its volatile political notions. It was barred from Austrian stages for its alleged licentious content.

When Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, proposed to Emperor Joseph II that they would like to turn it into an opera, they must have done some fast talking. The Emperor gave his blessing (on the condition that they tone down the revolutionary tendencies), and the result was one of the greatest operas ever written.

This weekend, the Princeton Festival will unveil its production of “The Marriage of Figaro,” which will run for three performances at McCarter Theatre Center: Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and 6/21 & 6/28 at 3 p.m. The festival’s artistic director Richard Tang Yuk will conduct.

This year’s musical theatre offering, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” will begin its run of ten performances at Matthews Acting Studio, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, beginning today at 8 p.m.

Also this weekend, the final round of the piano competition will take place on Sunday at 3 p.m., at the Clark Music Center, The Lawrenceville School, in Lawrenceville.

Other highlights of the festival include upcoming concerts by Concordia Chamber Players (6/20), the Nashville guitar duo Striking Matches (6/21), the Festival Baroque Orchestra (6/24), pianist Fei-Fei Dong (6/26), and the Indian music and dance group Pradhanica (6/27). Related lectures and events pepper the schedule.

The Princeton Festival runs through June 28. For more information, look online at http://www.princetonfestival.org.

You can read more about it in my article in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/06/classical_music_princeton_fest_1.html

PHOTO: Super-salesmen Mozart and Da Ponte

June 12, 2015
Jaws Turns 40 Underwater Thriller Film Scores

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

The film “Jaws” opened on June 20, 1975 – which means we are barreling down on its 40th anniversary. (Personally, I find that concept much more terrifying than anything portrayed onscreen.)

The blockbuster success of “Jaws” is widely credited with having laid the foundation for the phenomenon which was to become known as the summer movie. This week, we celebrate Steven Spielberg’s game-changer with music from films about underwater threats.

“Beneath the 12-Mile Reef” (1953) stars Robert Wagner and Peter Graves in a Romeo and Juliet story about two families of competing fishermen along the Gulf coast of Florida, one working class and of Greek origin, and the other a family of privileged WASPs. Gilbert Roland is the Greek patriarch who runs afoul of an improbably large octopus. Bernard Herrmann wrote the music. The complete score, characterized by ample harp glissandi for the underwater sequences, has been reissued on Kritzerland Records in a limited edition of 1000 copies.

In “The Sharkfighters” (1956), Victor Mature joins Navy scientists in trying to develop a shark repellent (from octopus ink, actually) in order protect downed pilots at sea. The score, by Jerome Moross, employs an expanded percussion section reflective of the film’s Cuban environs.

A young Henry Mancini was one of three composers to work on “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954). Mancini was teamed with veteran film composer Hans J. Salter and Herman Stein. None of the three are credited on screen – typical of what was considered at the time a low-budget B-movie.

It all culminates in “Jaws” (1975). What can be said about John Williams’ masterful music? It’s right up there with “Psycho” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” in terms of most recognized and most-frequently parodied. Everyone remembers the primal shark theme, but what is sometimes overlooked is that “Jaws” is also one of the great adventure scores, the music effortlessly navigating the choppy waters of suspense, horror, and seafaring swashbuckler. The composer was recognized with a richly-deserved Academy Award.

I hope you’ll join me (on the beach) for “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this evening at 6 ET, with a repeat tomorrow morning at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

June 12, 2015
Strauss, Bernstein & More on WPRB This Week

A lousy night’s sleep, but lots of great music ahead, including Strauss conducting Strauss (on his birthday); Bernstein conducting American music (by request); birthday candles for Carl Nielsen (6/9), Carlisle Floyd (6/11), and Carlos Chavez (6/13); in studio visits by Richard Tang Yuk, artistic director of the Princeton Festival (who will conduct “The Marriage of Figaro” at McCarter Theatre, starting this weekend), and members of the Assisi Quartet (who will talk about Olivier Messiaen, in anticipation of their concert tonight at Westminster Choir College’s Bristol Chapel).

I hope you’ll join me, from 6 to 11 a.m.: WPRB 103.3 FM, or online at wprb.com.

Keep it classy with… zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

PHOTO: A nattily dressed Strauss, on his birthday

June 11, 2015

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