Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Ethel Smyth Rebel Composer and Suffragette

Anticipating the assertion that well-behaved women seldom make history, Dame Ethel Smyth was acting up from the start. When her father, a major general in the Royal Artillery, opposed her entering a career in music, she studied privately, and then attended the Leipzig Conservatory. Her travels brought her into contact with Dvořák, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann and Brahms.

Her “March of the Women” became the anthem of the women’s suffrage movement. When they locked her up for smashing out the windows of politicians who opposed the female vote, she led her comrades-in-arms in song, conducting them from between the bars of her cell with a toothbrush.

Later, in her mid-50s, she began to lose her hearing. Undeterred, she commenced a second career as a writer, producing ten books. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1922.

The always questing Leon Botstein revived Smyth’s most famous opera, “The Wreckers,” in a concert performance at Carnegie Hall in 2007. This summer, he will conduct a fully staged production at Bard College, as part of the school’s annual SummerScape festival.

Incredibly, Smyth’s opera “Der Wald,” written between 1899 and 1901, remains the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. That was in 1903.

Happy birthday, Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)!

The overture to “The Wreckers”:

PHOTO: Smyth rocks the boat

April 22, 2015
Vernon Duke April in Paris & Beyond

It’s April in Paris (and everywhere else for that matter).

Vernon Duke was born Vladimir Dukelsky in what is now Belarus in 1903. In Kiev, he studied composition under Reinhold Gliere. He left the USSR in 1920, traveling to New York, where he was befriended by George Gershwin. In fact, it was Gershwin who suggested the name change. (Gershwin himself was born Jacob Gershowitz.)

For a time, he ping-ponged back and forth to Europe, where he fulfilled a commission by Serge Diaghilev (for the ballet “Zephyr and Flora”). The work impressed Sergei Prokofiev, and the two became fast friends. Dukelsky’s Symphony No. 1 was given its premiere in Paris, under Serge Koussevitzky, on the same program as excerpts from Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel.”

Around the same time, Duke began contributing material to musical comedies in London. This laid the groundwork for a return to New York in 1929. There, he continued to composed “serious” works, while insinuating himself into the Broadway scene. A number of his songs – “April in Paris,” “Autumn in New York,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” “I Can’t Get Started” – have since become standards.

When Gershwin died in 1937, Duke stepped in to complete his unfinished score for “The Goldwyn Follies,” for which he contributed a couple of ballets (choreographed by George Balanchine) and the song, “Spring Again.” His greatest success came in 1940, with the Broadway show, “Cabin in the Sky.”

A number of his concert works have been recorded in recent years. While bouncing around YouTube this morning, I came across this rare concert broadcast of his Symphony No. 3:

Here’s a fine, digital recording by Metropolitan Opera cellist Samuel Magill of Dukelsky’s Cello Concerto:

Mov’t I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqtTdGa2Co
Mov’t II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ggFix_8x4
Mov’t III: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0eXu5wSF_8

Finally, Sarah Vaughan sings “April in Paris”:

PHOTO: Duke (right), with Ira Gershwin

April 21, 2015
Gardiner’s Monteverdi Returns to Princeton

I’ve spent the bulk of the day writing about Sir John Eliot Gardiner for the Trenton Times. Gardiner will return to Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium, with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, for a performance of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo,” on April 29 at 7:30 p.m. The same forces will present Monteverdi’s “Vespers for the Blessed Virgin” at Carnegie Hall the following evening. The Princeton appearance will honor the late William H. Scheide.

I probably wouldn’t have bothered to say anything until the article hits print on Friday (as always, I’ll provide a link to it here), except for the fact that I just noticed that today is Sir John Eliot’s birthday. Happy birthday, Maestro!

Here, the musicians perform Handel’s “Dixit dominus,” a work they brought to Richardson last June:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH2-4D32azo

April 20, 2015
Record Store Day Avoidance Princeton Record Exchange Fan

It’s Record Store Day! You won’t catch me within miles of any record stores today – though I encourage you to support your favorites. I’ll content myself with going on un-Record Store Day. That still gives me 364 days to choose from. I don’t think I could handle the crowds and the heat, and whatever festive noise and live events they’ll have cranked up. Factor in weather like today’s and you’ve got a recipe for overstuffed mayhem.

My favorite record shop on the planet, of course, is Princeton Record Exchange. I’d been walking around with a great big hole in my heart since Tower Records closed its cut-out store, behind its former location at 4th & Broadway in NYC. PREX puts Tower in the shade. It’s the same Aladdin’s Cave, only more so. The inventory vacillates, depending on what libraries have been purchased recently, but there is always way, way more than in your average record shop (if you can even find any record shops these days).

And you can’t beat the prices. You can walk in there with $20 dollars in your pocket and come out feeling like a rich man, if it weren’t for the dozens of discs you’ll have to pass up, since you only have $20.

I emailed Classical Discoveries’ Marvin Rosen earlier this week and caught him at the Exchange. Then, I think there is usually a five-in-ten chance that I will catch Marvin at the Exchange. I was so envious. After doing my income tax this week, I won’t be able to set foot in that place, probably, until October.

Remember, I’ll be accepting gift certificates for my birthday.

More about PREX here – but if you go, don’t buy anything I’d want!

http://www.prex.com/

PHOTO: You know Marvin’s in here somewhere

April 18, 2015
Happy Birthday Miklós Rózsa Film Score Legend

BTW – and not incidentally – today is the birthday of the great Miklós Rózsa (1907-1995). Here he is, conducting a suite from arguably his greatest film score:

Rózsa receives his third Academy Award, from the hand of Gene Kelly (BONUS: André Previn wins for his work on “Porgy and Bess”):

PHOTO: “Singin’ in the Rain,” and reining in the charioteers: Miklós Rózsa (left), with Gene Kelly

April 18, 2015

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