THE FIFTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS
The Twelve Days of Christmas have, for me, given way to the Twelve Labors of Hercules. Newspaper articles, radio shifts, scripts, production work, interviews, commuting, holiday appointments, email email email, and an additional, special project on an epic scale to air on WWFM on January 6. More on that later, once I finish cleaning the Augean Stables.
THE FOURTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we do our best to maintain a festive spirit with selections from the notorious – and uproarious – Hoffnung Music Festival concerts.
Gerard Hoffnung was born in Berlin in 1925. His family fled the Nazis while he was still a boy and settled in London, where Gerard became more English than the English. Over the next two decades, he attained celebrity through his work as a cartoonist, a sparkling panelist and a public speaker. He was lauded as a brilliant improviser with a dry wit and a masterly sense of timing. In addition, he played the tuba well enough that he was able to tackle the Vaughan Williams concerto.
Following his participation in an April Fool’s concert in 1956, Hoffnung embarked on the enterprise which, aside from his cartooning, ensured a kind of immortality – the first of the Hoffnung Music Festival concerts. The concerts brought together representatives of England’s finest musical talent to lampoon what, especially at the time, could be perceived as a rather stodgy art form.
For the inaugural effort, Sir Malcolm Arnold wrote “A Grand, Grand Overture” for an orchestra augmented by a rifle, two electric floor polishers and a vacuum cleaner. (The work was dedicated to President “Hoover.”) Sir William Walton walked on to conduct a one-word excerpt from his cantata “Belshazzar’s Feast,” in which he picked up the baton and the chorus shouted, “Slain!”
There would be three Hoffnung concerts in all. Alas, the third was presented posthumously. Hoffnung collapsed at his home in 1959 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage three days later, at the age of only 34! He was a mere child by today’s standards, yet he seemed his entire life to be a brilliant middle-aged man, always at the peak of his form.
I hope you’ll join me for “Have a Ball: Laughing in the New Year with the Hoffnung Music Festival Concerts,” this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat New Year’s Eve at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.
PHOTOS: Gerard Hoffnung and one of his creations
THE THIRD DAY OF CHRISTMAS
“Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember.”
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Happy birthday, kindred spirit!
P.S. Marvin Rosen’s “Viva 21st Century” marathon is underway (it began at 2 p.m. ET) on WPRB Princeton, at 103.3 FM or http://www.wprb.com. Enjoy Marvin for 25 hours, as he is buoyed up by energy snacks, tea and his boundless enthusiasm for contemporary music. It’s all very un-Oscar Levant.
Levant plays Gershwin:
Levant on “The Tonight Show” with Jack Paar:
THE SECOND DAY OF CHRISTMAS
Now that I’m back in my own space, and since my Christmas shopping is done (well, mostly), and since I don’t have any kids, I can finally hear myself think again. I can type on my own laptop without a television set blaring or my nephew peering around the screen.
Today is St. Stephen’s Day. Or Boxing Day. Or the Second Day of Christmas. There are twelve days to the holiday, after all – through Epiphany on January 6 – even if most of the Christmas music disappears with December 25. So don’t let the post-holiday blues overtake you. It’s not quite time for our hearts to break over Hans Christian Andersen’s Fir Tree, not quite yet. (Do not read this if you want to be happy: http://hca.gilead.org.il/fir_tree.html).
Today is a big, big holiday all over Europe, and in Canada, and in the Antipodes, and just about anywhere that served as a European colony, except the U.S., where for some reason Madison Avenue has completely overlooked an excellent opportunity to wring a few more dollars out of Christmas. But it’s just as well. For one thing, everyone is already broke. For another, I wouldn’t want capitalism to spoil any more of the rustic traditions.
St. Stephen’s Day is a merry antidote to the subdued piety of December 25. It is, after all, the day Good King Wenceslas looked out, determined to feed and heat the poor. In Spain, the holiday is one more excuse to consume a big meal. In Finland, it is a day of parades and sleigh-rides. In Great Britain, it used to be the custom to thrash with holly branches late risers and female servants. And you can’t tell me that still doesn’t go on in some of those manor houses.
In Ireland, St. Stephen’s Day is the Day of the Wren. It’s the day rowdy lads dress up in straw and dance around with stuffed birds (thankfully fake; they used to kill the real ones), supposedly in an allegorical homage to the birth of Christ, but also as a convenient way to extort treats (see wassailing). These wren boys or mummers show up at one’s house and sing:
The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze,
Although he was little his honour was great,
Jump up me lads and give us a treat.
As I was going to Killenaule,
I met a wren upon the wall.
Up with me wattle and knocked him down,
And brought him in to Carrick Town.
Drooolin, Droolin, where’s your nest?
‘Tis in the bush that I love best
In the tree, the holly tree,
Where all the boys do follow me.
Up with the kettle and down with the pan,
And give us a penny to bury the wren.
I followed the wren three miles or more,
Three miles or more three miles or more.
I followed the wren three miles or more,
At six o’clock in the morning.
I have a little box under me arm,
Under me arm under me arm.
I have a little box under me arm,
A penny or tuppence would do it no harm.
Mrs. Clancy’s a very good woman,
a very good woman, a very good woman,
Mrs. Clancy’s a very good woman,
She give us a penny to bury the wren.
Give those boys a St. Stephen’s Day pie!
http://www.loverofcreatingflavours.co.uk/2012/11/cold-comfort-classics-2-st-stephens-day-pie/
End of the year celebrations make up the meat of my article in today’s Trenton Times.
The New Jersey Capital Philharmonic Orchestra will present a New Year’s Eve concert at the Trenton War Memorial, beginning at 8 p.m. on 12/31 (obviously). The program will be simulcast over WWFM The Classical Network, which can be heard locally at 89.1 FM, or at http://www.wwfm.org.
In other radio news,Marvin Rosen of “Classical Discoveries” will host a 24-hour “plus” marathon of contemporary music, “Viva 21st Century,” over WPRB Princeton, beginning at 2 p.m. tomorrow and concluding at 3 p.m. Sunday. WPRB may be heard at 103.3 FM, with streaming at http://www.wprb.com.
The reality of New Year’s Eve is generally pretty terrible, but good music makes the bitter pill go down easier.
Read more about it here:
http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2014/12/nj_capital_philharmonic_to_rin.html
PHOTO: Composer Robert Moran (right) will be one of several drop-by guests during the course of Marvin Rosen’s “Viva 21st Century” marathon on WPRB
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