Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Spring Hope & Movie Music New Beginnings

Has the world got you down? Spring is a time of hope and renewal. This week on “Picture Perfect,” enjoy music from movies about fresh growth, new beginnings, and second chances.

You can’t get much more spring-like than “The Secret Garden,” after the novel of Frances Hodgson Burnett. A spoiled orphan raised in India returns to England and her aloof uncle’s gloomy mansion on the Yorkshire moors. Gradually, she is drawn outside of herself by a cantankerous gardener, a saucy robin, and a fey lad named Dickon, who has a particular affinity with wild creatures. Her transformation, signified by the titular garden, the maintenance of which teaches her to nurture, improves the lives of all around her.

The story has been adapted numerous times, including a classic version with Margaret O’Brien, in 1949. In 1993, Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope backed a lovely adaptation directed by Agnieszka Holland. The music was by Zbigniew Preisner.

“The Best Years of Our Lives,” from 1946, is one of the most beautiful films to treat the subject of American soldiers readjusting to civilian life following World War II. A trio of veterans returns from overseas to find their lives irrevocably changed. It isn’t easy, but they rise to meet all challenges with the help of family and friends. The film is all the more moving and inspirational for its characters’ integrity and tenacity.

The cast includes Frederic March, Dana Andrews, and real-life veteran Harold Russell. Russell was awarded a special Academy Award for “bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance.” Russell had lost both his hands in an explosion. Honored also with an award for Best Supporting Actor, he is the only figure ever to win two Oscars for the same performance.

The film won nine Oscars in all, among them Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (March), Best Screenplay (Robert E. Sherwood), and Best Music (Hugo Friedhofer).

Based on a novel of Anne Tyler, “The Accidental Tourist,” from 1988, stars William Hurt as a travel writer, the loss of whose son leads to emotional sterility and estrangement from his wife, played by Kathleen Turner. He is eventually brought around by a quirky dog-trainer (Geena Davis, in an Academy Award-winning performance). It’s a movie about letting go, and having the courage to move forward. The understated score is by John Williams.

Finally, sports movies have always been a popular genre through which to tell stories of resurrection and redemption. “The Natural,” Barry Levinson’s 1984 adaptation of the novel of Bernard Malamud, tells the tale of a baseball player (played by Robert Redford), who is struck down in his prime, only to be reborn in mythic triumph. The inspiring music is by Randy Newman.

Put some “spring” back into your step, with music from movies about new beginnings and second chances, on “Picture Perfect,” 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

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

March 21, 2025
Stravinsky’s Rite vs Delius’ Cuckoo for Spring

March 20.

Delius’ “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring” is all well and good, but in this month notorious for its whiplash caprice, Leonard Bernstein conducting Stravinsky’s “Le sacre du printemps” is perhaps a better, if not safer, bet.

Then again, from that photo, perhaps the cuckoo is not to be undersold…

Here’s Bernstein, captured in his prime, conducting Stravinsky’s primal masterpiece without a score.

Happy spring?

Perhaps you prefer to decompress with Delius’ romanticized cuckoo.

Both works were first performed in 1913!

March 20, 2025
Boulez Centenary on The Lost Chord Radio Show

Just finished recording this week’s edition of “The Lost Chord.” To mark the centenary of the birth of Pierre Boulez on March 26, the program juxtaposes two Boulez-conducted song cycles: Boulez’s own “Le Marteau sans maître” (“The Hammer without a Master”) and Ravel’s “Chansons madécasses“ (“Madagascan Songs”). Hear it on KWAX, this Saturday at 7:00 p.m. EDT/4:00 p.m. PDT. Stream it wherever you are at https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

March 19, 2025
Black Oak Ensemble Plays Princeton

For whatever reason, the second half of the concert season always turns out to be especially busy for me. I don’t know if it’s the allure of the repertoire, the irresistible discount offers, or the madness of spring, but since the pandemic, anyway, every year, March and April have turned out to be crazy concert months. Surely the madness peaks at the end of April, when I will be hearing Yuja Wang and Yo-Yo Ma on the same day (!), but I’ll be running it close with a concert of rarely-heard music from the 1920s (including John Alden Carpenter’s “Skyscrapers”) at Lincoln Center with the American Symphony Orchestra this weekend and Jake Heggie’s “Moby Dick” at the Met later in the week.

Despite the fact that my dance card is full, I’ll definitely make room for this one, which totally snuck up on me: tomorrow night, Thursday, at 7:00, the BLACK OAK Ensemble will perform works for string trio at Trinity Church, 33 Mercer Street in Princeton, NJ.

The program is Classic Ross Amico catnip, including music by Gideon Klein, Jean Cras, and Henri Tomasi. Also some guy named Johann Sebastian Bach (to be played, as it turns out, on the eve of his birthday anniversary).

The Czech pianist and composer Gideon Klein (1919-1945) was one of a number of major musical figures to be interned at Terezin, or Theresienstadt, the model “artists’ camp” set up by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. Basically, it was an antechamber to Auschwitz. When there were no camera crews or Red Cross representatives to bear witness, Klein was deported and killed with the rest.

Jean Cras (1879-1932) was a career navy officer from Brittany, who composed a fair amount of his music shipboard. His opera, “Polyphème,” about the lovelorn cyclops Polyphemus, is a great wallow.

French composer Henri Tomasi (1901-1971) found steady work as a conductor, beginning in the early days of radio. In the 1940s, he established the contemporary music group Triton with Sergei Prokofiev, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, and Francis Poulenc.

The program will conclude with some ersatz Romani music, Vittorio Monti’s “Csárdás” from 1904. (You know it, even if you think you don’t.)

The concert is the latest in a chamber music series featuring visiting ensembles presented by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. If it lures me out on a Thursday evening during such a busy month, it’s got to be something special. For tickets, visit princetonsymphony.org.

To learn more about the Black Oak Ensemble, look here: https://www.blackoakensemble.com/about

March 19, 2025
Edward Everett Horton Birthday Tribute

I note that today is the birthday of character actor Edward Everett Horton. Horton’s screen career began in the silents, where he started out as a comic lead. By the time of the talkies, he settled into supporting roles as the Nervous Nellie best friend (playing second banana to Fred Astaire, among others). His characters often appear with self-absorbed smirks on their faces, gliding obliviously through life. But security is fleeting, and time and again their faith in the status quo is abruptly undermined. When the rug is yanked out from under, surprise, anxiety, and frustration are registered in a trademark double-take.

Earlier experience on the stage, in vaudeville and on Broadway, allowed Horton to hone his comic timing. He was the ne plus ultra of flustered, fidgety fussbudgets. Over a 50-year career, he would appear in some 130 movies.

To anyone who grew up in the era of classic television or its reruns, Horton will be recognized as the voice of the narrator in Rocky and Bullwinkle’s “Fractured Fairy Tales,” as Roaring Chicken on “F Troop,” or as Chief Screaming Chicken (alongside Vincent Price’s Egghead) on “Batman.” Furthermore, I have seen no confirmation of this, but surely the character of C-3PO owes a thing or two to Horton. Without knowing anything of his romantic proclivities (in real life he sold himself as a bachelor), on screen, alongside Franklin Pangborn and Eric Blore, he was ever the coded “gay” character.

While Horton was an indispensable presence during the TCM-era of comfort food comedies, the primary reason I mention him is because decades ago I heard a recording of him on the radio, narrating Ernst Bacon’s “Fables.” It was a live performance, likely borrowed from an archive (possibly the Fleisher Collection?) and probably not available commercially. At any rate, I have never been able to locate it. Until now. Or an excerpt anyway, posted on YouTube. Today I share this movement with Horton narrating “The Lion and the Sheep.”

Bacon, who was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships and a Pulitzer Scholarship in 1932 for his Symphony No. 2, is remembered primarily for his vast output of art song, having set poetry by Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, A. E. Housman, Nikolaus Lenau, Herman Melville, Carl Sandburg, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sara Teasdale, and Walt Whitman, among others.

I’m amused to learn that Horton was kicked out of Oberlin College (where he majored in German) after he climbed to the top of a building and, to the horror of a gathering crowd, threw a dummy off the roof. That’s the kind of prank I could really get behind.

Happy birthday, Edward Everett Horton!

Horton and Eric Blore in “Shall We Dance” with Fred Astaire

“Fractured Fairy Tales”

Ernst Bacon, Symphony No. 2

Four Poems of Emily Dickinson

March 18, 2025

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