Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Hemingway on Film: Music for Stoic Manliness

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we get in touch with our masculine side, with music from movies inspired by the writings of Ernest Hemingway.

Seemingly at odds with Hemingway’s minimalist, “iceberg” style, big screen adaptations of the writer’s work show what the stories don’t tell. In the case of 1946’s “The Killers,” the screenwriters unapologetically just made stuff up, an entire back story explaining the motivations for the hit of boxer “Swede” Andreson. Fortunately those screenwriters happened to include an uncredited John Huston, who virtually codified noir with “The Maltese Falcon.”

“The Killers” provided Burt Lancaster with his break-out role. It also features a knock-out score by Miklós Rózsa, in which he uses the dum-dee-dum-dum theme later made famous by the television series “Dragnet.”

In 1977, George C. Scott reunited with his “Patton” director, Franklin J. Schaffner, for an adaptation of Hemingway’s posthumously published novel, “Islands in the Stream.” Scott gives one of his best performances as a Hemingway-like figure living on a Caribbean island. “Patton” composer Jerry Goldsmith wrote the music. Goldsmith spoke of it often as his favorite score.

Hemingway himself handpicked the leads for the 1943 adaptation of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman falling in love against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. The music was by the prolific and versatile Victor Young.

And finally, Spencer Tracy is the whole show, as he faces off against a large marlin, in the 1958 version of “The Old Man and the Sea.” Dimitri Tiomkin’s music earned him his fourth Academy Award.

Join me for an hour of laconic grace and stoic manliness on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6. Or listen to it later as a webcast, at http://www.wwfm.org.

PHOTO: Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner killing it in “The Killers”

September 25, 2014
Panufnik Centenary Warsaw Variations

Today is the centenary of the birth of Polish master Andrzej Panufnik, about whom I wrote a few days ago to promote last Sunday night’s “The Lost Chord,” which was devoted to two of his symphonies. (The show will be repeated Friday at 3 a.m. ET and then posted as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.)

Here’s a fascinating audio documentary about Panufnik and his friend Witold Lutoslawski. You’ll remember that Lutoslawski and Panufnik formed a piano duo which performed in Warsaw cafes, since it was the only means through which to share music during the Nazi occupation, when there was a ban on organized gatherings.

http://www.fallingtree.co.uk/listen/warsaw_variations

“Warsaw Variations” aired several times on BBC radio and was awarded a Prix Europa for Best Radio Music Documentary. Lutoslawski’s “Variations on a Theme of Paganini,” which had its origins in the piano duo’s repertoire, features throughout.

“I think they both had a sort of mission that people needed music, and they needed music more than any other time ever, almost, in order to keep their courage up.”

– Camilla Jessel Panufnik, the composer’s widow

PHOTO: Lutoslawski (left) and Panufnik (right), with violinist Eugenia Umińska. Umińska joined the Polish resistance, took part in the Polish Uprising, and survived capture to become a professor and later rector at the Academy of Music in Kraków. The photo was taken in 1942.

September 24, 2014
Remembering Christopher Hogwood

Somewhere I’ve got an uncashed check from Christopher Hogwood, from back in the days when I still had my book business. I remember he had ordered a book of facsimiles of a Purcell manuscript. I was probably about 30 and star struck, so I sent it to him gratis. He likely watched his bank account with a degree of annoyance for months after, as he waited for whatever the amount was to be deducted from his balance.

I only just learned of Hogwood’s death from an unspecified illness lasting several months. He was 73 years-old.

Hogwood, of course, was a pioneer of the early music movement. He was a founding member of the Early Music Consort of London. He also played the harpsichord on recordings of Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. In 1973, he broke away to establish the Academy of Ancient Music. He directed the ensemble for some 30 years and produced more than 200 albums. For a time, he also directed Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society.

By the 1990s, he began to branch out to produce memorable discs of Stravinsky, Sir Michael Tippett and especially Bohuslav Martinu. With the turn of the millennium, he tackled the complete symphonies of the Danish romantic Niels Wilhelm Gade.

In the early days of compact disc, period instrument recordings struck me as metallic and strident. I don’t know if it was the evolution of performance practice, the technology or my ears (perhaps a bit of all three), but that all started to change. By the time I heard Hogwood’s recording of Haydn’s “The Creation,” I found it a revelation. In fact, I’m going to put it on right now.

God bless you, Mr. Hogwood. Rest in peace.

September 24, 2014
Autumn Arrives Welcoming the Season’s Charm

After a sticky Sunday, Autumn crept in last night at 10:29 ET, riding a chill breeze like Cougar & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. Can’t wait for the change of color, the crunching underfoot, the classic horror movies, the sweaters, the infinite night skies, and Thanksgiving. Welcome, O Happy Season!

“Valse Septembre” by Felix Godin (real name Henry Albert Brown), another British Light Music classic:

September 23, 2014
Čiurlionis Lithuanian Genius of Music & Art

It doesn’t seem right that someone so talented in one discipline should be equally if not more talented in another. But that’s precisely the case with Mikalojus Čiurlionis, a composer of opulent tone poems who also happened to be a major Symbolist painter. Oh yeah, he could write, too. In his 35 years, he managed to compose 400 pieces of music and to create about 300 paintings. This is all the more impressive in that his career basically spanned a single decade.

Čiurlionis was born into a Polish-speaking family in the Lithuanian village of Senoji Varėna on this date in 1875. He studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and then the Warsaw School of Fine Arts.

A passionate figure in the Romantic mold, he lived his life at a fever pitch. He was interested in photography, geology, history, chemistry, geometry, physics, astronomy, astrology, mythology, philosophy, dead and modern languages, and eastern and western religions.

He hurled himself into the Lithuanian national movement. He was the first composer to collect and publish Lithuanian folk music. He organized and participated in the first three exhibitions of Lithuanian artists. He was one of 19 founding members of the Lithuanian Artists Union. He declared to his brother that he intended to dedicate all of his past and future works to Lithuania.

In 1909, he married the art critic Sofija Kymantaitė. Their time together was brief. At the age of 33, Čiurlionis fell into a profound depression and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Marki, northeast of Warsaw. There he contracted pneumonia and died without ever having met his daughter.

Čiurlionis was a synesthete, so that he experienced colors and music simultaneously. A number of his paintings bear musical titles. His music teeters between Romanticism and Modernism, and his paintings between Symbolism and Abstract Expressionism.

Happy birthday to this intense, doomed artist.

Čiurlionis’ tone poem, “The Sea” (1903-1907):

Paintings by Čiurlionis:

http://www.wikiart.org/en/mikalojus-ciurlionis/mode/all-paintings

PHOTO: News (1905)

September 22, 2014

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