Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Henry Brant Spatial Music Pioneer Remembered

I’m feeling a little spacey today, so I suppose it’s only appropriate to remember Henry Brant.

Brant, who died in 2008 at the age of 94, was best known for his experiments with spatial music, in which performers are located not only on stage but also at carefully worked-out positions throughout the hall. The bodies of musicians are frequently distinguished through the playing of music of different characters.

Brant’s “Ice Field” was inspired by an episode from his boyhood when, as a 12 year-old in 1926, he found himself aboard a ship passing cautiously through a field of icebergs in the North Atlantic. Its performance calls for strings, two pianos, two harps and timpani on stage, oboes and bassoons in the organ loft, brass and jazz drummer in the first-tier seats, piccolos and clarinets at one end of the second tier, with pitched percussion at the other end, and additional percussion to the side of the audience on the main floor.

Brant played the organ at the work’s first performance at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, under Michael Tilson Thomas. The piece was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2001.

By coincidence, Tilson Thomas and organist Cameron Carpenter will be reviving the work at Davies Symphony Hall later this week.

http://www.sfsymphony.org/About-Us/Press-Room/Press-Releases/MTT-Carpenter-September-18-21.aspx

Interestingly, Brant also worked as an orchestrator for Hollywood film scores. In particular, his distinctive timbres, frequently bright and shrill, color a number of the classic scores of Alex North. He also worked as an orchestrator on Virgil Thomson’s “The Plow that Broke the Plains” and Aaron Copland’s “The City.”

Here is Brant discussing his concept of spatial music:

And a beautiful spatial work – though on a comparatively modest scale – “On the Nature of Things” (1956), after Lucretius, for some reason posted here in two parts:

Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyglGX8fPmE
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dueRnnn4Bo

Happy 101st birthday to the Canadian-born American composer Henry Brant!

September 15, 2014
Leon Fleisher A Legend’s Journey

At 86, Leon Fleisher is a living legend. A former child prodigy, his is a direct line to Beethoven. He studied with Artur Schnabel, who studied with Theodor Leschetizky, who studied with Carl Czerny, who studied with the master himself.

When he performed with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Monteux at the age of 16, Monteux called him “the pianistic find of the century.” Fleisher landed a recording contract with Columbia Records and began laying down benchmark recordings of Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Grieg and Rachmaninoff with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra.

Then everything changed.

Fleisher was diagnosed with focal dystonia in 1964. He gradually lost control of his right hand, throwing his career as a concert pianist into jeopardy. His struggle with the affliction led to a period of soul-searching, and it forced him to diversify. He realized, as Schnabel had espoused, that music came first, the piano second.

Fleisher began channeling his energy into teaching and conducting. He has been a venerable presence at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

Fortunately, the left-hand piano repertoire is extensive, and Fleisher himself has added considerably to it, through commissioned works from contemporary composers or gifts from friends. His new album, “All the Things You Are,” issued by Bridge Records, documents some of these, alongside his performance of Brahms’ towering arrangement of the Bach Chaconne.

The record has become a surprise hit. This week, according to Nielsen Soundscan data, the album ranked second, in terms of overall sales of classical records, in the United States. Billboard ranked it at number 11. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross lauded it as “one of [Fleisher’s] finest hours on record.”

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” I am honored to have Leon Fleisher as my guest. He will join me to talk a little bit about the album and share some of his reflections on music.

Fleisher is an extraordinary individual. Not only has he fought hard to regain control of his right hand – and done so, thanks to experimental treatments with, of all things, Botox – he is quite possibly the most gracious and generous interview subject I’ve ever encountered. It pains me to have had to edit the conversation. But perhaps there will be a follow-up show, in which I’ll air his thoughts on Paul Wittgenstein, Franz Schmidt, Paul Hindemith, Federico Mompou and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll join me for “In Good Hands,” this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Friday morning at 3. Remember, you can enjoy episodes of “The Lost Chord” later as a webcast, at http://www.wwfm.org.

September 13, 2014
Artists’ Lives on the Big Screen

How to translate visual art to the big screen? Generally by focusing on the drama in the artists’ lives, that’s how.

And what drama!

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll listen to music from movies inspired by the great artists. “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” based on the novel of Irving Stone, dramatizes the friction between Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) and his benefactor, Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), over the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For his part, Michelangelo would have been perfectly content to stick to sculpture. Alex North’s score is an Early Music banquet, with allusions to – and sometimes outright quotations of – music of the Renaissance.

Stone had another bestseller in “Lust for Life,” about the tormented Vincent van Gogh. This time Kirk Douglas plays one of his most sympathetic roles – and looks remarkably like the artist. Anthony Quinn turns up as his “frenemy,” the painter Paul Gaugin, and earns an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The great Miklós Rózsa wrote the music, softening up the edges of his brawny Hungarian sound with the softer palette of the French Impressionists.

John Huston brought Pierre La Mure’s novel about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to the big screen as “Moulin Rouge” (not to be confused with the more recent Baz Luhrmann spectacle starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, which relegated the artist to a supporting role). José Ferrer dominates the earlier version, spending most of the film walking through off-camera trenches and shuffling along on his knees. Georges Auric, one of the composers of Les Six (which also included Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud), captures the spirit of the titular cabaret. The score became one of Auric’s best-known, thanks to the waltz becoming a popular hit, “Where is Your Heart.”

“The Picasso Summer” is a departure from the usual formula of focusing on the artist himself. Instead, a young couple (played by Albert Finney and Yvette Mimieux), admirers of Picasso’s work, take off on a European adventure in an attempt to track him down. Originally Picasso himself had agreed to appear, but some off-screen drama involving a matador friend and Yul Brynner’s wife drove him off. The film was based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury hated the adaptation, as did the studio, and “The Picasso Summer,” after being heavily cut and patched with new footage, was never released theatrically in the United States. The film is striking for its extended animation sequences inspired by Picasso’s paintings, and for its score by Michel Legrand.

Join me for an hour of music from films about the great artists this week, on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6 ET, or listen to it later as a webcast, at http://www.wwfm.org.

September 11, 2014
Rossen Milanov to Lead Columbus Symphony

Princeton Symphony Orchestra music director Rossen Milanov will venture west next season, to create a new world in Columbus, OH.

Milanov, 49, has been named music director of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, beginning with the 2015-2016 season. He will appear with the orchestra twice during the upcoming season, Jan. 30-31 and Mar. 20-21.

Milanov, who is also artistic director of Orquesta Sinfonica del Principado de Asturias in Spain, will retain his post in Princeton. He will, however, be stepping down as conductor of the Collingswood-based training orchestra, Symphony in C.

This past week, he led Symphony in C in a concert featuring Peter Richard Conte on the famed Wanamaker organ at what is now Macy’s department store in Center City Philadelphia. Milanov will conduct the Princeton Symphony in music of Max Bruch and Anton Bruckner at Richardson Auditorium on Sept. 28. For more information on that program, visit http://princetonsymphony.org/.

Milanov’s primary residence will be in Columbus, where he plans to spend 16 weeks next season working with the orchestra, though he will retain his apartment in Philadelphia.

Milanov served with the Philadelphia Orchestra for eleven years, first as assistant conductor, from 2000-2003, and then as associate conductor, from 2003-2011. Concurrently, he served as the orchestra’s artistic director at its summer home of the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, from 2006-2010.

Here’s an article that appeared this morning in The Columbus Dispatch:

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2014/09/10/columbus-symphony-to-tap-milanov-as-new-conductor.html

If all goes as planned, I’ll be talking with Milanov this week about his upcoming concert with the Princeton Symphony. The interview will run in the Trenton Times a week from Friday.

September 10, 2014
Higdon Weds Alsop Officiates

I just learned of the marriage of composer Jennifer Higdon, and I was wondering if conductors are like ship captains, if Marin Alsop can officiate at a wedding? It turns out, in California, a person can become a Deputy Commissioner of Civil Marriages for 24 hours with the right paperwork.

Alsop married Higdon and her high school sweetheart Cheryl Lawson early last month. Lawson is the manager of Higdon’s publishing company. Higdon, who is on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music, and whose works are frequently programmed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, received a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for her Violin Concerto.

Alsop previously officiated at the wedding of composers John Corigliano and Mark Adamo. Corigliano was recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 2 in 2001 and an Academy Award for his score to “The Red Violin” in 1999.

Alsop, a former protégée of Leonard Bernstein, has been music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra since 2007.

I’m just hurt I’m only just now learning about the wedding, since I only live a block away from the happy couple.

PHOTO: With that CD collection, I’d marry her, too. (Actually this looks a lot like my apartment, minus the piano.)

September 9, 2014

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