Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Elgar’s Melancholy Genius & Dog Devotion

For many, Sir Edward Elgar is inseparable from “Pomp and Circumstance.” His ceremonial music conjures thoughts of Imperial England (and Stateside graduation ceremonies), though anyone with a sensitive ear will detect the melancholy underpinnings of the artist.

Elgar was a soulful composer, whose faith, love of country, love of his wife and love of animals enriched his existence and informed his music. However, all was not peaches and cream. A Catholic in overwhelmingly Protestant England, of humble origins in a class-conscious society (his fiancée was disinherited for accepting his proposal), Elgar was seldom completely comfortable in his own skin.

He was also a grand procrastinator, often getting lost in his experiments as an amateur chemist and shirking his duties in favor of slipping off to the races.

Though he loved his wife devotedly, he was deprived while she lived of the pleasure of the company of dogs, which he adored. A close friend’s bulldog, Dan, became an honorary pet, and as we know from Elgar’s letters and marginalia scribbled in his manuscripts, the spirit of Dan infuses a surprising number of his works. (An episode in which Dan tumbled into the Thames is immortalized as one of the “Enigma Variations.”)

After the death of his wife, Elgar was able to openly indulge his passion for dogs, right down to setting places for them at the table. One of these was a cairn terrier named Mina, who was the inspiration for a charming miniature, his very last work (performed here a mite under tempo):

Happy Birthday, Sir Edward Elgar!

PHOTO: Elgar with his spaniel Marco

June 2, 2014
Otters Play Piano Delighting Camille Saint-Saëns

Otters playing the piano? I suspect Camille Saint-Saëns would be delighted. (These are real otters, by the way, as will be immediately obvious when you follow the link.)

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/you-otter-believe-these-zoo-animals-can-play-piano-harmonica-xylophone-180951590/?utm_source=twitter.com&no-ist

While we’re at it, here’s “Nessun dorma” with goats.

PHOTO: Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas

June 1, 2014
Water Spirits in Music Rusalka Week Special

There have been innumerable pieces of music written about water spirits – sirens, naiads, lorelei, undines, mermaids and melusinas. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll sample just a couple of these for Rusalka Week.

In Slavic mythology, a rusalka is a spirit that dwells at the bottom of a river or lake. She lures unsuspecting men with her song, invariably resulting in a watery doom. Rusalki are never more dangerous than in early June, when the spirits roam free.

Rusalka Week plays a role in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, “May Night,” drawn from Gogol’s collection, “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.” Alexander Dargomizhsky’s opera, “Rusalka,” is based on a dramatic poem by Pushkin. And the best known of the bunch, Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” was inspired by Czech fairy tales of Karel Jaromir Erben and Bozena Nemcova.

Of course, we won’t be listening to any of these. (We’ve treated Rimsky and Dargomizhsky in the past.) Instead, we’ll have a flute sonata from 1882, by Carl Reinecke, which bears the subtitle “Undine,” an allusion to a novella by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, which was very popular among the Romantics. Fouqué’s Undine tells the tale of a water spirit who marries a knight in order to gain a soul.

Then we’ll hear the complete ballet, “Les Sirènes,” from 1946, by Lord Berners. Berners, notorious for his sense of the absurd (a horse was a regular guest at his indoor tea parties) was a talented composer, writer and painter. “Les Sirènes,” on a scenario devised by Frederick Ashton, features mermaids combing their hair and singing on rocks at a seaside resort, where sirens of another sort behave coquettishly on shore.

That’s “Come on in, the Water’s Fine.” PLEASE NOTE: Due to the egregious length of the Sunday opera (Wagner’s “Parsifal,” beginning at 3 p.m. ET), “The Lost Chord” will begin one hour later than usual, at 11. The repeat will air Thursday at the same time.

You don’t want to be out walking during Rusalka Week anyway, so why don’t you stay indoors and enjoy the show? Or listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

May 31, 2014
Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Hollywood’s Prodigy

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957). I don’t know, maybe it has something to do with watching those Errol Flynn movies on television as a kid – you know, the ones that inspire you to take down the curtain rods and start dueling around the house.

Korngold was one of music’s great child prodigies. His ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann” (“The Snowman”), composed at the age of 11, was performed at the Vienna Court Opera before Emperor Franz Josef. His early piano and chamber works were picked up by Artur Schnabel. His “Sinfonietta” (a full-scale symphony in all but name) was performed by Felix Weingartner and the Vienna Philharmonic when he was 15. At one performance, Korngold shared a box with Richard Strauss.

Several of his operas are knock-outs. The double premiere in Hamburg and Cologne of “Die tote Stadt” (“The Dead City”) in 1920 made Korngold, at the age of 23, one of the leading opera composers of his time.

Several factors contributed to an enormous shake-up in Korngold’s reputation. One was the fact that his musical language never really developed. His earliest works are as finely crafted and as fully realized as those written at the end of his life – most impressive, except that what seemed strikingly modern when he was a teen later seemed hopelessly romantic and passé.

Another was that Korngold followed theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt to Hollywood for a big screen adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” This led to further offers from Warner Brothers, under terms he couldn’t refuse. In the meantime, the Nazis rolled into Austria, effectively sealing off his return home.

For decades, Korngold’s reputation among “serious” music aficionados suffered. His Violin Concerto was famously derided by one critic as “more Korn than Gold.” But that all began to change in the 1970s, with the issue of an album on the RCA label, featuring music from Flynn’s “The Sea Hawk,” “Captain Blood” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” that proved there was indeed a market for classic film music. Ironically, the very projects that had dragged him down in the eyes of some served to jumpstart his posthumous revival.

With the advent of compact disc, with labels searching for worthwhile though underexposed repertoire to lure consumers who had already replaced their entire record collections, Korngold’s reputation again began to soar. While he will never be regarded as the next Mahler or even Richard Strauss, it’s fairly obvious at this point that his place in “serious music” is secure.

Still it is with affection that many remember his film scores, which he regarded as operas without words. It was Korngold who brought Old World opulence to New World popular culture. His efforts earned him two Academy Awards.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll have two scores by Korngold as part of our second installment celebrating the films of 1939, which film historians frequently refer to as “Hollywood’s greatest year.” The first installment aired in February, and featured music from “The Wizard of Oz,” (Harold Arlen & Herbert Stothart) “Of Mice and Men” (Aaron Copland), “Gunga Din” (Alfred Newman) and “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (Richard Addinsell).

This week’s episode will include Korngold’s “Juarez,” an historical drama about Mexican resistance against the French army of Napoleon III, which starred Paul Muni, Bette Davis and Claude Rains, and “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” with Davis and Errol Flynn, as Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, respectively. The latter features plenty of Korngold’s signature pageantry.

The show will also include two scores by Alfred Newman, for “Wuthering Heights” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

A third installment, focusing on the indefatigable Max Steiner – who worked on 13 films in 1939 – will air in the fall. So no more brickbats from you “Gone With the Wind” fans, please!

Join us on the second leg of our journey to celebrate the 75th anniversary of “Hollywood’s greatest year,” on “Picture Perfect,” Friday evening at 6, or enjoy it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

PHOTO: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (right) works with a score mixer laying down the tracks for “Juarez.” That’s Paul Muni onscreen.

May 29, 2014
Remembering Ligeti Avant-Garde Genius

I can’t believe György Ligeti has been dead for eight years already. An avant-garde composer whose music could actually inspire affection, Ligeti rocketed to broader fame when his music was used, against his will, in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Ligeti was born in Transylvania in 1923. He survived many hardships. Most of his family was wiped out in the Holocaust; he was conscripted into a forced labor brigade; he lived for a time under strict communist rule. He survived the violent Soviet putdown of the Hungarian Revolution, and finally escaped with his on-again/off-again wife in a pair of mail sacks, leaping off a night train and crawling for miles through the mud to find safety in Vienna. He went on to become one of the leading composers of the second half of the 20th century.

Ligeti was not the kind of artist who would have flourished under totalitarianism. (Come to think of it, what artist is?) He even abandoned the avant-garde circle in Cologne, which included Karlheinz Stockhausen, because he found the environment to be too dogmatic. Though he wrote little electronic music himself, he incorporated the lessons he learned at the Cologne Electronic Music Studio into his instrumental works, often creating otherworldly textures.

Remarkably, for all he endured, he was able to hang on to his sense of humor, and this shone through in his music from time to time.

Here’s the car horn prelude to his opera, “Le Grand Macabre.”

And perhaps his greatest hit (thanks to Kubrick), his “Requiem,” most recently heard in the trailers for “Godzilla.”

Lastly, Barbara Hannigan in “Mysteries of the Macabre,” a distillation of three coloratura arias from “Le Grand Macabre,” sung by the character of Gepopo, the chief of secret police. In case you’re curious, the text is semi-nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFFpzip-SZk

Happy birthday, György Ligeti!

May 28, 2014

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