Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

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
Andrzej Panufnik: Polish Music’s Sleeping Giant

Andrzej Panufnik is the sleeping giant of Polish music. He’s one of those figures, like Bohuslav Martinu, who always seems perched on the verge of greatness, and yet never quite achieves the full degree of recognition he deserves.

To begin with, his particular brand of modernism was eclipsed by the avant-garde experiments of his compatriot and friend, Witold Lutoslawski. Panufnik’s relationship with Lutoslawski dated back to the war years. During the German occupation, the two formed a piano duo which played in Warsaw cafes – at the time the only way to share live music in public, since there was a ban on organized gatherings.

In the meantime, Panufnik quietly produced subversive works celebrating Polish heroism and the resistance. Following the war, he was instrumental in the re-establishment of the Warsaw Philharmonic. However, increasing friction with Poland’s communist regime led to the composer’s defection, under hair-raising circumstances, in 1954. He was granted asylum in England, where he received a knighthood in 1991, the year of his death.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll pay tribute to Panufnik to mark the centenary of his birth – September 24, 1914 – with two of his ten symphonies, both of them markedly Polish in character.

His “Sinfonia Rustica” (1948, revised in 1955), as the title implies, is a work very much of the people, making use of fragmented Polish themes, meant to reflect the rustic, semi-abstract, paper-cut art of the peasantry. Not only the symphony’s framework, but also the layout of the orchestra, is meant to reflect the symmetry found in Polish folk art. Nevertheless, despite the work’s direct character, it was denounced in 1949 as “alien to the great socialist era.”

Whenever I listen to Panufnik’s “Sinfonia Sacra” (1963), I always think of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1884 epic, “With Fire and Sword,” set in the 17th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. With its evocation of winged hussars in courageous battle against the Cossacks, Sienkiewicz’s monumental page-turner whipped readers living in a partitioned Poland into a patriotic fervor.

Conceived as a tribute to Poland’s millennium of Christianity and statehood, the symphony reflects the composer’s religious and patriotic sentiments. Panufnik based the work on the first known hymn in the Polish language, “Bogurodzica.” Throughout the Middle Ages, this served as something of a national anthem, sung not only in the church, but also on the battlefields by Polish knights.

Join me for these two symphonies by Andrzej Panufnik – “Andrzej the Giant” – this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Friday morning at 3; or listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

PHOTO: Panufnik, adjusting to English life

September 21, 2014
Cinecittà World Rome: Italy’s New Movie Theme Park

At last, somewhere I can put my eye-squinting and Toscano-chomping skills to good use.

Cinecittà Studios has opened Italy’s largest amusement park in Rome. In addition to two roller coasters, a flight simulator, an immersive tunnel, a water attraction, four theaters and theme restaurants, the park is home to attractions inspired by classic films.

Visitors enter the park through the jaws of the Temple of Moloch from the silent classic “Cabiria,” the film that introduced the world to the enduring strongman Maciste. The Maciste craze reached its peak in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, prior to the rise of the spaghetti western, the character appearing on American screens in the guise of Hercules, Samson, Atlas or whatever other mythological, Biblical or historical strongman you can think of. “Cabiria” was shot in Turin in 1914.

The studios, cofounded by Mussolini in 1937, became a creative hotbed for the Italian neorealist movement and directors such as Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. Cinecittà also supplied lots and soundstages for American productions from “Ben-Hur” and “Cleopatra” to “The Gangs of New York,” “The Passion of the Christ” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.”

The park, which opened in July, was designed by three-time Academy Award-winner Dante Ferretti, with music supplied from the film scores of Ennio Morricone.

Of particular interest is Ennio’s Creek, built on a spaghetti western motif, where Morricone’s music evokes the dusty, sundrenched terrain so memorably occupied by Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef. The attraction was introduced earlier this month.

Sounds an awful lot like “Westworld,” without the robots.

You can read more about it here, though you may have to hit the translate button:

http://www.cinecittaworld.it/set/ennios-creek-citta-di-frontiera/

In inglese:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cinecitta-world-theme-park-opens-721738

September 20, 2014
Korngold’s Hollywood Composers

Errol Flynn writes a ballet? Charles Boyer composes a tone poem? Claude Rains writes a cello concerto!

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ve got three examples from Hollywood’s Golden Age of movies about fictional composers. These, of course, required music allegedly written by the characters, and this was provided by two-time Academy Award-winner Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Korngold is probably best known to movie buffs as the composer for Flynn swashbucklers such as “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Sea Hawk,” but his filmography is more varied than one might at first suspect. No matter what the subject, Korngold could be counted on to bring that opulent fin de siècle gloss, developed in a Vienna steeped in Mahler and Strauss.

We’ll hear music from “Escape Me Never” (1947), a slightly preposterous melodrama about two composer brothers who become rivals in love; “The Constant Nymph” (1943), about a would-be romantic bond between a composer struggling to find his true voice and an admiring girl on the verge of womanhood who develops deeper feelings for him; and “Deception” (1946), about a cellist reunited with his former love, who had believed him killed during the war, and the vindictive composer who attempts to shatter his psyche through grueling rehearsals of his latest concerto.

“Deception” was Korngold’s last, wholly original score, though he was lured back to Hollywood for one final project, “Magic Fire” (1955), a biopic of the composer Richard Wagner, for which he adapted selections from Wagner’s operas. Furthermore, Korngold makes an appearance onscreen (!) as conductor Hans Richter. The film was subject to heavy cuts prior to its U.S. release and was not a success.

Hollywood seldom gets it right when it comes to portraying the process of the composer, but Korngold, true to his name, did his best to spin gold from corn, producing some appropriately grand utterances, albeit condensed to only a few minutes of screen time. Quite a task for this figure who made his greatest mark in opera.

Join me for these examples of Korngold as ghostwriter, on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6 ET, or enjoy it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

Follow the link to hear Korngold improvise on themes from “The Flying Dutchman” (with entertaining stills):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4bNEw1nu3I

PHOTO: Paul Henreid in “Deception.” He wore a special jacket to accommodate the arms of two professional cellists who stood behind him as he emoted. On the film’s soundtrack the concerto was performed by Eleanor Aller Slatkin, the mother of Leonard Slatkin.

September 18, 2014
Griffes’ Pleasure Dome American Impressionist

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree…”

Sounds good to me! As I sit here like Sardanapalus luxuriating amidst my musical treasures, I contemplate the short life and creative promise of Charles Tomlinson Griffes.

Griffes’ was a unique voice in American music. At the beginning of his life, our native composers mostly emulated Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms; by the end, they were starting to gravitate toward jazz. By contrast, Griffes, like the painter Mary Cassatt, was attracted to French Impressionism, yet the weird incense of Scriabin also permeates his work.

He is best known for dreamy meditations like “The White Peacock” and “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan,” after Coleridge.

Griffes was born in Elmira, NY, on this date in 1884. He died of influenza in 1920, aged only 35 years.

Elmira was Mark Twain’s home from 1870. I’ve sometimes wondered if the two ever met. It has been documented that Griffes saw Twain there when moving about the streets. They certainly adhered to very different aesthetics.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2010-03-14-elmira-new-york-mark-twain_N.htm

Take some time today to enjoy an opiate dream at the Pleasure-Dome:

PHOTO: It’s good to be the king

September 17, 2014

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