Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

  • Philly Music Greats: Kay & Amram Birthdays

    Philly Music Greats: Kay & Amram Birthdays

    Today is the birthday of two notable Philadelphians.

    Hershy Kay (1919-1981) is known mainly for his arrangements for George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet and for his work on Broadway. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, where Randall Thompson was his composition teacher and Leonard Bernstein a classmate. He started making arrangements to get out of playing the cello in pit bands. Along the way, he taught himself how to orchestrate.

    The success of Kay’s orchestrations for Bernstein’s “On the Town” put him much in demand. He would later collaborate with Bernstein on “Peter Pan” and “Candide.” His work as an orchestrator can also be heard in such varied projects as Marc Blitzstein’s “Juno,” Cy Coleman’s “Barnum” and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita.”

    For Balanchine he wrote the sub-Copland “Western Symphony” and the splashy “Stars and Stripes Ballet,” after Sousa. He also reconstructed and orchestrated works of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, resulting in the “Grande Tarantelle,” for piano and orchestra, and the ballet “Cakewalk.”

    David Amram (b. 1930) has always been equally at home in classical music, jazz, folk and world music. He’s composed over 100 orchestral and chamber works, music for Broadway and film (including scores for “Splendor in the Grass” and “The Manchurian Candidate”), and two operas. He’s also written three books, with a fourth in the works.

    He was raised on a farm in Bucks County, where he was introduced to classical, jazz and cantorial music by his father and uncle. He took piano lessons and experimented with instruments of the brass family, finally settling on the French horn. Following a year at Oberlin, he lit out for George Washington University, where he studied history. While there, he performed as an extra hornist with the National Symphony. He also studied privately with two musicians in the orchestra.

    Amram became a pioneer of the jazz French horn, as well as the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence (named in 1966). He’s worked with artists ranging from Dizzy Gillespie to Bob Dylan, from Jack Kerouac to Arthur Miller, from Christopher Plummer to Johnny Depp. He’s a musician without boundaries, who has always been open to new experiences.

    Happy Birthday, Hershy Kay and David Amram!

    Kay’s arrangement of the “Grande Tarantelle”:

    Some of Amram’s music for “The Manchurian Candidate”:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4V0uQE-nRY

    An octogenarian Amram at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 2011:

  • Italian Composers & the Seasons

    Italian Composers & the Seasons

    “La generazione dell’ottanta” is a label used to describe that group of Italian composers born around 1880. By and large, they are remembered for their contributions to orchestral and instrumental music, as opposed to opera, though their contributions to the latter form were not inconsiderable. The group included Franco Alfano, Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Ildebrando Pizzetti, and the best known of the bunch, Ottorino Respighi.

    This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll enjoy seasonal works by three of them.

    Respighi wrote his “Poema autunnale,” for violin and orchestra, in 1926. He prefaced his score with the following descriptive program:

    “A sweet melancholy pervades the poet’s feelings, but a joyful vintner’s song and the rhythm of a Dionysiac dance disturb his reverie. Fauns and Bacchantes disperse at the appearance of Pan, who walks alone through the fields under a gentle rain of golden leaves.”

    The work is meditative, lovely and uplifting in the manner of Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending.”

    For a composer who disliked sonata form, Malipiero certainly wrote a lot of symphonies – 11 numbered symphonies, in all – though largely on his own terms. Two of these were inspired by the seasons.

    In the case of the Symphony No. 1, composed in 1933, the connection might be said to be analogous, as opposed to strictly programmatic. His initial plan had been to set passages from Anton Maria Lamberti’s poem, “La stagione.” Ultimately, he abandoned that design, but the idea of an annual cycle remained.

    The composer subtitled the work, “In Quattro tempi, come le quattro stagioni” (“In four movements, like the four seasons”). Indeed, the first has something of a vernal flavor, with the second, according to the composer, “strong and vehement like summer,” the third autumnal, and the fourth akin to “the winter carnival season and the gaiety of snow.”

    The program will open with music by Pizzetti that, while not strictly seasonal, is clearly of an autumnal cast. His “Preludio a un altro giorno” (“Prelude to Another Day”) is a fairly late piece, and rather a world-weary one, composed in 1952.

    Just before writing it, Pizzetti had received a painful letter from his former teacher, Giovanni Tebaldini, then 87 and praying for death after a series of strokes left him confined to a chair, terrified to stand for fear of falling. Not surprisingly, I thought it best to listen to this one first, so that we could relax and enjoy the leaves and snow.

    I hope you’ll join me for “Italian Seasoning,” tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll enjoy it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

    PHOTOS: Pizzetti looking severe; Malipiero and Respighi enjoying la dolce vita

  • William Scheide Princeton Philanthropist Dies at 100

    William Scheide Princeton Philanthropist Dies at 100

    I learned last night of the death of William Scheide, who passed yesterday morning at the age of 100. Scheide was as generous as he was long-lived. He shared his abiding love for music, of course, especially that of Johann Sebastian Bach, of whom he was a respected interpreter and scholar; but he was also active in social causes, fighting against poverty, disease, hunger, ignorance and discrimination. He touched many, many lives in the Princeton area and beyond.

    This article, which was posted on Planet Princeton yesterday, merely scratches the surface:

    Princeton Philanthropist William H. Scheide Dies at 100

    My sympathy to his family and friends.

    PHOTO: William Scheide (center) with the Bach Aria Group he founded. Clockwise, from left, Eileen Farrell, Julius Baker, Robert Bloom, Paul Ulanowsky, Jan Peerce, Norman Farrow, Bernard Greenhouse, Maurice Wilk and Carol Smith

  • Dryden Ensemble Celebrates Purcell Anniversary

    Dryden Ensemble Celebrates Purcell Anniversary

    Ah, the Eternal Questions. Why do I bother to arrange my thoughts into paragraphs, when in the print edition the sentences get thrown together willy-nilly? Even more puzzlingly, why are my last two paragraphs transposed? Clearly some mysteries are not meant to be plumbed.

    The Dryden Ensemble will celebrate its 20th anniversary on (or, as the paper would have it, “at”) two concerts this weekend, with music of Henry Purcell. The program, “Purcell: A Theatrical Musick,” will be given at Miller Chapel on the campus of the Princeton Theological Seminary, tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., and at Trinity Episcopal Church in Solebury, Pa., Sunday at 3 p.m.

    Dryden will be joined by countertenor Ryland Angel and the Princeton High School Chamber Choir for selections from the semi-opera “King Arthur” and more.

    Read more about it in “my” article in today’s Trenton Times. At least the paragraphs are retained online, if not exactly in the sequence I imagined.

    http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2014/11/classic_music_dryden_ensemble.html

    PHOTO: Henry Purcell, unimpressed by his coverage in the Times

  • Film Noir: Shadows and Moral Ambiguity

    Film Noir: Shadows and Moral Ambiguity

    This week on “Picture Perfect,” as the shadows lengthen, we revisit the world of film noir, a genre notoriously slippery to define, but easy to know when you see it – with its long shadows and moral ambiguities; cock-eyed camera angles and snappy repartee; isolation and innuendo. It’s a genre where a pair of gams is an invitation to the gallows; where a man’s best friend – and sometimes his worst enemy – is his Colt .38, where only cigarettes and bourbon can ease the pain.

    The labyrinthine mystery at the heart of “The Big Sleep” (1946) is so disorienting, even the book’s author, Raymond Chandler, couldn’t tell whodunit. Who cares? Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall get some more steamy dialogue to satisfy fans of “To Have and Have Not,” and there’s plenty of Bogey pounding the pavement and tossing off tart one-liners in pursuit of the truth. But my favorite scene involves Dorothy Malone, who runs the hottest bookstore in town.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO9Q-81w6KQ

    Whenever there are gallows to be built or gangsters to be beaten, Warner Brothers could be counted on to assign Max Steiner.

    “Chinatown” (1974) is one of the best of the neo-noirs of the 1970s. This time, Jack Nicholson plays private dick J.J. Gittes, who takes on a seemingly routine case that begins to spiral out of control. When producer Robert Evans rejected Philip Lambro’s original score, Jerry Goldsmith stepped in as a last-minute replacement. The composer was hired with the understanding that he had only ten days to write and record new music. For his effort, Goldsmith received an Academy Award nomination.

    The Coen Brothers clearly love noir, from their first feature, “Blood Simple,” to their Academy Award winners, “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men,” to their absurdly entertaining reimagining of “The Big Sleep,” “The Big Lebowski.” “Miller’s Crossing” (1990) was one of the more underappreciated of these. The film follows the well-worn device of an anti-hero playing two sides off of one another, until he is the last one standing – shades of Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest,” with a healthy dose of “The Glass Key” thrown in, for good measure. The Irish-inflected score is by Coen regular Carter Burwell.

    Before he became stereotyped as a composer for epic films like “Ben-Hur,” “King of Kings” and “El Cid,” Miklos Rozsa was the king of noir, providing scores for genre classics such as “Double Indemnity” and “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.” We’ll hear a suite assembled from three such projects: “Brute Force” (1947), a hard-hitting prison drama, starring Burt Lancaster as a desperate inmate and a contemptible Hume Cronyn as a sadistic guard; “The Killers” (1946), also starring Lancaster as a marked boxer; and “The Naked City” (1948), with Barry Fitzgerald leading a police investigation into the murder of a young model. The suite is titled “Background to Violence.”

    Put on your rumpled linen suit, draw the Venetian blinds, and play the sap for nobody this week. It’s film noir in the gritty city, on “Picture Perfect” – music for the movies – this Friday evening at 6, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6; or you can listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

    The theatrical trailer for “Brute Force”:

    PHOTO: Jack “nose” noir

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