Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Macy’s Philly Closing Organ’s Fate Uncertain

Philadelphia’s Macy’s will close. I could care less about the business, which was but a wraith lurking in distant shadows cast by the glory days of the Department Store. However, the space also happens to house the world’s largest fully functional pipe organ. Originally built for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the instrument was tripled in size when brought to Philadelphia by John Wanamaker, the better to suit the grandeur of his new department store at 13th and Market Streets, then regarded as an architectural marvel.

The organ quickly gained international renown. Marcel Dupré, Louis Vierne, and Nadia Boulanger all played on it. The Philadelphia Orchestra ventured from the Academy of Music and later the Kimmel Center to perform concerts with it. Among the music written specifically for the instrument is Joseph Jongen’s “Symphonie Concertante,” which must be one of the most frequently played large-scale works for organ and orchestra in existence.

The organ is historically protected, but will anyone be able to hear it? Moreover, will whatever entity takes over the space be legally bound to maintain it? The Wanamaker Friends and Fans Facebook page urges everyone to rein in the negativity and cynicism, as all parties work diplomatically and professionally toward a satisfactory transition to whatever it is the future may hold for this irreplaceable civic and cultural asset.

January 10, 2025
Miss Marple Before Lansbury Movie Music

Before Angela Lansbury, there was Margaret Rutherford.

Rutherford played Miss Marple in a series of Agatha Christie adaptations scored by Ron Goodwin. Goodwin’s music for “Murder, She Said” (1961) will be among the selections on this week’s “Picture Perfect,” an hour of wry mysteries and thrillers featuring the sound of the harpsichord.

In the first of the Marple films, Rutherford’s amateur sleuth goes undercover as a domestic servant. Goodwin’s Miss Marple theme became a popular hit, which you may still recognize.

Bette Davis enjoyed something of a comeback following her turn in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” opposite Joan Crawford. The film singlehandedly defined a subgenre which has been variously described as “psycho-biddy,” “hag horror,” “hagsploitation,” and “grande dame guignol.” Camp and black comedy are essential elements. “Dead Ringer” (1964) was yet another “bad twin” film, with Davis’ delicious performance underscored by André Previn.

Sir Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine play a deadly game of cat and mouse, as a mystery writer plans to exact revenge on his wife’s lover, in a big screen adaptation of Anthony Shaffer’s play, “Sleuth” (1972). John Addison, who had previously harpsichorded his way to an Academy Award with his score for “Tom Jones,” wrote the impish music.

Finally, Barbara Harris plays a fake psychic and Bruce Dern her cab-driving, private investigator boyfriend, who become embroiled with serial kidnappers, in Alfred Hitchcock’s final film, “Family Plot” (1976). The composer was none other than John Williams, poised between his breakout success, “Jaws,” and “Star Wars,” which was to make him a household name. (Both “Jaws” and “Star Wars” were Academy Award winners for Best Original Score.)

Hitchcock was full of suggestions as to the music and how it should be conducted. The composer recollects that on one occasion, when trying to convey the tone he was looking for, Hitch remarked, “Mr. Williams, murder can be fun.”

We’ll keep our tongues firmly in cheek as the corpses pile up. It’s an hour of arch harpsichords this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

January 10, 2025
Carter’s Love of Music A Final Appreciation

On this national day of mourning, one final appreciation of President Carter’s love of the musical arts. As I’d previously noted, Carter enjoyed a broad array of music from all genres. Reminiscences in the press in recent days remind us of the White House Jazz Festival, the president’s lifelong ties to gospel and country music, and his friendships with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. Many describe him as the Rock ‘n’ Roll President. But Carter seems to have held classical music especially dear, dating back to at least his days at the U.S. Naval Academy. (His roommate was a pianist, and the two pulled their resources to build a considerable collection.) That said, both he and Rosalynn had already been instilled with an appreciation of classical literature, art, and music, which the president attributed, with gratitude, to the efforts of Julia Coleman, a high school teacher in Plains, Georgia.

Of necessity, anybody who wants to get into the White House had best not come across as too high brow on the campaign trail, but once Carter was elected, it was no secret he spent long hours in the company of the longhairs. It’s said that classical music played on a turntable in the Oval Office up to ten hours a day. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Copland, Schumann. He expressed a particular fondness for the recordings of Andrés Segovia. His taste in opera ranged from “Madama Butterfly” to “Tristan und Isolde.”

Vladimir Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin, Leontyne Price, and the Juilliard String Quartet all performed at the Carter White House. The president collaborated with PBS in the development of broadcasts of some of these recitals. The budget for the National Endowment of the Arts, created as an independent agency of the federal government by an act of Congress and signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, doubled under the Carter presidency.

I’m not saying that Carter loved classical music more than any other, but clearly the genre played an active and important role in his everyday existence.

In 1978, at the opening the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, he remarked, “We have no ministry of culture in this country, and I hope we never will. We have no official art in this country, and I pray that we never will. No matter how democratic a government may be, no matter how responsive to the wishes of its people, it can never be government’s role to define exactly what is good, or true, or beautiful. Instead, government should limit itself to nourishing the ground in which art and the love of art can grow.”

Carter recognized the civilizing influence of art in a healthy society. He was a living example of the kind of hope, sanity, and appreciation that a belief in greater things can instill.

Rest in peace, Mr. President.

January 9, 2025
Happy Birthday Robert Moran Composer & Friend

Today is the birthday of my good friend and steadfast companion for Mahler concerts at the Philadelphia Orchestra, composer Robert Moran. A pupil of Darius Milhaud, Luciano Berio, and Hans Erich Apostel, Bob’s experimented with all kinds music, from city-encompassing performance art “happenings,” to collaborations with Philip Glass, to commissions from Houston Grand Opera, Scottish Ballet, and Trinity Wall Street. Throughout his career, he’s often been fascinated by spatial effects in music. This is one of his more recent works, “Solenga,” from 2023:

Bob, if you see this, I’ve been trying to contact you. My computer died the other week and my email account is now over the storage limit, so I can’t write. I’ve been trying to phone, but of course you don’t have voice mail. (Come to think of it, neither do I!) But you can call me, text, or private message me on Facebook, if you are so moved. There’s a dinner invitation in it for you. Happy birthday!

An aria from Bob’s Beauty and the Beast opera, “Desert of Roses”

Selections from “Trinity Requiem,” for the tenth anniversary of 9/11

Flying high over Albania

“Alice” for Scottish Ballet

Looking groovy and introducing his “Lunchbag Opera” for the BBC

“Buddha Goes to Bayreuth,” Part 1

“Buddha Goes to Bayreuth,” Part 2

“Modern Love Waltz” by Philip Glass, arranged by Robert Moran for accordion and cello

“Waltz. In Memoriam Maurice Ravel”

January 8, 2025
Princeton Symphony Tchaikovsky’s Manfred

From the repertoire alone, how could this weekend’s concerts of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra not stand as a highlight of the current season? And positing that, I take into account the bigger brand name orchestras in the adjacent metropolises of New York and Philadelphia. Rossen Milanov will conduct Tchaikovsky’s vertiginous, broody, and magnificent “Manfred Symphony” at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium in two performances, this Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m.

This music is Romantic with a capital R. The quintessential Byronic hero, Manfred is weary but indomitable, an unconquerable superman, tormented by unimaginable suffering. Haunted by mysterious guilt (in connection with the death of his beloved), he wanders the Bernese Alps, longing for extinction, and meets his fate defiantly, rejecting all authority, corporeal and supernatural. And as you know, it doesn’t take much to get Tchaikovsky to seethe most eloquently.

It will be very interesting to see how the group tackles this foray into the sublime, which requires a large orchestra with organ. (Richardson’s was removed years ago.) The work was originally scheduled for the ill-fated pandemic season of 2019-20, then coupled with Reinhold Glière’s Harp Concerto. If it could be thus, and it were not a madness and a mockery, I might have been most happy!

But I will definitely be content with Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, one of the loveliest works of the composer’s neoclassical period, to be heard on the reconstituted program’s first half. Temperamentally, the concerto is worlds away from Tchaikovsky’s Alpine awesomeness, but its prismatic reflections on Baroque airs can be quite seductive, with the spirit of Bach flitting around the composer’s crystalline heart. Leila Josefowicz, last heard here in Alban Berg’s concerto in 2016, will return to Princeton as the work’s soloist.

The concerts are being presented in celebration of PSO music director Rossen Milanov’s 60th birthday. In the spirit of Manfred, I defy the solace of both cake and conviviality! However, I confess, I can’t wait to hear this program.

For tickets and information, visit princetonsymphony.org.

IMAGE: John Martin, “Manfred and the Witch of the Alps” (1837)

January 8, 2025

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