Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Sonatinas: A Light Music Program with Cascarino & Schmitt

I was really scratching my head on this one. How to construct a unified light music program with such seemingly disparate pieces?

This morning on “Sweetness and Light,” marvel at how gracefully I meet the challenge of marking the birthday anniversaries of composers Romeo Cascarino and Florent Schmitt and also including music from a too-long-deferred pleasure: a recent release of “Latin American Piano Gems” (Centaur 4083) performed by pianist Gila Goldstein.

The unifying theme is sonatinas, or “little” sonatas.

Philadelphia composer Romeo Cascarino’s Bassoon Sonata was written after World War II for his Army buddy Sol Schoenbach, who would go on to become principal bassoonist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. “Sonatina” may not be in the title, but the character is light, and the sonata is only seven minutes long!

Florent Schmitt’s “Sonatine en Trio” is a very happy discovery indeed. There’s a certain neoclassic quality to the music, which we’ll hear in a version for flute, cello and piano, by a French composer whose orchestral works can be quite opulent. The title itself seems to harken back to an earlier time. In fact, the keyboard part was originally conceived for harpsichord. It’s cheering music, and I think you’ll agree, a great start to the day!

“Latin American Piano Gems” is a transporting collection of works by Ernesto Lecuona, Astor Piazzolla, Manuel Ponce, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. We’ll enjoy a piece by Argentine composer Carlos Guastavino, who is largely remembered for his songs. Guastavino wrote his Sonatina while visiting Manuel de Falla, who spent his final years in self-imposed exile in Cordoba, Argentina, following the Spanish Civil War. All in all, a very enjoyable album. We’ll be dipping into it again soon!

This morning’s program will also include delights by Federico Moreno Torroba, Eugène Bozza, Erik Satie, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

I hope you’ll join me for “Small Pleasures” – an hour of sonatinas for varied instruments and instrumental combinations – on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

Think a sonatina for mandolin and piano is a bit far-fetched? Tune in to hear what Beethoven made of it.

September 28, 2024
Small Town Secrets Dark Suburbia in Film

This week on “Picture Perfect,” our unifying theme is two-pronged, as we explore the dark underbelly of small-town life and the consequences of bucking conformity.

The events of “Peyton Place” (1957) unfold in a picturesque New Hampshire town, in which all sorts of sordid goings-on roil beneath the surface. Grace Metalious’ runaway bestseller spawned a film, starring Lana Turner, and also a subsequent TV series, with Mia Farrow. Neither version is nearly as seedy as the original, which was about an idyllic New England community whose residents have more than their share of skeletons in the closet. The score includes one of Franz Waxman’s best-known themes.

“Far From Heaven” (2002) is set in a Connecticut suburb during the 1950s. Therefore, it makes sense that the filmmakers deliberately attempted to conjure the vibe of a Douglas Sirk film. In common with Sirk melodramas like “All That Heaven Allows” and “Imitation of Life,” “Far From Heaven” deals with social issues, in this instance regarding race, class, gender roles and sexual orientation.

The score was the last by the great Elmer Bernstein, who had actually been composing for film since the ‘50s. Over the course of his career, he was nominated for 14 Academy Awards. Despite his work on such classics as “The Ten Commandments,” “The Magnificent Seven” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” his only win would be for “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” of all things, in 1967. He received his final nomination for his work on this film.

“Edward Scissorhands” (1990) is Tim Burton’s satirical-yet-touching update of the “Frankenstein” tale, transported to a contemporary American suburb. An artificial man with unusual appendages gradually wins over his suspicious neighbors with his aptitude for hairstyling and lawn sculpture. However, things quickly go south. For the very differences for which Edward was briefly celebrated, he is now hunted by an angry mob.

Burton presents a cookie-cutter suburbia, simultaneously tacky and anonymous. The houses are painted in faded pastels, and everyone follows the same routine. The score, by Danny Elfman, alternately antic and romantic, has proved to be one of his most memorable.

Finally, we turn to “Kings Row” (1942), based on the novel by Henry Bellamann (one time dean of the Curtis Institute of Music!). The film is a spiritual forerunner, not only of “Peyton Place,” but also, to an extent, of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks,” in the sense that it presents life in an idyllic small town that nonetheless casts some very long shadows.

The film of “Kings Row” accomplishes a remarkable balancing act, in that it manages to maintain an air of hope and optimism, despite all the horrible things that happen to a number of the characters. In this sense, it pulls some of the punches thrown by the original book, in part as a concession to the Hays Code, which forced some of the rougher themes to be altered, dropped or implied. Bellamann’s novel is a much bleaker experience.

The score was by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, at this point in his career associated with historical adventure films, as Errol Flynn’s regular composer. He wrote the brash theme music for “Kings Row” wholly in this vein, allegedly on an initial assumption drawn from the film’s title. Korngold’s music for this picture was also one of the primary inspirations for John Williams’ main title for “Star Wars.”

Good fences make good neighbors. Join me for “Suburban and Small Town Blues” 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 EDT/5:00 PM PDT

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

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

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

September 27, 2024
Gershwin & Schoenberg An Unlikely Friendship

Who’d a thunk the High Priest of Dodecaphonic Music would be such an admirer of popular success George Gershwin? You know, the guy that gave us “Swanee,” “I Got Rhythm,” and “Embraceable You,” and also “Rhapsody in Blue,” “An American in Paris,” and “Porgy and Bess.” And that furthermore the admiration would be reciprocated?

In this Arnold Schoenberg sesquicentennial year (he was born on September 13, 1874), we mark Gershwin’s birthday anniversary (born on this date in 1898) with a glimpse into classical music’s most unlikely mutual admiration society.

Gershwin and Schoenberg were tennis partners, both very serious about the game; they were painters (although Schoenberg abandoned the art to devote himself to music); and of course Gershwin hoped to study with Schoenberg, arguably the most influential avant-garde master of the 20th century.

Sadly, just months after Gershwin painted Schoenberg’s portrait, he died of a brain tumor at the age of 38. The next day, Schoenberg eulogized his friend for broadcast over the radio.

Interestingly, Gershwin’s friend and champion, the pianist Oscar Levant, did study composition with Schoenberg. Schoenberg was sufficiently impressed that he offered Levant a job as his assistant, but Levant turned him down, feeling he wasn’t worthy. Levant is still considered one of Gershwin’s foremost interpreters. Of course, he also appeared in the film version of “An American in Paris” with Gene Kelly.

George and Arnie were like the Frog and Toad of Beverly Hills. Remembering the multifaceted George Gershwin on his birthday.

Gershwin the painter

https://smtd.umich.edu/ami/gershwin/?p=870

Schoenberg paintings and drawings

https://www.schoenberg.at/index.php/en/schoenberg-2/bildnerischeswerk

Home movies of Schoenberg, filmed by Gershwin, set to a recording of Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 4 that Gershwin sponsored. The nattily turned-out Gershwin can be seen with pipe and five o’clock shadow, winding the camera. Also, Schoenberg eulogizes Gershwin. All in three minutes!

More Gershwin home movies, including images of Schoenberg, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Levant in “An American in Paris.” He’s the whole show in Gershwin’s Concerto in F.

PHOTO: Gershwin paints Schoenberg

September 26, 2024
Shostakovich Birthday & “Lady Macbeth” Scandal

On Dmitri Shostakovich’s birthday, here’s some footage of the fleet-fingered composer knocking out a passage from his opera “Lady Macbeth from Mtsenk.”

This of course is the work that was lambasted in Pravda, following its premiere in 1936, as “muddle instead of music” – an assessment, said to have been Stalin’s own, that would have been enough to have given any Soviet artist the night sweats.

Sensing that he was walking on very thin Siberian ice, Shostakovich wisely suppressed his angry, dissonant, and frankly weird Fourth Symphony and launched into writing a Fifth, which he described as “a composer’s response to just criticism.” A good performance still has the power to exhilarate audiences, with its sense of hard-won triumph and the over-the-top grandiosity of its finale. But many have found in it a kind of shadow program that is rather more subversive.

In Solomon Volkov’s controversial “Testimony,” a memoir of challenged authenticity, assembled by Volkov from conversations with the composer, Shostakovich allegedly states, “I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in ‘Boris Godunov.’ It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’”

How much of “Testimony” is Shostakovich, and how much is Volkov? The original manuscript, in which the composer signed off on the first page of each of the chapters, was sold to an anonymous collector and never made available for scholarly investigation. Furthermore, Volkov maintains his original notes are lost. (He is still living, at 79 years-old.) Whether or not the book is everything Volkov and his publishers claim it to be, it does have the ring of truth.

From the rollicking nature of the piano excerpt, one would never guess at the inflammatory nature of the opera, a provocative tale of sexual violence, adultery, and (multiple) murder. The video does remind one that Shostakovich once supplemented his income by accompanying films at the cinema.

The Symphony No. 4 did not receive its first performance until 1961, eight years after Stalin’s death.

Happy (?) birthday, Dmitri Shostakovich!

The clip, by the way, has been circulating on YouTube for quite some time as part of other compilations, like this one, in which Shostakovich plays, speaks, and smokes!

PHOTO: In America, people talk about news. In Soviet Russia, news talks about you!

September 25, 2024
Movie Music Talk Princeton Oct 8

The last time I tried to post about this it was taken down and I was threatened with banishment. I understand it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but seriously? In yesterday’s post, I mused over and invited speculation as to why this might have been.

Hopefully Facebook’s new hypervigilant A.I. golem is looking the other way, because I’m about to give it another shot:

If you’re in the area, consider dropping by Princeton Public Library on October 8 at 7 p.m. for my highly-subjective and occasionally even irrefutable observations on the evolution of movie music from the early days of silent film to the 21st century – with plenty of love lavished on some of my favorite, formative scores.

The event is free, so if you don’t like it, you’ll still get your money’s worth. Thanks to the Princeton Symphony Orchestra for cohosting the talk. Hope to see you there, and at one of the PSO’s future concerts!

September 24, 2024

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