Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Movie Music & Literary Lives on Picture Perfect

Words on the printed page captivate us so completely that it’s natural to assume that the lives of writers must be rich, full of incident, and very dramatic indeed. Surely that is sometimes the case. Who among us could keep up with a Byron or a Pushkin or a Poe?

Yet, with even the most outlandish writers, Hollywood for some reason often feels the need to fabricate. How else to explain “Devotion” (1943), Warner Brothers’ salute to the Brontës? Then again, the temptation must be strong to characterize the sisters who penned “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” as tortured Romantics.

Ida Lupino plays Emily, the creator of Cathy and Heathcliff, and Olivia de Havilland, Charlotte, who conceived Jane and Rochester. Nancy Coleman is their sister Anne, who wrote “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” and Arthur Kennedy, their dissolute brother Branwell. The film also features Sidney Greenstreet as William Makepeace Thackeray, Paul Henreid as an Irish priest, and – well, you get the idea. The casting, at times, strains credulity.

However, the music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold is up to the composer’s usual high standard. Korngold himself became so enamored of one of its themes that he recycled it for use in the first movement of his Violin Concerto. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll have chance to sample some of it.

We’ll also hear selections from movies about Iris Murdoch (“Iris,” with music by James Horner), the Bard of Avon (“Shakespeare in Love,” with an Academy Award-winning score by Stephen Warbeck), and Samuel Clemens (“The Adventures of Mark Twain,” by Max Steiner).

Writers are such characters, especially when they’re depicted on the big screen. Everything’s writ large, 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/

November 15, 2024
Copland’s Lincoln Portrait Still Inspires Today

Suddenly the pride and optimism of “A Lincoln Portrait” has come to seem so quaint. But I will always carry its idealism in my heart.

Incorporating texts from Lincoln’s speeches, most notably “The Gettysburg Address,” Aaron Copland’s work for speaker and orchestra has been embraced by narrators across the political spectrum, from William Warfield and Carl Sandburg to Margaret Thatcher and Charlton Heston.

Regardless of one’s personal ideology, the work has the power to stir and inspire. When it was performed under the direction of the composer in Venezuela in 1957, in the presence of reigning dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, it was so passionately received by the audience that it may have contributed to Jiménez’ overthrow and exile only a few days later. So clearly, it can be heady, even incendiary stuff.

Maybe it is, after all, the very thing we need at the present time. The message is one of unity, not division, in serving the greater good and honoring our responsibility to the nation and our fellow citizens in rising to the challenges of “the stormy present.” (“The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”) The elevating marriage of Lincoln’s words and Copland’s music humbles in its persuasive espousal of the American ideals of fairness and sacrifice. it’s not surprising that the work has appealed to people across the political spectrum. It’s not about partisanship. It’s about embracing the democratic ideals of the United States of America.

This weekend will bring the opportunity to experience the work live, as Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait” will be the centerpiece of a program on American and often patriotic themes, to be presented this Friday night at 8:00 by the Main Line Symphony Orchestra, at Valley Forge Middle School in Wayne, PA.

Jamie Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein’s daughter, will be the narrator. Also on the program will be her father’s “Candide Overture,” Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto (with Marc Rivetti, assistant concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the soloist), William Schuman’s “New England Triptych” (based on melodies of Revolutionary Era composer William Billings), and selections from John Williams’ “Lincoln” and “The Patriot.”

The conductor will be the orchestra’s music director, Don Liuzzi, whose day job is as principal timpani of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The program will be repeated at Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, PA, on Sunday at 2 p.m.

On Aaron Copland’s birthday (today), it’s a timely reminder of the kind of thinking that really made this country great. For more information on these concerts and upcoming performances of the Main Line Symphony Orchestra, follow the link.

https://www.mlso.org/concerts.htm

Leonard Bernstein conducts “A Lincoln Portrait,” with William Warfield narrating. Watch for Gerard Schwarz as co-principal trumpet. Schwarz would go on to make his own recording of “A Lincoln Portrait,” as music director of the Seattle Symphony, with James Earl Jones as the speaker.

November 14, 2024
George Whitefield Chadwick American Composer

George Whitefield Chadwick is my favorite composer of that group commonly classified as “The Second New England School,” prominent American musicians, who largely modeled themselves on the European Romantics and were destined to be eclipsed by the later, more overtly “American” followers of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. The school included John Knowles Paine (America’s first music professor), Horatio Parker (teacher of Charles Ives), Amy Beach (a virtuoso pianist who curtailed her compositional activity during the years of her marriage), Arthur Foote (my second favorite of the group), and Edward MacDowell (“the American Grieg”).

These composers studied abroad (there were few options then), learned their lessons well, and largely emulated the German masters in their own works. Schumann, Brahms, and Mendelssohn loomed large, with Beethoven often lurking in the background. There were exceptions, of course. Amy Beach countered Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony with her own “Gaelic Symphony.” MacDowell corresponded with Grieg, not only in his letters, but in his collections of piano miniatures.

All of them wrote worthwhile music, if you can be bothered to root around musty steamer trunks in the far corners of the attic, but for me Chadwick has the most vibrant personality. He was the most successful of the group at conveying a kind of exuberance and optimism that reflect the zeitgeist of a country ripe with possibility that was still very much on the way up. As a person, he was described as independent and self-reliant, and his students remarked on his fairmindedness and wit.

Is his music identifiably “American,” as in stereotypically Coplandesque? Not really. But he was often inspired by American subjects and he really did take Dvorak’s “American” experiments to heart. You can hear it in his string quartets, and you can hear it in his “Symphonic Sketches,” especially “Jubilee.” But his vivacious symphonies are also hard to resist. Are they world-beaters? Certainly not. Are they enjoyable? Certainly!

Chadwick had a long and varied career. While his baseline is always rooted in a fairly conservative, 19th century musical idiom, he remained curious, and he was always growing. Every once in a while, he could toss out a genuine surprise. It’s interesting to hear him flirt with contemporary musical developments of the day (Dvořákian folk-inflections, Straussian tone poem, French Impressionism). Clearly, he was no isolationist. His spirit of exploration and his artistic growth make him a standout from the stodgier American classical music milieu of the Gilded Age.

A tip of the hat to Chadwick, by George, on the 170th anniversary of his birth!

“Symphonic Sketches” (1895-1904)

String Quartet No. 4 (1896)

“Rip Van Winkle Overture” (1879)

“Cleopatra” (1904)

“Tam O’Shanter” (1914-15)

Symphony No. 2 (1883-85)

November 13, 2024
WWII Photos My Grandfather The Army Engineer

My sister was kind enough to send me these photos of Pap and the boys. He was a sergeant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

On the left, he’s in Europe. He’s third from the front (second from the back) on the right side. It looks like he’s holding a pipe, which makes perfect sense because in the early 70s, one my grandmother’s errands on a Saturday afternoon, when my grandfather was working (six days a week), was to swing by the smoke shop downtown, so that we could pick up some pipe cleaners. While we were there, she let me pick out a comic book. Sometimes, if I was lucky, she’d even take me up the street, not too far from where she’d trade in her Green Stamps, to Hobby Hangout, so that I could buy an Aurora monster model. Even then, I loved the old Universal horror movies.

On the right, it looks as if they’re in the Philippines. My grandfather is seated (or crouching?), front left. They had some close calls in both theaters. I don’t know a lot about what kind of action he saw. I know at the very least people were taking shots at him in the Pacific. In Europe, I already wrote about the time the German plane came down unexpectedly in the middle of the night. His duties, as he described it, involved getting everything ready for troops and transports on their way to battle, from what I gather sometimes also providing makeshift infrastructure for encampments, and then blowing everything up afterwards so that the enemy couldn’t follow. Apologies to Pap if I’m misremembering or getting it wrong.

I don’t know anything about the rest of the boys, but one of them showed up at the viewing to say goodbye, on the eve of my grandfather’s funeral in 1996.

November 11, 2024
A Grandfather’s Grit WWII Sacrifice & American Ideals

My grandfather clambered out of the Great Depression, subsisting on a diet of raw onions, ketchup sandwiches, and the occasional egg. Despite being diagnosed with a terminal illness, he still did his part to help smash the Axis, serving in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in both the European and Pacific theaters, during World War II. And you know what? He managed to live another half-century, doing whatever he could to keep it together and support his family: chicken farming, carpentry, bus driving, credit managing. This is a man who had dreamed of becoming a doctor and had to drop out of school when he was just getting started, because his medical bills ran him dry.

He was soft-spoken and modest. If he talked about the war, which was rare, it would be a humorous recollection, like the time one of his Army buddies took a welder to a drum without considering it had once contained gasoline. The drum took off like a rocket, he said, the guy was lucky it didn’t take his head off. Or something crazy, like the time a plane was flying over at night and they heard the engine cut out and suddenly everyone had to dive for cover. At the crash site, the only thing they could find of the pilot was his feet.

He didn’t say much, but once, when we were alone, when he was in his late 70s, he let something drop that hinted at just how harrowing it could be to live under constant threat of enemy fire, and how, after a time, he just became numb and wound up taking a crazy chance. Afterward, he said he never told anyone about it before. After he died, I shared the story with my mother, and she said she had never known that side of him. Now that she’s gone, I’m probably the one alive who does.

Back in the day, he served as a Republican committee chairman of his county. He would be appalled to know what the party of Eisenhower has become. How could people in public office be so transparently self-serving and abhorrent, and how can so many voters sanction it? I was 8 years-old when Richard Nixon resigned, and we watched the speech together in his living room. I remember him saying, “Watch this. This is history.” I was just a kid, of course, but the significance was impressed upon me, and as I matured, I noticed that whenever my grandfather had anything to say about politicians, it was generally with an air of disgust.

50 years on, Watergate wouldn’t have even been a blip. It’s nauseating to consider that all the sacrifices made by my grandfather and his contemporaries, and all the other American soldiers down the generations, may have bought us but a few decades. Is America really going to be driven into the ground by greed and grievance?

Holidays like Veterans’ Day, Memorial Day, and Armed Forces Day are so important. Not so one can go through the motions of raising a flag, or to fly one off the back of a truck, but to prompt one to step outside oneself and take a moment to reflect and to honor those who put themselves on the line for the preservation of the higher ideals of the United States of America.

My grandfather was the hero in a family of heart murmurs and flat feet. Of the younger generations, our veterans have all been in-laws (U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force). One suffers from severe PTSD. I remember in my early 20s the creeping dread of the Gulf War, that it would spiral out of control and lead to a reinstatement of the draft. That kind of service isn’t in anybody’s plan. But people like my grandfather understood the necessity and did what they had to do.

Thank you for your service and your many sacrifices, Pap, wherever you are. And thank you, honorable men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces.

November 11, 2024

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