Sir Charles Mackerras excelled as an interpreter of a lot of different kinds of music. He was acclaimed as a Mozartian and recorded a celebrated set of the composer’s complete symphonies. He was also something of a specialist in Czech music, setting down most of Janeček’s operas, in particular.
But he was a lifelong enthusiast of the works of Gilbert & Sullivan, from the time he was a boy, in to old age. This week on “Sweetness and Light,” we’ll enjoy an hour of Mackerras’ delightful Gilbert & Sullivan recordings.
When the copyright expired on Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music in 1950, Mackerras arranged any number of the composer’s works, but most especially the stage successes conceived in collaboration with librettist W.S. Gilbert, into a ballet, “Pineapple Poll.” Employing a method similar to that of Manuel Rosenthal, when reimagining the works of Jacques Offenbach into the ballet “Gaîté Parisienne,” Mackerras cherry-picks from his harvested source material to mix and match and present the music in new and inventive ways. There are a lot of familiar tunes here for seasoned Savoyards, so feel free to hum along.
Mackerras was in his 70s, when he returned to the recording studio to set down more G&S, with a series of their operettas issued on single compact discs (shorn of the overtures and dialogue for time considerations) for the Telarc label in the 1990s. To round out the hour, we’ll sample from his late-career recording of “The Mikado.”
Oh joy unbounded! Oh rapture unexampled! Make way for Charles Mackerras and Gilbert & Sullivan 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!
BONUS! A 1959 broadcast of “Pineapple Poll,” with the Royal Ballet. The work was co-created by the production’s choreographer, John Cranko, and its arranger/conductor (Mackerras, of course).
I still have a few posts about the Bard Music Festival left in my quiver, which I promise to share in the coming days. One aspect of the festival I do want to mention – which so far I have failed to do – is that evening concerts at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts are available for livestreaming. Keep that in mind when taking a gander at this weekend’s schedule. These include Programs Seven (a more intimate lead-in to Weekend Two, the most prominent offering being Liszt’s transcription of Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy” for viola and piano), Nine (featuring Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 and Joachim Raff’s Symphony No. 10 “Autumn”), and Eleven (a complete performance of Berlioz’s “The Damnation of Faust”). No need to bargain your soul in following the link:
How to translate visual art to the big screen? Generally, by focusing on the drama in the artists’ lives, that’s how.
And what drama!
This week on “Picture Perfect,” expand your palette with music from movies about the great artists. “The Agony and the Ecstasy” (1965), based on the novel of Irving Stone, dramatizes the friction between Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) and his benefactor, Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), over the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For his part, Michelangelo would have been perfectly content to stick to sculpture. Alex North’s score is an Early Music banquet, with allusions to – and sometimes outright quotations of – music of the Renaissance.
Stone had another bestseller in “Lust for Life” (1956), about the tormented Vincent van Gogh. This time Kirk Douglas plays one of his most sympathetic roles – and looks remarkably like the artist. Anthony Quinn turns up as his “frenemy,” the painter Paul Gaugin, and earns an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The great Miklós Rózsa wrote the music, softening up the edges of his brawny Hungarian sound with ethereal suggestions of the French Impressionists.
John Huston brought Pierre La Mure’s novel about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to the big screen as “Moulin Rouge” (1952) – not to be confused with the more recent Baz Luhrmann spectacle starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, which relegated the artist to a supporting role. José Ferrer dominates the earlier version, spending most of the film walking through off-camera trenches and shuffling along on his knees. Georges Auric, one of the composers of Les Six (the loose collective that also included Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud), captures the spirit of the titular cabaret. The score became one of Auric’s best-known, thanks to the waltz, which yielded the popular hit “Where is Your Heart?”
“The Picasso Summer” (1969) is a departure from the usual formula of focusing on the artist himself. Instead, a young couple (Albert Finney and Yvette Mimieux), admirers of Picasso’s work, take off on a European adventure in an attempt to track him down. Originally Picasso had agreed to appear, but he was driven off by some off-screen drama involving a matador friend and Yul Brynner’s wife! The film was based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury hated the adaptation, as did the studio, and “The Picasso Summer,” after being heavily cut and patched with new footage, was never released theatrically in the United States. The film is striking for its extended animation sequences inspired by Picasso’s paintings, and for its score by Michel Legrand.
I hope you’ll join me for brushes with the great artists, 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
When the Bard Music Festival calls itself “[insert composer’s name here] and His World,” it does so with the aim of providing a diverse, expansive, and at times even exhausting exploration of the subject’s contemporaries, his influences, those he influenced, and his wider legacy. And by suggesting that it can wear you out, I am in no way implying that I don’t love it. If Bard can bring it, I can take it, and with gratitude.
As you undoubtedly know by now, if you’ve been following my posts, this year’s focus is Berlioz. However, even with such a heavy helping of Hector as on the concert presented on Saturday night, featuring not only the composer’s titanic “Te Deum,” but also selections from his grand opera “Les Troyens” (“The Trojans”) and a mammoth setting of “La Marseillaise” that REALLY would have flabbergasted Major Strasser, there was also the inclusion of Gluck’s overture to “Iphigénie en Aulide” (Gluck, a composer who influenced Berlioz), in an arrangement by Wagner (a composer Berlioz in turn influenced) – ingenious programming, actually, but hardly surprising – AND the overture to Auber’s “Fra Diavolo” (Auber, a figure who undoubtedly influenced Berlioz, but about whom Berlioz could be rather ambivalent, feeling he pandered a little too much to what he perceived as shallow Parisian tastes).
And you know what? For as popular as Auber’s overtures remain – for decades, staples of afternoon drive time on any classical music radio station – this may actually have been the first time I ever actually heard one in concert. How can that possibly be? Any one of them would make for a sparkling opener to an enjoyable evening of music-making. (Sorry, Berlioz!) As it is, he is yet another composer whose music I encountered live for the first time at Bard.
So often with Berlioz, who at the far end of his large-scale works can be such a frankly draining composer, I am convinced he willed himself to greatness. What a genius he must have been to take the rudimentary tools he had at his disposal and create such monuments in sound. Unquestionably, he knew his way around an orchestra. And he was well-drilled by his teachers at the Paris Conservatory. Yet he was perhaps not so naturally inclined to the minute workings-out of formal musical procedures in the manner of a Haydn or a Mozart. If so, he was all the better for it, as there is only one Hector Berlioz. No one thought in orchestral terms quite like him. But at the other end of the scale, he was also a born composer of song.
Earlier in the day, a Saturday morning panel discussion examined different aspects of the composer and his world through engaging and often fascinating talks and exchanges about revolution, the historical evolution of Paris in the 19th century, and even how Berlioz was received and interpreted by the droll caricaturists of his time.
As is so often the case with Bard, the most shattering moments may have come during in the evening concerts, when the full forces of symphony orchestra and chorus were massed at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts; but most of the quieter, more revelatory moments occurred in the more intimate space of Bard’s Olin Hall, at which song and chamber music prevailed.
At the Fisher Center, Joshua Blue’s pleasing tenor voice lent considerably to the opening night rehabilitation of Berlioz’s “Lélio” (at least in terms of the work’s musical content). He returned on Saturday night not only as soloist in the “Te Deum,” but to share a love duet from “Les Troyens” with mezzo-soprano Megan Moore. He might have been the weekend’s greatest vocal discovery, if not for soprano Jana McIntyre. (Even so, those attending Bard this Sunday will have no complaints, as Blue will sing Berlioz’s Faust!)
McIntyre, with her captivating voice, magnetic presence, and superhuman endurance, appeared frequently throughout the weekend and emerged as the most enchanting performer at Olin. Always radiant and communicative, she was in her element in French art song during her frequent afternoon appearances on the chamber concerts. But on Saturday night, she also demonstrated her ability to command a concert hall, even in Berlioz’s gargantuan arrangement of “La Marseillaise,” with its massed brass, winds, percussion, and chorus. She stood her ground – “the very embodiment of liberty,” as a fellow concertgoer memorably put it – dominating center stage in a brilliant red gown with her chin held high. Yes, coupled with the “Te Deum” AND selections from “Les Troyens,” AND the aforementioned overtures, by Gluck (arr. Wagner) and Auber, it proved to be a high-caloric evening!
I can’t believe she had any voice at all left over for Sunday morning, yet there she was at 11 a.m., participating extensively in Byron Adams’ matinée musicale, where she continued to shine and, quite frankly, glow. What a talent! She easily stood out as the star of the festival’s first weekend, and she receives a respectful tip of the hat from Classic Ross Amico.
As for the music itself, discoveries I will carry with me include the “Introduction and Variations on Bellini’s Opera ‘Norma’” by Elias Parish Alvars (known in his day as “the Liszt of the harp”), mesmerizingly played by Noël Wan, a String Quartet in C minor by Anton Reicha (who taught Berlioz counterpoint at the Paris Conservatory, previously known to me mostly from his woodwind music), affectionately performed by the Balourdet Quartet, and a languid, intoxicating song, “Adieux de l’hôtesse arabe,” by Georges Bizet (of “Carmen” fame), again sung by McIntyre, as part of Byron Adams’ exquisitely-curated program of French chansons, romances et mélodies on Sunday.
Baritone Tyler Duncan, a Bard veteran, as always was a singer of commanding presence, but also expert at conveying the wry tone of a song like Saint-Saëns’ witty throwback to the manners of the ancien regime, “Marquise, vous souvenez-vous?” Also returning was mezzo-soprano Rebecca Ringle Kamarei. For as fine as she was in the afternoons, she was outstanding on Sunday evening in a virtuosic performance of an aria by Rossini from “L’italiana in Algeri.”
I would be remiss not to credit the contributions of pianists Kayo Iwama and Erika Switzer, both with their own distinctive musical personalities, who not only accompanied but were sensitive collaborators with the aforementioned singers.
I want to treat Sunday night’s treasurable presentation of Pauline Viardot’s fairy tale opera “Le dernier sorcier” (“The Last Sorcerer”), which concluded the opening weekend, in a separate post. So watch for it!
The Bard Music Festival resumes today with a supplementary, already sold-out concert at Church of the Messiah in Rhinebeck, NY (with a second concert to be held there tomorrow afternoon), but Weekend Two really commences in earnest with a concert tomorrow night at the Fisher Center on Bard campus, featuring violist Luosha Fang and pianist Piers Lane in Franz Liszt’s transcription of Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy.” The program on Saturday night will include Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 and Joachim Raff’s Symphony No. 10 “Autumn.” Sunday will conclude with a complete performance of Berlioz’s “The Damnation of Faust.”
The great French conductor Georges Prêtre would have been 100 years old today. I have to say, he had a pretty good run. He died on January 4, 2017, at the age of 92.
Prêtre studied under André Cluytens, among others, at the Paris Conservatory. He made his conducting debut in Marseilles in 1946. He was director of the Opéra-Comique in Paris from 1955-59. There, he gave the premiere of “La voix humaine” by Francis Poulenc, a composer with whom he would become closely associated. He went on to conduct at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and La Scala, Milan.
He was a regular at the Lyric Opera of Chicago from 1959-71. He was music director of the Paris Opera for the 1970-71 season. He later became principal conductor of the Vienna Symphony, from 1986-91.
Prêtre was invited to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in its popular New Year’s Day concert twice, in 2008 and 2010. To date, he is the only French conductor to have done so.
Among his other notable achievements, he conducted the world premiere of Joseph Jongen’s “Symphonie Concertante for Organ and Orchestra,” with Virgil Fox and the Paris Opera Orchestra, in 1959.
I hope you find this as amusing as I do. Prêtre doesn’t waste a gesture when conducting this selection from Bizet’s “Carmen,” with Maria Callas.
Joseph Jongen, “Symphonie Concertante”
Florent Schmitt, “The Haunted Palace” (after Edgar Allan Poe)
Albert Roussel, “The Spider’s Banquet”
Accompanying Francis Poulenc and Jacques Février in Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos
New Year’s Concert in Vienna, 2010
Merci, Maestro! Fondly remembering you on the 100th anniversary of your birth.
