Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Glenn Gould & The Organist: A Bach Story

For some reason, everyone seems to think August is a great time to get married. So, alas and alack, it is with much disappointment that I am unable to attend the second weekend of the Bard Music Festival, devoted to “Berlioz and His World.” However, I still have some memories and assessments to share from last weekend. Tomorrow I hope to write-up my impressions of last Sunday’s performance of Pauline Viardot’s fairy tale opera “Le dernier sorcier” (“The Last Sorcerer”).

In the meantime, here’s a follow-up to my post about Bill Osborne. Bill, you’ll recall, is my most recent Bard acquaintance, a retired organist who studied at Fontainebleau with the venerable pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. For over 40 years, he served as Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Denison University. Do yourself a service, if you haven’t read it, and check out my previous post about him, which is chock full of amusing anecdotes! You’ll find it at one of the links below.

Somehow, in writing about Boulanger and Bernstein and Osborne’s adventures in Princeton, I failed to share his Glenn Gould story. Bill was rehearsing an organ recital for the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor May Festival, when he was asked if it would be all right if the now-legendary pianist might have access to the auditorium, as Gould wanted to prepare for his appearance with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. (I learn through a search of May Festival records that the concert took place on May 4, 1958.) Anyway, even though Bill had the auditorium reserved for the afternoon, naturally he said yes. It may have been spring, but Gould, one of classical music’s great eccentrics, showed up at the appointed time, bundled, characteristically, in heavy winter clothing.

The work he was scheduled to perform was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, but when he sat down at the keyboard, it was not Beethoven he rehearsed, but rather, from first note to last, Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” It’s probably not necessary for me to mention that the recording Gould made of the variations only a few years before, in 1955, remains one of the all-time classics of the gramophone. With Gould’s permission, Bill sat there all by himself, out in the house, and enjoyed a command performance.

Afterward, Gould expressed interest in the venue’s organ and asked if he could try the instrument. Again, Bill said yes (naturally), and Gould sat there in his street shoes and pulled some stops and made a terrific noise. A few years later, he would record Bach’s “The Art of Fugue” on the organ in 1962.

Just after Gould’s Beethoven performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the pianist again encountered Bill, as he walked off stage, and what was the first thing he said? He wanted to know how Bill’s recital went. Bill told me he was incredibly touched by that.

Anyway, that’s the Glenn Gould story. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

The Bard Music Festival continues through tomorrow at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Tonight’s concert, featuring Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 and Joachim Raff’s Symphony 10 “Autumn” (with Berlioz’s “Les francs-juges” Overture the “William Tell” Overture” by the composer’s bête noire, Gioachino Rossini), is available for livestream. You’ll find a complete schedule at https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/

Fisher Center at Bard

My previous Bill Osborne post

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1360873204831739&set=a.883855802533484

History of the Philadelphia Orchestra at the May Festival

https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/history-lessons-ums-philorch/

Programs for the 1957 May Festival. I couldn’t locate 1958. Osborne is credited as pianist with the University Choral Union and bassoonist with the Musical Society Orchestra, conducted by Thor Johnson, then music director of the Cincinnati Symphony.

https://aadl.org/sites/default/files/docfiles/programs_19570501b.pdf

Glenn Gould plays the “Goldberg Variations” in 1955

PHOTOS: With Bill Osborne at Bard (top); Glenn Gould at the May Festival in 1958

August 17, 2024
Mackerras Gilbert & Sullivan Delight

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!

Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

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).

August 17, 2024
Czech Neoclassical Music on The Lost Chord

Neoclassicism in music was a reaction against what was perceived as the garish effusiveness and gooey excesses of late Romanticism.

Contemporary composers, in search of a new lucidity, turned their attention to the 18th century, revisiting its musical processes, though reinterpreting them through a distinctly 20th century prism. Stravinsky was the master, but neoclassicism swept the world.

This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have three cheery examples of Czech neoclassicism, including works by Ilja Hurník (his “Sonata da Camera”), Iša Krejči (his “Serenade for Orchestra,” conducted by Karel Ančerl) and Bohuslav Martinu (his Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra).

These composers – well, Krejči and Martinu, anyway – manage to balance the clarity of the Enlightenment with an unmistakably Czech national sound.

Hurník’s work is perhaps the purest, in terms of looking back. The term “Sonata da Camera” recalls music of the Baroque and Classical eras, as does the clarity of its instrumentation, involving flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord. Each movement begins as if it were ripped from the pages of history and then gradually squeezed like a lemon, leaving a tangy, contemporary aftertaste.

All of this music is calculated to lift your spirits. I do hope you’ll join me for “Balanced Czechs,” on “The Lost Chord,” 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/

Tightrope walker by Jiří Sliva

August 17, 2024
Bard Music Festival Livestream Berlioz

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:

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/

“Berlioz and His World” will continue at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, through Sunday.

Fisher Center at Bard

August 16, 2024
Great Artists on Screen Movie Music and Drama

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

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

August 16, 2024

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