This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ve got the need for speed!
With yet another Mad Max movie in theaters, we’ll revisit music from the second installment in the series, “The Road Warrior” (1981). Australian composer Brian May (no relation to the Queen guitarist) wrote the music for the first two films. The director, George Miller, specified that he was looking for a gothic, Bernard Herrmann-type mood to underscore his dystopian vision of a post-apocalyptic Australian Outback.
Maurice Jarre took over to write the music for the third installment, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” but it’s purely by coincidence that we’ll hear selections from another Jarre score built for speed, “Grand Prix” (1966). The film’s international cast includes James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, and Toshiro Mifune, but the plot’s assorted relationship and business conflicts take a back seat to driver’s-eye views of lapping the track.
When we remember Steve McQueen, chances are one of the first images that springs to mind is that of McQueen behind the wheel of his Ford Mustang GT 390 Fastback, tearing up and down the streets of San Francisco in “Bullitt” (1968). The high-octane action sequence became the yardstick against which all big screen car chases were measured (at least until “The French Connection”). Lalo Schifrin provided the jazzy score.
Finally, Marty McFly and Doc Brown’s time-travelling DeLoreon needs to hit 88 miles per hour in order to get “Back to the Future” (1985). Director Bob Zemeckis had already worked with composer Alan Silvestri on “Romancing the Stone,” but the producer of “Back to the Future,” Steven Spielberg, didn’t care for the music in that film. Zemeckis’ advice to his colleague: go grand and epic, since Spielberg had a marked preference for the music of John Williams. It was a very good choice.
I hope you’ll join me for an hour of chases and races, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.
Just be sure you’re not driving when you do!
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
Couldn’t be nicer weather in the forecast for the opening weekend of The Princeton Festival.
Tonight at 8:00, radiant soprano Angel Blue will perform arias by Puccini, Verdi, and Gershwin, with music director Rossen Milanov conducting the Princeton Symphony Orchestra in orchestral works by Puccini, Dvořák, Delius, and zarzuela master Ruperto Chapí.
Tomorrow night at 7:00, Broadway star and “American Idol” finalist LaKisha Jones will be a part of a pavilion-rocking Tina Turner tribute show.
Sunday at 4:00, Sonia De Los Santos and her band will be the main attraction of a festival Family Day. Gates open at 1:30 for free, kid-friendly activities, including an instrument petting zoo, musical crafts, and a large toe-tap piano.
73 degrees and clear at 8:00 this evening, for opening night with soprano Angel Blue;
77 degrees and clear tomorrow evening at 7:00, for the Tina Turner tribute concert;
78 degrees and partly cloudy on Sunday afternoon at 4:00, for Sonia De Los Santos. 75 degrees at 1:30 for the start of Family Day.
All three concerts will be held in the performance pavilion on the grounds of historic Morven Museum & Garden at 55 Stockton St. (Route 206).
The fun will continue through June 22, including music in a wide variety of genres, with three fully-staged performances of Mozart’s comic opera “Cosi fan tutte” (June 14, 16 & 18).
Also on the way: chamber music by Shostakovich, Beethoven, and Reena Esmail (with the Abeo Quartet, June 13), dance with American Repertory Ballet (choreography by Arthur Mitchell and Meredith Raine; music by Philip Glass, Edvard Grieg, Miranda Scripp, and Jean Sibelius, June 15), Black choral music (with the Capital Singers of Trenton and friends, directed by Westminster Choir College’s Vinroy D. Brown, Jr., June 19), Baroque favorites, including a selection of “Brandenburg Concertos” (with the ensemble The Sebastians, June 20), genre-bending classical crossover (with the trio Empire Wild, June 21), and cabaret (with Tony Award winning artist – for his tour de force performance in Broadway’s “Tootsie” – Santino Fontana, June 22).
Concerts featuring the Abeo Quartet and The Sebastians will be held across the road at Trinity Church Princeton (technically 33 Mercer St.).
For more information about parking and concessions and additional events, including pre-performance talks, the Juneteenth celebration, and Yoga in the Garden, visit the festival website at princetonsymphony.org/festival.
On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, my thoughts turn to American composer George Rochberg, who could write symphonies with the best of them, but was also a man of principle, who had real guts.
Rochberg, born in Paterson, NJ, in 1918, was for decades a fixture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he chaired the music department until 1968. He continued to teach there until 1983.
But his big claim to fame – or, in some circles, notoriety – is that he was one of the first composers of his kind to emerge from the strictures of serialism, predominant in academic circles from mid-century, to embrace a new tonality. The shift was brought on, it is said, by the untimely loss of his son, Paul, to a brain tumor in 1964.
Rochberg felt the musical vocabulary he had been employing inadequate to express his grief and rage. Beginning with his String Quartet No. 3 in 1971, he began to incorporate tonal passages back into his music, much to the dismay of his academic peers. His String Quartet No. 6 of 1978 includes a set of variations on Pachelbel’s “Canon.” Horrors!
Little did anyone realize at the time that this was the most avant-garde thing Rochberg could have done. He was the unwitting prophet of a new pluralism that went on to become the norm.
What is perhaps not so well known is that Rochberg’s mettle had been tested well before the petty skirmishes of Ivory Tower politics, when he was thrown into the deep-end of one of the pivotal operations of World War II.
Rochberg was drafted into the U.S. Army infantry in 1942. A lot of musicians fulfilled their military service by composing marches or playing in military bands. Many were never even shipped overseas. While Rochberg did have his share of musical assignments, he saw real action as part of George S. Patton’s Third Army during its perilous breakout from Normandy following D-Day in 1944.
Amy Lynn Wlodarski writes about it in her book, “George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity” (University of Rochester Press, 2019):
“Nearly fifty years later, he could still vividly recall the ‘look of fear’ on the faces of the soldiers who had been wounded in the initial onslaught: ‘Walking away from the plane that had just landed on an airstrip on Omaha Beach… and seeing the wounded, walking and on stretchers, going to the same plane that had just taken us from England. The look in their eyes, a look I’d never seen before that day. Almost an animal look; glistening fear, anxiety, uncertainty radiating from their eyes.’ Upon arrival, his division was immediately dispatched to help with the second stage of the invasion, which involved breaking through the hedgerows in northern France, a deafening assault that required explosive charges to dislodge the thick, thorny bushes of the French countryside. The fatigue from constant marching and physical work was overwhelming despite nearly a full year of basic training: ‘I remember being dog-tired [at] night. Apparently I [once] slept through some minor bombing by German reconnaissance planes.’”
Mangled feet were par for the course, but Rochberg himself wound up taking a bullet, the first of several substantial injuries he would receive in combat. His doctors remarked that if it had been the First World War, it would have cost him a leg.
The accepted narrative is that the composer’s later grief over the death of his son motivated his drift toward a more communicative means of expression in his music. But Rochberg was always at heart a humanist, and already during the war, twenty years earlier, his worldview and aesthetic outlook were beginning to coalesce, as when he came to regard the destruction he witnessed at the town of Saint-Lô, where the Allies faced off against the Second SS Panzer Division of the German Army, as “a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture.”
Rochberg, of course, was not the only artist to think this way. The war left its indelible mark on all the arts. In music, especially, its devastation and sorrow were reflected in the creations of composers on all sides, as demonstrated in Jeremy Eichler’s recent, excellent book, “Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance” (Knopf, 2023).
The varied experiences of Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten are examined at some length. None of them actually “saw action,” although Shostakovich was present during the siege of Leningrad and Britten performed on site for survivors of Bergen-Belsen. Rochberg is not part of the narrative.
Rochberg drafted a number of musical sketches during the European campaign. These later became the basis for his Symphony No. 6, completed in 1986. The work is tonal, yet harmonically extremely loose. I don’t believe it has even been recorded for commercial release. The linked performance is conducted by Raymond Leppard, which is interesting, since Leppard was regarded for so long as a Baroque specialist. But of course his repertoire was much broader than that, and he conducted a number of first performances of works by contemporary composers.
There’s another recording on YouTube, taken from a concert with Leppard conducting the Saint Louis Symphony, but the sound isn’t as good. So we’ll stick with this one, with Leppard’s own orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, the orchestra he directed from 1987 to 2001.
What’s with the video’s moon imagery is anyone’s guess.
Rochberg died in Bryn Mawr, outside Philadelphia, in 2005. He left more than 100 works, including six symphonies, seven string quartets, and an opera, “The Confidence Man,” after Melville. At the time of his death, he was 86-years-old.
His service is remembered, as is that of everyone who made the push through on D-Day possible, so that the free world could achieve victory over fascism.
Symphony No. 2 (1955-1956), serial but, contrary to the composer’s later concerns, still emotionally expressive
Pachelbel Variations from the String Quartet No. 6 (1978)
Opening of the “Transcendental Variations” (1971-1972, the third movement of Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 3, transcribed for string orchestra in 1975)
PHOTO: Wlodarski and the cover of her book, with Rochberg in uniform
84 years after it was shot down – nearly to the day – the wreckage of Henry William Antheil Jr.’s plane has been found at the bottom of the Baltic.
Henry, who worked as an American diplomat, departed from Tallinn, bound for Helsinki, on June 14, 1940, when approximately ten minutes after take-off the aircraft, a commercial passenger plane, exploded. At the time of his death, Henry was in possession of several pouches of secret information.
Henry was the brother of composer George Antheil, Trenton’s self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music” (also the title of his autobiography). George achieved his greatest notoriety for his mechanized nightmare, “Ballet Mecanique,” which caused fists to fly at its Paris premiere. Later, his music became less confrontational and he pursued the Great American Symphony.
George also wrote prose on a variety of subjects (war correspondence, murder mysteries, endocrinology, and advice to the lovelorn) and, when he needed cash, Hollywood film scores. Latterly, he became a footnote in biographies of actress Hedy Lamarr for their experiments in developing a frequency-hopping system to confound Nazi torpedoes.
A grave marker to Henry’s memory was installed in Trenton’s Riverview Cemetery. Of course, his body is not there, but the remains of George and the rest of the family are.
Somehow, I totally missed the announcement last month that June would mark the final installment of Kile Smith’s long-running podcast, “Fleisher Discoveries.” But even if I’d known, I don’t know that it would have packed any less of a wallop. I’m not even entirely sure what I feel. Loss, maybe. A touch of separation anxiety, perhaps. Mostly melancholy for the passing of an age.
For its musical content, “Fleisher Discoveries” draws from the vast collection of scores stored in the Edward A. Fleisher Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia – the largest lending library of orchestral performance sets in the world. The show is a continuation of “Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection,” which Kile first produced for Philadelphia’s classical and jazz station, WRTI, 22 years ago. More often than not, the program highlights off-the-beaten-path composers and/or repertoire, sometimes heard in rare recordings, a selection of these also stored at Fleisher.
I confess, for as much as I love the show, I have not been as conscientious as I should have been in listening to it regularly. While I save every email notification as a reminder (and for Kile’s excellent writing) – and even now, I have several tabs open on my laptop with sound files still waiting to be listened to – time has a way of passing, and before I know it, a month or two will have slipped away, before suddenly I realize I never got around to listening to that Marianne Martines show.
But, more for me to enjoy in the future. It’s just disturbing to know there won’t be any new installments being produced. For now, the programs are archived and accessible on Soundcloud and Spotify.
Kile is uniquely qualified to have instituted such a project, through his experience actually working at the Fleisher Collection for 30 years, beginning in 1981. In 1993, he became curator of the collection, a position he occupied for 18 years.
Being the modest guy he is, Kile probably would never have considered ending the series with one of his own compositions. In the 22 years of the show’s existence, he’s devoted only one earlier program to his music. Fortunately, he was convinced by current Fleisher curator, Gary Galván, that there would be no more fitting conclusion. So what we get is a terrific little symphony Kile composed for Donald Spieth and the Lehigh Valley Chamber Orchestra in 2002, when he was 38-years-old – his only symphony, in fact.
Kile has written in so many forms and for so many different vocal and instrumental combinations. In fact, the reason he gives for ending the podcast is that it is essentially a casualty of his success. Of course, Kile would never put it that way. But the fact is that he has so many commissions for substantial new works right now, that something had to give. Here’s hoping there’s another symphony in his future.
At any rate, I hope you will enjoy the ultimate installment of “Fleisher Discoveries.” The program has a rich archive, and I will be catching up on past episodes, myself. If you are at all familiar with the show, you will find an old friend in Kile’s symphony, as he has used the opening of the last movement as his signature music for the past 22 years.
If you are NOT familiar with the show and would like to be introduced to a lot of interesting and worthwhile music, with Kile’s spoken introductions – full of rich, creative, and often playful observations – do give it a shot on Soundcloud or Spotify.
Here, I’ve linked it for your convenience:
And while we’re at it, you’ll find lots more good stuff on his website, kilesmith.com.
Onward and upward, Kile! Excelsior! Citius, altius, fortius, and all that jazz. Thank you so much for your dedication and hard work, and best wishes on your future endeavors.
