There was an awful lot to absorb and distill about Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra, which moved into its new digs on Westminster Choir College campus this past summer. Witness my struggle with information overload and learn more about the orchestra’s founder Matteo Giammario, Princeton’s protean Portia Sonnenfeld, and the history of Westminster Choir, among other things, in my whirlwind cover story in this week’s U.S. 1, out today.
GPYO musicians will perform music by Rossini, Fauré, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Andrew Lloyd Webber on a concert to be held at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium on Saturday, February 3, at 7 p.m.
This year’s Academy Awards nominees were announced this morning, and sure enough, John Williams has earned yet another nod, for his score to “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Going into today, Williams was the most-nominated person alive. Now he’s even MORE the most-nominated (with the tally at 54). He also happens to be the second most-nominated person in Oscar history, after only Walt Disney (at 59).
The other nominees in the category of Best Original Score are Laura Karpman (“American Fiction”), Robbie Robertson (“Killers of the Flower Man”), Ludwig Göransson (“Oppenheimer”), and Jerskin Fenrix (“Poor Things”).
There’s a good possibility that whatever wins will do so for more than purely musical considerations. But that seems to be how it’s been for many years. The score for “Oppenheimer” is ludicrously overbearing.
In any case, it’s nice to see Williams handed another feather for his nest, even though his latest Indiana Jones music will not win. Or at least I hope it won’t. The film itself was godawful, and Disney has done all it can to be sure that your average consumer can’t get a hold of a physical copy of the soundtrack. A limited edition CD was made available for pre-order months in advance of the film’s release. If you didn’t know about it, you were welcome to spend hundreds of dollars for it on the collector’s market.
Merciful Disney has since decided to give everyone a second chance and make it available again as part of an expensive box set of all the Indiana Jones scores, duplicating the content of the previously-released soundtracks for all the other films. Thanks for nothing.
Williams should have automatically won for just about every year from at least 1975 to 1982. Nevertheless, he has been the recipient of five Oscars, for “Fiddler on the Roof” (adaptation of the stage musical by Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick), “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” and “Schindler’s List.” The last bestowed was in 1994.
It would be nice for him to get an honorary Oscar at some point – he’ll be 92 next month – but it wouldn’t be televised anyway, and Williams is doing just fine. Oscar needs John Williams more than John Williams needs him.
On this date in 1894, Antonin Dvořák, then serving as director of the newly-established National Conservatory of Music in New York, presented a concert of African-American choral music at Madison Square Garden.
The event, which also featured at least some of Rossini’s “Stabat Mater,” was given to benefit the New York Herald Tribune’s Free Clothing Fund. The program was performed by members of St. Philip’s Colored Choir, with the participation of vocal soloists Sissieretta Jones and Harry T. Burleigh.
Jones was a graduate of the New England Conservatory, a soprano equally at home in the singing of grand opera, light opera, and popular music. She wound up touring internationally and sang for four consecutive U.S. presidents. One critic dubbed her “The Black Patti” – a reference to Italian singer Adelina Patti – an epithet that Jones, a modest woman, disliked.
However, given the limited opportunities for black singers at the time, ultimately she decided to capitalize on the association, founding the Black Patti Troubadours, a successful revue that ran for 20 years. By 1895, she had become the best-known and highest-paid African-American performer.
As for Burleigh, American art music might have developed very differently without him. Born in Erie, PA, in 1866, he was accepted into the National Conservatory, a progressive institution for the time. On Dvořák’s insistence, students were not to be discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity.
There, he studied with, among others, Rubin Goldmark, the hidebound pedagogue who would later give lessons to Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. He also played double-bass and timpani in the school’s orchestra, which Dvořák conducted.
One day, the story goes, while seated at his desk, Dvořák was transfixed by the most soulful, plaintive air, being sung by Burleigh in an adjacent corridor. This was his first exposure to the African-American spiritual, and it had the force of an epiphany. Thereafter, Burleigh was a regular guest at the Dvořák home.
Reflecting on his own debt to the folk idioms of his native land for his part in the development of a Czech national sound, Dvořák was eager to share his impressions with American composers, and to encourage them to embrace this unique and neglected resource.
“I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies,” he wrote. “This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States. When I first came here last year I was impressed with this idea and it has developed into a settled conviction. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American.”
This was quite the pronouncement for 1893.
African-American spirituals, of course, would profoundly influence Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony. Interestingly, another Dvorak pupil, William Arms Fisher, was responsible for transforming the work’s famous Largo into the neo-spiritual “Goin’ Home.” Since the symphony was intended, in part, as instructional, an attempt to lead American composers by example, Burleigh’s significance becomes inescapable.
Burleigh himself went on to a distinguished career as a composer and arranger. Not only did he popularize a great many spirituals, he also wrote hundreds of original songs. Isn’t it ironic that one of the great, unsung figures in American music wound up changing the course of our music through singing?
Here’s one of the works that received its premiere on that 1894 Madison Square Garden concert – Dvořák’s arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.”
Burleigh’s setting of “Goin’ Home”
Sissieretta Jones:
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Dvořák (doing his best Sean Connery impression), Burleigh, and Jones
The composer and bandleader Laurie Johnson has died at a venerable age.
Among other things, Johnson was the composer of super-cool TV music for shows such as “Jason King,” “The Professionals,” and of course “The Avengers” – by which I mean the elegant and often surreal spy-fi series, starring Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg. You won’t find the incredible Hulk shooting very many corks out of champagne bottles.
Johnson was already composing and arranging for the Ted Heath Band by his late teens. At 21, he was recording with his own band for EMI. He spent four years in the Coldstream Guards. In the 1950s, he became well-established as a composer and arranger for many of the major big bands.
His music for the stage included collaborations with Lionel Bart (of “Oliver!” fame), Peter Cooke (of “Beyond the Fringe”), and Harry Secombe (of “The Goon Show”).
Later, he cofounded Mark 1 Productions, the television company responsible for “The Avengers” and “The Professionals,” and became co-owner of Gainsborough Pictures.
Among his feature film scores were those for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and the Hammer cult classic “Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter.”
Arbiters of “serious music” are too often dismissive of the kind of skill it takes for an artist of Johnson’s ilk to succeed. It requires versatility, speed, polish, and instant memorability. What’s more, those putting up the money want it on the cheap. You won’t find many Stravinskys or Schoenbergs in the field (although, Lord knows, both tried to break in).
Johnson was tutored at the Royal College of Music by Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
In addition to conducting albums of his own works, he recorded film scores of Dimitri Tiomkin and “North by Northwest” by Bernard Herrmann. He also wrote an autobiography, “Noises in the Head.”
He directed, toured, and recorded with his own big bands well into old age. I own a number of their recordings. I’m thinking I might resurrect one of his more ambitious works, the “Symphony (Synthesis),” this weekend on my radio show, “The Lost Chord.”
In 1971, a critic for Gramophone magazine described the symphony as a masterpiece: “This is perhaps the first truly successful combination of the Jazz and European music traditions,” he wrote.
Those who believe gender fluidity is so au courant should have greater familiarity with Baroque opera.
Ewa Podleś’ repertoire was wide-ranging, encompassing Chopin, Offenbach, Tchaikovsky, Massenet, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Shostakovich, and Penderecki. But many of her greatest operatic parts were so-called “trouser roles.” She once cracked that she played so many men that she sometimes looked in the mirror fearing that she might be growing a mustache.
Her vocal range was extraordinary, spanning well over three octaves. She was able to conjure rich chest tones and powerful high C’s, a true coloratura contralto. Her accompanist, the pianist Garrick Ohlsson, was not the only one to describe her as “a force of nature.”
In 1975, she made her operatic debut as Dorabella in Mozart’s “Così fan tutte.” Ten years later, she appeared in Handel’s “Rinaldo” at the Met, but it would be nearly a quarter century before she returned to the New York stage.
Following a run of performances in Donizetti’s “The Daughter of Regiment” in 2017, she announced she would be taking a break to have orthopedic surgery. These turned out to be her final performances.
Her husband, the pianist Jerzy Marchwiński, died in November at the age of 88. Podleś followed on Friday. At the time of her death, she was 71 years-old. R.I.P.
“Cara sposa” from Handel’s “Rinaldo”
Sporting a full-on beard in Rossini’s “Ciro in Babilonia”
She sang women’s parts, too – from Donizetti’s “The Daughter of the Regiment”
