Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Used Bookstores The Holdovers and Vinyl Passion

I’m a total used bookstore guy. Hell, I’ve worked in four of them and owned two. But nothing beats going to somebody else’s shop, if it’s a good one. You’ll make discoveries there you never will at a box-store chain. And chances are the paper and the bindings will be of far better quality.

I agree with Giamatti about getting rid of anything. His observation applies to records just as well as it applies to books. Invariably, the record I trade in, within a few years, whatever it contains becomes my next passion. And yes, I have to buy it again.

I would love to see this guy get an Oscar. He was his usual excellent self in “The Holdovers.” I loved the movie, too. The ‘70s vibe is so meticulously cultivated that there are actual ticks and pops and flecks and scratches added to the opening titles, before a single image even hits the screen. Watching it reminded me of better times, when movies felt handmade and personal.

February 26, 2024
Vikings Handel and Jack Cardiff’s Cinema

In preparation for Roy and my discussion on Friday night about “The Vikings” (1958), on Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, I was brushing up on legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who was responsible for the film’s breathtaking visuals (many of them captured on-location at the fjords of Hardanger, Norway). “The Vikings” was produced by Kirk Douglas and directed by Richard Fleisher (who helmed “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Fantastic Voyage,” and one of my favorite films noirs, “The Narrow Margin”). Cardiff also worked with Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger on “Black Narcissus” and “The Red Shoes,” John Huston on “The African Queen,” and Alfred Hitchcock on “Under Capricorn.”

Occasionally, he took the director’s chair himself. Riding the box office success of “The Vikings,” he was given the opportunity to direct another Viking adventure, “The Long Ships” (which, alas, has little to do with the absurdly entertaining source novel by Frans G. Bengtsson). He received his greatest acclaim in that capacity for an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers,” which was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including one for Best Director.

This is all preamble to the revelation of my discovery that Cardiff once lensed a film called “The Great Mr. Handel” (1942). Coincidentally, Friday, the day of our “Vikings” discussion, also happened to be George Frideric Handel’s birthday! Here’s a link to the film, surely an agreeable diversion for a Sunday afternoon. It looks like it may even include the episode in which the irascible composer threatened to drop a soprano out the window!

If you’re interested, Roy and I raise our drinking horns to Odin, as we converse about “The Vikings,” here:

Roy will welcome back filmmaker Jeffrey Morris, founder and CEO of FutureDude Entertainment, to update viewers on the progress of his current documentary, “The Eagle Obsession.” The film centers on the continued resonance of the iconic spacecraft created for the television series “Space: 1999.” Morris’ appearance will stream at a special time, on Facebook, YouTube, etc., this Wednesday evening at 8:30 EST.

https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner

We’ll be taking off on Friday. More time for me to catch up on half-forgotten composer biopics!

February 25, 2024
Paul Wittgenstein’s Left-Hand Legacy

Concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm during the First World War. Rather than abandon his career, he commissioned works for the left hand from some of the great composers of his day, including Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, and of course Maurice Ravel.

This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll highlight two of Wittgenstein’s lesser-known commissions.

In 1922, Wittgenstein approached Paul Hindemith – at 27, a rising star of German modernism, indeed the radical avant-garde – to produce his “Klaviermusik mit Orchester.”

Wittgenstein’s reaction to the piece is unknown, although we can easily surmise. He never played the work in public. Furthermore, since he had secured exclusive performance rights, he wouldn’t allow anyone else to play it, either.

Following the pianist’s death in 1961, his widow relocated to a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where for decades she kept all of her husband’s belongings in a single room. When the estate was finally catalogued in 2002, a copy of the Hindemith concerto was discovered among Wittgenstein’s effects, along with other scores, correspondence, and items of interest, including locks of both Beethoven’s and Brahms’ hair.

It was Leon Fleisher who gave the belated premiere of the concerto, some 80 years after it was written, with the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. I was present at the U.S. East Coast premiere, with Fleisher and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach. Listen carefully to see if you can hear me applauding, in a recording made at Philadelphia’s Verizon Hall, at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, on April 27, 2008.

As a rule, Wittgenstein gravitated toward composers of a more Romantic bent. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of music’s most astounding prodigies, a Viennese wunderkind and celebrated opera composer, who later achieved world fame in Hollywood. There, he produced over a dozen classic scores, for films like “Captain Blood,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” and “The Sea Hawk.”

His greatest operatic success was “Die tote Stadt,” given its debut in 1920. Korngold was 23 years-old. In 1922, he became the first composer to be approached by Wittgenstein for a left-hand piano concerto. (It was the same year, by the way, that Wittgenstein enlisted Hindemith.) The result was the Piano Concerto in C-sharp. On today’s program, Marc-André Hamelin will be the soloist, an outstanding virtuoso figuratively playing with one hand tied behind his back.

Interestingly, Wittgenstein much preferred this piece to Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. It was the Ravel, commissioned in 1929, that would secure his place in music history, but he must have felt Korngold’s Romanticism and sense of struggle played more to his strengths. For whatever reason, Korngold became a Wittgenstein favorite. In the few minutes remaining at the end of the hour, Leon Fleisher will return to the keyboard for a performance of the “Lied,” the ardent slow movement of Korngold’s Suite for Two Violins, Cello and Piano Left-Hand.

I hope you’ll join me for “What’s Left?” – rarely-heard commissions by Paul Wittgenstein – on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Remember, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for those of you listening in the East. Here are the respective air-times for all three of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PM PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EST)

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday on KWAX at 8:00 AM PACIFIC TIME (11:00 AM EST)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PM PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EST)

Stream all three, at the times indicated, by following the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

February 24, 2024
Rediscovering Black Composers

Time was, one really had to scrape to pull together a good Black History program. My, how things have changed! The past few years have seen an explosion of recordings and wider exposure for composers once known mostly to record collectors. Who knew that Florence Price would one day be played everywhere?

This week on “Sweetness and Light,” I feel sheepish even making it a two-parter, as I’m still merely skating across the surface. But it is, after all, a light music show.

Enjoy a second cup of coffee with Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; the “Dean of Afro-American composers,” William Grant Still; former slave “Blind Tom” Wiggins (allegedly once the highest-paid pianist of the 19th century); Philadelphia-born bugle virtuoso Francis Johnson (including his “Princeton Gallopade”); and Duke Ellington.

Next year, maybe I’ll make it a four-parter. Or better yet, be more conscious about including more of this music throughout the year. I try, but I can’t tell you how many times things get cut, so that I can fit it all into an hour. (Apologies to you, Scott Joplin, Eubie Blake, and Edmond Dédé!)

Good music is not a black and white issue. I hope you’ll join me for another “Sweetness and Light,” music calculated to charm and to cheer. It’s part two of “Black and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Listen to it, wherever you are, at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

PHOTO: Have coffee with the Duke

February 24, 2024
Gilded Age Novels on Film A Picture Perfect Series

The opening scene of Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence,” in which Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) first glimpses his cousin, Ellen Olenska, during a performance of Gounod’s “Faust,” was actually shot at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. I remember the call for anyone with a tux to come down to the Academy so that they could fill out the balconies with extras. Sadly, I had to work (not that I owned a tux).

“The Age of Innocence” is but one of the films we’ll be treating this week on “Picture Perfect,” as the focus will be on adaptations from novels of, or about, the Gilded Age. “The Gilded Age” was a term coined by none other than Mark Twain to describe the era extending roughly from the end of Reconstruction (following the Civil War) to the turn of the 20th century. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. A gilded age is one which conceals serious social problems beneath a veneer of gold.

“The Heiress” (1949) was adapted from a play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, which in turn was based on the Henry James’ novel, “Washington Square.” Olivia De Havilland is the “plain Jane” heiress of the title, Ralph Richardson her overbearing father, and Montgomery Clift, the adventurer who may or may not be out for her fortune. De Havilland won an Oscar for her portrayal, as did the music, by Aaron Copland.

“The Age of Innocence” (1993) is based on a novel by one-time James correspondent and close friend, Edith Wharton. The book was published in 1920, but looks back to the 1870s, its story dealing with the impending marriage of an upper class couple and the appearance of a disreputable interloper who threatens their happiness. The title is an ironic play on the outward manners of New York society, in contrast to its inward machinations. The novel earned a Pulitzer Prize, the first Pulitzer awarded to a woman. The film was something of a curve ball from director Martin Scorsese, who made his name on meaner streets. Veteran composer Elmer Bernstein provided a lovely, Brahmsian score.

“The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942) is based on another Pulitzer Prize winner, this time by Booth Tarkington, from 1918. The novel is part of trilogy that tells the story of the declining fortunes of three generations of an aristocratic Midwestern family, between the end of the Civil War and the early years of the 20th century. With industrialism on the rise, the Ambersons’ “old money” wealth and prestige wane.

“Ambersons” became the basis for only the second film directed by Orson Welles. By that time, however, the fall-out from “Citizen Kane” caused the film to be removed from Welles’ control and re-cut by the studio, shaving a full hour off the original running time. It says something about the quality of the film that it yet remains in itself a magnificent achievement.

The score was by Bernard Herrmann, CBS staff composer from Welles’ radio days. Herrmann had followed Welles to Hollywood to provide the music for “Citizen Kane.” Like the film, the score was drastically edited, with half the music removed. The famously irascible Herrmann, who had just written his Academy Award winning music for “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” was so angry that he threatened legal action if his name was not removed from the credits.

The action of “Mr. Skeffington” (1944), based on a 1940 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, begins at a point some consider the end of the Gilded Age, the eve of World War I. Bette Davis stars as a woman so enamored of her own beauty and the suitors it attracts that she fails to value the affections of the man who eventually becomes her husband. Mr. Skeffington, played by Claude Rains, is a Jewish financier, riding high in the ‘teens, but his fortunes change when he’s caught in Europe during the rise of the Nazis.

Both Davis and Rains earned Academy Award nominations for their work. The vivid score is by Franz Waxman. Davis was going through a period of emotional turmoil during the filming, so that she was allegedly insufferable to everyone during the entire shoot. Someone finally poisoned her eyewash. When the police questioned the director, Vincent Sherman, he wished them good luck with their investigation. “If you asked everyone on the set who would have committed such a thing, everyone would raise their hand!”

Certainly all that glitters is not gold, this week. We peel back the veneer of prosperity with “Novels of the Gilded Age,” on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Remember, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for those of you listening in the East. Here are the respective air-times for all three of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PM PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EST)

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday on KWAX at 8:00 AM PACIFIC TIME (11:00 AM EST)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PM PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EST)

Stream all three, at the times indicated, by following the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

February 23, 2024

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