Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Winter Reading and Classical Music on KWAX

With the holidays now largely in the rear-view mirror, it’s a good time to curl up and catch up on your winter reading.

This morning on “Sweetness and Light,” it’s all about books, with light music classics inspired by “Vanity Fair,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Don Quixote,” “The Leopard,” “Oliver Twist,” and “Tales of Hoffmann.”

I hope you’ll join me for some “light” reading, on “Sweetness and Light,” music calculated to charm and to cheer, this Saturday morning on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.

The show will air at 8:00 Pacific Time, but you can stream it on the East Coast at 11:00 when following the link.

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

Need I say, “bookmark” it!

January 6, 2024
Film Noir: Shadows, Style, and Soundtracks

We haven’t even emerged from the midwinter holidays yet (tomorrow is Epiphany), but already, for my first show of the new year, the shadows are very long indeed.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we revisit the world of film noir, a genre notoriously slippery to define, but easy to know when you see it – with its long shadows and moral ambiguities; cock-eyed camera angles and snappy repartee; isolation and innuendo. It’s a genre where a pair of gams is an invitation to the gallows; where a man’s best friend – and sometimes his worst enemy – is his Colt .38; where only cigarettes and bourbon can ease the pain.

The labyrinthine mystery at the heart of “The Big Sleep” (1946) is so disorienting, even the book’s author, Raymond Chandler, couldn’t tell whodunit. Who cares? Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall get some more steamy dialogue to satisfy fans of “To Have and Have Not,” and there’s plenty of Bogey pounding the pavement and tossing off tart one-liners in pursuit of the truth. But my favorite scene involves Dorothy Malone, who runs the hottest bookstore in town. Whenever there are gallows to be built or gangsters to be beaten, Warner Brothers could be counted on to assign Max Steiner.

“Chinatown” (1974) is one of the best of the neo-noirs of the 1970s. This time, Jack Nicholson plays private dick J.J. Gittes, who takes on a seemingly routine case that begins to spiral out of control. When producer Robert Evans rejected Philip Lambro’s original score, Jerry Goldsmith stepped in as a last-minute replacement. The composer was hired with the understanding that he had only ten days to write and record new music. For his effort, Goldsmith received an Academy Award nomination.

The Coen Brothers clearly love noir, from their first feature, “Blood Simple,” to their Academy Award winners, “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men,” to their unlikely and absurdly entertaining reimagining of “The Big Sleep,” “The Big Lebowski.” “Miller’s Crossing” (1990) was one of the more underappreciated of these. The film follows the well-worn device of an anti-hero playing two sides off of one another, until he is the last one standing – shades of Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest,” with a healthy dose of “The Glass Key” thrown in, for good measure. The Irish-inflected score is by Coen regular Carter Burwell.

Before he became stereotyped as a composer for epic films like “Ben-Hur,” “King of Kings,” and “El Cid,” Miklos Rozsa was the king of noir, providing scores for genre classics such as “Double Indemnity” and “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.” We’ll hear a suite assembled from three such projects: “Brute Force” (1947), a hard-hitting prison drama, starring Burt Lancaster as a desperate inmate and a contemptible Hume Cronyn as a sadistic guard; “The Killers” (1946), also starring Lancaster as a marked boxer; and “The Naked City” (1948), with Barry Fitzgerald leading a police investigation into the murder of a young model. The suite is titled “Background to Violence.”

Put on your rumpled linen suit, draw the Venetian blinds, and play the sap for nobody this week. It’s film noir in the gritty city, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

BTW – Have you heard I’ve got a new show? Check out “Sweetness and Light,” now entering its third week, Saturday mornings on KWAX. It’s music calculated to charm and to cheer (the very opposite of noir, in fact), and this week it’s all inspired by books. That brings my tally at KWAX to three. See below for air times.

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 ON THE EAST COAST)

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

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

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

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

PHOTO: Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown.

January 5, 2024
Josef Suk Morbidity & Melodies

Josef Suk (1874-1935) was the one-time pupil and eventual son-in-law of Antonin Dvořák. In fact, his early works very much reflect Dvořák’s influence, sunny, romantic music full of nationalistic touches.

However, a double tragedy occurred in Suk’s 30th year. In 1905, he lost both his father-in-law and his beloved wife – Dvořák’s elder daughter – Otilie. The events directly inspired Suk’s “Asrael Symphony,” named for the Angel of Death. Not surprisingly, morbidity colors much of his mature output.

Today marks the 150th anniversary of Suk’s birth. Here are some samples of Suk, pre- and post-happiness.

Serenade for Strings (1892)

“Asrael Symphony” (1905-06)

And a personal favorite, “Pohádka,” or “Fairy Tale” (1897-98). Suk arranged the suite from incidental music he composed for a play called “Radúz and Mahulena,” in which true love conquers all. The work took on special significance for the composer, since it was the period in which he was secretly in love with his teacher’s daughter and feared the day of reckoning, when all would be revealed. He needn’t have worried, of course. Dvořák was delighted. Alas, Suk’s happiness was to be short-lived.

Respect to Josef Suk on his sesquicentennial.

January 4, 2024
Revisiting 2010 A Space Odyssey Sequel

It’s always interesting to go back and look at a piece of speculative fiction. Even the widely-lauded “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) carried the Pan-Am corporation ten years past the company’s expiration. It’s not the only thing it got wrong, of course. The belated sequel, “2010: The Year We Make Contact” (1984), doubles-down on the Pan-Am attachment (the company was still in existence at the time of the film’s making); but what’s more resonant in these movies is not what they got wrong, but rather what they got right.

Hindsight will be 20/10 on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, as we kick off the new year with a conversation about Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of a redemptive future.

“2010” connects best when it addresses what, for better or worse, never changes – human nature. If anything, its message of peace and the necessity of cooperation between the world’s nations is more timely than ever. Also, it makes us care more about its characters than Stanley Kubrick ever did in the comparatively aloof original.

Where the sequel is conspicuously less successful is in addressing the great, unknowable mysteries of the beyond. Peter Hyams is no Kubrick, nor does he attempt to emulate his style, but he puts together a surprisingly competent follow-up, with a knock-out cast, including Roy Scheider, Helen Mirren, John Lithgow, and the always fine Bob Balaban, in the days before Jeff Goldblum gobbled up all the quirky scientist roles.

The special effects are spectacular, of course – by 1984, they had it down – but they could never be as special as in 1968, when technicians had to invent everything from the ground up. Much as space travel was portrayed as commonplace in “2001,” believable depictions of planets and space ships, by 1984, had become a matter of course. It pains me now to look back and be reminded of how good we still had it at the movies, before everything really did become mundane with the rise of CGI.

Some of “2010” is a little too literalist for my taste, but fans of the original will have fun with the meticulously reconstructed sets and the return of Keir Dullea, the Discovery, and Hal-9000 – the latter given an unexpected twist in its character arc.

Roy and I will be joined by filmmaker Jeffrey Morris (who, if I understand correctly, had some experience with Hyams), for a reassessment of perhaps three-quarters of an underrated movie. “2010” is sci-fi for adults, so it’s good that Jeffrey will be on hand to keep us on point. But there will be plenty of “Contact” sport in the comments section, I’m sure, when we livestream on Facebook, YouTube, etc., this Friday evening at 7:00 EST!

https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner

“2001” franchise-creator Arthur C. Clarke predicts our modern world with, in some respects, remarkable accuracy in this astonishing video. Still waiting for the blessing/curse of his replicator, though, even as I detest his vision of animal “servitude.”

“The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.”

January 4, 2024
Sibelius Steals the Show in ’70s Pop Music

Unexpectedly, I got to spend a few hours with a very good friend on New Year’s Eve, a high point of the holiday – perhaps THE high point. He’s been in the act of overhauling his living room, taking up the carpet, replacing the furniture, and, his greatest source of pride, enhancing his entertainment center.

So we listened to Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp (yes, folks, that is how I like to celebrate New Year’s Eve) and “Straussiana,” and, since he’s also a ‘70s prog rock guy (when we were teenagers, I remember, I would sometimes see him at school wearing a Yes t-shirt), we fell into a discussion about unexpected quotations of classical music in ‘70s popular song.

That’s when he put on “Beach Baby.” “Beach Baby,” written by John Carter and his wife, Gillian Shakespeare, became the only substantial hit for the band The First Class in 1974. It clearly emulates the carefree endless summer sound of The Beach Boys, in ironic contrast to the lyrics which suggest it’s all now a faded memory, at least as far as the love relationship is concerned.

So I’m sitting there, my thoughts drifting to Wawa Hoagie Fest jingles, when all of a sudden what should appear in the firmament but the noble “swan theme” that climaxes Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5! Talk about out of left field.

Sibelius, Finland’s national composer, wrote the 5th on a commission from the Finnish government to celebrate his 50th birthday. That’s how big a deal Sibelius was and is in Finland. The last movement builds to a climax of impressive grandeur, a sublime apotheosis in the form of an ennobling “swan theme” (identified as such, as Sibelius specifies in his journal that it was the sight of swans in flight over a lake near his home that inspired it). The 5th Symphony is among the noblest in the entire literature, and I have long regarded it as my favorite symphony.

And here it was, hilariously, seemingly out of nowhere, in “Beach Baby.”

Somehow its use got back to the Sibelius estate, as a lawsuit was filed against the songwriters for copyright infringement. The case was settled out of court, with the estate receiving half of the song’s proceeds.

But I guess it was worth it, as it became the band’s biggest hit. In fact, it was the band’s only hit. Although they went on to release two studio albums and a number of singles, The First Class was unable to replicate the success of “Beach Baby.” Maybe if they had gone on to appropriate the big tune from Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2…

Interestingly, Trenton composer George Antheil, who never seemed to have a problem with aping the styles of his contemporaries, also “borrowed” a passage from Sibelius’ 5th. I’ve never seen anything to the effect that he received a cease-and-desist because of it. Then again, it’s not quite so blatant unless you really know Sibelius’ symphony. For some reason, he poaches not the “swan theme,” but rather a scurrying passage in the strings introduced at the opening of the last movement (preceding the big tune). Did George really get away with it? He WAS the Bad Boy of Music.

All in all, a New Year’s Eve well spent.

Once you know “Beach Baby,” it’s easy to detect a suggestion of the Sibelius tune at the opening, but the blatant crib appears around three minutes in.

In this recording of Antheil’s Symphony No. 3, his Sibelius crib appears for the first time, in the second movement, around 17 minutes in. Here, I cued it up for you.

Finally, the last movement of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5, in all its glory

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The Sibelius estate says, see you in court!

January 3, 2024

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