Quite a concert weekend for Classic Ross Amico – perhaps for you too, if you live in Central Jersey – and we won’t even have to drive to New York or Philadelphia!
Yesterday, I posted about George Antheil’s cacophonous masterpiece of the Machine Age, “Ballet Mécanique,” which will be performed in Trenton, with members of the New Jersey Capital Philharmonic Orchestra, Plenty Pepper Steel Band, and Trenton Circus Squad. The concert – nay, event – will be held at Trenton Machine Shop on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
As if the Capital Phil’s industrial vaudeville weren’t enough, the Princeton University Glee Club will also join the Princeton University Orchestra for two performances of Edward Elgar’s monumental “The Dream of Gerontius.” Alongside the “Enigma Variations,” this is the work that cemented Elgar as the foremost English composer of his generation. It’s not something you will encounter live on this side of the pond every day. Dream along with two performances, at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall, Friday & Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
A link to info for the Friday concert (Saturday is identical):
It takes a thief to catch a thief, and it takes a madman to interview Leopold Stokowski. Here is Leopold, the craziest dinner guest since Andre Gregory in “My Dinner with Andre,” being interviewed by the pianist-eccentric Glenn Gould. Gould was famously summed-up by conductor George Szell as “That nut’s a genius!” Stokowski himself was always an artist who thrived at the intersection of genius and charlatan. That said, even at his whackiest, Stokowski reminds us that a broken clock is still right twice a day. When he’s at his best, I don’t care if we’re talking about clocks or sausage, the rest is merely casing.
Beethoven is not really the first composer I think of when I think about Stokowski. Stokey was often most in his element when sculpting music with more overtly coloristic effects. But here he and Gould collaborate on Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto in 1966. Unsurprisingly, for those familiar with the concerto, it’s an ear-opener, with Stokey doing his best to will the orchestra to grandeur, while Gould plays whatever the hell he feels like.
Video of 85 year-old Stokowski rehearsing Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture No. 3”
From the same sessions, rehearsing Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”
Some of my favorite Stokowski footage is in the movie “Carnegie Hall” (1947), in which he conducts a movement from Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony. Just when you think his hair can’t get any bigger, he overachieves. The director, Edgar G. Ulmer, cut his teeth in German Expressionist cinema, and it shows. In America, he directed “The Black Cat,” with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and the film noir “Detour.”
The wild hair, the dove-like hands, the faux middle-European accent (he was the son of an English-born cabinet-maker of Polish heritage), Stokowski knew how to work a crowd. He also knew his way around a score. Despite his protestations in the Beethoven rehearsal footage at the link above, Stokey was not averse to looking past whatever could be gleaned of a composer’s intentions, if it meant realizing his own glorious visions.
He could be controversial, to be sure, and he was not difficult to parody. But he was also magnetic and, at his best, a true magician. In common with Oscar Wilde, Stokey knew there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Happy birthday, Leopold Stokowski!
Shaking hands with Mickey Mouse in “Fantasia” (1940)
Parodied in “Long-Haired Hair” (1949)
Introduced by Burns & Allen in “The Big Broadcast of 1937”
Introduced in a snood around the 3:30 mark in “Hollywood Steps Out” (1941)
With Deanna Durbin in “One Hundred Men and a Girl” (1937)
With Marian Anderson and Princeton’s Westminster Choir
When “Ballet Mécanique” was given its world premiere in Paris in 1926, the onslaught of synchronized player pianos, airplane propellers, siren, electric bells, and percussion whipped the audience into an opening night frenzy. Some of the most prominent artists of the day began to throttle one another and rain fists upon their neighbors’ heads. Even in a city jaded by musical scandals (“The Rite of Spring” was unveiled there in 1913, sparking surely classical music’s most-discussed riot), “Ballet Mécanique” was something special.
The composer was George Antheil (pronounced “ANN-tile”), born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1900. Antheil went on to pursue an unusually varied career, but he never could live down this masterpiece of the Machine Age. It is not for nothing that he titled his autobiography “Bad Boy of Music.”
This week, Trenton’s Bad Boy will make good, when he is embraced by his hometown orchestra, the New Jersey Capital Philharmonic Orchestra, under circumstances that will not soon be forgotten.
In a prime example of form following function, “Ballet Mécanique” will be the centerpiece of a kind of industrial vaudeville to be held at the Roebling Machine Shop, 675 South Clinton Avenue, in Trenton, on Saturday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m.
But that’s not all. There’s also John Cage, Lou Harrison, the Plenty Pepper Steel Band, and Trenton Circus Squad!
Read more about it in my article in this week’s U.S. 1 Newspaper – PrincetonInfo, available from local vending machines and at area business, or online, today.
