I’m only just getting around to it myself, but I hope you’ll consider supporting some worthy charitable causes before the end of the year. Giving Tuesday is a good reminder and a great excuse, since many of the donations being made today are being matched. And I’m sorry, Giving Tuesday should be for charity, and not for everyone who feels like they deserve a cut of the pie. Thanks for sparing a thought for those in need.
#GivingTuesday
Yayyyyyyy! After sitting in a Zoom antechamber for over two hours, someone on the jury staff came on and said that if we can see her and hear her voice, she has good news: we’ve all been dismissed. Good news, indeed! I guess no one really wants to do jury duty, so it’s a good thing they threaten to fine you and toss you in the hoosegow. They never even interviewed me. (Maybe they saw yesterday’s Superman post.) Such a load off! This has been hanging over me since October, when I had to request a postponement. So happy! Now I can get back to grocery shopping and fretting about Christmas and working on my radio shows like a human.
FREE! FREE!! FREEEEEEEEEEE!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Anyone familiar with Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner knows that our nostalgia runs deep. I was at a post-Thanksgiving gathering the other night, and what was streaming on a wall-set in the television room, clearly visible from the kitchen, but “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
For those of us of a certain age, family movies were an essential part of the holidays, as the networks kept kids entertained so that the adults could catch-up after the meal. Roy and I have shared our fond recollections of those halcyon days with salutes in recent years to “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” and (with apologies) the “Star Wars Holiday Special.”
This weekend, we had planned to carry on the tradition with a nostalgic recollection of George Pal’s star-studded Cinerama classic “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” (1962). However, the conversation has been postponed, as I suspect at least one of us is still in the process of metabolizing his intake of Thanksgiving tryptophan.
Since one of the film’s chapters, the Puppetoon-laden “The Cobbler and the Elves,” is a Christmas segment, the delay will do nothing to diminish the timely nature of the discussion. We hope you’ll join us for a Grimm time in the comments section, when we livestream on Facebook, YouTube, etc., this Friday evening at 7:00 EST!
https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner
Thank you for your understanding, and enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend!
This week on “The Lost Chord,” it’s one more trip to the well, with well-played works of American composers rendered by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Slake your thirst with selections from “Five Songs of William Blake” by Virgil Thomson (born on this date in 1896), the Symphony No. 7 by Roy Harris, and “Four Squares of Philadelphia” by Louis Gesensway.
Gesensway was born in Latvia in 1906. A violin prodigy, he was one of the founders of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He came to Philadelphia at the age of 19, where he played under both Stokowski and Ormandy.
In his mid-20s, he took a leave of absence to study composition with Zoltán Kodály. “Four Squares of Philadelphia” was described by the composer as a “symphonic poem for large orchestra, narrator and street criers.”
The piece opens with a recitation of William Penn’s prayer, then continues with musical evocations of Washington Square (in early morning, during Colonial times, with street criers hawking their wares), Rittenhouse Square (on a bright and cheerful afternoon), Logan Square (with its fountains at dusk), and Franklin Square (at night, evocative of noisy bridge traffic, a side excursion into Chinatown, and musical interjections from the honky tonk joints located around the square in the 1950s).
Be there or be square. Eugene Ormandy serves up the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers. I hope you’ll join me for “All-American Ormandy III,” 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 the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EST)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EST)
Stream them here!
PLEASE NOTE: This show was recorded in 2015 and employs material reissued on compact disc for the first time on the Albany and Bay Cities labels. All three of these performances have since been remastered (including the wholly restored “Five Blake Songs”), as part of Sony Classical’s 120-CD box set of Ormandy’s Philadelphia mono recordings, “Eugene Ormandy: The Columbia Legacy,” in 2021.
The first installment of Ormandy’s stereo recordings were released earlier this month in an 88-CD box, also from Sony, “Eugene Ormandy/The Philadelphia Orchestra: The Columbia Stereo Collection,” on November 17.
Both Sony sets sound fantastic (with the caveat that the first is in mono). Both are highly recommended.
PHOTO: Statue of Penn, high atop the city he founded
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