Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre Halloween Classic

I don’t care how stealthily one creeps through the graveyard at midnight. You won’t get through the Halloween season without encountering Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre.”

Saint-Saëns, born on this date in 1835, originally set Henri Cazalis’ poem – about the personification of Death summoning the departed from their graves to cut a rug until cockcrow – as a chanson, or art song, for voice and piano in 1872. Two years later, he expanded it, putting some flesh on its bones and crafting it into the beloved symphonic poem, which has been a staple of Halloween programs ever since.

Someone married the classic 1937 cartoon short “Skeleton Frolic” – pretty well, I think – to the orchestral version.

It’s also used effectively in this modern trailer for the 1922 silent classic “Häxan.”

And featured prominently in this scene from Jean Renoir’s 1939 film “Rules of the Game.”

Here it is, in its original version. José Van Dam sings it, with Jean-Philippe Collard at the piano.

That’s celebrating Saint-Saëns‘ birthday, with some rather “grave” thoughts! Bon anniversaire, mon vieux!

Translation of the text, by Henri Cazalis:

Zig, zig, zig, Death in cadence
Striking a tomb with his heel
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune
Zig, zig, zag, on his violin

The winter wind blows, and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden trees
White skeletons pass through the gloom
Running and leaping in their shrouds

Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking
You can hear the cracking of the bones of the dancers
A lustful couple sits on the moss
So as to taste long lost delights

Zig zig, zig, Death continues
The unending scraping on his instrument
A veil has fallen! The dancer is naked
Her partner grasps her amorously

The lady, it’s said, is a marchioness or baroness
And her green gallant, a poor cartwright
Horror! Look how she gives herself to him
Like the rustic was a baron

Zig, zig, zig. What a saraband!
They all hold hands and dance in circles
Zig, zig, zag. You can see in the crowd
The king dancing among the peasants

But hist! All of a sudden, they leave the dance
They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed
Oh what a beautiful night for the poor world!
Long live death and equality!

October 9, 2023
Bernstein’s Unanswered Question Harvard 1973

50 years ago today: Leonard Bernstein delivers the first of six lectures, collectively titled “The Unanswered Question,” while serving as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University.

October 9, 2023
Remembering Finnish Composer Rautavaara

The great Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara was born on this date in 1928. In his later years, he was rightly regarded as one of the world’s great composers, the grand old man of Finnish music and the spiritual heir of Jean Sibelius. As a young man, he had actually worked as Sibelius’ chauffeur! In all, he composed eight symphonies, nine operas, 14 concertos, and dozens of other orchestral and vocal compositions. After he died in 2017 at the age of 87, I presented a five-hour marathon of his music on WPRB Princeton.

I was lucky to meet him once, in 2000, backstage at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, prior to the first performance of his Symphony No. 8. He was kind enough to sign my Naxos CD of his Symphony No. 3, the Piano Concerto No. 1, and the so-called concerto for birds and orchestra “Cantus Arcticus.” I wonder what he thought of this peculiar, 33-year-old, American fan?

Here’s a performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1, with my recent acquaintance, Yifei Xu of the New Jersey Festival Orchestra, as the soloist.

The Philadelphia Orchestra touring Rautavaara’s Symphony No. 8, “The Journey.” I didn’t even know this video existed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llL8YGvVkkc

“Cantus Arcticus,” with bird songs recorded by the composer in the bogs of Liminka, near the Arctic Circle:

PHOTO: Ross and Rautavaara. Holding the camera: Sibelius’ grandson, the filmmaker Anssi Blomstedt!

A more complete account here:

October 9, 2023
Andrzej Panufnik Rediscovering a Polish Giant

Andrzej Panufnik is the sleeping giant of Polish music. He’s one of those figures, like Bohuslav Martinu, who always seems poised on the verge of greatness, and yet never quite achieves the full degree of recognition he deserves.

To begin with, his particular brand of modernism was eclipsed by the avant-garde experiments of his friend and compatriot, Witold Lutoslawski. Panufnik’s relationship with Lutoslawski dated back to the war years. During the Nazi occupation, the two formed a piano duo that played in Warsaw cafés – at the time the only way to share live music in public, since there was a ban on organized gatherings.

In the meantime, Panufnik quietly produced subversive works celebrating Polish heroism and the resistance. Following the war, he was instrumental in the re-establishment of the Warsaw Philharmonic. However, increasing friction with Poland’s communist regime led to the composer’s defection, under hair-raising circumstances, in 1954. He was granted asylum in England, where he received a knighthood in 1991, the year of his death.

This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll pay tribute to Panufnik with two of his ten symphonies, both of them markedly “Polish” in character.

His “Sinfonia Rustica” (1948, revised in 1955), as the title implies, is a work very much of the people, making use of fragmented Polish themes, meant to reflect the rustic, semi-abstract, paper-cut art of the peasantry. Not only the symphony’s framework, but also the layout of the orchestra, is meant to reflect the symmetry found in Polish folk art. Nevertheless, despite the work’s direct character, it was denounced in 1949 as “alien to the great socialist era.”

Whenever I listen to Panufnik’s “Sinfonia Sacra” (1963), I always think of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1884 epic, “With Fire and Sword,” set in the 17th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. With its evocation of winged hussars in courageous battle against the Cossacks, Sienkiewicz’s monumental page-turner whipped readers living in a partitioned Poland into a patriotic fervor.

Conceived as a tribute to Poland’s millennium of Christianity and statehood, the symphony reflects the composer’s religious and patriotic sentiments. Panufnik based the work on the first known hymn in the Polish language, “Bogurodzica.” Throughout the Middle Ages, this served as something of a national anthem, sung not only in the church, but also on the battlefields by Polish knights.

Watch your toes – the giant stirs! Join me for two symphonies by Andrzej Panufnik, on “Andrzej the Giant,” 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 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 EDT)

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

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

October 7, 2023
Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 5 in NJ & PA

Thanks, New Jersey Festival Orchestra and conductor David Wroe, for a glorious performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5, presented last night in the acoustically-impressive St. Helen’s Church in Westfield, NJ. You did RVW proud!

It was also my great pleasure to meet Facebook friend Jim Barclay Jr., who, like me, traveled a little over an hour to get there. RVW devotees unite!

Two further area performances of this symphony coming up – astonishing as, to my knowledge, it has not been performed in the Philadelphia area since André Previn led the Curtis Orchestra in 1995.

On November 4 at 7:30 p.m., the Southeastern Pennsylvania Symphony Orchestra will perform the Fifth at Calvary Baptist Church, 1380 S. Valley Forge Road, in Lansdale, PA – again, for me about an hour’s drive. Also on the program will be Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.” Two of my favorite pieces in English music! Allan R. Scott will conduct.

https://www.spso.info/concert-ii-elgars-enigma/

The Main Line Symphony Orchestra will perform the Fifth on November 17 at 8 p.m., also about an hour away, at Valley Forge Middle School in Wayne, PA. The latter concert is especially attractive in that the Symphony No. 2 by Vaughan Williams pupil Ruth Gipps will also be performed. Ernest Bloch’s “Schelomo” will feature as soloist Philadelphia Orchestra cellist Yumi Kendall. The conductor will be Don Liuzzi, also of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

https://www.mlso.org/concerts.htm

Prior to yesterday, I only ever heard the Fifth in concert twice! (The other time was with Leon Botstein conducting at a Bard Music Festival devoted to Sibelius in 2011.)

As always, I ask everyone to keep me apprised of Vaughan Williams performances on the East Coast. To hear the Fifth Symphony live, as it was played last night, can be transformative. It’s a hard heart indeed that can resist its third movement Romanza, but the whole thing is a wonder.

PHOTO: Vaughan Williams conducting the Fifth Symphony at Royal Albert Hall

October 7, 2023

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