Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Remembering Peter Nero Philly Pops Legend

This Nero didn’t play as Philly burned.

Peter Nero, who conducted the Philly Pops for 34 years, is dead. At the orchestra’s founding in 1979, it was Nero’s intention to take on Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. For decades, Boston had been ensconced as the very model of a modern major pops orchestra. With a touch of hubris, Nero stated at the time, “I’d like to beat the pants off them.” Granted, by then, Fiedler was tottering into the homestretch of a 50-year career as Boston’s music director. Nevertheless, the pants stayed on. Nero left the Philly Pops in 2013, when the orchestra could no longer afford his salary.

A multifaceted musician, Nero started out as a piano prodigy. He earned the respect of no less than Vladimir Horowitz, and Roy Charles would cite him as one of his favorite pianists, alongside Art Tatum.

It was hearing Tatum that changed the course of Nero’s life. He fell in love with jazz and determined not to be pigeonholed, instead embracing and often combining music from a variety of genres. His enthusiasms would carry him from piano competitions to smoky jazz clubs to posh concert halls to open-air band stands before audiences numbering in the thousands.

He performed “Rhapsody in Blue” with Paul Whiteman, who had introduced the piece with George Gershwin at the piano. Nero was celebrated as a premier interpreter of Gershwin’s music.

His first album for RCA, “Piano Forte” (1961), was a hit, earning him a Grammy for Best New Artist. The next year, he would garner another, for Best Performance by an Orchestra or Instrumentalist with Orchestra – Primarily Not Jazz or for Dancing (what a cumbersomely named category!), for “The Colorful Peter Nero.” He would be nominated ten more times.

In all, he released 67 albums. His instrumental version of Michel Legrand’s “Summer of ‘42” became a million best seller. He appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” 11 times, and made numerous appearances on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. He also worked with Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Andy Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Diane Schuur, Johnny Mathis, Roger Kellaway, Elton John, and his bête noire, Arthur Fiedler.

In the 1970s, Nero’s focus shifted to conducting and composing. He performed up to a hundred concerts a year, often at the piano, playing with one hand, while conducting the orchestra with the other.

He wrote a cantata after Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” It’s said to have been the first musical treatment of the material, and the work embraced rock, symphonic, and traditional Jewish music. He conducted the piece in several cities, including with the Greater Trenton Symphony in 1973.

During his decades with the Philly Pops, Nero made his home in Media, PA. The orchestra’s repertoire was a mix of orchestral arrangements of popular jazz, swing, Broadway, and blues, with a smattering of light classical.

His departure from Philly was not an amicable one. Even then, in 2013, the Philly Pops was experiencing choppy waters. The orchestra filed for bankruptcy and asked Nero to take a salary cut. Nero declined.

The orchestra continues to struggle. The 2022-23 season was a particularly dramatic chapter in its turbulent history. But that’s for another post, one I don’t particularly feel like writing!

Intriguingly, following the death of Marvin Hamlisch in 2012, it was revealed that the latter was poised to take over the orchestra’s reins. David Charles Abell was named principal conductor and music director in 2020.

In the 1990s, Nero served concurrently as Pops Music Director of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra. He also played with his jazz trio. Post-Philly, Nero returned to concertizing with his longtime bassist, Michael Barnett.

At the time of his death, he was 89-years-old. R.I.P.

Nero plays “Rhapsody in Blue” with Fielder and the Boston Pops

“Fiddler of the Roof” on “The Ed Sullivan Show”

“Tea for Two” (for three)

Million-selling “Summer of ’42”

“Rocky” at Independence Hall

“Rhapsody in Blue” in Philly

July 10, 2023
Rediscovering Forgotten Classical Gems

One of the unfortunate things about not having a live air shift anymore is that I no longer get a chance to play a lot of those wonderful, shorter pieces I used to work into my shows. On the birthday of Ottorino Respighi, I’m reminded of the composer’s “Adagio con variazioni” (“Adagio with Variations”), a lovely work for cello and orchestra that’s worlds away from the rafter-rattling tone poems that comprise his famous “Roman Trilogy.” I haven’t heard this since the last time I played it on the radio, which would have been before the pandemic. How many equally lovely pieces have fallen through the cracks now that I’m no longer sitting at the control board? At home, I don’t often go to my personal collection to pull out short pieces I once played fairly regularly, pieces like Oskar Nedbal’s “Valse triste” or Armstong Gibbs’ “Dusk.” No one in management considers how much the landscape will change once someone is shown the door and takes his record collection with him. Which is why you will no longer hear John Foulds’ “Keltic Lament” or Alexander Glazunov’s “Idyll” for horn and strings. Be that as it may, I hope you will take a few minutes to enjoy some Respighi you won’t often encounter.

July 9, 2023
Jean Shepherd’s Lost 4th of July Gem

I’m sure there are times when we all get to feeling a bit like little lost lambs gone astray. On such occasions, the best medicine is the rejuvenating waters of our youth. Nobody understood that better than the shepherd called Jean.

In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, Jean Shepherd was the storyteller, humorist, writer, and radio personality who spun gold from the experiences and eccentricities of his boyhood in blue-collar Indiana, which he harvested to notable comic effect. Shep was an expert at making the personal universal.

Shep lives on in annual marathons of the film “A Christmas Story” (1983), with its knowing, nostalgic reminiscences of the aspirations and terrors of childhood. References to Red Ryder BB guns and “fra-gee-lee” leg lamps are now part of the American holiday experience.

On a related note – and the reason I’m bringing this up in July – earlier this week, I recollected a television adaptation my mother and I had watched 40 years ago, as part of the PBS anthology series “American Playhouse,” of Shep’s “The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters” (1982). I decided to revisit it on the Fourth this year as a little birthday present to myself.

If you are fond of “A Christmas Story,” it would behoove you to check this one out too, as many of the motifs of the subsequent film are already present here, with recurring characters like Ralphie and the Old Man, and admonitions that “you’ll shoot your eye out.”

The bare-bones budget makes it all the more amusing, at least for me, as it reminds me of the super-8 films my friends and I used to make in high school. Somehow (don’t ask me how), the producers were able to get Matt Dillon of all people, already a rising star at the movies, to play Ralphie. “Rumble Fish” and “The Outsiders” were released the same year. (Dillon can currently be seen as part of the ensemble cast in Wes Anderson “Asteroid City.”)

If I were a casting director, he probably wouldn’t have been my first choice – it’s hard to imagine Dillon as Shep’s alter ego – but he acquits himself well enough as a teen version of the character played by Peter Billingsley in “A Christmas Story.” Dillon is especially funny in a tangent about a blind date.

Shep himself appears in the frame story, on a pilgrimage down I-95 to the iconic South of the Border to purchase illegal fireworks.

The Fourth of July may be past, but while it’s still fresh in your memory, you could do worse than check-out this nostalgic look back to the Fourths of our childhoods. Sadly, the program doesn’t appear ever to have been issued commercially, so it’s available only by way of a poor VHS copy that’s been posted to YouTube. Trust me, though, you will quickly adjust. It’s well worth seeing. If you’ve got an hour and you want to smile, do check it out.

I don’t know why it would have been allowed to fade into obscurity, but I suspect part of the reason is the show’s mysterious appropriation of John Williams’ music for “Jaws.” The filmmakers help themselves to the shark theme, “Out to Sea,” and especially “Tourists on the Menu,” which is used liberally throughout. I don’t know how they expected to get away with it, if they didn’t pay for it, because everybody knows “Jaws,” and “Jaws” was released only eight years earlier.

There is another reason that Shep looms in my thoughts this week, and it is a musical one, in that Shep happened to be a huge fan of George Antheil, the Trenton-born composer whose birthday anniversary I celebrated yesterday on “The Lost Chord.” Shep would sometimes play Antheil’s music during his own radio broadcasts and even provided an on-air eulogy following the composer’s death. I located a sound file here!

Christmas in July: Shep reads the autobiographical short story that would become everyone’s story when adapted as “A Christmas Story”

Of course, “The Great American Fourth of July” contains a whole other level of nostalgia for me now that I am grown and my mother is long gone. Watching it with her 40 years ago remains a happy, if bittersweet memory.

July 9, 2023
George Antheil Bad Boy of Music Birthday

George Antheil, classical music’s original Trenton cracker, was born on this date in 1900.

The self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music” (the title of his autobiography) had to travel all the way to Paris to make good. It doesn’t make my transcontinental exile to Eugene, Oregon seem so bad! I hope you’ll join me for “The Lost Chord,” now on KWAX, as we divvy up the nut bread for a musical celebration of Antheil’s birthday.

Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique” sparked one of classical music’s great riots when it was unveiled at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1926.

The work made preposterous demands on performers and audience alike, with its battery of player pianos, sirens, bells, and airplane propellers – all difficult to coordinate, but worth it, if they were to transform concert halls into free-for-alls and secure Antheil’s status as enfant terrible. His notoriety earned him the respect, friendship, and envy of Paris’ artistic community. From the stage, he watched as Man Ray punched a heckler in the face, as Satie cheered, “Quel precision!,” and as Ezra Pound shouted, “Shut up, you are all stupid idiots.” Pound became one of Antheil’s most ardent champions, taking a break from poetry to publish an inflammatory book, “Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.”

Antheil speculated, perhaps facetiously, that his mechanistic nightmares may have been inspired by his having been born across the street from a noisy machine shop. In fact, a number of his works bear the boisterous imprint of the factories he knew in Trenton as a boy, including the “Airplane Sonata,” “The Death of Machines,” and the “Sonata Sauvage.”

It was all rather forward-looking. Antheil was one of the first composers to search beyond conventional instruments for musical means. He not only presaged the alien soundscapes of Edgard Varèse, but also anticipated the stupefying repetitions of minimalism – though infusing his own compositions with enough violence to prevent them from ever becoming numbing. Stravinsky was his hero. He fed off the savagery of “The Rite of Spring,” then followed the master’s subsequent hairpin turn into neoclassicism. Both artists suffered a backlash from former idolaters who felt betrayed by what was perceived as a cowardly retreat into the past.

In Antheil’s case, his reputation never recovered. The one-two punch of his Piano Concerto No. 2, transparently influenced by Bach, and the spectacular failure of his “Ballet Mécanique” to impress at its American premiere at Carnegie Hall (mostly due to faulty machinery) cast Antheil, rebel angel that he was, from the lofty heights of notoriety to the slag heap of has-beenery.

But if it is true that the remainder of his career was indeed that of a has-been, we should all be so lucky.

The composer of six symphonies, Antheil also wrote books on endocrinology and speculative war tactics, a murder mystery, a nationally syndicated column of advice to the lovelorn, and over 30 Hollywood film scores. With the actress Hedy Lamarr, he patented a torpedo guidance system that became the basis for modern Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular phone technology.

I hope you’ll join me for music by this eccentric and multitalented figure, including “Ballet Mécanique,” in all its original, uncompromising glory; then selections from his neo-classical Piano Concerto No. 2, his wartime Symphony No. 4, and dance music from his score to the ballet film noir “Specter of the Rose.”

The irony is blistering that Trenton’s own classical music station no longer hosts “The Lost Chord,” but you can still enjoy this celebration of Trenton’s (other) bad boy, thanks to the miracle of worldwide streaming. I hope you’ll be able to join me for “Antheil Establishment,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

For more information, see below.

Keep in mind, 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/

July 8, 2023
John Williams’ Genius Beyond the Screen

I’m a little late in sharing this – the article ran yesterday – but I couldn’t agree more with the premise. Anyone who sneers at John Williams’ indelible themes doesn’t understand the full extent of his artistry, and those who continue to approach film music as mere grist for pops concerts (especially in “pops” arrangements) is doing film music at its best a serious disservice. I wish someone would have the guts to present extended passages from these scores without the images, so that listeners can appreciate more fully what the composer has achieved. Yeah, they’re not symphonies, but it takes a special kind of talent to make this type of music work as often as John Williams has. If there’s anyone else alive that can maintain this balancing act between the dramatically appropriate and musically satisfying as well as he does, I don’t know of it.

The article is written by Frank Lehman, Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University. It’s refreshing to see an appreciation piece written by someone who understands the inner workings of the music and can actually express himself in musical terms. Too often, these kinds of articles are written by well-meaning fans, who don’t really possess a larger perspective or the necessary tools to communicate musically. Not to trash the fans. Williams is who he is he is, in large part, because of them. But if his music is to be taken seriously, we need people like Lehman.

The article is interactive, with plenty of film and sound clips to illustrate the writer’s points. I wouldn’t want all newspaper articles to be done like this, but for a music piece, especially one about how music works with the movies, this was very well done. Great job, and a fun read, @[100059174186752:2048:The New York Times]!

July 8, 2023

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