Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Korngold Prodigy Opera to Hollywood Legend

One of classical music’s most astonishing composer prodigies – sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus, as it were – Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the toast of Vienna. His opera “Die tote Stadt” was probably his greatest success, receiving double-premieres in Hamburg and Cologne. It became one of the most popular operas by a living composer during the 1920s.

With the rise of the Nazis, Korngold and his family found refuge in Hollywood, where he wrote film scores for such classics as “Captain Blood” (1935), “The Prince and the Pauper” (1937), “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939), “The Sea Hawk” (1940), and “Kings Row” (1942).

Even as a boy, Korngold had amazed audiences with such works as the ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann,” or “The Snowman,” composed at the tender age of 11 and first performed at the Vienna Court Opera in the presence of Emperor Franz Josef. His Piano Trio was composed at 13 and given its premiere by Artur Schnabel and members of the Vienna Philharmonic. The Sinfonietta, a symphony-in-all-but-name, was composed at 15 and first conducted by Felix Weingartner, while Korngold shared a box with an admiring (and, by his own admission, somewhat intimidated) Richard Strauss.

With the premiere of his opera “Die tote Stadt,” or “The Dead City,” in 1920, at age 23, Korngold’s reputation seemed assured. He wrote a piano concerto for Paul Wittgenstein, undertook a revival of the operettas of Johann Strauss II, and was publicly honored by the president of Austria.

However, the trajectory of his career took an unexpected turn with the ascendancy of Hitler. To escape the creep of fascism, Korngold embarked on a second career, settling in Hollywood to write film scores for Warner Brothers.

The first of these was composed at the invitation of famed impresario Max Reinhardt, with whom Korngold had collaborated on the Strauss revivals. Reinhardt was in the process of adapting Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the big screen, and he enlisted Korngold to rework Felix Mendelssohn’s famous incidental music.

In true Korngoldian fashion, the composer went well beyond what was expected, weaving in passages from Mendelssohn’s symphonies and “Songs Without Words,” writing his own connective material, and sprinkling the whole with fairy dust.

Korngold’s work on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935) led to an exclusive contract at Warner’s, where the composer revolutionized the language of film music, applying the kind of opulence, pageantry and romance characteristic of his operas to silver screen historical dramas and swashbucklers.

The result was kind of a pop cultural immortality, but to the detriment of his reputation as a serious composer. The center of European musical culture was off-limits, indeed severely limited by Nazi strictures, and the language of musical modernism, as exemplified by the output of his contemporary and compatriot Arnold Schoenberg, made Korngold seem positively old-fashioned. It would be decades before his reputation would recover, and unfortunately by then he was long dead.

I feel like I was in on the ground floor of the Korngold revival, snapping up everything available, though a mere fraction of his output, shortly after it appeared on LP during the 1970s. Then came a veritable Korngold bumper crop during the compact disc era, especially in 1990s. Since then, we’ve been blessed especially with multiple recordings of the Violin Concerto, now in the repertoire of practically every major violinist.

It’s been very exciting for me, personally, to live through the comeback of one of my favorite composers, and one who has been so important to me for most of my existence. Well before I knew anything about music, my best friend and I used to “sing” the music from “Robin Hood,” after the film’s television broadcasts, while executing curtain rod duels around the house.

With gratitude to Erich Wolfgang Korngold on his birthday. May I obey all your commands with equal pleasure, sire!

Good nine-minute primer on E.W.K.

Violin Concerto

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

Sinfonietta, composed at 15

Marietta’s Lied from “Die tote Stadt”

“The Sea Hawk”

What say you to that, Baron of Loxley?

May 29, 2023
Romeo Cascarino Blades of Grass Memorial Day

Philadelphia composer Romeo Cascarino (1922-2002), who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, composed a plaintive elegy, “Blades of Grass,” in 1945. He expressed a preference, on several occasions, that Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Grass,” be read before performances of the work. Sandburg’s poem was written in 1918, in response to “The Great War.”

Alas, how little the world changed in 27 years. Alas, how little it has changed today.

On Memorial Day, let us honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice by committing to being more conscious of living with compassion, regarding others with respect, striving for peaceful resolutions, and when conflict is unavoidable, acquitting ourselves with honor, humility, and mercy.

These are ideals we may not always live up to, but who are we, if we don’t try to be better?

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

May 29, 2023
Ligeti: Avant-Garde, Affection, and 2001

György Ligeti was that rare bird: an avant-garde composer whose music could actually inspire affection. He rocketed to worldwide fame after some of his works were used, without permission, in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Ligeti was born into a Jewish family in an ethnically Hungarian region of Transylvania, one hundred years ago today. Destined to become one of the most important musical voices of his generation, he first had to overcome many hardships. Most of his family was wiped out in the Holocaust. He was conscripted into a forced labor brigade. He lived for a time under strict communist rule. He survived the violent Soviet putdown of the Hungarian Revolution, and finally escaped with his on-again/off-again wife in a couple of mail sacks, leaping off a night train and crawling for miles through the mud to find safety in Vienna.

Ligeti was not the kind of artist who would have flourished under totalitarianism. “Totalitarian regimes do not like dissonances,” he ruefully observed. He even abandoned the avant-garde circle in Cologne, which included Karlheinz Stockhausen, because he found the environment to be too dogmatic. Though he wrote little electronic music himself, he incorporated the lessons he learned at the Cologne Electronic Music Studio into his instrumental works, often creating otherworldly textures.

Remarkably, for all he endured, he was able to hang on to his sense of humor. Unquestionably, he had his playful side, and this shone through in his music from time to time.

Here’s the car horn prelude to his opera, “Le Grand Macabre.”

And the Act II doorbell prelude

If you’re wondering how to pronounce his name, the first sounds like George. His last name does NOT rhyme with spaghetti, since in Hungarian the accent is on the first syllable. Only when you realize this will you understand the genius of my pun when I state that “Ligeti split” in 2006. He was 83 years-old.

His centenary is a round occasion I would have loved to have observed on “The Lost Chord,” had I had the capability to record new shows. No longer reliant on WWFM, you can expect more flexibility from me in the future.

For now, happy birthday, György Ligeti!

Perhaps his greatest hit, thanks to a boost from Kubrick: the Kyrie from “Requiem”

“Lux Aeterna” (with creepy fractal)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iVYu5lyX5M.

“Mysteries of the Macabre,” a distillation of three coloratura arias from “Le Grand Macabre,” with Barbara Hannigan as Gepopo, the chief of secret police – in case you’re curious, the text is semi-nonsense!

In London

In Berlin

In New York in a semi-staged production of the complete opera

Trailer for the New York Philharmonic performances

H. Paul Moon’s film on Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes”

Ligeti for people who think they don’t like Ligeti: the folk-inflected “Concert Românesc” (“Romanian Concerto”)

I once interviewed Cristian Măcelaru, then conductor-in-residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra, for an intermission feature for a broadcast concert on Philadelphia’s WRTI. You’ll have to scroll down to the gray box below the article at the link (below, not above, the photo of Sarah Chang) in order to hear it. I was not the one who edited the interview, or it would not have sounded so choppy!

https://www.wrti.org/wrti-spotlight/2015-10-14/the-philadelphia-orchestra-in-concert-on-wrti-sarah-chang-plays-dvorak-sunday-october-18-1-pm?fbclid=IwAR1vY8Y45jjRWkanI-1ZuNFISUoKb2ipHatlz8LDgWc5iCXqdtRtbZcjVoE

Perhaps equally attractive, Ligeti’s “Six Bagatelles”

“I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.” – György Ligeti

May 28, 2023
Samuel Barber’s Lost Symphony No. 2

Just as KWAX allows for the continued broadcast of “The Lost Chord” – no longer affiliated with WWFM after twenty years, but still available in syndication – Howard Pollack’s biography, “Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy,” preserves the story behind the composer’s Symphony No. 2.

Barber’s music will be among my featured works this week on a program devoted to works conceived for the U.S. armed forces. Barber was serving in the U.S. Army Air Force when he was approached to write a symphony in 1943.

Every two weeks, he would report to a colonel at West Point to demonstrate his progress. Here’s a passage from Pollack’s book, with a nice Princeton connection on p. 236.

“As it [the symphony] was one of my most complicated works, I had no idea what [the colonel] expected to hear. I rather thought it might be something like ‘You’re in the Army Now.’ So I was a little nervous when I reported to play for him on a battered-up piano in the back of the army theater. All he said was, “Well, corporal, it’s not quite what we expected from you. Since the air force uses all sorts of the most modern technical devices, I’d hoped you’d write this symphony in quarter-tones. But do what you can, do what you can, corporal.”

Barber actually made some concession toward this general expectation by employing, in the second movement’s final section, an “electrical ‘tone generator’” constructed by Bell Telephone Laboratories in imitation of the low-frequency radio signals used to help pilots navigate during these years. The composer even traveled to the company’s Princeton location to investigate the matter. “In the end, it never did work right,” recalled Barber. “I remember [conductor Serge] Koussevitzky having a fit at rehearsal and shouting “Throw the damn thing out.” When Barber revised the work in 1946, he rewrote the small tone-generator part for E-flat clarinet.

Barber was very proud of the work when it was completed, thinking it one of his best pieces. However, with the passage of time, he came to feel embarrassed by it, perhaps because of its programmatic roots – although he always emphasized that the work was meant to reflect the emotional response to events rather than the events themselves – or perhaps because of the war itself, the ties to which he felt dated the piece. Whatever the case, after a few drinks one afternoon, he convinced his publisher to allow him back to the office to tear up the score. Of course, the piece had been published, so this was largely a symbolic gesture, and the Symphony No. 2 was revived after his death.

Parenthetically, Barber did authorize the publication of the work’s Andante as a free-standing piece, called “Night Flight.” The score is prefaced by an epigraph by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (aviator and author of “The Little Prince”), from his novel of the same name, drawn from a passage depicting the final moments of a pilot’s doomed flight: “A single radio post still heard him. The only link between him and the world was a wave of music, a minor modulation. Not a lament, no cry, yet purest of sounds that ever spoke despair.”

We’ll hear a recording of Barber’s complete, reconstituted symphony with Marin Alsop and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

In addition, we’ll hear Morton Gould’s Symphony No. 4, his first large scale work for symphonic band. Gould’s symphony, composed in 1952 for the United States Military Academy at West Point, calls for a “marching machine,” but on the recording we’ll hear, a classic on the Mercury label, the feet will be those of the 120 musicians of the Eastman School Symphony Band. Frederick Fennell will direct the Eastman Wind Ensemble.

Remember the sacrifice of Americans at war, while listening to “Orchestrated Maneuvers,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon. Stream it at the link below.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour time difference – actually rather convenient for those of us located in the vicinity of WWFM. Here are the conversions of the respective air-times of my shows:

PICTURE PERFECT – Fridays on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD – Saturdays on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

BONUS: Another of Barber’s wartime works, the “Commando March,” performed by “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band

More info on Howard Pollack’s “Samuel Barber: His Life & Legacy”

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c044908&fbclid=IwAR2xcgzDYdCzC0KFAlhyMOFt7S72RKmmnh_Nk4lsWPm9goNSUb1LHsSpDWg

PHOTO: U.S. Army Air Force Corporal Samuel Barber

May 27, 2023
John Williams’ WWII Film Scores on KWAX

I won’t put too fine a point on it, because I feel it would be disrespectful to those who made the ultimate sacrifice to use Memorial Day to sharpen my bayonet. But here’s an example of programming you WON’T hear on WWFM this weekend.

You will hear it, however, on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon, where “Picture Perfect” will continue, as I prepare to produce and distribute fresh programs.

This week, we’ll revisit some of John Williams’ music for films set during World War II.

Only six months after Pearl Harbor, America struck back, devastating the Japanese fleet in a battle regarded as one of the war’s turning points. “Midway” (1976) was a belated big-screen dramatization of the event, featuring an all-star cast of war movie standbys, including Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Glenn Ford, Hal Holbrook, Toshiro Mifune, Robert Mitchum, and Cliff Robertson.

Unfortunately, the assembly of old-timers, combined with abundant stock footage from “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and actual period newsreels, may have saddled the film with an all-too-palpable sense of been-there-done-that. Williams does his best to freshen things up with a rousing, patriotic score and a crackerjack victory march. Fun fact: “Midway” was one of only four films ever to be presented in theater-rumbling Sensurround.

Frank Sinatra starred in – and directed – “None But the Brave” (1965), the only time the Chairman of the Board sat in the director’s chair. This time, Japanese and American units are forced to coexist, and even cooperate, after they are stranded on a Pacific island. The film is also noteworthy for being the first Japanese-American co-production and bears a somewhat forward-looking anti-war message. The music is a fascinating glimpse of Williams’ work from ten years before his mega-success with “Jaws,” and “Star Wars” yet to come.

“1941” (1979) is just plain weird. Steven Spielberg’s too-big-to-fail gamble stumbles pretty badly, following his back-to-back blockbusters, “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” The premise – a Japanese u-boat sighting off the coast of California triggering an overabundance of slapstick panic – posits, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad war.

“1941” employs a staggering amount of talent, from its behind-the-scenes effects artists, to screenwriters Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, to its dream cast pushing as hard as it possibly can. It also features a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Toshiro Mifune and Slim Pickens in the same scene. But for the most part, perhaps unsurprisingly, it fails to deliver the laughs. What it does deliver is the most rousing of John Williams’ neglected scores.

Spielberg actually approached John Wayne about appearing in the film. Wayne was too ill to participate, but offered the following advice: “You know, that was an important war, and you’re making fun of a war that cost thousands of lives at Pearl Harbor. Don’t joke about World War II.” Whether or not audiences agreed, they didn’t exactly queue up as they had for Spielberg’s previous successes.

We’ll strike a more reverent tone with Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998). Spielberg’s war-is-hell narrative yet manages to honor the sacrifice of the fighting men of World War II. The opening – a sustained “you-are-there” battle sequence on Omaha Beach – is unforgettable. Remarkably, it is presented wholly without music, Williams preferring to allow the tension of the mise-en-scène to speak for itself. Spielberg picked up his second Academy Award for Best Director. The film, however, inexplicably, lost to “Shakespeare in Love.” We’ll hear “Hymn to the Fallen,” of the hour’s selections, easily the most appropriate to Memorial Day.

Sadly, we’re not talking about “Star Wars” here, but a real war that killed tens of millions and destroyed the lives of countless others.

John Williams looks at World War II from four different angles this week, on “Picture Perfect” – music for the movies – this Friday evening, syndicated on KWAX. Stream it at the link below.

Keep in mind, the station is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour time difference – actually rather convenient for those of us located in the vicinity of WWFM. Here are the conversions of the respective air-times:

PICTURE PERFECT – Fridays on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD – Saturdays on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

PHOTO: War has a way of putting one’s problems in perspective

May 26, 2023

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