Sometimes with Vivaldi, a bassoon and a shot glass are all you need. I confess it’s the shot glass that makes me share this video. Woodwind players can get a little obsessive about their reeds. At least, I assume it’s a reed. Maybe it’s just a shot of vodka, or a Sea Monkey ™.
Happy birthday, Antonio Vivaldi.
Prepared to get all fired up. This week on “Picture Perfect,” there be dragons!
Who doesn’t enjoy a good dragon movie? Unfortunately, there are so few of them. Inevitably, the stories fail to live up to the production design, the special effects, and, yes, often the music.
One score that Universal Pictures definitely took to, like a dragon to its hoard, was that for “Dragonheart” (1996). The film starred Dennis Quaid, with Sean Connery supplying the voice of the film’s dragon, Draco. The studio loved the music so much that it was used in its movie trailers for years, so don’t be surprised if you recognize it, even if you never saw the film. The composer was Randy Edelman.
Alex North wrote one of the finest dragon scores for “Dragonslayer” (1981). “Dragonslayer” caused a bit of stir on its release, since it was an early foray by Disney into more mature territory. The film featured shocking (for the time) onscreen immolations and dismemberment.
The story is a fairly generic sorcerer’s apprentice tale. However, the dragon, Vermithrax Pejorative, easily carries the movie, which also features a late performance by Sir Ralph Richardson as the master sorcerer. The composer reused portions of his rejected score for Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A number of critics, including Pauline Kael, praised the result.
The film was nominated for an Academy Award for its outstanding visual effects, but lost out to “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic provided the effects for both. In my humble assessment, Phil Tippett’s “go motion” dragon has yet to be surpassed.
Many years later, Disney competitor DreamWorks released “How to Train Your Dragon” (2010), a wholly computer-animated film. The story is one of forbidden friendship between a young Viking and a scaly representative of his tribe’s hereditary foes. Despite the Viking characters and setting, the score has an overt Celtic flavor and the actors speak with a Scottish burr (!). The music was by John Powell.
Purely animated films are often more successful in creating an organic, believable world than those supposedly “live action” films that place actors in front of green screens and surround them with video game pyrotechnics. Only director Peter Jackson could have devised a way to pad J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic bedtime story, “The Hobbit,” into three bloated installments, darkening the tone, tying it in with lore from Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion,” and self-consciously anticipating the events in the equally self-indulgent film versions of “The Lord of the Rings.”
Howard Shore supplied the music for all of the Middle Earth movies. He was recognized with three Academy Awards – one for “The Fellowship of the Ring,” in 2001, and two for “The Return of the King” in 2003, for which he also provided the Best Original Song. We’ll hear a selection of his music for the second of the films inspired by “The Hobbit,” subtitled “The Desolation of Smaug” (2013). The part of the dragon, by the way, was voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch.
Feel the burn! Fire your imagination and rekindle your affection for dragons, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
I put out a new seed bell this morning, and within hours the remnants – the part that simulates the mouth of the bell – were already on the ground, surrounded by a gang of blackbird toughs. Then a squirrel bounced up nonchalantly and rolled it away. I swear I could actually see the question marks and exclamation points over the blackbirds’ heads.
Can it be much longer before this migratory menace disperses or moves on to greener pastures? The other birds would like to eat, please.
I don’t know how I didn’t think of this before. It’s the Symphony No. 2 by Finnish composer Einar Englund, subtitled “The Blackbird.” Perhaps I should put my speakers in the window and turn up the volume.
Too bad the symphony apparently takes the side of the blackbird. One critic described it as “a sarcastic statement by a rebellious soul on the brutality of Man and our distorted civilization, compared with the purity of Nature.” That’s how they roll in Finland, I guess. And I’m not about to tangle with the Swan of Tuonela.
Wayne Shorter died yesterday at the age of 89. I don’t claim to be a world authority, but I spun a lot of his records when I was doing overnights at Philadelphia’s WRTI. Here’s Shorter on tenor sax, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. All legends.
Miles Davis said of Shorter, “Wayne is a real composer. He writes scores, writes the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound. …Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didn’t work, then he broke them, but with musical sense; he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your own satisfaction and taste.”
Shorter on working with Davis:
E.S.P.
R.I.P. Wayne Shorter
Yes, I am emerging from a cold, but I am very much on the mend, and I can’t help it, I bought my ticket in November, so damn it, I am on my way to hear the New York Philharmonic! Also, the weather is supposed to be fairly mild this afternoon, so I will dress sensibly, try not to overdo things, and hope for the best (and of course mask in the hall).
First, I plan to swing by the Czech Center New York to take in their “Famous Czech Composers” exhibit – devoted to Bedřich Smetana, Antonin Dvořák, Leoš Janáček, and Bohuslav Martinů – which will run through March 31st. It’s only appropriate, since today happens to be Smetana’s birthday! (Total coincidence.) I confess I’ve been going back and forth on it, since I’m not sure that I buy into the exhibit’s apparent “graphic novel” approach, but supposedly there are also costumes from the first New York productions of some of the operas (including Smetana’s “The Bartered Bride”). And who knows what else I’ll see? It was at the Czech Center that I once shook the hand of Dvořák’s grandson!
https://new-york.czechcentres.cz/en/program/slavni-cesti-skladatele
Then I’ll grab dinner at some dive before heading over to the newly-renovated David Geffen Hall for a concert with the Philharmonic. The program will include William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 2 “Song of a New Race” – my second-favorite William Grant Still symphony (I’ll be hearing No. 1, the “Afro-American Symphony,” with Neeme Järvi and the New Jersey Symphony, later in the month) – but it is as icing on the cake next to the main attraction: Adolphus Hailstork’s stirring oratorio “Done Made My Vow.”
I was bowled over by this piece from the first time I heard it as part of a concert broadcast over the radio, back in the 1980s. I finally stumbled across a recording with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2012. I never dreamed I would ever actually have a chance to hear it live! The work is scored for speaker, vocal soloists, and orchestra. Among tonight’s guest artists is Simon Estes, whose birthday it also is today. Estes having recently retired from opera, I am guessing he will be the narrator. The concert will be repeated on Saturday at 8 p.m.
With luck, I will be back in bed, reading the Kalevala, by 11:30.
Happy birthday, Smetana and Simon Estes!
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