Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Max Reger

His surname reads the same forward and backward; which is oddly appropriate for a composer whose music plenty of listeners have felt doesn’t seem to really go anywhere. But knowing what I do of Max Reger, I’m sure he couldn’t have cared less about other people’s opinions.

Perhaps the craziest exemplar of crazy German contrapuntalism, Reger could write music of such density that the individual voices could get lost in a tangle, deep inside a knot, somewhere in an impenetrable thicket.

He was mostly a composer of “abstract” music – mainly a lot of fugues and sets of variations – seeing himself as the heir of Beethoven and Brahms. But it is the Baroque masters Reger most closely resembles, in his own gargantuan, overcooked way, especially in his organ works, of which he composed many.

Aside from his sporadically delightful (though occasionally borderline) “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart” and a handful of organ works, most of his prolific output is known mainly by specialists. For some reason or another, Rudolf Serkin remained a high-profile torchbearer. Serkin recorded Reger’s Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra and, later in life, the “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Bach.”

To me, Reger comes closest to being palatable – and even charming – when restricted to a single, non-keyboard instrument, as in his sonatas for solo violin and suites for solo cello.

Also, it sounds like he may have actually had some fun composing his “Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin.” Böcklin, you may recall, was the Swiss artist who painted “The Isle of the Dead,” which inspired the third of these. Surprisingly, the tone poems are late works. Did anyone see them coming? I guess after a lifetime of getting all tangled up, Reger just wanted to walk around with loose shoelaces for a change.

Despite the fact that in most of his photos he looks like he’s got a mouth full of sauerkraut, Reger actually proved himself to have a sharp sense of humor. His most famous retort to a critic came in the form of a letter written in 1906. It reads: “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.”

Reger, you rascal. Why couldn’t you get more of that into your music?

On the occasion of his sesquicentenary, happy 150th, Max Reger!

“Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart”

“Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H”

Rudolf Serkin plays the “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Bach”

Serkin plays the Piano Concerto

Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin in G Major, Op. 91, No. 6

Mov’t I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW4Jk3zmbzg
Mov’t II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKfGFwQZgeg
Mov’t III https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u_sWKiLc60
Mov’t IV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoaTz5mVuXg

Suite for Unaccompanied Cello in G Major, Op. 131c, No. 1

“Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin,” with the paintings that inspired them (let the playlist run)

PHOTOS: The many moods of Max Reger (1873-1916)

March 19, 2023
Silk Road Film Scores Yeoh & More

This week on “Picture Perfect,” with Michelle Yeoh’s Academy Award win for her lead performance in “Everything, Everywhere All at Once,” I thought we’d revisit her earlier international success, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” as part of a musical journey along the Silk Road to China.

We’ll begin with “The Adventures of Marco Polo” (1938), starring Gary Cooper, of all people, as the medieval merchant-explorer. The score was the first by Hugo Friedhofer – despite his über-German name, born in San Francisco. Freidhofer had been laboring as an orchestrator for bigger-named composers, such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner. He would go on to win an Academy Award for his music for the 1946 film “The Best Years of Our Lives.”

Then we’ll hear selections from two big-screen presentations of the exploits of Genghis Khan. “Genghis Khan” (1965), in the best Old Hollywood tradition, has quite the multi-national cast: Omar Sharif, Stephen Boyd, James Mason, Robert Morley, Francoise Morleac, Telly Savalas, Eli Wallach, Woody Strode, and hordes of extras. The music is by Yugoslavian composer Dusan Radic.

It’s interesting to compare it with “Mongol” (2007). Though the latter film was a joint production of Russia, Germany, and Kazakhstan, it was actually shot in China. The music is by Finnish composer Tuomas Kantelinen, supplemented by contributions by the Mongolian rock band Altan Urag. We’ll stick with the orchestral stuff.

The score is striking for its use of khöömii throat-singers, female soloists lamenting and ululating over the orchestra, as well as the unique art of “urtiin duu,” traditional Mongolian long-singing. “Mongol” received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

Finally, we’ll hear selections from Ang Lee’s martial artsy opus “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), with music by Tan Dun. Let’s just say, Yeoh, as Yu Shu Lien, and Chow Yun-fat, as Li Mu Bai, are extraordinarily light on their feet. The film was the winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score. It was also nominated for Best Picture.

Yo-Yo Ma performs the cello solos. One of the tracks is titled “Silk Road.” In 1998, Ma founded his Silk Road Ensemble.

Slip into some sensible shoes. We’ll travel 7000 miles along the Silk Road this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

March 18, 2023
Roy’s Sci-Fi: St. Patrick’s Day Hiatus

Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner will not be seen tonight, in order that we may better commune with St. Patrick.

However, if you get all sentimental after a few glasses of stout, you can always call up this classic episode from 2021, about “Darby O’Gill and the Little People.” This is the one in which the viewers and I enjoy a private joke and get wasted at Roy’s expense (which is revealed only at the end of the show).

Sorry, I haven’t grown back the beard. I still look 20 years younger. But I’ll do my best to catch up with a night of hard living.

Later this weekend, be sure to join Roy and special guest, author and Starlog Magazine writer David Hirsch, as they discuss Professor Bernard Quatermass and his half-century of rescuing mankind from sinister alien forces, during the course of the various “Quatermass” adventures, on radio, television, and film.

The show will be livestreamed on Facebook, YouTube, etc., at a special time, THIS SUNDAY EVENING AT 7:00 EDT.

https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner

For now, remember to donnybrook responsibly. Roy and I will reconvene next Friday evening at 7:30 (provided somebody posts bail).

Sláinte!

March 17, 2023
St Patricks Day Vintage Ireland and Irish Song

Happy St. Paddy’s Day! I hope you’ll join me for a pint of stout over this vintage footage of the Emerald Isle, set to the John McCormack favorite “The Garden Where the Praties Grow.” McCormack was one of the great tenors of his day, by all accounts a weak stage actor, but with a clarion voice and superior diction that pleased in both the opera house and in recital. For the latter, he was always sure to include Irish songs, many of which he recorded. These feature prominently in my St. Patrick’s Day playlist.

March 17, 2023
Tom Jones & The Genius of John Addison

If I hadn’t watched the Academy Awards the other night, one of the movies I would have had in my watch pile would have been “Tom Jones,” Best Picture winner of 1964, totally inappropriate – if it ever WAS appropriate – for these days of Twitter-propelled outrage. Let’s just say there is plenty of wenching in evidence and also a fox hunt that, though not excessively graphic, I confess is hard to watch. I think that’s the point, actually, but it does kind of wipe the smile off one’s face, coming as it does in the middle of a bawdy farce. The film also features a memorable eating scene, surely one of the most prolonged and comically eroticized in the entire history of cinema.

“Tom Jones” was also the recipient of awards for Best Director (Tony Richardson) and Best Adapted Screenplay (John Osborne), after the picaresque novel of Henry Fielding.

Also nominated were Albert Finney for Best Actor (the first of his five nominations), Hugh Griffith for Best Supporting Actor (his antics would be so “cancelled” in 2023), and Diane Cilento, Edith Evans, and Joyce Redman for Best Supporting Actress. “Tom Jones” is the only film in the history of the Oscars for which three actresses in the same movie were in competition for Best Supporting Actress. (The award went to Margaret Rutherford for “The V.I.P.s.”)

In addition, it received a nod in the category of Best Art Direction.

Freewheeling is one of the most fitting adjectives I can think of for “Tom Jones,” which is also vivacious, versatile, and virtuosic. The same could be said for Richardson’s direction, which at times reverts to silent movie style slapstick. It can certainly be said of the hand-in-glove score by John Addison, who was born on this date in 1920.

Addison too was awarded an Oscar. His music is a brilliant mix of unusual instrumentation (harpsichord, well-worn upright, banjo, accordion) and music hall brio.

Later, he provided the memorable music for “Sleuth.”

And, for television, “Murder She Wrote.”

Addison was the composer to whom Alfred Hitchcock turned, notoriously, after his falling out with Bernard Herrmann over the scoring of “Torn Curtain.” The studio was pressuring Hitch for a more “popular” sound. Ironically, Addison just wound up trying to conjure Herrmann – as did every one of Hitch’s collaborators thereafter.

Addison also provided music for “The Entertainer,” “A Taste of Honey,” “The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner,” “Start the Revolution Without Me,” “Luther,” “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” “A Bridge Too Far,” and the television miniseries “Centennial.”

A student of Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music in London, he wrote a number of concert works, though he remarked, “If you find you’re good at something, as I was as a film composer, it’s stupid to do anything else.”

Here is Addison’s Trumpet Concerto in three movements:

I. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9kX_RyXhac
II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrW_Tj8Pkw4
III. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOJTZ2cnPLc

Over a half century before Warren Beauty and Faye Dunaway got caught up in the infamous “La La Land” snafu, Sammy Davis Jr. was bitten by “Tom Jones”:

Happy birthday, John Addison!

March 16, 2023

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