In this year of America 250 observations, naturally I would be inclined to look back to the 18th century. While a frigid New Year’s Day at the Philadelphia Mummers Parade is the big New Year’s tradition around here (it’s a regional thing; if you don’t know it, look it up), I’ll welcome 2026 in a more civilized manner: in my periwig, seated at the harpsichord, pecking out these “Auld Lang Syne Variations.”
It’s a new discovery for me, by a composer named… Ross!
Happy New Year, everyone!
Franz Waxman, of course, was one of the great film composers. His music can be heard in “The Bride of Frankenstein,” “Rebecca,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “A Place in the Sun,” “Rear Window,” “Peyton Place,” “The Spirit of St. Louis,” and dozens of others.
It was customary that Waxman and his family would get together with their neighbors, the Jascha Heifetzes, to welcome the new year with an evening of chamber music. Other guests on these occasions would include violist William Primrose and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.
Mainstream classical fare would dominate the festivities until the countdown to midnight. With the turn of the year, the musical selections would become a bit more frivolous.
Waxman composed his “Auld Lang Syne Variations” in 1947, for one such gathering. This party piece sends up the traditional New Year’s anthem in the styles of several well-known composers.
Feel free to play along and test your musical knowledge. You’ll find further clues in the work’s subtitles, listed below the video on YouTube. One can only imagine Heifetz stepping out in “Chaconne à Son Gout.”
Happy New Year!
I hope you’ve been enjoying a warm and meaningful holiday season. Christmas isn’t supposed to be about the loot, but it’s always welcome to receive an exciting gift. Yes, it’s the thought that counts, and with the winter winds howling, we can all use socks, sweaters, gloves, scarves, etc. But when a gift hits the bull’s-eye, it can light you up like a string of Christmas bulbs. You know, like the ones at your grandparents’ house that were so magical and emitted uncanny odors and threatened at any moment to burst into flame. Ah, the nostalgia of Christmases past!
With the family so fragmented at this point and friends scattered willy-nilly, there is no centralized “Christmas” for me anymore. The Christmas season really is the Christmas SEASON. So the revelry and gift-gifting will continue into the New Year. Here, up to this point, are some of the winners that have appeared in my mailbox and under the tree. The bar must have been set mighty low for me to rank so highly on the “nice” list this year, since, if I haven’t exactly been naughty, I’m still not sure I’ve been exceptionally deserving of such munificence. So thanks to all you miscreants who dragged down the mean, because Santa was obviously grading on a curve!
I learned about the Copland disc of pre-LP recordings on Mather Pfeiffenberger’s breathtakingly exhaustive Copland marathon earlier this month on WHRB. It went right on my wish list. What must it have been like to have been an artist of Copland’s caliber whose career spanned the piano roll to the digital age?
The John Williams biography, the first in English issued by a reputable publisher (Oxford University Press), will probably be the book I’ll read to kick off the new year (as soon as I finish Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” which I’ve been reading for her 250th anniversary, with interruptions to dip into a Christmas anthology). I read Steven C. Smith’s biographies of Bernard Herrmann and Max Steiner, so naturally his exploration of the Herrmann-Hitchcock relationship will be of interest to me. The Edward Gorey book, published for his centenary was an out-of-nowhere, post-Christmas surprise. It is quite the handsome tome – so beautiful, I am almost afraid to touch it!
Despite my interests in music, the Faust legend, and German literature, I have never read Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus.” Much has been made of the book’s allegorical significance, mirroring the collapse of German culture and morality and the rise of Nazism, but I expect it will be especially absorbing for me in light of the musical dust-up it caused with Arnold Schoenberg (who, to be clear, was vehemently anti-Nazi), as the novel’s antihero embraces the composer’s twelve-tone technique, which Mann clearly found to be harmful to German art and culture. Also, one of the concerts depicted in the book allegedly mirrors a passage in George Antheil’s autobiography, which, according to an interview I once conducted with a representative of the Composers Guild of New Jersey, Mann clearly read. Both Thomas Mann (who lectured at Princeton) and George Antheil (born in Trenton) had local connections.
The Franco Alfano DVD has been on my Amazon wish list since 2007. Alfano is probably best known for having completed Puccini’s “Turandot.” The swagger and doomed romance of “Cyrano de Bergerac” have always very much appealed to me, but I can’t say I’m all that familiar with the opera. Perhaps I’ll watch this one, with Roberto Alagna, and the one I already own (which I’ve yet to watch), with Placido Domingo, back-to-back. I can’t think of a better way to begin a new year than with plumes and panache!
I receive all these gifts with thanks and great humility. Don’t think for a moment that I don’t know how lucky I am. By any standard, it’s been quite a Christmas!
For International Cello Day, here’s an 1867 “pantomime comic” by Gustave Doré, a whimsical series of caricatures of Jacques Offenbach to illustrate the influence and increased popularity of the instrument. In 1858, Offenbach engaged Doré to provide scenic designs for his operetta, “Orpheus in the Underworld.” Doré rendered a “serious” engraved portrait of the cellist and composer in 1860.
One of Offenbach’s cello duets here:
Piano legend Gary Graffman has died.
Graffman had a powerful start as part of Columbia Records’ stable of American pianists that also included Leon Fleisher and Eugene Istomin, and he made some fantastic recordings with George Szell and Leonard Bernstein, until, like Fleisher, a hand injury drove him into semi-retirement as a performer.
Graffman was instrumental in resurrecting works in the left-handed repertoire, a number of them commissioned by pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm during the First World War. In particular, Graffman was a champion of the works composed for Wittgenstein by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and I was fortunate (and thrilled) to be able to hear him play these pieces in Philadelphia at a time when they were not widely available on recordings. It’s so easy now to take for granted how spoiled for choice we are in this day of exhaustive recordings and internet access to them. In particular, I got to know Korngold’s Suite for Two Violins, Cello and Piano Left-Hand from Graffman’s concert performances (although it was Fleisher who made the definitive recording of the piece).
I also attended the world premiere of Ned Rorem’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (his fourth piano concerto) at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, which was recorded live and released on New World Records. Rorem always was a miniaturist at heart, or that is my impression, so even when working in larger forms, as here, it was not unusual for him to construct them out of smaller individual components. The concerto consists of eight brief movements, as opposed to three epic statements in the grand German tradition. The outer movements employ kind of a twelve-tone “scat” – the way it’s handled, it’s not going to leap out and clap you on the ears as “twelve tone music” – but at its core, the concerto shares a French sensibility that might appeal to anyone who enjoys the music of Francis Poulenc. It’s an attractive piece, and I’ve played it on the radio many times.
It’s one of several works for left hand composed specifically for Graffman. In 1996, William Bolcom wrote a concerto, “Gaea,” for Graffman and Fleisher to perform together. In 2001, Graffman gave the premiere of “Seven Last Words,” by Curtis alum Daron Hagen.
Graffman’s recording of “Rhapsody in Blue” has enjoyed an especially lucrative existence, thanks to its use in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan.” It’s turned up in numerous film and television productions ever since.
Graffman found a second career as an influential teacher and administrator at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he joined the faculty in 1980 and became its director in 1986. In 1995, he also became Curtis’ president. He served in all three capacities – teacher, director, and president – for the next 21 years. I never lived more than a few blocks from Curtis, and I was a frequent concertgoer (also, my girlfriend at the time worked there), so of course I saw him all the time. What I didn’t see was his behind-the-scenes instruction of super-pianists like Lang Lang and Yuja Wang, who went on to stunning careers. Graffman’s own teachers included Isabelle Vengerova, Rudolf Serkin, and, informally, Valdimir Horowitz.
Graffman’s wife, Naomi, predeceased him in 2019. Their marriage spanned some 67 years. Although I did not know them personally, beyond the exchange of a sentence or two at a reception, they seemed like a lovely couple.
Graffman’s death unexpectedly conjures another era for me. Suddenly, I feel very far away from my 20s.
Gary Graffman died yesterday at the age of 97. R.I.P.
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Graffman performing the rarely-heard Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 4 – another Wittgenstein commission, but never played by him.
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PHOTO: André Previn, Ned Rorem, and Gary Graffman rehearse Rorem’s Piano Concerto for Left Hand and Orchestra
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