Category: Daily Dispatch
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Laugh in the New Year with Gerard Hoffnung
It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? Well, 2026 can only be better. Right? RIGHT?
In any case, it’s been said that laughter is the best medicine. Therefore, this week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll do our best to laugh in the New Year with highlights from the notorious and uproarious Hoffnung Music Festival concerts.
Gerard Hoffnung was a boy when his family arrived in London, refugees from Nazi Germany. In his new home, he cultivated the persona of an English gentleman, though one with a decidedly impish bent. He attained celebrity through his work as a cartoonist, a sparkling panelist, and a public speaker. He was lauded as a brilliant improviser with a dry wit and a masterly sense of timing. He also played the tuba well enough that he was able to tackle the Vaughan Williams concerto.
Following a successful April Fool’s concert in 1956, Hoffnung embarked on the enterprise which, alongside his cartooning, ensured a kind of immortality – the first of the Hoffnung Music Festival concerts. The concerts brought together representatives of England’s finest musical talent to lampoon what, especially at the time, might have been perceived as a rather stodgy art form.
There would be three Hoffnung concerts in all. Alas, the third was presented posthumously. Hoffnung collapsed at his home in 1959, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage three days later, at the age of only 34. An untimely finish for a character who seemed his entire life to be a brilliant, fully-developed, middle-aged man, always at the peak of his form.
I hope you’ll join me as we celebrate Hoffnung’s whimsical legacy. We’ll hear Sir Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand, Grand Overture,” for orchestra, organ, electric floor polisher, and three vacuum cleaners – the work was dedicated to President HOOVER – and Franz Reizenstein’s “Concerto populare,” billed as “a piano concerto to end all piano concertos,” among others.
It’s a lighthearted playlist calculated to put a smile on your face and lend a boost to your spirits – to say nothing of your immune system. He who laughs last laughs best. So “Have a Ball,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu -
Take 2 Holiday Tea Party on “Sweetness and Light”
For whatever reason (i.e. I sent in the wrong show), my New Year’s program aired on “Sweetness and Light” a few weeks ago. Aside from having eggnog on my face, no harm done, I suppose, although I’m sure listeners were wondering why I was going all Guy Lombardo three weeks before Christmas.
Since it’s already recorded, and because it’s the holidays, and because I’m lazy, I’m putting the kettle on to boil some more water for a festive tea party. The playlist will include Dmitri Shostakovich’s charming arrangement of “Tea for Two,” Samuel Barber’s “Souvenirs,” his musical evocation of the elegant Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel in days of yore, and Richard Strauss’ hallucinatory dancing tea leaves from the high-calorie ballet “Schlagobers,” or “Whipped Cream.”
The show will achieve its nutty apotheosis when sugar and caffeine intersect with the hypnotic patter of the 1953 novelty song “The Little Red Monkey,” which tells of a simmering simian’s reactions to violin, euphonium, and tea.
Your eyes will pinwheel, your brain will hum, and your heart will go pitter-pat when you join me for a bottomless cuppa on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it wherever you are at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/ -
From Bernard Herrmann to Pee-wee Herman: Toys Everywhere on “Picture Perfect”
With the grand cacophony of Christmas still fresh in everyone’s ears, I thought it only appropriate this week on “Picture Perfect” to focus on music from movies about toys.
Without giving anything away, in the unlikely event you don’t already know the story’s big pay-off, “Citizen Kane” (1941) is a film flanked by toys. There’s even a snow globe in the film’s opening montage. A certain memory of Kane’s childhood provides a poignant glimpse of the larger-than-life newspaper magnate’s lost innocence. “Kane” is often cited as one of the greatest films ever made. Orson Welles triumphed in his debut as writer-director-star, even if, ultimately, his creation proved to be a bottle rocket that blew up in his face. The film also marked the Hollywood debut of composer Bernard Herrmann.
I’m not sure that “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (1985) could be described as the “Citizen Kane” of the ‘80s, exactly, but this endearingly goofy sojourn into the surreal does revolve around the recovery of a lost toy, as Pee-wee, the eternal boy, determines to make his way to “the basement of the Alamo” in an attempt to reclaim his stolen bike. The feature was director Tim Burton’s first. It was also his first collaboration with Danny Elfman, who is obviously a big fan of Nino Rota.
The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are better known for their contributions to architecture, industrial design, and manufacturing, but they also made short films. “Toccata for Toy Trains” (1957) was inspired by the Eames’ passion for vintage toys. The score was provided by their go-to composer, Elmer Bernstein.
Finally, in acknowledgement of the greatest toy series of our day, we’ll conclude with music from “Toy Story” (1995), the first full-length computer animated feature. The quality of the film propelled it beyond mere novelty status into the realm of instant classic, and the beloved “Toy Story” franchise has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. Early on, it was decided by the filmmakers that they did not want “Toy Story” to be a musical, but that songs could be used to underline its emotional content. Randy Newman has provided the music for all the “Toy Story” films so far. He was recognized with an Academy Award for his work on “Toy Story 3,” for the song, “We Belong Together.”
Keep popping those aspirin. It’s “Toys Everywhere” this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu -
The Sound of Silence, Christmas Eve Edition
Christmas Eve, already.
On this date in 1818, the Christmas carol “Silent Night” was first sung at St. Nicholas Church in Obendorf, Austria. The words were from a poem, “Stille Nacht,” written by a young Catholic priest, Joseph Mohr, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. It’s said that Mohr was inspired in part by a walk he took, on which he was impressed by the quiet, wintry aspect of his town at peace.
He handed the words off to the church’s choir director, Franz Xaver Gruber, who wrote the melody with a deadline looming for that evening’s mass. The carol was introduced on Christmas Eve, its creators singing it in duet, with Mohr on the guitar. (St. Nicholas Church was prone to flooding, which may have damaged the organ. Eventually, the church would be replaced by Silent Night Chapel.)
An organ builder and repairman heard the carol and took it with him back to his own village, where it was picked up by two separate families of traveling folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers. The Rainers performed it before the King of Prussia and Tsar Alexander I and sang it for the first time in the United States, where they introduced it at the Alexander Hamilton Monument outside Trinity Church in New York City.
Nearly two centuries before social media, the carol went viral. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t know it. It’s been recorded over 137,000 times, for the first time back in 1905.
Even given the irresistibly Romantic story of a priest introducing the carol to his congregation on a guitar on Christmas Eve, there had been speculation over the years attributing its creation to starrier names. It was only in 1994 that the original manuscript was discovered in Mohr’s hand. Scholars now believe that two years elapsed between the actual writing of the poem in 1816 and Gruber’s last-minute contribution of the indelible melody.
If this is true, it does nothing to take away from the carol’s magic, and the rare alchemy between poet and composer.
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Stained glass from Silent Night Chapel, reinforcing the legend of Gruber (as opposed to Mohr) on the guitar
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