Wow! Here’s Mimi Stillman with “The President’s Own” United States Marine Chamber Orchestra in the world premiere of a new flute concerto by Zhou Tian, composer. I’ve had the privilege to interview and record with Mimi a number of times over the years, and I know Zhou from having interviewed him for the Trenton Times and on the air during my days at WPRB. Both such personable and talented people! Definitely also do check out Zhou’s Grammy-nominated Concerto for Orchestra, recorded by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It’s a knockout! Mimi has many other wonderful videos posted on her page. Follow her! And congratulations to both.
World premiere of Zhou’s Flute Concerto
Live performance of his Concerto for Orchestra, with the Basque National Orchestra
PHOTO: Zhou, Mimi, and the U.S. Marine Band’s Col. Jason K. Fettig
Damn the bureaucracy of government oversight – space travel is the patriotic duty of America’s entrepreneurs!
Sure, George Pal’s “Destination Moon” (1950) is astonishing for revealing just how much was actually known or conjectured about space at that time. Really, it’s a remarkable film, in terms of scientific accuracy and educated guesswork as to what it would be like to actually travel to the moon. What a long way from Georges Méliès’ vision of being launched out of a cannon in 1902!
But now the film is even more prescient than most of us ever realized, with the conquest of space having fallen to the tycoons and robber barons. Somehow, I think the creators of “Destination Moon” (including Robert A. Heinlein, upon whose story it is based) imagined more altruistic motives. They certainly held a more optimistic vision of humanity. Hence the pronouncement at the end of the film: “This is the end of the beginning!” How wonderful it must have been to live with such hope.
This week on Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, we travel back to the future to talk about this genre classic, actually suggested to us by Roy’s dad, who will pop in to share some of his recollections of seeing the film as an impressionable boy. Hang around in the comments section (zero-G, of course) for a discussion of “Destination Moon,” when we livestream on Facebook, YouTube, etc., this Friday evening at 7:30 EST!
Among the followers of Mily Balakirev that collectively came to be known as “The Mighty Handful” or “The Five,” unquestionably the least well-known is César Cui. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin all went on to attain a kind of immortality in Russian music, each having left his indelible mark.
Cui wrote 15 operas, believe it or not – one of them, “William Ratcliff,” earning the highest praise from Franz Liszt – but today, he is remembered, if at all, as a miniaturist, or perhaps as a composer of art song, and at that, the least Russian-sounding of the five.
He shared in common with the others the fact that for him music was an avocation. He paid his bills as a military engineer. Beyond that, however, he was a bit of an outsider – born in Vilnius (now in Lithuania) to a father who had been a general in Napoleon’s army, who stayed and married a local. In addition to Russian, Cui grew up speaking French, Polish and Lithuanian. Perhaps this broader cultural perspective led to a more cosmopolitan approach to music.
As a critic, he was prolific, and he could be blistering in his sarcasm. Perhaps most notorious was his reception of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony:
“If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students were to compose a program symphony based on the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would delight the inhabitants of Hell. To us this music leaves an evil impression with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, meaningless repetition of the same short tricks, the nasal sound of the orchestra, the strained crash of the brass, and above all its sickly perverse harmonization and quasi-melodic outlines, the complete absence of simplicity and naturalness, the complete absence of themes.”
The assessment plunged Rachmaninoff into a two-year depression, during which he was unable to compose until being lifted out of his funk by hypnotic therapy. Of course, today everyone knows Rachmaninoff’s music (if not his First Symphony). How many, I wonder, know Cui’s?
On the anniversary of Cui’s birth, enjoy his “Deux morceaux” for cello and orchestra.
25 Preludes for Piano, Op. 64
Nocturne in F-sharp minor
Suite No. 3 “In modo populari”
Cui’s greatest hit? Perhaps “Orientale” from his collection for violin and piano “Kaleidoscope,” for many years a popular encore. Here are two contrasting treatments.
Efrem Zimbalist
and Midori
Finally, the Carmen Dragon treatment
A work that’s received a lot of notice since Covid: the one-act opera “A Feast in Time of Plague”
Happy birthday, César Cui!
IMAGE: With so many whiskers in the room, you know you must be in the company of The Five. Center, left to right: Modest Mussorgsky (standing, by the piano), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, critic and champion Vladimir Stasov (seated), Mily Balakirev (standing behind), César Cui (standing, with spectacles), and Alexander Borodin (seated).
“Among the more astounding spectacles in ‘Solomon and Sheba’ are the PAGAN REVELS… the WINE-BATHED ORGY… before the GRAVEN IMAGE. The shameless FERTILITY RITES… as recorded in the BOOK OF KINGS!”
If I had been around in 1959, I would have bought a ticket for this one so fast. I just love Biblical epics that purport to teach a moral lesson and instill a reverence for the awesome power and majesty of the Almighty, while juicing up the action with as much sex and violence as humanly possible.
What red-blooded male could ever forget Gina Lollobrigida as the Queen of Sheba? What connoisseur of toupées could ever forget Yul Brynner as Solomon?
The composer is Mario Nascimbene, the poor man’s Miklós Rózsa. Rózsa, of course, achieved a career high that year with his music for “Ben-Hur.” “Solomon and Sheba” is no “Ben-Hur.”
Spectacle like this transcends wisdom. Take my 46 cents (the average price of a movie ticket in 1959), please!
Disoriented by Brian Ferneyhough? John Travolta and the Joker are with you, not quite sure what to make of the composer’s Second String Quartet. The high priest of New Complexity turned 80 yesterday.
