Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

May Is for Music at the Raritan River Music Festival

Somewhere between the return of Catbird and the reopening of the public pool comes the 37th Raritan River Music Festival. The festival, curated by Laura Oltman and Michael Newman of the Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo, gets a jump on the festival-heavy summer months with a series of May programs that honor, in one way or another, the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation. These will be presented over four concerts in historic venues located in New Jersey’s Hunterdon and Warren Counties.

Since it’s been a very busy week – chockful of everything except sleep, apparently – and I’m running on fumes right now, I’m going to turn it over to this encapsulation from the Raritan River Music website:

“This season RRM celebrates the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation. Many of our festival venues pre-date the American Revolution. The congregations of our churches were founded by people who were among the first European settlers in North America.

“So far from anything they had ever known, they fashioned a government and a culture separate from their origins, whose modern global appeal surely derives from the multiplicity of those who created it. A core mission of Raritan River Music is to embrace the creation and performance of new music from the New World and to build a recorded archive of these musical compositions – music that is as original, dynamic, and aspirational as our nation.”

Now back to me:

Duo Jalal will return to the festival with works for the striking (and bowed) combination of viola and percussion. The program, “Threads of Sound: Voices of American Composers,” will consist of new music by Kenji Bunch, Caroline Shaw, Dafnis Prieto, Kurt Rhode, and Dawn Avery. The concert will be performed at Historic Hunterdon County Court House, 71 Main St., in Flemington, on May 2 at 7:30 p.m.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw’s music will also be represented on a concert by Trio Ondata, alongside works by Shostakovich, Haydn, and Chicago-born composer of Indian and Western classical music Reena Esmail. “American Mycelium: Explorations of the New World” will take place at Old Greenwich Presbyterian Church, 17 Greenwich Church Rd., in Stewartsville, on May 9 at 7:30 p.m.

Newman & Oltman will bring the “Greatest Hits of 1776,” as works by Haydn, Rossini, and Yankee tunesmith William Billings share a program with Early American-related works by Gaspare Spontini, Fernando Sor, and Stephen Jenks, along with an RRM commission, “Raritan Triptych,” by another Pulitzer Prize-winner, Paul Moravec. The concert will be held at Bethlehem Presbyterian Church, 2 Race St., in Pittstown, on May 16 at 7:30 p.m.

The series will conclude with “Two by Two: Harpsichord Duets Across the Centuries” – music performed on two harpsichords by ARTEK, Gwendolyn Toth and Peter Sykes, with an emphasis on composers for the virginal, clavichord, harpsichord, and chamber organ in the late 1500s/early 1600s, the peak period of English exploration of the New World. The program will be given at Stanton Reformed Church, 1 Stanton Mountain Rd., in Stanton, on May 23 at 7:30 p.m.

Concerts will also be available for streaming.

Stick a feather in your cap, call it macaroni, and visit https://www.raritanrivermusic.org/!

April 30, 2026
Princeton Pro Musica to Revive Frank Lewin’s Kennedy Requiem at Princeton University Chapel

As teased in yesterday’s post, here’s my article in the Princeton weekly U.S. 1, out today.

I really wanted to write about Princeton composer Frank Lewin and his “Mass for the Dead (Requiem for Robert F. Kennedy).” The work will be revived by Princeton Pro Musica at Princeton University Chapel on Saturday, May 9, at 4 p.m., as part of an all-American concert, which will also include Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms.” The Requiem was first heard there 57 years ago, during a memorial service for RFK, in 1969.

As an added bonus for me, I got to interview the composer’s daughters, radio host Naomi Lewin, whose syndicated show, “Classics for Kids,” follows my light music show “Sweetness and Light,” Saturday mornings on KWAX; and her sister, documentary filmmaker Miriam Lewin, who once worked at the Opera Company of Philadelphia, where I briefly interned in the ‘90s (after she had already left), and who has the distinction of having introduced supertitles to opera.

I must say, this is the quickest turnaround, from submission to publication of a piece, I ever experienced. Usually, arts writers are requested to get their work in days in advance. For U.S. 1, I think it’s usually about a week. But this an interim editor. Once production hits a bump or I exceed my quota by a million words, maybe the deadline will get pushed up. As it stands, I’m pretty happy with it.

Physical editions of the paper are available in vending machines and at local businesses through next Tuesday. But if you just can’t wait, you can always access the article here:

https://www.communitynews.org/princetoninfo/artsandentertainment/princeton-pro-musica-revives-frank-lewin-s-requiem-for-rfk/article_c6c148b4-1539-4ced-b932-109339bf7b26.html

PHOTOS: Frank Lewin (seated) prepares his Kennedy Mass with soprano Sylvia Jones and tenor Leo Goeke; RFK funeral train passes through Princeton Junction on June 8, 1968

April 29, 2026
Venerable Trenton-Princeton Conductor and Music Educator Matteo Giammario Has Died

I am very sorry to learn that conductor and music educator Matteo Giammario has died. Among his other achievements, Giammario founded the Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra. He devoted much of his life to inspiring young people. His contagious love of music made the world a better place. Happily, he lived to a venerable age. Giammario died on March 9, just days shy of his 101st birthday. Here’s a bio extracted from an article I wrote about the organization in 2024:

Born to parents who immigrated from Italy’s Apulia region – the heel of the “boot,” as it were – he developed an early fascination with music from the Neapolitan songs he overheard growing up in Trenton’s Little Italy. His mother steered him from the guitar to the violin, which started him on the path of his life’s passion, which has been for music education and performance.

Following service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Giammario used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend NYU, where he received his bachelor’s degree. He earned his master’s from Columbia University and a doctorate from the University of Arizona. Further training was undertaken at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome.

Most of Giammario’s teaching career was spent in the Trenton school district, where he served first as a music educator, then as director of music education. In 1960, he was invited by the American Federation of Musicians, Local 62, to conduct the Mercer County Symphonic Orchestra. The orchestra originally performed mainly at the Trenton War Memorial and, according to an article in the digital archive of the New York Times, was intended as a sort of training ground for future members of the Greater Trenton Symphony. From the start, its personnel consisted of local high school and regional college musicians.

The orchestra became a resident ensemble of the Lawrenceville School. Another article in the Times announces a benefit concert at the school in 1975 to be conducted by the internationally beloved pianist and humorist Victor Borge. The orchestra, it notes, “is composed of approximately 70 musicians from public and private junior and senior high schools and few community colleges within the Delaware Valley.”

At the time, Giammario was also conductor of the Bucks County Youth Orchestra and the Ars Nova Chamber Orchestra.

Later still, Giammario oversaw the board during a period of transition that yielded the orchestra’s rebranding as the GPYO, offering even greater breadth to the student musician experience.

“He is so dedicated to the concept of music, music education, music performance,” [board chair of the Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra David] DeFreese says. “He’s a true piece of history and a legend in the Trenton-Princeton community.”

In retirement, Giammario continues to compose and arrange, and of course share his rich history and that of the orchestra he founded. The concerto competition, named for him, is one of the many ways in which the GPYO has committed to honor his legacy.

———

I only just learned of his passing from an article that ran in last week’s edition of the Princeton weekly, U.S. 1.

https://www.communitynews.org/princetoninfo/business/fastlane/gpyo-founder-matteo-giammario-dies-at-age-100/article_d255dae1-b822-4b15-b218-f0d972114b0d.html

R.I.P.

April 29, 2026
Shameless Self-Promotion

I’m breaking in a new editor at the newspaper: having, as usual, turned in 1700 words against a 1200-word limit, I was wholly expecting this to be his reaction. Instead, he sent me a proof of the layout in the fastest turnaround I’ve ever seen, and a compliment into the bargain. Next time, I must try harder…

Watch for my article on Princeton composer Frank Lewin and the Princeton Pro Musica revival of his 1969 work “Mass for the Dead (Requiem for Robert F. Kennedy)” at Princeton University Chapel on May 9 (on the same concert as Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms”).

If I understand correctly, the article will run in the Princeton weekly U.S. 1, online and in local vending machines tomorrow.

April 28, 2026
Sergei Prokofiev Offers Three Times Your Daily Allowance of Vitamin C

On Sergei Prokofiev’s birthday, I’ve got a love for…

I’ve also got a newspaper article due.

Ever wonder about the rest of the opera? I thought the production at the link below was the same as the one I caught in Philadelphia. However, as I remember it, the Philly production was not quite so dark. Turns out, that one was conceived by Alessandro Talevi. The one at the link was designed by the Brothers Quay – who also have a Philadelphia connection, as graduates of the late, lamented University of the Arts. Both productions employ an English translation by David Lloyd-Jones, who conducts the performance here – but if you still can’t understand it, use the closed captioning.

Prokofiev wrote his own libretto, in French, after a play by Carlo Gozzi. The work was given its first performance in Chicago, with the composer conducting, in 1921. None of the critics liked it, except Ben Hecht, a newspaper man who also wrote novels and was soon to became one of Hollywood’s most-valuable screenwriters. When he completed a last-minute, uncredited rewrite of “Gone with the Wind,” he was dubbed the “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” which the cynical Hecht dismissed as proof of just bad Hollywood movies really are.

It didn’t stop him from accepting assignments, though. It’s true that Ben liked “Oranges,” but what he really loved was green.

——-

Played in transcription by Jascha Heifetz

And Emil Gilels

April 27, 2026

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