Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

George Crumb Halloween Haunt

It is fortuitous indeed that George Crumb’s birthday falls so close to Halloween. It’s not for nothing that his work for electric string quartet, “Black Angels,” was used in “The Exorcist” (though it was actually inspired by the Vietnam War).

It’s a piece I first encountered on a Friday night radio show, called “Music Through the Centuries,” broadcast on Philadelphia’s now-defunct classical music station, WFLN. The host, George Diehl, was at one time WFLN’s program director, if you can believe it. He also provided program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra. I credit his show with having inspired my own radio program, “The Lost Chord,” on WWFM The Classical Network.)

What made this particular episode so indelible (I heard it probably 35 years ago) is that Diehl introduced Crumb’s otherworldly, often hair-raising quartet by placing it in context, deftly illuminating its structure, and supplementing it with recordings of other works referenced within the piece. It was fascinating radio.

Also, having cut my teeth on the station’s usual, more traditional fare, my mind was officially blown. “Black Angels” scared the hell out of me and enthralled me completely. I immediately determined to pick up everything I could find by George Crumb.

A few years later, I heard “A Haunted Landscape” on a Philadelphia Orchestra concert, with William Smith conducting. On the same program was Maurice Ravel’s “Le tombeau de Couperin” and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “A London Symphony!” By then, I already owned the work’s first recording, with Arthur Weisberg conducting the New York Philharmonic.

Crumb didn’t compose that many orchestral works. He was more like a master jeweler, working in miniature, and revealing a surprising number of facets in his unique – and uniquely memorable – creations.

Of course, he was more than just a “horror” composer, though his music could be creepy as hell. Many of his chamber works, especially those that employ percussion and voice, are models of economy and elegance. I always think of him as a kind of spiritual descendent of Charles Ives, in that many of the curious sonorities he explored, especially in the context of his song settings, seem to suggest truths beyond our workaday concerns.

That said, here’s some sensational Crumb to play when you’re alone with the lights out.

Happy birthday, George Crumb!

“Black Angels” in concert

“Black Angels” with score

“A Haunted Landscape”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWa4eXg-Jdo

“Star-Child” (Watch out for that “Musica Apocalyptica,” beginning at 11:47!)

“Ancient Voices of Children” in concert (“Ghost Dance” at 17:55)

October 24, 2022
Libor Pešek Beloved Conductor Dies at 89

Genial, esteemed, self-effacing and beloved – the conductor Libor Pešek has died.

Pešek was a regular presence on the podiums of his native land for some 70 years and did much to promote Czech music abroad.

In particular, he was instrumental in raising the awareness of the works of Josef Suk outside the Czech Republic, especially the wounded, even morbid scores of the composer’s maturity.

Suk, the pupil and son-in-law of Antonín Dvořák, lost both his mentor and his young wife, Otylie (Dvořák’s daughter), at the age of 30. Already, when Suk was a young man, Dvořák detected a melancholy strain in his music and set him the challenge of writing something sunny. The result was Suk’s Serenade for Strings, which became one of the composer’s most frequently performed works.

Suk could do Czech nationalism with the best of them, but as he entered his prime, his works became as gloomily introspective as anything by Gustav Mahler, without the ecstatic peaks. Pešek’s recording of the “Asrael Symphony” (which takes its name from the Angel of Death) did much to increase the work’s international reputation. It was a piece he performed not only in Liverpool, where he was music director, but also took with him (much to the chagrin of tour agents) to Spain and the United States.

Pešek, who studied with conductors Václav Smetáček and Karel Ančerl, began his professional career in the opera houses of Plzeň and Prague. He founded the Prague Chamber Harmony in 1958.

As his stature grew, he assumed posts with the Slovak Philharmonic (1981-82), the Czech Philharmonic (1982-90), the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (1987-98), and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra (2007-19).

Pešek stepped down in Liverpool over budgetary difficulties, but continued to work with the orchestra in the capacity of laureate conductor for the next quarter century. Liverpool came to be regarded as “the best Czech orchestra this side of Prague.”

Among his many honors, he was made Knight Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. He retired from the podium at the age of 85. Most of his recordings were issued on the Supraphon and Virgin Classics labels.

Happily, he also appears to have been an amiable person, both professionally and personally, refreshingly lacking in ego and able to enjoy relaxed times with musicians, family, friends, and animals.

At the time of his death, Pešek was 89 years-old. R.I.P.

Pešek’s recording of Suk’s “Asrael Symphony” (with appropriately Halloweeny cover):

And a score from Suk’s happier days, “Pohádka,” or “Fairy Tale.” He arranged it from music he composed for a play called “Radúz and Mahulena,” in which true love conquers all. The work took on special significance for the composer, since he happened to be secretly in love with his teacher’s daughter and feared the day of reckoning, when all would be revealed. He needn’t have worried. Dvořák was delighted. Sadly, Suk’s happiness was to be short-lived.

Pešek also championed the music of Vítězslav Novák, another Dvořák pupil (and Suk’s classmate at the Prague Conservatory). See what you think of the “Slovak Suite.”

Also, Novák’s tone poem “Toman and the Wood Nymph,” in which a youth is seduced by an alluring dryad on St. John’s Eve:

Pešek certainly knew his way around the symphonies of Dvořák, if not always quite scaling the heights of the composer’s grandeur. I find he was often more satisfying in the “filler” material, as it were, and works like Dvořák’s lesser-known “American Suite.”

You don’t often encounter Dvořák’s earlier symphonies (i.e. those before No. 7), either in the concert hall or on the radio. I’ve always been partial to Pešek’s recording of No. 3. Here, the movements are posted separately (probably with ads in between). If you like it, you can let the feed run directly into No. 4.

October 24, 2022
Harry Potter Lord of the Rings Music

Lumos Solem!

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” it’s an hour of musical enchantments inspired by “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

Herbert Chappell composed the occasional concert work (including an impressive guitar concerto for Eduardo Fernandez), in between writing television scores and producing documentaries for the BBC. Unquestionably, his greatest coup was in cutting a deal on behalf of Decca Records for his telecast of “The Three Tenors.” No one, not even the tenors themselves, anticipated its staggering success.

According to Chappell, his concert overture “Boy Wizard,” an impression of Harry Potter, is meant to conjure “an academy of wizardry and witchcraft, owls that deliver letters, cats that act as lie-detectors, unicorns with silvery blood, and a helter-skelter death-defying game of aerial acrobatics, where one whizzes around the sky on turbo-charged broomsticks.” The work appeared in 2001, the same year as the first of the “Harry Potter” film adaptations.

In 1995, American composer Craig Russell was reading “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” aloud to his family, when he became “an unexpected party” to a commission for string orchestra. Russell responded with a seven-movement suite. In 1997, he added two more movements and expanded the orchestration to create “Middle Earth.”

We’ll hear “Frodo Leaves the Shire,” “Gimli, the Dwarf,” “Galadriel and Her Elvin Mirror,” “Gollum,” “Gandalf: The White Rider,” “Shelob’s Lair,” “Orcs and Ring Wraiths,” “Strider and the Crowning of Aragorn,” and “Frodo and Company Return.”

Aulis Sallinen is one of the most respected of contemporary Finnish composers. In 1996, he completed his Symphony No. 7, on a commission from the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, which he gave the subtitle “The Dreams of Gandalf.” Its origins were in a projected ballet inspired by “The Lord of the Rings.” However, the composer hastened to add that the symphony doesn’t actually depict any of the events in the story, but rather its atmosphere and its poetry.

To round out the hour, we’ll have a few minutes to enjoy selections from a fondly-remembered song cycle on Tolkien texts, “The Road Goes Ever On,” by Donald Swann (of Flanders and Swann fame).

I hope you’ll join me for this program of music inspired by pop-cultural and quasi-literary wizards. The effect is guaranteed to be pure magic, on “Spellbound,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

In addition to the considerable achievements noted above, Herbert Chappell also wrote “The Gonk,” employed so memorably in George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.” Get your hit of whimsical zombie music while awaiting tonight’s broadcast by following the link below.

October 23, 2022
Ned Rorem: French or German?

Composer Ned Rorem has a famous bit, wherein he sorts everything in the world into two categories, French and German. He’s repeated it, with variations, many times over the years, perhaps most definitively in his autobiography, “Knowing When to Stop,” published in 1996:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that the entire solar system is torn between two aesthetics: French and German. Virtually everything is one or the other. Blue is French, red is German. ‘No’ is French, ‘yes’ is German. Formal gardens are French, oceans are German. The moon is French, the sun German. Gay men are French, lesbians are German. Crows’ feet are French, pigs’ knuckles are German. Schubert on his good days is French, Berlioz is forever German. Jokes are French, the explanation of jokes is German. If ‘French’ is to be profoundly superficial, like Impressionism, which depicts a fleeting vision of eternity, then ‘German’ is to be superficially profound, as when Bruckner’s music digs ever deeper into one narrow hole. If you agree with all this, you’re French. If you disagree, you’re German.”

Rorem signed my copy after a reading at Borders in Philadelphia. I must have caught him in a good mood. He was very pleasant and conversational, even after I told him I was German.

Rorem is notorious for his candid (some would say bitchy) diaries and musical assessments. He had a lively intelligence and a razor wit. Also, he must have had an aging portrait in an attic somewhere, transfigured by his abundant sins. At the time of the signing, he was in his 70s, but he could have easily been mistaken for someone twenty years younger.

He was still teaching composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in those days. Philadelphia has always been a small town masquerading as a big city, and wouldn’t you know it, Rorem was also the uncle of the (equally-ageless) woman who managed an architecture and design bookstore at which I worked in my early 20s. Rorem would come in to the shop occasionally to have some things framed. I also saw him at student concerts at Curtis and attended the world premiere of his Piano Concerto for Left Hand and Orchestra, written for Curtis’ then-director, Gary Graffman.

Rorem has composed in all forms – symphonies, concertos, chamber music, opera – but he has always been most highly regarded for his art songs. Here’s a lovely piece of nostalgia, called “Early in the Morning.” It’s easy to see how Rorem, who spent his formative years in Paris, would connect to the text, by Robert Hillyer.

Early in the morning
Of a lovely summer day,
As they lowered the bright awning
At the outdoor café,
I was breakfasting on croissants
And café au lait
Under greenery like scenery,
Rue François Premier.
They were hosing the hot pavement
With a dash of flashing spray
And a smell of summer showers
When the dust is drenched away,
Under greenery like scenery,
Rue François Premier.
I was twenty and a lover
And in Paradise to stay,
Very early in the morning
Of a lovely summer day.

Although Rorem also worked in larger forms, his true genius was for the miniature. Even when he tackled longer works, it was not unusual for them to be built out of smaller individual units. In the case of his Piano Concerto for Left Hand and Orchestra, there are eight short movements – as opposed to three epic statements in the grand German tradition. Very French, you might say.

At his most lyrical, I always thought Rorem shared an affinity with Francis Poulenc. But you need to get to the middle movements to appreciate that. Especially the one that starts about 22 minutes in. I always thought the approach to the theme that opens the work – and returns in the last movement – as kind of like scat-singing. I was present in the hall for this recording, made at the work’s world premiere at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music in 1993.

Happy birthday, Ned Rorem, 99 years-old today!

PHOTO: (counterclockwise from top) Rorem, André Previn, and Gary Graffman rehearse the Piano Concerto for Left Hand and Orchestra. In support of my “aging portrait” theory, Rorem is five years older than Graffman, and 5 1/2 years older than Previn!

October 23, 2022
Rosemary Brown Liszt’s Medium?

The medium is the message.

On the birthday of Franz Liszt, I conjure Rosemary Brown. Brown was the English spiritualist who claimed that the great composers were still very much active and dictating posthumous works to her.

At the age of 7 (circa 1923), Brown maintained she was confronted by a curious specter with long white hair and a flowing cassock. The specter prognosticated that one day he would make her famous. It was ten years before she stumbled across an old photograph and realized that what she had encountered was no less than the shade of Liszt.

Brown was born into a family of alleged psychics. Both her parents and grandparents claimed extrasensory powers. Brown took up the piano at the age of 15. Her period of study is unclear, as she seems to have changed her story over the decades, but she would have us believe she was basically a dilettante with little formal training.

Then, in 1964, the ghost of Liszt reappeared and she began “transcribing” new works by the great composers – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Grieg, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky. And Liszt, of course. These included two symphonies she attributed to Beethoven, a new “Fantaisie-Impromptu” by Chopin, and a 40-page sonata by Schubert.

She claimed that some of the composers directed her hands on the keyboard (Chopin and Liszt); others sang (Schubert) or dictated notes (Bach and Beethoven). All of them communicated in English.

Skeptics abounded. A number of critics and musicologists dismissed the new compositions as substandard pastiches, claiming that the great composers tended to reinvent themselves and push boundaries, while these freshly “dictated” works offered nothing of the sort.

Some psychologists attributed the phenomena to extraordinary activity on the part of Brown’s subconscious, with the medium essentially reworking and synthesizing all the music she had been exposed to as a child.

Still, they had to admit it was impressive. Over the course of her life, Brown produced hundreds of such pieces. One expert described it as “the most convincing case of unconscious composition on a large scale.”

Respected concert pianists Howard Shelley, Peter Katin, Cristina Ortiz, and John Lill have all included these perhaps spurious works on their programs.

Brown died in 2001. Whether or not she herself is now dictating is anyone’s guess.

Rosemary Brown plays a piece allegedly transmitted to her by Liszt

Brown meets the Amazing Kreskin. (She makes her appearance 9 minutes in; she plays at 12:30.) She claims Liszt helped her son with his homework!

Documentary on Brown from 1976

Her obituary in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/dec/11/guardianobituaries

October 22, 2022

Tag Cloud

RECENT POSTS