From “Gaslight” to “Mary Poppins Returns.” From “The Manchurian Candidate” to “Mame.” From Mrs. Lovett to Mrs. Potts. Angela Lansbury was a stalwart of stage and screen for over 70 years. The winner of seven Tony Awards. Nominated for three Oscars and a record 18 Emmys. She left quite a legacy. Who would have thought at the time she started “Murder, She Wrote” that she was only at mid-career. Lansbury died earlier today, five days shy of her 97th birthday. I always loved this photo of her having lunch with Basil Rathbone, during the making of “The Court Jester” with Danny Kaye. R.I.P.
Category: Daily Dispatch
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Vaughan Williams 150th NYC Celebration
October 12 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams. American admirers of the composer are totally in the wrong country this year. The U.K. has been a nonstop RVW jamboree.
That said, if you’re in New York City or the vicinity tomorrow, organist David Briggs will present his transcription of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5 on the composer’s birthday at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, NYC, 980 Park Avenue, at 7 p.m.
If you can’t be there, the concert will be livestreamed and archived through Friday. For more information, visit the St. Ignatius website and click on the links. If you plan to view the livestream, make sure you make your reservation using the correct tab!
https://ignatius.nyc/music/concerts/
Briggs has also recorded this transcription, at Truro Cathedral in Cornwall. The CD is available for purchase from Albion Records, the official label of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.
https://rvwsociety.com/transcriptions/
If our American orchestras can’t be bothered to program any of RVW’s symphonies – and what I wouldn’t give to be able to hear an orchestra play No. 5 tomorrow – at least someone is in a position to pull out all the stops.
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Exceeding Limits Blog Post Length Penalties and SEO
I just submitted a 2,133 word article against a 1,200 word quota. We’ll see how Perry White takes that one.
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Milhaud & Honegger’s Controversial Columbus Finds
I know Christopher Columbus is anathema these days, but I can’t help but buy music inspired by him whenever I can find it on the cheap. Pictured are two recordings I acquired recently from Princeton Record Exchange. Both works are by members of Les Six, that loose collective of composers, brought together by Jean Cocteau, that flourished in Paris in the late ‘teens and 1920s.
The Milhaud is the more idiomatic and musically satisfying of the two, with an all-French cast, captured at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The conductor is Manuel Rosenthal, a composer himself (and a Ravel pupil), best known for his arrangements of Offenbach for the ballet “Gaîté Parisienne.” Unfortunately, the sound is also idiomatic – which is to say, mid-1950s French, complete with tinny cymbal crashes and fillings-rattling climaxes. It‘s a live performance, as opposed to a studio recording.
The Honegger is a recorded premiere, a recreation of a radio drama in state-of-the-art digital sound. However, it’s delivered by actors in a manner and acoustic that suggest a theatrical performance. (It was actually recorded in a church.) Furthermore, the dialogue is in English.
Toward the beginning, someone shows up just long enough to do their best John Cleese-style impression of a Frenchman. Puzzlingly, for the remainder of the performance, all the Italian and Spanish parts are spoken in unaccented English. Well, unaccented in Italian and Spanish, anyway. The principals are all divided as to whether they should emulate English stage-speak or American high school drama club. Columbus himself sounds like a good approximation of 1940s Warner Bros.’ supercilious screen-villain Henry Daniell.
I wish the release had included as a bonus an isolated presentation of the music, without the spoken dialogue, since, unlike the historic Columbus, the actors are in imminent peril of dropping off a flat earth into the chasm of parody. The first few minutes, when it’s just the narrator, before the actual dramatization begins, is especially agonizing.
Be that as it may, I’m pleased to be able to add them both to my collection of Columbiana. There’s a surprising amount of it, composed by the likes of Leonardo Balada, Gaetano Donizetti, Manuel de Falla, Alberto Franchetti, Philip Glass, Victor Herbert, Richard Wagner, William Walton, and Kurt Weill, among others.
Fingers crossed that I can still get away with posting about it on Columbus Day, if only because of my Italian surname.
Selections from Rosenthal’s 1956 recording of Milhaud’s “Christophe Colomb” (1930)
A staging of the complete opera in a 1993 production
Arthur Honegger’s radio play “Christophe Colomb” (1940)
PHOTO: Honegger and Milhaud, flanking mentor Jean Cocteau
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Vaughan Williams’ Wasps Premiere: Unassuming Start
How unassuming was the premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ incidental music for “The Wasps?”
Aristophanes’ comedy, a stinging commentary on the Athenian judicial system, was produced as the Cambridge Greek Play at Trinity College in 1909. The play itself was performed in Greek, with translations sold to the audience. As you can see, when you click through the gallery of photos at the link at the bottom of this post, the composer’s credit is buried midway down the third page of the printed program (as “R. Vaughan Williams”). The music is offered for sale, “price three shillings.”
The year before, Vaughan Williams spent three months in Paris studying with Maurice Ravel, who was at first reluctant to take him on as a pupil. But RVW wouldn’t take no for an answer. Despite his earthy disposition (his response to Ravel’s assignment to write a minuet in the manner of Mozart was met with an unprintable response), Vaughan Williams quickly earned his teacher’s admiration and soon his friendship. Ravel later remarked that Vaughan Williams was “the only one of my pupils who does not write my music.” RVW, already in his mid-30s and three years older than his teacher, learned his lessons well (at least the ones he considered valid), assimilated what he found useful, and applied it to the achievement of his own objectives.
Ravel’s influence is most evident in the transitional moments of “The Wasps Overture” and in its dreamy central section. The opening, of course, is a musical joke, self-evident from the onomatopoeic buzzing around the orchestra, but the middle introduces one of those immediately endearing, big-hearted English melodies. The jolly, rollicking theme in the outer portions of the overture sounds equally homegrown.
Vaughan Williams’ complete incidental music runs to approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. It was recorded for the first time, with English narration, in 2006. The overture has been a concert favorite since its introduction. Vaughan Williams himself recorded the jauntiest version on record, back in 1925, at a manic 7 minutes and 25 seconds. An average performance of the work is more in the ballpark of 9-10 minutes.
You’d think that more American orchestras would have taken it up as a guaranteed crowd-pleaser to open concerts during this RVW sesquicentennial year. But U.S. music directors and administrators – “The Lark Ascending” and the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” aside – remain largely immune to the charms and allure, and certainly the versatility, of Ralph Vaughan Williams. For the composer’s enthusiasts, it’s a good year to live in the U.K.
“Gentlemen who are willing to be tried for the chorus are requested to state whether their voices are tenor or bass.” Stills from the 1909 Cambridge production.
https://www.cambridgegreekplay.com/plays/1909/wasps
The overture opens this 26-minute concert suite, which also includes the equally charming “March Past of the Kitchen Utensils” (at the 13-minute mark).
Vaughan Williams and Ravel
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