Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Remembering the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon

For those of a certain era, it was never Labor Day without the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon. The show, presented as a benefit for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, was a star-studded endurance test, with celebrities ranging from Sinatra to Charo to Don Rickles to Midori giving their all, the whole while with a toll-free number superimposed at the bottom of the screen.

The show began on Sunday evening and ran through late Monday afternoon. Jerry would emcee in varying degrees of sleep-deprived dishevelment. By the end, the bowtie was undone and the rumpled shirt unbuttoned, as he wrung out the final dollars and maybe even a few tears from a captivated television audience.

The telethon ran for 44 years, from 1966 to 2010, raising billions for MD research. For a good deal of its existence, it was broadcast from Las Vegas, with Ed McMahon serving as cohost. A super infusion of old-school showmanship – a glitzy, schmaltzy, backslapping, in-jokey exercise, turned to the service of a good cause – there really was nothing like it. It had an inexplicable magnetism, easy to make light of, but hard to look away.

Jerry opens the show in 2006 by conducting Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide Overture.”

Charo

Reunion with Dean Martin

Jerry brings it home with “You’ll Never Walk Alone”

There’s a whole channel devoted to this stuff on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/c/MDATelethon

And another one here

https://www.youtube.com/user/thetelethonyears

September 5, 2022
Labor Day Road Trip American Music

Labor Day weekend. Summer’s last hurrah.

It may be the first weekend of September, but there’s still time for one more summer road trip.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” it’s an hour of quintessentially American music about travel by car.

Frederick Shepherd Converse’s “Flivver Ten Million” traces the Ford Motor Company’s affordable assembly line automobile, from its creation in a Detroit factory to the manifest destiny of America’s roadways.

John Adams’ “Road Movies” has nothing at all to do with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, alas. What it is, however, is a violin sonata written firmly within the American tradition, with a special affinity at its core with Aaron Copland’s Violin Sonata.

Virgil Thomson’s “Filling Station,” written for Leon Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan, may have the distinction of being the only ballet set at a gas station. The work’s success gave Copland the confidence to follow through on another Caravan commission, which resulted in “Billy the Kid.”

Finally, we’ll hear one of Michael Daughtery’s most performed works, the exuberant “Route 66,” inspired by the storied “Main Street of America.”

Put the pedal to the metal. American composers hit the road for Labor Day, on “The Last Roads of Summer,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

September 4, 2022
Frederick Zlotkin Cellist Dies at 75

I didn’t have a chance to share this earlier. I saw it mentioned on Friday on Leonard Slatkin’s Facebook page. Sadly, the news remains the same. Slatkin’s younger brother, Frederick Zlotkin, has died at the age of 75. Zlotkin (who preferred the original spelling of the family name) was principal cellist of the New York City Ballet for fifty years. Like his parents, he also recorded for motion pictures and numerous contemporary artists – in his case, Frank Sinatra, Madonna, Aretha Franklin, and Neil Young, among others.

Leonard and Frederick were products of an enviable music dynasty. Their father was the violinist Felix Slatkin (concert master of the 20th Century Fox Orchestra), who conducted and made recordings with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Their mother was Eleanor Aller Slatkin (principal cellist at Warner Bros.), who played cello on the soundtracks to dozens of films, including “Deception” (1946) and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). Both parents were founding members of the Hollywood String Quartet.

Here, from a documentary on Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Zlotkin and Leonard Slatkin discuss, rehearse, and perform Korngold’s Cello Concerto, the work introduced by their mother, who dubbed actor Paul Henreid’s “performance” in “Deception.”

I’ve cued it up to the 28-minute mark, but the entire documentary is worth watching. It includes lots of interesting info about the Slatkins.

My condolences to Leonard Slatkin and the rest of the Zlotkin/Slatkin family.

https://www.northjersey.com/obituaries/ber110040

September 4, 2022
New Indiana Jones Theme First Listen

Check out the first new Indiana Jones music in 14 years. John Williams conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in “Helena’s Theme,” last night at the Hollywood Bowl. Sounds pretty vintage to me! The still-untitled Indy 5 is scheduled for release on June 30, 2023.

September 3, 2022
Bernstein’s Waterfront A Hollywood Contender

“I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody – instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

We’ve all had those kinds of days, haven’t we?

Yet Leonard Bernstein’s score for “On the Waterfront” (1954) was always a contender, even if at times the composer found himself on the ropes.

“On the Waterfront” was the only original film score composed by Bernstein (the screen adaptations of his stage musicals were adapted by other hands). Narrative film, of course, is a collaborative effort, in which music is usually the last to the table and the first to go. Bernstein’s score was edited and dialed down to suit the overall needs of the film.

Unused to such rough treatment, Bernstein found his brush with Hollywood to be dispiriting, to say the least. He arranged his music into a concert suite, over which he had complete control, and the work has gone on to become one of his better-known pieces. That said, what can be heard in the film remains a powerful statement, and one of the great film scores.

The original recordings, as they appear in the film, were long believed to have been lost. However, in the course of restoration of “On the Waterfront” for release on BluRay, it was discovered that audio had been preserved on acetate discs used for playback during the original recording sessions. Material from these were issued for the first time in 2014, on the Intrada label.

Bernstein’s music would be nominated for an Academy Award, one of “On the Waterfront”s twelve nominations. The film would be recognized with wins in eight categories, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando), and Best Director (Elia Kazan). Bernstein may have lost out to Dimitri Tiomkin for his work on “The High and the Mighty.” However, like Brando’s Terry Malloy, his score to “On the Waterfront” proves itself a champion.

We’ll hear selections, alongside some of Aaron Copland’s music for “The Red Pony” (1949), once again, from the film’s original elements; dances from the only film score ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, “Louisiana Story” (1948), by Virgil Thomson; and the music that lends “Picture Perfect” its signature tune, “They Came to Cordura” (1959), by Elie Siegmeister.

It’s an hour of New York composers in Hollywood this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

September 3, 2022

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