Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Vaughan Williams’ Antartica Symphony: Ice and Tragedy

Think cool thoughts with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Sinfonia Antartica” – his Symphony No. 7 – spun off of his score for the Ealing Studios film “Scott of the Antarctic” (1948).

The fatal polar expedition of Robert Falcon Scott and his companions enthralled the composer, who responded with music evocative of ice and wind, penguins and whales, and inexorable snows. Vaughan Williams wrote most of the score before even seeing the film.

The symphony is scored for large orchestra, including vibraphone, pianoforte, organ, and wind machine, with wordless women’s chorus and soprano soloist.

It falls into five movements – Prelude, Scherzo, Landscape, Intermezzo, and Epilogue – with the third movement leading directly into the fourth. The scherzo is propelled by whales and penguins. The “landscape” in question is the icy wasteland of Ross Island.

The score itself includes brief literary quotations – from Shelley, the Biblical Book of Psalms, Coleridge, Donne, and Captain Scott’s Last Journal – at the head of each movement. These are sometimes declaimed in performance and recordings, though the composer did not indicate that they were intended to be spoken.

The title of the work is frequently misspelled, since the composer opts for the Italian “Antartica” (spelled with only one “c”) – a decision he made at the last minute, so as to keep it consistent with his use of the Italian word “Sinfonia.”

Vaughan Williams was 80 years-old when he completed the symphony in 1952. It received its first public performance on January 14, 1953. Sir John Barbirolli conducted the Hallé Orchestra.

The tragic dimension of the overall tone of the symphony is unmistakable, with man’s endeavors insignificant in the face of implacable nature.

Here’s hoping your reception is a chilly one!

August 3, 2022
Yoko Sato Violinist Remembered

The Japanese violinist Yoko Sato has died. There is shockingly little documentation of her artistry available in the West, in terms of video and recordings, especially on CD, although she did make an album with Ennio Morricone, the soundtrack to “Dedicato al mare Egeo.” (All that’s posted on YouTube is a horrible disco cover, with no violin that I can perceive.) However, there is a great video that’s been circulating of her playing Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto at the age of 13, with the composer conducting.

Here, she appears at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1966 (around the 3-minute mark), with some footage of her teacher, Leonid Kogan.

Wouldn’t mind hearing this album, in which Sato plays the rarely-heard concerto by Tikhon Khrennikov, who caused so much suffering for Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and others – including Khachaturian – as General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/feb99/violin.htm

Oh, this is very interesting. Apparently “Dedicato al mare Egeo” is a quasi-skin flick, directed by Masuo Ikeda, the painter, printmaker, sculptor, and novelist (and Akutagawa Prize winner for his novel “Offering in the Aegean,” upon which the film is presumably based), who was Sato’s partner from 1980.

https://letterboxd.com/film/dedicato-al-mare-egeo/

Sato was 72 years-old. Ikeda died in 1997 at the age of 63.

Her obituaries have been succinct. None of them mention the movie.

Renowned Japanese Violinist Yoko Sato Dies at 72

R.I.P.

PHOTO: Sato as soloist, with a well-decorated Khachaturian on the podium, in 1965

August 2, 2022
Jerome Moross Frankie and Johnny Rediscovered

Wow! Here’s a neat discovery. An actual performance of Jerome Moross’ ballet, “Frankie and Johnny.”

You probably know the bluesy song, inspired by one or more sensational crimes of passion, in which a betrayed woman shoots her lover. (“He was her man, but he done her wrong.”) There are now so many variants that it’s taken on the quality of a folk song. Elvis sang it. Johnny Cash sang it. It’s been covered by innumerable jazz artists.

Moross uses it as a kind of Greek chorus (sung by a trio Salvation Army sisters) in his brash and jazzy dance piece, which created a sensation at its premiere in 1938. The work predated Leonard Bernstein’s “Fancy Free” by six years and sent the censors into a moral panic.

Though Moross was adept at writing music in many forms – including concert pieces (a symphony for Beecham), musical theater (the cult classic “The Golden Apple,” including the evergreen “Lazy Afternoon”), and opera (“Sorry, Wrong Number”) – he is best known for his classic film scores. He spent much of his career ping-ponging back and forth between New York and Hollywood.

When “Porgy and Bess” concluded its New York run in 1935, George Gershwin invited Moross to join the show, on tour, as a pianist. It was while on a bus trip to Los Angeles to participate in “Porgy’s” west coast premiere that the 23 year-old made a stop in Albuquerque.

“[A]s we hit the Plains I got so excited,” Moross recollected. “. . . [T]he next day I got to the edge of town and then walked out onto the flat land with a marvelous feeling of being alone in the vastness, with the mountains cutting off the horizon. The whole thing was just too much for me . . . it was marvelous, and I just fell in love with it.”

The experience served him well. Moross drew on the memory of that trip in the writing of some of his most famous music, the Academy Award-nominated score for “The Big Country,” with its sense of wide-open excitement in the face of sweeping vistas. Western high-spirits and American jazz color most of Moross’ output.

Happy birthday, Jerome Moross. You tackled everything with exuberance and vitality.

One of the most thrilling credits sequences of all time?

Surely one of the greatest film scores ever written

Rare historic radio broadcast of the Symphony No. 1, with Moross himself at the piano

“Lazy Afternoon” from “The Golden Apple,” sung by Kaye Ballard from the 1954 original cast recording

Theme to “Wagon Train”

Sonata in G major for Piano Duet and String Quartet

August 1, 2022
Suk’s Summer’s Tale Healing Through Nature

Josef Suk’s 30th year was a tragic one, marked by the deaths of both his young wife, Otilie, and her father, his former teacher, Antonín Dvořák. Not surprisingly, a sense of morbidity colors much of his mature output. The double-loss directly inspired Suk’s “Asrael Symphony,” named for the Angel of Death.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll take a look at “A Summer’s Tale,” the next step in Suk’s emotional rehabilitation. The work is a five-movement symphonic poem, the second of a four-part cycle that contemplates death and the meaning of life. More affirmative than the grim “Asrael,” which is full of pain, loss, and grief, “A Summer’s Tale” explores the healing powers of nature, in a score that at times reflects the epic romanticism of Gustav Mahler and at others the impressionism of Claude Debussy. It was composed over the course of just six weeks in the summer of 1907. Further tinkering took place over the next year-and-a-half. The work received its premiere in January of 1909.

Suk later described the theme of the piece as “finding a soothing balm in nature.” I hope you’ll join me as we clear a path to “Healing by Nature” – Josef Suk’s “A Summer’s Tale” – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

July 31, 2022
Myths & Movie Music Clash of the Titans

Release the Kraken!

This week on “Picture Perfect,” it’s a mythological mash-up, with music from four films inspired by classical myths.

“Helen of Troy” (1956) is based on events recounted in Homer’s “The Iliad.” Like the more recent film “Troy,” this version glosses over any participation by the gods. Could it be their wrath that caused this Robert Wise-directed spectacle to be plagued with difficulties?

Reportedly three people were killed during the making of the film, extras were injured by a runaway chariot, and 80 percent of the two-acre recreation of Troy was burned to the ground by a cigarette. On the bright side, it was Bridgette Bardot’s first film made outside of France, and Rossana Podestà played Helen. A spectacle indeed! Max Steiner provided the lush, romantic score.

“Clash of the Titans” (1981) is not to be confused with the 2010 CGI-fest. This is the real deal, with special effects by legendary stop-motion maestro Ray Harryhausen.

Just as special is its luxury casting of supporting roles, including Sir Laurence Olivier as Zeus, and Claire Bloom, Maggie Smith, Sian Phillips, and Ursula Andress as fellow Olympians. Burgess Meredith is among the mortals, Flora Robson turns up in one scene as a witch, and Perseus is played by newcomer Harry Hamlin, soon to find fame on television’s “L.A. Law.”

The composer, Laurence Rosenthal, studied at the Eastman School and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. He also wrote the music for “Raisin in the Sun,” “The Miracle Worker,” “Becket,” and the 1977 version of “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

“Clash of the Titans” would be Harryhausen’s final film. Despite flashes of his inimitable brilliance, in sequences like the one involving Medusa, and the creation of something of a cultural icon in the Kraken, the effects came to seem a little too retro in the wake of “Star Wars” and “Superman.” Though a sequel, “Force of the Trojans,” was pitched to M-G-M, it was not to materialize. Harryhausen died in 2013, after a lengthy retirement, at the age of 92.

It would be a crime against peplum to put together a program of this sort without at least a nod to Hercules. The peplum genre originated in Italy with Maciste, a supporting character in the 1914 classic “Cabiria.” So powerful did this strongman prove that he became an industry unto himself. The Maciste craze reached its muscular peak in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. When the films arrived in the United States, in hilariously dubbed versions, the character was invariably renamed Hercules, Samson, Atlas, Goliath, or any other mythological, Biblical, or historical bodybuilder you can think of.

A peplum revival sprang up around “Conan the Barbarian” in the early 1980s. We’ll hear a selection from “Hercules” (1983), starring Lou Ferrigno, television’s Incredible Hulk. The music is by Pino Donaggio.

Finally, we’ll make things right again with an extensive suite from the ultimate Ray Harryhausen mythological playground, “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963). This is the one that features the climactic battle with the skeleton army. The music, by Bernard Herrmann, brilliantly suits the visuals. We’ll hear a superb re-recording of the score on the Intrada label, with the Sinfonia of London conducted by Bruce Broughton.

You won’t want to myth it, no bones about it! It’s a quest for classical mythology this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org!

July 30, 2022

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