Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Hollywood Bowl Celebrates 100 Years

The Hollywood Bowl formally opened on this date 100 years ago.

The open-air auditorium, constructed in a natural canyon, is immediately recognizable by its iconic band shell, a proscenium of concentric arches. Controversially, in 2004, the original shell, which over the decades had experienced wear from exposure to the elements and accrued acoustical issues, was demolished and replaced by a larger version.

The Hollywood Bowl is the largest natural amphitheater in the United States. The shell is set against the backdrop of the Hollywood Hills, with the landmark Hollywood sign to the northeast. The “bowl” refers to the shape of Bolton Canyon, which serves as a natural amplifier.

Music by Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Rossini opened the venue. But it wasn’t long before the orchestra shared space with actors, orators, dancers, and popular musicians. The Bowl can accommodate an audience of nearly 18,000.

You can learn more about the venue’s history and the shell’s remarkable architects here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Bowl

And here:

https://www.hollywoodbowl.com/about/the-bowl/hollywood-bowl-history

Many of us in other parts of the country got to know this West Coast landmark through its use in dozens of films and television shows, especially cartoons. This is where Bugs Bunny was venerated as “Leopold!” and Tom and Jerry attempted to one-up each other while conducting a feline orchestra.

Glimpse the real deal, in its heyday, in historic footage of some of the greatest classical musicians active in the 1930s. Consult the index below the videos to see Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Albert Einstein with Artur Rodzinski, Leopold Stokowski, William Grant Still, and Béla Bartók, among others.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Here’s a Hollywood Bowl cartoon from 1938, produced by Walter Lantz (of Woody Woodpecker fame), chockful of caricatures of classic movie actors. I love this sort of thing. The score is by Frank Churchill, indebted to Liszt, Johann Strauss, Mendelssohn, Weber, Beethoven, Schubert and others. Churchill composed many songs and scores for Walt Disney, including “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” and those for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Dumbo.” Stokowski gets a fair amount of screen time. Definitely check out his introduction, as he charges his fingers at 1:36! Once bandleader Ben Bernie takes over, Fats Waller, Rudy Vallee, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Fred Astaire, and Martha Raye get their moments to shine.

https://vimeo.com/126713908

Leopold!

July 11, 2022
French Seascapes Music From the Water

Claude Debussy wasn’t the only French composer to write music inspired by the sea. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll find refreshment in an hour of “musique de l’eau.”

Jacques Ibert served as a naval officer during World War I. One of his most frequently performed pieces, “Escales” (“Ports of Call”), conjures impressions of three Mediterranean locales: Palermo, Tunis-Nefti, and Valencia. Considerably less well known is his “Symphonie marine,” composed nine years later, in 1931. Ibert refused to allow the work to be performed in his lifetime, though exactly why is unclear.

The music actually derives from a film score (for a short film titled “S.O.S. Foch”). Ibert was the first European composer to write music for a talking picture. He certainly wasn’t ashamed of his output for the cinema. In all, he wrote some 30 film scores.

For whatever reason, the “Symphonie marine” was given its belated premiere shortly after the composer’s death, in 1963, with Charles Munch conducting. We’ll hear the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Louis Frémaux.

Joseph-Guy Ropartz (1864-1955) was a student of Théodore Dubois, Jules Massenet, and César Franck. He composed five symphonies, chamber music, and a number of choral works. When his friend, Albéric Magnard, was killed defending his home from German soldiers during the First World War – in retribution Magnard’s house was burned to the ground and his unpublished manuscripts destroyed – Ropartz was able to reconstruct the orchestration of Magnard’s opera, “Guercœur,” from memory, since he had conducted a performance of its third act.

Ropartz was associated with the Breton Cultural Renaissance and an ardent supporter of Breton regional autonomy. He joined the Breton Regionalist Union in 1898.

The central movement of his “Prélude, marine et chansons,” composed in 1928 – actually a quintet for flute, violin, viola, cello and harp – is clearly a seascape. The finale is based on an old Breton folk song, “What noise there is upon the earth.” We’ll hear a performance by the Linos Ensemble.

Another composer with a connection to Brittany was Jean Cras (1879-1932). Cras, who was born and died in Brest, wrote a ravishing opera, “Polyphème” (“Polyphemus”), about a forlorn cyclops, unlucky in love, who wanders off into the sea. Not only was he a productive composer of meltingly lovely music, he was also a career naval officer. And one of distinction. He commanded a torpedo boat in the Adriatic, during the First World War. On one occasion, he sank an enemy submarine, then rescued one of his sailors who had fallen overboard. Clearly he would have written a lot more music if not for the demands of his day job.

Cras’ “Journal de bord” (“Ship’s Log”) was composed in 1927. Like Debussy’s “La mer,” composed in 1903-05, the work suggests the sea at different times of the day and under various conditions.

First: Eight to midnight quarter – swell on the open sea, the sky is overcast, clearing at sunset, nothing in sight.

Second: Midnight to four quarter – beautiful weather, beautiful sea, nothing unusual, moonlight.

Third: Four to midnight quarter: Land ahoy!

We’ll hear the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jean-Francois Antonioli.

I hope you’ll get yourself a crusty bread, then join me for “Fruits de mer,” a nourishing repast of French music for the sea, this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

July 10, 2022
Napoleonic War Movies & Their Epic Scores

There is a pithy quote you may have heard to the effect that England and America are two countries divided by a common language. The observation is sharp and spot-on, so naturally it has been attributed to two of the greatest wits of their day, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Yet these attributions are without verifiable foundation. (The closest Wilde ever came in print: “We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, the language.”)

Similarly, we all know what is meant by “Napoleon complex.” But did you know there is every possibility that Napoleon was not short? Like the commonality of language that divides the English and the Americans (and I know that Shaw and Wilde were Irish), it turns out that there may be some confusion over Napoleon’s actual height on account of two different systems of measurement that happened to use the same terms.

Be that as it may, this week on “Picture Perfect,” with Bastille Day (July 14) right around the corner, we’ll surge to power on the allegedly diminutive shoulders of Napoleon Bonaparte. The focus will be on the Napoleonic Wars – which is to say, movies set, at least in part, between about 1803 and 1815.

There is a lot of unlikely casting in these films. The first English language adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” (1956) stars Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Mel Ferrer, with Herbert Lom as Napoleon. Lom is fine; but Henry Fonda? At least the music is by Nino Rota.

Stanley Kramer’s “The Pride and the Passion” (1957) is loosely based on the novel “The Gun,” by C.S. Forester. Forester is best known for the nautical adventures of Horatio Hornblower – also set during the Napoleonic Wars.

The film depicts the story of a British officer (Cary Grant) who is ordered to retrieve a large cannon from Spain. But before he can do so, he must lend assistance to the leader of the Spanish guerillas (Frank Sinatra!) in the transport of the weapon across 600 miles of treacherous ground to reclaim the city of Avila from the French. Further complications arise from their respective feelings for Sinatra’s mistress (Sophia Loren).

The score is by Trenton-born George Antheil, self-proclaimed “bad boy of music.” Antheil achieved lasting notoriety as the composer of the raucous “Ballet Mécanique” in the 1920s. He would later embrace a more conservative language for his symphonies and for his music for the movies. Antheil composed over 30 film scores. “The Pride and the Passion” would be his last.

Ridley Scott’s first feature, “The Duellists” (1977), is based on a story by Joseph Conrad. It relates the tale of an obsessive duellist (Harvey Keitel), who takes it as a personal affront when he is arrested by a fellow hussar (Keith Carradine) for crossing swords with the mayor’s nephew, whom he has fatally wounded. This sets the two men in a kind of combative pas de deux, a series of duels that spans the entire Napoleonic era. The sheer beauty of the film is matched by Howard Blake’s haunting score.

Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” (1927) is widely regarded as one of the towering achievements in all of cinema. I’ve had the good fortune to see it on the big screen twice. However, it was with a new score by Carmine Coppola, the father of Francis Ford Coppola, who financed the film’s revival. The original score was by Arthur Honegger. Honegger was the famed French composer (of Swiss birth), who was one of the members of Les Six, a lose collective of artists that also included Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud.

Gance’s epic was gargantuan at the time I saw it, in the 1980s – about four hours long. A more recent restoration places the film’s running time at 5 ½ hours. That’s still down from a 9 ½ hour version shown in 1927!

The film is crowned by a celebrated triptych, for which the screen widens to accommodate the simultaneous projection of three reels – an extraordinary innovation for its time. “Napoleon” is full of such touches. Apparently, there had even been a sequence shot in 3-D, which was left on the cutting room floor. If you’re at all interested in the squandered potential of cinema, this is a film which must be seen in the theater.

I hope you’ll join me for music from big movies set during the Napoleonic Wars. It will be a satisfying show by any measure, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

PHOTO: A brooding Harvey Keitel in the extraordinarily beautiful “The Duellists”

July 9, 2022
Lathe of Heaven The Unfilmable Sci-Fi Masterpiece

Even Ursula K. Le Guin thought her 1971 novel “The Lathe of Heaven” unfilmable. There were simply too many ideas and shifting realities to be communicated in a visual format.

It took PBS heavy hitters, WNET’s David Loxton (executive producer of “Great Performances” and “American Playhouse,” Academy Award winner for “The Times of Harvey Milk”) and WGBH’s Fred Barzyk (whose programs aired on GBH, HBO, ABC, CBS, and NBC, an Emmy and Peabody Award winner), to prove her wrong.

Last night, Roy and I tested ourselves against “The Lathe of Heaven” (1980), a no-budget adaptation that miraculously gets just about everything right. If you’re curious to explore more ambitious speculative fiction than the superhero junk cluttering today’s multiplexes, definitely check this one out. The surviving source material is rather primitive (remastered from two-inch Quadruplex videotape), but the transfer at the link is not bad.

https://archive.org/details/the-lathe-of-heaven-1980

At all costs, avoid the murky upload on YouTube!

Fortunately, the power of the original story is such that the message transcends the medium. You can watch us grapple with some of the themes during last night’s discussion here:

On Sunday, Roy will welcome special guest Shawn Tabor, executive director, writer, and producer at Battlegrounds Productions, who is currently serving as property master and military consultant, among other things, on the web series “Star Trek: New Voyages.” Tabor will talk about his experiences on the show and friendship with William Windom, an actor known to “Star Trek” fans for his role in the original series episode “The Doomsday Machine.”

Make the voyage to the comments section to give “props” to Shawn Tabor, on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. The conversation will livestream on Facebook, this Sunday evening at 7:30 EDT!

https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner

July 9, 2022
Respighi’s Belkis Queen of Sheba Birthday

It’s music that’s so over-the-top, Cecil B. DeMille would have blushed. Ottorino Respighi gets all quasi-biblical in this suite from “Belkis, Queen of Sheba.” The ballet spectacle, set at the court of King Solomon, was given its first performance at La Scala in 1932. The finale featured over a thousand performers, which likely accounts for the work’s subsequent neglect. Grandiose even by Respighi standards, the concluding orgiastic dance whipped the opening night audience into a frenzy.

Think big, and aim high! Happy birthday, Ottorino Respighi!

(ENCORE: “Köçekçe” by Ulvi Cemâl Erkin)

July 9, 2022

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