Category: Daily Dispatch

I was sorry to learn, only last week, a year and a half late, that WPRB Princeton’s long-time “Sunday Jazz” host, Jeannie Becker, died on April 28, 2023. She was a lovely woman, exuding positivity, always with a smile on her face, and sporting a smooth, mellifluous radio voice. I didn’t know her well, but we swapped chairs many times when I was doing Sunday morning classical there. Her build was slight and she moved carefully, and I gather she was not in the best of health, but she was always very well put-together, and she impressed me as being remarkably youthful.

I had no idea of Jeannie’s service in the U.S. Navy or her career at the Pentagon. Over the years, I’ve shared the airwaves with several colleagues who served in our armed forces (Ralph Collier and Bliss Michelson, among them), but to my knowledge, Jeannie is the only one who is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. She lived quite a life, and I think a fulfilling one. Thinking of her on this Veterans Day.

https://www.lewisfuneralhomemoorestown.com/obituaries/Jeannie-Becker/#!/Obituary

The insanely prolific Ennio Morricone composed some 500 film and television scores. Remembering him on his birthday with this lesser-known gem, his theme for “The Cat” (1977), a giallo-comedy – not to be confused with the straight giallo “The Cat o’ Nine Tails” (1971) or the comedy “Eye of the Cat” (1975), which features a cat named Wolfgang Amadeus! – both of which he also scored.

“The Cat,” produced by Sergio Leone, with whom Morricone galloped to international fame with “A Fistful Full of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More,” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” was one of 11 movies he scored in 1977.

Be forewarned: once listened to, “The Cat” will be with you for the rest of the day.

Happy birthday, Ennio Morricone!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGBxzofJo7c&t

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PHOTO: Morricone recording “The Exorcist II: The Heretic,” also 1977

It’s a mercurial November Sunday here in Princeton, one hour overcast and gloomy, the next blue sky and amorphous clouds, with perhaps an interlude of rain expected this afternoon. Optimal conditions for a pilgrimage to Solebury, PA (outside New Hope), at 3 p.m. to hear Concordia Chamber Players perform Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Phantasy Quintet.”

It’s not that Vaughan Williams didn’t know how to spell “fantasy.” His “Phantasy” was one of a number of works commissioned from England’s great composers by Walter Wilson Cobbett. Cobbett was a businessman and amateur violinist whose dual passions were chamber music and music of the Elizabethan era. The “phantasy” was Cobbett’s musical folly, an eccentric answer to the fancies and fantasias of Byrd, Gibbons, and Purcell.

Cobbett’s phantasies are short and sweet at around 12 minutes in length. Personally, I could listen to Vaughan Williams all day, but the Concordia concert will also include Johannes Brahms’ String Quintet in G major, Op. 111. Very cool.

The program will open with a rare bit of chamber music by a composer who liked to think big – Anton Bruckner. Bruckner composed his String Quintet in F major in 1878-79, between his Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6. This is civilized and beautiful music. In 1884, the Viennese critic Theodor Helm wrote: “While the finale of the Bruckner Quintet – at least the effect of first-time listening – is in doubt, the three remaining movements are of the highest interest, especially in the happy and original invention of the motives. …But the pearl of the quintet is the Adagio (in G-flat major), one of the noblest, most enlightened, tenderest and most beautiful in sound, written in modern times […]. What an exceedingly deep, flowing in a truly ‘infinite’ stream of emotion! This adagio looks rather as if it were a play, only now found in Beethoven’s estate, from the last time of the master and animated by his fullest inspiration. This is probably the highest praise that can be said about the composition of a living sound artist, and we are not afraid to say it.”

The entire quintet runs to some 43 minutes. Concordia will perform the sublime Adagio, around 14 minutes in length.

The venue is the hill-top, timber-trussed Trinity Episcopal Church, located at 6587 Upper York Rd., again, in Solebury, PA. I can’t think of a cheerier venue for a concert of this kind. Anticipating a phantastic afternoon!

For more information, visit concordiaplayers.org.