This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” get ready for Memorial Day with two symphonies composed for the armed forces.
Morton Gould wrote his Symphony No. 4, his first large scale piece for symphonic band, in 1952, for the United States Military Academy at West Point. The score calls for a “marching machine,” but on the recording we’ll hear, now a classic on the Mercury label, the feet are those of the 120 musicians of the Eastman School Symphony Band. Frederick Fennell directs the Eastman Wind Ensemble.
Samuel Barber composed his Symphony No. 2 in 1943, while he was serving in the U.S. Army Air Force. 20 years later, he revised and published its slow movement as a separate piece, titled “Night Flight.” He then jettisoned – and actually tried to destroy – the rest of the symphony. The work was reconstituted only after the composer’s death, from rediscovered parts in a warehouse in the UK. We’ll hear a recording with Marin Alsop and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Reflect on the sacrifice of Americans at war, on “Orchestrated Maneuvers” – American military symphonies for Memorial Day – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
PHOTO: Corporal Samuel Barber with the score of his Second Symphony
May 29 marks the birthday of one of my favorite composers: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957). Thanks to a steady diet of Errol Flynn films, Korngold will forever be a part of the soundtrack to my life.
Korngold went from being one of Europe’s most astounding musical prodigies – his works admired by Mahler, Strauss and Puccini, and championed by Schnabel, Weingartner and Klemperer – to becoming one of Hollywood’s transformative film composers. He is a link from Old World opulence to New World fantasy, his music gracing a number of Warner Brothers’ classic historical adventures.
The best ones starred Flynn, and this week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll hear music from “The Sea Hawk” (1940) and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), as well as the mostly forgotten “Another Dawn” (1937). Flynn stars alongside Kay Francis and Ian Hunter (who would go on to play Richard the Lionheart in “Robin Hood”) in this love triangle involving pilots in a British desert colony.
The film may be an obscurity to all save classic movie buffs, but Korngold thought enough of his music that he salvaged the main title as the opening theme of his Violin Concerto, premiered by Heifetz in 1947.
It was an invitation from theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt that brought Korngold to Hollywood in the first place, for a cinematic adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935). The film stars James Cagney, Dick Powell and Olivia de Havilland, in her big screen debut, with Mickey Rooney an irrepressible Puck.
For the project, Korngold adapted the famous incidental music of Felix Mendelssohn, interweaving material from Mendelssohn’s symphonies and orchestrating some of the “Songs without Words.” Even so, the music bears the composer’s unmistakable stamp, as you’ll hear in the opening number, lifted from the “Scottish Symphony,” but infused with plenty of Korngoldian swagger.
I hope you’ll join me, as the playlist is all-Korngold this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Yesterday’s modern premiere of a Sibelius overture, said to have been rediscovered in the manuscript of the composer’s one-act opera, “The Maiden in the Tower,” sent me back to a complete recording of the stage work.
At 35 minutes, Sibelius’ grandiose music is too much for the slight libretto – a simple story about a damsel in distress, a lecherous bailiff who abuses his authority, the maiden’s devoted lover, ready to defend her to the death, and a deus ex machina in the form of the castle’s justice-loving chatelaine. As a secular cantata, I can see how this might be regarded as something of an action-packed potboiler, a pre-Raphaelite painting in sound; but as “opera,” there’s no way. The whole thing just buckles. How I wish the composer had followed through on his earlier design of a grand opera after the Kalevela.
What I didn’t understand until today’s reencounter with a work I have not listened to in years is that the resurrected overture – not to be confused with the opera’s brief orchestral prelude – is basically a compilation of material that already exists within the larger piece. It doesn’t, however, explain away the overture’s potpourri character, since the prelude and first scene are presented, as near as I can tell, as is, within the “new” work. It rather puts me in the mind of the overture to Vaughan Williams’ “The Poisoned Kiss,” in form rather than character, since both are basically constructed on tunes from the opera.
It was the conductor of yesterday’s modern premiere, Tuomas Hannikainen, who, as a doctoral candidate, discovered not a separate score, but rather handwritten clues left by the composer on the opera itself suggesting a new orchestral work, or “overture,” hidden within the piece. So basically, that’s the story behind this Sibelius rediscovery. The composer is said to have conducted a couple of performances of the work back in 1900. The 12-minute overture should not be confused with the three-minute prelude to the opera.
Sibelius suppressed “The Maiden in the Tower” after a few early performances in 1896, with the intention of revising the entire work, which he never got around to addressing. Indications for the new overture may have been the composer’s attempt to salvage some of the best bits from the opera. After all, material from an earlier, incomplete opera, “The Building of the Boat,” was recycled in his “Four Legends from the Kalevala” – with “The Swan of Tuonela” forming the opera’s original prelude – and his symphonic poem “The Wood Dove.”
Yesterday’s performance of the overture reconstructed from “The Maiden in the Tower” is now posted on the YouTube channel of the Avanti Chamber Orchestra. If I understand correctly, a complete concert will be made available there on May 30, which will include not only this “premiere,” but also Sibelius’ melodrama “The Countess’ Portrait” and a suite from his incidental music to “Belshazzar’s Feast.” Also featured will be André Caplet’s “Conte fantastique” for harp and string orchestra, after Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”
This Memorial Day weekend, as the woods resonate with the eerie, UFO-like drone of Brood X cicadas, we direct our thoughts to the quintessential giant insect invasion classic – marked by equally distinctive, otherworldly calls – “Them!” (1954).
In the age of atomic anxiety, gigantic mutated ants emerge from the New Mexico desert to wreak havoc in Los Angeles. James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, and James Arness put in an order for a whole lot of RAID, and Fess Parker secures for himself the role of Davy Crockett with one short but memorable scene. You’ll have to watch fast for Leonard Nimoy, Dick York, Richard Deacon, William Schallert, and many others.
Released four months before “Godzilla,” drive-in thrills didn’t come any bigger than “Them!” The “Wilhelm scream” gets a good workout in this one. If Ridley Scott didn’t watch “Them!” before he made “Alien,” I’ll wander through the storm drains of Los Angeles with a box full of sugar cubes.
I hope you’ll join us as we flap our mandibles about “Them!,” on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, this Memorial Day weekend AT A SPECIAL TIME. Leave your sweets and formic acid in the comments section, as we livestream with our flamethrowers, to the full extent that Facebook allows, this SUNDAY EVENING AT 7:00 EDT!
We’re only a few hours away from the first modern performance of a long-lost work of Jean Sibelius.
News of the 2019 rediscovery of the score of this “Concert Overture” (found with the manuscript of Sibelius’ only completed opera, “The Maiden in the Tower”) somehow eluded my notice. The overture was last performed in 1900. This is not to be confused with either the Concert Overture in E (1891) or the Concert Overture in A minor (1902), both recorded by Neeme Järvi and others.
You can watch a performance of the “new” work live on the YouTube channel of the Avanti! kamariorkesteri / Avanti! Chamber Orchestra today at 12 pm EDT:
Or wait for the video to be posted on May 30. Learn more about it here:
The complete concert program will feature two more Sibelius rarities – the melodrama “The Countess’ Portrait” and a suite from “Belshazzar’s Feast” – as well as André Caplet’s “Conte fantastique” for harp and string orchestra, after Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”
An earlier attempt at a grand opera, “The Building of the Boat,“ was abandoned in 1893, though much of the material was reworked by the composer into “Four Legends from the Kalevala” and the symphonic poem “The Wood Nymph.” One of his most frequently-programmed pieces, “The Swan of Tuonela,” was originally planned as the prelude to this opera.
UPDATE: Having just watched the modern premiere, here’s my assessment. The overture won’t change anyone’s fundamental understanding of Sibelius, but it is by turns evocative, dramatic, charming, exciting, and beautiful. If you’re a fan of the “Lemminkäinen” symphonic poems, I think you will enjoy this. A magical treat, and at 12 minutes, not an insignificant one. I’ll be checking back for the full concert on May 30. Just what I needed on a 90-degree day. Thank you, Avanti!
UPDATE #2: The performance of the overture is now posted.
