In a time when binge-watching is all the rage, how about a little Binge listening? British light music master Ronald Binge was born 110 years ago today. Here’s some carefree summer music if ever there was any.
“Sailing By”
“The Watermill”
“Elizabethan Serenade”
Most musicians dream of playing Carnegie Hall. Joseph Bertolozzi dreamed of playing the Eiffel Tower. Quite literally.
This mad visionary and his technicians ascended the Tour Eiffel in 2013, turning the iconic French landmark into a gigantic percussion instrument. The results can be heard on his album “Tower Music,” which was released on the innova Recordings label in 2016.
95 years earlier, Jean Cocteau brought together five of his composer protégés, all members of Les Six, to provide music for a ballet set atop the Eiffel Tower – on July 14, Bastille Day. (The sixth member, Louis Durey, declined, pleading illness.)
The scenario of “Les mariés de la tour Eiffel” (“The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower”) describes a wedding breakfast on one of the tower’s platforms. A series of surreal and vaguely satiric incidents involve a pompous speech made by one of the guests, a hunchbacked photographer asking the assembled guests to “watch the birdie,” the sudden appearance of a telegraph office, a lion devouring one of the guests, and the arrival of “a child of the future” who commits mass murder. The ballet concludes with the end of the wedding.
Cocteau encapsulated the ballet’s themes as “Sunday vacuity; human beastliness, ready-made expressions, disassociation of ideas from flesh and bone, ferocity of childhood, the miraculous poetry of everyday life.” Quel illumination!
Francis Poulenc, who provided the music for some of the numbers, alongside that of Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Germaine Tailleferre, referred to the piece as “toujours de la merde.”
Vive la France – and Happy Bastille Day!
“Tower Music”:
“The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower”:
In performance, following introductory info, beginning at 6:52:
The loose collective known as “The Frankfurt Gang” came together in 1890s, as students at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt-am-Main. Its members included Balfour Gardiner, Roger Quilter, Norman O’Neill, Cyril Scott, and the youngest of the bunch, the piano prodigy Percy Grainger. This brilliant array of talent bonded in a foreign land, united by a shared language and culture, but also a determination to break away from Teutonic dominance in music, with the goal of creating a fresh “English” art.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have music by four of these firebrands, including Gardiner’s “Overture to a Comedy,” Quilter’s “Where the Rainbow Ends,” Scott’s “Neptune” (refashioned from an earlier work inspired by the sinking of the Titanic), and one of Grainger’s choral settings of a text from Kipling’s “Jungle Book.”
The Hoch Conservatory of the day had the reputation of being one of the very finest in Europe. Clara Schumann had been on the faculty there until 1892 – within a few years of the Frankfurt Group’s arrival. In fact, at least one of them was there before Schumann’s departure.
Scott arrived at the school early, at the age of 12, and then later returned for a second stint. Gardiner was also there twice, taking a break to attend Oxford. Grainger was 13 at the time he was admitted. He was to remain at the Hoch Conservatory for four-and-a-half years.
Frankfurt alumni aim for the high notes this week. I hope you’ll join me for “Hochschule Musical,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
Hochschule reunion: (left to right) Grainger, Scott, and Quilter
Addio, Ennio.
This week’s Classic Ross Amico crossword honors the life and career of Ennio Morricone, who died on Monday at the age of 91. The composer of over 500 film and television scores, Morricone was likely the most prolific film composer of all time, but he also left his mark on the classical and popular worlds. For a “film composer,” he was unusually influential.
To fill out the puzzle, follow the link and select “solve online” at the bottom of the page. You’ll then be able to type directly into the squares. Once you feel you’ve exhausted the puzzle, you’ll find the solutions by clicking on “Answer Key PDF.”
Celebrate the composer of “The Mission,” “The Untouchables,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “Once Upon a Time in the West,” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” With Ennio, it was all good.
https://www.armoredpenguin.com/crossword/Data/2020.07/1206/12064820.131.html
In “Zardoz” (1974), the Eternals, an immortal race, suffer ennui and even slide into catatonia, as each day bleeds into the next. No end, no passion, no inspiration, no purpose. Does this movie have added resonance in time of COVID?
In case you missed it (and I know you did), here’s my latest appearance on “Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci Fi Corner.” Roy and I chisel away at John Boorman’s trippy, hopelessly pretentious, yet somehow oddly relevant parable, which riled critics and baffled audiences at the time of its release, but today seems surprisingly worthy of reevaluation.
New episodes of “Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner” stream Fridays and Sundays at 7 p.m. EDT.
Join Roy this Sunday AT A SPECIAL TIME, 4 PM, for a conversation with special effects legend Brian Johnson, the Academy Award winning artist who worked on “Alien,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Dragonslayer,” “Space: 1999,” “Thunderbirds,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Thanks again, Roy! See you next Friday, for “The War of the Worlds!”
Ross and Roy on “Zardoz”:
Watch Brian Johnson, Sunday at 4 p.m., here:
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