This week on “Sweetness and Light,” I can confidently say all the music will be Ernest! The focus is on Ernest Tomlinson. Tomlinson, extraordinarily long-lived, was born on this date in 1924. He died in 2015 at the age of 90.
Not only was he a light music master, he was also something of a patron saint of the genre. In 1984, when he was about 60, he learned that the BBC was disposing of its light music archive. He stepped up and founded the Library of Light Orchestral Music, rescuing an estimated 50,000 pieces, which he kept in a farmhouse on his family’s property.
Among his own light music classics are 100 pieces of library music – music to be licensed to film, television, and radio. He also composed thirteen orchestral suites, symphonic works (including works for symphonic jazz), works for solo instrument and orchestra, choral music, a one-act opera, and music for brass band.
I hope you’ll join me for one of his most popular works, his “Suite of English Folk-Dances,” after John Playford, three dances from his ballet “Aladdin,” and selections from a BBC radio play about Cinderella, broadcast on Christmas Eve 1955. It was the success of latter that secured Tomlinson the freedom to devote himself to full-time, freelance composition.
Learn more about the importance of being Ernest, on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon! ‘ Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:
Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. He lit a match and watched it burn and as it burned he thought of boxers and marlins and the Spanish Civil War. The stories were brave and strong and good. He ordered a mojito and prepared to face the music.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” the focus is on Ernest Hemingway.
Seemingly at odds with Hemingway’s minimalist, “iceberg” style, big screen adaptations of the writer’s work show what the stories don’t tell. In the case of 1946’s “The Killers,” the screenwriters unapologetically just made stuff up, an entire back story explaining the motivations for the hit of boxer “Swede” Anderson. Fortunately, those screenwriters happened to include an uncredited John Huston, who virtually codified noir with “The Maltese Falcon.”
“The Killers” provided Burt Lancaster with his break-out role. It also features a knock-out score by Miklós Rózsa, in which he uses the dum-dee-dum-dum motto later made famous by the television series “Dragnet.”
In 1977, George C. Scott reunited with his “Patton” director, Franklin J. Schaffner, for an adaptation of Hemingway’s posthumously published novel, “Islands in the Stream.” Scott gives one of his best performances as a Hemingway-like figure living on a Caribbean island. “Patton” composer Jerry Goldsmith wrote the music. Goldsmith spoke of it often as his favorite score.
Hemingway himself handpicked the leads for the 1943 adaptation of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman falling in love against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. The music was by the prolific and versatile Victor Young.
And finally, Spencer Tracy is the whole show, as he faces off against a large marlin, in the 1958 version of “The Old Man and the Sea.” Dimitri Tiomkin’s music earned him his fourth Academy Award.
Join me for an hour of laconic grace and stoic manliness on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree…”
Sounds good to me! As I sit here like Sardanapalus luxuriating amidst my musical treasures, I contemplate the short life and creative promise of Charles Tomlinson Griffes.
Griffes’ was a unique voice in American music. At the beginning of his life, our native composers mostly emulated Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms; by the end, they were starting to gravitate toward jazz. By contrast, Griffes, like the painter Mary Cassatt, was attracted to French Impressionism (oddly, he studied in Germany with Engelbert Humperdinck, of “Hansel and Gretel” fame), yet the weird incense of Scriabin also permeates his work.
He is best known for dreamy meditations like “The White Peacock” and “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan,” after Coleridge.
Griffes was born in Elmira, NY, on this date in 1884. He died of influenza in 1920, aged only 35 years. (No flu vaccine then.) Elmira was Mark Twain’s home from 1870. Twain was in Elmira putting the finishing touches on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” the year Griffes was born. I’ve sometimes wondered if the two ever met. It has been documented that Griffes saw Twain there when moving about the streets. They certainly adhered to very different aesthetics.
It was Pierre Monteux, who introduced Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe,” Debussy’s “Jeux,” and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” and “The Rite of Spring” with the Ballets Russes, that unlocked the Pleasure Dome for the first time, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1916.
You’ll recall Samuel Taylor Coleridge launched into his famous poem one night in 1797, after waking from an opium-induced dream, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door. When he returned to his desk, he was unable to pick up the thread. According to Coleridge, he envisioned the work as two or three hundred lines, but he found he’d forgotten the words! (Oh, how I can relate to this…) We can thank Lord Byron for convincing him to publish it, finally, in 1816.
Here’s Coleridge’s phantasmagoric fragment, to refresh your memory.
60 years ago today, the Metropolitan Opera consecrated its new house at New York’s Lincoln Center with the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” Adapted from Shakespeare’s play, the libretto was fashioned by Franco Zeffirelli.
Zeffirelli could be a fine director, but in the opera house his lust for opulence and grandeur threatened to obscure the human drama. Here, his vision of “Cabiria”-style excess – with 22 principal singers, chorus, dancers (choreographed by Alvin Ailey), extras, and live camels – swelled the cast to 400 players. Many years later, I worked with Justino Diaz, who sang Antony, and he described the opulence of the production as being like Zeffirelli’s “Turandot” times 20.
There was only so much of this that Barber, or even Shakespeare, could take. The excess of steel, brass, and aluminum sets pushed the house’s state-of-the-art technology to the literal breaking point. The weight proved too much for the newly installed revolving stage, and Leontyne Price, who sang Cleopatra, was trapped inside a hydraulically-operated pyramid. Fortunately, that was during rehearsals, but the costumes continued to prove cumbersome, the technical workarounds awkward, and the spectacle soul-numbingly vulgar. Audience response to the overinflated production made for a cool night in the desert. As for the critics… you think Julius Caesar had it bad?
You can imagine how Barber, elegant and reserved two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (one for an earlier opera, “Vanessa,” introduced at the Old Met) and composer of the ubiquitous “Adagio for Strings,” would have taken it. In the years following the work’s brutal reception, he struggled with depression and alcoholism.
“Antony and Cleopatra” was extensively revised by Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti in an edition first performed in 1975. Barber also prepared a concert suite, “Two Scenes from ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’” for Price.
Barber provided two other works for the opening of Lincoln Center: the Piano Concerto, which earned him his second Pulitzer, and a piece for soprano and orchestra, “Andromache’s Farewell.” The former was performed by John Browning and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. The latter was performed by Martina Arroyo and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Thomas Schippers.
Thankfully, the Met transcended the failure of its opening run. The cavernous, 3800-seat opera house – the largest in the world – has seen some magnificent performances over the decades, featuring many of the world’s – and history’s – greatest singers.
As you can imagine, you need stellar voices, compelling music, and solid productions to fill such a venue night after night, and in recent years, the Met has struggled. There are plenty of performances that sell out – a lot of the new operas make for good theater, even if the composers can’t compete with Puccini – but new productions of the classics that go dark and contemporary, in a bid for “relevance,” often misfire. Most crucially, voices and personalities that can whip audiences into the kinds of frenzies that greeted the greatest singers of the past are always rare.
Not all the challenges facing the Met are of the house’s creation. The industry and culture have shifted enormously since the ‘90s. The collapse of the record industry, the selling off or dumbing down of classical music radio stations, the lack of television, magazine, and newspaper exposure, cuts to music education, a shift in the priorities of the donor class, changes in the approaches to vocal training, and lack of interest in opera or classical music within the home have marginalized opera, as an art form, as an entertainment, and as an aspirational, inspirational pursuit with the power to lift us outside ourselves.
Still, there’s plenty of magic left in the Met. This season, I’m curious to see – and hear – what Missy Mazzoli makes of “Lincoln in the Bardo.”
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Documentary teasing “Antony and Cleopatra,” with Barber, Zeffirelli, Price, Thomas Schippers, Rudolf Bing, and Marc Chagall, who painted the Met’s iconic dual murals – which the organization has been trying to sell, with the provision that they continue to be displayed in the Met lobby.
I first learned of Richard Arnell, born on this date in 1917, from a recording of his ballet “The Great Detective.” But he was also a renowned symphonist, who spent the war years here in the United States, cut off from his home in the U.K. while visiting the 1939 World’s Fair. Here, he cultivated important friendships with Bernard Herrmann, Virgil Thomson, and Sir Thomas Beecham (who, alongside Sir John Barbirolli and Leopold Stokowski, championed his concert works). He also wrote film music for Robert J. Flaherty and ballets for George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton.
“The Great Detective,” commissioned by the Sadlers-Wells Ballet in 1953, is transparently influenced by the exploits of Sherlock Holmes, though not based on any particular book or episode in the Holmes canon. In fact, the inclusion of a gorilla places it more in line with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” – although the tone of the ballet is certainly more tongue-in-cheek.
The complete ballet includes an “Overture;” “Police and the Doctor;” “The Distracted Ladies;” “Detective’s Mental Arithmetic;” “Pas de Deux: Distressed Ladies and Suspect;” “Pas de Trois: Distressed Ladies and Doctor;” “The Victims;” “The Fiend;” “Villains;” “Villains and Police;” “Dance of Deduction;” “Finale;” “The Fight;” and “Doctor’s Distress – Detective Safe.”
Arnell himself recorded a suite from the work in 1953. Martin Yates recorded it complete with the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2008.
Interestingly, “The Great Detective” would not be the only occasion on which a gorilla would be associated with Arnell’s music. Not so very long ago, I wrote about his Symphony No. 5, which the composer humorously compared to a rude simian he visited at the London Zoo. It has a great tune in the last movement, derived from the music hall, that Arnell’s father used to sing and whistle.
Arnell died in 2009 at the age of 91. We remember him with fondness on his birthday anniversary.
