Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Einstein’s Unexpected Music Taste at Princeton

Yesterday, I had folks in from out of town and took them over to see Einstein’s furniture at Updike Farm on Quaker Road. Since 2004, the property has been owned by the Historical Society of Princeton.

I’d been there before, but yesterday was the first time I thought to lean in and take note of what was on Einstein’s turntable. By squinting, I could just about make out Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, but it was only by taking a photo, flipping it, and enlarging that I could make out the music: William Schuman’s Symphony No. 3! A most bizarre selection as, despite his friendship with Bohuslav Martinů and association with Arnold Schoenberg, from everything I’ve heard, Einstein was not really a contemporary music guy. He was all about the meat-and-potato classics. (He loved Haydn and Mozart.)

If this record was indeed from Einstein’s personal collection, it was a very interesting choice, making more of an impression on me than E = mc². But I am the first to admit, as a classical music lover at the science fair, I tend to look at things a little differently.

More than likely, someone who didn’t know William Schuman from Robert Schumann had selected it – if he or she even knew who Schumann was. I like to think the record was actually from Einstein’s collection and not just something from the period that somebody picked up at a yard sale. The docent, while friendly and attentive, didn’t seem to know anything about it. But I’m used to that.

In the same room, as part of an Innovators Gallery, there’s also some material on Freeman Dyson, one of Einstein’s colleagues at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, who also happened to be the son of eminent English composer Sir George Dyson. Again, I appeared to be the only one with much interest in the connection (neither was it noted, that I could see, in the literature).

In his day, William Schumann was recognized as one of our great American symphonists. In particular, his Symphony No. 3 of 1941 was held up, alongside the corresponding symphonies of Roy Harris and Aaron Copland, as among the best this country had to offer. Schuman won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1943, became president of the Juilliard School in 1945, and president of Lincoln Center in 1961.

By coincidence, he was a student of Roy Harris, whose Symphony No. 3 is being performed this afternoon by the Princeton University Orchestra. The concert, a repeat of last night’s program, will be held at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium at 3:00. Also on the program will be Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique.” Be there, or be square.

For tickets, visit

https://tickets.princeton.edu/

Discover Albert Einstein at Updike Farmstead

Discover Albert Einstein

Ormandy conducts William Schuman’s Symphony No. 3

Article I wrote about Einstein’s musical activities and enthusiasms

https://www.communitynews.org/princetoninfo/artsandentertainment/relatively-musical-albert-einstein-and-bohuslav-martin/article_68a1ba00-fe7d-11ef-a05a-2f8ce43f2de6.html

October 5, 2025
Beer Barrel Polka From Czech Roots to WWII Hit

When lyrics were added to the best-known polka of Czech composer Jaromir Vejvoda, it also became perhaps the most famous Czech song.

Originally conceived as the “Modřanská Polka” – or “Polka of Modřany” – with words it took on a new life as “Škoda lásky” (“Unrequited Love”). It was also a hit in Germany as “Rosamunde.” World-wide popularity ensued, as soldiers adopted it as a drinking song during World War II and introduced it at home as the “Beer Barrel Polka.”

This week on “Sweetness and Light,” in this season of the harvest and Oktoberfest, it will be one of our featured works as we roll out the barrels for a salute to BARLEY AND THE GRAPE.

The hour will include the “Revelry Overture” by Montague Phillips and Leopold Godowsky’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis on ‘Wine, Women and Song’” after Johann Strauss II. We’ll raise our goblets to the god of wine with ballet music from Jules Massenet’s rarely-heard opera “Bacchus” and the “Procession of Bacchus” from Léo Delibes’ ballet “Sylvia” (conducted by Richard Bonynge, who turned 95 this week).

We’ll also quaff to drinking songs by Reginald De Koven (“Brown October Ale” from the comic opera “Robin Hood”) and Henry Purcell (himself a casualty of one too many pub-crawls).

We’ve a powerful thirst for BARLEY AND THE GRAPE on “Sweetness and Light.” The taps are open, this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

October 4, 2025
Swiss Missed Forgotten Music from Switzerland

Enough with the jokes about alphorns and cuckoo clocks! This week on “The Lost Chord,” it’s forgotten music from Switzerland.

Ernest Bloch, best known for his music on Jewish themes (such as his Hebraic rhapsody “Schelomo”), actually spent most of his life in the United States. He died in Portland, OR, in 1959, at the age of 78.

50 years earlier, while still in Switzerland, he composed his song cycle “Poèmes d’automne.” At the time, he was at work on his opera, “Macbeth,” but he was sidelined when he made the acquaintance of a young poet by the name of Beatrix Rodès. He fell instantly in love with her, and set four of her poems within two months. Rodès would eventually become his mistress, though in the end Bloch chose to remain with his wife. It’s said that the texts, even in the original French, are of dubious literary quality.

The composer arranged them to form a kind of progression, in which a woman passes from sadness and desolation, to peace and love, to lamentation for the passing of her beauty, to an air of serenity as she becomes a priestess.

Okay, so it’s not his strongest work, but it is seasonal and interesting to listen to.

Hans Huber, who lived from 1852 to 1921, was the composer of nine symphonies (of which he acknowledged eight), five operas, and a number of concertos for various instruments. His four concertos for piano are somewhat unusual in that, like Brahms’ experiments in the form, they are made up of four movements, with the addition of a scherzo, as opposed to the customary three.

The Piano Concerto No. 3 first appeared on a concert in Basel, in February of 1899, which also included Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture No. 3” and Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy.”

The concerto is also unusual, for, among other things, anticipating in the first movement the theme from the work’s finale as the underpinnings of a passacaglia.

I hope you’ll join me for an hour of forgotten music from Switzerland – “Swiss Missed” – on The Lost Chord, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

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

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

October 4, 2025
Hitchcock’s Other Composers Beyond Herrmann

Alfred Hitchcock’s most celebrated musical collaborator was Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann scored just about every one of Hitch’s films over the span of a decade, enhancing the impact and memorability of such classics as “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho.” But Hitchcock also worked with a number of other notable composers.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll cast some light into Herrmann’s shadow with selections from “Rebecca” (Franz Waxman), “Strangers on a Train” (Dimitri Tiomkin), “Spellbound” (Miklós Rózsa), and “Family Plot” (John Williams).

Herrmann goes on hiatus, and the suspense is killing us, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

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

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

October 3, 2025
Princeton Revives Neglected American Symphony

Roy Harris was born on Lincoln’s birthday in a log cabin in Lincoln County, Oklahoma. If that doesn’t imbue a composer with a sense of destiny, I don’t know what will.

Harris went on to became one of our great American symphonists. In particular, his Symphony No. 3 of 1939 has been much beloved and frequently performed. Unfortunately, we don’t hear all that much of his music anymore. And that’s a damned shame.

So thank you, Princeton University Orchestra, for reviving Harris’ Symphony No. 3 on your opening concerts this weekend at Richardson Auditorium, Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3:00, on the same program with Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique.”

Most of the orchestra’s personnel, mind you, are not music majors, but rather committed dilettantes pursuing degrees in other fields, such as astrophysics, bioengineering, computer science, linguistics, sociology, philosophy, and a lot of other things in no way related to music. Also, a substantial number of the players turn over every year as students graduate.

Yet on those occasions when I have been privileged to hear them perform, the orchestra has never been less than solid – interpretively safe, perhaps, but on occasion they surpass themselves. And I have heard them tackle Mahler’s 3rd, “Ein Heldenleben,” and the complete “Daphnis and Chloé.”

Most recently, a performance with the Princeton University Glee Club of Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius” was revelatory, finally unlocking the magic of the piece for me, which I had previously known only from recordings. Music director Michael Pratt, who has led the orchestra since 1977, is a miracle worker.

I can’t wait to hear Harris’ symphony. I’d travel a lot further to enjoy music from this now-neglected “greatest generation” of American symphonists. What a delight to have some of it right here, in my own backyard!

For tickets, follow the link:

https://tickets.princeton.edu/

The orchestra’s 2025-26 season:

Current Season

October 2, 2025

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