Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Martinů Awakens at Bard Music Festival

In less than a month, the sleeping giant of Czech music will awake!

The 35th annual Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” will to be held largely on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 8-17.

Why is Bohuslav Martinů not better known? Perhaps it’s because he wrote so damn much in so many difference styles. With a career that took him from Czechoslovakia to Paris to the United States and then back again to Europe, absorbing a multiplicity of stylistic influences along the way, Martinů is not the easiest guy to pin down.

Some of his works have a strong Czech national flavor, revealing a spiritual descent from the line of Dvořák and Smetana. Others are evidently modernist, full of churning flywheels and motor rhythms, characteristic of a mechanized age. Others still flirt with popular styles, especially jazz. He’s a unique mash-up of Bohemian, French, and American influences. His “modernism,” such as it is, is seldom at the expense of broadening passages of great lyrical beauty.

Over two weekends, the Bard Music Festival will do what it does best: immerse audiences in works from all periods of the composer’s creative life, setting them off against music of his role models, his contemporaries, and those in turn he inspired. The listening experience will be enhanced by panel discussions, pre-concert talks, and lobby chit-chat with fellow enthusiasts over coffee and sandwiches.

Conductor and Bard president Leon Botstein will oversee orchestral, orchestral/choral, and opera performances, at the helm of the American Symphony Orchestra and Bard’s crackerjack graduate ensemble, The Orchestra Now. Evening concerts will take place at the Sosnoff Theater, the state-of-art concert hall housed in the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

Daylight concerts and panels will be held across campus in the more intimate surroundings of the 300-seat Olin Hall. Performers will include superb musicians and ensembles from the faculty of the Bard Conservatory, guests, and visiting artists with long relationships with the festival.

For the uninitiated, the prospect of getting one’s head around Martinů’s output can seem a little daunting. Yet the composer’s music is immediately appealing, generally easily digestible, and often a great deal of fun.

Treat yourself to this preview featuring Bard co-artistic directors Leon Botstein and Christopher H. Gibbs. The music bed is from Martinů’s “Three Frescoes of Piero della Francesca” – not part of the festival, but performed on a previous concert by Botstein and The Orchestra Now.

I’m especially looking forward to hearing Martinů’s Nonet, the Cello Sonata No. 3, the Flute Sonata, the jazz sextet “La revue de cuisine,” and a selection of his Etudes and Polkas for piano. Among the larger works will be the Symphonies Nos. 2 & 6, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the Violin Concerto No. 2, and a semi-staged performance of his opera “Julietta.”

This being Bard, there will be plenty of fascinating rarities by other hands, including a string quartet by Martinů student (and mistress) Vítězslava Kaprálová and a piano concertino I didn’t even know existed by his friend and champion Rudolf Firkušný.

Also featured will be works by Iva Bittová, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Antonín Dvořák, Petr Eben, Karel Husa, Leoš Janáček, Jaroslav Ježek, Arthur Honegger, Kryštof Mařatka, Jan Novák, Maurice Ravel, Jaroslav Řídký, Erwin Schulhoff, Josef Suk, Alexandre Tansman, Joan Tower, and Frank Zappa!

For more information about “Martinů and His World,” including a more complete schedule, visit

Bard Music Festival

The festival is the crown jewel in the diadem of Bard SummerScape, Bard’s annual celebration of the arts, now in progress. Fans of Czech music will also eagerly anticipate a fully-stage production of Bedřich Smetana’s “Dalibor,” that will precede the Martinů festival, July 25-August 3.

Bard SummerScape

Some of the events, including one of the performances of “Dalibor” will be available for livestreaming.

The festival’s annual tie-in book of scholarly essays will be released on August 12, but there will likely already be copies available at the festival.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo258537662.html

It’s past time that American concertgoers and programmers hold Martinů’s music in the same esteem as that of his better-known compatriots, Dvořák, Smetana, and Janáček. Here’s hoping that Bard lends traction to this giant’s seven-league boots.

NOTE: Giant artwork is mine; don’t blame Bard

Fisher Center at Bard

July 15, 2025
Bastille Day: Composers of the Revolution

It’s Bastille Day. A French toast for breakfast, and a nod to two of France’s greatest composers of the Revolutionary Era.

On top of the usual burden of trying to cobble together a living as working musicians, both Étienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763-1817) and Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842) bore the additional stress of having to navigate an incendiary political environment.

When Méhul’s opera “Adrien” was banned, he quickly figured out which side his baguette was buttered on and began writing propaganda pieces and patriotic songs. Vive la France! He was rewarded by being the first composer named to the newly-established Institute de France in 1795. He was also installed as an inspector at the Paris Conservatory.

Allegedly, he was one of the favorite composers of Napoleon, with whom he was on friendly terms. He became one of the first recipients of Napoleon’s Légion d’honneur. According to musicologist and Berlioz biographer David Cairns, Méhul was also the first composer to be classified as “Romantic.”

Cherubini was born in Florence. He arrived in France in 1785. There, he was introduced to Marie Antoinette and, of necessity, as a musician, had many interactions with the aristocracy – which likely caused sweat to bead on his forehead in 1789.

Following the Revolution, Cherubini (born Maria Luigi Carlo Zenobio Salvatore Cherubini) adopted the French version of his name (Marie-Louis-Charles-Zénobi-Salvador Cherubini). It was during this period that his music began to really take flight. His works became more adventurous, more dynamic, more heroic. It’s not for no reason that Beethoven claimed him as an influence. His rescue opera “Lodoiska” served as a model for Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” Beethoven is also said to have found inspiration in Cherubini for the writing of his Fifth Symphony.

Following the Revolution, Cherubini took great care to play down his former aristocratic connections and cleave to the prevailing government. Every year for over a decade, he was mindful of composing at least one overtly patriotic work.

While Napoleon is said to have disliked Cherubini’s music, finding it “too complex,” he did appoint him director of music in Vienna. Perhaps Cherubini’s best-known work, the comic opera “Les deux journée” (“The Two Days”), was written in an intentionally simplified style and became an enormous hit. Beethoven kept Cherubini’s score on his desk at the time he was engaged in the writing of “Fidelio.” The incident upon which the opera is based allegedly occurred during the time of the Revolution, but again, treading lightly, Cherubini and his librettist, Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, erred on the side of caution, setting the action in a safely remote 1647.

Gradually, as Cherubini’s operas began to fall out of fashion, he transitioned to writing church music. His Requiem in C minor, again, was particularly admired by Beethoven (also Schumann and Brahms).

In 1822, Cherubini became director of the Paris Conservatory. There he came into conflict with a young firebrand by the name of Hector Berlioz. Berlioz’s withering and amusing portrayal of Cherubini in his “Mémoires,” as a hidebound pedant, has colored the elder composer’s reputation to the present day, more indelibly than has any of Cherubini’s own music.

However, during his lifetime, the composer enjoyed fame and fortune and was the recipient of France’s highest and most prestigious honors.

Méhul, Symphony No. 3

Méhul, “Le chant du départ”

Cherubini, “Anacréon” Overture

Cherubini, “Hymn du Panthéon”

Berlioz’s arrangement of “La Marseillaise”

They kept their heads: Luigi Cherubini (left) and Étienne-Nicolas Méhul

July 14, 2025
Diana McVeagh’s Charming Music Memoirs

I did not know Diana McVeagh personally, but I own her books on Elgar and Gerald Finzi and was totally charmed by this video memoir curated and introduced by Byron Adams. By my calculations, McVeagh was just weeks shy of her 97th birthday when she shared her recollections of Finzi, Herbert Howells, and Ralph & Ursula Vaughan Williams – all of whom she knew – with wonderful side-stories about Sir Edward Elgar and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, among others. It’s an invaluable document, full of wit and personality, and guaranteed to elicit a few chuckles.

My thanks to Byron for making it possible. The interview was conducted during the 2023 Bard Music Festival.

McVeagh died on July 2, two months shy of her 99th birthday. R.I.P.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SjZTNK_3aI

Photo borrowed from Piers Lane’s Facebook page

July 13, 2025
Les Six: French Composers on KWAX

With Bastille Day coming up on Monday, the focus this week on “The Lost Chord” will be Les Six, that collective of French composers who rose to prominence in Paris in the 1920s, followers of Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie – in reality, each following their own aims, but loosely organized around a reactionary stance against Wagnerism in music and the so-called Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel.

But never mind all that. What’s important is that they wrote plenty of delightful music, mostly in a neoclassical style.

We’ll have a chance to get up close and personal, as we listen to music by Les Six, performed by members of Les Six, with Georges Auric and Jacques Février playing music of Erik Satie into the bargain.

You can always count on The Six. I hope you’ll join me for “Six by Six” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station on 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/

PHOTO: Standing, left-to-right, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc, and Louis Durey, with Jean Cocteau at the piano

July 12, 2025
Fountain Music Burbling or Gurgling Summer Sounds

In writing this, I am wondering if it’s more accurate to state that fountains burble or gurgle? This is the kind of heavy-lifting I do behind the scenes to make my light music shows seem so buoyant and effortless.

This week on “Sweetness and Light,” as I weigh the finer points, peering through the magnifying glass into my O.E.D., I hope to lessen your own burdens with a refreshing and restorative playlist for the hazy, lazy days of summer. Join me for an hour of “fountain” music by Robert Farnon, Franz Liszt, Maurice Ravel, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Hans Christian Lumbye, Arthur Meulemans, and Carl Bohm. I’m deliberately omitting Respighi, since it was his birthday on Wednesday, and someone is bound to have programmed “Fountains of Rome” – but fear not, the opulence of Meuleman’s “Pliney’s Fountain” will give old Ottorino a run for his money!

I may be a fount of indecision, but you can be certain of plenty of burbling or gurgling music on “Sweetness and Light,” 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/

IMAGE: “Doves of Pliny” from Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, after second century BCE mosaic by Sosus of Pergamon (reproduced many times)

FUN FACT! IMPRESS YOUR FRIENDS! Tivoli was also the location of the villa that inspired Liszt’s “Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este” (“The Fountains of the Villa d’Este”), also to be heard in this hour.

July 12, 2025

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