Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Schubert’s Octet Marlboro Music Festival

It’s foolish to attempt to play something like the Schubert Octet all by yourself. Many have tried – mad dreamers! – only to come up looking ridiculous. Not even the gloss of extraneous percussion instruments or transposition to the banjo can disguise the bald fact of the matter – that to really enjoy this work as Franz Schubert intended, you can’t do better than eight superb musicians from the Marlboro Music Festival.

On the next “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll hear Schubert’s Octet in F major, D. 803, performed in its entirety, by violinists Joseph Genualdi and Felix Galimir, violist Steven Tenenbom, cellist Peter Wiley, double-bassist Peter Lloyd, clarinetist Shannon Scott, bassoonist Alexander Heller, and hornist David Jolley. Marlboro musicians toured the piece, alongside Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” in 1987.

Tune in for this expansive masterwork a little earlier than usual – there’s too much melody and charm to be confined within a single hour – this Wednesday evening at 5:50 EST. It pays to be a team player. One can’t outscore the Octet, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

November 20, 2019
Kansas Conductor Leads Lunar Concert

Raised in Conway Springs, Kansas – 30 miles south of Wichita – Alicia N. Brozovich demonstrates that there is still plenty of heart in the Heartland.

Her passion for music brought her to Westminster Choir College to pursue a master’s degree in choral conducting in 2013. Following her graduation, she joined the faculty of Westminster Conservatory.

Now she is about to lead her first public concert as conductor of the conservatory’s Westminster Community Chorus, at Westminster Choir College’s Bristol Chapel, on Friday at 7:30 p.m.

The program, “Vespers by the Sea” (think Sea of Tranquility), is designed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and will incorporate historic NASA transmissions related to the moon landing. At its core will be Ola Gjeilo’s “Sunrise Mass.”

“Ad astra per aspera” – to the stars through difficulty – is the Kansas state motto. Learn more about Brozovich, the concert, and the journeys we all take to come into our own identities, in my article in this week’s U.S. 1 Newspaper – PrincetonInfo, out today.

https://princetoninfo.com/community-chorus-takes-vocal-journey-through-space/

November 20, 2019
Nancy Deussen Gershwin Secret Dies

Composer Nancy Bloomer Deussen has died at the age of 88, and for the second time in two years, there are murmurs about an illegitimate child of George Gershwin. Deussen’s mother, Julia Van Norman, was exceptionally close with Gershwin, perhaps closer than the Gershwin estate would have liked.

For her part, Deussen never wished to exploit her possible kinship to promote her own music, so perhaps it’s a disservice to her memory to even mention it. I only do so, because still fresh in the memory is the death last year of Alan Gershwin, who always insisted he was George’s son.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/obituaries/alan-gershwin-who-claimed-a-famous-father-is-dead-at-91.html

Alan was 91. I must say, the resemblance is uncanny.

Georgie be good!

Deussen’s “Night Forest” for Native American flute:

PHOTOS: Nancy Bloomer Deussen and, top to bottom, George Gershwin, Alan Gershwin, and juicy Gershwin scandal rag

November 19, 2019
Millennial Music & Mortality on WWFM

Boy, do I feel old. One day I wake up, and I realize I’ve been alive long enough for an entire generation of new composers to come of age.

On today’s Noontime Concert, it’s another program featuring musicians from Network for New Music. We’ll hear recent works, including a few premieres, by contemporary composers Rene Orth, Joshua Hey, Sky Macklay, Andrew Hsu, Gabriel Bolaños and Charles Peck, all presented under the unifying theme of “Millennial Music.”

NNM’s mission is to perform new musical works of the highest quality by a diverse array of established and emerging composers; to strengthen the new music community in the Philadelphia region; and to build support for new music by engaging in artistic and institutional collaborations and educational activities.

Founded in 1984, Network for New Music has presented more than 650 works by living composers (of which over 150 they have commissioned) and recorded four CDs for the Albany and Innova labels. The ensemble has held an ongoing residency at Haverford College since 2007.

NNM will present its season opener, “Streams of Sound,” at Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School Mary Louise Curtis Branch, 416 Queen Street, this Sunday at 3 p.m. For more information and a complete schedule, look online at networkfornewmusic.org.

As if a program of millennial music isn’t enough to make me feel acutely the passage of time, our featured work following today’s broadcast concert will be Franz Joseph Haydn’s oratorio “The Seasons.” Haydn’s late masterpiece underpins the cyclical nature of the year with colorful vignettes suggesting the circle of life (and death). I think I’ll just focus on the wit and the wine.

I hope you’ll join me as I stare into the face of my own mortality, from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

“Sharpening the Scythe” (1897), by Ralph Hedley

November 19, 2019
Nancy Deussen Gershwin’s Secret?

Composer Nancy Bloomer Deussen has died at the age of 88, and for the second time in two years, there are murmurs about an illegitimate child of George Gershwin. Deussen’s mother, Julia Van Norman, was exceptionally close with Gershwin, perhaps closer than the Gershwin estate would have liked.

For her part, Deussen never wished to exploit her possible kinship to promote her own music, so perhaps it’s a disservice to her memory to even mention it. I only do so, because still fresh in the memory is the death last year of Alan Gershwin, who always insisted he was George’s son.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/obituaries/alan-gershwin-who-claimed-a-famous-father-is-dead-at-91.html

Alan was 91. I must say, the resemblance is uncanny.

Georgie be good!

Deussen’s “Night Forest” for Native American flute:

PHOTOS: Nancy Bloomer Deussen and, top to bottom, George Gershwin, Alan Gershwin, and juicy Gershwin scandal rag

November 19, 2019

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