Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Broadway Musicals Celebrate July 4th

With the Fourth of July still six days away, I was trying to come up with a way to honor some aspect of the country’s rich musical heritage – it is, after all, the last weekend before the holiday – but I didn’t want to start clobbering everybody with Sousa marches just yet.

I found my solution on Broadway: both of my specialty shows today are connected in some way or another to classic American musical theater.

The playlist on “Sweetness and Light,” the light music show, is constructed on works that were actually staged on the Great White Way, including Eubie Blake & Noble Sissle’s “Shuffle Along” (the 1921 all-Black musical that spawned the breakout hit “I’m Just Wild about Harry”), Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town” (the ballet music, before it was distilled into the familiar “Three Dance Episodes,” with a 24-year-old Bernstein conducting), George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” (conceived by the composer as an opera, but produced on Broadway several times over the decades before finally being elevated to the pantheon), and Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart’s “On Your Toes” (the climactic “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” sequence, which we’ll enjoy on Rodgers’ birthday).

We’ll get your toes tapping, for the most part, but also include a grand piano fantasy on themes from “Porgy” by Earl Wild.

It’s showtime, this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT.

Then later, on “The Lost Chord,” a program that revives unusual and neglected repertoire, we’ll come at the same source from a different perspective, as we’ll hear concert works by composers of notable Broadway hits.

Vladimir Dukelsky was born in what is now Belarus, but when he settled in the United States, his friend, George Gershwin suggested a name change. Thereafter, he was known as Vernon Duke. As Duke, he composed such standards as “April in Paris” and “Autumn in New York,” and he had a hit show in “Cabin in the Sky.”

As Dukelsky, he had works championed by Serge Koussevitzky and choreographed by Léonide Massine and George Balanchine. We’ll hear a Piano Concerto he composed at the age of 19 at the request of Arthur Rubinstein.

Meredith Willson is best-known for his Broadway smashes “The Music Man” and “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” but he emerged from the classical music world, as a flutist who played with John Philip Sousa and the New York Philharmonic. We’ll hear Willson’s Symphony No. 2, subtitled “The Missions of California.”

I hope you’ll join me in giving my regards to Broadway with “Broadway Lights” on “Sweetness and Light” (at 11:00 a.m. EDT/8:00 a.m. PDT), and “Broad Talents from Broadway” on “The Lost Chord” (at 7:00 p.m. EDT/4:00 p.m. PDT), both of them on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

IMAGES: “Shuffle Along” sheet music and (top to bottom) Sissle & Blake, Rodgers & Hart, and Meredith & Rini Willson

June 28, 2025
Jaws at 50 Dive into Aquatic Movie Music

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, this week on “Picture Perfect,” we mark the 50th anniversary of “Jaws.”

“Jaws” opened on June 20, 1975. The film’s balance of terror, wit and adventure, with a perfectly-calibrated trio of central characters and a young Steven Spielberg eager to please, propelled it to unprecedented box office glory, the first film to glide past the $100 million mark. Needless to say, the studios sat up and took notice. “Jaws” is widely credited as having laid the foundation for what became recognized as the summer blockbuster season. When it was surpassed by “Star Wars” two years later, there was no looking back. With so much chum in the water, the shareholders went into a frenzy and everyone wanted a bite.

Given the film’s ultimate influence on the industry, with superheroes and computer animation long dominating the year’s major releases in a quest for ever-higher profits, it seems only proper now to honor “Jaws” with an hour of aquatic traumas.

“Beneath the 12-Mile Reef” (1953) stars Robert Wagner, Terry Moore, and Peter Graves in a Romeo and Juliet story about two families of competing fishermen along the Gulf coast of Florida, one working class and of Greek origin, and the other a family of privileged WASPs. Gilbert Roland is the Greek patriarch who runs afoul of an improbably large octopus. Bernard Herrmann wrote the music, which employs no fewer than nine harps (one for each arm, and a spare).

A young Henry Mancini was one of three composers to work on “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954). Mancini, soon to be world famous for “Moon River,” “Baby Elephant Walk,” and “The Pink Panther,” was teamed with veteran film composer Hans J. Salter and Herman Stein. None of the three were credited on screen – typical of what was then considered just another low-budget B-movie.

What can I say about John Williams’ masterful music for “Jaws” (1975)? It’s right up there with “Psycho” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” in terms of most recognized and most frequently parodied. Everyone remembers the primal shark theme, but what is sometimes overlooked is that “Jaws” is also one of the great adventure scores, the music effortlessly navigating the choppy waters of suspense, horror, and seafaring swashbuckler. The composer was recognized with a richly-deserved Academy Award (his second of five).

The conflict in “The Swimmer” (1968) is not a giant octopus, nor a great white shark, nor a prehistoric gill man, but rather the progressive psychological breakdown of an upper middle class Connecticut man who believes he’s living the American Dream.

Adapted from a short story by John Cheever, “The Swimmer” stars Burt Lancaster as the man, who acts on a quixotic impulse to travel all the way home, across county, by way of a network of suburban swimming pools. The adventure starts out well enough, with Lancaster and everyone he encounters full of optimism and fun; but the further he moves along his allegorical journey, the more the enterprise, the climate, and the people begin to grow cold.

“The Swimmer” is a decidedly downbeat tale which could make the viewer as reluctant to dip a toe into a chlorinated in-ground swimming pool as the shark-infested waters of Peter Benchley’s Amity Beach. The score is by Marvin Hamlisch, of all people, and it suits the film brilliantly.

Better stick to the bath. Dreams of aquatic refreshment are all wet this week, 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/

June 27, 2025
Lalo Schifrin, ‘Mission: Impossible’ Composer, Dies

Only five days after his 93rd birthday, I’m sorry to have to say adios to Lalo Schifrin.

Schifrin, the composer of perhaps the most indelible of all television themes – that for “Mission: Impossible” – was born Boris Claudio Schifrin (Lalo was a childhood nickname) in Buenos Aires on June 21, 1932.

At university, he studied sociology and law, but by then a life in music had been seemingly preordained. His father was concertmaster of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, and by the age of 6, Lalo was studying piano with Enrique Barenboim, father of Daniel Barenboim. He took further lessons with Andreas Karalis, one-time head of the Kyiv Conservatory (then living in Argentina), and studied harmony with Juan Carlos Paz.

Schifrin entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of 20 (Olivier Messiaen was among his teachers) and indulged his love of jazz while moonlighting in the city’s clubs. At home, American jazz had been strictly forbidden under the nationalist regime of Juan Perón, but a friend serving in the U.S. Merchant Marine was able to smuggle some in some records from New Orleans. Schifrin described his jazz conversion, at a live performance of Louis Armstrong, to “a religious awakening.” He was also taken with the Gershwin biopic “Rhapsody in Blue.”

When Lalo returned to Argentina – Perón was deposed in 1955 – it wasn’t long before he formed his own 16-piece jazz orchestra, which received national exposure on a weekly variety show on Buenos Aires television. In 1956, he came to the attention of Dizzy Gillespie, for whom he composed an extended work for big band, “Gillespiana,” in 1958. That same year, he found work as an arranger for Xaver Cugat’s Latin dance orchestra.

After Gillespie was forced to disband his own orchestra for financial reasons, Schifrin was hired as a pianist in his new quintet, allowing him to move to New York City. He became a U.S. resident and moved to Los Angeles in 1963. His naturalization would follow in 1969.

In Hollywood, screen composers such as Alex North, Elmer Bernstein, and Henry Mancini had already been experimenting with jazz in their music, beginning in the 1950s, but, after Duke Ellington’s “Anatomy of a Murder,” Schifrin took jazz-symphonic fusion in film to new heights.

In all, Schifrin was the composer of over 100 film and television scores, including those for “Cool Hand Luke,” “Bullitt,” “Dirty Harry,” “Enter the Dragon,” “Mannix,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “Rush Hour,” and of course “Mission: Impossible.”

Not everyone was a fan. Director William Friedkin was so displeased with Schifrin’s music for “The Exorcist” that he hurled the master tape out into the parking lot, in the presence of the composer. Schifrin had written music for the trailer, which had reportedly scared the pants off preview audiences, so the executives at Warner Bros. told Friedkin they wanted him to tone it down. Friedkin being Friedkin – this is, after all, the guy who fired guns on set to unnerve his actors and filmed the chase scene in “The French Connection” without a permit – he didn’t convey the message. Instead, he fired Schifrin and crammed his soundtrack with equally disturbing music by avant-garde masters Krzysztof Penderecki, George Crumb, Anton Webern, and Hans Werner Henze, not to mention Mike Oldfield.

Happily, most of Schifrin’s other collaborators were more genial. He worked frequently with Clint Eastwood and scored George Lucas’ first feature, “THX-1138.” In all, he earned 22 Grammy nominations (winning five), four Primetime Emmy nominations, and six Academy Award nominations. He received an honorary Oscar in 2018.

Schifrin made a very healthy living arranging and composing across genres, including bossa nova, jazz, bebop, rock, and classical, all the while cashing those lucrative Hollywood paychecks. Alongside the theme to “Mission: Impossible,” the music he composed for the road-tarring sequence in “Cool Hand Luke,” picked up as the theme for ABC “Eyewitness News,” kept those sweet royalties rolling in.

If anything, when “Mission: Impossible” made the leap to the big screen in 1996, the theme gained renewed vigor in a franchise that has spanned nearly 20 years.

The four-note motto that propels Schifrin’s most memorable music sprang from Morse code for “M” (dash dash) “I” (dot dot). The composer claimed he wrote it in only a matter of minutes, spurred by the idea of a lighted fuse and a desire to keep the tone light and fun, with the promise of adventure and excitement, but with a sense of humor. Further, he employed 5/4 rhythm to lend it a sense of unpredictability.

For Lalo Schifrin, a multifaceted talent in so many fields, even the impossible was effortlessly, elegantly possible. R.I.P.

“Concierto Caribeño” for flute and orchestra

Lalo Schifrin and Dizzy Gillespie

“Cool Hand Luke”

Rejected score from “The Exorcist”

The disturbing trailer

Lalo receives his honorary Academy Award from Eastwood

Schifrin’s greatest hit

June 27, 2025
Summer Self-Care Enjoying Midsummer Ale

I’ve been too busy to concentrate on posting today. But it is summer. Remember to take some time for yourself and enjoy some “Midsummer Ale.”

June 26, 2025
Kurt Schwertsik Birthday Celebration

Even if Erik Satie had never claimed the mantle of “Velvet Gentleman,” there would still be Kurt Schwertsik. Schwertsik, impish and dandified on the one occasion I met him (pictured, right), was born in Vienna on this date, 90 years ago.

A pupil of both Joseph Marx – a self-professed romantic of rather conservative bent – and avant-garde icon Karlheinz Stockhausen, Schwertsik was a founding member of the so-called Third Viennese School. He also co-founded the ensembles die reihe (the series), with Friedrich Cerha, the composer who completed Alban Berg’s “Lulu,” and MOB art and Tone ART, with his friend HK Gruber. (All uses of upper and lower case are Schwertsik’s. Clearly, he is rather loose in his application of the shift key!)

In addition, he played horn with the Vienna Symphony, and taught at the Vienna Conservatory and Vienna Musikhochschule.

Schwertsik’s music is frequently characterized by irony and humor, and invariably rooted in melody and tonality.

I had the privilege to interview him during a concert held at Austrian Cultural Forum New York in March 2012. The Aron Quartett performed his “skizzen und entwürfe” (“sketches and drawings”), from 1974, and a Schwertsik world premiere, “Lammersammlung” (“Song Collection”), which had been commissioned for the occasion. Also on the program were works by Erich Zeisl and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Schwertsik, sporting Freudian beard and spectacles, was all smiles, and rather dapper, in cravat and red velvet jacket. He exuded much charm and held the audience in the palm of his hand.

By the time of our meeting, his “Dracula’s House-and-Court Music” had already become a staple of my Halloween programming, just as I try to include his Strauss tribute, “Vienna Chronicles 1848,” in my playlists around New Year’s. Neither piece is posted on YouTube.

Here’s one that’s new to me, “Adieu Satie,” for bandoneon and string quartet:

“Conversation Piece” for guitar and marimba:

“Drei späte Liebeslieder” (“Three Late Love Songs”) for cello and piano:

Happy birthday, Kurt Schwertsik!

June 25, 2025

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