Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Spaghetti Western Music for Father’s Day

This week on “Picture Perfect,” with Father’s Day right around the corner, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the spaghetti western. After all, whose Dad doesn’t like spaghetti?

We’ll hear an hour of distinctive scores written for these ultra-cool, hyper-stylized westerns that were originally released in Italy, with their multinational casts heavily dubbed in post-production.

Spaghetti westerns frequently turned the conventions of American westerns on their heads. At any rate, the morality of the traditional western was made much murkier, with antiheroes cast as protagonists, usually motivated by greed and revenge. Especially greed.

As with the American film industry, only more so, when the Italians found something that worked, they went into overdrive, churning out literally dozens of knock-offs and imitations a year, until a given genre had run its financially lucrative course.

To this end, over 600 European westerns were produced between 1960 and 1980. The most influential of these were those directed by Sergio Leone, especially those of the so-called “Dollars” Trilogy – “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More,” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

These, of course, featured then-rising star Clint Eastwood. His co-star in the second and third films was Lee Van Cleef, who in American westerns like “High Noon” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” had bit parts as one of the villain’s henchmen, but became an international superstar as the spaghetti western’s most reliable – and bankable – heavy.

We’ll sample from music for the “Dollars” Trilogy, composed by Ennio Morricone, and the “Sabata” Trilogy (which also starred Van Cleef), composed by Marcello Giombini.

Tell Dad it’s all-you-can-eat. I’ll be piling the plates high with music from spaghetti westerns, on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

June 15, 2018
Classical Commute Tag Team Blowout Thursday

Carl Hemmingsen and I have been training hard in order to form a successful tag team for your afternoon commute.

Carl will hold you as if in a half nelson of continuous musical pleasure until 5 p.m. Then I’ll be over the ropes to execute a classical camel clutch, in celebration of the birthdays today of conductor Rudolf Kempe, composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and tenor John McCormack.

In the 6:00 hour, watch out for a slingshot suplex in the form of the “Yellow River Concerto,” an artifact of China’s Cultural Revolution – this to mark the birthday of pianist Lang Lang. We’ll break the birthday lock with “Broken Ink,” a colorfully orchestrated work that strives for almost cinematic grandeur, by Chinese-American composer Zhou Tian.

I hope you’ll join Carl and me for a tag team championship smackdown, this Thursday from 4 to 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org

June 14, 2018
MPR Raccoon a Twin Cities Triumph

Lalo Schifrin’s “Mission: Impossible” theme is put to good use by KARE 11 in Minneapolis as the St. Paul MPR Raccoon saga comes to a happy end. Is there anyone on the internet who missed this story? Or rather, 25 stories? Way to go, little guy. We could all learn from your courage and tenacity.

https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-lifestyle/nation-watches-as-intrepid-raccoon-scales-st-paul-skyscraper

June 13, 2018
Respighi & Pizzetti: Italian Masters at Marlboro

We’re headed back to the ‘80s for this week’s “Music from Marlboro” – the 1880s, that is.

We’ll hear music by two composers of “la generazione dell’Ottanta” (literally, “the Generation of the ‘80s”), artists of the post-Puccini era, born around 1880, who made their reputations largely in the concert halls, as opposed to in the opera houses. This would have been a change of pace for Italy.

The best known of these, of course, was Ottorino Respighi. Respighi may have written twelve operas – can you name them? – but unquestionably it is for his roof-raising tone poems and time-traveling suites for chamber orchestra that he is most celebrated.

Respighi’s “Il Tramonto” (or “The Sunset”), composed in 1918, was inspired by a poem of Shelley, which tells of a pair of crepuscular lovers who meet in the woods at twilight. The young woman wakes to find that the man has passed in the night.

We’ll hear a performance by Marlboro musicians on tour at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, in 2010, including Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, violinists Ira Levin and Yonah Zur, violist Beth Guterman, and cellist Saeunn Thorsteindottir.

Ildebrando Pizzetti was best known as an associate of the poet and playwright Gabriele d’Annunzio, providing incidental music for a number of d’Annunzio’s plays and setting his drama “Fedra” as an opera. Pizzetti’s Piano Trio in A major, written in 1925, is big music with big things to say. There is plenty of drama, lyricism, and warmth throughout the 30 minute piece, which is almost never heard.

It was performed, however, at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1968, by violinist Pina Carmirelli, cellist Leslie Parnas, and that venerable poet of the keyboard, Mieczyslaw Horszowski.

Temperatures will rise into the ‘80s, on this week’s “Music from Marlboro” – chamber music performances from the legendary Marlboro Music Festival – this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

June 13, 2018
Rediscovering Medtner Rachmaninoff’s Forgotten Genius

It’s hard to figure out exactly why the music of Nikolai Medtner hasn’t caught on with audiences. Except, of course, it hardly ever gets played, so nobody knows it’s out there.

On today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network, violinist Rolf Schulte will be joined by pianist Nicolas Namoradze for a performance of Medtner’s “Three Night Songs,” (or “Nocturnes”), Op. 16, alongside two works by Sergei Prokofiev – “Five Melodies,” Op. 35b, and the Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 80. The concert, titled “From Czarist Russia to the Soviet Union,” was recorded on April 19, at Elebash Recital Hall in Midtown Manhattan, as part of The Graduate Center, CUNY’s free “Music in Midtown” series, designed to showcase the university’s DMA program. Schulte is on the faculty there; Namoradze is a DMA candidate.

Medtner was a good friend and classmate of Sergei Rachmaninoff. Both studied with Vasily Safanov at the Moscow Conservatory. Later, they both became exiles, who shared a painful nostalgia for their homeland.

It was Rachmaninoff who arranged for Medtner his first North American concert tour – the programs decidedly uncommercial affairs, devoted entirely to Medtner’s music. Medtner never captured the public’s imagination in the way that Rachmaninoff did, and to this day, despite many recordings on the market (including the early ones sponsored by Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, twenty-fifth maharaja of the Kingdom of Mysore), Medtner remains largely a pianist’s composer.

Tellingly, Rachmaninoff believed whole-heartedly in his friend’s superior talent. He also described him as “the greatest composer of our time.” Medtner, for his part, deeply admired Rachmaninoff’s conducting, and supported him emotionally through periods of self-doubt. Rachmaninoff would dedicate his Fourth Piano Concerto to Medtner (composed in 1926; with the final, revised version appearing in 1941); Medtner returned the compliment by dedicating his Second Concerto (composed between 1920 and 1927) to Rachmaninoff.

Following today’s Noontime Concert broadcast, stick around to hear Medtner’s Piano Concerto No. 2. It will be among my featured works between 12 and 4 p.m. EDT on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

PHOTO: The Rachmaninoff-Medtner Mutual Admiration Society

June 12, 2018

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