Classic Ross Amico

Death on the Nile: Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” Opens the Met at Lincoln Center

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Ross Amico

September 16, 2026

in Daily Dispatch

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60 years ago today, the Metropolitan Opera consecrated its new house at New York’s Lincoln Center with the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” Adapted from Shakespeare’s play, the libretto was fashioned by Franco Zeffirelli.

Zeffirelli could be a fine director, but in the opera house his lust for opulence and grandeur threatened to obscure the human drama. Here, his vision of “Cabiria”-style excess – with 22 principal singers, chorus, dancers (choreographed by Alvin Ailey), extras, and live camels – swelled the cast to 400 players. Many years later, I worked with Justino Diaz, who sang Antony, and he described the opulence of the production as being like Zeffirelli’s “Turandot” times 20.

There was only so much of this that Barber, or even Shakespeare, could take. The excess of steel, brass, and aluminum sets pushed the house’s state-of-the-art technology to the literal breaking point. The weight proved too much for the newly installed revolving stage, and Leontyne Price, who sang Cleopatra, was trapped inside a hydraulically-operated pyramid. Fortunately, that was during rehearsals, but the costumes continued to prove cumbersome, the technical workarounds awkward, and the spectacle soul-numbingly vulgar. Audience response to the overinflated production made for a cool night in the desert. As for the critics… you think Julius Caesar had it bad?

You can imagine how Barber, elegant and reserved two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (one for an earlier opera, “Vanessa,” introduced at the Old Met) and composer of the ubiquitous “Adagio for Strings,” would have taken it. In the years following the work’s brutal reception, he struggled with depression and alcoholism.

“Antony and Cleopatra” was extensively revised by Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti in an edition first performed in 1975. Barber also prepared a concert suite, “Two Scenes from ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’” for Price.

Barber provided two other works for the opening of Lincoln Center: the Piano Concerto, which earned him his second Pulitzer, and a piece for soprano and orchestra, “Andromache’s Farewell.” The former was performed by John Browning and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. The latter was performed by Martina Arroyo and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Thomas Schippers.

Thankfully, the Met transcended the failure of its opening run. The cavernous, 3800-seat opera house – the largest in the world – has seen some magnificent performances over the decades, featuring many of the world’s – and history’s – greatest singers.

As you can imagine, you need stellar voices, compelling music, and solid productions to fill such a venue night after night, and in recent years, the Met has struggled. There are plenty of performances that sell out – a lot of the new operas make for good theater, even if the composers can’t compete with Puccini – but new productions of the classics that go dark and contemporary, in a bid for “relevance,” often misfire. Most crucially, voices and personalities that can whip audiences into the kinds of frenzies that greeted the greatest singers of the past are always rare.

Not all the challenges facing the Met are of the house’s creation. The industry and culture have shifted enormously since the ‘90s. The collapse of the record industry, the selling off or dumbing down of classical music radio stations, the lack of television, magazine, and newspaper exposure, cuts to music education, a shift in the priorities of the donor class, changes in the approaches to vocal training, and lack of interest in opera or classical music within the home have marginalized opera, as an art form, as an entertainment, and as an aspirational, inspirational pursuit with the power to lift us outside ourselves.

Still, there’s plenty of magic left in the Met. This season, I’m curious to see – and hear – what Missy Mazzoli makes of “Lincoln in the Bardo.”

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Documentary teasing “Antony and Cleopatra,” with Barber, Zeffirelli, Price, Thomas Schippers, Rudolf Bing, and Marc Chagall, who painted the Met’s iconic dual murals – which the organization has been trying to sell, with the provision that they continue to be displayed in the Met lobby.
Going Bananas for Richard Arnell

by

Ross Amico

September 15, 2026

in Daily Dispatch

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I first learned of Richard Arnell, born on this date in 1917, from a recording of his ballet “The Great Detective.” But he was also a renowned symphonist, who spent the war years here in the United States, cut off from his home in the U.K. while visiting the 1939 World’s Fair. Here, he cultivated important friendships with Bernard Herrmann, Virgil Thomson, and Sir Thomas Beecham (who, alongside Sir John Barbirolli and Leopold Stokowski, championed his concert works). He also wrote film music for Robert J. Flaherty and ballets for George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton.

“The Great Detective,” commissioned by the Sadlers-Wells Ballet in 1953, is transparently influenced by the exploits of Sherlock Holmes, though not based on any particular book or episode in the Holmes canon. In fact, the inclusion of a gorilla places it more in line with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” – although the tone of the ballet is certainly more tongue-in-cheek.

The complete ballet includes an “Overture;” “Police and the Doctor;” “The Distracted Ladies;” “Detective’s Mental Arithmetic;” “Pas de Deux: Distressed Ladies and Suspect;” “Pas de Trois: Distressed Ladies and Doctor;” “The Victims;” “The Fiend;” “Villains;” “Villains and Police;” “Dance of Deduction;” “Finale;” “The Fight;” and “Doctor’s Distress – Detective Safe.”

Arnell himself recorded a suite from the work in 1953. Martin Yates recorded it complete with the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2008.

Interestingly, “The Great Detective” would not be the only occasion on which a gorilla would be associated with Arnell’s music. Not so very long ago, I wrote about his Symphony No. 5, which the composer humorously compared to a rude simian he visited at the London Zoo. It has a great tune in the last movement, derived from the music hall, that Arnell’s father used to sing and whistle.

Arnell died in 2009 at the age of 91. We remember him with fondness on his birthday anniversary.

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“The Great Detective” (the composer conducting)

Symphony No. 5 “Gorilla”
Johann Michael: The Hidden Haydn

by

Ross Amico

September 14, 2026

in Daily Dispatch

He ain’t heavy; he’s Haydn’s brother.

Though Johann Michael Haydn’s entrance into a musical career was eased by his yet-to-be-famous older brother, he very much earned a reputation on his own merits. Michael started out as an organist and chorister (gone to Vienna at age 8; employed as an organist there by age 12). It’s said that Michael was the brighter student of the two and that his singing was more admired.

In 1762, Michael arrived in Salzburg, where he rose through the ranks to become concertmaster and organist to Archbishop Sigismund Schrattenbach. In Schrattenbach’s service, he churned out more than 360 compositions. The Haydns met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Salzburg. Naturally, his music made a great impression. What’s surprising, perhaps, is that their music made a great impression on him, as well.

For years, Michael’s Symphony No. 26 was misidentified as Mozart’s Symphony No. 37. Mozart had borrowed the work to perform in Linz. On another occasion, Mozart stepped up to fulfill one of Michael’s commissions (anonymously) when Michael was too ill to do so himself. When he came to write his Requiem in 1791, Mozart clearly remembered the requiem mass Michael had composed some 20 years earlier on the death of his employer.

For his part, Mozart’s father, Leopold, disapproved of Michael’s heavy drinking. Perhaps that only made him all the more appealing to his son.

Joseph Haydn also thought very highly of his brother’s music. He found his sacred works to be particularly effective, bearing an intimate and devotional stamp in contrast to his own more secular, monumental approach. At a point, Michael received a job offer from Joseph’s former boss, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, but he opted to remain in Salzburg. He would die there at the age of 68.

This summer’s Bard Music Festival, “Mozart and His World,” offered rare opportunities to hear Michael Haydn’s Requiem and the opening movement of his Symphony No. 26, long attributed to Mozart as his Symphony No. 37. Mozart only wrote the intro; the rest is hidden Haydn.

Happy birthday, JMH.
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FUN FACT: Franz Joseph and Johann Michael had a still younger brother named Johann Evangelist. He was a tenor, whom the family nicknamed Hansl (without the “e”).

IMAGES: Those talented Haydn boys, Michael (left) and Joseph, knocking out another symphony
Schoenberg, You Beautiful Mountain, You

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Ross Amico

September 13, 2026

in Daily Dispatch

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First of all, this is the first opportunity I’ve had to wish all of you who observe Rosh Hashanah a sweet new year!

There’s been a lot going on the past couple of days. And now today is the birthday of dodecaphonic icon Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951).

Schoenberg, who was born Jewish, converted to Lutheranism in 1898 – not, as might be assumed, for professional reasons or in an attempt to assimilate, but because of a nagging spiritual hunger.

He formally converted back to Judaism in defiance of the National Socialists, who came to power in 1933. He was on vacation in France, when he was warned that it would dangerous for him to return to Germany. He reclaimed membership in the Jewish faith in a Paris synagogue. Schoenberg was summarily denounced by the Nazis as a Jew and an exponent of degenerate art. He was dismissed from his post at the Prussian Academy of Letters, where he had taught since 1925.

Unbowed, he drafted a “Four-Point Program for Jewry,” calling for a united Jewish party and the creation of an independent Jewish state. He emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Los Angeles, where he taught at U.C.L.A.

Throughout his career, Schoenberg produced a number of works on Jewish themes, including his opera “Moses und Aron” (which he worked at between 1930 and 1932, before his second conversion). In 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, he composed a setting of “Kol Nidre.” He also wrote an oratorio, “Die Jakobsleiter,” between 1917 and 1922.

In reputation, in photographs, and in his music, Schoenberg can often come across as a somewhat forbidding figure. But once one learns of his fondness for tennis, his friendship with George Gershwin, his delight in Hopalong Cassidy, and his fear of the number 13, it’s impossible not to grasp his humanity. In home movies, he smiles with friends. In photos, he loves his children. His social circle included Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx.

There’s a section in Jeremy Eichler’s book “Time’s Echo” (published by Alfred A. Knopf in fall of 2023) – see the link below to learn more about it – that I guarantee will instill in a reader a greater affection for Schoenberg the man, possibly even a genuine curiosity to revisit his music. Because it turns out the somber godhead of serialism was actually a real mensch, a passionate humanitarian, even if touchingly blinkered by his idealism.

His cantata “A Survivor of Warsaw” proved to be so disturbing in 1947, with its uncompromising text relating the barbarity of a concentration camp, complete with beatings and gas chambers, that nobody knew what to do with it. More disturbing was a willful silence surrounding many of the atrocities committed against Jews, in particular, that was upheld seemingly everywhere.

When the Boston Symphony Orchestra hesitated to program the piece, which it had commissioned, it was picked up by a semi-amateur group, consisting of cowboys and farmhands, who mastered not only the twelve-tone idiom but Hebrew for its first performance – in Albuquerque, New Mexico! – in 1948. Time magazine reported that the work was performed twice, to allow the audience to better absorb what it was listening to, and that it responded with thunderous applause.

With all the division in our country right now, how can this image not charm one’s socks off: Schoenberg, possibly the most divisive composer in the history of classical music, connecting with the salt of the earth.

Happy birthday, Arnold Schoenberg, and shana tova!

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More impressions of Jeremy Eichler’s “Time’s Echo”

https://rossamico.com/2024/02/06/times-echo-music-the-holocaust/
Music of Remembrance and Consolation for the 25th Anniversary of 9/11 on “The Lost Chord”

by

Ross Amico

September 12, 2026

in Daily Dispatch, The Lost Chord

4 responses

The day after 9/11, I’m sure we’re all ready to put it behind us. But 25 years is a landmark, and I didn’t have a show yesterday on which I could share some appropriate music. There’s only so much one can do with a film music program!

The anniversary is especially sobering this year, as I realize that we are now as far away from the World Trade Center attacks as my birth was from Pearl Harbor. That’s the perspective from which younger generations now perceive 9/11. It’s something that happened a long time ago.

While I understood that abstractly, it only really registered a year or two ago, when I noticed all these irreverent 9/11 posts on social media. Now, I can be as irreverent as the next guy, but these are obviously people who were not old enough to remember 9/11. There are still plenty of folks out there, who aren’t all that old, who experienced the terror first hand or continue to suffer loss, debilitating illness, or even lasting trauma just from having witnessed it on TV. All of us are living now with the legacy of 9/11. The world was forever changed that day, and not for the better. September 11, 2001 was the dawn of a new century of anxiety and dark uncertainty. We are living in unkinder times.

There’s really very little I can add to the countless memorials and reflections surrounding the surreal, unforgettable events of that September morning – a morning that, for those of us old enough to have lived through it, still feels like yesterday. But I’m a radio host, and I have a platform, and I would like to use it to try to encourage some reflection and maybe even offer a little solace. To this end, this Saturday on “The Lost Chord,” I will be presenting an hour of music of remembrance and consolation.

Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Puts addresses the horrendous imprint of the attacks in his Symphony No. 2, which in a single movement traces an emotional arc from comparative innocence of an almost cinematic benignity, shocked by a sudden, violent upheaval, from which emerges a more reflective epilogue of uncertainty and fluctuating hope. It certainly does not leave one feeling uncompromisingly desolate in the manner of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 6, the last movement of which some have compared to a world laid waste by atomic warfare.

Philadelphia composer Robert Moran wrote his “Trinity Requiem” to mark the tenth anniversary of the attacks. Moran rises to the occasion to provide an ethereal masterpiece, a 30-minute journey into paradise worthy to stand alongside the transcendent Requiem of Gabriel Fauré.

“Trinity Requiem” received its first performance in 2011 at Trinity Wall Street, the so-called “Ground Zero church” in Lower Manhattan. Miraculously, a hundred-year-old sycamore tree preserved the church’s St. Paul Chapel, constructed in 1766, from destruction by debris from the World Trade Center, including what would have been a direct hit from a falling I-beam. A recording of Moran’s work was released on the Innova label, featuring the Trinity Youth Chorus and members of the Trinity Wall Street Choir under the direction of Robert Ridgell.

“Trinity Requiem” is scored for treble voices, four cellos, organ, and harp. Handbells are employed in the “Pie Jesu.” And, following in the steps of Fauré, Moran includes a setting of “In Paradisum,” emphasizing a desire to attain peace at last.

Listen for a remarkable moment that occurs in the “Offertory” – the fourth movement (built on a bass line employed by Johann Pachelbel in his famous Canon) – when a siren appears. It was not written into the score, but rather actual street noise that bled into the recording session – an eerie bit of serendipity, unavoidably conjuring memories of the horror that unfolded outside the venue a decade before. But it is horror recollected in tranquility.

I hope you’ll join me for “The Persistence of Memory,” music of remembrance and consolation to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon.

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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/