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You may have seen my post yesterday about Yo-Yo Ma on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It just so happens that Colbert paid tribute to Ma in 2011, when the cellist received a Kennedy Center Honor. Watch it here:
Happy 60th, Yo-Yo Ma!
PHOTO: Ma with fellow Kennedy Center Honorees (clockwise) Meryl Streep, Neil Diamond, Barbara Cook and Sonny Rollins
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Something about autumn puts me in the mind of Baroque music (and Brahms). However, since the Baroque isn’t really my area of expertise – and since, therefore, a lot of it starts to sound the same to me – I thought I’d devote my program tomorrow morning on WPRB to music of the NEO-Baroque.
Some of it will consist of pastiches by 20th and 21st century composers dressed up in antique clothing; a lot of it will assimilate Baroque forms while remaining decidedly of our time. In addition, there will be variations on Baroque themes and tributes to Baroque masters.
Not a lot to do about the hankering for Brahms, unless I break down and play his “Handel Variations.” I hope you’ll join me tomorrow morning from 6 to 11 ET, on WPRB 103.3 FM or at wprb.com. I’ll be donning the powdered wig and giggling bwoo-hoo-hoohoohoo, on Classic Ross Amico.
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Thank you, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, for bringing not just Yo-Yo Ma, but Misty Copeland to late night television. Has a cultural figure been given so much air time on network TV since the days of Johnny Carson? Ma sat in with the band all night, playing Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Gershwin’s “Prelude No. 1” and a jazzy rendition of Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan,” with ample plugs from Colbert for Ma’s new album, “Songs from the Arc of Life.”
If you missed it, here are a few highlights, including two and half minutes of Bach for unaccompanied cello (if you don’t count the dancing):
http://time.com/4062685/misty-copeland-yo-yo-ma-late-show/
I don’t expect it to change the late night landscape, but how nice to see something elevating on television for a change. It makes me feel good about the world for a few minutes.
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Arguably the most important Polish composer of his generation, Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) absorbed the musical influences of Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin and Claude Debussy, and then put them through his own creative refinery. Listening to Szymanowski can be a bit like submerging oneself too long in a hot bath – the same low blood-pressure, the increased heart rate, the wooziness. Though the harmonies and melodies suggest the familiar patterns of tonality, the traditional framework has been almost wholly eaten away by the hothouse atmosphere. The music is seductive and dangerous, and one risks being overcome by languor, even as one is overrun by fast-growing vegetation. It may be in poor taste to suggest that so much humidity was bad for the acute tuberculosis that eventually claimed him at the age 55.
Even so, happy birthday, Karol Szymanowski!
Symphony No. 2 (1910):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OMjbIdQBjc
Symphony No. 3 “Song of the Night” (1914):
PHOTO: Languid Szymanowski
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Clearly, not all the French living in 1900 were quite as prescient as Jules Verne – though how cool would it be to live in a world of bat-like firemen and whale buses? How efficient for schoolmasters to dump books into a meat-grinder and have knowledge transmitted directly into students’ brains? And how useful for children to have the ability to rob an eagle’s nest?
Interesting that so many of these automated schemes involve someone having to supervise by pressing many buttons or manipulating levers (for example, the barber and the beauty station). It would seem as much trouble as simply performing the tasks the old-fashioned way – which, come to think of it, is probably why they never caught on.
The outlook for theater orchestras, however, seems eerily prescient. View these breathtaking prognostications here:
Aaron Copland (93) Beethoven (95) Composer (114) Film Music (144) Film Score (143) Film Scores (255) Halloween (94) John Williams (195) KWAX (229) Leonard Bernstein (104) Marlboro Music Festival (125) Movie Music (159) Mozart (91) Opera (213) Philadelphia Orchestra (89) Picture Perfect (174) Princeton Symphony Orchestra (109) Radio (88) Ross Amico (244) Roy's Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner (290) The Classical Network (101) The Lost Chord (269) Vaughan Williams (105) WPRB (397) WWFM (881)
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