At last, the truth can be told: from the back of this year’s lavish Bard program book. The sleeping giant of Czech music stirs! ALL HAIL MARTINU.
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Martinu Awakens Bard Celebrates Czech Giant
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Amadeus Turns 40 New Miniseries Arrives
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I had been holding off until Antonio Salieri’s birthday (Salieri born on this date in 1750) to share two bits of news, which, because of my self-imposed delay, you may have already heard by now.
First, Milos Forman’s highly entertaining and Academy Award winning film of Peter Shaffer’s play is coming to 4K UHD Blu-ray for its 40th anniversary. (The film was released in September 1984.) This is the theatrical cut, as opposed to the more widely-circulated-in-recent-years director’s cut. (Stop with these directors’ cuts supplanting the versions we originally fell in love with, please!) Forman’s revision adds 20 minutes and hardens the original PG rating to an R. Interesting to see once, in my opinion, but it should be treated as a curiosity and consigned to the bonus features. I have no firm information as to whether or not it will be included in the new set, however. If you want to devote the time to doing a more intensive search, you may be able to find out more.
The other bit of news – again, perhaps old news at this point, but the first I am mentioning it – is that “Amadeus” has been adapted into a new miniseries, projected to stream later this year. For his source material, screenwriter Joe Barton is apparently sidestepping Shaffer (and perhaps his copyright?) by going back to the Alexander Pushkin play “Mozart and Salieri” of 1830, which cemented the legend of Salieri’s enmity for Mozart. The play was previously adapted as an opera of the same name by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
In the latest version, Will Sharp will play Wolfie and Paul Bettany will assume the role of Salieri. They’ll have some big buckled shoes to fill, as both Forman’s leads – Tom Hulce as Mozart and F. Murray Abraham as Salieri – were nominated for Best Actor, and Abraham took home the Academy Award – as, for that matter, did Forman’s film, which was honored as Best Picture, among its total eight-Oscar haul.
That said, any popular entertainment that takes classical music seriously can’t be a bad thing. If nothing else, it will remind audiences of, and perhaps attract new viewers to, the 1984 classic.
Happy birthday, Antonio Salieri!
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Bard Music Festival Berlioz Finale
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I’ve got a full day of travel ahead, so again, I’m afraid I will have to postpone sharing my most favorable impressions of the charming Sing for Hope production of Pauline Viardot’s fairy tale opera “Le dernier sorcier” (“The Last Sorcerer”) that capped the first weekend of this year’s Bard Music Festival, “Berlioz and His World,” with a performance at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts last Sunday. I got a good start on it this morning, but I want to make sure to do it justice. So watch for my reminiscences and assessments tomorrow!
As a singer, pianist, collaborator, friend, and confidante, Viardot was a major contributor to the artistic milieu of Berlioz’s time. I can’t wait to write more about her.
In the meantime, all good things must come to an end. Today is the final day of the festival. Program Ten, “Berlioz’s Transformation of the World of Sound,” including works ranging from Berlioz to Steve Reich (!), will be presented at the campus’ Olin Hall at 11:30 this morning (with a pre-concert talk at 11:00).
The festival will conclude with Program Eleven, “Faust and the Spirit of the 19th Century,” featuring Berlioz’s “The Damnation of Faust,” at 3:00 this afternoon (with a pre-concert talk at 2:00). The latter performance will also be available for streaming.
To learn more, visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my personal ride to the abyss!
Fisher Center at Bard
Delacroix, “Faust and Mephistopheles Galloping through the Night of the Witches’ Sabbath” (1828)
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Mackerras Gilbert & Sullivan Delight
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Sir Charles Mackerras excelled as an interpreter of a lot of different kinds of music. He was acclaimed as a Mozartian and recorded a celebrated set of the composer’s complete symphonies. He was also something of a specialist in Czech music, setting down most of Janeček’s operas, in particular.
But he was a lifelong enthusiast of the works of Gilbert & Sullivan, from the time he was a boy, in to old age. This week on “Sweetness and Light,” we’ll enjoy an hour of Mackerras’ delightful Gilbert & Sullivan recordings.
When the copyright expired on Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music in 1950, Mackerras arranged any number of the composer’s works, but most especially the stage successes conceived in collaboration with librettist W.S. Gilbert, into a ballet, “Pineapple Poll.” Employing a method similar to that of Manuel Rosenthal, when reimagining the works of Jacques Offenbach into the ballet “Gaîté Parisienne,” Mackerras cherry-picks from his harvested source material to mix and match and present the music in new and inventive ways. There are a lot of familiar tunes here for seasoned Savoyards, so feel free to hum along.
Mackerras was in his 70s, when he returned to the recording studio to set down more G&S, with a series of their operettas issued on single compact discs (shorn of the overtures and dialogue for time considerations) for the Telarc label in the 1990s. To round out the hour, we’ll sample from his late-career recording of “The Mikado.”
Oh joy unbounded! Oh rapture unexampled! Make way for Charles Mackerras and Gilbert & Sullivan on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Stream it, wherever you are, at the link:
BONUS! A 1959 broadcast of “Pineapple Poll,” with the Royal Ballet. The work was co-created by the production’s choreographer, John Cranko, and its arranger/conductor (Mackerras, of course).
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Glenn Gould & The Organist: A Bach Story
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For some reason, everyone seems to think August is a great time to get married. So, alas and alack, it is with much disappointment that I am unable to attend the second weekend of the Bard Music Festival, devoted to “Berlioz and His World.” However, I still have some memories and assessments to share from last weekend. Tomorrow I hope to write-up my impressions of last Sunday’s performance of Pauline Viardot’s fairy tale opera “Le dernier sorcier” (“The Last Sorcerer”).
In the meantime, here’s a follow-up to my post about Bill Osborne. Bill, you’ll recall, is my most recent Bard acquaintance, a retired organist who studied at Fontainebleau with the venerable pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. For over 40 years, he served as Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Denison University. Do yourself a service, if you haven’t read it, and check out my previous post about him, which is chock full of amusing anecdotes! You’ll find it at one of the links below.
Somehow, in writing about Boulanger and Bernstein and Osborne’s adventures in Princeton, I failed to share his Glenn Gould story. Bill was rehearsing an organ recital for the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor May Festival, when he was asked if it would be all right if the now-legendary pianist might have access to the auditorium, as Gould wanted to prepare for his appearance with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. (I learn through a search of May Festival records that the concert took place on May 4, 1958.) Anyway, even though Bill had the auditorium reserved for the afternoon, naturally he said yes. It may have been spring, but Gould, one of classical music’s great eccentrics, showed up at the appointed time, bundled, characteristically, in heavy winter clothing.
The work he was scheduled to perform was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, but when he sat down at the keyboard, it was not Beethoven he rehearsed, but rather, from first note to last, Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” It’s probably not necessary for me to mention that the recording Gould made of the variations only a few years before, in 1955, remains one of the all-time classics of the gramophone. With Gould’s permission, Bill sat there all by himself, out in the house, and enjoyed a command performance.
Afterward, Gould expressed interest in the venue’s organ and asked if he could try the instrument. Again, Bill said yes (naturally), and Gould sat there in his street shoes and pulled some stops and made a terrific noise. A few years later, he would record Bach’s “The Art of Fugue” on the organ in 1962.
Just after Gould’s Beethoven performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the pianist again encountered Bill, as he walked off stage, and what was the first thing he said? He wanted to know how Bill’s recital went. Bill told me he was incredibly touched by that.
Anyway, that’s the Glenn Gould story. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
The Bard Music Festival continues through tomorrow at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Tonight’s concert, featuring Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 and Joachim Raff’s Symphony 10 “Autumn” (with Berlioz’s “Les francs-juges” Overture the “William Tell” Overture” by the composer’s bête noire, Gioachino Rossini), is available for livestream. You’ll find a complete schedule at https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/
Fisher Center at Bard
My previous Bill Osborne post
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1360873204831739&set=a.883855802533484
History of the Philadelphia Orchestra at the May Festival
https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/history-lessons-ums-philorch/
Programs for the 1957 May Festival. I couldn’t locate 1958. Osborne is credited as pianist with the University Choral Union and bassoonist with the Musical Society Orchestra, conducted by Thor Johnson, then music director of the Cincinnati Symphony.
https://aadl.org/sites/default/files/docfiles/programs_19570501b.pdf
Glenn Gould plays the “Goldberg Variations” in 1955
PHOTOS: With Bill Osborne at Bard (top); Glenn Gould at the May Festival in 1958
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