Calling all rapscallions and scapegraces! This week on “Picture Perfect,” get ready to revel in some freewheeling lack of judgment, with an hour of films based on picaresque novels.
For those of you who weren’t English majors, the picaresque novel is a literary genre often characterized by the presence of rogues or anti-heroes as protagonists, episodic, wayward structures, and, not infrequently, low humor.
We’ll hear music from “The Reivers,” after William Faulkner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a coming-of-age story about a boy swept into automobile theft and illicit horseracing in the American South. Mark Rydell directed the 1969 film, which stars Steve McQueen as the rakish Boon Hogganbeck and features narration by Burgess Meredith. John Williams wrote the breezy Americana score.
Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is frequently categorized as an American picaresque. It’s certainly one of the funniest of “serious” books. A middling film adaptation was made in 1960, directed by Michael Curtiz, with Tony Randall given top billing, shifting the focus of the story to the con artistry of the King and the Duke. It features an evocative score by Jerome Moross.
If Hervey Allen’s “Anthony Adverse” had any humor to begin with, it was definitely lost in translation. (Too bad the novel was written in English.) However, the 1936 screen adaptation certainly does sprawl. One could say it’s picaresque in the worst way. It just doesn’t go anywhere. It does, however, feature a top-notch cast (Frederic March, Olivia De Havilland, Claude Rains, etc.) and an Academy Award-winning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
While the modern picaresque novel has its roots in the Renaissance, the genre really seemed to hit its stride in the 18th century, with comic novelists such as Henry Fielding. Fielding’s “Tom Jones,” perhaps the quintessential picaresque, was made into a film in 1963. It went on to win Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Tony Richardson), Best Adapted Screenplay (John Osborne), and Best Original Score (John Addison). Addison’s music suits Richardson’s quirky virtuosity like an off-kilter powdered wig.
We’re up to no good, with an hour of picaresque adventures, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, 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
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Picaresque Adventures on “Picture Perfect”
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Respighi and Diamond Look to the Past to Create Their Own Classics
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Neoclassicism is the name of the game today, as we celebrate two composers who scored their biggest successes by building on styles and themes of the past.
Ottorino Respighi composed not only his “Ancient Airs and Dances” suites, but also tone poems – while not strictly speaking “neoclassical” (in fact, more like orgiastic) – evocative of Rome’s illustrious and/or notorious history. He also wrote music redolent of the Catholic Church, with works influenced by Gregorian modes. Even his ballet, “Belkis, Queen of Sheba,” is set 3000 years ago.
In 1944, American composer David Diamond was asked by conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos for a “happy” piece. It was still the height of World War II, and Mitropoulos was depressed from conducting too much 12-tone music. Diamond’s response was the clear, cool “Rounds for String Orchestra.” a work alive with imitative counterpoint. The title is a reference to musical canons or “rounds” – you know, like the “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Frère Jacques” – with the different “voices” entering in rapid succession along the same melodic lines.
This is music is full of optimism, vitality, and joy, qualities too often dismissed at the expense of the weightier considerations of human existence. Clearly, it hit the spot. “Rounds” went on to become Diamond’s best-known music, embraced as a bona fide American classic.
Happy birthday, Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) and David Diamond (1915-2005)!
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Uto Ughi performs Respighi’s “Concerto Gregoriano”
Diamond’s “Rounds for String Orchestra,” played with youthful exuberance by the Portland Youth Orchestra
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When Worlds Collide: Jerome Moross Remembers George Antheil
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When worlds collide! On George Antheil’s birthday, here are some recorded recollections of Jerome Moross of Trenton’s “Bad Boy of Music.” Antheil, one of the great eccentrics, was most notorious for his “Ballet Mécanique,” a clangorous work for player pianos, electric bells, sirens, and airplane propellers, that caused the audience at its premiere in Paris in 1926 to take the place apart.
Moross was composer of the film score for “The Big Country” and the musical theater piece “The Golden Apple” (which yielded the standard “Lazy Afternoon”). When Moross refers to Benny, he of course means his good friend, Bernard Herrmann, with whom he used to sneak into rehearsals of Carnegie Hall concerts, and who later wrote the music for “Citizen Kane,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Jason and the Argonauts,” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”
Antheil eventually wound up in California himself, where his musical language settled down, so that he earned his bread writing film scores and symphonies, as well as books, newspaper articles, and magazine columns on a wide variety of subjects, including war correspondence, murder mysteries, advice to the lovelorn, glandular criminology and bust enhancement (!).
It was the latter topic that attracted actress Hedy Lamarr for what started out as a consultation. It turned out Lamarr was also every inch the Renaissance person, and soon they were partnering on a frequency-hopping device conceived to prevent the enemy from blocking Allied torpedoes. They offered it to the military, which never used it. In recent years, it has been claimed (perhaps overstated) that their invention anticipated modern spread-spectrum communications technology.
It’s a small world after all – from Trenton to New York to the Champs-Élysées to Hollywood. Happy birthday, George Antheil!
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Moross talks Antheil
https://archive.org/details/AM_1979_06_19
The Ben Hecht film he refers to is the ballet noir “Specter of the Rose”
Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique”
His Symphony No. 4
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“Fantastic” Conductors Tackle Mahler’s “Resurrection”
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I’m sorry, I’ve been so busy lately, and if I don’t get started on these posts first thing in the morning, it’s very hard for me to write anything of consequence that reads well. Generally speaking, the earlier I write, the better. Best is when it’s so early, I can’t even think. Just sit down with a cup of coffee and let those fingers go.
But life is such that I can’t always do that. Which is why, for Gustav Mahler’s birthday, here I am at 11:00 a.m., sharing a video of Yoda, Gandalf, and Voldemort conducting the “Resurrection” Symphony. Hey, don’t let it be said that I don’t do my part to popularize the classics.
And it’s not like it’s that farfetched. Dismiss the concept, if you’d like, as puerile nonsense, but it would take wizards of this magnitude to translate the work’s emotional grandeur into images worthy of its transcendent power, even if the music itself is more seismic, uplifting, and transformative than anything that could possibly be expressed on a motion picture screen.
Let me know which of the three you think has the best technique, if you’re so inclined, and happy birthday, Gustav Mahler.
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Worthwhile American Music Marathon Archived for a Limited Time on WHRB
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Last week was a really a crazy one for me. I had to so much to do in an abbreviated amount of time (since everyone had off on Friday, in anticipation of the holiday) and the madness only intensified yesterday, since not only was it the Fourth of July, but it was my birthday. And on my birthday, it’s never just about me. Because there are family obligations and entertaining to be done. And c’mon, it was America 250! However, my entire life it’s been like that, more or less. Never be born on a holiday! But at least I’ve always got off work. All the same, I’m always glad whenever the festivities are over and we can all just get back to our own routines.
I wasn’t even able to finish everything I *needed* to get done, so of course I neglected to promote a special marathon of American music that was broadcast yesterday of WHRB, the radio station of Harvard University. Every year, my friend Mather Pfeiffenberger makes the trek back to his alma mater to share a special Fourth of July program, and this year was set to be a doozy. Unfortunately, Mather wound up being stuck in D.C., but he was able to enlist a trusted colleague, Jonathan Lehrich, to share his thoughtfully curated playlist and some of his insights into the music.
I only got to catch a little of it yesterday, but I must say, the selections I heard were exceptional, and many of them are things you will never hear on the radio – live concert recordings, historic documents of such vintage they would never be considered for air play anywhere else, and more – alongside interesting performances of certified American classics, some of them offered in alternative editions. Seriously, if you care about American classical music and you think you just can’t listen to another performance of “Victory at Sea” or the “Grand Canyon Suite,” do check this out. I know an awful lot, and there were things on this show I have never heard.
But how can I listen, you say, if the show was yesterday? Surely, we ALL can’t fit into Classic Ross Amico’s time-traveling DeLorean…
Well, you’re in luck, because the show is archived at the WHRB website for the next two weeks. Visit whrb.org, run your cursor over PROGRAMMING, and from the dropdown box select BROADCAST ARCHIVE.
Ignore any pop-ups and DO NOT click the box (if you get it) that reads ACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT TO START. I’m not sure if it’s actually affiliated with the station, or if it’s just a phishing scam. Either way, you don’t need to register. Simply click the box under BROADCAST ARCHIVE that says YESTERDAY (if you’re seeing this after Sunday, the box will read JULY 4). Then click 1:00 to start. The program ran from 1:00 to 10:00 p.m.
I am eager to hear it myself. Enjoy!
To learn more, here’s a link to Mather’s Facebook post about the broadcast:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0zt9jCsuZdjT7ZNAd4m1a8JyMQQ7zqMPwHSVjay8hKGWp4R4SaLFwbJcSNmpuMg4El&id=100093688583899
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