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Julián Orbón Composer of Four Worlds

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Ross Amico

August 7, 2025

in Daily Dispatch

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Julián Orbón was a composer with his feet in four worlds.

In 1925, one hundred years ago today, he was born in Avilés, Spain. As a child, he studied music with his father, composer Benjamin Orbón. At 10, he entered the Oviedo Conservatory to begin his formal training.

When he was 13, the family moved to Cuba. There Orbon studied with José Ardévol, with whom he assembled a group of aspiring young composers, Grupo de Renovación, whose mission it was to promote new Cuban music. He was still in his teens when he stepped up to take over the direction of the then only recently-established Orbón Conservatory, following his father’s death.

Not long after, he won a scholarship to study composition with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. Afterward, he returned to his position at the conservatory until the Cuban Revolution began in 1953. In 1960, he left Cuba permanently, to teach at Mexico City’s National Conservatory of Music alongside Carlos Chávez.

In 1963, he moved to the United States, where he taught at Lenox College, Washington University in St. Louis, Barnard College, and the Hispanic Institute of Columbia University.

For the rest of his life, he made New York his home. He died in Miami while undergoing cancer treatment in 1991.

Orbón’s experiences in four countries allowed him to assimilate many influences in his music: Spanish, Cuban (and by extension Afro-Cuban), American, Gregorian chant, neoclassicism, and a kind of melancholy romanticism shaped by the collapse of his world during the Cuban Revolution. He was friendly with Copland, Chávez, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, all of whose music he clearly admired.

His own music is attractive, personal, and accessible. It’s a mystery why it isn’t heard more often. Like many composers of his generation, he seems to have fallen through the cracks between the classics and the new. A pity, because one could do worse than to program any of the pieces below.

¡Feliz centésimo, Julian Orbon!

Danzas sinfónicas (1955)

Tres versiones sinfónicas (1953)

Concerto Grosso for String Quartet and Orchestra (1958)
WFLN Philadelphia Airchecks Jill Pasternak & More

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Ross Amico

August 6, 2025

in Daily Dispatch

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My recent posts about Jill Pasternak have prompted me to go back and search out a few air checks of WFLN that I’d been able to find online. WFLN served as Philadelphia’s only full-time classical music radio station since 1949. Pasternak, who was hired in 1986, was the one tasked with bidding farewell, before the frequency’s changeover to a contemporary pop format, on September 5, 1997.

At the link below, you’ll find her in happier times, sitting in for Bill Shedden and hosting “Evening Concert” on August 20, 1989. Jill introduces music by Balakirev, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff. (The audio cuts off shortly after she announces Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.”)

On the same page, there’s a sound file of Frank Kastner hosting on October 22, 1989. Kaster was the announcer who signed on the station on March 14, 1949 (his 25th birthday), playing Brahms’ “Academic Festival Overture,” Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 from 78 rpm records. The playlist here consists of Léo Delibes’ “Coppélia” (in progress) and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Partita for String Orchestra (sadly, cutting off before the end).

WFLN (Philadelphia) Evening Concert

PHOTO: Representatives of the WFLN crew in 1997, Jill Pasternak kneeling in front. I also recognize Mark Pinto (left), Dave Conant (obscured), Frank Kastner (with mustache), Charles Lee (white hair), Jack Moore (white jacket), Bill Shedden (blue shirt). Anyone know the others?
Remembering WFLN Philadelphia’s Lost Classical Station

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Ross Amico

August 5, 2025

in Daily Dispatch

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My post on July 28 about the passing of WRTI radio host Jill Pasternak stimulated some interesting reader comments and a lot of personal memories about Jill’s former employer, the late, great WFLN, Philadelphia’s full-time classical music station for nearly 50 years. I am a nostalgic person by nature, so it’s easy for me to get lost for hours sometimes obsessively googling favorite subjects from the past. WFLN flourished largely in the days before the internet, so every nugget is hard-won and savored to the fullest. I wish there were more out there. But I am always digging.

Yesterday, David Nethermark Carson left a message on the Pasternak post. He was WFLN’s chief engineer for a time in the 1950s. That reminded me of this blog I stumbled across a few years ago by former WFLN host Gordon Spencer, who also goes way back. It occurs to me, I may never have mentioned it or shared the link. There’s not much to it, only a few entries, but it offers some valued glimpses of the Wild West days of Philadelphia’s now-lamented classical music station. Since WFLN was sold in 1997 (28 years ago???), the sixth largest city in the United States has been without a full-time classical music broadcast outlet.

WRTI, as Temple University’s former full-time jazz station, now divides its schedule between jazz and classical. Interestingly, I learn from Spencer’s reminiscences that at one time WFLN offered jazz as well.

Spencer died in 2018 at the age of 84. His entries are prefaced with a remembrance by his wife.

https://stationbreaks2bygordonspencer.umkc.edu/
Montemezzi’s Lost Opera A Rediscovery

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Ross Amico

August 4, 2025

in Daily Dispatch

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If opera will not come to the middle of the mountain, the middle of the mountain will come to opera!

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Italo Montemezzi (Montemezzi, if I am not mistaken, literally translating as “half-mountain”).

A representative of that vast artistic lineage of one-hit wonders, Montemezzi is pretty much known for his opera “L’amore dei tre re” (“The Love of Three Kings”), which one might assume from the title to be a heartwarming Christmas piece about the three Magi, along the lines of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl of the Night Visitors.” If so, one would be mistaken.

“L’amore dei tre re” is an overheated historical tragedy, centering around a love triangle – perhaps even a ménage à quatre – in which everyone winds up dead or inconsolable. Another great night at the theater! Only in opera does one set foolish, deadly traps to ensnare the guilty, only to have the scheme backfire horribly.

“L’amore dei tre re” opened at La Scala in 1913 to mixed reviews. But what do the Italians know about opera? When it made its way abroad, it became an international success. In the U.S., it was hailed as “the best operatic work coming from Italy since Verdi’s ‘Falstaff.’” In 1918, it was sung at New York’s Metropolitan Opera by Enrico Caruso, Claudia Muzio, and Pasquale Amato.

Alas, the mania for “The Love of Three Kings” proved to be but a flare. The opera had its moment, but after World War II, frequency of performances declined to the point where now, if it’s ever done at all, it’s an event.

Unabashedly decadent, coyly erotic, dramatic, and dreamlike, “Three Kings” may be Italian, but it was written by a composer who had assimilated broader musical influences. The score cranks up the heat, in kind of a mélange of Wagner, Strauss, and Debussy.

It won’t turn up very often at your friendly neighborhood opera house. Happily, there’s a fine recording of the work in modern sound (i.e. stereo), featuring Anna Moffo, Placido Domingo, and Cesare Siepi.

That said, here’s an interesting document from the Met in 1941, with the composer conducting on a broadcast introduced by Milton Cross!

In 1948, the New York Times described “L’amore dei tre re” as “a tone poem for voices and orchestra,” lauding it as “the most poetic and aristocratic of Italian operas” and declaring of its composer, “He never descends beyond the loftiest level.”

Not bad! Where is it now?

We’ll keep a candle in the window for you on your sesquicentenary, Italo Montemezzi.
Martinů and His World Bard Music Festival

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Ross Amico

August 3, 2025

in Daily Dispatch

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Here’s a little teaser about the 35th Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” which will take place at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 8-10 and 14-17.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1247374413423449

As a bonus, I’m also including links (below) to a few works that will be featured on this year’s concerts, to give you an idea what to expect. Of course, a lot of other composers’ music will be performed, as well. This is Martinů AND HIS WORLD, remember. The programs come pretty fast and furious at Bard. It’s a lot to take in, but you know I’ll do my best to report here on what I can.

If the promo’s music bed intrigues you, it’s from “The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca.” The audio is excerpted from an earlier Bard concert, but the work itself is not scheduled for this year’s festival. All the same, I’ll include a link to that too.

But first, more about the Bard Music Festival:

Bard Music Festival

Fisher Center at Bard

Nonet

Cello Sonata No. 3

“La revue de cuisine” (ballet about kitchen utensils!)

Symphony No. 6 “Fantaisies symphoniques”

“The Epic of Gilgamesh”

“Les fresques de Piero della Francesca”

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