Classic Ross Amico

  • Khrennikov Shostakovich and Soviet Power

    Khrennikov Shostakovich and Soviet Power

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    Tikhon Khrennikov, in his role as Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, made life miserable for many of his more talented colleagues, especially Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Mieczyslaw Weinberg. In fact, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who was a big man, once stormed into Khrennikov’s office and gave him a good shaking by his lapels for being such an A-one a-hole.

    But Khrennikov was also one of the great survivors. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, he managed to ride out each successive regime for four more decades, holding on to his influential post until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    There were some who claimed that Khrennikov was actually quite the sensitive fellow, who used his influence to quietly protect some of his more vulnerable colleagues. Whether or not that is true, I cannot say. He was a controversial figure, no doubt.

    Just because Khrennikov was an artist doesn’t mean he was a nice person. All the same, I hope you’ll join me as I sample some of his music this afternoon, alongside that of his fellow birthday celebrants Heinrich von Herzogenberg and Frederick Loewe.

    We’ll be seeing Red, between 4 and 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

    PHOTO: Khrennikov talks; Shostakovich listens

  • Dvořák’s Dark Side Erben’s Spooky Tales

    Dvořák’s Dark Side Erben’s Spooky Tales

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    Hot on the heels of Rusalka Week – a time when Slavic naiads roam free, luring unsuspecting men to a watery grave – we cast a wary eye upon Karl Jaromir Erben.

    Erben (1811-1870) served as a kind of Brothers Grimm to the Czech people, synthesizing works based on folkloric themes into gruesome ballads full of witches, goblins, and ghosts. Most of these were collected into a lurid, if poetic, little volume titled “Kytice,” or “Bouquet.” The tales, recited by generations of schoolchildren, were embraced as a kind of celebration of Czech national identity.

    Antonín Dvořák was most susceptible. Bohemia’s greatest composer wrote a surprising number of pieces inspired by Erben’s grisly tales, including the symphonic poems “The Water Goblin,” “The Noon Witch,” and “The Wood Dove.” Erben’s influence also looms over Dvořák’s most famous opera, “Rusalka.”

    This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll salute Erben with two selections by Dvořák: the symphonic poem “The Golden Spinning Wheel” and the spine-tingling graveyard scene from the dramatic cantata “The Spectre’s Bride.”

    “The Golden Spinning Wheel” is a Cinderella story gone very, very wrong, as a wicked stepmother and stepsister not only murder, but dismember an unfortunate maiden favored by the king. Naturally – or perhaps supernaturally – they overplay their hand, and the titular appliance proves their undoing.

    “The Spectre’s Bride” is another of the seemingly infinite variations on the tale of a young woman borne away by the ghost of her lover. The climax of Dvořák’s cantata deposits the heroine in a cottage besieged by howling spirits, as a corpse on the table, prepared for burial, stirs to do their bidding.

    It’s a long, long way from Dvořák’s “Slavonic Dances.” Join me for “Erben Legends” – a celebration of Karel Jaromir Erben – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

  • Godzilla & Dinosaur Movie Music

    Godzilla & Dinosaur Movie Music

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    How many dinosaurs have atomic breath? Have you ever woken up next to one?

    I know, I know, strictly speaking, Godzilla is not a dinosaur. Don’t give me any guff. All I’m looking for is an hour’s worth of “fearfully great lizards” (from the Greek), and I don’t care how I get them.

    This week on “Picture Perfect,” with Godzilla back in theaters, I thought it would be a good time for Godjira to rise from the surf yet again for another day of sand and fun.

    We’ll hear music from the film that kicked off the latest American attempt at a Godzilla franchise, titled, simply and leanly, “Godzilla” (2014), a “reboot” of the long-running Toho series. Since every Hollywood blockbuster these days seemingly aspires to emulate comic books, the film was planned as the cornerstone of yet another cinematic Tower of Babel. Reportedly, next year Godzilla will finally fight Kong (again). I kind of miss when he was just a guy in a suit, though…

    As these things go, “Godzilla” was not too bad, with at least some show of restraint in not revealing too much of the titular monster too soon (some felt it couldn’t be soon enough), especially in the film’s marketing. Also, the producers managed to assemble an A-list cast, including Bryan Cranston, Academy Award winners Juliette Binoche and David Straitharn, Japanese Academy Award winner Ken Watanabe, and soon-to-be Best Actress (for “The Shape of Water”) Sally Hawkins. The music was by Alexandre Desplat, in recent years everywhere at once.

    Of course, Godzilla is not the only pre-historic being to sport fashionable beachwear. “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) featured special effects by the legendary Ray Harryhausen and an equally legendary fur bikini, worn by Raquel Welch.

    Not to be confused with the recent “10,000 B.C.,” this was actually a Hammer Studios remake of a 1940 Hollywood film, “One Million B.C.” – a fact as little known as the well-kept historical secret that man and dinosaurs did indeed co-exist. With its stop-motion dinosaurs, fur bikinis, and Peter Brady-style volcanoes, this cheese ball classic is a guilty pleasure indeed. The music was by Mario Nascimbene, who wrote one of my favorite scores for Kirk Douglas, “The Vikings.”

    Some kinder, gentler fare will be served up by way of the animated film “The Land Before Time” (1988). Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, and Frank Marshall – all of whom were involved with “Raiders of the Lost Ark” – this Don Bluth-directed opus about anthropomorphized dinosaurs spawned a profitable franchise, with at least 12 direct-to-video sequels. The music for the original was by James Horner.

    Spielberg turned to B-movie source material for his visual inspiration for “Jurassic Park” (1993), based on the novel by Michael Crichton. The herky-jerky dinosaur effects of yore were replaced with state of the art computer-generated effects, in this story of a safari park gone wrong.

    The premise this time takes advantage of the most recent scientific thinking, albeit filtered through a prism of speculative wonder and horror – DNA extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber, cloning, and the theory that dinosaurs were not lizards, after all, but rather birds.* John Williams music proved to be the Tyrannosaurus rex among his film scores of the 1990s.

    Join Godzilla and me for a dinosaur clambake, on “Picture Perfect,” Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

    *If we’re going to drag science into the thing, here’s an amusing article I discovered in Smithsonian Magazine, in which paleontologists speculate what dinosaurs may have been a part of Godzilla’s DNA. Before his radioactive mutation that is.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-kind-of-dinosaur-is-godzilla-45639768/?no-ist&fbclid=IwAR30oAV7CkYpOA7cksEA9mymnwXbBkzHq2p7GZ6-RtX0k-pvmbmpnHTfXPk

  • Siegfried Wagner’s Shadow

    Siegfried Wagner’s Shadow

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    Ross Amico
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    They can’t all be Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In fact, it’s more often the case that they turn out to be Franz Xaver Mozart, Soulima Stravinsky, or Siegfried Wagner.

    The latter were all musicians who strained to find their place in the sun, but in the end there was no escaping the enormous shadows of their old men.

    You certainly couldn’t fault Siegfried Wagner for not trying. In his quest to continue the family business, he wrote no less than 18 operas. And the ones I have heard are not bad! Unfortunately, most of them seem to be in the tradition of Engelbert Humperdinck, whose most famous opus, of course, is “Hansel und Gretel.” But I happen to be easily charmed by fairy tale operas, so count me in!

    “Der Bärenhäuter” (“The Bear-Skin Man”), “Der Kobold” (“The Goblin”), “Schwarzshwanenreich” (“Realm of the Black Swan”), and “An Halle ist Hütchen schuld” (“Hattie is to Blame for It All”) all contain fantastic or supernatural elements, but none of them bear the archetypal resonance of the “Ring Cycle,” much less push music into bold new harmonic territory like “Tristan und Isolde.” You have to admit, that’s a tough row to hoe, and none of Siegfried’s operas have entered the standard repertoire.

    Of course, being a Wagner, everything was tied up with the old man. Siegfried was director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1908 to 1930. There is a delicious irony in the fact that Papa Wagner, an über-nationalist, anti-Semite, and all-around amoral satyr – whose bludgeoning music dramas fairly seethe with an obsessive focus on the redemptive power of women – would sire a child who would turn out to be homosexual. Perhaps he tempted fate by giving him such a butch name. A far cry from Wagner’s prototype of the he-man without fear, Siegfried became affectionately known to family as “Fidi.”

    In the wake of a national scandal involving accusations of homosexual behavior among certain aristocrats in the Kaiser’s circle, the Wagners thought it was high time for Siegfried to take a bride. At the age of 45, he married 17 year-old Winifred Klindworth, who would later become a fanatical admirer of Adolf Hitler. She bore Siegfried four children. All of them would be closely involved with the workings of Bayreuth and uncomfortably close to the Nazi Party. The youngest of Siegfried’s children, Verena Wagner Lafferentz, died only weeks ago, at the age of 98.

    Marriage did not “cure” Siegfried of his proclivity for the company of men. He died in 1930. At the very least, Nazism is one controversy he managed to avoid.

    Happy birthday, Siegfried Wagner, on the 150th anniversary of your birth. You were certainly the nicest of the Wagners. You may not have been a chip off the old block, but in the Wagner family, to have been so would have been somewhat more than a mixed blessing.

    The overture to “Der Bärenhäuter” (“The Bear-Skin Man”):

    PHOTO: Siegfried Wagner, with his mother, Cosima

  • Siegfried Wagner Idyll Story & Recording

    Siegfried Wagner Idyll Story & Recording

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    Ross Amico
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    Even as a child, Siegfried Wagner seemed out of step with his parents.

    Nevertheless, here’s the charming story behind the “Siegfried Idyll,” a work named for him by his father.

    The idyll was composed shortly after Siegfried’s birth, in1869, and presented as a surprise gift by the composer to Siegfried’s mother, Wagner’s new bride, Cosima (recently divorced from conductor Hans von Bülow, a Wagner champion, who had tolerated their affair).

    In a supreme romantic gesture, Wagner unveiled the work on Christmas morning, with his musicians arrayed along the stairs leading to the master bedroom of their Swiss villa. Wagner had it played for Cosima every year as an expression of his love. It had been his original intention to keep it private, within the family, but then cash ran short, as it almost always did, and he was willing to change his mind. Themes from the work would also be reused in the Ring Cycle.

    The original title of the piece was not quite so snappy. At the time the music was first presented, the score bore the inscription: “Triebschen Idyll, with Fidi’s birdsong and the orange sunrise, as symphonic birthday greeting. Presented to his Cosima by her Richard.” Fidi, of course, was the Wagners’ nickname for their son, born 150 years ago today.

    Hear Siegfried conduct the serenade named for him by his father, in this 1927 recording.

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