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In case you haven’t heard, here’s the latest buzz on Westminster Choir College.
https://patch.com/new-jersey/princeton/rider-sells-wcc-chinese-company-40-million
More:
http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2018/02/rider_university_selling_westminster_choir_college.html
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¡Hola!
The centerpiece of today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network will be a chamber music rarity by the great Spanish cellist Gaspar Cassadó (1897-1966). Cassadó had the advantage of having been born into a musical household in Barcelona. His father, a composer, organist, and piano salesman, shepherded his development and even moved the family to Paris so that he and his elder brother, Augustin, a violinist, could take advantage of the artistic climate there.
At the age of nine, Cassadó was heard in recital by Pablo Casals, and though Casals was at the height of his career and very much in demand, he took the boy on as one of only three pupils. Needless to say, Casals’ influence made a deep impression on the young cellist. Cassadó also studied composition with Maurice Ravel and Manuel de Falla.
Like the violinist Fritz Kreisler, Cassadó remained sheepish about some of his original miniatures in the styles of other composers and gained a degree of notoriety when it was discovered that many of the works he had been attributing to others, such as Frescobaldi, Boccherini, and Schubert, were in fact his own.
Casals performed and conducted a number of Cassadó’s acknowledged works, and teacher and student often appeared together in concert. However, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Casals fled the country, effectively abandoning his career, while Cassadó chose to continue to perform extensively. Though Cassadó stayed out of Spain until after World War II and performed only once in fascist Germany, Casals publicly disavowed him in a letter to the New York Times. It’s thought that this irreparably damaged Cassadó’s career, though the two cellists later reconciled.
Among Cassadó’s most frequently performed works are his “Rapsodia Catalana,” his Suite for Solo Cello, and “Requiebros,” which was championed by Casals.
We will hear Cassadó’s Piano Trio in C major, performed by artists of the Lenape Chamber Ensemble, from a concert given at Delaware Valley University on July 22. Also on the program is Mozart’s Horn Quintet in E-flat major and Tchaikovsky’s string sextet, “Souvenir de Florence.”
The Lenape Chamber Ensemble is made up of hornist David Jolley, violinists Nancy Bean and Cyrus Beroukhim, violists Catherine Beeson and Brett Deubner, cellist Arash Amini, and pianist Marcantonio Barone.
The ensemble’s next concerts – featuring works by Haydn, Poulenc, and Schubert – will take place at 8:15 p.m. on March 2 at Upper Tinicum Lutheran Church, 188 Upper Tinicum Church Road, in Upper Black Eddy, PA, and at 3 p.m. on March 4 at Delaware Valley University’s Life Sciences Auditorium, 700 E. Butler Street and Route 611, in Doylestown. To learn more, visit lenapechamberensemble.org.
For today, I hope you’ll join me for music by Mozart, Cassadó, and Tchaikovsky, at 12:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Casals performs Cassadó’s “Requiebros:”
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It’s Presidents’ Day. Hopefully you hit the white sales early, so that you can sit back and enjoy the music. We’ll have works inspired by Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Chester A. Arthur, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and of course Washington and Lincoln. I’ll be practicing arithmetic on the back of a coal shovel and hurling silver dollars across the Potomac, from 4 to 7 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org
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It’s education versus superstition in Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” – with the added peril of being tossed into a wasps’ nest!
“Treemonisha” (1915) has often been described, though perhaps not entirely accurately, as a “ragtime opera” – Joplin was, after all, the king of the rag – but his opera encompasses a broader range of influences than that would suggest. Even so, none of it could have been written by anyone else. Everything is distilled into a unified artistic statement. Better still, all of it is tuneful and engaging and very, very American.
“Treemonisha” will be our featured work this Sunday morning on WPRB, the crowning achievement in three hours of earworms and toe-tappers by American composers of African descent.
We’ll also hear ballet music, “Miss Sally’s Party” (1940), by William Grant Still, and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra will perform a medley of hit tunes from the Broadway revue “Shuffle Along” (1921), by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake.
Perhaps the least likely pupil of Edgard Varèse, Still cut his teeth writing arrangements for Paul Whiteman, W.C. Handy, and Artie Shaw. According to Blake, one of Still’s improvisations while working in the pit band for “Shuffle Along” became the basis for George Gershwin’s hit tune “I Got Rhythm.” Still didn’t appear to be bitter about the appropriation (which Blake conceded was probably inadvertent), and in fact Still and Gershwin were on friendly terms and made it a point to attend performances of one another’s music.
“Shuffle Along” was the first financially successful Broadway play to have African-American writers and an all African-American cast. “I’m Just Wild About Harry” became the show’s break-out number. The song shattered what had been a taboo against musical and stage depictions of romantic love between African-Americans.
Fun fact: So mainstream was the show’s success, and so enduring its influence, that Harry Truman selected “I’m Just Wild About Harry” for his campaign song during the presidential election of 1948.
We’re just wild about light music, this Sunday morning from 7 to 10 EST, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. Join me for these compositions in black and light, on Classic Ross Amico.
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Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) achieved much in his comparatively short life, attracting the attention and advocacy of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir Edward Elgar, and Sir Malcolm Sargent.
His cantata “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” became a cultural phenomenon between the wars. Sargent led performances of the piece annually, from 1928 to 1939, in a costumed, semi-ballet version, featuring close to a thousand performers. Unfortunately, this was among the works the composer had sold outright, his heirs thereby missing out on the royalties. By the time of Sargent’s advocacy, the short-lived Coleridge-Taylor had already been dead for 16 years.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear selections from a complete recording of “Scenes from ‘The Song of Hiawatha,’” one of the earliest to feature rising star Bryn Terfel, released on the Argo label back in 1991. We’ll also hear Sargent’s 1932 recording of Coleridge-Taylor’s “Othello Suite.” The hour will conclude with one of the composer’s musical explorations of his African heritage, the “Symphonic Variations on an African Air,” in a performance conducted by Grant Llewellyn, released on Argo in 1993.
That’s “Taylor-Made” – music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
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