Classic Ross Amico

  • Airport Airplane Movie Music Picture Perfect

    Airport Airplane Movie Music Picture Perfect

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    Ross Amico
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    This week on “Picture Perfect,” we take flight with music from movies about airports and airplanes.

    In the original “Airport” (1970), producer Irwin Allen established the pattern for disaster movies of all stripes by placing an aging all-star cast in spectacular peril. Burt Lancaster! Dean Martin! George Kennedy! Jean Seberg! Jacqueline Bisset! Helen Hayes! The list goes on and on, longer than the longest runway. The bongo-laden theme was by veteran composer Alfred Newman, from the last of his over 200 film scores.

    Another movie with something of the same feel is “The V.I.P.s” (1963), allegedly inspired by a real-life love triangle made up of Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and Peter Finch. The story is set at London Heathrow Airport, where flights are delayed because of a dense fog. The film was written by Terrence Rattigan, and sports a laundry list of stars, including Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jourdan, Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor and Orson Welles, with Margaret Rutherford in an Academy Award-winning performance. The music was by Miklós Rózsa.

    By contrast, Steven Spielberg’s “The Terminal” (2004) is an (intentionally) comic take on the predicament of an Eastern European who finds himself in a kind limbo, trapped in an international arrivals airport terminal in New York after his country erupts into civil war and his passport and other documentation are no longer valid. His plight mirrors that of real-life Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian who lived 17 years in a terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

    Tom Hanks plays the unfortunate traveler, who makes the terminal his home, and Catherine Zeta-Jones the airline attendant with whom he strikes up a relationship. The music was by regular Spielberg collaborator John Williams, and I think you’ll find it quite different from the Williams known for his work on “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.”

    Finally, we turn to the Alfred Hitchcock thriller, “North by Northwest” (1959), a film which had Cary Grant encountering love and danger in, on, and from a variety of planes, trains and automobiles. Planes are particularly significant. Over the course of the film, we find out the title is a play on a Northwest Airlines flight; Eva Marie Saint learns she must do all she can to avoid getting on another; and of course the film’s most iconic image is that of Grant fleeing a strafing crop duster. Bernard Herrmann’s opening fandango propels us into the adventure.

    I hope you’ll join me for an hour of music from films featuring airports and airplanes this week on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

  • Aussie Composers Brumby Hill & Beyond on WPRB

    Aussie Composers Brumby Hill & Beyond on WPRB

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    Ross Amico
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    As the sun rises over the ‘roos, I hope you’ll join me for a morning of music from the Land Down Under. We’ll enjoy FIVE HOURS of music by Australian composers, including Colin Brumby, who died on January 3rd at the age of 84. Repertoire will range from a symphony by seminal antipodean composer Alfred Hill, influential in both Australia and New Zealand, to an experimental work by a creative artist of the current generation, Carl Vine. Also represented will be a Master of the Queen’s Music, a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, and a figure better known as a conductor, who had his career destroyed because of a lurid scandal involving both sex and witchcraft. If that’s not enough, I’ll also toss in a didgeridoo or two.

    Join me as we travel Down Under, to remember the late Colin Brumby and explore the musical outback (from the perspective of the myopic West). It’s all music from Australia, this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EST, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. I’ll be wrestling crocodiles and savage koalas, on Classic Ross Amico.

  • Carl Reinecke: An Unsung Musical Titan

    Carl Reinecke: An Unsung Musical Titan

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    Ross Amico
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    Carl Reinecke lived an unusually long life for his day. Or perhaps it is just the amount of incident crammed into that life that makes it seem so.

    A musical prodigy who composed from the age of 7 and performed in public from the age of 12, Reinecke lived and worked in Copenhagen, Paris, Cologne, and Leipzig. He studied with Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Liszt. His concert tours took him throughout Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the British Isles.

    He taught in Cologne, Breslau, and Leipzig. Among his pupils were Isaac Albéniz, Max Bruch, Ferruccio Busoni, Mikalojus Čiurlionis, Edvard Grieg, Leoš Janáček, Julius Röntgen, Christian Sinding, Charles Villiers Stanford, Johan Svendsen, and Felix Weingartner. In addition, he was music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra for over three decades.

    Somewhere along the way, he found time to compose – three hundred published works, including operas, symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and instrumental pieces. When he was born, Beethoven and Schubert were still alive. Toward the end of his life, he was making piano rolls, the earliest born musician to have his artistry preserved in any format. Reinecke died in 1910 at the age of 85.

    For having lived such a monumental life and having wielded such an enormous influence, Reinecke’s own compositions can seem so effortless – modest, even.

    On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll enjoy his utterly charming Octet for Winds, Op. 216. Also on the program will be a performance of Beethoven’s “Three Marches for Piano Four Hands,” with the 87 year-old Mieczyslaw Horszowski and the 18 year-old Cecile Licad.

    Age is just a number, at the legendary Marlboro Music Festival, this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

    Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

    Carl Reinecke: He had the chops – mutton and otherwise

  • Australian Classical Music WPRB

    Australian Classical Music WPRB

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    Ross Amico
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    One response

    With the recent death of composer Colin Brumby on January 3 at the age of 84, it occurred to me that I have never given Australia the WPRB treatment. Therefore, get ready to suffer some serious jet lag, as we embark for the antipodes and five hours of music from the Land Down Under.

    We’ll hear from composers who found world renown in London, and others who chose to remain at home to find inspiration in their native traditions and geography. Among our featured composers will be John Antill, John Carmichael, Ross Edwards, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Sir Eugene Goossens, Matthew Hindson, Peter Sculthorpe, and Brumby himself.

    I hope you’ll join me this Thursday morning for a full playlist of didgeridoos and don’ts, from 6 to 11 EST on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. If the crocodiles don’t get you, the dingoes will, on Classic Ross Amico.

  • Medieval Music on The Classical Network

    Medieval Music on The Classical Network

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    Ross Amico
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    This Tuesday at noon on The Classical Network, we present another gem from GEMS – Gotham Early Music Scene – as the ensemble Marginalia enlivens your lunch hour with a program of medieval French music. The broadcast will feature selections from the 13th century, including songs of the trouvères and troubadours, as well as instrumental dances. Marginalia consists of Dongmyung Ahn, rebec and vielle; Christa Patton, harp, pipe and tabor; and Peter Walker, bagpipe and voice.

    Today’s program was recorded at St. Bartholomew’s Church, 50th Street and Park Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan. The next Midtown Concert will take place there this Thursday at 1:15 p.m., when Hollinshead & Bass (mezzo-soprano Barbara Hollinshead and lutenist and guitarist Howard Bass) will present “Time, Cruell Time!,” with music reflective of the passage of time by Thomas Campion, Robert Johnson, John Dowland, and others. You’ll find a complete schedule of free lunchtime performances at midtownconcerts.org.

    In addition, GEMS presents evening concerts. Talisman Medieval (David Yardley, countertenor and harp, and Christopher Preston, tenor and harp) will present a program of medieval and newly-composed medieval-inspired music, this Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Church of the Transfiguration, 1 East 29th Street, Manhattan.

    On Sunday at 4 p.m., Juilliard415 will present “Madness and Enchantment,” with Luigi Boccherini’s Sinfonia in D minor “From the House of the Devil,” Georg Philipp Telemann’s “Burlesque de Quixotte,” and excerpts from Henry Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen.” Jonathan Cohen will direct, at Corpus Christi Church, 529 West 121st Street, Manhattan.

    Gotham Early Music Scene is a non-profit organization that supports and promotes artists and organizations in New York City devoted to early music – music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, and early Classical periods. For more information on these and other programs presented by GEMS, look online at gemsny.org.

    Then stick around – among my featured works this afternoon, between 12 and 4 p.m. EST, will be a concerto by Anton Rubinstein and a symphony by Eduard Tubin. Rubinstein is fine, and we’re cruisin’ for some Tubin, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

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