Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Aaron Copland

Remembering Lenny Bernstein Classical Music’s Lost Stars

Wow, Lenny, what happened? Almost 25 years in the grave. I remember receiving the news of your death, on October 14, 1990, only 12 days after the passing of Aaron Copland. It was a horrible one-two for American music.

The classical music scene still seemed robust when you were alive, and it was actually exciting to walk into Tower Records, pre-internet, and find one of your new releases, with the gold Deutsche Grammophon cartouche – back when Deutsche Grammophon was still Deutsche Grammophon – displayed in one of those ludicrous blister packs.

Those were the days before much of the more interesting material you recorded for Columbia had been reissued by Sony. Your earlier, fantastic Schumann cycle hadn’t even made it to CD. My adrenaline would skyrocket for a new recording of American music. Copland? Bought! A re-recording of the Roy Harris and William Schuman Symphonies No. 3? Ka-ching!

While there are so many talented performers out there today, few of them have your larger than life personality, and none of them have your media presence. Where are the Bernsteins? The Horowitzes? The Pavarottis?

Of course, a lot of the change has to do with a break of the stranglehold on the market by major record labels with major marketing budgets. Also, in a sense, the mystique of the classical superstar has been swapped for the grass roots efforts of musicians eager to reach out to the public by way of performances at bars and in pop-up concerts. Not a bad thing for the performers or the music, but the landscape is certainly different.

There was a time when opera singers and violinists would be featured on late night talk shows, or pianists and guitarists would turn up on television commercials. They were artists, but they were also celebrities. In a sense, it was what was really needed to keep classical music in the public eye, if not the public ear, so that people understood that the music was out there, and it could be big, a viable alternative to pop.

Even when you were doing something purely educational, they would put you on TV. You were that rare combination of first rate music-making and Hollywood pizzazz. Happy birthday, Lenny. You sure are missed.

Rudolf Firkušný sells sneakers for Nike:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVKWBrVqCzs

Pavarotti on “The Tonight Show”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDMrLuK24r4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC1vaeU1UQk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWNJRou4lKs

Leonard Bernstein “Young People’s Concerts”: What is Melody?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AFovpvDRCI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O09V4NQkOKI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_pPeBg3Tb8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTmrGbwmX7w

August 25, 2015
Carlos Chávez Mexican Musical Innovator

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, Carlos Chávez (1899-1978) appeared like Quetzalcoatl, the creator-deity of Aztec lore, to forge a distinctive sound in Mexican music.

Chávez was regarded as the foremost Mexican composer and conductor. He became director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Mexicana, the country’s first permanent symphony orchestra. He was appointed director of the National Conservatory of Music. Later, he served as director-general of the National Institute of Fine Arts. At the same time, he formed the National Symphony Orchestra, which supplanted the old OSM.

In 1937, he conducted the world premiere of “El Salón México,” the work which essentially launched Aaron Copland into the mainstream.

Chávez himself was one of the first exponents of Mexican nationalism in music, writing ballets on Aztec themes. His most famous work is probably the Symphony No. 2, composed in 1935-36. Known as the “Sinfonia India,” it is based on melodies by indigenous tribes of northern Mexico.

The percussion section originally included a large number of traditional Mexican instruments, including the jicara de agua (half of a gourd inverted and partly submerged in a basin of water, struck with sticks), güiro, cascabeles (a pellet rattle), tenabari (a string of butterfly cocoons), a pair of teponaxtles, tlapanhuéhuetl, and grijutian (a string of deer hooves).

However, when the score was published, the composer sensibly substituted the nearest equivalents commonly used by most orchestras, though he requested that the originals be employed wherever possible.

Here is Chávez’s recording of the “Sinfonia India”:

Everyone else seems to take it a tad slower. Here’s a spirited live performance with the SCM Symphony Orchestra (Sydney Conservatorium of Music), under the direction of Mexican conductor Eduardo Diazmuñoz:

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Carlos Chávez!

June 13, 2015
Copland’s Memorial Day Sonata

Memorial Day.

Aaron Copland dedicated his one and only Violin Sonata, composed in 1942 and 1943, to the memory of his close friend, Lieutenant Harry H. Dunham (a Princeton alumnus), who died in action in the South Pacific shortly after the work was completed.

Virgil Thomson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “I suspect it is one of the author’s most satisfying pieces… It has a quality at once of calm elevation and buoyancy that is characteristic of Copland and irresistibly touching.”

Here’s a performance by Louis Kaufman (who advised the composer on bowings and fingerings), with Copland himself at the keyboard:

Mov’t I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8kY1jO4Z34
Mov’t II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKr4ZZrT3Sw
Mov’t III https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUvAi33DkXQ

PHOTO: Aaron Copland, American music’s secret weapon

May 25, 2015
Thanksgiving Film Music Family Community Country

This week on “Picture Perfect,” with Thanksgiving fast approaching, we’ll have music from films about family, community and country.

Aaron Copland’s music for “The Cummington Story” (1945) sets the tone. The short semi-documentary, made for the Office of War Information, relates the gradual acceptance of European war refugees into a cautious but fundamentally decent New England community. The score is pure Americana, with some of the material later finding its way into Copland’s Clarinet Concerto and “Down a Country Lane.”

Thank you, amazing YouTube, for making the complete film available online!

James Horner’s music for “Field of Dreams” (1989) is cut from the same cloth, or at any rate it is a square in the same folksy counterpane. Horner clearly wrote the music under the influence of Copland’s “Our Town.” The film itself is a male wish-fulfillment fantasy, in which a man finds redemption and a new understanding of his father in the enchanted cornfields of America’s heartland.

“The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) tells the tale of the three war veterans struggling to readjust to civilian life. It isn’t easy, but with the support of family and friends, there’s plenty of hope for the future. Hugo Friedhofer wrote the Academy Award-winning score. The orchestrations were by Copland protégé (and composer of “The Big Country”) Jerome Moross.

Finally, Daniel Day-Lewis elevated Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012) to greatness with one of the most amazing performances ever captured on film. Day-Lewis’ gentle but shrewd Man of Destiny would go to any lengths to hold the country together. John Williams tapped into America’s proud musical heritage, clearly influenced by Copland and Ives, to create a score of stirring nobility.

I hope you’ll join me for these musical reflections of family, community and country this week, on “Picture Perfect.” You can listen to it this Friday evening at 6, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6, or you can catch it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

November 20, 2014
Nietzsche, Music, and the Joy of Raking Leaves

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

Thus spake Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), philosopher and sometimes Wagnerite, whose birthday it is today. Did you know Nietzsche was also a composer? Here’s one of his works for violin and piano, written at the age of 19:

Actually, this time of year, with the leaf-blowers blasting full-tilt, I am always reminded of Nietzsche’s forerunner, Arthur Schopenhauer, who inveighed against the carriage drivers of his day mindlessly cracking their whips for the sake of filling up the silence with noise.

Here’s his complete screed on the subject:

http://www.schopenhauervereinigung.com/articles/arthur-schopenhauer-on-noise/

Bring back the rake is what I say!

Raking allows one to be in the moment and part of nature. We’re losing too many of the quiet rituals that permit us to become absorbed in a natural rhythm. The state of “peace and pensiveness” Schopenhauer craved is more rarified than ever, alas (says Ross, as he types on Facebook).

When you walk the dog this afternoon, leave your smartphone on the kitchen counter. Close your laptop and observe what’s going on outside. But above all, put your leaf-blower on Craigslist and pick up a rake!

PHOTO: If it was good enough for Aaron Copland, it’s good enough for me

October 15, 2014

Tag Cloud

RECENT POSTS