Attention, film music fans: “Picture Perfect” is about to go epic.
Join me this Friday afternoon on The Classical Network as I mark the 90th anniversary of the Academy Awards with a SPECIAL THREE-HOUR BROADCAST celebrating the history of music in the movies. Hear selections from all five of this year’s nominees for Best Original Score, alongside music from some of the best-loved and most-honored movies of all time – including “The Godfather,” “Star Wars,” “Titanic,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Ben-Hur,” and “Gone with the Wind.”
You provide the popcorn; I’ll provide the music, this Friday from 4 to 7 p.m. EST, on WWFM The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
This has been circulating all over the internet today. It turns out Sunday night’s envelope mix-up was not the first in Academy Awards history. Watch as Sammy Davis Jr. is handed an envelope for a different category than the one announced. Nobody fielded the foul ball on Sunday as well as Davis does here. I am also inclined to share it because of the staggering talent of the nominees for Best Original Score. I don’t think the time will ever come again. Truly, this was an era when giants walked the earth.
PHOTO: André Previn, Sammy Davis Jr., and Elmer Bernstein
This week on “Picture Perfect,” join me for a special, two-hour edition, as we anticipate the 89th Academy Awards. We’ll hear selections from the five nominees for Best Original Score (“Jackie,” “La La Land,” “Lion,” “Moonlight,” and “Passengers”), alongside music from established, Oscar-winning classics, like “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Godfather,” and “Gone with the Wind,” and more recent favorites, like “Titanic,” “The Lord of the Rings,” and “The Hateful Eight.”
You supply the popcorn. I’ll cue the music, this Friday evening from 6 to 8 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
There are only so many days in a year, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that two giants in a particular field would share a birthday anniversary. Hence, we have Rachmaninoff and Busoni on April 1, and Heifetz and Kreisler on February 2. May 10 marks the birthdays of Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin.
Steiner (1888-1971), the literal godson of Richard Strauss, helped transplant the sound of fin de siècle Vienna to the realm of cinematic dreams. He composed over 300 film scores for RKO and Warner Brothers, earning 24 Academy Award nominations and winning three – for “The Informer,” “Now, Voyager” and “Since You Went Away” – though he is unquestionably better remembered today for his work on “King Kong,” “Gone with the Wind” and “Casablanca.”
Tiomkin (1894-1979), a pupil of Alexander Glazunov, was born in Ukraine. He settled in the United States, where he composed music for films in all genres, though in the 1950s he enjoyed particular success writing for Westerns, including the Academy Award-winning “High Noon.” When asked why this would be the case, that a composer born half a world away would have such a command of this distinctly American idiom, Tiomkin replied, “A steppe is a steppe is a steppe.”
Tiomkin was honored with four Academy Awards – three for Best Original Score (for “High Noon,” “The High and the Mighty” and “The Old Man and the Sea”) and one for Best Original Song (“The Ballad of High Noon”).
Here’s a transcript of his reception speech, when winning the Oscar for “The High and the Mighty” in 1955:
“Lady and gentlemen, because I working in this town for twenty-five years, I like to make some kind of appreciation to very important factor what make me successful to lots of my colleagues in this town. I’d like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov. Thank you.”
You can watch here:
Steiner’s “Now, Voyager”:
Tiomkin’s “Land of the Pharoahs”:
If you have an interest in Hollywood composers and what they achieved on screen and in the concert hall, you might want to set aside your Thursday morning this week to join me on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com. I’ll tell you a little more about it tomorrow.
For anyone interested in previewing this year’s nominees for Best Original Score, last week’s “Picture Perfect” has been posted as a webcast, as has this week’s “Oscar Party” of classic film themes. It’s a great way to kill two hours as you anticipate the Academy Awards.
