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Tag: Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Sea Captain Movie Music Sail WWFM

Taste the lash, and prepare to be keelhauled!

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we stand tall against tyrannical sea captains, with music from “The Sea Wolf” (by Erich Wolfgang Korngold), “Moby Dick” (Philip Sainton), “The Caine Mutiny” (Max Steiner), and “Mutiny on the Bounty” (Bronislau Kaper). Strawberries will be pilfered and arms distributed among the crew, this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

CAPTAINS OUTRAGEOUS (clockwise from left): Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, Edward G. Robinson as Wolf Larsen, Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg, and Trevor Howard as Captain Bligh

August 9, 2019
Korngold Film Music at Bard Music Festival

Is Erich Wolfgang Korngold my favorite film composer? Quite possibly, yes. In fact, he’s one of my favorite composers, period. Chalk it up to a childhood misspent in the company of Errol Flynn and Bette Davis.

I’m especially excited, then, that Korngold will be the focus of this year’s Bard Music Festival. The festival, now in its 30th year, will be held over two weekends – from August 9 through August 11, and August 16 through August 18 – at Bard College, in upstate New York. Concert programs, talks, and panel discussions will examine every aspect of Korngold’s output, including an ample representation of his film music and that of some of his colleagues.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” my guest will be conductor Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and co-director of the Bard Music Festival. Dr. Botstein will join me in previewing some of the festival’s highlights and providing commentary on this most fascinating composer, who, as one of classical music’s greatest prodigies, had one foot in Old Vienna and the other in New World Hollywood.

As a kind of special preamble to the festival, Korngold’s opera, “Das Wunder der Heliane” – “The Miracle of Heliane” – will be presented in a fully staged production, in its U.S. premiere, starting tonight and running through August 4, again on the campus of Bard College. Korngold’s most famous opera, “Die tote Stadt,” will be performed semi-staged, as the festival’s finale, on August 18. For more information, visit fishercenter.bard.edu.

Then strike for the shores of Dover! It’s an hour of Korngold’s film music on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

July 26, 2019
Korngold’s Birthday & Bard Music Festival

Happy birthday, Erich Wolfgang Korngold!

I am so excited to have just gotten off the phone with Leon Botstein. Botstein, who is president of Bard College, is also co-artistic director of the Bard Music Festival, held each summer on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. This year, the festival’s focus will be on “Korngold and His World.”

Tune in this afternoon for some of Dr. Botstein’s insights into Korngold the composer, as we talk just a bit about the festival, which will take place this year over two weekends: August 9-11 and August 16-18.

Then watch this space for news of upcoming installments of “Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord,” which will include more of Botstein’s comments on Korngold’s significance as a composer for opera house, concert hall, and film.

The Bard Music Festival will encompass a veritable cornucopia of Korngold, including the composer’s two greatest operas – a concert performance of “Die tote Stadt,” which will round out the festival, on August 18, and a fully-staged production of “Das Wunder der Heliane,” which will act as a kind of preamble to the festival proper, from July 26 to August 4. Leon Botstein will conduct. As has been the case with so much music performed at Bard, “Heliane” is an opera that has never before received a staging in the United States.

The festival will shine light on all aspects of Korngold’s art, by way of his own work for different media (including a performance, with film, of selections from “The Adventures of Robin Hood”), and music by his contemporaries, those he influenced and those who were influenced by him.

You can find at more about “Das Wunder der Heliane” and the Bard Music Festival by visiting fishercenter.bard.edu.

Then tune in today, in the 4:00 hour EDT, to hear portions of my conversation with Dr. Botstein – with more to come on future episodes of “Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord” – on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College

May 29, 2019
Doppelganger Movie Music for Disoriented Times

Do the holidays already have you feeling a little disoriented? This week, on “Picture Perfect,” we’re literally seeing double.

James Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a traumatized police detective who becomes obsessed with the woman he loves – and loses – in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958). Kim Novak portrays both the enigmatic beauty and her spitting image, who Ferguson, rather creepily, attempts to mold. Bernard Herrmann wrote the hypnotic score. Not too long ago, the love theme was recycled in the Academy Award winning film, “The Artist.”

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “La double vie de Véronique”/“The Double Life of Véronique” (1991) features parallel characters living in Poland and France who are mysteriously linked, both of them played by Irène Jacob. The performance earned Jacob an award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival. The music, which plays a significant role in the actual plot, is by Zbigniew Preisner. (Again, thanks to Bill Zeltman for sending me a copy of the soundtrack!)

For the second time in her career, Bette Davis gets a chance to play an evil twin in “Dead Ringer” (1964). The first was in the 1946 good twin-bad twin melodrama, “A Stolen Life.” When asked what the difference was between the two performances, Davis quipped, “About 20 years.” “Dead Ringer” was directed by her longtime friend and “Now, Voyager” co-star Paul Henreid. The music is by André Previn, whose score employs a stock-in-trade sinister harpsichord, yet when he comes to write the love theme, he manages to whip up one hell of a tribute to Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Korngold scored a number of Davis’ films in the 1940s, though he is principally remembered for his work on the swashbucklers of Errol Flynn. To capitalize on Flynn’s star-making performance in “Captain Blood,” Warner Brothers produced a big screen adaptation of Mark Twain’s Tudor switcheroo, “The Prince and the Pauper” (1937). Flynn steals the show as Miles Hendon, the devil-may-care guardian of Prince Edward and Tom Canty, Edward’s mirror image, played by real-life twins Bobby and Billy Mauch. If you’re a Korngold fan, or an enthusiast of violin concertos, you may recognize some of the music. Korngold recycled the theme for use in the last movement of his Violin Concerto in D, championed by Heifetz and others. (By coincidence, today is Twain’s birthday!)

Double your pleasure with music from movies about doppelgangers, twins, and dual identities, on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

November 30, 2018
Korngold Errol Flynn and Hollywood’s Golden Age

With the necessary emphasis on fundraising this week, I happened to miss the birthday anniversary of one of my favorite composers. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born on May 29, 1897. Thanks to a steady diet of Errol Flynn films, his music will forever be a part of the soundtrack of my life.

Korngold went from being one of Europe’s great musical prodigies, his works admired by Mahler, Strauss and Puccini – and championed by Schnabel, Weingartner and Klemperer – to becoming one of Hollywood’s transformative film composers. He is a link from Old World opulence to New World fantasy, his music gracing a number of Warner Brothers’ classic historical adventures.

The best ones starred Flynn, and we’ll hear music from “The Sea Hawk” (1940) and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), as well as the mostly forgotten “Another Dawn” (1937). Flynn stars alongside Kay Francis and Ian Hunter (who would go on to play Richard the Lionheart in “Robin Hood”) in this love triangle involving pilots in a British desert colony.

The film may be an obscurity to all save classic movie buffs, but Korngold thought enough of his music that he salvaged the main title as the opening theme to his Violin Concerto, premiered by Heifetz in 1947.

It was an invitation from theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt that brought Korngold to Hollywood in the first place, for a cinematic adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935). The film stars James Cagney, Dick Powell and Olivia de Havilland, in her big screen debut, with Mickey Rooney an irrepressible Puck.

For the project, Korngold adapted the famous incidental music of Felix Mendelssohn, interweaving material from Mendelssohn’s symphonies and orchestrating some of the “Songs without Words.” Even so, the music bears the composer’s unmistakable stamp, as you’ll hear in the opening number, lifted from the “Scottish Symphony,” which is marked by plenty of Korngoldian swagger.

Set sail with Erich Wolfgang Korngold this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies. Enjoy it this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, immediately following today’s classical music countdown. Please sustain our programming on WWFM – The Classical Network by calling 1-888-232-1212 or making your contribution at wwfm.org. Thank you for your continued support!

PHOTO: The music was actually on my “personal favorites” playlist – Henry Daniell and Errol Flynn in “The Sea Hawk”

June 1, 2018

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