Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Fantasia

St. John’s Eve Bonfires, Folklore & Fun

Just as you’ve recovered from your solstice hangover, here comes St. John’s Eve!

You can thank the Romans. They’re the ones who designated June 24 the summer solstice – hence, the discrepancy between the longest day (June 21) and Midsummer. The Romans gave us roads, aqueducts, and a legacy of midsummer debauchery. Why split hairs?

Later, as was so often the case with the placement of religious holidays, the Church figured out it had the highest probability of winning friends and influencing people if it diverted the stream of paganism, rather than outright dam(n) it. To this end, June 24 became the Feast Day of St. John. This worked out very nicely indeed, since St. Luke implies the birth of John the Baptist occurred six months before that of Jesus. Which reminds us: only 185 shopping days until Christmas!

On the eve of St. John’s nativity (observed), the night of June 23, good Christians celebrate as only reformed pagans can, with an understanding that everyone will be up to fulfill their religious obligations on the morrow. What happens on St. John’s Eve stays on St. John’s Eve.

For tonight, it will be a time for harvesting St. John’s Wort, with its miraculous healing powers. It will be a time for seeking the fern flower, which can bring good fortune, wealth, and the ability to understand animal speech. It will be a time for the lighting of bonfires against evil spirits, and even dragons, which roam the earth, as the sun again pursues a southerly course. And it will be a time when witches are believed to rendezvous with powerful forces, such as the Slavic demon Chernobog, who emerges from the Bald Mountain at the climax of Disney’s “Fantasia.” (Erroneously, the narrator, Deems Taylor, claims that it’s Walpurgis Night.)

Leaping over a bonfire is seen as a surety of prosperity and good luck. Not to light a bonfire is seen as offering up one’s own house for destruction by fire. The bigger the fire, the further at bay are kept evil spirits. The further the evil spirits, the better guarantee of a good harvest.

So get out there and cavort heartily under a strawberry moon!
Chernobog loves strawberry.

Leopold Stokowski conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in this Disney showstopper by Modest Mussorgsky:

http://www.cornel1801.com/disney/Fantasia-1940/film8.html

Happy St. John’s Eve!

June 23, 2021
Leopold Stokowski Birthday & Hollywood

Today is the birthday of Leopold Stokowski.

And since the comments section is bound to be filled with gasps of “LEOPOLD,” we may as well get this out of the way right now. (Then read on!)

The snapping of the baton is a little bit of an in-joke, since Stokowski made it a point to lead not with a stick, but rather using his expressive, mesmerizing hands.

Here he is in “Carnegie Hall” (1947), real junk food for the classical music lover. Forget about the plot, which is total hokum – a brash young American pianist turns the classical music world on its ear with the debut of his corny “jazz” concerto (with Harry James, no less, playing trumpet obbligato) – the main draw is a parade of real-life classical music superstars.

The director Edgar G. Ulmer, emerged from German Expressionist cinema (he claimed to have worked on “Metropolis” and “M”), to direct atmospheric Hollywood films like “The Black Cat” and “Detour.”

The experience obviously prepared him for this showcase of Stokowski, who in the film’s best sequence conducts a movement from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. The camera angles are striking, the lighting dramatic, and Stoky’s hair just keeps getting bigger… and bigger… and bigger.

Stokowski also shared screen time with Deanna Durbin in “One Hundred Men and a Girl” (1937). In case you’re curious, Charles Previn, credited as associate musical director, was the second-cousin of Andre Previn. Stokowski conducts the finale of the same Tchaikovsky symphony. Also, Deanna Durbin sings from “La Traviata.”

Naturally, there’s the obligatory shot of a bored husband (character actor Eugene Pallette) dozing in the audience, and a boy-next-store shouting from a balcony, just to keep it all comfortably “regular guy.”

But it goes without saying that the most enduring artifact of Hollywood’s romance with Stoky was the conductor’s work on Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” (1940), including this iconic handshake with Mickey Mouse:

Stokowski recorded the soundtrack in experimental stereo, captured by 33 microphones and three million feet of sound film, at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music in 1939. Stokowski served as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s music director from 1912 to 1938. Here he directs Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” from a Spanish print of the film:

Finally, Stokowski talks about his experiences in Hollywood, most specifically his work on “Fantasia,” in an interview given in the 1960s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCGdRntUJ0M

Notoriously, the accent is totally phony baloney. Stokowski’s grandfather was Polish, but he himself was a second-generation Londoner. But Stoky always did have a whiff of P.T. Barnum about him. He may have been a visionary, but, first and foremost, he knew how to captivate an audience.

I hope you’ll join me tonight for “The Lost Chord,” as I’ll be highlighting some of Stokowski’s early Wagner recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The program, “Magic Fire,” will air at 10:00 EDT on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

April 18, 2021
Fantasia at 80 Disney’s Bold Experiment

Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” was released into theaters for the first time 80 years ago today.

Giddy with the success of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), which became a surprise hit – the highest grossing feature up to that time (soon to be supplanted by “Gone with the Wind”) – and hoping to reinvigorate the popularity of house brand Mickey Mouse, Disney spared no expense in the creation of this bold, beautiful, mind-bending, slightly pretentious, occasionally kitschy experimental enterprise, engaging Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra to record the film’s soundtrack and, on its initial run, displaying it in special road show productions, featuring souped-up, “Fantasound” surround audio. This was the first feature film to be released in stereo. It ran in one venue in New York for a solid year. At a point, Disney even toyed with the idea of pumping different scents into the theater, but he must have realized it was all becoming a little too Scriabinesque.

Eventually reality caught up. “Fantasia” was a money-loser from the start. The war in Europe cut off any possibility of overseas revenue, and it became apparent that the film would have to be reissued, with cuts, in standard format, in regular theaters, if the studio hoped to make any of its money back. As it was, it didn’t turn a profit until 1969. I suspect it was the same crowd that was buzzing to “2001: A Space Odyssey” that finally pushed “Fantasia” into the black. It is now the 24th highest-grossing film in the United States. There aren’t any studios, and very few classical record companies, that would make that kind of investment in the future anymore.

I venture to guess most people who were lucky enough to see “Fantasia” in the cinema, back in the days before home video brought an end to its regular theatrical reissues, were charmed to see Stokowski shake hands with Mickey Mouse. Even so, this is the moment that became seared into many an impressionable memory. And I know I loved it.

Apologies for posting it in two parts, but “Fantasia” was reissued and “restored” a number of times over the years. This one I know sports Stoky’s original audio.

November 13, 2020
Night on Bald Mountain Halloween History

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN (DAY 15)

On this date in 1886, Modest Mussorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain” was given its posthumous debut. The premiere took place in St. Petersburg, with the Russian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Mussorgsky’s rough-hewn textures, idiosyncratic harmony, slap-dash orchestration, and illogical modulations were often viewed as “mistakes” by his well-intentioned contemporaries. The composer was notoriously fond of alcohol, flamboyantly reckless, until a series of seizures sent him into a rapid decline. A week after his 42nd birthday, Modest Mussorgsky was dead.

Understandably, many of the artistic choices of this raging bull of a man were regarded with skepticism and even pity.

It is through the arrangements, revisions and completions of his friend, Rimsky-Korsakov, that “A Night on Bald Mountain,” “Boris Godunov,” and “Khovanschina” became world-famous. It is only in recent decades that Mussorgsky’s original thoughts have been reassessed. And you know what? The guy may have been a total slob, but he was brilliant.

“A Night in Bald Mountain” exists in several incarnations, the first dating all the way back to 1867. It was a symphonic poem; it was outfitted with a chorus for a collaborative project by members of the Mighty Handful (the opera-ballet “Mlada”); and it was plugged into one of Mussorgsky’s own operas, “Sorochinsky Fair,” left incomplete at the time of the composer’s death.

Some fifty years after “Bald Mountain’s” debut in the Rimsky edition, Leopold Stokowski made his own arrangement for the Walt Disney classic, “Fantasia.” And it’s been scaring the hell out of little kids ever since. Happy Hallowe’en!

Behold, the demon Chernabog:

“The Scary Origins of Disney’s Most Evil Character”

October 15, 2019
Sorcerer’s Apprentice Halloween Day 1

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN (DAY 1)

For Paul Dukas’ birthday, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

https://video.disney.com/watch/sorcerer-s-apprentice-fantasia-4ea9ebc01a74ea59a5867853

October 1, 2019

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