This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” it’s one more trip to the well, with well-played works of American composers rendered by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Slake your thirst with selections from “Five Songs of William Blake” by Virgil Thomson, the Symphony No. 7 by Roy Harris, and “Four Squares of Philadelphia” by Louis Gesensway.
Gesensway was born in Latvia in 1906. A violin prodigy, he was one of the founders of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He came to Philadelphia at the age of 19, where he played under both Stokowski and Ormandy.
In his mid-20s, he took a leave of absence to study composition with Zoltán Kodály. “Four Squares of Philadelphia” was described by the composer as a “symphonic poem for large orchestra, narrator and street criers.”
The piece opens with a recitation of William Penn’s prayer, then continues with musical evocations of Washington Square (in early morning, during Colonial times, with street criers hawking their wares), Rittenhouse Square (on a bright and cheerful afternoon), Logan Square (with its fountains at dusk), and Franklin Square (at night, evocative of noisy bridge traffic, a side excursion into Chinatown, and musical interjections from the honky tonk joints located around the square in the 1950s).
Be there or be square. Eugene Ormandy serves up the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers. I hope you’ll join me for “All-American Ormandy III,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
PHOTO: Statue of Penn, high atop the city he founded
