Classic Ross Amico

Tag: KWAX

Nordic Music Delights Sweetness and Light

This week on “Sweetness and Light,” it’s a program of lighter music from the northern countries.

We’ll give poor overworked Edvard Grieg a break, with Norway represented by Johan Halvorsen and the now lesser-known pianist-composer Agathe Backer Grøndahl, a pupil of Franz Liszt.

From Sweden, we’ll enjoy two versions of Hugo Alfvén’s evergreen “Swedish Rhapsody No. 1” – first, Mantovani’s popular hit from 1953, then with the composer himself conducting, from the very next year, in the first stereo recording ever made in Sweden.

Speaking of popular hits, we’ll also hear Arthur Fiedler’s bestselling recording of “Jalousie,” by Danish composer Jacob Gade (no relation to Niels Wilhelm Gade), from 1935. Fiedler remade it in stereo, but it’s my show, so I’m keeping it hardcore.

Also from Denmark, we’ll have a folk-music suite by Percy Grainger. Ah! But Grainger was not from the north, you say. He was born in Australia. Quite true. However, as an energetic pianist and composer of insatiable curiosity, he traveled seemingly everywhere, with a particular fondness for the Scandinavian countries. (His wife was Swedish.)

But if authentic Danish composers are more your thing, not to worry, we’ll round out the hour with a galop by Hans Christian Lumbye.

All eyes and ears face north this week on “Sweetness and Light.” I hope you’ll join me for this hour of northern “lights,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

January 11, 2025
Miss Marple Before Lansbury Movie Music

Before Angela Lansbury, there was Margaret Rutherford.

Rutherford played Miss Marple in a series of Agatha Christie adaptations scored by Ron Goodwin. Goodwin’s music for “Murder, She Said” (1961) will be among the selections on this week’s “Picture Perfect,” an hour of wry mysteries and thrillers featuring the sound of the harpsichord.

In the first of the Marple films, Rutherford’s amateur sleuth goes undercover as a domestic servant. Goodwin’s Miss Marple theme became a popular hit, which you may still recognize.

Bette Davis enjoyed something of a comeback following her turn in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” opposite Joan Crawford. The film singlehandedly defined a subgenre which has been variously described as “psycho-biddy,” “hag horror,” “hagsploitation,” and “grande dame guignol.” Camp and black comedy are essential elements. “Dead Ringer” (1964) was yet another “bad twin” film, with Davis’ delicious performance underscored by André Previn.

Sir Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine play a deadly game of cat and mouse, as a mystery writer plans to exact revenge on his wife’s lover, in a big screen adaptation of Anthony Shaffer’s play, “Sleuth” (1972). John Addison, who had previously harpsichorded his way to an Academy Award with his score for “Tom Jones,” wrote the impish music.

Finally, Barbara Harris plays a fake psychic and Bruce Dern her cab-driving, private investigator boyfriend, who become embroiled with serial kidnappers, in Alfred Hitchcock’s final film, “Family Plot” (1976). The composer was none other than John Williams, poised between his breakout success, “Jaws,” and “Star Wars,” which was to make him a household name. (Both “Jaws” and “Star Wars” were Academy Award winners for Best Original Score.)

Hitchcock was full of suggestions as to the music and how it should be conducted. The composer recollects that on one occasion, when trying to convey the tone he was looking for, Hitch remarked, “Mr. Williams, murder can be fun.”

We’ll keep our tongues firmly in cheek as the corpses pile up. It’s an hour of arch harpsichords this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

January 10, 2025
Overtures! KWAX Radio’s Sweet Start to 2025

You don’t really hear too many sparkling curtain-raisers by Auber or Suppé or Offenbach, to open concerts anymore, which is a pity. But the music still lives on, at least on drive-time classical radio and during fundraising campaigns. And a little bit this morning, anyway, on “Sweetness and Light.”

I thought for the first show of the new year, it might be fun to listen to an hour of overtures. A good overture always whets the appetite and fills one with anticipation of exciting things to come.

Of course, nostalgic soul that I am, I’ll also be looking back and sharing a few fond recollections. One of the selections I’ve programmed will be from one of the very earliest classical records I ever owned – a spontaneous gift from the collection of a favorite uncle, who noted the enjoyment I received from it while listening to it on his state-of-the-art stereo system, on a Saturday afternoon, probably in the late 1970s. It’s the classic album of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic in “William Tell” and other favorite overtures.

Hard to believe in this post-CD era that there was actually a time when music-lovers – in the case of my uncle, a classic rocker (before there was such a category) and an audiophile with a soft spot for Richard Rodgers, “Rhapsody in Blue,” and the Moog – would actually listen to an entire album of overtures in a sitting. The practice seems hopelessly antiquated in this era of attention-deficit clicks.

Of course, I can’t go all froth, so in addition to audience favorites by Ambroise Thomas and Gioachino Rossini and crowd-pleasers by Mikhail Glinka and Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, we’ll experience the full power of the fin de siècle orchestra in works by Carl Nielsen and Edward Elgar.

Think of it collectively as a preamble to your weekend, with hopes for more smiles than tears in 2025, this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

January 4, 2025
Sweetness and Light New Year’s Operetta Mix

It’s always good practice to pay proper obeisance to a man with a scythe and nothing to lose. So try not to make too big a fuss about the kid in the diaper this week on “Sweetness and Light.”

I hope you’ll join me for a playlist that will blend the wisdom of experience with the exuberance of innocence. We’ll flip the hourglass to enjoy a few selections from operetta, including a concert overture on themes from Franz Lehár’s “The Merry Widow,” a duet from Oscar Straus’ “A Waltz Dream,” and the irresistible “Song of the Laugh,” an insert aria employed in Sidney Jones’ “The Geisha,” in a vintage recording, performed by Ukrainian soprano Claudia Novikova. Trust me, it will put a smile on your face.

In addition, we’ll have some variations on the familiar New Year’s melody “Auld Lang Syne” – one a playful multi-movement set in the styles of different composers by Franz Waxman (who wrote scores for such classic films as “The Bride of Frankenstein,” “Sunset Boulevard,” and “The Nun’s Story”), conceived for an informal New Year’s Eve get-together with his neighbor, Jascha Heifetz, and friends; the other, an orchestral showpiece incorporating parodies of no less than 129 familiar melodies, by British Light Music master Ernest Tomlinson.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who enjoyed a successful run of reviving the operettas of Johann Strauss II, brought some of that same breezy Old World elegance to his own Hollywood film scores, proving that you can take the composer out of Vienna, but you can’t take Vienna out of the composer, as demonstrated in his “Flirtation Waltz” from the 1936 Errol Flynn classic “The Prince and the Pauper.”

With only days left in 2024, Father Time still has a few tricks up his sleeve. I hope you’ll join me in raising a mimosa (or two) to the old man this week on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

December 28, 2024
Radio Rewind Vintage Christmas Carols on KWAX

I’ve been in radio for so long, when I began, recorded shows were being broadcast from reel-to-reel tape (edited by hand using a razor blade). Later, they were played from DAT tape (that is to say, Digital Audio Tape), and now from automation from a computer network.

So I really dug deep into the archive for this week’s broadcast of “The Lost Chord” – 21 years deep, as a matter of fact – extracting from a vein of probably about 100 shows that I found here on CD-R, which I likely transferred from DAT, before the station ditched the machines. According to the label on the jewel case, this particular episode aired in 2003 and 2007.

For all that, the technology is not quite as ancient as that employed for the actual recordings I selected for a nostalgic glimpse back at Christmases of yore. A few of of them date to the 1910s and 1920s. Among the featured artists are Enrico Caruso, Fritz Kreisler, John McCormack, Paul Robeson, Raymond Scott, and Fats Waller.

I hope you’ll join me, when I wipe away the cobwebs for “Ghosts of Christmases Past,” a special holiday edition of “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

December 21, 2024

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