Classic Ross Amico

Tag: KWAX

Classical Music for Dad A Sports-Themed Father’s Day

I may have been told to clean out my locker at a certain classical music station in the Trenton-Princeton area, but happily there’s still room for me on the bench at KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon. So buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack. I don’t care if I never go back!

This week on “The Lost Chord,” it’s the mother of all Father’s Day shows, as we pay tribute to Dad with an hour of music about sports.

I realize it’s possible that not all dads necessarily like sports. However, it’s been my experience that Sunday afternoons and Monday nights have always been off-limits, as far as the family television is concerned. For me personally, that meant that after Abbott and Costello or the Bowery Boys, it was football, golf, or “Wide World of Sports,” and that I never saw “MAS*H” during its first run.

Be that as it may, it’s All-Dads Eve, so we’re going to give him what he wants – an hour of rough-and-tumble, the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat.

We’ll hear “Rugby” by Arthur Honegger, “Half-Time” by Bohuslav Martinu, “The Yale-Princeton Football Game” by Charles Ives, and highlights from the baseball opera “The Mighty Casey” by William Schuman.

Combine with a La-Z-Boy and a cold beer, and it’s a recipe for dad contentment. I hope you’ll join me for “Good Sports,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

See below for streaming information.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

PHOTO: Philadelphia Baseball Club, 1887 (Dad center)

June 17, 2023
Movie Music for Father’s Day on KWAX

Even if you’re not appreciated by your former employer, Father knows best; and my old man says I’m better off at KWAX!

This week on “Picture Perfect,” with Father’s Day right around the corner, we’ll celebrate by listening to music for movie dads.

Vito Corleone may not exactly have been a model father, but he did adhere to a certain code of ethics. Besides, what father doesn’t love “The Godfather” (1972)? “The Godfather” was recognized with 11 Academy Award nominations – of which it won three, including Best Picture. However, the awards were not without controversy.

Of course, Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to the ceremony to decline his Oscar, in protest over Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans in television and film. Then there was the matter of the score, by Nino Rota. Rota was nominated, but the nomination was withdrawn when it was discovered that he had used one of the themes in a 1958 film, “Fortunella,” which starred Giulietta Masina and Alberto Sordi. In the end, the Academy turned around and gave Rota the award anyway, two years later, for “The Godfather Part II.”

“Field of Dreams” (1989) is one of those rare movies that has the ability to reduce manly men – even those without daddy issues – to a pool of tears. Phil Alden Robinson’s superior adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s novel, “Shoeless Joe,” is a male wish-fulfillment fantasy, in which a man finds redemption, and a new understanding of his father, in the enchanted cornfields of America’s heartland. And it’s all brought about courtesy of America’s pastime, baseball. The evocative score is by James Horner, who rides on the shoulders of Aaron Copland. The composer seems particularly smitten with Copland’s “Our Town.”

William Powell plays Clarence Day, the irascible paterfamilias of an upper-class family of redheads, in the comedy “Life with Father” (1947), for which Max Steiner wrote the music.

And Gregory Peck plays one of his most memorable roles as defense attorney – and model father – Atticus Finch, in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), based on Harper Lee’s beautiful “coming of age” novel. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor a year later. The score is one of the best-loved of Elmer Bernstein.

You can try to rank the music, but Father’s Day generally yields a tie. (Yes, it’s a pun. Dads love puns.) Spare a thought for dear old Dad, this Friday evening, on “Picture Perfect,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

See below for streaming information for both of my recorded shows.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

June 16, 2023
Mount St Helens Blows Up The Lost Chord This Week

I suppose I should apologize on behalf of my former employer for all the smoke this week. You can’t burn a bridge that’s stood for 28 years without kicking up a little pollution.

That said, my unnatural dismissal from a certain local classical music station puts me in mind of some more natural disasters. With my broadcast base shifting for the time being to the Pacific Northwest and KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon, my thoughts drift back to 1980 and the fearsome eruption of Mount St. Helens. When Helens blew, she killed 57 people, reduced hundreds of square miles to wasteland, and caused over a billion dollars in damage. The most active volcano in the contiguous United States, Helens is situated only a three-hour drive north of Eugene (home of KWAX).

This week on “The Lost Chord” we’ll be dancing around the mouth of the volcano, as it were. Composer Alan Hovhaness was always acutely attuned to nature. For decades, he lived outside Seattle, where he enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the Seattle Symphony. Mountains, in particular, inspired a number of his more reverential works. Commenting on his best-known music, the Symphony No. 2, “Mysterious Mountain,” composed in 1955, he wrote, “Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man’s attempt to know God. Mountains are symbolic meeting places between the mundane and spiritual worlds.”

The friction of the natural and the transcendent certainly informs the progression of his Symphony No. 50, the “Mount St. Helens” Symphony, composed in 1983: from a sense of grandeur in the first movement, a prelude and fugue in praise of Helens; the placidity of Paradise Lake, the beauty of which disappeared forever; and the volcano itself, recalled in the third and final movement, most percussively rendered. The violence subsides, and the dawn hymn of the opening returns in triumph.

Hovhaness’ volcano symphony is like a walk in the park alongside the mad inspirations of Icelandic genius Jon Leifs. Leifs’ “Hekla,” from 1961, is probably the closest you’ll ever want to get to a volcanic eruption. Requiring 19 percussionists banging away on anvils, stones, sirens, plate bells, chains, shotguns, cannons, and a large wooden stump, it has been called the loudest piece of classical music ever written. For their own well-being, the performers were instructed to wear earplugs.

As a bonus, with what’s left of our hearing, we’ll also enjoy “Volcanic Eruption and Atonement” from Leifs’ ballet, “Baldr.”

In this graduation season, if there was a degree awarded for distinguished achievement in volcanology, these composers undoubtedly would have graduated “Magma Come Loudly.”

Prepare to be blown away, this Saturday on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX!

See below for streaming information.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

June 10, 2023
Lost Worlds Movie Music on KWAX

It’s a shame you’ve got to stream all the way from the West Coast now to enjoy “Picture Perfect,” but there it is. Dropped from its natal station, the show can now be heard only in syndication (distributed exclusively by me). Stream it today on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.

It seems only appropriate that the focus of such a fine show, so ignominiously dismissed, should be “Lost Worlds and Lands That Time Forgot.”

While the concept of the “Lost World” dates at least as far back as Plato’s Atlantis, it wasn’t until the Victorian Era that the idea really blossomed in the public consciousness. At the time, of course, lost civilizations were genuinely being discovered – which might help to explain, in part, the incredible of success of “King Solomon’s Mines.” The author, H. Rider Haggard, wrote the book on a bet that he could churn out an adventure story half as good as Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” which had been published two years earlier.

“King Solomon’s Mines” became the literary sensation of 1885. Its protagonist, Allen Quatermain, is a direct ancestor of Indiana Jones. The book inspired reams of sequels and at least five film adaptations.

The two best known of these starred Stewart Granger and Princeton-born Paul Robeson, respectively. Robeson, who played Umbopa, a king in disguise, received top billing in 1937. It’s music for THAT version that we’ll be sampling. There was no score for the 1950 Granger version, beyond some tribal drumming (although Miklós Rózsa did provide a cue for the film’s trailer). The score for the 1937 adaptation is by Mischa Spoliansky.

Haggard achieved another “Lost World” hit with “She,” first issued in book form two years later, in 1887 – another adventure about Europeans in Africa, who meet a seemingly immortal white queen, known as the all-powerful “She” or “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.”

“She” has been adapted to film six times. The 1965 version starred Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee. The music is by Hammer Studios house composer, James Bernard. It’s nice to hear Bernard, who wrote mostly horror scores for the likes of Dracula and Frankenstein, provide something a little more nuanced for a change. She’s theme is so sensuous, it sounds as if it could have been cast off from Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe.”

Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” published in 1888, was clearly influenced by the writings of Haggard. In this case, two British adventurers in India strike out for a remote corner of Afghanistan to set themselves up as kings. The story was made into one of the great adventure films of the 1970s, directed by John Huston, and starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. That Christopher Plummer appears as Kipling himself is only icing on the cake. Maurice Jarre wrote the rousing score.

Finally, James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon,” published in 1933, imagines Shangri-La, a Utopian society nestled in a sheltered valley somewhere in the mountains of Tibet. A British diplomat is one of a handful of passengers who survives a plane crash to be taken into the lamasery.

“Lost Horizon” was made into a film twice. The less said about the 1973 version, a musical with songs by Burt Bacharach, the better. Frank Capra directed the classic 1937 version, which starred Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, and outstanding character actors of the day – actors like Edward Everett Horton, Thomas Mitchell, Sam Jaffe, and H.B. Warner.

The score, Dimitri Tiomkin’s first major contribution, was also one of his most ambitious. Seldom was it so obvious that he had studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Alexander Glazunov.

I say unto to you what my former employers said unto to me: Get lost! I hope you’ll join me for music for lost civilizations this week, on “Picture Perfect” – music for the movies – this Friday evening, now on KWAX!

See below for streaming information.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

PHOTO: Connery (right) with the man who would be Caine

June 9, 2023
Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony A Colossal Masterpiece

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Havergal Brian’s Symphony No. 1, the “Gothic Symphony,” composed between 1919 and 1927, is the longest symphony ever written.

It’s certainly one of the largest, requiring multiple choirs and orchestras. The work calls for vocal soloists, two double choruses, brass bands, and a much-enlarged symphony orchestra, including 32 woodwinds, 24 brass, two timpani, assorted other percussion (requiring 17 players), celesta, two harps, organ, and a greatly expanded string section. In addition, two horns, two trumpets, two tubas, and one set of timpani combine in each of the four brass bands – a total of nearly 200 players. And that’s before factoring in the singers!

The composer had to paste multiple sheets together in the writing of the piece in order to accommodate its titanic demands. Brian dedicated the work to Richard Strauss, who declared it magnificent.

We’ll get to sample but a fraction of it this week, on “The Lost Chord.”

A contemporary of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, Brian dropped out of school at the age of 12 and went to work in a coal mine. He also worked for timber firms and as a carpenter’s apprentice, the whole while nursing a secret desire to write music.

Though attracting early admiration from the likes of Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Thomas Beecham, and Sir Donald Francis Tovey, Brian was destined always to be a cult figure. But there were and are enough people out there that believe strongly enough in his music, that most of his major works have been recorded.

Among them are 32 symphonies – 20 of them composed after the age of 80 and the last at the age of 93. Brian died in 1972, the result of a fall, two months shy of his 97th birthday.

The “Gothic” falls into two parts, subdivided into three movements each. Part One was inspired by Goethe’s “Faust,” and Part Two is a gargantuan setting of the “Te Deum” – combined they present a symphonic vision of the Gothic Age, a period of incalculable expansion in human knowledge. The music in Part Two is essentially modeled on Gothic architecture. It’s literally Brian’s conception of a cathedral in sound.

Clearly, this is one musical edifice that’s too big for an hour, so well cut to the chase and grapple with the last 40 minutes. As a curtain raiser, we’ll enjoy Brian’s comedy overture “The Tinker’s Wedding,” composed in 1948, at the age of 72.

Of course, there will be plenty of biographical information along the way. I hope you’ll join me for “Life of Brian,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.

Keep in mind that KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour time difference (conversion included in parentheses) – actually rather convenient for those of us located in the vicinity of the show’s erstwhile home at WWFM.

THE LOST CHORD – Saturdays on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

And don’t forget my movie music show, PICTURE PERFECT, now on Fridays on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

June 3, 2023

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