Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Leonard Bernstein

Bernstein and Dvořák’s Graceful Exits

With summer winding down and Leonard Bernstein’s birthday right around the corner (on August 25), this week on “The Lost Chord,” I thought it would be a good time to enjoy a program of valedictory works by two complementary composers.

Bernstein’s autobiographical “Arias and Barcarolles” (1988) was winnowed from its original conception for four singers to a leaner combination of mezzo-soprano, baritone, and piano duet. The texts of the eight-movement song cycle, personal reflections on the nature of familial love, in all its layered harmonies and discords, are mostly by Bernstein himself. One of them, “Little Smary,” is a bedtime story his mother told him when he was a child. Others are propelled by witty repartee and amusing inside jokes.

The title is taken from a humorous episode Bernstein liked to recount, stemming from a meeting with President Eisenhower in 1960. After a performance at the White House, Eisenhower remarked, “I liked that last piece you played. It’s got a theme. I like music with a theme, not all them arias and barcarolles.”

The work was subsequently orchestrated, with the composer’s consent, by Bright Sheng, but personally, I think it works much better in this earlier form. It’s nimbler and more intimate, and the words land more cleanly.

Another composer whose influence on American music was incalculable was Antonin Dvořák. While director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York from 1892 to 1895, the revered Czech master was impressed by the character and individuality of what he heard all around him as only an outsider could be. He became intoxicated with the sounds of a diverse, vibrant culture, and was astonished that few had noticed what was so clearly evident – that the foundation of a nationally-identifiable school of music was not be achieved in emulating European models, but rather in assimilating the great American melting pot, through folk song, Native American elements, and especially what was then termed Negro spirituals. He led by example, composing works such as the “American” String Quartet and the “New World” Symphony.

Following his academic and administrative sojourn, Dvořák returned to Bohemia, where in his later years, he focused on opera and symphonic poems based on some astonishingly dark fairy tales. An exception was his final orchestral utterance, “A Hero’s Song” (1897). Admittedly, there is a somewhat sobering, somber interlude at its core, but this only serves to emphasize the swaggering exuberance of the 22-minute work’s outer, swashbuckling sections. It’s astonishing and gratifying to hear Dvořák go out in such a blaze of glory!

I hope you’ll join me for “Graceful Exits” – final works of Bernstein and Dvořák – on “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 EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

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

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

PHOTOS: Dvořák receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge in 1891 (left); Bernstein letting it all hang out in Fairfield, CT, in 1988

August 23, 2025
Stravinsky’s Rite vs Delius’ Cuckoo for Spring

March 20.

Delius’ “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring” is all well and good, but in this month notorious for its whiplash caprice, Leonard Bernstein conducting Stravinsky’s “Le sacre du printemps” is perhaps a better, if not safer, bet.

Then again, from that photo, perhaps the cuckoo is not to be undersold…

Here’s Bernstein, captured in his prime, conducting Stravinsky’s primal masterpiece without a score.

Happy spring?

Perhaps you prefer to decompress with Delius’ romanticized cuckoo.

Both works were first performed in 1913!

March 20, 2025
Bernstein Villa-Lobos TV’s Lost Art

Like so much else in the United States, the standards of broadcast television have eroded beyond recognition since the days of Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” first aired on CBS from 1958 to 1972. The most celebrated American conductor – communicative, charismatic, and cool – introduced classical music to receptive kids in living rooms across the nation. Such was the network’s belief in this Saturday morning program that for three years it was broadcast in prime time. Later, it was shown on Sunday afternoons. The shows were syndicated in more than 40 countries, and the series was honored with five Emmys.

It’s sad to reflect that there was once a time when those who set the standards for network television actually saw it as part of the medium’s mission to educate and to elevate. How quaint of legislators and executives of our grandparents’ generation to want that.

Of course, at the same time, the Flintstones were hawking cigarettes…

Inevitably, the lure of lucre would trump public service, and the presence of educational and artistic programming would dwindle. I’m thankful that remnants of this sort of thing were still around in the ‘70s and ‘80s, though mostly thanks to PBS – now under fire by small minds and empty souls determined to undermine anything that truly does make this country great.

Here, on the birthday of Brazilian master Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bernstein sums up the composer’s musical aims in four minutes in this “Young People’s Concerts” broadcast of 1963:

Then he conducts Villa-Lobos’ biggest hit, “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5.”

On an earlier broadcast, in 1960, Bernstein conducted the composer’s second-biggest hit, “The Little Train of Caipira,” from “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2”

Happy birthday, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and requiescat in pace, American sanity.

March 5, 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
Chamber Orchestra Blooms Under Hayes’ Baton

This was my kind of concert!

Yesterday afternoon, at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts’ Perelman Theater, The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia was conducted by David Hayes in a program of 20th century classics.

Aaron Jay Kernis’ “Musica Celestis” (1990-91) takes its inspiration from medieval mystic and composer Hildegard von Bingen – a work in the holy schmoly, “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”/Alan Hovhaness mode, with perhaps a little Barber’s “Adagio” tossed into the mix. Both Kernis’ and Barber’s works are arrangements of movements from their respective string quartets. This has always been my favorite Kernis piece, with perhaps his “Superstar Etude No. 1” (in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis) a guilty pleasure. Kernis himself was in attendance for yesterday’s performance. The program was a repeat of one previously presented on Friday night.

Béla Bartók’s Divertimento for String Orchestra (1939) was next, the first movement, a game of Baroque solo-tutti table tennis; the second an atmospheric tiptoe through the dank corridors of Dracula’s castle (Hayes, in some spoken remarks, compared it to the scene in every horror movie where you think, “Don’t open that door!”); and the third, a frenzied village dance, more determined in character than in any way euphoric. This is not your standard 18th century entertainment or diversion! But you’ll have this, with Nazism swallowing Europe and the world teetering at the brink of war. (Germany invaded Poland only weeks after the work’s completion.)

The concert concluded with Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade, after Plato’s ‘Symposium’” (1954) – scored for violin, harp, string orchestra, and percussion – essentially Bernstein’s violin concerto. Plato’s work is all about love, with dinner guests waxing philosophical on the multifarious aspects of Eros; but drink is involved, so things eventually devolve into a more worldly appreciation of the grape. Whether intentional or not, something of Bernstein’s character is reflected in the work’s debauched trajectory.

Dionysian Sandy Cameron was the soloist, wearing a silver tunic, cross-laced “Demetrius and the Gladiators” boots, and diaphanous, ankle-length chlamys. It was her “Megalopolis” moment. Cameron moshed and swayed, contorted and smiled to the music, while meeting all the work’s technical and emotional challenges. Aristophanes never sounded so much like Korngold.

I always thought this was Bernstein’s concert masterpiece, though of course there are moments when it is unmistakably the work of the guy who wrote “West Side Story” (already being formulated at the time). Hey, the work has six percussionists.

I’ve been following Hayes on and off over the decades, since his days as a student at the Curtis Institute of Music. Apparently, I haven’t followed closely enough. I always considered him a choral conductor (for years, he was music director of the Philadelphia Singers; later, he directed the New York Choral Society), but his resume is much more diverse. I knew, but I guess must have willfully downplayed the significance of his service on the conducting staff of the Philadelphia Orchestra for a decade, from 2001-11. He kind of dropped of my radar when he moved to New York, and he’s racked up a whole lot of impressive credits since.

Then a couple of years ago I saw him conduct the world premiere of Adolphus Hailstork’s Symphony No. 4 at Alice Tully Hall, on a program that also included works by Jennifer Higdon and Zhou Tian, with all three composers in attendance. Parenthetically, I was sorry to have to miss one of my favorite Hailstork works, the “Sonata da Chiesa,” on the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia’s October concert, with Michael Torke’s “December” and Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, but unfortunately I had scheduling conflicts and was unable to attend.*

At any rate, evidently I wasn’t really paying attention, as David Hayes is all growed-up!

This is Hayes’ first season as music director of the chamber orchestra (succeeding Dirk Brossé). I hope the inclusion of so much worthwhile, wholly accessible 20th century and contemporary music works for the organization, because it really works for me. I could have very happily spent my Sunday afternoon at home (it was a whirlwind round-trip as I had another obligation on Sunday night), but this concert was like classical music shoo-fly pie. Bravo, and more please!

*ERRATA: It was actually a more recent Hailstork work they performed, “Sagrada: Sonata da Chiesa No. 2.” All the more shameful for me to have missed it!

Video excerpt from Bernstein’s “Serenade” from Friday night’s performance:

November 25, 2024

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