Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Music

Happy Halloween My Musical Traditions

Happy Halloween!

Hard for me not to be on the air today. For me, so much of the best Halloween music is on the shorter side, and the most enjoyable playlist intersperses fairly brief tricks (3 to 6 minutes) with medium-length treats (15 to 20 minutes), and if I’m not spinning the platters for broadcast, I just won’t get to hear them. I’m not going to put on a three-minute piece of music for myself. So no Frederic Curzon “Dance of an Ostracised Imp,” no Thomas S. Allen “Dance of the Lunatics,” No Charles Ives “Hallowe’en.” I could go on.

At any rate, I hope you are able to find some musical enjoyment in your day. I’ll be finishing up reading some ghost stories and by mid-afternoon probably be stacking up the Halloween movies. I’ll listen to “A Faust Symphony” or something while doing my wildlife food deliveries, and I’ll be sure to get in a Halloween walk and a slice of pumpkin pie with my afternoon coffee. Mostly, I guess, I’ll be living the ideal Halloween in my head.

Surely it would include this:

October 31, 2022
Jerry Lee Lewis Remembered

Rock and roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis has died. Here’s an out-of-left-field tribute by Aaron Jay Kernis: the “Superstar Etude No. 1” (1992).

And Lewis in concert (1964)

Whoa, baby!

October 28, 2022
Amazon’s Decline Frustrates Music Lovers

What’s going on with Amazon?

It used to be, in a pinch, and with Amazon Prime, I could get most any major release delivered within two days.

Now I notice that many CDs are available only from offsite dealers, a good many of those that are actually in stock – as in, actually shipping from Amazon – are now ridiculously overpriced, and of those, many won’t be delivered for at least three days. Not all, mind you, but many.

And I’m not talking about unknown artists on tiny labels. I’m talking about Sir Neville Marriner and Sir Colin Davis on London/Decca and Philips, evergreen recordings made in the 1980s that have never been out of the catalogue. I would say it seems like Amazon is really trying to push everyone to its streaming, which personally I won’t do and is not really helpful in instances when I want to send a gift.

The claim could be parroted that the CD is on the way out, but the fact of the matter is that CD sales have actually been on the rise the past few years, and most classical music folks still want their physical media.

Quit trying to drive the market, corporations. There are still millions of us out there who want to collect, want to fill out our music libraries, want quick access to libretti and intelligently written liner notes, enjoy cover art, appreciate the ease of programming multimovement works, want to be able to play CDs in our cars, and not to be constantly lashed to the internet!

I do most of my CD shopping with online specialty dealers these days, many of them overseas, or close to home at Princeton Record Exchange. But when I need it quick, with guaranteed shipping, Amazon has always been a convenient fallback, both for gift-giving and for a hard-pressed radio programmer.

This recent increase in asspainery isn’t just limited to CDs. A few weeks ago, I received a notice from Amazon that something is going on with their magazine subscriptions too, and I’ll now have to look elsewhere for Opera News.

Of course, I won’t let it hinder my consumption. The fact that classical music continues to be so marginalized only makes me want to pad my libraries even more. Outlets like Amazon are just going to get an even slenderer slice of the pie.

I’ll have to make sure to start planning my Christmas shopping a little earlier this year. For Amazon, I guarantee two-day shipping for the back of my hand and my whisky breath.

October 3, 2022
Ken Russell’s Wild Ride Through Music & Film

Throughout his career, Ken Russell alternately tickled and tried the patience of audiences and critics alike with his excesses in films like “The Devils” (1971), “Tommy” (1975), “Gothic” (1986), and “Salome’s Last Dance” (1988). (The latter was memorably reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer and given a rating of three question marks.)

But he had a parallel fascination with the great composers and also directed features or short subjects about Bartók, Bax, Bruckner, Delius, Elgar, Mahler, Martinu, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Vaughan Williams, and perhaps most notorious of all, Franz Liszt.

In “Lisztomania” (1975), The Who’s Roger Daltrey plays Liszt and Wagner is portrayed as a kind of zombie-Nosferatu-Frankenstein’s monster-Hitler, whose electric guitar doubles as a machine gun. (I’m not kidding.)

Occasionally, Russell also directed staged opera, including a production of Boito’s “Mefistofele,” with Faust reimagined as an aging hippie.

On Claude Debussy’s birthday, would you buy Oliver Reed as the great French composer? Why not?

You can watch “The Debussy Film” (1965) here:

August 22, 2022
Olivia Newton-John A Stake Through My Childhood

Yeah, I know. Reading about Olivia Newton-John here is probably about the last thing you would expect. But her passing hits really close. Not because I was such a fan of her music, necessarily, but because her songs were everywhere during my happiest years, and “Grease” was such a cultural touchstone. The summer of ’78 was all about “Grease.” In my memory, it seems like every song from the musical became a hit, and the film’s soundtrack was all that was played at the public pool. Her death is like a stake through my childhood.

I can’t believe she was 73. I thought she had beat the cancer. R.I.P.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i52mlmJtyJQ

August 8, 2022

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