Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Percy Grainger

Cyril Scott Forgotten Genius Rediscovered

A languid Saturday is a good day for Cyril Scott. Though I suppose under ideal circumstances it would be a rather balmy day full of cicadas and satyrs.

Scott was one of the so-called Frankfurt Group, a collective of up-and-coming musicians who studied at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in the 1890s. The group included conductor and composer Balfour Gardiner (the great uncle of John Eliot Gardiner), songwriter Roger Quilter, and the nearly forgotten Norman O’Neill. The youngest of the bunch was a quirky, 13 year-old piano prodigy by the name of Percy Grainger.

Scott’s fame, such that it is, rests primarily on a piano miniature called “Lotus Land,” which helped insulate the piano benches of musical grandmothers everywhere. But he also left behind a sizable body of dreamy, wayward orchestral works, including two symphonies, four operas, four oratorios, and concertos of all stripes, to say nothing of his chamber and instrumental music. Often referred to as “the English Debussy,” Scott could usually be counted on for a good wallow. Alban Berg described his music as mushy.

His works, more or less neglected for decades, beyond some notable recordings of the piano concertos by John Ogdon, have received a lot of love in the recording studio over the past ten years.

Scott was fascinated by the occult. His claim to have contacted Grainger’s mother from beyond the grave put an end to their friendship. He was also occupied with the subject of health foods. His writings on diet and alternative medicine prefigure a school of thought which has become practically mainstream in the present day.

Someone must have sold off the library of Eugene Ormandy at some point since, somewhere in my own collection, I’ve got a book inscribed to Ormandy by Cyril Scott.

Happy birthday, C.S. (1879-1970).

Scott plays “Lotus Land”:

September 27, 2014
Grieg’s Circle: Friends & Admirers

From all accounts, Edvard Grieg was a gentle-though-principled, generous soul. He was certainly Norway’s most important composer, and his example proved an inspiration not only to Scandinavians, but also to musicians worldwide seeking to find a way around the Austro-German stranglehold on music.

Is it any wonder that he attracted such a devoted following? Tchaikovsky dedicated his “Hamlet Fantasy Overture” to Grieg. Liszt performed his piano concerto. Antonin Dvorak was a friend. Frederick Delius worshipped him.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll listen to an hour of music dedicated to Grieg by his friends and admirers.

The American composer Edward MacDowell never actually met Grieg, though he shared a certain musical affinity. He contacted the Norwegian to ask permission to dedicate to him his Piano Sonata No. 3, which he subtitled the “Norse.” Grieg was full of compliments about the piece, and he enthusiastically accepted. The two men enjoyed an admiring, though unfortunately short-lived correspondence, since both were already nearing the end of their lives. (MacDowell died in 1908, at the age of 47; he was already in the throes of the illness that would claim him at the time Grieg passed in 1907, at the age of 64.)

Julius Röntgen was born in Leipzig, but by his early 20s he settled in Amsterdam. He went on to become one of the most important figures in Dutch music, establishing the city’s music conservatory and participating in the founding of the Concertgebouw. Rontgen was successful in becoming a good friend not only of Johannes Brahms (no mean feat), but also Grieg, whom he visited in Norway 14 times. The result was a number of works he composed on Norwegian themes. Röntgen dedicated his suite “Aus Jotunheim,” inspired by a hike he had taken with the composer through the Norwegian mountains, to Grieg and his wife, on the occasion of their 25th wedding anniversary.

Grieg encountered the tireless Australian pianist Percy Grainger only toward the end of his life, but he was convinced he had found his ideal interpreter. He invited Grainger to perform his Piano Concerto in A Minor under his own direction. Sadly, Grieg died before it could come to pass. Nevertheless, Grainger continued to champion Grieg’s music for the rest of his life. Also, he dedicated a number of folk-inspired works to the memory of the Norwegian master. We’ll hear two historical recordings, of Grainger playing music of Grieg and then one of his own such works.

I hope you’ll join me for “Grieg-arious,” music by Grieg’s dedicated friends. You can enjoy it tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat at 3 a.m. Friday, or listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

PHOTO: (left to right) Grieg, Grainger, Nina Grieg & Röntgen at Grieg’s home, Troldhaugen, in 1907

August 24, 2014
Wacky Composers: Grainger & Antheil’s Eccentric Genius

July 8 is classical music’s birth date of wacky. Were there two more eccentric characters than Percy Grainger and George Antheil? Undoubtedly, there were some who would give them a run for the money, but few could win the race.

Antheil, the self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music,” was born in Trenton, NJ, in 1900. His “Ballet Mécanique,” for synchronized player pianos, siren, electronic bells, xylophones and airplane propellers, caused a riot at its Paris premiere in 1926.

At the time, he and his wife lived in a one-bedroom apartment above Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company bookshop, a favorite haunt of Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. Relishing his notoriety, Antheil carried a pistol in a silk holster sewn into his jacket, which he ostentatiously would place on the piano prior to commencing a recital.

Later, he was co-holder of a patent with actress Hedy Lamarr for a communications system based on frequency-hopping, as applied to radio-controlled torpedoes. Though the idea of spread spectrum became the basis for modern cell phone technology, neither Antheil nor Lamarr ever saw a dime for their invention.

In his spare time, Antheil wrote a column of advice to the lovelorn for Esquire magazine, a couple of murder mysteries and a book on criminal endocrinology.

Grainger, born in Australia in 1882, was an outstanding pianist and an innovative composer. He was also obsessed with physical fitness and the idea of racial superiority. Rather than drive or take the train, he preferred to jog across country from engagement to engagement. He would throw a ball over one side of a house, and then race around the other side to catch it.

Enamored of Nordic culture, he went out of his way to use only Anglo-Saxon words, avoiding in his letters anything of Norman or Latin origin. However, the dominance of German music rankled him.

He was unusually close to his mother and developed sadomasochistic tendencies. He donated whips and blood-stained clothes to the Grainger Museum, which he founded in 1932. (His request to have his skeleton displayed – posthumously, of course – was denied.)

Late in life, he experimented with electronics and “machine music,” in a sense paralleling an obsession of Antheil, who besides the “Ballet Mécanique,” wrote works like the “Airplane Sonata” and “Death of Machines.”

Sadly, only the smallest portion of Grainger’s output (“Country Gardens,” “Molly on the Shore,” “Shepherd’s Hey”) is known by the general public, and generally celebrated for the wrong reasons. Grainger’s treatment of harmony and rhythm could be highly original. He was a brilliant musician, and wholly unconventional in more ways than one.

Happy birthday, you wacky, wacky boys.

Here’s Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique” – presumably in its revision, because of the use of live pianists – with the annoying Fernand Léger film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX9SZ21OmYU

And Grainger’s setting of a text from the Faroe Islands, “Father and Daughter”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPAVUlmL0sk

PHOTOS: Grainger (left) and Antheil, both very bad

July 8, 2014

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