Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Philadelphia

Germaine Tailleferre in Philadelphia

I find it fascinating that Germaine Tailleferre waited out World War II in Philadelphia. And yet I can never seem to find out very much about what she did while in exile.

Tailleferre was the only female member of Les Six, that loose collective of composers that rose to prominence in Paris in the late ‘teens and 1920s, under the guidance of Jean Cocteau. Her famous colleagues included Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, and Georges Auric. Louis Durey, a hard-line communist who went on to set poems by Ho-Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, is the one nobody remembers. (I wonder why.)

Tailleferre was strong-willed from the beginning. Her birth name was Taillefesse, but she changed it to spite her father, since the old man opposed her musical studies. However, she took piano lessons with her mother and was admitted into the Paris Conservatory. It was there that she met the rest of The Six and that the prizes began to pile up. She also earned the friendship and received the support of Maurice Ravel.

In 1925, she married Ralph Barton, the American caricaturist, and moved to New York. Two years later, the couple returned to France, then divorced. Her career thrived in the 1920s and ‘30s. With the outbreak of World War II, however, she beat it back to the United States, leaving most of her scores at her home in Grasse, and, as I said, passed the war years in Philadelphia.

After the war, she again returned to France, where she resumed her career. As she got older, her pieces tended to be shorter, as she suffered from arthritis. She also wrote a lot for children and young pianists. She composed virtually right up until the time of her death in 1983, when she was 91 years-old. She wrote so much, in fact, that a lot of the music of her later years has never been published, and fresh discoveries from her output are being recorded all the time.

Happy birthday, Germaine Tailleferre! If anyone has any information about her activities in Philadelphia, I would be very curious to know.

The Concertino for Harp and Orchestra (1927):

The lovely and wistful “Arabesque” for clarinet and piano (1972):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0E8tUzQezA See Less

The Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1924). The piece was given its U.S. premiere – in the presence of the composer – by Alfred Cortot and the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted Leopold Stokowski.

April 19, 2021
Leo Smit Philadelphia Composer Centennial

Leo Smit was born in Philadelphia 100 years ago today.

Not to be confused with the Dutch composer of the same name (born in 1900), Smit was the son of Russian immigrants. His father was a violinist who performed with Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia, Fritz Reiner in Cincinnati, and Arturo Toscanini in New York (with the NBC Symphony).

A child prodigy, Leo took to the piano by the age of 5. When he was about 8, his mother took him to Moscow, where he studied for a year with composer Dmitri Kabalevsky.

Back home, he was accepted into the Curtis Institute of Music. He was taught there by Isabella Vengerova. Vengerova was a Leschetizky pupil. Her other students included Gary Graffman, Gilbert Kalish, Leonard Pennario, Menahem Pressler, and Abbey Simon.

Smit also learned from José Iturbi, the Spanish conductor, pianist, and harpsichordist, who achieved wider recognition in Hollywood films of the 1940s. Iturbi stood in for Cornel Wilde on the soundtrack to the Chopin biopic “A Song to Remember.”

He received further instruction in composition from Nicolas Nabokov, who was the first cousin of Vladimir Nabokov.

At 15 or 16, Smit became a rehearsal pianist for George Balanchine. He first worked with Igor Stravinsky while preparing for the world premiere of “Jeu de Cartes.” He was a devoted champion of the music of Aaron Copland, all of whose works for the keyboard he recorded. He once had the opportunity to play privately for Béla Bartók, for whom he turned pages at Carnegie Hall. Following the Carnegie concert, Copland introduced him to Leonard Bernstein. Smit also did much to revive the reputation of boogie-woogie master Pete Johnson.

In 1951, the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed Smit’s First Symphony. He also composed two operas, “The Alchemy of Love,” on a libretto by British astronomer Fred Hoyle (who also provided the text for an oratorio about Copernicus), and “Magic Water.” Among his other compositions was a collection of 100 songs after poems of Emily Dickinson. His works were programmed by Bernstein, Stokowski, and Serge Koussevitzky.

For three decades, he made his home in Buffalo, where he served on the faculty of the State University of New York. Earlier, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of California. As a photographer, he captured images of some of the era’s most notable musicians. He sometimes performed recitals to curated slide shows of his work.

Smit died in 1999 at the age of 78.

Leo Smit, Symphony No. 1:

Interesting interview with Bruce Duffie, including a great recollection of Stravinsky:

http://www.bruceduffie.com/leosmit.html

Smit speaks with David Dubal, now host of WWFM – The Classical Network’s “The Piano Mattters”:

Smit and Copland play “Danzon Cubano,” in its original two-piano version:

PHOTO: Smit (standing), with Copland and Bernstein, photobombed by some guy in a hair helmet

January 12, 2021
Hubert’s Ridiculously Long Name Philly Connection

This guy – Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr., for short – is credited with having actively used what is said to be the longest personal name in the world. Of course, its derivation is German, so it could conceivably go on forever, like pi. Needless to say, his life was a trail of typographical errors. You can wade through the full name by following the link below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Blaine_Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff_Sr.

Philadelphia attracts some very strange people. (I offer this as a resident of over 30 years.)

What it reminds me of is this classic Monty Python sketch, about the neglected German baroque composer.

My best friend and I had this memorized when we were in the seventh grade.

NOTE: Even in its shortened form, Hubert’s surname caused my computer to parse it out. As I cut-and-pasted my post from a Word document, there appeared several artificial breaks, signified by little perpendicular symbols, since removed!

May 19, 2020
1991 One Meridian Fire Then and Now Beards

On the night of February 23, 1991, One Meridian Plaza, a high-rise office building located in Center City Philadelphia, burst into flame. It was a serious fire. Lives were lost.

At the time, I was working as a humble clerk at Barnes & Noble, located on Chestnut near Broad, essentially right across the street. When I arrived on Sunday morning, Chestnut was blocked, since it was close enough that debris, and indeed the building itself, could have tumbled down onto the store front. I remember spending the morning over at the Philadelphia Art Museum (back in the days of free admission, Sundays until 1 p.m.), I stood on the steps, immortalized by “Rocky,” watching the smoke billow into the sky.

By Monday, a new work strategy was in place: employees were to go around the back of the bookstore and pound on the fire door (located on Sansom, across from the Union League), to be let into the basement to help out with receiving.

There, we all cheerfully went to seed. Much coffee was consumed, and the menfolk all started in on their solidarity beards. After a week or two, a good friend of mine took a look at me and commented, “Man… that beard makes you look like nobody famous.”

Two weeks into self-isolation, I am now working on my Corona beard, and again, I’m looking like nobody famous. Here are a few photos of some well-known composers who thankfully outgrew their flirtations with facial hair.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Bearded Mahler, Bernstein, Bartók, and Ravel

March 28, 2020
O Little Town of Bethlehem’s Philly Roots

As we anticipate the annual live broadcast of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” from King’s College, Cambridge (on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org, at 10:00 this morning EST), here’s a spot of trivia for you: Did you know that one of the most famous of all Christmas carols has its roots in Philadelphia?

Philip Brooks was an Episcopal priest and rector of Church of the Holy Trinity (located on the northwest corner of Rittenhouse Square) at the time he jotted down a poem, in 1868, inspired by a trip he had taken to the Holy Land. He conceived the text for a Sunday school service and requested that his organist, Lewis Redner, come up with a suitable melody.

For whatever reason, the task wasn’t at the top of Redner’s list of priorities. When Brooks checked in with him on his progress on the Friday before the service, Redner still hadn’t done anything with it. Of course, the organist assured him it would be done by Sunday, but it wasn’t until Saturday night, Christmas Eve, that he sat down and devoted any thought to it at all. Alas, his Muse was as lackadaisical as he. Redner wound up surrendering to Morpheus before he could settle on a worthwhile idea.

“I thought more about my Sunday-school lesson that I did about the music,” Redner later recollected. “But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony.”

The carol was first printed as a leaflet by Richard McCauley, a bookseller on Chestnut Street, west of 13th. One of these found its way to the rector of All Saints’ Church in Worcester, MA, who asked to be able to include it in a hymnal titled “The Church Porch.” He christened the piece “St. Louis.” We know it better by the address of its opening, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

In the UK, the text was sung to the hymn tune “Forest Green,’ which had been adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams from an existing folksong, “The Ploughboy’s Dream.” Vaughan Williams had notated the song while doing fieldwork in Surrey in 1903 and published it three years later in “The English Hymnal.”

H. Walford Davies also set the text, in two versions, as a hymn known as “Wengen” and for choir as “Christmas Carol.” The latter is frequently sung on the Christmas Eve broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, heard annually all over the world.

It may be the case that Brooks’ original poem is more familiar on the other side of the pond in its settings by these two venerable English composers, but in the United States, Redner’s melody remains one of the most recognizable of the incessantly sung Christmas carols.

Both Brooks and Redner were astonished by the popularity of their creation, which they had intended as a modest one-off for children. Never underestimate the power of procrastination! With a little help from those “angel whispers,” Philadelphia, for once, managed to live up to Penn’s vision of a City of Brotherly Love.

The Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square

Brooks & Redner’s “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:

The Vaughan Williams version (from King’s College, directed by the late Stephen Cleobury):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsul9A3dU40

H. Walford Davies:

December 24, 2019

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