Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Pulitzer Prize for Music

Passover Ernst Toch & Bitter Herbs

It was not my intention by focusing on Easter the past couple of days to overlook the observance of Passover. You can bet your afikoman prize that if I weren’t doing the Easter circuit yesterday, I would have been home last night watching “The Ten Commandments.”

Though the Seders are past, Passover is an eight-day festival. I hope you’ll accept this link to a mini-documentary on Ernst Toch’s “Cantata of the Bitter Herbs” – a work which I nearly played on “The Lost Chord” yesterday (perhaps next year) – as an expression of my best wishes for a chag Pesach Sameach.

Toch, a European exile who settled in the United States (by way of Paris and London) following Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1956 for his Third Symphony.

April 6, 2015
MLK Day Willie Stargell & Freedom’s Song

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Here’s Willie Stargell in Joseph Schwantner’s “New Morning for the World (Daybreak of Freedom),” from 1982, the text compiled from speeches of MLK.

These are the forces which gave the piece its premiere on January 15, 1983 (King’s birthday), at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. For my money, it is still the preferred recording of the work. Why has this never been issued on compact disc?

In fact, there don’t appear to be any recordings of the piece currently in print! Schwanter was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1979 for his work, “Aftertones of Infinity.”

More about Stargell here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Stargell

It makes me realize how naive and complacent I am that I am surprised by the episodes of discrimination and harassment against such a beloved figure. It also makes me realize just how short history is.

January 19, 2015
Pulitzer Music Prize History & Preview

Tomorrow afternoon, the Pulitzer Prize committee will announce this year’s winners and nominees. In anticipation, tonight on “The Lost Chord,” we look back on the history of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Really, other than Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Ives’ Symphony No. 3, how often do you get to hear this stuff? Okay, the operas of Menotti and Robert Ward get revived from time to time, and Jennifer Higdon has been very fortunate for a composer in her prime. Yet most of the Pulitzer winners remain elusive.

We’ll have a chance to sample three of them, as part of our annual “Pulitzer Surprises” show – including the very first, William Schuman’s “A Free Song” (1943), recorded for the first time only in 2011, and the most recent, Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” (2013).

Shaw – at 30, the youngest recipient in the history of the category – is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. Her work for string quartet, “Ritornello 2.sq.2.j,” will be performed by the JACK Quartet in Princeton this Tuesday.

The “Partita” is certainly the highlight of tonight’s program, with a dizzying array of genres and techniques ably navigated by the a cappella ensemble, Roomful of Teeth.

Also on the program will be a sampling of William Bolcom’s “12 New Etudes for Piano,” the Pulitzer-winner from 1988.

You can hear it tonight at 10:00 ET, with a repeat Thursday night at 11, or catch it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

April 13, 2014

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