Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Ravel

Skrowaczewski Birthday Broadcast Bruckner & Ravel

With all the salutes to Sir Neville Marriner, who died on Sunday at the age of 92, it’s easy to overlook the fact that yesterday was the 93rd birthday of conductor and composer Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Interestingly, both Methuselahian maestros served as one-time music directors of the Minnesota Orchestra – as powerful an argument as any for the health benefits of fried food on a stick. Join me this afternoon, as we honor Skrowaczewski with his recordings of Bruckner and Ravel.

First, it will be another Noontime Concert with the Lenape Chamber Ensemble. The program, which was presented on July 23rd at Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, Pa., will feature a string trio by Beethoven, the Violin Sonata by Francis Poulenc, and a rarely-heard piano sextet by a 15 year-old Felix Mendelssohn. The Lenape Chamber Ensemble is made up of crackerjack musicians from Philadelphia and New York. You can find out more about the group and its upcoming concerts, the next of which will take place this weekend, at lenapechamberensemble.org.

Tune in today from noon to 4 p.m. EDT. The musical selections will range from chamber works to Bruckner, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.

October 4, 2016
Wittgenstein’s Left Hand Piano Legacy

Some of us may puzzle over the Zen riddle about the sound of one hand clapping, but, thanks in large part to Paul Wittgenstein, we all have a pretty good idea of the sound of one hand playing.

I hope you’ll join me this morning on WPRB, as we observe the anniversary of the birth of Wittgenstein (1887-1961), a pianist from a immensely wealthy and rather eccentric Viennese family, who famously who lost his right arm in the First World War. Through hard work and the power of sheer will, he managed to return to the concert stage, using his fortune to commission many of the great composers of his time to write new works for the left hand alone.

Among the composers to take up the challenge were Sergei Bortkiewicz, Benjamin Britten, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Sergei Prokofiev, Franz Schmidt, Richard Strauss, and of course Maurice Ravel. We’ll hear Wittgenstein himself grapple with Ravel’s masterpiece in a 1937 concert recording.

We’ll also enjoy a work composed in 1923 by Paul Hindemith that remained unheard for 80 years, until its rediscovery in a Pennsylvania farmhouse in 2002, following the death of Wittgenstein’s widow. Wittgenstein retained exclusive performance rights to many of his commissions, and if he didn’t somehow connect with a work, it simply went unheard. Such was the case with Hindemith’s “Klaviermusik mit Orchester” and also Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 4.

In the case of the latter, composed in 1931, Wittgenstein was eventually convinced by Siegfried Rapp, another pianist who had lost his arm in the war, to allow him to give it its premiere in Berlin in 1956. The U.S. premiere was given by Rudolf Serkin, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, in 1958. We’ll hear those same forces perform it this morning. Rapp will perform Bohuslav Martinu’s “Concertino for Piano (Left-Hand) and Orchestra.”

Leon Fleisher, who grappled with focal dystonia for 40 years, was the pianist who gave the Hindemith its belated premiere in 2004, with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. We’ll hear Fleisher, now a vibrant 87 years-old, perform it – and great deal else – this morning.

Get ready to rub shoulders with a lot of southpaws this week. Tune in from 6 to 11 ET to WPRB 103.3 FM or online at wprb.com. It will be wholly intentional, for a change, when nothing goes “right,” on Classic Ross Amico.

November 5, 2015
Ravel’s Trio & Rediscovering Casella

One hundred years ago today, the world was introduced to Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio in A Minor. It was first performed in Paris by Gabriel Wilaume, violin, Louis Feuillard, cello, and at the keyboard, none other than the composer Alfredo Casella.

To be able to hear any of Casella’s own music in concert these days is a rarity, but it was just announced yesterday that his Symphony No. 2 will feature on a concert next season by The Philadelphia Orchestra. Gianandrea Noseda will conduct. Last season, he directed the orchestra in a colorful suite from Casella’s opera, “La donna serpente” (“The Snake Woman”).

The composer’s star may have faded, but his music has been increasingly present in recordings in recent years. A figure of the so-called “generazione dell’ottanta” (“Generation of ’80” – a group of composers born around 1880 – alongside Gian Francesco Malipiero, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Franco Alfano and Ottorino Respighi), Casella impressed music-loving Philadelphians of an earlier era to the extent that his Serenata, Op. 46, split the vote in a chamber music contest held by The Musical Fund Society in 1926. The rest of the prize money went to Béla Bartók, for his String Quartet No. 3.

Casella’s “Concerto Romano” was inspired by the Wanamaker Organ.

Here’s Ravel’s Piano Trio (with Yehudi Menuhin, Gaspar Cassadó and Louis Kentner):

And the first movement of Casella’s Serenata for Clarinet, Bassoon, Trumpet, Violin and Cello:

PHOTO: Casella in spats!

January 28, 2015

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