Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Richard Strauss

Remembering Wolfgang Sawallisch & Philadelphia

I remember being told by a friend over coffee, back in the early ‘90s – still a few years away from the brushfire circulation of news on the internet – that Wolfgang Sawallisch was to be the next music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Sawallisch?!!

It was a name I associated with Old World integrity and classic (mono) recordings of Richard Strauss. Also, a fabulous, underrated recording of “Ma Vlast” I had discovered while doing college radio, with the Suisse Romande Orchestra, of all things.

Had he ever even been to the United States? How old was he? I guess at the time he must have been around 70. In the event, he died in 2013, only six months shy of his 90th birthday. Philadelphia would prove to be the high-profile capstone of a very respectable, indeed enviable, if not exactly glamorous career.

Still, after the intensity and flash of Riccardo Muti, it would be a nice corrective. And I offer that as a Muti fan. This was Philadelphia, after all, where Ormandy roosted for 40 years.

While Sawallisch was not the most thrilling music director (the word
“kapellmeister” was bandied a lot), he provided solid leadership and proved on more than one occasion that on a good day he could still surprise.

I remember a concert on which he programmed works by Kodály and Miklós Rózsa (the rarely-heard Viola Concerto), which were interspersed with performances by a traditional Hungarian band, complete with cimbalom. He may have to some degree drained Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Symphony No. 8 of some of its Finnishness, but at least he secured its premiere. When a severe snowstorm meant the orchestra couldn’t make it in for a scheduled concert of scenes from Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and “Die Walküre” (including all of Act I), he made the impromptu decision to throw open the doors of the Academy of Music and play the accompaniment himself at the keyboard, with Deborah Voigt, Heikki Suikola, and chorus, for the enjoyment of anyone who cared to show up.

He was generally all about Beethoven and Bruckner and, yes, Strauss – a concert performance of “Ariadne auf Naxos” was a highlight of his tenure (with Werner Klemperer, Colonel Klink, as the Majordomo!) – but he could also turn around and play the tar out of something like Bohuslav Martinu’s Symphony No. 4. All in all, not a bad legacy.

I hope you’ll join me – once again over coffee – as I remember Wolfgang Sawallisch, with a selection of his recordings, as conductor and pianist. They’ll be among my featured highlights on this, his birthday, this afternoon from 4 to 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

August 26, 2019
Strauss, Busch & Marlboro’s Divergent Paths

On the next “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll have works by two German composers who traveled widely divergent paths.

As the aging elder statesman of Romantic opulence, Richard Strauss was in his late 60s when the Nazis seized control of Germany in 1933. He was 75 at the outbreak of World War II. Controversially, he remained at home, hoping to preserve and promote German music (including his own) and to shield his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren. While comprehending Strauss’ importance as a propaganda tool, Goebels wasn’t actually fond of his music, referring to him privately as a “decadent neurotic.”

All that was still decades in the future at the time Strauss wrote his Piano Quartet in C minor, in 1883-84, at the tender age of 20. Interestingly, for a composer who became celebrated for the apotheosis of the lavish tone poem, Strauss here channels his admiration for Johannes Brahms, and in a genre not generally associated with a follower of the post-Wagnerian “New Music School.” Brahms was at the height of his fame while the young Strauss was living in Berlin. In fact, Strauss attended the premiere of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, following his appointment as music director in Meiningen at 21.

We’ll hear Strauss’ quartet, performed at the 1972 Marlboro Music Festival, with Walter Klien at the keyboard, in his early 40s and at the peak of his pianistic powers. The string players will include violinist Edith Peinemann, violist Philipp Naegele, and cellist Miklós Perènyi.

Violinist Adolf Busch lived with his family – and friend, future son-in-law Rudolf Serkin – in Berlin in the 1920s, as Serkin established himself as one of Europe’s outstanding young pianists. The musicians remained in Germany until 1927. The much-respected Busch, who was not Jewish, vehemently opposed the National Socialists. He was one of the first prominent non-Jews to do so. With the rise of Hitler, Serkin and the Busches relocated to Switzerland. Busch repudiated Germany entirely in 1933.

He and Serkin arrived in the United States, with the rest of Busch’s family, in 1938, with Europe on the brink of war. They settled in Vermont in the 1940s. There, alongside flutist Marcel Moyse, they founded the Marlboro Music School and Festival in 1951, having successfully eluded the horrors that had claimed so many others to create something of lasting beauty – a chamber music retreat in what must have seemed like a bucolic paradise.

In addition to being one of the great violinists, Busch was also a talented composer. We’ll hear his “Divertimento for 13 Solo Instruments,” from 1925, in a 1982 recording featuring Marlboro musicians: Isidore Cohen and Irene Serkin, violins; Caroline Levine, viola; Robie Brown Dan, cello; Carolyn Davis, double bass; Odile Renault, flute; Rudolph Vrbsky, oboe; Cheryl Hill, clarinet; Stefanie Przybylska, bassoon; Robin Graham and Stewart Rose, French Horns; Henry Nowak, trumpet; and Neil Grover, timpani, all under the direction of Sol Schoenbach.

The path of least resistance leads to misery, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

More about Strauss’ complicated relationship with the Third Reich here:

http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/reichskulturkammer/strauss-richard/

PHOTO: Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin in 1928

May 8, 2019
Busoni, Strauss, and Queen Christina on the Radio

When his parents named him Ferruccio Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Busoni, clearly they had high expectations for their boy. These expectations were more than fulfilled, when he went on to become one of the outstanding pianists of his day, a brilliant intellectual, and an influential teacher. He also composed what may be the most grandiose piano concerto of all time.

Join me this afternoon on The Classical Network to hear Busoni’s magnum opus. The five-movement concerto, written in 1904, when the composer was 38, spans over 70 minutes and concludes with a male chorus. Chamber music it is not!

The apotheosis is a setting of a lofty text lifted from the verse drama “Aladdin,” by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschläger. By contrast, there are passages in the fourth movement, of much earthier stuff, that barely skirt self-parody, conjuring the specter of Chico Marx.

There was no way I would have been able to present this piece yesterday, Busoni’s birthday, during afternoon drive time, and reasonably expect to fit much else; but a Tuesday mid-afternoon is ideal for such an epic journey. The pianist will be Garrick Ohlsson, whose birthday it is tomorrow. Expect the concerto to commence around 2 p.m. EDT.

We’ll follow that with one of Richard Strauss’ lesser-heard works, the ambitious symphonic fantasy “Aus Italien” (“From Italy”), from 1886. When Strauss, at 22 years-old, employed what he believed to be a traditional Italian melody in the fantasy’s finale, he suddenly found himself the target of a lawsuit. The Neapolitan song “Funiculì, Funiculà” had been composed in celebration of a funicular cable car that was used to convey passengers up and down Mount Vesuvius – before it was predictably destroyed in an eruption in 1944. The song was composed in 1880 by Luigi Denza (music) and Peppino Turco (lyrics). It became a huge international hit and sold over a million copies. Poor Strauss. He wound up having to pay a royalty fee every time “Aus Italien” was performed.

We’ll begin our sojourn with today’s Noontime Concert, which will feature The Dryden Ensemble in a program titled “Queen Christina Goes to Rome.” The musical selections were chosen to mirror the unorthodox Swedish queen’s journey from Stockholm via Innsbruck to Italy, with excursions to Paris and Hamburg. Composers will include Dietrich Buxtehude, Louis Couperin, Arcangelo Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, among others.

The free-spirited queen scandalized her contemporaries by dressing as a man and refusing to marry. Equally confounding was her abdication at the age of 28, trading her throne for a life of music, art, and religion in Rome. The concert will feature actors Roberta Maxwell as Christina and Paul Hecht as the narrator, in dramatic readings from the letters and diaries of the queen and other historical figures. The program and script were assembled by Dryden artistic director Jane McKinley.

The Dryden Ensemble’s next set of concerts will take place this weekend. “Musica Stravagante” will include works for oboe and strings by German and Italian masters, including Tomaso Albinoni, Johann Sebastian Bach, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, and Antonio Vivaldi, again among others. The program will be presented twice, on Saturday at 7:30 p.m., at Trinity Episcopal Church in Solebury (outside New Hope, PA), and on Sunday at 3 p.m., at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Miller Chapel. For more information, visit drydenensemble.org.

I hope you’ll join me today in getting a “kick” out of music from the Apennine Peninsula, from 12 to 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Clockwise from left: The Apennine “boot;” Garbo as Queen Christina; a Vesuvian funicular car; Ferruccio Busoni enjoying a cigar

April 2, 2019
My First Bernstein Record

Do you remember your first Bernstein record? Mine was this LP of famous overtures, including “William Tell” and “Poet and Peasant” – great cartoon music! It was sent home with me by my uncle at the end of a Saturday visit, after I picked it out of his collection and listened to it transfixed through his headphones.

My uncle was an audio nut. Until my cousins were born, he was constantly upgrading his system. He always had the latest equipment. You’d think he’d be a natural candidate for a classical music lover – Richard Strauss or Shostakovich would have given his system a hell of a work-out – but he wasn’t. He was into classic rock before it became “classic.” The fact that he even had Bernstein in his collection demonstrates just how remarkable and pervasive Lenny was. He was the people’s conductor.

My uncle loves “Rhapsody in Blue.” He’s got many recordings – even one made on a Moog synthesizer – but Bernstein’s remains his favorite.

The overtures LP was one of my first classical records. Who knew where it would lead?

August 25, 2018
WWFM Today Strauss & Concordia Concerts

Immediately following today’s installment of “What Makes It Great,” it’s Richard Strauss’ “Ein Heldenleben” (“A Hero’s Life”), in an acclaimed recording that, to my knowledge, has never been played on this station, with Semyon Bychkov and the West German Radio Orchestra.

Coming up at 4:00 EDT, stay tuned for a special concert presented by Concordia Chamber Players. The broadcast will feature Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581, and Beethoven’s String Quintet in C major, Op. 29. Concordia’s next concert will take place this Sunday at Trinity Episcopal Church, Solebury, PA, (outside New Hope) at 3 p.m. The program will include works by E.J. Moeran, Bohuslav Martinu and Sir William Walton. Find out more at concordiaplayers.org.

I’ll be with you until 4 today. Keep listening to WWFM – The Classical Network, and pledge your support at wwfm.org. Thanks!

October 18, 2016

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