Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Riverside Symphonia

Lara St. John Plays New Hope Plus Much More

Talk to Lara St. John about her upcoming concert in New Hope, and she is just as likely to drift to topics as diverse as a Chagall exhibit she recently attended in Montreal, her experience of playing the score for “The Red Violin” (by her friend, composer John Corigliano) live with the film, and editing videos like “Bar Fight” and “The Kosher Chicken Dance” for her YouTube channel.

As serious artists go, St. John is refreshingly unpretentious and occasionally even a bit geeky. She is well enough versed in “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings” to pepper her conversation with references to AT-ATs and dragons. Her record label, Ancalagon, is named for a pet iguana (now deceased), which in turn was named for a creature in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion.”

St. John likes to keep it interesting, and she likes to have fun. When she plays, she is often very spontaneous, and she always goes for broke.

The Lambertville-based Riverside Symphonia will host St. John and her frequent partner, the pianist Matt Herskowitz, for a recital at St. Martin of Tours Church in New Hope on Mar. 10 at 8 p.m. On the first half of the program will be sonatas by Beethoven and César Franck.

The second half of the concert will be made up of special arrangements made for her from material largely collected by her from Yiddish, Macedonian, Israeli, Armenian, and Hungarian sources. These showpieces form the basis of her most recent album, “Shiksa.”

Capturing St. John in print is always a challenge. Read my most recent attempt in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2017/03/classical_music_lara_st_john_p.html

March 3, 2017
Grazyna Bacewicz Polish Composer Spotlight

“I believe this is the most brilliant woman composer who ever was.” So says conductor Mariusz Smolij about Grazyna Bacewicz.

Smolij, known in the Greater Delaware Valley as Music Director of the Riverside Symphonia, based in Lambertville, NJ, joins me this week on “The Lost Chord,” for the second installment in a two-part series, to talk about his recording projects for the Naxos label. His recorded repertoire focuses on neglected music by Eastern European composers, from Hungary, from his native Poland, and, in the case of Ernest Bloch, from Jewish tradition.

Bacewicz, who lived from 1909 to 1969, studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. She is a most interesting, Janus-like figure, her music embracing a kind of cosmopolitan neo-classicism, but not at the expense of her Polish heritage. She was an adept violinist and pianist, who survived a serious automobile accident that allowed her to concentrate wholly on composition for the last 15 years of her life. She remained energetic and prolific, also writing novels, short stories and memoirs. Though she is sometimes classified as a musical conservative, she retained her curiosity in regard to new developments in composition and was always on the lookout for ways to expand her horizons as an artist. She composed four symphonies, 12 concertos, chamber and instrumental works, opera and ballet, incidental music and film scores.

Smolij, who has directed the Riverside Symphonia for over 20 years, is also music director of the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra and Conservatory of Music in Lafayette, LA, and formerly associated with the Houston Symphony Orchestra and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. He has taught conducting at the School of Music at Northwestern University and was a founding violinist of the internationally acclaimed Penderecki String Quartet.

Only I would elect to highlight music by a great woman composer on Father’s Day. Consider it payback for the year I did an Odysseus show on Mother’s Day!

I hope you’ll join me for “Topping the Poles” – Mariusz Smolij’s recordings of Grazyna Bacewicz, first lady of Polish music – this Sunday night at 10 EDT, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.

PHOTOS: Mariusz Smolij (left) and Grazyna Bacewicz

June 19, 2016
Shakespeare Anniversary Celebration on WPRB

Saturday is the big day. The 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. Also the anniversary of his birthday (52 years earlier), allegedly. Have you anything special planned? Back-to-back screenings of the Olivier and Branagh versions of “Henry V?” Falstaff beer pong? A “Hamlet” sleepover?

We’ll do our best to get your creative juices flowing this morning, as we set the scene with the third of four programs devoted to music inspired by the Bard’s plays. Be with me bright and early for Johan Svendsen’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Sir William Walton’s “As You Like It,” and Josef Bohuslav Foerster’s “From Shakespeare,” really musical portraits of four female characters from Shakespeare’s plays (Perdita from “The Winter’s Tale,” Viola from “Twelfth Night,” Lady Macbeth from, well, “Macbeth,” and Katherina from “The Taming of the Shrew”). And that’s just in the 6:00 hour!

Before too late, we’ll also have Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Cymbeline” by his teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky. By then, you should be sufficiently caffeinated to compose sonnets with a quill.

I’ll be welcoming two guests this morning: Mariusz Smolij, music director of the Riverside Symphonia , who will tell us about his orchestra’s Friday night concert at St. Martin of Tours Church in New Hope – he’ll talk to us a little after 8 – and William Walker from The Princeton Singers will drop by a little after 9 to tell us about the choir’s Shakespeare-inspired concerts at Princeton University Art Museum on Saturday evening.

Music and sweet poetry agree this morning, from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and at wprb.com. We’re donning an Elizabethan collar, on Classic Ross Amico.

#Shakespeare400

April 21, 2016
Riverside Symphonia Concert New Hope PA

Coming up in the 9:00 hour, I’ll be joined by violinist Kinga Augustyn and conductor Mariusz Smolij, who will fill us in on their upcoming concert with the Riverside Symphonia. The program will include violin favorites by Sarasate and Wieniawski, bookended by life-affirming serenades by Mozart and Dvořák. The performances will take place tomorrow night at 8, at St. Martin of Tours Church, in New Hope, Pa.

How good is Augustyn? Check out her recital videos on YouTube. Try this gorgeous Chopin Nocturne to start:

Otherwise, it’s all music of the Neo-Baroque – 20th and 21st century composers looking back to the 18th century – including Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ wacky reimaginings of the works of Henry Purcell, “Variations on a Theme by Couperin” by Hendrik Andriessen, Paul Dukas’ “Variations, Interlude and Finale on a Theme by Rameau,” and Julian Orbon’s “Concerto Grosso for String Quartet and Orchestra,” among others, this morning until 11 ET, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com.

If it ain’t Baroque, we fix it anyway, on Classic Ross Amico.

October 8, 2015

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