Classic Ross Amico

Tag: The Lost Chord

Elgar’s Third: A Symphony Realized

What can I say? I’m a man of contradictions.

Still fairly close on the heels of last Saturday’s post in which I expressed my reservations surrounding the completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, here I am, celebrating the realization of Elgar’s sketches for an unfinished Third.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have a remarkably vivid piece of wishful thinking.

Sir Edward Elgar produced no major works following the death of his wife in 1920. It was his friend and champion, George Bernard Shaw, who, in an attempt to keep one of England’s greatest composers from withering on the vine, persuaded the BBC to commission from Elgar a Third Symphony.
Elgar, who died in 1934, worked at the piece during the last year of his life, jotting down his ideas – some merely a few bars in length; others, pages in full score. As his health deteriorated, he realized he would never be able to complete the work, and he made contradictory remarks concerning his intentions over the fate of the sketches.

Another of his friends, the violinist W.H. Reed, passed many hours playing through what existed of the piece, with the composer at the piano. After Elgar’s death, Reed published 40 pages worth of sketches into a memoir, which kept the work at the periphery of the public consciousness.

Several attempts were made over the decades to make something more of the sketches, but musicians and musicologists were always stopped short by the Elgar estate.

The composer Anthony Payne became interested in the fragments in 1972. For many years, he worked at a realization of the piece, again meeting resistance from Elgar’s heirs, until it became apparent that, due to the publication of the sketches in Reed’s book, the material would soon fall into the public domain. The family opted to capitalize on what control it had left and finally authorized Payne’s efforts.

His realization was given its premiere in 1998 and granted broad exposure through performances by major orchestras, particularly in England and the United States (including the Philadelphia Orchestra), and the piece has been recorded at least four times.

The formal title is “Edward Elgar: The Sketches for Symphony No. 3, Elaborated by Anthony Payne” – known for short as the “Elgar/Payne Symphony No. 3.” You’ll have a chance to hear it tonight.

I guess the reason I am so forgiving of Elgar’s Third is because at no level is anyone trying to pass it off as Elgar’s actual symphony. Rather, it is a fascinating amalgam that manages both to recall Elgar and bring out the best in Payne. The two creative voices mix remarkably well to form a cohesive work of art.

I hope you’ll join me for “No Payne, No Gain,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

PHOTOS: A Payne on Elgar’s side

September 22, 2019
British Composers Abroad on The Lost Chord

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” the only thing missing will be a dour Dame Maggie Smith, as we holiday on the Continent with the British. It’s an hour of music by English composers inspired by their travels abroad.

Elisabeth Lutyens must have been a rather prickly personality herself. She wrote principally in a modified twelve tone idiom. While she despised the modal melodies of the English pastoralists (in reference to whose works, she coined the term “cow-pat music”), she was equally dismissive of strict serialism.

It’s interesting that someone who made so many enemies could turn around and write a piece like “En Voyage,” a delightful suite of British Light Music. But I suppose it served to keep Lutyens in cucumber sandwiches.

Lennox Berkeley met Benjamin Britten at a contemporary music festival in Barcelona in 1936. While there, the pair witnessed some Catalan folk dancing in a park. Britten jotted down some of the melodies onto an envelope, and the two composers worked closely to create an orchestral suite called “Mont Juic.”

Finally, it was the remembrance of a trip to Upper Bavaria that inspired the Elgars to collaborate on a set of part-songs, which would be called “Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands.” Edward Elgar (not yet knighted), set texts of his wife, C. Alice Elgar. Three of the movements would later be published separately, in a purely orchestral version, much better known, as “Three Bavarian Dances.”

Send word for the valet to pack up your steamer trunk. We’ll be “Channel Hopping,” with the English abroad, this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

August 4, 2019
Cosmic Classics Moonwalk Anniversary

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” for the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk, cap your weekend of lunar celebrations with an hour of music inspired by the cosmos.

When Spanish master Joaquin Rodrigo was in the United States in 1970 to attend the world premiere of his “Concierto Madrigal” at the Hollywood Bowl, he decided to make a side-trip to Houston, where he visited what is now the Johnson Space Center. There, NASA saw to it that the composer, blind since the age of three, was introduced to astronauts and permitted to handle moon rocks.

The experience left him with a powerful impression, so that when he was commissioned by the Houston Symphony Orchestra several years later to write a piece of music to celebrate the American Bicentennial, his thoughts returned to his friends at NASA and the idea of space exploration. The result was something worlds away – if you’ll pardon the expression – from his popular works for guitar: the symphonic poem “A la busca del más allá” (“In search of the beyond”).

Another Spaniard inspired by extraterrestrial concerns was Enrique Granados, very well-known for his music for the keyboard. Perhaps Granados’ most unusual work is a concerto-of-sorts for piano, with choruses and organ, “Cant de les estrilles” (“Song of the Stars”). This music was composed as a vehicle for Granados himself and dedicated to the long-lived pianist, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, who died as recently as 1993 – one month shy of his 101st birthday.

“Song of the Stars” was given its first performance in 1911, on the same program as the premiere of Granados’ enduring piano suite “Goyescas.” However, the manuscript would remain unpublished. Granados died in 1916, only a few years later, on a return trip from the United States, when his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine while crossing the English Channel.

The manuscript found its way to New York in the 1930s, brought there by the composer’s son, who was lured by businessman and conductor Nathaniel Shilkret with the promise of publication. Legal entanglements ensued, involving other members of the Granados family. A fire in the 1960s was feared to have destroyed the work, and efforts by the family to recover the piece with the assistance of José Iturbi and Alicia de Larrocha came to naught.

In 1982, Granados’ daughter enlisted the American pianist Douglas Riva to act as the family representative. Finally, an agreement was negotiated with Shilkret’s grandson, and the work was performed again for the first time in nearly 100 years. The unattributed Catalan text is said to be a response to the poetry of Heinrich Heine, about love and the stars, from the perspective of the stars themselves.

Finally, we’ll round out the hour with music by contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Saariaho evokes both the mythological and astrological in her work for orchestra, “Orion,” from 2002. The piece falls into three movements: “Memento mori,” “Winter Sky,” and “Hunter.”

Pour yourself some cosmos. Then look to the skies in wonder! Join me for “Creating Space,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

July 21, 2019
Ellis Island History & Lessons for Today

At a time when immigration remains a divisive issue, it’s instructive to look back to political cartoons of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when bomb-toting Bolsheviks seemed poised to take down our democracy, the Chinese were inscrutable back-stabbers, the Jews were bearers of poverty and disease, and the Irish were simian-faced hooligans and drunks. Anxiety about outsiders has always been with us, yet somehow we got over each successive alien group, and the country has plugged along just fine.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll gain a little perspective, courtesy of composer Peter Boyer. From 1892 to 1954, more than 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island in search of a better life. More than 40 percent of the U.S. population – over 100 million Americans – can trace their roots to someone who entered this country along that route.

Boyer’s “Ellis Island: The Dream of America” incorporates texts from testimonials archived as part of the Ellis Island Oral History Project. These are real words of real people telling their own stories. The work is performed by actors, rather than speakers or narrators, who deliver their monologues in the first person. In a powerful epilogue, each of them comes together to recite a stanza from Emma Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus.” It’s so effective – and affecting – I get a little choked up just thinking about it.

You will, too, when you join me for “Spirits of Independence,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

June 30, 2019
Walt Whitman Songs of Democracy

“Happiness… not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour…”

Celebrate America’s national poet with the first of four installments, in anticipation of the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman, on May 31, 1819. Enjoy music inspired by his verse, including choral works, orchestral pieces, and songs, from an international array of composers.

This week, it’s an all-American program, featuring selections by Roy Harris, Frederick Converse, and Pulitzer Prize-winner George Walker.

Re-examine all that you have been told. Join me in honoring Walt Whitman with “Songs of Democracy,” on “The Lost Chord,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

May 5, 2019

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