|
Sunday July 3: American opera is called for on this Sunday
of the Fourth of July holiday weekend. I therefore offer up three
lyric theater works by three different American composers. Douglas
Moore (1893-1969) built his reputation on his American folk operas
like The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956). He wrote the quintessential
Yankee opera The Devil and Daniel Webster (1939) after the short
story and stage play by Stephen Vincent Benet. Fear of Satan's infernal
kingdom underlies this one-act lyric drama. Webster, the rock-hard
senator from New Hampshire, must debate a slick Boston lawyer in
a hellish trial over the fate of the soul of a Yankee farmer. Way
back on Sunday, November 26, 1989, I broadcast an old Desto LP recording
of The Devil and Daniel Webster. Lyric Opera of Kansas City revived
The Devil and Daniel Webster in 1995. The audio document of that
stage production was released through Newport Classics on a single
silver disc. Mrs. H. H. A. ("Amy") Beach (1867-1944) earned the
unofficial honorary title of "Dean of American Women Composers".
She wrote more than three hundred compositions in all genres of
art music, but especially piano music, since she was a virtuoso
pianist. Mrs. Beach left us only one little opera: Cabildo, composed
at the MacDowell Colony for composers in Peterborough, New Hampshire
in 1932, but first performed in 1945, two months after her death.
(Her will left a generous endowment for the Colony.) Cabildo is
a chamber opera in one act to a libretto by Amy's friend playwright
Nan Bagby Stevens. It deals with the legendary pirate Jean Lafitte,
who was imprisoned in New Orleans, the setting of the opera, during
the War of 1812. Cabildo got the professional premiere it deserved
in the series "Great Performers at Lincoln Center," May 13, 1995.
The Delos CD recording features the original cast, conducted by
Ransom Wilson. Jerome Moross (1913-83) was best known as a composer
of film scores and Broadway musicals, but he also wrote ballet music
and concert pieces. His ballet score for Frankie and Johnny (1938)
is a uniquely American combination of dance and opera with no spoken
dialogue. Moross' music might remind you of jazz composer Duke Ellington
in his most classical groove. Keep listening for the third part
of my holiday presentation, which includes Moross' Those Everlasting
Blues (1932) and Willie the Weeper (1948). Naxos Records released
these three lyrico-dramatic works by Moross in its "American Classics"
line on a single silver disc. Richard Rosenberg conducts the Hot
Springs (Arkansas) Music Festival Symphony Orchestra and Chamber
Chorus. Frankie and Johnny received its world premiere recording
at this festival.
Sunday July 10: Now for an afternoon of pure popular musical
entertainment. The music from countless Walt Disney motion pictures
has become imbedded in Twentieth Century American culture. Disney
now sets out to conquer Broadway with a musical revue Disney's on
the Record (2005), which compresses eight decades of Disney music
into a two-act show. That was an incredibly difficult task, given
the wealth of material, but it seems David Chase has succeeded in
it. He adapted, supervised and arranged all the musical numbers
in the show. Thomas Schumacher produced Disney's on the Record,
as directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom. The two-CD original
cast recording has just been released by Walt Disney Records.
Sunday July 17: Stephen Sondheim created so many Broadway hits;
it's hard to think of any of his shows that were flops. Bounce (2003)
is one such. It opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and
received so-so reviews there and at its venue of origin, the Goodman
Theatre in Chicago. The show never made it to Broadway. Savants
of American musical theater like Frank Rich will tell you Sonheim's
music for Bounce is arguably the best he ever wrote. Maybe it was
the characters in the show that turned theatergoers off. Bounce
has some of the qualities of one of those old Bob Hope/Bing Crosby
The Road to… movies. But the two leads, the Mizner brothers, are
a couple of shameless hustlers, and their doting mama is not exactly
a heartwarming figure either. A radio audience can forget about
the flaws in the playbook and concentrate on the scintillating music.
The original cast recording of Bounce was released in 2003 through
Nonesuch Records. Usually at this point in the summer lineup, I
make sure to present a French operetta or opera bouffe. This time
around, I'm offering two little comic operas in French language
by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959). Martinu lived in
Paris for seventeen years. During that period he imbibed deeply
of the French national style of Ravel and his colleagues. La Comedie
sur le Pont ("The Comedy on the Bridge," 1935) was written on commission
from the Czechoslovak state broadcasting company as a radio operao
with a Czech libretto. Say Fanfare magazine's critic David Johnson,
"It is a splendid work and highly stageworthy despite its origin
as an opera for radio…the near legendary Manuel Rosenthal conducts
The Comedy on the Bridge with as light a touch as he brings to Offenbach."
(Fanfare, July/Aug. 1991 issue). This work is paired with Martinu's
Alexandre Bis ("Alexander Twice," 1937), a zany, frivolous Dadaist
one-act comic opera, on a single French Harmonica Mundi compact
disc in HM's "Le Chant du Monde" line. Both little operas come to
us as air tapes of ORTF French National Radio broadcasts of the
1960's, featuring a virtual honor roll of great French singers of
the period. In Alexandre Bis Jean Doussard leads the Orchestre Lyrique
of ORTF. Sunday July 24: Baby boomer listeners are old enough to
remember the opening music to the TV series "Sargent Preston of
the Yukon." It was the effervescent overture to Donna Diana (1894)
by Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek (1860-1945). On its own the overture
to this comic opera was frequently played in pops concerts. The
opera itself, although wildly popular in German-speaking places
early in the twentieth century, is nowadays virtually unknown. Reznicek
wrote several light operas, now all forgotten, but Donna Diana has
insured him a niche in music history. The story of the opera has
similarities to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Reznicek
took it from a short story in Spanish about a beautiful but cold-hearted
senorita. The best case for Reznicek's comic masterpiece in a live
recording of the stage revival of Donna Diana at the Kiel Opera
in 2004. Ulrich Windfuhr conducts the Kiel Opera Chorus and Kiel
Philharmonic Orchestra.
Sunday July 31: Gilbert and Sullivan operettas always figure
in the summer lyric theater programming mix. The Gondoliers, or
The King of Barataria (1889), was the last successful creative collaboration
of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. True, Utopia Limited (1893)
and The Grand Duke (1896) followed, but they lacked the old G&S
magic and ultimately failed to catch on with the audiences. The
Gondoliers, however, has retained its popularity right up to the
present day, and has remained in the immortal G&S canon. And no
wonder! Sullivan's score is full of suave Italianate melody. Never
did he draw so heavily on dance rhythms: the tarantella, the barcarole
and the cachucha from Andalusia in Spain. A classic old London recording
of The Gondoliers has been reissued through Decca Ltd. in 2003 on
two silver discs. Originally recorded in 1961 in early stereo sound,
it has the added benefit of all of Gilbert's witty dialogue. It
serves to turn the presentation into a complete radioplay with music.
I last broadcast the old London LP's on Sunday, July 28, 1985. The
cast consists of all the famed Savoyards of half a century ago,
all of them members of the historic D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Isadore Godfrey conducts the New Symphony Orchestra of London.
Sunday August 7: Also included every summer in the opera
lineup is an opera buffa of Giochino Rossini. I last broadcast Il
Signor Bruschino (1813) on Sunday, August 13, 1995. A long one-acter
like this falls into the subgenre of farsa giocosa, meaning, I guess
that it's all the crazier because the theatrical action is so compressed.
Musically it's everything you would expect of the young master from
Pesaro. Naxos Records has given us a sparkling new take on "Mister
Bruschino." Claudio Desderi conducts the chamber orchestra I Virtuosi
Italiani, with eight all-native Italian vocal soloists. Desderi
made his debut as a conductor in 1969 directing this very work.
Bruschino doesn't last too long in airplay, so we'll have plenty
of time to devote to the glories of Neapolitan song. Keep listening
for the voices of Benjaminio Gigli, Giuseppe di Stefano, Tito Schipa
and Carlo Bergonzi, as documented in historic recordings derived
from my own collection.
Sunday August 14: Like other European countries, Denmark
has had a long history of opera, even if Danish operas are not well
known in the operatic world at large. The first significant one
was F.A.A. Kunzen's Holger Danske (1789). The world premiere Da
Capo recording of Holger Danske I broadcast on Sunday, May 4, 1995.
Carl Nielsen's Maskarade (1906) is probably the single finest representative
opera from Denmark. There is only one commercial recording of it
still in print, made in 1977 in the studios of Radio Denmark. The
original LP set had been reissued on CD through Unicorn-Kanchana.
Maskarade is a romantic comedy inspired by the stagework of the
same name by Ludvig Holberg, a sort of Danish Shakespeare of the
eighteenth century. Like the play, the opera is set in Copenhagen
in the Spring of 1723. To elude their watchful parents, young lovers
meet at a masquerade ball. These costume balls, which took place
in theaters, were part of an extended period of revelry something
like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. What a blessing that the one-and-only
recording is a superb one, winning the highest praise from Fanfare
magazine's reviewer John Baumann. The last time I broadcast Maskarade,
I worked from the Unicorn-Kanchana CD's I borrowed from the Hartford
Public Library. This time I'm using the Da Capo re-release on two
silver discs that has newly come into our station's huge classical
record holdings.
Sunday August 21: I never fail to program a Viennese operetta
sometime during the summer months. Johann Strauss, Jr.'s Der Zigeunerbaron
("The Gypsy Baron," 1885) I have presented on four previous occasions
over the course of two decades. There are plenty of recordings of
this opera around. Most notable among them is Nikolaus Harnoncourt's
restored original score of 1885 for Telarc records, which I broadcast
on Sunday, August 27, 1997. The traditional score of Zigeunerbaron
has numerous changes in libretto and orchestration that the composed
never authorized. It's also lacking whole musical numbers that the
Austrian state censors cut out for political reasons during World
War One. We return this Sunday to the traditional "Gypsy Baron,"
beautiful as always has been to hear even in its usual truncated
form. In July, 2004 it was captured for posterity by Radio France
in a concert-style broadcast as part of the Radio France Festival
of Montpelier. Armin Jordan conducts the National Orchestra and
Chorus of Radio France. Most of the vocal soloists are from Central
Europe. They full understand the general traditions of the style
of Vienese operetta.
Sunday August 28: I always reserve the last Sunday in August
for one of the operas of Frederick Delius (1856-1934), who has been
called "the English Debussy." I do so because the music of Delius
is so evocative of the lazy, hazy end of summertime. Longtime readers
of our Program Guide will remember my four-part series on the seven
operas of Delius and the attributes of his style, which appeared
in the Guide from July/August 1988 to March/April 1989. Since the
early 1980's, I begin a fourth cycle with Delius' first opera Irmelin
(1892), his single longest musical composition: a gorgeous fairy
tale of an opera with a libretto by the composer himself, based
partly on Hans Christian Anderson's version of the medieval romance
of the Princess and the Swineherd. Irmelin never saw the stage in
Delius' lifetime. A pity, too, since composers Edvard Grieg and
Andre Messager praised the music. In 1953 Delius' friend and promoter
Sir Thomas Beecham conducted an amateur performance of Irmelin which
wen unrecorded. In December, 1984 it was given a concert broadcast
performance from the studios of the BBC Third Programme. The tapes
of that broadcast were issued under the BBC's Artium label, first
on LP, then on CD upgrade. I aired the LP set way back on Sunday,
August 26, 1986 and the CD reissue twice thereafter: Sundays, August
25, 1990 and August 30, 1998. Since no new rerecording of Irmelin
has been made, you'll hear those same Artium silver discs today.
In this two-month period of programming, as usual over so many years,
I draw again upon my own remarkable record collection of Rob Meehan,
former classics deejay here at WWUH and a specialist in the alternative
musics of the the twentieth century. Rob loaned me for broadcast
his copy of the Naxos recording of the music of Jerome Moros, and
the two little operas of Martinu from Le Chant du Monde. Most of
the rest of the programming comes from our station's ever-growing
collection of classical music on CD. From my own collection comes
Disney's On The Record and Delius' Irmelin.
WWUH: July/August Program Guide 2005 ©
|
