WOSU Public Media - Classical

The BBC Music Magazine Awards nominees for this year have been announced and your votes will help determine the winners. Make your selections at www.bbcmusicmagazine.com/awards from now until Sunday, February 28th. The six winning discs will be announced in April, together with five special jury awards. The jury will also award the Disc of the Year selected from the winners of the readers’ vote.

To get the full experience, click here to check out the videos on the nominees – 18 recordings in six categories. Plus,  ArkivMusic.com has posted the list of recordings for purchase, all on sale!

Hope you have a “jolly good time.” – Beverley Ervine

Christopheren Nomura

Derek Bermel

The old and the new converged at the Southern Theatre and the Pontifical College Josephinum last weekend as ProMusica Chamber Orchestra welcomed three guests…Composers Michael Daugherty and Derek Bermel, along with baritone Christopheren Nomura.  This is one of those times that you really did need to attend both performances.  The only common threads for the weekend were Mozart’s 29th Symphony and baritone Christopheren Nomura.  Mr. Nomura has performed with some of the worlds finest orchestras and conductors, including the Boston Symphony and San Francisco Symphony, under the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa.  Saturday’s performance at the Josephinum featured two disparate works…Bach’s Cantata 82 and the gorgeous Songs of a Wayfarer by Gustav Mahler, both sung by Mr. Nomura, along with Mozart’s 29th Symphony.

Timothy Russell discusses Christopheren Nomura and Mozart

Then on Sunday evening at the Southern, Mr. Nomura presented his third piece of the weekend, Letters From Lincoln, which is a stirring setting of Lincoln’s own words by Michael Daugherty.

Timothy Russell discusses Michael Daugherty

Letters from Lincoln is one of TWO regional premieres performed Sunday evening.  The other was by one of music’s hottest composers, Derek Bermel.  Bermel’s A shout, a whisper, and a trace is dedicated to the memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky and was inspired by the reading of letters written by Bela Bartok.

Timothy Russell discusses Derek Bermel

Timothy Russell discusses commissions

As always, the Southern Theatre performance was followed by Coda, an opportunity for those attending the concert to meet the guest artists and composers and find more about them and their music.  Timothy Russell and I led the lively discussion which you’ll be able to hear as part of ProMusica’s next broadcast season this fall on WOSU-FM.  As usual, a weekend with ProMusica is full of great music and great surprises.  If you were unable to attend, I hope you can join us next time! — Boyce Lancaster

Black History Month is a good time to remember and pay tribute to tenor

Roland Hayes (1887-1977)

Roland Hayes (1887-1977). The other twelve months of the year will do just as well. We can’t celebrate Roland Hayes enough. If the world eventually was able to embrace Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, Paul Robson and Kathleen Battle it was not only for their great artistry but because the talent of Roland Hayes got there first.

Roland Hayes was born in Curryville, Georgia in 1887. His parents had been slaves; their son grew up to sing for King and Queen of England in Buckingham Palace. It was reported that young Roland Hayes’s concerts in London moved the rather granite faced Dame Nellie Melba to tears. No  easy thing, since Melba with her phenomenal voice and technique was not known to be the cuddly type. Never mind. Her imprimatur gave Hayes a head start, but the tenor himself said later, “If they praise your technique, that’s no compliment.  That means you didn’t move them. No singing isn’t a re-creative art. You don’t create. you stir up the atmosphere so people can feel those things common to all of us.”

Still, I have to praise Hayes’s beautiful voice AND his technique. Listen to the spiritual Weepin’ Mary recorded in 1942

Roland Hayes sang all over Europe. In 1928 he toured Russia, but an American career proved more difficult. “It will never happen here” his own teacher told him of a black man attempting to sing lieder, melodies and arias in America’s great concert halls.  The teacher was wrong. By the mid 1920s Roland Hayes was at home in Carnegie Hall and in Boston’s Symphony hall. Hayes settled in Boston and died there at the age of eighty nine.

This performance of Schubert’s Du bist die Ruh’ was recorded in concert at Symphony Hall on October 23, 1955. Reginald Boardman is at the piano. Hayes was nearly seventy years old.  “His voice is long past its prime” wrote one critic. “But his art is at its zenith…this is not to say that the voice has lost its beauty-once in awhile there is a flash of liquid gold”

From the same Symphony Hall concert, here is Berlioz’s L’absence. The beautiful mezza voce (half-voice) of ‘Reviens, reviens’ makes this performance for me. Roland Hayes had sung this to ecstatic audiences in Paris thirty years earlier. In 1955, his performance was no less beautiful

Roland Hayes made recordings, but they are hard to find today. He refused to work with the inferior labels available to African American artists.  Eventually in 1939 he signed with Columbia records. There were session in the 1940s and there’s archival material documenting Roland Hayes’s later career. He sang through the 1960s. There was a eightieth birthday tribute in Carnegie Hall in 1967-and a recital in Boston’’s (Cambridge) Longy School of Music for his 85th birthday in 1972. Handel’s Where e’er You Walk was recorded for Columbia in 1942. Hayes had this in his repertoire for his first concerts in Boston in 1922 and in Paris a year later. It  “remained one of his favorites throughout his singing career”

Opera was closed to Roland Hayes. What a splendid Rodolfo he would have made. Romeo! Des Grieux! Alfredo in La traviata. It was not to be. He did champion a young woman who became the first African American soloist to perform with the Metropolitan Opera, Marian Anderson. Thirty years earlier Hayes invited the young Marian Anderson to appear in concert with him. So impressed was he by the young woman’s talent that he told her family “You mark my words. Soon enough this girl will earn fifty dollars a night for her singing.”

She did, and then some. So did he.

Roland Hayes published a memoir, its title is a tribute to his formidable mother, Angel Mo and Her Son. Mr. Hayes’s daughter, Afrika Hayes Lambe went on to have a fine career as a singer mad music educator. Roland Hayes died  at home in Brookline Massachusetts on New Year’s Day, 1977.  Almost sixty years earlier, on April 23, 1921, “a royal limousine drove the Georgia farm boy to Buckingham Palace. For nearly two hours he sang European art songs and spirituals for the royal family.”

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot was recorded in 1955. The accompanist, as he is for all of the performances heard here, is Reginald Boardman.

The musical selections used here come from The Art of Roland Hayes published by the Smithsonian, (RD 041) The notes to the CD by Robert C. Hayden have been an invaluable help.

–Christopher Purdy

Let me say right up front…I am not a golfer.  Oh, I have a set of clubs, two pairs of golf shoes, several gloves, clubs I set aside when I replaced them with better clubs that would improve my game, but I am STILL not a golfer.  However, I WILL go abuse a course now and then.  That said, I will head to Shamrock Golf Club in Powell OH with Ken Cookson from Kegler, Brown, Hill, & Ritter, also a member of the Friends Board of WOSU Public Media, this Saturday at 9am.  Why, you ask?  Well, we are playing in the 19th Annual Arctic Open, presented by Dublin AM Rotary.  It is an opportunity for you to have some fun, brag about how you’re so tough you played golf in February (or moan that you are so bad, the only time they’ll let you on a course is when it’s closed).  There is great food, door prizes, a silent auction, and the good feeling that comes with helping others.  At the same time, you also will be supporting a number of charitable endeavors undertaken by Dublin AM Rotary: Miracle League, Dublin Veterans Project, Willow Ridge Equine Center, and many more.  there is still room if you’d like to play.  Individuals, twosomes, however many craz…errr… players you can bring, we’d love to have you join us this Saturday! — Boyce Lancaster

Music history. 

If the phrase doesn’t conjure images of a schoolmarm rapping knuckles with a hickory stick, it might just stick in your throat like a crust of dry bread.  This is unfortunate, for what is history but a deep, dense mesh of people’s stories, some funny, some sad, some strange?  And what is music if not beautiful, impassioned, relaxing, joyous?  How does such a melange of excitement and beauty get drilled down to what most might consider a skeleton of dry, dry bones?

We might look to the schoolmarm for one answer to this last question, since she may well have buried the human stories of musical works and their authors beneath mounds of random facts.  And if you’ve ever sat down to read the phone book, you know that facts alone do not a narrative make.  In Secret Lives of Great Composers:What your Teachers Never Told You about the World’s Musical Masters (Quirk Books, 2009), author Elizabeth Lunday has put the “story” back in history and, in doing so, has brought back to life the composers who for so long have seemed all to dead, all too dull, and all too distant from us today.

Lundy starts by making the very good point that composers of art music were never the uptight crowd many of us envision today.  “The idea of ‘outrageous musician’ is much older than rock and roll,” she writes in her introduction to Secret Lives,  “a lot of composers led truly outrageous lives.  Mozart had a potty mouth, Schumann had syphillis, and Bernstein had an ego bigger than New York City.  Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier while locked up in the clink, Wagner cranked out Lohengrin while on the run from creditors, and Puccini crafted Madama Butterfly while trying to keep his wife from hunting down his (latest) mistress.”

These are broad outlines of just a few of the more outrageous composer anecdotes out there.  And these stories do make for good, even if not always entirely accurate, copy.  There is some dispute, for example, about whether or not Schumann had syphillis.  We do know he went mad, threw himself into the Rhine, and spent the rest of his life in an institution.  That’s outrageous (though sadly so) enough, isn’t it?

But for this type of book perhaps we need not be too pushy when it comes to apocrypha.  It’s all about the good read, and Lundy’s paperback volume, amply illustrated from cover to cover with graphic novel-style artwork by Mario Zucca, isn’t vying for status among peer-reviewed musicological monographs.  Secret Lives of Great Composers is an anywhere-anytime book: the volume is sized just right for tucking into your briefcase or purse, and the stories unfold in sections brief enough to tackle while sitting in the dentist’s waiting room.  Don’t like to get into thick plots during a flight?  Secret Lives is your next vacation book.

Read while on vacation?  In a sense, this book is a vacation, in that each story in it is truly a trip.  One of my favorite composer stories (which we are to believe is true - at least the composer writes about it in his memoirs) is that of Hector Berlioz’s triple murder plot.  The composer of the Symphonie fantastique and, later, La Damnation de Faust was on his Prix de Rome stay in Italy when the mother of his fiancée, Camille Moke,  wrote to tell him that she preferred her daughter marry the rich piano maker, Camille Pleyel.  Lunday sums the story up well: “To put it lightly, Berlioz lost it.  He decided his only recourse was to murder Pleyel, his fiancée, and her mother.  He developed an elaborate plan to disguise himself as a ladies’ maid so that he could enter his beloved’s house unsuspected; he even purchased a dress, wig, and hat as part of the plot.  He stole a pair of pistols and armed himself with vials of strychnine and laudanum.”

I’ve always suspected the laudanum, literally the opiate of the masses in the nineteenth century, was for Berlioz, not the Moke-Pleyel trio.  The story ends with Berlioz somewhere between Italy and the south of France discovering that he had left his disguise in a coach.  When he reached Nice, Lunday writes, “he had returned to his senses. He consoled himself by writing an orchestral overture.”

That orchestral oveture, if you care to know, was his Le roi Lear overture.  The stories in Lunday’s book go on an on, one wild romp after another through the pages of time.  And, if you’re into this kind of thing, Secret Lives also tells us that Berlioz was a Saggitarius, Bach was an Aries, and Wagner was a Gemini. 

What better way to commune with the composers who wrote the music that enriches your life?  Those composers were people, with passions and fancies just like yours.  Far from dead, they jump off the pages of Lunday’s book with all the life of a good story.

- Jennifer Hambrick

I interviewed soprano Roberta Peters for print a number of years ago, just

Roberta Peters balancing Joseph Pilates at the gym, Life magazine

after she celebrated the 50th anniversary of her Metropolitan Opera debut (November 17, 1950 as Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni). This performance was not only the 20 year old’s Met debut, it was her first professional appearance on any stage.  She went on as the understudy on a few hours notice, in a cast of seasoned professionals including Eleanor Steber,  Ljuba Welitsch and Jerome Hines.  Fritz Reiner conducted, no less.  (”He told me, ‘Dunt vurry dollink. Ven I point, you zink!’”) There followed a career that for all I know may be on going in 2010. Miss Peters sang over five hundred Met performances in thirty- five years. Out of curiosity I looked her up recently on Youtube and I was floored at what I found: a 1994 performance of Casta diva from Bellini’s opera Norma. I didn’t know this existed, and I’m still buzzed by the remarkable technique, the flawless line and the superb musicianship. Roberta Peters was sixty- four years old here. Watch,  listen and learn:

WOW!

Roberta Peters had a Met-centric career. She sang in London, Moscow and Vienna but she was busiest at home.  She was Ed Sullivan’s most popular TV guest (ask your parents…) She was crossover, long before the term was widely used. Grand opera, show tunes, musicals, you name it she sang it and people admired her for over forty years.  But I was unprepared for the warm legato spin of her singing in this  Norma clip. To give you some contrast, to let you hear how little her voice deteriorated, here’s Roberta Peters in 1955:

“”I stress again and again” she told me. “Singers must practise.  They must keep their vocies exercised.  And you must know what suits you and stick to it.  I almost never left my fach. The coloratura, soprano leggero roles.  Later I did a few Bohemes and Traviatas away from the Met.  I do regret not singing I puritani althugh I did record the arias.  My one favorite role was Salome. I loved that. When she sings, Ach, ich habe deine Mund gekusst!”, I always get chills.”

Me too. Maybe not from the unsung Salome, but that 1994 Norma excerpt has me verklept.

–Christopher Purdy

This is Samuel Barber’s centennial year. The composer was

Samuel Barber 1910-1981

born in West Chester, Pennsylvania on March 9, 1910, and died in New York, on January 23, 1981. These posts will offer some of his exquisite vocal music.

REINCARNATIONS, (1940) is a collection of three poems by James Stephens set by Barber for four part chorus in 1940. By this time Barber had joined the faculty of his alma mater, the Curtis Institute, and was receiving financial support from the chatelaine of Curtis, the wealthy Mary Louis Bok, who was soon to marry Efrem Zimbalist.  Toscanini’s championing of barber’s First Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for Strings had brought the young composer celebrity, but I  suspect he found the pressure of fame hard to deal with. Rather than a lot of self promotion, Barber went “home” to Pennsylvania, and to Curtis but he didn’t stay long. His relationship with Gian Carlo Menotti ripened into a marriage, and with Mrs. Bok’s help a home was purchased for the couple in Mt. Kisco, New York. Barber was about to enter a busy period, collaborating with Martha Graham and the Metropolitan Opera.  But not before he turned to the poetry of James Stephens.

James Stephens (1882-1950) was an Irish poet “born in the same hour” a James Joyce. Stephens mined Irish myth for his work, and Barber brilliantly captures both the breathlessness, the passion and the sorrow of Stephen’s words in Reincarnations. Here’s the first of the set,  Mary Hynes

She is the sky of the sun, she is he dart of love; She is the love of my heart

Anthony O’Daly is my favorite of the three. The lower voices function as a dirge and the high enunciate the text as if “keening”.

Since your limbs were laid out, the stars do not shine!

The Coolin is the most loved in the set.

Come with me under my coat, and we will drink our fill/Of the milk white goat

The performanvces come from the CD An American Collection with The Sixteen conducted by Harry Christophers.

We’ll be exploring more of Samuel Barber’s vocal music in weeks to come in his centennial year. He gets lost in the (deserved) success of the Adagio for Strings. Aside form the orchestral music, there are many great songs, Dover Beach, Knoxville:Summer of 1915 and the opera Antony and Cleopatra. Stay tuned.

–Christopher Prudy

I have Earl Wild to thank for my appreciation of George Gershwin.  I have to admit that when I first began listening to classical music, in what I guess you could call a  “serious” way in the early 1980’s, I didn’t immediately take to some of Gershwin’s music, that unique blending of orchestral concert music and Jazz.  I thought, give me Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler, even Stravinsky–or give me real Jazz, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, but not this hybrid form.  Well, it was Earl Wild’s joyous and exuberant performances that won me over.

My first recollection of the late, great Earl Wild was his fantastic recording of George Gershwin’s music with the Boston Pops and conductor Arthur Fiedler.  While there are other fine versions of these pieces, they have never been performed better than this.  The recording of Rhapsody in Blue from 1959 and particularly the Concerto in F from 1961, are magnificent; both the pianist and orchestra sound great in this brash and outgoing music.  The Variations on I Got Rhythm demonstrate Wild’s marvelous virtuosity as well, and the recording includes An American in Paris, and in its most recent CD incarnation, the Cuban Overture as well–an easy first choice for a single disc collection of Gershwin.

I discovered that Earl Wild was a Gershwin specialist and had a long history of playing his music.  In 1942, Toscanini invited Wild to play Rhapsody in Blue with the NBC Orchestra, and it was such a success that it made Wild a household name in America.  Another of his specialties was his virtuoso transcriptions which included Gershwin songs as well as Rachmaninoff and other composers (readily available on CD), confirming Wild’s brilliance as a composer and transcriber, as well as being a great virtuoso at the keyboard.  For Wild’s brilliance as a performer of Romantic works in the standard repertoire, see the video my colleague Boyce Lancaster has posted on this blog site in his tribute to Earl Wild (playing Franz Liszt’s Fountains of the villa d’Este), or see Christopher Purdy’s blog from last November 3rd in which he describes the superb recording of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto (recorded with the London Symphony and Jascha Horenstein in 1965).

I couldn’t find a video of Earl Wild Playing any Gershwin, but I did come across this 1971 Boston Pops performance with him and Arthur Fiedler playing the 3rd movement of Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto.  Enjoy:

–John Rittmeyer

To celebrate Earl Wild’s extraordinary life and career, WOSU FM will

Earl Wild 1915-2010

present three installments of Mr. Wild’s 1995 radio series, Earl Wild’s Grande Piano (’Grande’ with a e, please) produced here at WOSU.  These programs will pre-empt Music in Mid Ohio, which resumes March 7th.

Please see www.earlwild.com for more information about this great artist and raconteur, and join us Sunday evenings at 6: Feb. 7, 14, 21, and for an extended interview with music on February 28th on WOSU 89-7 FM or on line at www.wosu.org.

Earl Wild’s Grande Piano grew out of discussions I had with Mr. Wild and his partner Michael Rolland Davis, after recording a one hour special with the artist in 1994.  Mr. Wild was living in Columbus at the time, and making exquisite recordings at his home, Fernleaf Abbey, in Linworth.  Earl Wild in conversation was hysterical, opinionated, profane, intelligent, brilliant, smart, off-color and often unsuitable for broadcast. Earl Wild’s commentary on Grande Piano, his choice of artists, his knowledge of and passion for music, and his own artistry were second to none.  I have hours of outtakes and you’ll have to go to my funeral to hear them (it will be worth it).

I served as Producer of the series, since it was in large part my”fault” for asking in the first place as the gentlemen himself was wont to say. Kevin Petrilla did all the editing and made the series a fit for radio.  As you listen, you are hearing Kevin’s work as much as Earl Wild’s. Michael Rolland Davis was crucial in making all of this happen, and  lot of the work was his. (You wanna know from magnificent recordings, go to www.ivoryclassics.com).  I made notes, coordinated, got Earl into the studio, did some edits and stayed out of the way. Nobody functioned as a producer for Earl Wild.  He knew exactly what he wanted to do and he did it. Thank God.

Here’s an outline of the four programs to be heard in February.  Music in Mid Ohio returns March 7th.  Please join us.

Sundays, 6 PM WOSU 89-7 FM or on line www.wosu.org

So many of today’s artists who have big recording contracts are just plain old fashioned boring. B-O-R-I-N-G.

FEB 7

Earl Wild plays and discusses performances by

Arthur Rubinstein Schumann: Arabeske

COMPARISONS:  Mozart: Don Giovanni Serenade

arr. Busoni with Leslie Howard; arr. Backhaus with Earl Wild

Brahms: Rhapsody 1 Ivo Pogorelich

Prokofiev: Visions fugitives Deborah Arder

Debussy: Images (selections) Ivan Moravec

Leslie Howard, the British pianist who performed the Busoni transcription you just heard, has been working for years on the project of recording the complete solo works of Franz Liszt. I say, good luck!

FEB 14

Earl Wild plays and discusses performances by

Earl Wild's Grammy award winning CD

Egon Petri  Beethoven: Sonata in F# Op. 78

COMPARISIONS Tchaikovsky: April (The Seasons)

Brigitte Engerer; Mikhail Pletnev

Schumann: Blumenstueck Christopher Saiger

Liszt: Transcendental Etude 5 Minoru Nojima

Debussy: 2 Etudes Paul Jacobs

Rachmaninoff: Preludes in G Major and g minor Earl Wild

Record companies are responsible for foisting on the public through their massive publicity budgets hundreds of mediocre discs…usually a necessary to a library of recorded music as a plague of locusts.

FEB 21

Earl Wild plays and discusses performances by

Vladimir Horowitz Scarlatti 3  Sonatas

COMPARISONS

Brahms Capriccio Op. 76 no. 2

Walter Gieseking; Murray Perahia

Schumann: Buente-blaetter Clara Haskil

Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 2 Ania Dorfamn

Chopin” Nocturne in f#, Op. 48, no. 2 Earl Wild

Busoni: Carmen Variations Marc-Andre Hamelin

Most competitions today have descended to the level of state fairs, where the competitors rattle off their wares in a sideshow of technique and endurance

FEB 28

Earl Wild with music and in conversation with Christopher

Earl Wild on Ivory Classics. www.ivoryclassics.com

Purdy (rec. 2006)

EARL WILD’S GRANDE PIANO-SUNDAYS AT 6 PM BEGINNING FEB 7 on WOSU 89-7 FM

P.S. Earl Wild was called in late in the day to join Maria Callas for one of

Earl Wild with Maria Callas

her last concerts, on her 1973-1974 world tour. I believe it was in Dallas. Callas was playing to cheering houses but her voice was gone. She knew it, everyone knew it. Earl Wild was and remained at the height of his powers. He told me she would sit backstage, in Halston and pearls, thumbing through music to try and find something she could sing, deciding only as they walked out on stage. The public cheered and went nuts anyway. Coming off stage after a harrowing performance (hers) and listening to the cheers, La Callas took Mr. Wild by the hand and said, “Come Earl, they love us” and sailed out with him to the applause.

–Christopher Purdy

A mighty voice has been silenced with the passing of the last of the great romantics…Earl Wild, who died quietly in his sleep early Saturday morning.

He was an engaging, charming, witty artist who was not afraid to voice an opinion, whether about music and those who performed it, world events, people he knew, or the quality of his martini.  Dinner conversations covered all of those topics and more.

My wife (WOSU Music Director Beverley Ervine) and I were privileged to have been invited by Earl and his companion Michael Rolland Davis (also his manager) for a rehearsal of an upcoming Carnegie Hall performance, followed by a delicious lasagna supper.  Their Northwest Columbus home, dubbed Fernleaf Abbey, also served as Earl’s recording studio.  When you entered, you couldn’t help but notice the black Baldwin grand piano which dominated the room, various pieces of electronic recording equipment, and the cathedral ceiling, which offered great acoustics for Earl’s recording engineer, Ed Thompson, to work with.

To this day, I still remember sitting awestruck as Earl began playing Liszt’s “Les Jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este” with it’s bell-like tones evoking the sparkling waters of the fountains Liszt could see from his balcony.  Never had I heard such a sound come from a piano.  It is a sound and a memory I carry with me to this day.

As you may have also read, Earl played for many presidents, from Herbert Hoover through Lyndon Johnson, and has entertaining stories about them all.

Earl Wild played for Presidents

None, however, is more riveting than his account of playing at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.

Earl Wild on the Kennedy Inauguration

Earl’s impish side also came out in his music.  The same hands which pulled Liszt and Rachmaninoff from the keys also brought us Variations on a Theme by Stephen Foster, “The Doo Dah Variations”, and his virtuosic treatment of the simple “Mexican Hat Dance.”

I have included a video of Earl Wild below to allow you to experience something of what we saw while watching him rehearse…seeing his hands as they danced along the keyboard.

I am grateful to have had the privilege to have known Earl Wild, to have seen and heard him play, and to be in a position where I can continue to make his amazing talent available to listeners for years to come.

Earl, may you rest in peace. — Boyce Lancaster