Guest Host Helena Della: My Favorites

Saturday's show was presented by Helena Della, a guest host!

Here's the transcript.  Helena Della writes:

Surprise, it’s not Arch, it’s Helena Della, your guest host tonight for the Archives!   Arch has graciously invited me to play whatever I like, as long as at least half the program is classical.

Most of what I like in classical music I absorbed as a very small child, when it came pouring out of my parents’ Hi Fi.   It is so easy to picture my mother’s head bobbing and elbows flying as she ironed in time to the music, or my father puffing on his 99th cigar and sipping his third whiskey, with his elbows on the kitchen table and his face in a book.

Part A: Music my Mom would have enjoyed.

Mom, Anne Moller, loved warm, emotional composers like Gershwin, Prokofiev, Debussy, and Ravel.  She had a rich alto voice and adored choral music.  My Dad, George Moller had a lot of folk music in his collection – the Brothers Four, Leon Bibb, and some marvelous 78s of traditional English folk songs.  His classical taste was light and lively.  Enesco rhapsodies, Chabrier, and Rossini were up his alley.  He also admired classical guitar.

Here are three of mom’s:  Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3; with Martha Argerich and the Berlin Philharmonic; then Philip Glass’ Beauty and the Beast, played by Angele Dubeau and Pieta; and finally, “My Man’s Gone Now” from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, sung by Inez Matthews for the 1959 movie version.

Part B: Some music from Dad's collection, and more.

From my Dad’s collection, first we’ll hear Chabrier’s Espana, played by Michel Plasson and the Toulouse Capitol Orchestra, then Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance with the Royal Philarmonic, and a selection from Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco’s Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra.   That one is played by Miguel Gomez-Martinez and the English Chamber Orchestra.

The next two coming up are:  Signor Bruschino Overture by Rossini, with Neville Mariner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.  Then two Debussy piano arabesques played by Alain LeFevre.

Part C: More Helena Della favorites

The next set of two are performed again by the all-female Canadian ensemble, Angele Dubeau and Pieta.  Archie and I saw these women at Bucknell a few years ago, they are wonderful performers.  Angéle Dubeau can make her Stradivarius do anything she wants.   The CD named Fairy Tales was made for lullaby time.  Parents, are you listening?  This stuff puts me in a serene and restful state of mind, so it should work well on small rambunctious children.  (It’s better than strangling them.)  First, we will hear Fantasia para un Gentilhombre, then another version of Beauty and the Beast, this time not by Philip Glass but by Francois Dompierre.

Part D: Wake Up!

Wake up! Want to hear “Lost in Space” played by the Czech Philharmonic?  How about a ditty called “Birds Chirping” played on a Wurlitzer Theatre Organ?  (That’s played by an organ roll, not a person.)  And I KNOW you need to hear Enesco’s Roumanian Rhapsody No. 2 played on the harmonica (by Larry Adler).

[I did not introduce the next three, because they were chosen after the announcements were taped.  They are the King's Singers, who usually sing a capella, but are accompanied here by a few instruments, singing three unidentified songs.  These were recorded for me by Arch back in 2009, and we weren't very careful about keeping track of the names of the pieces.  But Arch still has the CDs, and if you're interested, we can do some research.]

Part E:  Crossover and New Age music before New Age was born.

Renaissance,
Gryphon, and
Winter Consort

To finish up, I want to play some music of the 70s that uses classical instruments played by classically trained musicians, but adding rock influences.  Remember Gryphon, King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer, the Moody Blues, and all those classy, rich rock songs of the early 70s?  You’ll recognize most of what I have coming up next.  On the air, I promised to put the playlist right here, and here it is:

Stupidity Tries: Radiohead, performed by Christopher O'Riley
Running Hard: Renaissance, vocals by Annie Haslam
Second Spasm: Gryphon
Black Flame: Renaissance, Annie Haslam
Icarus: Paul Winter Consort
Opening Move: Gryphon
Bordel 1900: Astor Piazzola, performed by Al di Meola

[Added by Archie: the amazing Annie Haslam was performing as recently as two years ago; search for her on YouTube.]

Thanks for everything, and become a member and support the Station!

Helena Della

Songs

The show on Songs aired as scheduled.  Here are the podcast files for the show, in four quarters.

Part A
Part B
Part C
Part D

This is one of the earliest shows I put together, and one with which I was most pleased when it was finished.  If you go back to the blog post for when it first aired, there is mention of a bad bass rumble.  It turns out that my own subwoofer was turned up a little too high, and when the station software turns up the bass just a little ö—most of the music it plays sounds a little better with a punchier bass, I suppose— the result was a little overwhelming.

My script for the show is incomplete; as the deadline grew closer, I threw the script out and ad-libbed the introductions to each song, or just left them completely out!  So here are short remarks to go with each song.  All the featured works were songs, or more properly, arias.

Michael Arne: The Lass with the Delicate Air
Michael Arne was the son of Thomas Arne, who wrote Rule Britannia, which, as I remarked on the show, was a wildly patriotic British anthem, still sung on patriotic occasions over there.

This song, a very lighthearted one, was sung by Julie Andrews in an early recording, when she was in her twenties, at most.  There is rather an affected flourish with which she ends it, but it doesn’t seem inappropriate for the song, in retrospect.

Thomas Arne: Where the Bee Sucks
This is a song very well known in Britain, taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Emma Kirkby, one of Britain’s greatest sopranos, married to Christopher Hogwood, incidentally, does a great job, as does Mr. Hogwood himself in the accompaniment.

Kurt Weill: Moritat Vom Mackie Messer
Lotte Lenya, who was said to be Kurt Weill’s muse, made this song from The Threepenny Opera popular throughout Europe, and then the song went on to be a hit for American singers from Louis Armstrong to Bobby Darrin, in its English translation as Mack the Knife.  We merged two recordings: one with Lotte Lenya singing it in German, with a second one where she sings it with Louis Armstrong in English.

Joseph Haydn: Nun beut die Flur
Milton’s Paradise Lost was proposed to Joseph Haydn as a possible libretto for an oratorio.  The gentleman who brought it to Haydn’s attention provided a German translation, and the result was one of the greatest entries in the oratorio form: Haydn’s Creation.  In this song, the Angel Gabriel wonders at the beauty of the newly-created flora.  The soprano is Helen Donath, who was born in Texas, but went on to excel in German opera in Germany and Vienna.

P. D. Q. Bach: Now is the season
P.D.Q. Bach is the fictional 20th son on Johann Sebastian Bach, an invention of Peter Schickele, the talented and imaginative American composer and graduate from Juilliard, who performed in Williamsport around 1985 in the Scottish Rite Auditorium.  The aria, sung by the brilliant Lorna Haywood, is from the Oratorio The Seasonings.  (In case you miss the joke, there is more than one Oratorio named The Seasons, notably one by Haydn.)

Schumann: Der Nussbaum
This is a beautiful Lied, by Robert Schumann, sung by Emmy Ameling.  (Der Nussbaum means The Nut Tree.)

Tom Lehrer: Poisoning Pigeons In The Park
Possibly the best known song by Tom Lehrer, this song should be sung in April, ideally.  Someone who was around in the spring of 1965 would be better able to describe the facts around the curious title: did they actually poison pigeons back then?  They must have, otherwise the song would not be so funny.

George Harrison: All Things Must Pass
This was one of George Harrison’s most lovely songs, but I think this rendering by Paul McCartney, during a memorial concert for George Harrison, is almost better than George’s own, but that might be sacrilege.

Richard Strauss: Im Abendrot
A cousin of the Waltz Strausses, Richard Strauss is best known today for writing the tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra, whose stunning opening theme was borrowed by Stanley Kubrik for 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Strauss wrote Four Last Songs, a tour-de-force of Wagnerian songwriting, and this is one of them: Im Abendrot---at Sunset.  You hear birds flying away several times, depicted by a pair of trilling flutes.  I don’t understand the original German, but I would venture a guess that it is about departure.

J. S. Bach: Mein glaubiges Herze
This is a complete reversal of mood, quite unintentionally.  This aria from Cantata 68 is a reworking (a parody aria) of an earlier aria from a Secular Cantata, about Hercules at the Crossroads, or something like that.  At any rate, in the earlier tune, there is an extensive postlude that goes on for about a minute.  When Bach borrowed the tune for his church cantata, he could not bring himself to abbreviate the long postlude, so it remains as an extended ending to Mein glaubiges Herze (My joyful heart, or “My heart ever faithful,” in the versified English translation.  This is sung by Julianne Baird, Professor Emeritus of music at Rutgers, accompanied by the Aulos Ensemble.

Richard Wagner: The Making of the Prize Song
I introduced the Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, in an earlier show.  Walther von Stoltzing is a young aristocrat who comes into Nuremburg to meet with Hans Sachs, a skilled poet and composer of the 16th century, to further his musical education.  While there, he sees and falls in love with Eva, the young daughter of the city Goldsmith.  Unfortunately, the Goldsmith, who is the President of the Guild of Mastersingers, has promised that the winner of the annual song competition shall have first choice to marry Eva.  (If Eva turns the song champion down, she must remain unmarried for life.  Evidently they had moved beyond forced marriages, at least in Wagner’s imagination.)

Walther, once he learns of this, is desperate to join the Guild, and win the competition, which is impossible.  But this is opera, so he succeeds.  In this scene, Hans Sachs helps the young fellow to write a suitable song in the required form, for the competition.  I rudely provide a translation as a sort of voice-over.

Steve Goodman: City Of New Orleans
You should read up the history of this song, which was made popular by Arlo Guthrie (the son of Woody Guthrie).

J. S. Bach: Vergnügte Ruh
This lovely Bach aria is sung by Guillemette Laurens, and accompanied by Diego Fasolis and I Barrochisti.

Arthur Sullivan: Yum-Yum's Song
This is a lovely aria from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, sung here by Marie McLaughlin.

Edie Brickel: 'Stwisted
Texan Edie Brickel first became famous as a singer songwriter with her group the New Bohemians.  Edie Brickel was later married to Paul Simon.  This is sung by long-time Williamsport resident Uma, with her now-defunct group Episodes.

Meredith Willson: Till There Was You
Paul McCartney loved this song from The Music Man, and sang it with the Beatles in an early album.  There is a lovely acoustic guitar interlude, which gives it a sort of C & W flavor.

Nelson Lee: Welela
One of Miriam Makeba’s best known songs.  Miriam Makeba, a brilliant South African singer, was admired and promoted by Harry Belafonte.

Anonymous Folk Melody: Deep River
This song was made popular by Paul Robeson, and featured in the movie Showboat.  Here it is sung by Bryn Terfel, the Welsh bass.

P. I. Tchaikovsky: None but the Lonely Heart
Paul Robeson sings this Tchaikovsky song, which has been frequently reviled as being too sentimental.  Evidently the words are a translation of a poem by Johann von Goethe

Giaccomo Puccini: O mio babbino caro
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sings this well-known Puccini aria.

Paul Simon: Still Crazy After All These Years
From the album There goes Rhymin’ Simon comes this Paul Simon song, with a lovely saxophone interlude.

W. A. Mozart: Laudate Dominum
In my younger days I bought a Laserlight CD of The Best of Mozart, and this lovely piece was in it, sung by Maria Zadori.  I have never heard anything sung by this lady with such a lovely voice since, but I tried to find out more about her, and have only turned up that she is Hungarian, and a Handel expert.  Unfortunately, European Handel experts are seldom heard in the US, since Brits have got a lock on all things Handelian.

Björk: Human Behavior
This whimsical singer from Iceland has created some amazing songs, which were brought to my attention by my daughter.


Tomás Méndez: Cucurucucu Paloma
This song written in 1954 was performed by numerous singers, including Harry Belafonte, who sings it here.

George and Dhani Harrison: Horse to the Water
This song was one of the last sung by George Harrison, with Jools Holland’s Blues Band.  On the Concert for George, it was performed by Sam Brown, and this track is taken from the video performance.

WXPI is trying very hard to attract more listeners, and we're trying to expand and improve our website.  One thing we're going to do is to put a brief music file, a sampler of the type of material on the show.  Here's the track I will be putting there, as soon as it can be arranged.  Take a listen, and write in your suggestions!

Archie

Show 115: Chamber Music

[Added on 2015/7/18:  This used to be called Show 15.  I've renumbered the shows, so that this one is Show115.  For instance, the July 4^th show for this year will be numbered numbered Show201, and so on.  If you didn't figure this out yet, my first show aired the week of July 4th, 2014.]

First of all, WXPI is going to present a radio play sometime soon.  Archie, Veronica, Betty and Jughead ride again in this silly little skit about the holiday season.  I got to play one of the most interesting roles in it; I'll tip you the wink when I find out when it airs.

Today's show has been uploaded already, and will hit the airwaves tonight at 8:00.  However, I'm trying something new, and it might get screwed up.  Basically, instead of preparing twenty or twenty-five independent files (I explained why that was desirable a couple of weeks ago), I prepared four half-hour (actually, 28-minute) segments.  This means that the station doesn't get to break in at random times between files.  But if for some reason the station does break in, it will screw up royally, because it will discard an enormous chunk of music.  I guess I am playing with fire.

Anyhoo, here are the links to the podcast.

Part A:  Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Dvorák

Mozart:  Clarinet Quintet in A
This is an amazing work, possibly one of Mozart's best known.  Every movement is a jewel of perfection; this is the opening movement.  I have played the slow movement before.

Brahms: Sextet in B Flat
A lovely piece by Brahms, for a string quartet (two violins, a viola and a cello) with one additional viola and cello each.


Dvorák: Bagatelles, Op. 47
This is a quartet for an unusual combination: two violins, a cello, and a harmonium.  Harmoniums are little pedal organs where the sound is from reeds.  Not the sort of reeds you get in clarinets and bassoons, but the sort you get in a harmonica, or a piano accordion: a tiny brass strip tuned to a particular note.  I'm breaking with my usual habit of playing just one movement, and playing four of these bagatelles, because they're so delightful.  Warning: the set is interrupted in the middle by the station break, so the last couple continues afterwards.

Part B: Schubert, Thomas Morley

Schubert: Octet for clarinet, horn, bassoon & strings in F major
I was obsessed with Octets for some time, and I saw this Schubert octet on the shelf, and I got all excited.  When it arrived, I just loved it.  Schubert was as much of a genius as Mozart, especially in the department of melodic invention.  This is the first movement of an octet that was written for a string quartet, augmented with an oboe, a clarinet, a horn and a bassoon.  It is Archibudelli (which means ancient strings, because they play either original seventeenth century instruments, or reproductions of such instruments), and Mozzafiato, a word whose meaning I do not know.  Mozzafiato is led by Charles Neidich, who performed at the Community Arts Center (in Williamsport, Our Fair City) in the nineties.

Thomas Morley: Now is the month of Maying
This is a madrigal, sung by the King's Singers, who are all alumni of the King's College Cambridge Choir School.

Part C: Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bach, Mozart

Schubert: Piano Quintet (The Trout) - IV
Schubert wrote a lot of songs, and one of the most popular was one about a trout.  He later wrote a Piano Quintet, called The Trout Quintet, in which one movement is an air and variations on the tune of the song The Trout.  This is that movement.  The performers include Alfred Brendl on the piano.

Mendelssohn: Octet for strings in E flat major-Scherzo
The Scherzo from Mendelssohn's Octet from String is a lovely piece that features the sort of fairy music that Mendelssohn was so brilliant at, and which you hear in his Midsummer Night's Dream overture.  This is Hausmusic, London led by Monica Huggett.

Bach: Trio Sonata 1 in E Flat, ii
I have played the first movement of this one already for you, in our very first broadcast.  Here is the slow movement, played on a pedal harpsichord by E. Power Biggs.  A pedal harpsichord is just a harpsichord with a pedalboard, which is a keyboard intended to be played with the feet.

Mozart: String Quartet No 17 in B flat major ('Hunt')
Haydn and Mozart sort of taught each other to write string quartets.  Haydn is generally credited with inventing the genre, and immediately afterwards, Mozart heard some of them, and was soon writing even more beautiful string quartets, which Haydn got to hear, after which Haydn wrote some more fabulous quartets, and so on.  This is the Hunt quartet by Mozart, no. 17 in B Flat.

Part D: Mozart, Camerata Brasil, Wagner, Ravel

Mozart: Serenade in E-flat major K375- Adagio
This is a Mozart Serenade.  These were written for a small ensemble of maybe seven or eight instruments, but it is not chamber music at all, in fact it is outdoor music.  Bands of amateur musicians formed themselves into little performing groups, and serenaded homes from the street, a little like Christmas Caroling.  This is a lovely slow movement from the E Flat major serenade.

Vou Vivendo - Camerata Brasil
Taken from an album titled Bach in Brasil, this highly rhythmic little movement is played by the string band Camerata Brasil.

Wagner: Siegfried Idyll
Now, Wagner was unhappily married, but around 1870, he fell in love with the daughter of Franz Liszt, Cosima, who happened to be married to the conductor Hans Von Bulow.  After a while, the respective spouses allowed the two of them to move in together, and they had a child, the famous Siegfried Wagner, who at one time controlled Wagner’s opera hall in Bavaria, called Bayreuth.  Anyway, either Siegfried’s or his mother’s birthday was Christmas Day, I believe, so Wagner wrote this lovely, lovely one instrument-per-part tone poem, called Siegfriend Idyll, and early morning on Christmas Day, arranged for thirteen players to play it on the stairs of his grand home in the hills of Munich, or wherever his home was.  Ironically, this piece written for a small group of thirteen or so instruments is better known and loved that many of Wagner’s larger-scaled works for an orchestra of more than 100 instruments.

Ravel: Introduction and Allegro
Here is a relatively infrequently played piece by Maurice Ravel for a string quartet, flute, clarinet and harp.  It runs for more than 10 minutes, but I’ll play about four minute of it.  This is James Galway, Richard Stoltzman, and Heidi Lehwalder on Flute, Clarinet and Harp, respectively.

How did Archie make that Scary Introduction last Saturday?

Heh heh!

It was done using my all-purpose sound editor, Audacity.

Given a piece of sound, Audacity can do lots of things with it.

(1) Make it louder or softer.
(2) Edit it; that is cut piece of sound out of one place, and insert in another place; trim a piece of music as desired, and rearrange it.
(3) Speed it up, which means of course, the pitch rises.  Or slow it down.
(4) Speed it up or slow it down at the same pitch.  This is very clever; the piece is analyzed into individual notes, and the frequencies of each note, and its duration.  Then the duration is increased, leaving the frequency alone, and finally the piece is reassembled.
(4) Raise or lower the pitch, keeping the speed (the Tempo) as it is.

What I did is to [1] make a copy of the initial segment of the tune, where I say: "If you or someone you love ...".
[2] Then I pasted it somewhere away from the Intro, and raised the pitch an augmented fourth.  This is an interval that sounds unsettling (for instance, B to F).
Then [3] I pasted the modified copy alongside the original.  Now I had two voices, speaking exactly an augmented fourth apart.  If it had been two different people speaking at the same time, it would have sounded quite normal.  But since it was me speaking at two pitches, it sounded strange.  In addition, the music, too, was shifted.  That was the whole thing!

Actually, I did one more step.  Audacity can, in addition,

(5) Do a sound effect called Phaser.  What this does is to switch the Stereo channels back and forth from Left to Right in such a way that it seems to rotate around the room.  It is a combination of gradually switching channels, and making them louder and softer in rotation.  (This effect was available in Hammond Organs back in the Sixties, by rotating speakers inside the speaker boxes, and it was called Leslie!  Nobody has rotating speakers anymore, but a fake Leslie effect can be obtained with this Phaser effect, and it is actually superior to Leslie.  It can be used over the speakers in an Auditorium, for instance, which you could not do with old-time Leslie.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed all that nonsense, and how it was done!

Archie.