We are so busy with our lives; we often forget what’s important. We forget the need to get quiet and just get present with the moment; Or the need to reflect and celebrate and live in the moment; Or the need to just dance in the moment.
Help me to help you find this thoughtful place, at least once a week.
Join me on this journey!
This week is the start of the Jewish New Year, a time of reflection, repentance and forgiveness.
In that spirit, I want to share this "private" video of our son Evan Kahn performing a cello duet written by Erich Korngold, with Aileen Chanco on piano.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (May 29, 1897 – November 29, 1957) was an Austrian-born composer and conductor. After moving to Los Angeles, he became one of the most important and influential composers in Hollywood history. A child prodigy, he was having compositions performed by major orchestras and pianists by the age of 13. By 1931 he was a professor of music at Vienna State Academy.
At the request of director Max Reinhardt, and due to the rise of the Nazi regime, Korngold moved to the U.S. in 1934 to write music scores for films. He was one of many Jewish immigrants that moved to escape Nazi persecution and probable death. "Much Ado About Nothing Suite" was composed when Korngold was 21 years old, and here it is adapted for piano and cello.
With everything going on in the world with the pandemic, and now with the fires burning in the Western US, we all need comfort. My family is safe and secure and healthy. It is all we can ask for now.
This week the world needs Morton Lauridson, the great American choral composer. The other day Grant Gershon, the director of the LA Master Chorale and his wife and soprano soloist Elissa Johnston performed a duo version of SURE ON THIS SHINING NIGHT in their living room as a Facebook video.
I am not a big fan of Facebook, but if you don't mind their ads, it is a beautiful rendition, just remember to hit the little button in the lower right corner to turn on the sound.
Can you remember the first time you heard the William Tell Overture? If you are as old as I am you probably remember it as the theme to "The Lone Ranger" TV show. Or maybe it was in one of the early Bugs Bunny cartoons that is embedded in your brain from childhood?
I love this video. It not only shows the joy of music making, and the multi-generational power of music, but you also get a little glimpse into the lives of the orchestra members.
As a member of a famed symphony orchestra like the SFO, there are certain pieces that you have played SO MANY TIMES in your life that you might actually dread the fact that you see it once again programmed for the upcoming season. I imagine this piece might fall into that category.
But here, all the musicians are having so much fun, you can't help but start to gallop around your living room with the kids. Please enjoy!
Have you heard of Hazel Scott? Even many die-hard jazz fans have never heard her name. Hazel Scott (June 11, 1920 – October 2, 1981) was a Trinidadian-born jazz and classical pianist, singer, and actor. She moved to New York City with her mother at the age of four. Scott was a child musical prodigy, receiving scholarships to study at the Juilliard School when she was eight. In her teens, she performed in a jazz band. By 1945. at the age of 25 she was the toast of New York Cafe Society, and was earning $75,000 a year ($1,065,111 today). That year she married US Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and they were THE Black "Power Couple" of New York City.
In the '40s she began appearing in Hollywood films, always playing herself. She was willing to take on other acting roles, but she refused to play a maid or a nanny or any other Black character role, so she never got cast. She was the first person of African descent to have their own television show in America, The Hazel Scott Show, which premiered on the DuMont Television Network on July 3, 1950.
She was a strong civil rights activist, and she became known for being "difficult" as she insisted on being treated as an equal on and off the screen. Scott voluntarily appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee on September 22, 1950, speaking to Joe McCarthy's committee. She stated she had never been a communist, but she expressed her frustrations with the mass amount of false accusations of entertainers and offered the suggestion to utilize “democratic methods to immediately eliminate a good many irresponsible charges.” Scott concludes her statement to the HUAC with a request that entertainers are not already "covered with the mud of slander and the filth of scandal when proving their loyalty to the United States". Her television variety program, The Hazel Scott Show, was cancelled a week after Scott appeared before HUAC, on September 29, 1950.
Hazel moved to Paris in 1957, and her marriage ended in divorce in 1960. She returned to the US in 1967 after the Civil Rights Movement had made some advances. She continued to perform, but her career was pretty much over.
Imagine how different this story might have been, if she had not been born a woman of color?
