“Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure.”
Federico Fellni (quoted in The Atlantic, December 1965)
Almanac: Somerset Maugham’s formula for commercial playwriting
“I reflected upon the qualities which the managers demanded in a play: evidently a comedy, for the public wished to laugh; with as much drama as it would carry, for the public liked a thrill; with a little sentiment, for the public liked to feel good; and a happy ending.”
Somerset Maugham, preface to Collected Plays
The best musicians you’ve never heard of
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about the Hollywood String Quartet. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Now that the best symphonic film scores of the studio-system era are generally recognized as masterpieces of their kind and programmed by orchestras around the world, the names of the men who composed them—Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman—have come to be familiar to music lovers. But what of the men and women who played them? The major studios employed in-house orchestras to record the scores for the films they released, and the players were highly trained, well-paid top-tier musicians who took their anonymous studio work seriously. Nevertheless, many of these artists continued to perform classical music on the side, and four of the finest of them started giving concerts in 1947 and, later, making records. Unashamed of their unprestigious day jobs, they instead flaunted them by dubbing themselves the Hollywood String Quartet, and within a few years the HSQ was widely regarded as one of America’s top chamber-music groups.
The HSQ was led by Felix Slatkin, the concertmaster of the Twentieth Century Fox orchestra, whose first-chair cellist, Eleanor Aller Slatkin, was Felix’s wife and a charter member of the quartet. The other members, Paul Shure and Paul Robyn, who was later replaced by Alvin Dinkin, were also Hollywood studio musicians. The group was noteworthy for many reasons, starting with the fact that all of its players were born and trained in America. Most of their U.S.-based contemporaries were émigrés who had studied in Europe. Yet there was no Juilliard Quartet-like big-city brashness to the rich-toned, unabashedly romantic yet tautly disciplined playing of the HSQ. Instead, the group sounded like an eight-armed Heifetz…
Unusually for classical players of their generation, the HSQ took popular music just as seriously, so much so that it backed up Frank Sinatra, a close friend of Felix and Eleanor, on “Close to You,” a 1956 album arranged by Nelson Riddle….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.Snapshot: the Hollywod String Quartet on TV
The Hollywood String Quartet appears in a never-telecast TV pilot from 1953 featuring performances of Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade, Turiña’s La Oración del torero, and two movements from Beethoven’s C Major Quartet, Op. 59/3:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
Almanac: Schiller on fate
“The heart’s impulse is the voice of fate.”
Friedrich Schiller, Piccolomini
Lookback: my first decade as a drama critic
From 2013:
Read the whole thing here.I recently looked back over my drama columns of the past decade and drew up a list of the fifteen shows that have meant the most to me personally. Needless to say, it does no more than hint at the wealth of memorable productions and performances that I’ve seen, and I expect that it would look different were I to draw it up from scratch next week….
To pick fifteen shows out of a thousand is necessarily to leave much gold on the counting-room floor. All that said, the following list will give you some sense of what I’ve liked best during my decade at the Journal….
Almanac: Erich Wolfgang Korngold on over-interpreting the classics
“Even a great performance can’t spoil a fine composition.”
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, in conversation with Louis Kaufman
Just because: the video for Donald Fagen’s “New Frontier”
The original music video for Donald Fagen’s “New Frontier,” from The Nightfly, produced by Annabel Jankel, directed by Rocky Morton, and released in 1982:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)