DownWithTyranny!: Sunday Classics: What stirs the blood better than a military march? This week courtesy of Mozart and Sousa

Unfortunately in audio only, Vladimir Horowitz plays his now-legendary finger-shattering arrangement of Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever. There's also an audio-only interview in which Horowitz explains how he came to play the piece, and then stop playing it. Horowitz's gradual tempo was deliberate, by the way. He believed that the piece was generally played too fast, trivializing it.

by Ken

For decades America's great bandmaster John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) had resisted the lure of the radio when he lifted his taboo, in 1929. Here is the March King talking, and conducting the Sousa Band in his best-known march (the greatest march ever written?), The Stars and Stripes Forever:

Sousa's father was a trombonist in the U.S. Marine Band, in which Sousa himself served an apprenticeship, eventually leading it, from 1880 to 1892, when he formed his own band. With the advent of recording, the Sousa Band became one of the most-recorded of all performing artists, playing not just Sousa's own music, marches and otherwise, but just about anything that could be arranged for band, and a lot of things you wouldn't have thought could be.

This is a direct outgrowth of the British band tradition. In many towns and villages throughout the British Isles the local band was for a long time the chief source of live music, a tradition that appears to have spread to the Commonwealth, as I discovered some years back on a crazy trip to Australia and New Zealand that left me something like two days in Melbourne. On arrival (from, I think, three days in Sydney, which it had taken me only a few hours to fall in love with), I noticed on arrival that the country's regional Marine band was playing one of a series of noontime concerts, in a church that looked on my map to be within walking distance of our hotel, with just enough time (I hoped) to make it.

I couldn't resist, and breathing pretty heavily (naturally it was a little farther than it looked on the map, and heck, I was venturing on foot in a city I'd been in for maybe half an hour) I slipped into a pew. I was surprised to find that none of the music on the program was "band" music. I don't remember the program, except that it included at least a couple of movements from Holst's Planets, which I remember sounded fairly weird, but then, so did the rest of the music. Nevertheless, I had a swell time.

I still don't understand the impulse to have bands perform all that un-band-like music (I guess if your town can't muster an orchestra, you make do with a band). But when it comes to marches, and in particular military and military-style marches (as most of Sousa's marches are), there's no better instrument than a well-drilled band, and traditionally the best-drilled of all are the actual military bands, which have been as important to American armed forces as they have to their British counterparts. It's one activity of those armed forces that I can get behind without reservation.

"SALUTE TO THE SERVICES"

Which brings me to a record that has given me as much pleasure as any I've owned. It contains just under 39 minutes of music, which was kind of stingy even on LP. Still, it's just as well that in preparing a CD edition EMI didn't try to pad it out. The LP was about as close to perfect as they come.

The official title is The Military Band,with the subtitle "Salute to the Services" (I believe on LP it was "A Hi-Fi Salute . . ."), which I've always taken to refer to the suite of five marches at the start, which are preceded by "Reveille" and followed by "Taps." Actually, on the CD "Taps" comes at the end of the program; I've taken the liberty of shifting it to where it seems to me to belong: following the five marches (some more official than others) representing the five U.S. military services.

1. Reveille
2. SOUSA: The U.S. Field Artillery March (Army)
3. ZIMMERMAN: Anchors Aweigh (Navy)
4. MANCINI arr.: Marines on Parade
5. CRAWFORD: U.S. Air Force Song
6. VAN BOSKERCK: Semper Paratus (Coast Guard)
7. Taps

Concert Arts Symphonic Band, Felix Slatkin, cond. Capitol/EMI, recorded 1958

I kept going back and forth as to whether to make separate files of the individual pieces or to put them all in one "suite" file, and finally opted for the latter -- with some care, you can still pick out the individual pieces within the group file. I think they're more fun heard in one fell swoop, and the better you get to know them, the more fun they are. This is, by the way, more music that falls in the category of stuff I can, indeed have been known to, listen to over and over and over.

THE SLATKIN CLAN

Conductor Felix Slatkin (1915-1963, felled by a heart attack), is perhaps better-known as the father of conductor Leonard Slatkin (born 1944), which is unfortunate, because where Leonard is a well-meaning plodder (and I'm not even thinking of his recent Met Traviata fiasco), Felix was the genuine article, a conductor of real passion and flair, who recorded actively in the days when Capitol still had a domestic classical recording program, both with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra and his own Concert Arts Symphony Orchestra. Leonard's mother, Eleanor Aller (1917-1995), was also a sensational musician, best known as the cellist of the wonderful Hollywood Quartet, of which Felix Slatkin was first violinist.

(Eleanor's brother Victor Aller, 1905-1977, was a fine pianist who often played and recorded with both the Concert Arts Symphony Orchestra and the Hollywood Quartet. The Slatkins' other son, Frederick Zlotkin, born 1947, is longtime principal cellist of the New York City Ballet Orchestra and cellist of the Lyric Piano Quartet. Zlotkin reverted to the pre-Americanized version of the family name; the Allers had been Altschulers in the old country. There's a lovely online reminiscence by Fred Zlotkin of growing up in that remarkable musical circle, which included Frank Sinatra, who recorded with Felix Slatkin. At some point we're going to have to come back to the Hollywood Quartet. The problem is that I don't have any of their recordings on CD, and while a lot of what they recorded has been reissued by Testament, those CDs are really expensive.)

Although both Felix and Eleanor were American-born, they came from Eastern European Jewish stock (Fred Zlotkin's reminiscence includes studying, not very successfully, with his violinist grandfather Gregory Aller, 1876-1963 who "came from what I would describe as the Old Russian school"), and like so many of those émigré musicians they found their way to Hollywood, where the movie studios offered so much employment for talented and versatile musicians that they could make a decent living and still have time to pursue their "serious" musical ambitions.

WAIT, HAVE I GOTTEN AHEAD OF MYSELF?

It was obvious (wasn't it?) that the connecting thread in last night's preview between Figaro's "Non più andrai," the aria with which he brings Act I of The Marriage of Figaro to such a rousing climax, and the Sousa marches we heard is the military march.

In Mozart's case, while the whole aria is set in a basic march rhythm, as Figaro goes into ever more grueling detail about the military career suddenly facing the young page Cherubino, Mozart almost surreptitiously slips in an unmistakably martial rhythm. By the time Figaro is ready to send his young friend off to "victory" and "military glory" with that potentially show-stopping "Cherubino alla vittoria, alla gloria militar," the music is in full military-march mode. The postlude for the aria, in which most stagings have Figaro leading Cherubino in some form of mock march, combines a tone of irony with an unmistakable sense of exhilaration and lift. It's music that almost inevitably sets the entire body in motion.

Last night we heard the great Ezio Pinza in a March 1940 Met broadcast performance, because I wanted you to hear the warmth and magnetism he brought to the recitative before the aria. Here's a studio recording of just the aria from only ten months earlier, with Pinza in even more resplendent vocal shape:

Ezio Pinza, bass; Victor Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Reibold, cond. RCA/Preiser, recorded May 8, 1939

THE MIGHT OF THE MARCH KING

It was in fact that trip to the South Pacific that put me on a series of long flights, both transcontinental and transoceanic, on every one of which the movie was A Few Good Men, with which I quickly developed a love-hate relationship. (On the final leg of the journey, the return flight from L.A. to New York, not only was the movie the inescapable A Few Good Men, but since it was a domestic flight, the airline expected me to pay for the headset. Oh, right! By then I figured I didn't need sound; I could recite the dialogue.

For a movie that was so heavily Marine-centered, director Rob Reiner made a recurrent musical choice that was easily understandable and also, I think, incredibly self-destructive: Sousa's Semper Fidelis. Let's here the performance from the Slatkin Military Band record:

SOUSA: Semper Fidelis

Concert Arts Symphonic Band, Felix Slatkin, cond. Capitol-EMI, recorded 1958

Now this is, as memory serves, a notably snappier performance than the one used in A Few Good Men. It occurred to me during my endless viewings of the film that the piece can stand, indeed cries out for, a still-snappier performance. That amazing snare-drum transition to the trio (at 1:09 of the Slatkin performance) could be sharpened and drilled beyond edginess to outright snarling vehemence, and then that contrasting tune of the trio (at 1:16) really has, if you listen for it, a really threatening edge.

I think Morton Gould (1913-1996) -- a gifted composer and arranger as well as conductor and, yes, bandmaster -- gets some of this in his recording. (The introductory flourish, sounding the tune of the trio is presumably Gould's own inspiration. I wouldn't want to hear the piece this way all the time, but I rather like it.)

Morton Gould and His Symphonic Band. RCA/BMG, recorded Oct. 17, 19, and 26, 1956

But even in a conventionally milder-mannered performance, the music has such tightly disciplined authority, even authenticity, that it sort of screams "Fake!" at the overblown histrionics of A Few Good Men's writing and acting. It's undoubtedly a good thing for the picture that it doesn't have the kind of performance of Semper Fidelis which it set me to imagining.

In case you were wondering, British bands love Sousa's marches as much as American ones, maybe more. Here is the 1983 performance of Semper Fidelis from this week's Special Bonus Prize CD, by the Band of H.M. Royal Marines conducted by Lt. Col. G.A.C. Hoskins, M.V.O., L.R.A.M., R.M. (Principal Director of Music, Royal Marines):

OUR "BASIC SOUSA" TOUR

Over the course of his long composing career, Sousa produced an enormous quantity of music, the best of which seems to me of a quality that hasn't been surpassed in any medium, and I think that, give or take a couple of numbers, there's general agreement as to which constitute the "core" Sousa marches. With a minimum of chatter, let's run through some of the general favorites.

The Stars and Stripes Forever

If you've had your fill of The Stars and Stripes, feel free to skip ahead. Personally, I can't get enough of it, at least in worthy performances. We're going to be hearing a lot of the Gould and Slatkin CDs we've already sampled, and it would be a shame not to let them have a go at The Stars and Stripes. It's not for nothing that their ensembles are both named "symphonic bands"; their performances have both a weight and a tonal refinement not often realized by even the best actual military bands.