Jay, I enjoyed your mention of Lalo Schifrin’s coming on a National Review cruise. I like his Dirty Harry music a great deal.
But, of course, the undeniable crowning achievement of his life as a composer was having a piece make its world premiere with the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, in 1999.
The piece, “Double Concerto for Violin, Violoncello, and Orchestra,” had been (so says the playbill) commissioned by Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky in 1965, but Heifetz fell ill and never performed the piece before his death in 1987. (I’m passing this on for the general reader, of course, not for Jay, whose knowledge of such things is comprehensive.) Piatigorsky passed away in 1976, and the piece was forgotten. The cellist Terry King, who had been a student of Piatigorsky’s and his archivist, discovered the work and organized a performance of it in 1999, featuring his wife, the violinist Laura Bossert-King.
This was only a couple of years after the first of the Mission: Impossible movies had come out, and so the orchestra greeted Schifrin wearing Ethan Hunt sunglasses and playing the famous theme. It was a corny gesture, but a sweet and memorable one. The opening of the Mission: Impossible theme is probably as well-known around the world as the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. Maybe more. I sense that most audiences prefer the familiar to the novel.
I think my ticket cost $7.
One of the great blessings of American philanthropy was the fact that for many years, almost every little city, even the obscure ones, had an orchestra, a couple of libraries, and a theater. The Lubbock Symphony was founded in 1946, in the wake of a terrible war, in a town of only 72,000 people surrounded by a seemingly infinite expanse of cotton and feedlots — that was the work of a different and more confident America.
Here’s an excerpt from the bio of the Lubbock symphony’s current music director:
Born in Seoul, Korea, David [Cho] immigrated to the United States in 1985. David received a variety of music lessons during his childhood in Palos Verdes, California, before focusing his energy exclusively on the piano. He later attended Oberlin College and Conservatory where he received his Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance.
In 1996, David won the E. Nakamichi Concerto Competition at the Aspen Music Festival and was awarded the Arthur Dann Prize at the Oberlin Conservatory. In 1999, while acquiring his Master of Music in Piano Performance at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, David was invited by Robert Spano and Seiji Ozawa to attend the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center as a Merrill Lynch Conducting Fellow. David was then invited by Larry Rachleff to study at Rice University where he served as guest conductor for the Shepherd School Orchestras while acquiring his Master of Music in Instrumental Conducting. David was subsequently invited by the Vienna Philharmonic to serve as an Assistant Conductor. As the recipient of the Karajan Fellowship, David has enjoyed residencies at the annual Salzburg Festival in Austria. In 2003, David was invited by Leonard Slatkin to participate in the National Conducting Institute during which time he made his début with the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
(Side note: I approve of that old-fashioned way of writing début.)
Orchestras, libraries (like the one where I started reading National Review), little magazines, and other things like that don’t pay for themselves, and they don’t dream themselves up. In spite of the rising and inundating tide of sewage that is American politics, ours is still a country of good people doing good things, and bringing those good things to even the dusty and remote corners of the country. I sometimes think that is more obvious to people born in Seoul or Buenos Aires (as Schifrin was) than it is to the natives.