Classic Crooner Sedaka Plays Sandpoint On Sunday

Amazin’ Neil Sedaka facts to know and tell:

From 1958 through 1963, only one artist outsold Sedaka. His name was Elvis Presley.

In nearly every month of the last half of the ‘60s, the Top 40 charts contained at least one Sedaka-written song performed by other artists.

Put those two facts together, and you can better understand the impact this 57-year-old former boy wonder had on popular music. Sedaka plays Sunday night at 7 at The Festival at Sandpoint.

It boils down to this: Even when he has not been singing hits, he has been a prolific writer of them.

Most people are familiar with the songs that he himself made into hits during his first phase of popularity: “Oh! Carol” (1959), “Stairway to Heaven” (1960), “Calendar Girl” (1960), “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen” (1961), “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” (1962) and “Next Door to an Angel” (1962).

But then he went on to write a string of hits, mostly with his partner Howard Greenfield, for the Fifth Dimension (“Working on a Groovy Thing”), Tom Jones (“Puppet Man”) and the Captain and Tennille (“Love Will Keep Us Together,” “Lonely Night” and “You Never Done It Like That”).

And in the middle of all of this songwriting production, his own performing career was revived after a 10-year hiatus. In 1974, he had his first No. 1 hit since 1962 with “Laughter in the Rain,” followed by “Bad Blood” (a 1975 Elton John collaboration) and a re-release of his first No. 1 hit, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” slowed down as a dreamy ballad.

How many Juilliard alumni have that many Top 40 hits?

Sedaka was a classical piano prodigy in high school and at Juilliard. He was even selected by the great Arthur Rubinstein to play on a New York radio show.

One of his more recent albums is called “Classically Sedaka” and it consists of the classical melodies he played at Juilliard - Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky - fitted with romantic lyrics by Sedaka.

According to Sedaka’s publicity, he is even contemplating a Broadway show entitled “Moscow Nights” based on selections from “Classically Sedaka.”

Today, Sedaka usually plays one or two classical piano selections at each concert. As well as a whole lot of his greatest hits.

Spokane Symphony

Five young conductors will be featured leading the Spokane Symphony in Saturday’s concluding orchestral program at the festival. The Memorial Field concert includes works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Bartok.

The conductors were selected by Gunther Schuller, the festival’s artistic director, from a class of 10 professional conductors who have been studying with him in three weeks of daily classes and rehearsals at Sandpoint’s Schweitzer Institute.

Sylvia Alimena will open Saturday’s 7:30 p.m. concert with Felix Mendelssohn’s concert overture, “The Fair Melusina.” Alimena, a graduate of Boston University who plays French horn in the National Symphony, conducts the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra and the Friday Morning Music Club Orchestra in Alexandria, Va.

Conducting duties for Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 will be divided between Brian Stone and Annie Chung. Stone is completing his doctoral studies in conducting at the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore, and Chung just finished her first year in the doctoral conducting program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Susan Robinson, who conducts the Central Florida Symphony in Ocala, will lead Bela Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances. Robinson is a graduate of Ball State University and Texas Technological University.

Matthew Boynick will end Saturday’s program conducting Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem, “Francesca da Rimini.” Boynick, born in Ohio but raised in Mississippi, has spent the last few years conducting orchestras in the Munich area in Germany.

The festival also will present two concerts of chamber music: tonight at Taps at the Schweitzer Resort Day Lodge and Sunday morning at Swan’s Landing Restaurant in Sandpoint. For program information on these chamber music programs, call the festival office at 265-4554 or toll-free outside Sandpoint at (888) 265-4554.

- Travis Rivers

Woody Herman Orchestra

Woody Herman has been gone since 1987, but his Thundering Herd thunders on.

Actually, they call this incarnation Woody Herman’s Young Thundering Herd, led by Frank Tiberi, who learned his chops under the great Woody himself.

The orchestra is carrying on one of the most respected traditions in all of big band jazz. Herman headed out on the road in 1930 as a jazz clarinetist and alto sax man. In the next 57 years he recorded nearly 50 hit songs with his various bands, including The Band that Plays the Blues, the Woodchoppers, and various incarnations of the Thundering Herd.

His band was a favorite with musicians as well as audiences, since by all accounts Woody was a beloved boss and an unsurpassed spotter of talent. The list of musicians who passed through the various Herds is astonishing: Neal Hefti, Carl Fontana, Jimmy Rowles, Red Norvo, Shorty Rogers, Zoot Sims and Stan Getz, to name a few.

Tiberi has been with the Woody Herman Orchestra since 1969, first as the lead tenor saxophone and then as director when Herman fell ill. His job, he says, is simply to make the band play “authentically,” meaning, the way Woody would have wanted them to play.

They play at Memorial Field on Friday at 7:30 p.m.

- Jim Kershner

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: These 2 sidebars appeared with the story:

1. FESTIVAL AT SANDPOINT Sandpoint Festival tickets are available at the Memorial Field box office, at the festival office, 305 N. Second or call 235-4554 or toll-free at (888) 265-4554.

2. FESTIVAL SCHEDULE Some tickets now yield two admissions for the price of one ticket. Schweitzer Institute Chamber Music, today, 7 p.m., Schweitzer Resort, $7. Woody Herman Orchestra, Friday, 7:30 p.m., Memorial Field, $19 general admission, $26.50 reserved seating. Spokane Symphony with Gunther Schuller and Schweitzer Institute conductors, Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Memorial Field, $17 general admission, $24.40 reserved seating. Schweitzer Institute Chamber Music, Sunday, 10:30 a.m., Swan’s Landing Restaurant, $7, with brunch available after concert. Neil Sedaka, Sunday, 7 p.m., Memorial Field, $19 general admission, $26.50 reserved seating.