From our reviews producer Phyllis Myers:

On my desk sits a copy of Music In — and On — the Air, a new collection of Fresh Air pieces by our classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz.

It was great to hear that it’s now up as a Kindle e-book on Amazon because it was a very limited print run; my copy is #37 and they sold out. Over the years, I’ve learned a little something from every piece I worked on with Lloyd, from Pierre Boulez or Elliot Carter  (their portraits by Ralph Hamilton are on the cover) to Maria Callas and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Lloyd is always surprising me; reviewing the old movie It Happened in Brooklyn so we could hear Frank Sinatra sing opera and Jimmy Durante, be — well — just Jimmy Durante. But the idea that surprised me the most was the DVD review of Car 54, Where Are You? Who knew that Molly Picon would appear and sing so tenderly in Yiddish? Lloyd.

Portraits of Pierre Boulez and Elliot Carter by Ralph Hamilton from the cover of the book

On Monday’s show, Lloyd Schwartz had a piece about Cinerama films from the 1950s, two of which are newly released on DVD and Blu-Ray. Above is an image (reproduced from Flicker Alley’s Cinerama catalog) of just how they made that magic happen. The image Cinerama reproduces mimics a person’s peripheral vision. Because no single lens recreate that without distortion, the Cinerama camera had three lenses, each taking a third of the picture’s total width.

Image courtesy of Flickr Alley

Please welcome to the Fresh Air Tumblr,our critic Lloyd Schwartz with a guest post to provide context on the opening music that was used for his segment on Cinerama that aired yesterday:

The opening music for my Fresh Air segment on Cinerama is Cole Porter’s “Stereophonic Sound,” a satirical song about the wide-screen/3-D/stereo techniques of the 1950s that were designed to entice TV-watchers back to movie theaters. The song is from Porter’s last Broadway show, Silk Stockings, a 1955 musical version of Ernst Lubitsch’s great spoof about Soviet Russia, Ninotchka, with Greta Garbo as the humorless commissar who changes her attitude when she’s on a mission to Paris (“Garbo laughs!” the publicity announced). In the musical, “Stereophonic Sound” was a comic number for a movie star swimmer, obviously modeled on Esther Williams. Gretchen Wyler, who sings it on the original cast album, created a sensation. In the 1957 movie version, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, Wyler’s part was played by the ebullient Janis Paige. But Hollywood caved to the enormous pressure from the production code to avoid the slightest sexual innuendo. Even as tame a line as “If Ava Gardner played Godiva, riding on a mare,/The people wouldn’t pay a cent to see her in the bare” (“Unless she had glorious Technicolor, breathtaking CinemaScope, and stereophonic sound”) was changed to the limp “The people wouldn’t pay a cent, and wouldn’t even care.” For Broadway, Porter wrote “The customers don’t like to see the groom embrace the bride, unless her lips are scarlet and her bosom’s five-feet wide.” But movie audiences heard: “Unless her lips are scarlet and her mouth is five feet wide.” I’d like to know how they convinced Cole Porter to allow his smart lyrics to be dumbed down and bowdlerized.

Above, Fred Astaire and Janice Page perform “Stereophonic Sound” from Silk Stockings.

Lloyd Schwartz on the kinds of films Cinerama was best at:

In 1952, the first Cinerama experiment, This Is Cinerama, was a sensation, and even though the ticket prices were higher, people flocked to specially designed movie theaters to ride a roller coaster, fly over Niagara Falls, or sway in a gondola through the canals of Venice. Two later Cinerama films — How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm — had actual stories, but mainly Cinerama stuck to travelogues. Probably wisely. This Is Cinerama and the 1958 Windjammer, which was filmed in a similar but slightly superior technique called Cinemiracle, have just been released on DVD and Blu-Ray. Even watching them on a TV screen, in a format called SmileBox, which simulates the curved Cinerama screen, that roller coaster ride at New York’s Rockaway Beach is still pretty breathtaking. And fun.

Image from This Is Cinerama courtesy of Flickr Alley LLC

Lloyd Schwartz on the Blu-ray reissue of the 1971 John Schlesinger film Sunday Bloody Sunday:

Sunday Bloody Sunday is one of those films that lets you into the lives of believable, complicated characters. A handsome, self-centered young artist played by the actor/rock singer Murray Head is having simultaneous affairs with both an older woman (played with infinitely nuanced self-irony by Glenda Jackson) and an older man, a Jewish doctor (the touching Peter Finch), two intelligent adults who have mutual friends and even know each other slightly. Each of them is aware of his or her rival and accepts the necessity of sharing the young man, who seems to love them both, though neither is as important to him as they would like. The characters are equally unsentimental and realistic about their possibilities for happiness.

I never heard of the Baroque composer Agostino Steffani until last year, when the Boston Early Music Festival presented the North American premiere of Steffani’s Niobe, an opera about the mythical queen who bragged so much about her many children, the gods killed them all in revenge. One of the leading roles, Niobe’s husband King Amphion, was played by the early-music superstar countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, who sang the opera’s most sublime aria — a hymn to the harmony of the spheres. I couldn’t wait to hear Jaroussky again, and was eager to hear more Steffani. Now, I have my wish. The celebrated coloratura mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has been studying Steffani, and he’s the focus of her latest CD, Mission.

— Lloyd Schwartz reviews the new album by coloratura mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli

When Elliott Carter died at home on Monday, he was 103 and had been writing music for more than 80 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for two of his five string quartets, was a recipient of the National Medal of Honor, and in September was awarded the title of Commander of the French Legion of Honor. Many regarded him not only as our greatest living composer, but also as perhaps the greatest American composer of classical music. He lived one of the most fulfilled lives any artist could wish for. What’s sad about his death isn’t only that a whole era in music has come to an end, but that Carter was still composing, and on the highest level.

— Lloyd Schwartz remembers composer, Elliot Carter

In the photo:Elliott Carter at Tanglewood in 2008 on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz is sitting right behind Carter.

Photo courtesy of Michael J Lutch

Hollywood is often at its best when it’s making fun of itself, and few movies are funnier or more fun than Singin’ in the Rain, the broadly satirical musical comedy about the transition from silent movies to sound. Gene Kelly, who co-directed the film with Stanley Donen, stars as the stuntman turned matinee idol who falls in love with adorable Debbie Reynolds. He even gets to parody his own swashbuckling in MGM’s Technicolor Three Musketeers.

—- Lloyd Schwartz review: 60 Years Later, Still ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ : NPR)

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is currently hosting the first major Willem de Kooning retrospective. Critic Lloyd Schwartz says the exhibit traces the development of de Kooning’s entire career, along with the little detours he took along the way.

Woman I (1950-52) is one of the works featured in de Kooning: A Retrospective. The exhibit is on display at the Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 9, 2012.

George and Ira Gershwin wrote some of their best songs for movies — one of which, 1937’s A Damsel in Distress, has just been issued by Warner Archives. Critic Lloyd Schwartz says it may be the oddest of the Gershwin brothers’ films.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz just attended two productions of Porgy and Bess: an operatic performance at Tanglewood and a musical-theater version in Cambridge, Mass. He says it can work either way, “as long as Gershwin’s great score remains its heart and soul.”

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews two newly released DVDs that take place at the opera.

Lloyd Schwartz, on a touring exhibit of Venetian masterpieces from the National Gallery of Scotland making their way around the United States (currently in Minneapolis):  “Right now, two of Titian’s very greatest paintings — Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto — are in the United States for the first time. … One reason I felt it was urgent to see them is that these two grand paintings are companion pieces, and there’s a chance they may be permanently separated.”

Celebrating James Levine’s 40 Years at The Met

“When she hit her high E-flat at the end of Lucia’s famous Mad Scene, my friend’s eyes popped, to the point where he spent the last scene of the opera on all fours searching for his contact lenses. Sutherland had that kind of voice. If you cared primarily about extraordinary vocal qualities, then Sutherland was probably your favorite singer. And, for some years, she was mine. I practically wore out my copy of her famous 1960 double-LP tribute to the great sopranos of the past, The Art of the Prima Donna.” (From classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz’s appreciation of opera singer Joan Sutherland, who died earlier this week.)