The Original Jacket Collections
George Szell, Devoted to Mozart
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I promise—and this is a promise I will try to keep—that I won’t keep on about how beautiful and fulfilling these Original Jacket Collection boxes are as items (though they are) and will instead turn to the content, the music. Conductor and pianist George Szell spent almost 35 years helming the Cleveland Symphony [...]
Mazurkas, and Final Thoughts on Rubinstein’s Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
Like any artist, Chopin had many sides—the accomplished fantasist of the nocturnes, the grandstander of the concertos, the wheezing pessimist (and long-range composer) of the Preludes, the rangy classicist of the sonatas, the droll wit of the impromptus and baccaroles, the macho and maudlin technician of the etudes and fantasies, and the chamber [...]
Facing The Night
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I cannot agree more with Alan Rich, who, in his liner notes to Rubinstein’s rcording of Chopin’s Nocturnes (dutifully and tantalizingly reprinted as part of one of these Original Jacket Collections I’ve been so in love with), calls this sequence of remarkable music “…strange and wonderful music.” As a chronic insomniac myself, I [...]
Chopin’s Preludes, from Arthur Rubinstein Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
The jacket notes for Arthur Rubinstein’s recording of the Chopin Preludes commence “Although the collected works of Frederic Chopin do not bulk large in physical size, it is doubtful if any other composer left behind him music of such consistently high standards.” In other words, it is indeed quality not quantity that [...]
Final thoughts on Leonard Bernstein: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
With sadness, I come to the end of my posts about the Bernstein Conducts Bernstein: Original Jacket Collection. I could spend months on these records, in grand exegesis of the personal meaning of all of these works, the spectacular quality of the composition, or the puzzle that was Leonard Bernstein. I could spend [...]
Serenade from Leonard Bernstein: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I grew up in Orange County, specifically in a small “town” called Placentia. I use “town” in scare quotes because it tends to conjure up Agee-like images of general stores and nosy neighbors, but that was not the case. More a suburb that rolled easily and unnoticeably into the next, so it wasn’t [...]
More on Leonard Bernstein: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
An excerpt of Harold C. Schonberg’s bitter 1971 The New York Times review of Bernstein’s Mass:
“For love and the brotherhood of man will not solve our problems. Better housing, jobs for everybody, and adherence to the Bill of Rights will do a lot more. Anyway, the ones who talk loudest about universal love are [...]
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, from The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
The election season has made it clear: we live in the most complex of times, divided times. I continue to think of a piece of music that I love—love—a piece that tries, fails, tries again, fails again, and doggedly keeps on trying regardless to advance a dramatic retelling of a particular kind of [...]
Final thoughts on Eugene Ormandy: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I’ve always thought that Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was a mess—a shaggy, wild, unpredictable mess, meant as the highest complement of course. It skitters from stark, bold melody to lilting quiet beauty to rough-and-tumble folk song (and that’s just the second movement). But, true to the work’s name, never has the orchestra [...]
More on Eugene Ormandy: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
As someone who does not celebrate Christmas, I keep feeling compelled to say that these Original Jacket Collections are like Christmas Morning: treats, treats, treats. If you are a classical music lover, you know all about the Philadelphia Orchestra because they were—and remain—the stuff of legend. Leopold Stokowski figures into this mythology of [...]