Me and a Guitar
Call it an early prejudice, a slab of ignorance, or just a plain matter of taste, but I’ve honestly never been a huge fan of the classical guitar (or any guitar for that matter). Maybe it hails back to my high school days when it seemed those who could play guitar—again, any sort of guitar—took the lion’s share of the attention from the opposite sex while we pianists (even those of us cool enough for a time, in a certain era, to sport one of those absurd, dated over-the-shoulder keyboards that simply aspired to guitar-ness) quietly sat immobile behind a behemoth of an instrument, sexy to nobody.
But you know, we grow, prejudices fade, and high school was some time ago indeed, so I decided to try Los Romeros album Celebration, starting slow with a piece I know well—we all know it well: Bach’s “Jesu bleibt meine Freude,” better known as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Having heard versions of this for piano, organ, chorus, orchestra and even (if memory serves) string quartet, I was actually not sure how this one would sit.
And of course, reader, you know this one: the wow-gosh-wasn’t-I-wrong moment I seem to have so much, which is always followed by the how-much-do-I-love-my-earn-while-you-learn-job moment. But yes, it happened, again, as it always does. But the sound of these instruments together was truly subtle, nuanced, even angelic (if you pardon my spate of clichés). The crystalline timbre of not one but four guitars is a strange sound—the unisons are beyond description, and the (more extreme than I remembered) different registers of the guitar(s) gave a heft and breadth to the work. Of course, the guitar is the sine qua non of Spanish-sounding instruments, and here in the eight capable hands of Los Romeros especially so. Bach with a slight Latin tilt (not jazzed up, a la Tiempo Libre, but played straight with a slight accent) and a surprising depth of sound.
What I think I liked most was the fact that these are clearly four virtuosi who feel little need to, as the above-maligned guitarists used to say in High School, “go chops.” They play together, in an ensemble as uniform and tightly wrought as any string quartet or madrigal chorus, and the arrangement is a humble one, not flashy, not proving how (undoubtedly) demonically well they play. Instead, they come together, one big “hyperguitar,” and it is something of a feast of sound. Pretty remarkable.
Purchase Los Romeros: Celebration
The Worm in the Ear
I am going to do a huge composition project that I call The EarWorm Project, which is basically going to be a series of pieces based on those insidious songs—love them or hate them—that you cannot for the life of you get out of your head once they are there; more about this later. What this means is that I’ve had to listen to a bunch of these tunes, most recently “I Could Have Danced All Night,” which is a lovely and damn-near-perfect song that composer Jon Deak (who also for years played Bass in the New York Philharmonic) simply could not get out of his noggin.
So I went to my newly-slim-packaged recording of My Fair Lady on the Masterworks Broadway label. Now this show is one of those unmovable cultural artifacts, so much so that it seems to have always been there. But giving it an honest listen—not just for blogging purposes here, but also for my own greedily sought musical ideas—reminds me that this is really a masterpiece of nuanced charm and sly cheek. Yes, there are famous tunes by composer Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner—the above mentioned “I Could Have Danced All Night” as well as “The Rain in Spain”, “With a Little Bit of Luck”, “On the Street Where You Live” (gorgeously used in Mad Men!), “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”—but more this is a show that outlines the severe and unrelenting talents of its stars: the inimitable Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews (both of whom also feel like unmovable cultural artifacts). Her lilting quality is well matched to his “sing-talking” (which he just does so well, doesn’t he?), and this odd little tale about making a cultured woman out of one who does not begin as such is gorgeously told in that classic way. No wonder it continues to thrive.
This record has on it some delightful extras, including an exhausted conversation (taking place at the end of the day-long session in which this recording was made) with Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews (wow, what an uncomfortable and politically incorrect moment when the interviewer asks her age—she confesses to being twenty—and is then told that “two states over and this would be rape,” yikes!) and Alan Jay Lerner. There’s also a wonderful chat between the composer and lyricist.
This of course is a side mission from my tour through David Zinman’s Beethoven Symphonies and some of his Mahler, the Juilliard playing Beethoven and Bartok (of which I wrote plenty here and figured you might have wearied of my enthusiasm) and a whole host of other cast albums.
Hope you all had a wonderful Labor Day.
Purchase My Fair Lady
The Excellent Listening Never Ends
Its been a good few musical days—apart from my own work, I’ve had a veritable orgy of listening. Lenny’s Haydn, of course, more gems from the Complete Stravinsky (Mavra!), Horowitz playing Brahms (First Piano Concerto!) and Schumann (C Major Fantasy from the Carnegie Hall Private Collection) and some old recordings like Bernstein’s Mass and Boulez’s Pierrot Lunaire.
And lately, based on the strong online recommendation of my colleague David Hurwitz of classicstoday.com, I dug into David Zinman’s Beethoven Symphony Cycle. It’s a “world premiere” of sorts, the first recording of a corrected edition played on modern instruments on the always-adventurous Arte Nova imprint. The conductor likes his tempi crisp, and this whole cycle is no exception. I especially like the unceremonious, just-go-ahead-with-it-already opening tattoo from the Fifth, and his near-to-manic quickness of the sixth (which builds so subtly and gorgeously that I actually came to love this piece again while listening). And the whole box is like that—full of lively surprises, even for a seasoned listener. If you are a buyer on a budget looking to invest in a Complete Symphonies boxed set (of which there are at least sixty; I lost count at some point) then this might be well worth considering.
Zinman’s Mahler Five is also pretty compelling, especially the opening movement and the famous Adagietto (the latter made into the music of death and decay in the film Death in Venice). I love that he doesn’t shmaltz it up in the beginning movement, choosing pacing and taste over garishness and grotesquerie—though there’s something to be said for that kind of thinking (this is, after all, music of sharp corners and hidden horrors) it is certainly nice to have this reading as a salve.
Onward to more!
Purchase music by David Zinman
Important, and Actually Good
I for one am glad that Sony is making available all those old fantastic recordings of the core repertoire by the Juilliard String Quartet. I mean, just having these in an easily downloadable format (or via “to order” CD from the always amazing Arkivmusic.com) is critical because these are indeed Important Recordings of the Cornerstones of the Western Quartet Repertoire, but that enough isn’t the best selling point—these are just amazing, nuanced, and rangy recordings of what is hands-down some of the best chamber music ever written. Period.
I am certain that I’ll get a few emails about this, but I don’t think it is a stretch to say that the sixteen by Beethoven, the six by Bartok and those of Debussy and Ravel are the absolute pinnacle of the genre. Beethoven in his intimate sequence was quietly taking music from the sometimes-fripperies of the Late Classical form (that of Mozart and Haydn, the so-called “First Viennese School”) and smashing the walls of musical exploration—so as “innovative” works these pieces rate higher than his symphonies or even his piano sonatas; this is deeply private Beethoven working it out. We’re all better for it.
But don’t take my word for it, listen—try the first string quartet in F major (a wonderful piece—this is Beethoven after all!—but one that owes much to his very important forebears) and then go to the Late Quartets and listen to the C-sharp Minor and see just how vastly different these two pieces are. Hard even to imagine the same composer wrote them. The former is brilliant, but the latter is mind-ripping and completely off-the-charts wild.
Now throw in the huge contribution of the always-important Juilliard String Quartet (Joel Smirnoff, violin; Ronald Copes, violin; Samuel Rhodes, viola; Joel Krosnick, cello) who earned their reputation as the ultimate mixed-repertoire ensemble, performing not only the great (and even not-as-great) pieces from the extant repertoire, but also commissioning works from and championing American composers (including Elliot Carter—he wrote all four of his absolutely seminal works for the Juilliards), and you have quite the hours of listening pleasure ahead.
What I love about this group is—and you’ll pardon my cliché—that they play with heart. It is easy to over-sacralize these works, to take them as holy writ rather than as the dangerous and progressive pieces of art they actually are, but the fearless Juilliard Quartet doesn’t do it that way, to their credit. Take, for example, the opening of the C Major Quartet, Opus 59 (one o the “Rasumovsky” quartets, part of Beethoven’s Middle Period), how they begin in this serene and delicate fashion, yet not without tension—from the way they play the music you know something is going to happen, you just aren’t sure what. There’s not a second of stasis, and when the piece finally bursts and gives way to the sheer and unadulterated joy that is this movement, the quartet is not afraid to play as vividly lustfully as is required to carry off this unrepentant joy. Truly wonderful, full and ripe and as good a performance—meaning as dangerous a performance—as the piece is likely to get, then or now.
More to come, because wow, wow, their digging in on the Ravel Quartet is really magical, not to mention the Bartok yet to come. I’ve not listened for years, and am now thrilled I can.
Purchase Music from the Juilliard String Quartet
Song of the Earth
I’ve always been a sucker for those big Mahler song cycles, the ones where in a way he manages to out-Wagner Wagner, writing what are essentially music drama-symphony hybrids that pack deep emotional punches and yet are full of whimsy, humor, longeurs and deep melancholic beauty. Not bad for just over an hour.
So yes, I was pretty thrilled when this new recording of Das Lied von der Erde turned up at my doorstep. I’ve always loved Kent Nagano’s overall orchestral sound—taut, yet unafraid to be lush, even appropriately soupy—and his breadth of repertoire, taking on much new music (love his old recording of The Rake’s Progress, and his Ligeti, oh his Ligeti…) so he seemed to be the perfect interpreter for this wild, fear-no-musical-corner song cycle.
How right I was. From the opening swell to those touching final flits of filigree, this is a performance for the ages. And this is saying a lot because this is an odd piece (which of course I mean in the best way) in that it has to be both ancient and modern, universal and yet emotionally specific—and proportionally, with a single movement (the sixth, “The Farewell,” a meditation on life and death that Mahler called “The most personal thing I have ever written”) taking up half the piece, a conductor must be in full command of all nuances—musical, technical, dramatic—to pull this one off. Nagano has excellent control—but not too much—over the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, and both singers (tenor Klaus Florian Vogt and baritone Christian Gerhaher) are magnificent.
I will look forward to more listening—though with Sony re-releasing a lot of those AMAZING seminal recordings from the Juilliard String Quartet, my listening time is cut out for me. But who’s complaining?
Purchase Kent Nagano: Gustav Mahler:Das Lied von Der Erde
Purchase music from the Juilliard String Quartet
Mandy and Me
Mandy and Me
I’m not afraid to sound sappy saying I just plain adore Mandy Patinkin. His voice, his take, his performances, I’ve listened to some of his records more times than I can count and seen him in concert more than a few times. I just think he’s one of the brilliant interpreters of a certain repertoire, as fearless and individual as any performer out there.
His first two records—Mandy Patinkin and Dress Casual—rate as favorites, perhaps because of the serious nostalgia invoked (I remember as a young man walking the streets of Cambridge, England sporting a cassette walkman and listening to his version of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” and feeling just good about life). Hell, I even love his version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” which is saying something from a person who spent untold adolescent hours coaching very mediocre singers through this famous-yet-insipid song…but Mandy does it gorgeously.
I could go on and on about the fantastic (and rangy) cuts to be found: his trio of Patinkins on “Pretty Lady” from Pacific Overtures; his ripping, spitting, moving performance of that hardest of musical monologues “Soliloquy” from Carousel; his toungue-lodged-firmly-in-cheek “Puttin on the Ritz”; the quiet sadness of (of all things) Kermit’s lament “Bein’ Green”; the calm mystery of “Mr. Arthur’s Place,” an obscure yet wonderful song So many more. So many, many more.
Dress Casual has some more “complete” treats too, like many selections from Pal Joey and, importantly, the debut of the music from Stephen Sondheim’s weird, wonderful musical for Television Evening Primrose, a duet with Bernadette Peters! This strange piece is about a poet who decides to escape the world by locking himself in the cynosure of a department store, only to find himself in love with one of the mannequins—who, as you can imagine, longs only for the world. It’s a pretty great piece.
I have to say, it’s been choking to listen to these old wonderful discs, like a blast of warm air on a cold day. Mandy does what few singers can do, and that is not only sing gorgeously but also communicate a story (he is an actor first and foremost). You never know which Mandy will emerge—zany, fast-talking Mandy (who reminds me of Danny Kaye in this respect); full-throated gutsy Mandy (closest in spirit perhaps to Liza Minnelli, or even (gasp!) her mother); quiet, calm and emotionally piercing Mandy; two-bit huckster Mandy, a showman of the old school; fun Dad Mandy; Mandy the crooner; Mandy of the Yiddish theatre, downtrodden like George Pepper yet full of heart; Chicago Hope Mandy, the doctor you hope will be the one who has to deliver you the bad news; Sondheim Mandy, one of the richest interpreters of the stage’s greatest and most emotionally wrought composers; or just plain Mandy the man, casually dressed, spinning a yarn, giving you his all.
Whichever one emerges, he is worth listening to. More than once. Trust me on this.
Rededication, For Love
Spent the week with my wife who was at a writer’s workshop in the Catskills, a lot of time alone to compose, to read, to listen to Lenny Bernstein (his music and his Haydn) and re-dedicate myself to music. Nothing weird—I think every artist (or thinker or lover) has to go through this from time to time. Solitude helped. Lenny helped. A stack of books helped. And—and I know this is cheesy but please remember me fondly for copping to my own cheesiness—the song “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line helped too.
As a ballad it is effective but dull—that is, were it to be one of literally thousands of love songs we’ve all heard—but as it stands, as an artist’s credo, it is something of a small miracle. To see the show, all these worn-out and somewhat desperate Broadway Gypsies standing in that famous line and singing about sacrifice always touches me. The things they—we—give up, the things that go, the relationships that fail and the friends that slip away into more secure lives while some just keep sweating and losing and facing it and surviving. That’s what the song is about for me.
Just typing the words that always choke me up—“we did what we had to do”—is making me tear up even now, late at night, alone at my computer. I spent the day struggling with four measures, studying a score to learn, practicing the piano, and listening to three symphonies I’d never heard before. In other words, I, too, did what I had to do. Can’t regret it, never have, probably never will.
So once again I thank my job for bringing such tools for contemplation direct to my door. Go listen to A Chorus Line (or see it!) because it’s a whole passel of stories that not only simply needed to be told, they needed to be sung.
It seems like an odd match, Bernstein and Haydn. After all, it’s easier to imagine the gushingest conductor cottoning more deeply to the gushingest music—Mahler, Brahms, Rachmaninov, etc. But when I was a student, I bought a Sony disc of Bernstein conducting Haydn’s Symphony No. 104, which I thought would be a passable, overwrought reading from which I could depart. I bought it, I listened, listened again, listened a few more times, and lo found out that this was a great marriage—I underestimated the conductor’s expansiveness, and his understanding of the music of this composer, the wittiest of them all.
So what gorgeous thing arrives on my doorstep this week—a whole box of Bernstein conducting Haydn. The London and Paris Symphonies (including my beloved 104, because that long-ago disc is also long-ago misplaced), the masses, The Creation. I am very much looking forward to some serious listening in this coming week. (How many times did I listen to Lenny’s recording of Missa in tempore belli during the onset of both Gulf Wars?).
But do yourself a favor and get this box, get to know Haydn through the eyes of Lenny—it’s well worth it.
Purchase Leonard Bernstein Conducts Haydn Boxset here
Points West (Side)
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Lately Sony has been inundating me with a whole burning mass of excellent nostalgia in the form of records of West Side Story, a show that changed it all—not only for the world, but for me as a young person. I wrote a lot here about the new Broadway Cast Recording, and lo, there go I to my mailslot and discover not one but two re-releases, a nicely packaged “twofer” called West Side Story X2 (part of a whole series of “X2s”) featuring the original Broadway cast and the soundtrack to the film. Of course I listened, and in yet another Proustian rush so much returned to me.
Now there will likely be heated debates over the film score’s “authenticity”—Bernstein himself was not (as the legend has it) super crazy about it as it played a little hell with the integrity. However, many got to know West Side Story not through the stage but through the screen (myself included) and so, right or wrong, the movie version plays. So if you are a fan of the film, Bernstein’s wishes aside, this could be your chance to do a little back-to-back listening to see (hear? I always miss that) the differences.
And to sweeten the deal there’s extra stuff—on the film soundtrack, some orchestral tracks like intermission music! (Does anyone remember when films had intermissions? I can only vaguely do so, with the possible exception of the hilarious two-second intermission in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Apparently in those days of the early sixties, one listened to an instrumental version of “I feel Pretty” while heading to the concession stand. You can also listen to the final moments of the movie, dialogue and a little bit of a capella singing from Natalie Wood. There’s also a nice sort of
“post-overture” in the form of the final credits, where the themes of the show are concatenated into a nice little suite—would one call this an “underture” perhaps? Nice for buffs. On the Broadway side of things, there’s a rousing set of bonus tracks in the form of Symphonic Dances, a suite from the show (with no less than Maestro Bernstein leading the New York Philharmonic). I’ve always loved this set, and this version is tops.
So who do you prefer? Natalie Wood or Carole Lawrence? Richard Beymer or Larry Kert? Chita or Rita? All are here in this neat little box with a few goodies to boot.
Purchase The Original Cast Recording of West Side Story
Purchase The New Broadway Cast Recording of West Side Story
Purchase The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Scratches? Pops? Who Cares?
Sometimes I realize how spoiled I am, to live in this day and age where sound quality and recording technology are so specific, so awesomely brilliant, that an old recording like, say, Vladimir Horowtiz playing both Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and the Liszt B-minor Sonata at Carnegie Hall in the late 1940s can at first put me off because, well, it sounds a little scratchy. But this problem is not Sony’s, not Carnegie’s, and not Horowitz’s—it is wholly mine. Because once I recovered from my own proclivities, I was not only amazed by the performance (come on, it’s Horowitz, what is not to be amazed by?) but also the sonics, the artful and delicate reconstruction of these masters into a gorgeous document—so hell, there’s scratches and pops, big deal. I felt transported to a vanished Carnegie in a vanished New York, with vanished music being played by a vanished performer. But beyond that “nostalgia” (can it be nostalgia if you never lived through the era?) what is to be heard on the record Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall: The Private Collection is just some damn good playing of some damn good music.
I’ve always loved the Liszt B-minor, that composer’s muscular paean to Beethoven. Like the great German before him, Liszt gambols between forceful gestures and light near-filigree, reining in his baser instincts to be (at times, mind you, only at times) strictly virtuosic and trading them up for a substantial foray into the dramatic exigencies of the sonata form—a form still worth listening to, learning from, etc. Embarking on a sonata—composing it or performing it—is a little like embarking on a performed epic poem with a point. A story is being told, and when the skill of the writer is matched by the skill of the performer, the tale is gripping. The way Horowitz carves out each nook of Liszt’s edifice is pretty remarkable—supple, athletic, dignified, rambunctious and even irreverent when called for. Like any great performer, he makes a case for the work—all of which is derived from the opening tattoo (a la Beethoven!).
I’ve always found that the best way to listen to any work like this which is seated in the idea of development is from the beginning on—that is to say, check out the first few moments (or even two minutes) and make a game of trying to follow them throughout. Those opening chords, the falling figuration that follows, the notes that seem a little “odd,” all of these will play out in the entire piece—it is from these notions that Liszt (pace Beethoven) makes his musical moves. And Horowitz knows this and does his bit to not only make it obvious but also captivating—he is, after all, a showman. (It is far too easy to make “sonata form” an abstract concept, the musical playing out of the great Heglian conflict, an outline for Being and an exercise in the passage of Time etc., but it really is just a piece of showbiz that at its best can move mountains.)
Next blog: Horowitz’s Pictures. I always miss the orchestration, but not here!
Purchase Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall: The Private Collection Mussorgsky & Liszt