The Once and Future Ormandy

THREE MASSIVE BOX SETS have given us nearly 300 CDs of Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in recordings made between 1944 and 1968, which is the entirety of his recordings for the Columbia label. Ormandy decamped to RCA, according to a 1967 New York Times piece, with mixed feelings, laying the decision at the feet of the orchestra’s board. But, according to the article, Columbia’s then-president Clive Davis “indicated that a dispute over the repertory Mr. Ormandy had been permitted to record figured heavily in the split.” The article finished with Ormandy recalling his earlier years with RCA, implying that he had more freedom then.

We had a look at what’s almost the earliest of Ormandy as a conductor with the 11-CD box of Minneapolis Symphony recordings, presenting an astonishing amount of repertory recorded in January 1934 and January 1935, including a terrific Mahler 2. Now we can explore the conductor’s first steps with the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he succeeded Leopold Stokowski on the podium – as thankless a challenge as could be imagined.

Stokowski, after all, was handsome, dynamic, and relentlessly charming, probably the only symphony conductor ever impersonated by Bugs Bunny. And he’d shaped the orchestra into an ensemble that easily sat alongside the bands in Boston and New York. Ormandy co-conducted for a couple of years before taking over the job completely, and the two co-recorded during that time as well. (Sony should consider issuing a box set of Stokowski’s Philadelphia work.)

Finish Lines

ONE OF THE STANZAS of “Crooked Foot Lane,” the opening track of Amy Engelhardt’s new album “Finish What,” runs

Downloaded directions / How to escape / Wrapped all of his fractures / In surgical tape

and is part of a compact paean to aspects of disability and acceptance. But the phrase “surgical tape” has a special resonance here. Engelhardt’s lyrics carry the incisiveness of a surgical operation, and I’m mired in enough of the past to decide that the tape in question could also be a strip of magnetic recording tape, once the usual vehicle for an audio recording.

In which case this entire collection of eight songs and an instrumental could be filed under “surgical tape.” The lyrics pierce more skillfully through the epidermis of our emotional lives than I’m accustomed to encountering, even as they dance to catchy tunes presented in inventive arrangements – and there’s a story behind that that we’ll get to shortly.

Engelhardt harbors an impressive nexus of talent, developed as she went from musical-theater kid to in-demand singer to songwriter to playwright/performer. A recent manifestation of the last-named is her solo show “Impact,” which I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and wrote about here.

Lash Resort

From the Food Vault Dept.: Speaking of Vermont, as was the case with the last two posts, here’s a journey back some 17 years to revisit the piece I wrote about The Whip Bar & Grill, a restaurant at Stowe, Vermont’s Green Mountain Inn. It’s still in business, although no longer serving lunch. Keep in mind the menu and, especially, prices have changed since I wrote this piece. But don’t let it affect your appetite.

                                                                                          

DRIVE UP STOWE’S MOUNT MANSFIELD (or, if you have a constitution more rugged than mine, bicycle or walk) and, when you near the peak, clamber in and around the paths and boulders that constitute Smuggler’s Notch. Imagine the forbidden cattle being herded over that mountaintop, cattle from Canada, forbidden because conflict with Canada-friendly Britain was a defining feature of early 19th-century politics.

And agriculture was a defining Stowe industry, and politics be damned: cranky Vermonters needed their animal trade.

Mt. Mansfield dominates the town: it’s the highest peak in the state, and has given rise to the tourism upon which the area now thrives. Hikers, campers and, especially, skiers show up when it’s warm or cold; foliage draws tourists in fall.

Lodges humble and swanky flank the road to the mountain, but in the center of the charming village of Stowe sits the Green Mountain Inn, one of the first structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with an 1833-vintage building at its heart. Other buildings have been added over the years, and the complex now offers tasteful accommodations ranging from a single queen bed to a two-bedroom, multi-story townhouse – over 100 rooms in all.

Latchis Past and Present

USUALLY WHEN A KID RUNS OFF with the family money, it’s for a nefarious purpose. We expect the kid to come to no good, to crawl back, if he’s lucky, and beg forgiveness. This was not the fate of Peter Latchis. His father, Demetrius, emigrated from Greece to New Hampshire at the start of the last century, operating a pushcart from which to sell produce. He grew his enterprise and did well enough to amass a tantalizing amount of cash. His son suggested that the family invest in the up-and-coming film industry. Dad refused, so Peter took it on his own initiative to help himself to some of that money and build a movie theater, opening it as the country (and the movie business) entered the no-holds-barred 1920s.

The theater was enough of a success to inspire the family – Peter had six brothers – to build more, eventually running a chain of 20 of them throughout New England, along with hotels and restaurants. And movies were a good business: Despite the Wall Street crash of 1929, the family remained financially unscathed.

In 1938, the Latchis brothers opened a grand memorial to their late father in Brattleboro, Vermont. It was what they termed “A Town within a Town All under One Roof,” including a hotel, restaurant, ballroom, and a lavish 700-plus-seat theater. The first movie shown there was the Sonja Henie comedy “My Lucky Star,” but the theater was designed to host live entertainment as well; among the performers were the Trapp Family (pre-”Sound of Music”), pianist Rudolf Serkin, all the big-name big bands, singers from the Metropolitan Opera, and, more recently, Don McLean, Roger McGuinn, Al Di Meola, the Brattleboro Concert Choir, the Windham Philharmonic, Paula Poundstone, and even operas by Wagner.

Getting Sirius at The Latchis

DATING, AS IT DOES, FROM 1938, Brattleboro’s Latchis Hotel is the kind of small-city gem that was built to welcome big-city escapees seeking a rural(ish) retreat without sacrificing the luxuries to which they were accustomed. The luxuries are still here, even if the guests now arrive by car instead of train. And the hotel is also host to three theaters that offer first-run and specialty films as well as live performances.

The hotel’s International Music Series presented the Sirius String Quartet in its Main Theater tonight, an ensemble that has been around since 1994 and quickly evolved a personality that bypasses the mainstream quartet repertory in favor of personal expressions and explorations. “We write and arrange our own music” cellist Jeremy Harman explained as the quartet took us through a program much of which is featured on their new CD (and streaming collection) “Incantations,” which I’ll get back to in a few paragraphs.

My wife insists that she found a soothing aspect to the concert, but she’s much better than I am at taking music at face value. I’m busily trying to untangle structure and harmony as I seek to contextualize what I’m hearing in a framework in which the music of this ensemble will never fit. They’ve collected elements from free jazz and Eastern Europe and vintage pop and more and synthesized them into sounds that test the limits of their instruments.

Ormandy Reigns Supreme - Again

FROM THE OPENING MOMENTS of the first CD in this collection, Bach’s “Easter Oratorio,” you’re whisked back to a time before historically informed performances roamed the land. It was recorded in April 1963, a year after Nicholas Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus Wien made its debut, but well before those arrow-like violin bows and valve-less brass spread into mainstream concert halls and recordings. With the HIP sound firmly tamped into my ears, I was shocked by the size of the orchestra and the operatic aspect of the soloists. Yet, if we were to hear this work at all back when it first was issued, this is how it would sound.

Massive orchestral forces do not diminish Bach’s music, nor do such beyond-reproach singers as Judith Raskin and Maureen Forrester. With this in mind, skip ahead to Ormandy’s recording of the “St. John Passion,” again with Raskin and Forrester, again with the mighty Philadelphians (and cover art by Paul Davis). The strings play hypnotically as one – as they do throughout the recordings in this set – and the Columbia engineers were able to mic the brass and winds to give them a stunning presence.

This is the second of Sony’s Columbia Stereo Collections devoted to Ormandy, and the third large set when you count the 120-CD set devoted to mono recordings. This present set, a long box of 94 discs, runs from 1964 to 1983, although that’s a bit disingenuous. The recordings in this set actually run from 1961 to 1968, with some languishing until 1975 for release.

The Free Lance

THERE’S A REJOINDER common to gigging freelance musicians, when invited to play a job for no money but with guaranteed “exposure”: “People die of exposure.”

I’ve had my share of such entreaties. I was naive enough – oh, let’s just say stupid enough – to think there might be credibility in that offer. There never was. It was just a horseshit move by a promoter or head of an entertainment committee or other such booking agent figuring that the place to save money was on the performers.

Because it’s tough to get catering on the cheap, and printers and other event-adjacent workers don’t make a habit of cutting their fees for the magic allure of “exposure.” By extension, of course, plumbers and electricians and other similar professionals have to make a living off what they do – but when it’s some manner of entertainer being considered, there’s a too-prevalent mindset that doesn’t take that seriously as a career choice. If you’re a professional in an entertainment field, I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re the kind of asshole who seeks to short-change your gig-workers, I’ll never convince you.

As I noted here a couple of weeks ago, I pursued a kind of literary piecework forty years ago, writing arts-related stories for Albany, NY-area publications. It started when a touring production of “Sweeney Todd” arrived at Proctor’s in Schenectady and I couldn’t afford tickets. I had a failed marriage (but remained married) and a new girlfriend. I was working the afternoon shift for an AM radio station that played second-generation big-band music and easygoing jazz; because of its daytime-only license, I had to shut down the station at dusk, which arrived earlier and earlier as the year waned and meant that my hourly wage paycheck diminished accordingly.