Hellenic Hullabaloo

Overindulgence Dept.: It's Thanksgiving again, and, although I swore I wasn't going to spend several days in menu planning and meal preparation . . . well, you can see the menu below. And there's a slide-show of past menus here. Just don't expect this again next year.

 

Cutting Classical

From the Classical Vault Dept.: I’ve grown much more hopeful about the state of large orchestras in the 32 years since I wrote the piece below. For one thing, the survivors are holding their own. Adventurous programming has very much increased, and the efflorescence of social media and alternative music distribution systems have, so to speak, spread the word. On the other hand, as the pandemic years proved, salaries for orchestral musicians are abysmal and some of those players are hanging by a thread. As for the Albany Symphony, my daughter is now working for that outfit, so I’m glimpsing more of its viscera than had been the case before, and I like what I’m seeing. And hearing, of course.

                                                                                

WATCHING A LARGE ORCHESTRA fold up and die is like seeing a stately old mansion collapse: You know it’s irreplaceable, and that with its demise goes a taste of the era in which it was built.

In our general area, we’ve seen recent season cancellations by the Syracuse and Hartford symphonies, and the Albany and Utica orchestras are doing pretty badly. But the problem is hardly confined to this region.

And it’s hardly surprising. Federal and state arts support has long carried the burden of supporting these musical behemoths, and that support has all but dried up. The audience for these orchestras is small, and even though it comprises an area’s wealthiest, to carry the brunt of the financing would force these folks to pay, in effect, hundreds of dollars a ticket to see their favorite ensemble saw through another all-Tchaikovsky evening.

In other words, the orchestras are now being forced to confront the fact that nobody—no appreciable majority, that is—really wants to hear them. The sooner they acknowledge this and bow out of existence, the sooner classical music stands a chance of coming back to life in this country.

On the March – Again

From the Pages of History Dept.: I blog-posted the piece below more than a decade ago, by which time they had become footnotes to an admirably sane settling-in of society – or so it seemed to naive me. The forces of horrific paternalism were arming themselves, so that soon the Supreme Court could be stacked with its worst-ever appointments by our worst-ever President. And, sure enough, Roe v Wade was overturned and women are once again dying because their reproductive rights are denied. With the clown car about to pull up to the White House once again, I’m reposting this piece as a reminder that our most important duty now is to resist the hopelessness that comes with so awful a political fate as this country soon will suffer. It’s my report on the March for Women’s Equality and Women’s Lives that took place in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1989.
    
                                                                                               

Photo by Michael Ackerman

“FREE BARBARA BUSH!”

It became the surprise rallying cry of the march, as a crowd estimated at between 300,000 and 600,000 chanted the slogan from pedestrian-packed Pennsylvania Ave., Constitution Ave., 1st St., 3rd St. and the steps and lawn of the Capitol itself.

 The march offically began Sunday morning on the north lawn of the Washington Monument, but for many Albany-area residents, the march began late Saturday as they boarded buses sponsored by local affiliates of the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood.

At 10:30 PM, three Greyhound buses idle their engines in a parking lot at the State Office Campus. During the next few minutes the scene resembles a workday morning as car after car arrives, parks, unloads. Just as it seems that the crowd will overwhelm the bus capacity, six more buses pull in and circle the lot in formation before joining the caravan. There’s a happy sense of a picnic or vacation, but buoyed by the energy of a crowd met to fight – or, in this case, affirm. The group is varied in age, but there’s an obvious socio-economic homogeneity. These are middle-class buses, carrying a segment of society that has been accused of too much complacency during the past administration.

The Doomsters

I’VE NEVER BEEN MUCH in thrall to the doomsayers. They used to be charmingly represented in single-panel cartoons as a bearded old man hefting a sign on which is block-lettered something wittily apposite; now they’re spewing their bile over talk-radio and internet shows. They have the skills of a cult leader, offering acceptance into an elite group that welcomes you once you have accepted the terms of membership, largely a matter of understanding that the persecution you feel comes from groups you can hate.

Thomas Hardy

I’m stopped right there. I don’t feel persecuted. I have learned that those responsible for denying me access to economical housing, healthy foodstuffs, and affordable healthcare are the white male gazillionaires who have created a world for themselves in which they are safe from the regulatory laws that, in a sane society, would stop them.

But I’m now in a state of what I’m terming “anticipatory persecution.” As an elderly white male of a solidly middle-class upbringing, I’m one of those whose paths long have been smoothed by our racist, patriarchal society. Thanks to a long marriage to a financially responsible spouse, my unreliable income has been pooled into a retirement fund that should see us through our dotages. I also have access to a robust health insurance plan that keeps my ticker ticking even as my ability to walk is waning and arthritis is waxing all over the place. I figured I could age and die in relative peace.

Voice of Freedom

JEROME KERN AND OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN insisted that they wrote “Old Man River” with Paul Robeson in mind, which is no surprise given the way the song luxuriates in a bass-singer’s range. They began work on it in 1925; it would hit the stage two years later. Robeson’s first public performance as a singer took place in Boston in 1924, and he sang again a few months later at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. The songwriters either discovered him fairly quickly, or got to know his voice by way of the many private recitals Robeson had been giving  during the preceding years.

His father was a former slave who became a Presbyterian minister; his mother a mixed-race Quaker who died when the boy was six. Robeson attended Rutgers College (as it then was known), graduating in 1919 as a football star and class valedictorian. He earned a law degree from Columbia University three years later and was admitted to the bar – but by that time was being sidetracked by music and theater.

He had made his professional stage debut in 1924 in Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” at the Provincetown, where a scene of him kissing the hand of a white woman created enough of a scandal to make the papers. He then starred in a revival of O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” the success of which landed Robeson his first movie role (Oscar Micheaux’s “Body and Soul”) and a recording contract.

The 14 CDs in this collection offer 287 songs recorded between 1925 and 1958, although there’s an eleven-year gap after 1947 because Robeson was too much of a political hot potato by then to be welcomed by the labels represented here. His repertory was comparatively small, and wisely so: Although his vocal quality was astonishingly warm and unique, he lacked the training for operatic roles, and he knew it. He added few art songs to his repertory, and stayed away from the opera stage.

Tom Paxton: A Fond Farewell

THERE WAS NO SENSE OF MELANCHOLY in Tom Paxton’s performance on Oct. 19 as he entertained a gathering of the faithful at the Eighth Step in Schenectady. True, it was part of his final tour before a well-earned retirement (he’ll be 87 on Hallowe’en), but he was as engaging as ever, a dynamic presence with a catalog of classic songs to his credit. And he was supported by the duo of Don Henry and Jon Vezner, known as the DonJuans, who have been performing and songwriting partners with Paxton since 2017.

Jon Vezner, Tom Paxton, and Don Henry

During one of his tours with the Kingston Trio, I interviewed Paxton in his dressing room after a show and mentioned how envious I was of him with so many tour dates ahead. He looked at me as if I were nuts. “It’s an awful grind,” he said. “Nothing to be envious about.” That was about forty years ago. Paxton estimates that he’s been on the road for sixty. A grind it may, but I’ve shared a lot of pleasure with an audience that has attended concert after concert, and that knows all the words and isn’t afraid to use them.

Thus it was, even as he launched into his opening song, “I Can’t Help but Wonder,” that the audience was right there with him, murmuring the lyrics as if they were emerging like apparitions in a dream. Because that’s the feeling you get when invited to sing songs you’ve know all your life, songs that are poignant and meaningful or just plain fun. All of that. Even better, you’re singing them back to the fellow who wrote them. And who is not above being in thrall himself to fellow artists: he noted that the fact that Johnny Cash recorded “I Can’t Help but Wonder” on the sixth (and last) of his “American Recordings” series was a dream come true. (And Paxton did a spot-on impression of Cash’s voice while telling us about this.)

Embarrassment of Riches

From the Theater Vault Dept.: During the late 1980s, an experiment in theatrical presentation settled into a small Schenectady theater for a couple of seasons. Run under the auspices of Proctor’s Theater (as the much less-ambitious entity styled itself back then), Proctor’s Too brought in an array of unexpected talent, among them Santa Fe-based Theater Grottesco. Founded in Paris in 1983 by former members of Theatre de la Jeune Lune (who also visited back then), the company is still going strong, having relocated to New York and Detroit before settling in New Mexico in 1996.

                                                                                         

THE PROGRAM BOOKLET PROMISED a full-length show with a large cast, but the stagehands could be seen nervously scurrying as the audience settled. Finally, the announcement: all of the cast and scenery had been delayed at O’Hare. The four stagehands would produce the show with a minimum of accoutrements.

"Richest Deadman," from a
more recent production

Those stagehands being, naturally, the Theatre Grottesco company, a Detroit-based ensemble that combines mime, dance and circus techniques into a theatrical experience that, as the prologue to “The Richest Deadman Alive” suggests, is not going to be your run-of-the-mill play.

What bogged down this production and ultimately proved to undermine the success of the show was the way in which this piece, conceived and written by the four performers, got into too traditional a groove. Terence McNally, for instance, could make a nice door-slammer out of this story of a man misdiagnosed as dead who joins his purported widow in a spending spree of his insurance money.