Taking It on the Chen

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Fifteen years ago, violinist Ray Chen performed in Schenectay, yet another example of a rising star being snagged for a local performance early enough in that career ascendancy to make such a booking possible. I thought we could have made him feel more welcome.

                                                                                      

Ray Chen

WHERE’S YOUR BACKBONE, PEOPLE? I’m talking to you, the audience at Ray Chen’s dazzling recital last week. The violinist finished with a Wieniawski finger-buster that spewed wicked spiccato, left-hand pizzicato, harmonics true and false and other virtuoso hallmarks, a spectacular finish to an astounding program. You leapt to your feet, applauding madly, and Chen and pianist Andrew Tyson returned and bowed and returned and bowed again.

Then Chen pulled a fast one: He played a slow one, “Melodie” by Gluck, a Fritz Kreisler arrangement of a flute tune from “Orfeo ed Euridice.” It’s a beautiful display of violin tone and interpretive gentleness, but, as an encore, it does more than that. It calms the audience, robbing them of the furor that the finger-buster provoked. 

And you applauded, albeit in a more restrained manner, and even before they were offstage after their second set of bows that time, you packed up your hands and toddled home.

Enriching the Hall

From the Comedy Vault Dept.: Back in my reviewing heyday, I presented myself as someone able to write knowledgably about many different disciplines, usually the snooty ones, but I enjoyed forays into realms like comedy, popular song, and even offbeat subjects like ice skating. Here’s a look at Rich Hall’s stop in Schenectady in 1990. Hall dipped into the SNL universe for a season and since has been busy writing plays (at his ranch in Montana) and living and working in London.

                                                                                  

RICH HALL'S APPEARANCE at Proctor’s Theatre Thursday night was presented in the guise of comedy, and it’s true that he worked a lot of delightfully-entertaining bits into his set. But he’s really, down deep, a humorist, following a tradition too few comics know about these days.

I haven’t seen him on television and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to share in the instant recognition factor – and that there’d be inside jokes I wouldn’t get.

It wasn’t like that at all. Hall works the audience with easily-recognizable situations – like so many others, he has his own dog and cat routine – but he’s also got a fascination with language that leads him into a territory of free-association once the province only of people like George Carlin.

Like Carlin, Hall explores the sound and sense of words. They differ markedly in matter, however. Carlin shocks by going for the jugular of taboos and chills the audience into laughing at itself. Hall’s is a warmer approach, making friends with the crowd and inviting them into the banter.

Courting the Farmgirl

From the Concert Vault Dept.: Baritone Sanford Sylvan displayed such virtuosity as he moved through his 30s that his resume included appearances with major opera companies and orchestras throughout the world, and the creation of roles in two acclaimed John Adams operas: “Nixon in China,” in which Syvan sang the role of Chou En-lai, and then the title role in “The Death of Klinghoffer.” We were fortunate enough to see him several times in the Albany area, including performaces as part of what was then known as the Schenectady Museum-Union College concert series. He was based in Manhattan but long associated with Boston, and he spent sabbatical time in Scotland. When he died in 2019, at the age of 65, his New York Times obituary failed to mention, among his survivors, the man he married in 1996. I reviewed his 1984 Union College recital here; below is a recently unearthed review of his 1994 visit, with Schubert’s “Schoene Muellerin.”

                                                                                            

SUPPOSE YOU FINALLY GET this attractive farmgirl to pay attention to you, then she suddenly throws you over for some hidebound hunter. Do you punch him out? Sue him?

Sanford Sylvan

If you're a self-pitying German poet, you rush home and write verse about it, ending up with the lullaby sung to you by the brook you flung yourself into. 

I haven't checked to see whether Wilhelm Mueller was actually being autobiographical in his cycle of 23 poems, published in 1820, but the sorrow and sentiment in “Die Schoene Muellerin” shines through a reading of bare texts and erupts into a magical marriage of music and verse in Schubert's famous setting of all but three of the poems.

The Schenectady Museum-Union College Concert Series had a later-than-usual finish as baritone Sanford Sylvan and pianist David Breitman were at last able to present this cycle. Measles – that dreaded Capital District word just now – postponed the concert until last night.

Which meant no other hardship than that we got to see a gorgeous sunset through the high windows of the Union College Memorial Chapel as Breitman opened the program with the Drei Klavierstücke, D. 946, by Schubert.

Jazzing the Classics

FOR A FEW DECADES during the last century, when classical music was a familiar part of the musical landscape, many jazz bands borrowed tunes with pleasing results. John Kirby’s sextet recorded several such examples (his Schubert Serenade is a knockout), and Freddy Martin set lyrics to those strains. Harry James played the Bumblebee; Woody Herman did the Sabre Dance. The practice has fallen off a great deal since then, but two recent recordings remind us that, as bassist Mark Wade puts it, “A good tune is a good tune.”

Wade’s trio performs on “New Stages” (Dot Time), a fifteen-track collection that takes some unusual turns through the classical repertory, while pianist Ted Rosenthal’s trio (and guests) explore eleven songs on “Impromp2" (TMR), so-named because it’s a follow-up to his 2010 collection of classical-informed pieces. 

Both collections share rhythmically compelling, harmonically inventive approaches to the music under consideration and, remarkably, given the breadth of source material out there, they also share a single piece: Chopin’s Waltz in A-Flat Major, Op. 69 No. 1, known to many as the “Farewell.” 

Rosenthal’s version was fashioned as a vehicle for Ken Peplowski, in one of the clarinetist’s final sessions (see Chip Defaa’s tribute to Peplowski in the March issue). It opens with a straightforward reading of the tune by Peplowski in duet with Rosenthal, who gives a light swing to his first solo passage; without deviating very much from the structure of the piece, Peplowski and Rosenthal alternate 16-bar passages, diving behind its innocent sweetness to embellish the melody with increasing urgency before Peplowski calms it again and brings it home.

Galway Dazzles, Flute Sparkles

Critical Drubbing Dept.: A few weeks ago (in this piece), I recounted my journey from a snotty, full-of-himself critic to a somewhat less-snotty, still rather full–of-himself critic, and I cited a concert by James Galway as one of the turning points in my attitude. I tried searching for the actual review with no success; naturally, it sprang to light when I wasn’t looking for it at all. Like so much of what I had published in 1986 and earlier, the original computer files are long gone, so I’m relying here on a tearsheet that lingered in my files. I wish I’d gotten over berating the audience for applauding between movements by then; now I’m just happy to learn that we’re all awake. Here’s that review.

                                                                                          

HIS GOLDEN FLUTE sparkling in the spotlight, James Galway dazzled a near-capacity crowd at Proctor's Theatre, where be performed with the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada Monday evening.

Galway served as soloist and conductor, and his music alone radiated the charm that the television audience knows from his talk-show appearances. Thanks to that exposure, he is a known quantity on the classical stage and thus draws people who might otherwise think twice about spending ticket money. His program similarly comprised known or accessible pieces, a splendid starting place for the novice coecertgoer.

The first suite from Handel's Water Music was the opener. Galway has a lean but enthusiastic conducting style —  not for him those flailing Bernstein arms — and he shaped his ideas along conventional and acceptible lines. The orchestra responded with appropriate energy, although there were the spotty problems that suggest a not-well-warmed-up group. There were no surprises in this very familiar work until the hornpipe movement busted loose with a wonderfully quirky but ompletely sensible rhythm; Galway probably has an Irish insight other conductors would be wise to learn.

Big Bands are Victorious

THE FIRST BATCH OF V-DISCS shipped to military fighters overseas on Oct. 1, 1943. Less than two years later, we won the war. Many other elements contributed to this victory, of course, but let’s not short-change the power those records must have had.

Mosaic Records celebrated this unique catalogue category with the release in 2024 of a massive set of V-Disc small-group sessions and the promise that a big-band set would follow. It’s here. It’s ten CDs of excellent-sounding music by top-flight bands and a few who never gained that category but should have. 

Right off the bat what invites celebration is the restoration quality. Those discs were meant to be played beside bunk and rack and even out in the field using the spring-wound phonographs that were shipped with the discs (along with packets of extra steel needles). And you got a lot of music: These discs were cut with more grooves per inch than usual to allow for up to six minutes of music on a 12-inch side.

The program continued until May, 1949, at which time the companies producing them destroyed all of their discs and masters. Service men and women were forbidden to bring them home, but with over eight million of those platters circulating overseas, many were bound to find their way back. There are stories of scofflaws having their collections confiscated, and at least one offender did jail time. 

Honey and Steel

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Again (as with last week), going back twenty years, I wrote about two back-to-back concerts that included an orchestra appearance at Proctor’s Theatre, something that now rarely happens at that venue. In any event, the violinist within me was thrilled. I’m a lousy player but a keen fan of the repertory.

                                                                                      

TWO MAGNIFICENT VIOLINISTS appeared within two days of each other in Schenectady, in two significantly contrasting settings of music and hall. Young Arabella Steinbacher blazed through the dazzling Khachaturian concerto surrounded by a large orchestra and witnessed by some 2,000 concertgoers at Proctor’s; Jaime Laredo, a renowned artist with decades of performance credit, played the three autumnal Brahms sonatas in an emotionally riveting partnership with pianist Leon Fleisher in the more intimate setting of Union College’s Memorial Chapel.

Arabella Steinbacher
Photo by Peter Rigaud

Laredo played like honey, Steinbacher like steel; both knew how best to approach the works they’d chosen.

Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto is a big and brassy trifle, replete with modal characteristics springing not only from the composer’s Armenian heritage but also with a fascination for Oriental sounds that found its way into music by Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakoff, among others.

Written in 1940 with lots of advice from violinist David Oistrakh, its fast outer movements are busy – the concluding Rondo is a feast of pyrotechnics – while its middle, an Andante, displays the lyricism that has attracted Khachaturian’s ballet music to hip filmmakers (the love theme from “The Hudsucker Proxy,” for example).