One Fine Evening

WHY DO WE ENJOY “Madame Butterfly”? It has great tunes that invite amazing performances. It tells a story that, despite its exotic trappings, comes from the abandoned-wife mode of melodrama that was so popular at the time, and is at heart a story of social class. We believe all over again the promises of U.S. Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton as he insincerely woos his Japanese child-bride, yet we know it’ll be a three-handkerchief finish.

Eric Taylor(left) and Randy Ho (right)
Photo: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

The Glimmerglass Festival has brought back a “Butterfly” most recently staged there in 2014, and my main question is, Where has it been? This is the essence of opera. If political-correctness concern have delayed it – well, read on. But first let’s have some quick shouts of praise for a top-notch cast and creative team, whom we’ll return to in a moment.

Before mass-media – before much of any media, really – we learned about exotic foreign cultures through spoken and written accounts, and sketches and paintings. And it certainly could seem exotic viewed from within one’s cultural cocoon. But it also invited cultural imperialism as a country’s self-perceived exceptionalism justified all manner of exploitation.

By 1904, when Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” debuted, Japan was only a half-century beyond its 250 years of isolationism, broken when US Commodore Matthew Perry forced the island nation to trade with the West. A fascination with “all things Japanese” followed, per Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Patience” and especially with “The Mikado” – although the latter borrowed and caricatured Japanese characteristics to drive home a satire about the British. 

You’re Doing Fine

THE OVERTURE BEGINS, in time-honored fashion, with a trill – the sound of two next-door notes alternating rapidly, giving a sense of uncertainty. It’s a great device that makes the sonority of the ensuing music all the more comforting. In other words, it’s a foretaste of the tension and release that informs all aspects of the drama to come. Even with a so-familiar musical like “Oklahoma!,” we’re encouraged by such devices to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in what’s ultimately an entertaining, inspiring show.

Jaelynn Ricks, Jude Emperado, Peter Murphy, 
Jordan Spena, and E. A. Hobbs. 
Photo Credit: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

With the U.S. celebrating 250 years since its declaration of independence, during a year in which the country’s much-vaunted freedom is so much under attack, the Glimmerglass Festival season opener of “Oklahoma!” whisked us away from those concerns to a time – 1906 – when a number of the rural inhabitants of the Oklahoma Territory were faced with their own issues of anger and reconciliation. It’s a brilliant production, marshalling all the talent and resources Glimmerglass uniquely has to offer: Great cast, great singing, great staging, great set. A great orchestra, led by a masterful conductor. And one of the finest directors in the business.

The musical premiered in 1943, during wartime, and ran for five years, winning a Pulitzer Prize along the way. It was based on a 1931 play by Oklahoman Lynn Riggs, which book-and-lyrics writer Oscar Hammerstein crafted in a sweeping but efficient two acts that, along with Richard Rodgers’s unforgettable music, gave the public a thoughtful story with plenty of fun, even while further changing the conventions of musical theater. 

Fresh Rhodora in the Woods

THE PROGRAM LOOKED more audience-challenging than I’d expect in a place like North Creek, NY, with string quartets by Joseph Haydn, Bela Bartók, and George Walker on the program. I’d felt like an outsider all day while relaxing in this charmingly rural community, because I wasn’t clad in the standard uniform of the male habitués: ball cap, tee shirt, shorts, and sneakers (or sandals or flip-flops). But at the Tannery Pond Community Center that evening, July 2, I felt more sartorially at home in my conservative shirt and slacks.

Rhodora Quartet

The handsome, energy-efficient building, erected in 2002, features an art gallery and large multi-use room that serves as an auditorium when so arranged. Tannery Pond Concerts, however, go back to 1991 when photographer Christian Steiner inaugurated the series, and the same high quality of artists and concerts he oversaw is clearly maintained.

 
The ear-filling sound of an SATB chorus fits nicely into the voicing of a string quartet. There are enough voices available to reinforce harmonic identity, and enough to further play with that identity, dipping into dissonance, affirming and thwarting rhythmic expectations.

Tell It to the Marines

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Some of my old stories pop up and inspire no recollection at all of writing it. I interviewed people, I put together quotes, I cranked out 1300 words. And I don’t remember a damn thing about it. Reading it today, I’m impressed – as I am with so many of my elderly tech pieces – at how obsolete everything in the story has become. The magazine itself, VARBusiness, I do remember mostly because I so enjoyed working with editor Beth Adelman. But we lost touch not long after this as other magazines lured me with more money. Until the whole computer-magazine empire collapsed. VARBusiness retooled its website in 2005, but has now been absorbed into CRN, “a media brand of The Channel Company.” Anyway, here’s how the Marines stored data 34 years ago.

                                                                          

YOU KNOW THE FRUSTRATION of accumulating page after page of information that needs to be filed? Documents that you may not need right now, but you know they’re going to come in handy. And they sit in rows of cabinets, hogging valuable office space.

Tell it to the Marines.

Millions of documents are stored in the Installation & Logistics operation at U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Material ranges from accounting data to troop lists, and keeping the paperwork up to date forced a heavy workload on the staff of 700. And even at its most efficient, the system only allowed one person access to a document at a time. 

Thanks to what’s billed as the world’s largest document image processing (DIP) system, filing cabinets and attendant frustration were replaced last June by a PC-based scanning system.

The Gieseking Story on Disc and Page

THE MOZART RECORDINGS grabbed my ear with their delicacy of touch and overall ethereal sound. This was late-night radio listening for me, a teenager in thrall to the many discoveries I was making in world of classical music. An eccentric radio host named Bill Watson purveyed the Mozart, calling particular attention to the fact that these sonatas and other keyboard works had been recorded by Walter Gieseking. 

I’d been amassing piano records by Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, but I sprang for the low-priced Seraphim-label reissue of Gieseking’s Mozart, and I have not been without it, in some form or another, in the half-century since. 

Gieseking was a unique phenomenon in the crowded world of piano virtuosos. From all accounts, his technique was impeccable, his six-feet-four body hunched close to the keyboard, the fingers seeming to move hardly at all. In his early years, his repertory was quite large, but it contracted as concert promoters grew increasingly wary of new works – a category Gieseking championed. He could sight-read anything with no mistakes, and he learned scores by studying them as an actor would study a script.

A Tangled Web

From the Unihanded Reading Dept.: My debut as a writer of smut occurred in D-CUP, a magazine devoted to – but need I explain? This takes us back to 1995, and the piece below is interesting more as a nostalgia trip for computer nerds than as anything salacious. I signed my pieces for that magazine “Dr. Barry Tetons,” but took on other names as I branched out to such other publications as “Shaved,” “Sex Acts,” and “Plump and Pink.” My daughter went to college, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and told me that when a group of students got to discussing their parents’ occupations, she offered “porn writer” as mine and immediately won all the prestige points.

                                                                                              

YOU'VE HEARD ABOUT the Internet. You may even know that its most passionate users are also passionate about a free exchange of ideas. What you may not know is that beautiful naked women are among those ideas, and just in case you don't get the idea, you settle for getting the picture – a full color, let’s-leave-nothing-to-the-imagination picture, that is.

Cat Tailer would have been 
at home in D-CUP

Let me be your guide. I’ve been working with computers for a decade, and if there’s smut to be seen on the screen, I’ve seen it. I’ve taught computer beginners in classrooms but that’s too damn polite and forces me to leave out the good parts. And that’s what I’m going to help you find every month as we explore together.

All you need is a good computer, the right software, and a little know-how. Let’s talk first about your hardware. I’ll show you mine: it’s an IBM clone, based on a 486 processing chip. It’s got 8 megabytes of memory, and a good color monitor. That’s the basic stuff to run Microsoft Windows, and the easiest way for us peeping Toms to find our thrills is to look through Windows. You can find a system like this for well under a thousand bucks.

I’m also going to show you in a moment how easy it is to help yourself to pictures of those sultry Internet women. It takes a little patience and perseverance, so don’t be like the cheesehead who recently complained that he was tired of the searching, and would someone just send dirty pictures to his e-mail address. “Go out and buy a magazine,” snarled one of the angry responses.

 From the Culture Vault Dept.: Forty years ago, our already loose delineation of the Capital Region (often erroneously monikered as the Capital District Region or the Capital Region Area, among other such variants) expanded in the summer to take in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and areas of the immediately southern counties of New York. That’s because the region exploded with happenings when the weather got warm. Here’s a listing I compiled for Metroland Magazine in 1986 of my disciplines of interest. I don’t expect you to read it, but I invite you to remember the impressive performers who stopped and marvel at the amount of dance.

                                                                                              

Summer Arts Preview: Theater

SUCH  IS THE BUSY state of the stage that we devoted a cover story all its own to summer theater (May 15, not posted here ), but there have been a few changes and announcements since that time, so let’s check in with the various groups and see what’s happening.

Lou Harrison

The Lakehouse, in Albany’s Washington Park. has announced a title for its city tricentennial revue: Nice TRI, Albany, to be directed by Michael J. Hume and Lloyd Waiwaiole (July 18-20, 23-26 at 8:30 PM). Also look for visits from the Lake George Opera Festival (August 5, 7 PM) and Kuperberg & Morris Movement Theatre (August 12,7 PM).

At New Lebanon’s Theater Barn, the season Is well underway with second production “On Golden Pond” running through, Sunday; next Thursday, the musical revue “Cole!” begins a 10-day run.

The Lake George Dinner Theater announced the title of its summer production: running from June 20 through October 12 at the Holiday Inn in Lake George will be Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”