Party at the Schumanns’ House

MUSIC GIVES A SOUL TO A PARTY. Not recorded music; that’s a cop-out which has become all too normalized because we’ve gotten so far away from making our own. I’m talking about putting that piano to use, or hauling out that guitar. Playing chamber music is a rich form of conversation, richer than party chatter. You listen to your fellow musicians in a manner that invites each instrumental voice to inhabit yourself even as you subsume yourself to the music you’re making.

The Schumanns – Clara and Robert – knew this. True, they were in the business of writing music, but when their musical friends stopped by, pleasant sounds were heard. This is the premise of “An Invitation at the Schumanns,’” a recording by the Paris-based Trio Dichter, an ensemble made up of pianist Fiona Mato, violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, and cellist Hanna Salzenstein.

As we expiate our sins of a patriarchy that demanded we celebrate Robert Schumann’s works and ignore those of Clara, his wife, we are discovering that she was a dab hand at composition herself, even as she was tasked with raising the children. Two of her works grace the program: the first of her Three Romances, Op 22, for violin and piano, and a Notturno for solo piano drawn from her Soirées musicales, Op. 6. These are beautiful performances – but they also convey the sense of intimacy you’d enjoy in the music salon of an accommodating home.

Taking Opera Seriously

From the Vault of the High Cs Dept.: Thirty years ago I reviewed a pair of NYC Opera performances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and correctly predicted that the opera company’s residency soon would end. What didn’t end was the horrible amplification inflicted on mainstage events – although I should note that I haven’t been to that venue in many years, discouraged by the number of drunks who began showing up at Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. I assume the management was papering the house, but why pass out tickets at the city’s gin joints?

                                                                                          

THE TRUTH ABOUT the New York City Opera's short, pre-summer visits to SPAC is that they’re a satire. A spoof. When a production is done reasonably poorly, as was the case with “Carmen,” it’s a poor joke. When it’s a reasonably good production, like “The Mikado,” the joke gets merely depressing.

Richard McKee

You could say that the joke is also a riddle: how many people will pay for amphitheater and lawn tickets to see what we call opera until they realize it’s actually not even as good as television? And can we fool them next year, too?

Unlike music and dance, which are appreciated viscerally, opera is a theatrical experience that engages a complicated combination of the senses. It requires an immediate involvement from the audience. But New York City Opera, like many another pretentious company, shuns the use of the English translations. And they’ve suckered the audience into accepting distracting supertitles as a compromise.

Opera is also a celebration of the human voice, a celebration entirely negated by the fact that even the amphitheater audience hears the singers amplified through a hardly-adequate speaker system (the SPAC techies boast that it’s the same thing they use for rock concerts, man, and management turns an obviously deaf ear to the problem).

At the Table

THERE’S A RECEIVED NOTION that American food is exemplified by the blandest of processed inventions, those rubbery slabs of “American” cheese being the epitome. By altering the standards by which the cuisine is judged – keeping the geography, but extending the history and re-coloring the inhabitants – we discover an impressive variety of foodstuffs and recipes.

Falafel from Michigan? Turns out that there’s an Arab population near Dearborn that started to boom in the early 1900s when Henry Ford told a Yemeni sailor about job opportunities. How about Marionberry Pie from Oregon? That celebrates a berry created at Oregon State University in 1948, a berry that grows in Marion County during the month of July and is too soft to export but snapped up by locals. A recipe from Montana for Bison Meatballs with Huckleberry Sauce celebrates the animal that was slaughtered to near extinction for racist reasons, now enjoying a more boutique presence as the meat is recognized as a healthy beef alternative.

Smithsonian American Table travels through time and geography to present a historical narrative that goes way beyond the standard bounds of imperialist tradition. It’s part social narrative, part recipes, interspersed with fascinating illustrations and sidebars. The dividing line for this country’s history is, of course, European colonization, but the book suggests another, later dividing line, noting, “a movement – that of food sovereignty – seeks to reclaim and return to those holistic and culturally significant foodways.” Meaning a return to the cultivation of local produce and well-raised meatstuffs.

In the Family

From the Food Vault Dept.: Here’s the restaurant review I wrote 30 years ago, offered now just to make me feel all the older. I had moved to NY’s Montgomery County in 1990, and was still getting to know the area when I discovered Pepe’s Restaurant in nearby Amsterdam. It seemed like one of those places that would live on forever, and indeed was run by family members for 77 years until it closed in April, 2000. Nothing has taken its place. (Nothing could take its place.)

                                                                                            

THE NEIGHBORHOOD ON WEST MAIN STREET has changed considerably since Pepe’s opened in 1923. The ethnic character, certainly, is different – what was once a stronghold of Italian newcomers has melting-potted into something more homogeneous by becoming more diverse. The look of the area, too, has changed, simply by staying the same, aging and decaying, accepting only a few later buildings.

There’s still a little enclave of Italian restaurants there, with a newcomer Polish eatery down the street, but Pepe’s has long and quietly dominated the scene.

It’s a friendly place with a warm, simple look. Chances are that you’re going to be greeted by one member of the Pepe family and served by another. In the kitchen, Sam Pepe holds forth as he has done for the past half-century, following in a family tradition. In fact, there’s another branch of the family running a bakery in Amsterdam, which is where the cognoscenti go for the best loaves and rolls in town ... but Sam bakes his own bread for the restaurant.

Glenn Miller and Me

MY MOTHER WANTED ME to move back in with the family. It was 1974. I was eighteen and already had been living on my own for two years as I finished high school and sought work. I was in Connecticut. The family lived near Chicago, a relocation brought on by my father’s change of employer. During a visit I made that year, Mom played a clever trump card. She knew that what I sought most was a girlfriend, and reasoned that if she could provide one, I’d stay.

Knowing also that I planned to see a concert at Ravinia, the Chicago Symphony’s longtime summer home, she proposed that I escort a young woman I’d never met, one who worked as a nurse alongside my mother at an area hospital. “But I’m not going to see the Chicago Symphony,” I confessed. “I’m going to a Glenn Miller concert.” “I’m sure she’ll like that,” my mother assured me. How I wish that had been true.

To be a Glenn Miller fan as a teen in the 1970s was difficult. You were aligning yourself with a generation that came of age during World War II – my parents’ generation, in other words, and the teen-aged me didn’t suffer those fogies very generously. One persistent piece of high-school-aged bitterness sees me hurrying, one Saturday morning, to the home of a classmate who could not have been bettered in beauty, and who suddenly noticed me in school one day. (I remember no names attached to this story, which is a kindness.) Because of my oddball taste in music and other realms of the arts, I was accustomed to being shunned. But she invited me to her house. “I know you’ll have a good time,” she declared.