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.

The Last Day

Guest Blogger Dept.: We hand over the reins again to Robert Benchley, who has an almost-timely piece about the end-of-the-season vacationer’s farewells.

                                                                                              

WHEN, during the long winter evenings, you sit around the snap-shot album and recall the merry, merry times you had on your vacation, there is one day which your memory mercifully overlooks. It is the day you packed up and left the summer resort to go home.

This Ultimate Day really begins the night before, when you sit up until one o’clock trying to get things into the trunks and bags. This is when you discover the well-known fact that summer air swells articles to twice or three times their original size; so that the sneakers which in June fitted in between the phonograph and the book (which you have never opened), in September are found to require a whole tray for themselves and even then one of them will probably have to be carried in the hand.

Along about midnight, the discouraging process begins to get on your nerves and you snap at your wife and she snaps at you every time it is found that something won’t fit in the suitcase. As you have both gradually dispensed with the more attractive articles of clothing under stress of the heat and the excitement, these little word passages take on the sordid nature of a squabble in an East Side tenement, and all that is needed is for one of the children to wake up and start whimpering. This it does.

On the Offense

TURNS OUT YOUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS were just as filthy-mouthed as you. Filthier, even. Written bawdry has a long tradition, of course, but with the onset of the age of recorded sound, we were able to hear, as often as we wished, the kinds of story (and language) that previously were the province of men’s smokers.

Writing of Thomas Edison’s earliest experiments of audio recording, Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni note, “Reliable earwitness accounts tell of Edison and his men repeatedly shouting ‘mad dog’ into the machine and then gleefully running it backwards to hear from the tinfoil one resounding ‘God damn’ after another.” The temptation go blue has always been compelling.

Some recording artists went much farther than mere blasphemy, as proven by “Actionable Offenses,” a single-CD collection on the Archeophone label subtitled, “Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s.” Indecent they are. Gleefully so.

Archeophone’s mission is to rescue acoustic-era recordings from obscurity, and the label has copped a GRAMMY award and many nominations along the way. Until 1925, audio recordings were created using a large horn as a microphone. Audio waves set a diaphragm at the horn’s narrow end into motion, and that drove a stylus to cut a cylinder or platter. Frequency response was limited and further obscured by repeated playback.

I Don’t Have to Do That

AS EACH FLEETING WEEK swipes another physical ability and leaves a fresh pain in its wake, I’m comforted by the mantra I summon: I don’t have to do that. It’s not belligerent. It’s a gentle reminder, obedience to which keeps me free of ache and frustration.

For example. I’m six feet four inches tall, a height offset, particularly when viewed from a distance, by the bulges I wear in a horizontal direction. And I probably would measure up now as an inch or two shorter, thanks to spinal collapse and my general crouch, but I haven’t measured my height in years. I don’t have to do that.

That height, combined with what I assume was a pleasantly accessible mien, often inspired shorter fellow-shoppers to ask me to reach items down from high shelves. I happily obliged. Now my shoulders are shot – I blew out both rotator cuffs by hammering a stage platform into being – and I can barely reach to the height of my head. Should someone ask that favor now – well, you know where I’m going. Of course, they don’t ask, because that accessible mien has also gone away.

Which means I’m merely a grumpy old man – I’m 68 as I write this – who becomes one of many trudging a grocery cart through a checkout line reminiscent of Cold War-era photos of GUM store queues. This makes me a target for the complainers which, despite my infirmities, I am not. “How long are they gonna make us wait here?” might go the opener, or “Can you believe that parking lot?” (Are we questioning its existence?) or “Whoever heard of paying five bucks for a carton of eggs?” My tactic is to first pretend I’ve been startled out of a reverie and ask the questioner to repeat the query. Then I shrug – a shrug can be a focus-grabbing gesture – and respond, respectively, “I’m in no hurry,” “It’s a beautiful thing,” and “I wouldn’t know. I have hens.”

Sonny Days

IN THE END, it comes down to your Moldy Fig quotient. If, like me, you rooted yourself in a jazz era that barely stretched into the Second World War, making friends with bebop has been too much of a challenge to pursue. Sure, I’ve been tempted by Bird and Diz, but never enough for a lasting commitment. At least at first. My horizons eventually broadened thanks to the same vehicle that got me interested in non-mainstream music in the first place: friends who insisted I listen to something that was new to me.

I wish I’d had this Sonny Clark set back then. Mosaic Records has just released The Complete Sonny Clark Blue Note Sessions, which captures the recordings made under the pianist’s name between 1957 and 1961, resulting in nine LP releases. Clark is remembered as an inventive exponent of the “hard bop” movement, a label I find too ill-defined—but there’s a lot of hard-driving, angular music in these grooves.

And then there’s something else, to which I now wish to point you. Acquire this set (and do so soon, because you know how quickly these limited-edition Mosaic sets tend to sell out) and head to Disc Five. That’s the “Singles Session,” recorded November 15, 1958, with bassist Jymie Merritt and drummer Wes Landers. The idea was to create recordings for jukebox play. From the first notes of Don Redman’s “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” we’re on very accessible ground. Clark had a history of solo-piano work, and it shows. It’ll lure you on in, your fig condition notwithstanding.

Trumping the Tramp

HE WAS FAR FROM A SAINT. We want to forgive him because he was funny as hell, a process that grows less and less difficult as the misbehaviors of others in the public eye grow (or are revealed to be) more heinous. Charlie Chaplin’s biggest sin was that he liked women, liked them young, and liked them to satisfy a prodigious sexual appetite. Chaplin’s biggest crime was his outspoken political stance, which was misinterpreted vigorously enough to win him a fat FBI file and eventual banishment from the U.S.

Scott Eyman’s meticulous study places the comedian’s film career against a rising tide of manufactured disapproval, culminating in the horrific kangaroo trials to which Chaplin was subjected and deftly (but not at all overtly) paralleling them to the kind of ideological nonsense we’re sprayed with in the age of MAGA. You think Trump is a dangerous idiot? Wait’ll you get to know J. Edgar Hoover.

Chaplin’s early years are sketched with sympathetic precision, covering the important points of his career and examining a fraught relationship with his show-biz parents: a father, famed for his music-hall turns, who was mostly absent and soon dead, and a soubrette mother who lost her mind. Although Eyman doesn’t indulge in too much psychological speculation, he sees this a stage-setting the relationships Chaplin eventually with the friends, co-workers, and, especially, women in his life.

He started as a boy performer in England, eventually landing a berth in the Fred Karno troupe, which toured knockabout sketches throughout the U.K. and, ultimately, across the U.S. In 1914, when Charlie was 24, he was invited to make films for Mack Sennett. In breathtakingly short order he created the character of the Tramp and placed him 36 one-reelers, all in the space of a year. Skyrocketing popularity led him to set his own terms for his subsequent 25 films, now two-reelers, that he wrote and directed for two different companies through the end of 1917.

Tooning In

THERE HAS BECOME A TRADITION for symphony orchestras to devote an evening to serving as accompaniment to a feature-length movie. In nearby Saratoga Springs this summer, the Philadelphia Orchestra will be pandering to the masses by playing to a Harry Potter movie. Silent movies invite accompaniment even more, typically with a single performer at the keyboard.

Turns out there’s a middle ground, a place where six virtuoso musicians serve as the soundtrack to a eclectic selection of cartoons. The music is high-spirited, in the tradition of the John Kirby Sextet and the Raymond Scott Quintet (also a sextet, but don’t worry about it. Scott didn’t).

The Queen's Cartoonists

The Queen’s Cartoonists derive their royal appellation not from the late sovereign but from their New York City borough of residency. They are impossibly talented. Joel Pierson is the pianist and leader, providing commentary throughout the show. Greg Hammontree generally plays trumpet, but picks up other instruments or percussion items as needed. Mark Phillips plays clarinet and/or (curved) soprano sax, while Drew Pitcher is usually playing tenor sax but switches out to any number of other instruments and noisemakers. Bass-player Sam Minaie plucks, snaps, and slaps his instrument like a madman, although he can turn around a bow a charming melody as well. And Rossen Nedelchev, behind the drum kit, not only provides a solid drive for this ensemble but also manages the video portions of the program.

The Hour Has Come

THE WORLD THAT JAMES JOYCE presents in his writing is unique. It’s Dublin, of course, portrayed in prose and verse by a master of language. But it’s a city he knew in staggering detail, peopled by those he also knew well, given life in a few deft strokes of his pen. Joyce also loved music. He sometimes seemed as likely to sing as to write, and music threads throughout his writing, with mentions of song after song, popular and obscure.

Richard Wargo, Michael Pavese,
and Dorothy Danner

So it’s no surprise that Joyce’s words lend themselves to music. Better still, the characters he describes think and act with the intimate characteristics of chamber music. Dubliners, a collection of fifteen stories finished in 1905, offers a view of the city through the lives of a number of seemingly unremarkable residents.

Two of them figure in the story “A Painful Case,” which is the subject of a new opera by Richard Wargo. It premiered as part of this summer’s music festival at the Sembrich Museum in Bolton Landing, New York, and it’s so new that only the first act (of two) was presented.

It was envisioned as a one-act but, as Wargo writes in the program notes, he didn’t anticipate “over the course of writing the libretto and developing one evolving relationship between the two characters in this intimate story, that the opera would double in size.”

“Bicycling,” the New Craze

Guest Blogger Dept.: We haven’t heard from Robert Benchley since January, at which time he was addressing a very seasonal topic - a mid-winter sport carnival, to be exact. Wishing to assert himself as a man for all seasons, or at least the current temperate one, he offers this disquisition on bicycling.

                                                                                        

THERE is a new sport this season which bids fair to have great popularity among the younger sets, a sport imported, as are so many of our outdoor games, from England, where it has had a great vogue for several years now. This sport is called “bicycling,” and derives its name from the instrument on which it is practiced—the “bicycle.” You will see that this word is made up of two words: “bi,” meaning “two,” and “cycle,” meaning wheel—“two wheels.” And such indeed it is, a veritable two-wheeled contraption, on which the rider sits and balances himself until he is able, by pushing two pedals arranged for the purpose, to propel the whole thing along the roadway at a great rate. And what a lark it is, too!

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

We show a picture of a bicycle here, and you may figure out for yourself just how it works. You will see that the pedals are so fixed that when one foot is up the other is down, thus giving the feet an equal chance at the rousing exercise and doing away with any chance of the rider’s becoming one-sided, as might well result from a position where one foot was up all the time and one foot down.

You will also observe that the saddle is placed at just the right height from the pedals, so that the rider sits on it easily without having to stretch his legs out beyond their natural length—or, on the other hand, without having to contract them. When experiments were being made on the first bicycle by the inventor, it was thought that it would be necessary for anyone who was going to ride one of the things to stretch his legs out anywhere from one to four feet beyond their natural length in order to reach the pedals. The inventor was very much discouraged when he realized this, “for,” as he said to his partner, “there won’t be enough people in the world who can stretch their legs out from one to four feet to make any decent kind of sale for my machine at all.”

Grin and Berlioz It

DURING A Q&A SESSION at the Bard Music Festival, the question was posed: “Do you ever fall asleep when you’re conducting?” The question was aimed at Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and conductor of the orchestral portions of the festival programs. “Do you ever get bored up there?” This took place during a panel discussion titled “A Revolutionary Life in a Revolutionary Era,” and the subject – the subject of two weekends’ worth of programming, in fact – was Hector Berlioz.

The question was inspired by Berlioz’s “Lélio,” a work for narrator, vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra, performed at the festival the evening before. It’s a formidable work (not that you expect anything less from this composer) that resists categorization. It is rarely performed, which is a major reason it was part of the festival’s opening concert, paired with Berlioz’s most famous work, the “Symphonie fantastique,”to which it is intended as a sequel.

Dr. Botstein has an impressively elegant way of suffering fools. His reply was measured, with just a whiff of archness. In the days before media saturation, before recordings were available, he explained, concert pieces were constructed to give listeners some musical signposts. And those listeners (I’m not quoting exactly) had actual attention spans. They didn’t have phones in front of their faces. In other words, it’s not the music that’s the problem. It’s the distracted listener.

Yet if ever there was a composer for the distracted listener, it’s Berlioz. Not for him, generally, the intimate gesture. “Lélio” just happens to be one of his least-accessible works. I wasn’t there for that performance, but I spent the entirety of the following day soaking in the variety of events that characterizes each day of this festival.

Metamorphosis on the Lake

CLASSICAL MUSIC, as far as mainstream listeners are concerned, has become remote and intimidating. Probably because it has faded from pop-culture contexts. It used to permeate cartoons (saluted recently by an appearance at Caroga Arts by The Queen’s Cartoonists), not to mention mainstream movies and TV commercials, but my understanding is that such is now rarely the case.

Garrett Hudson, Jason Kutz, and Kara LaMoure

What’s needed is a community-based approach in which the music is performed in a welcoming space with a track record of presenting enjoyable stuff, and this is exactly the forum presented each summer for the past baker’s-dozen years by the Caroga Arts Collective. The group offers an ambitious program that takes place on the grounds of a former amusement park next to a still-popular but somewhat obscure lake in New York’s Fulton County, a damp dot on the map between Utica and Albany. It remains a popular summer resort, so the concerts have a built-in local draw, but the series has gained a reputation that summons an audience from beyond as well.

They take a two-pronged approach to programming, nesting the classical-music concerts amidst a schedule of pop-music events. And the classical music is performed by an ensemble comprising players drawn from throughout the country who participate in a summer-long program of training and performance, players who are immensely skilled when they get there and are no doubt even better when they leave.

Which brings me to the concert I attended on August 2, held in the venerable Sherman’s Park Dance Hall building. It’s a large space with a flexible layout, largely defined by the placement of chairs. The concert was titled “Metamorphosis: Where Nature Meets Music,” and the presence of four large TV screens portended what was to come.

Splendid Vibes

ON THE FIRST TRACK of his first album as a leader, Bobby Hutcherson doesn’t solo until four minutes into the song. It’s “If Ever I Would Leave You,” from the then-recent Broadway show “Camelot,” and we start out with the domineering inventiveness of Joe Henderson on tenor sax. Recorded at the very end of 1963, this album, titled “The Kicker” after a Henderson original, wasn’t released until Mosaic’s Michael Cuscuna oversaw its issue in 1999.

And it seems to be a Henderson showcase throughout, although when Hutcherson brings his vibes to the fore, it’s always arresting. As in a Joe Chambers ballad, “Mirrors,” that puts Hutcherson squarely in the forefront and doesn’t welcome Henderson in until the four-minute mark.

Hutcherson was a performer steeped in the swing-era language of the vibraphone but with the innovations of Milt Jackson intruding to push Hutcherson’s creativity even beyond as he leaped into the world of hard bop. In that regard, he’s well-matched on this recording by pianist Duke Pearson. Listen to the piano on “For Duke P.,” a Hutcherson original, where Pearson tears through the up-tempo piece with the fleetest of fingers. And there are some surprises squirreled away throughout. Hutcherson’s “Step Lightly” finds Pearson slyly quoting “I’m Beginning to See the Light.” Perhaps in retaliation, guitarist Grant Green finds a moment in “Bedouin” to quote, of all things, “And the Angels Sing.”

Even Though Your Heart Is Breaking

Glimmerglass Festival 2024 Dept.: The fourth and final opera of my Glimmerglass season was that perennial, “Pagliacci.” Often paired with “Cavalleria rusticana,” another verismo one-act opera, it was here given a delightfully different performance context, as described below.

                                                                                      

COMEDY AND DEATH GO HAND-IN-HAND. When you fail onstage, you complain that you “died.” And comedy loosens audience emotions, making us more susceptible to the effects of tragedy. I offer the finale of Chaplin’s “City Lights” as proof.

Robert Stahley as Canio.
Photo by Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera “Pagliacci” is the mother ship from which many a “laugh, clown, laugh” story emerged (including Lon Chaney’s 1928 movie “Laugh, Clown, Laugh”). The aria that ends Act One, “Vesti la giubba,” has been a favorite since the dawn of recordings, with artists as diverse as Enrico Caruso, Freddie Mercury, and Spike Jones waxing distinctive versions.

This summer’s Glimmerglass approach deconstructs the piece. First, with the festivities that precede the opera proper. Weather permitting, there’s a performance on lawn. It’s a loose-limbed commedia dell’arte show, reminding us what the onstage “Pagliacci” audience had assembled to see. And would have seen, had jealous passion not intervened. Next, with an eerie approach to the opera’s Prologue, in which Tonio (Troy Cook) wanders through a gloomy warehouse, uncovering the props and set he remembers from an ill-fated performance.

Murder and the Music Hall

Glimmerglass Festival 2024 Dept.: Our third opera this summer was a recent work, “Elizabeth Cree,” commissioned by Opera Philadelphia in 2017 and here making its Glimmerglass debut. My review is below.

                                                                                 

A SERIAL KILLER IS STALKING LONDON. It’s 1880, just a few years before Jack the Ripper cuts his own swath through the city. Dan Leno is a rising star in the music halls, and has been the salvation of young Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, lately escaped from an abusive mother, now a stage star in her own right. How these stories intersect is the marvel at the heart of the Glimmerglass Festival’s brilliant presentation of “Elizabeth Cree,” a recent opera by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell.

Rear: John Chest, Tara Erraught, and Elizabeth Sutphen.
Front:  Tristan Tournaud, Evan Lazdowski, and Geoffrey
Schmelzer. Photo: Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

Glimmerglass last presented the work of composer Puts and librettist Campbell in 2018, with their Pulitzer Prize-winning opera “Silent Night,” which you can read about here. Their new piece is every bit as captivating as that one.

Theater, by definition, is an unreliable medium. We’re asked to believe in the memorized words of actors placed in an artificial location presenting some manner of heightened reality. Yet we’ll respond with more emotional intensity than we give to the outside world. Add music and the pipeline to the emotions is even more intense, which is why opera is the most satisfying of the performing arts.

But it’s still unreliable. We don’t usually question that aspect, because it’s part of the pact we make with ourselves before we take our seats. But “Elizabeth Cree” will put paid to that pact.

Landed Gentry, Humble Berths

Glimmerglass Festival 2024 Dept.: Here’s my review of the second of the four productions I’m seeing at the Glimmerglass Festival this summer.

                                                                               

BEFORE SONDHEIM, THERE WAS GILBERT – W.S. Gilbert, that is, he finest English-language lyricist of his era, and a dab hand at concocting the books to go with them. He was, of course, a product of his time, and the libretto he devised for the 1879 “Pirates of Penzance” overflows with the misdirections and other zany plot devices that Gilbert & Sullivan audiences adored.

Elizabeth Sutphen and Christian Mark Gibbs
as Mabel and Frederic.
Photo by Brent DeLanoy

And still adore. Familiar as the operettas may have become, Sullivan’s scores have a freshness that rewards repeated listening. So it’s a treat to see that the Glimmerglass Festival is offering its first G&S production in 20 years, and doing so with appropriate talent and energy. (If you’re interested, here’s my review of that 1994 “Patience.”)

“Things are seldom what they seem,” sings a character in a different G&S, but that observation rings true here, too. The crew of pirates we meet at the top of the show is a bunch of softies. The policemen we meet in the second act aren’t at all courageous, while the virginal maidens who egg them on turn out to be rather bloodthirsty.

Keeping in mind the Victorian-era sensibilities this story played against, there was plenty of room for social satire, in which Gilbert always gloried. Director-choreographer Seán Curran, reviving his 2013 Opera Theatre of St. Louis production, offers a dazzling festival of movement that pauses long enough to let the plot elements go by, but rarely otherwise slackening the pace.

But there is a meditative Act Two duet – “Stay, Fred'ric, stay,” “Ah, leave me not to pine” – between the sweethearts Mabel and Frederic that is the emotional heart of the piece, rendered by Elizabeth Sutphen and Christian Mark Gibbs with tug-at-your-heartstrings intensity.

For the Love of Gods

Glimmerglass Festival 2024 Dept.: We have four productions to consider in the coming days as the Glimmerglass Festival presents its 2024 season. The operas, in the order in which I’ll be seeing and reviewing them, are Cavalli’s “La Calisto,” Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance,” Kevin Puts’s “Elizabeth Cree,” and Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.”

                                                                                          

WE PREFER to space out our big emotional moments. The frenzy of infatuation, the despair over marital betrayal, the death of a loved one – too many of them in quick succession become a waking nightmare. But what if it’s all happening to someone else? You might be inclined to enjoy the schadenfreude aspect – or, if you’re in the land of Italian opera, gioia per il male altrui. Because that’s what Francesco Cavalli’s “La Calisto” is offering: heightened passions, from unrequited love to jealous despair, from egotistical aggression to that peculiar feeling you get when you realize you weren’t actually planning to lose your virginity but, well, there it went.

Emilie Kealani (Calisto) and Craig Irvin (Jove).
Photo by Sofia Negron

The work premiered in 1651, helping define, a generation after Monteverdi, the recitative-aria form of opera that has persisted ever since. Three love triangles anchor the plot of Giovanni Faustini’s libretto, drawing from Ovid’s “Metamorphosis,” among other sources. And a triangle outlined by color-changing light defines the stage on which this excellent Glimmerglass Festival production plays out.

For a piece like this to be effective, it needs top-notch voices. That’s pretty much par for the course where Glimmerglass is concerned, but Baroque opera also demands an ability to explore the nuances of those vocal demands through varied tone production, ornamentation, and other period techniques. And a commanding presence doesn’t hurt – after all, you’re probably playing a god. Thus it was that Eve Gigliotti, as Juno, dominated the stage, catching her errant spouse in an unfaithful act and punishing the victim. Yet, “Mogli mie sconsolate,” she sings in a virtuoso moment – “My disconsolate women,” noting that even when married, a woman ends up beside a man who’s irritable or exhausted.

No Power, Some Glory

TUESDAY AFTERNOON the sky darkened and the wind picked up, falling right in line with the tornado warning that caused my cellphone to buzz into life. Tornado skies are different from any other, adding a feral green to the shades of grey and black. I’ve seen it a couple of times since relocating to Montgomery County, NY, 34 years ago. The view from my porch looks downhill to the Mohawk River, which is four miles away, and the river invites weather phenomena like fog and rain and, when conditions are right, twisters.

Not long after moving to this area, I drove in the wake of a small tornado (not that size really matters when the winds are that strong), foolishly piloting a VW camper-bus across the river and on into a little town called Sammonsville. I wanted an ice cream, and Sammonsville hosts a 1897-vintage general store that has specialized in home-made ice cream since long before I got here. Which is only to plead my sugar addiction as an excuse for such reckless behavior. I had heard no tornado warning, but there’s no mistaking that sky.

I was still a few miles from the store when the wind grew so malevolent that horizontal rain and blusting leaves and branches blocked my view. I pulled over. Actually, I just stopped. No road-shoulder was visible. The sounds – wind, rain, branches, leaves – were bad enough, but there also seemed to be a pressure differential that caused the walls of my van to vibrate. I was scared.

Recital by the Lake

SOPRANO MARCELLA SEMBRICH, born in Poland in 1858, made her debut in Athens at 19, singing in five demanding operas; the following year she made her Dresden debut in “Lucia di Lammermoor,” which led to a five-year contract at Covent Garden. She debuted in 1883 at the brand-new Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she created roles as the Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute,” Gilda in “Rigoletto,” Rosina in “Barber of Seville,” and many others. In all, she sang over 450 performances during her eleven seasons at the Met. After she retired in 1917, she created the vocal programs at the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, as well as building a vocal studio near her summer home in Bolton Landing. That studio is now the Marcella Sembrich Opera Museum, an elegant tribute to the singer-teacher’s legacy.

Rubén Rengel and Ahmed Alom

Part of its mission is to present music, and this season’s series opened with a recital by violinist Rubén Rengel and pianist Ahmed Alom, performing in what’s essentially a large salon, a perfect venue for this kind of program. As the museum’s artistic director, Richard Wargo, explained, Sembrich knew many contemporaneous composers, among them Liszt, Brahms, and Kreisler, each of whom was represented in the programming.

Beginning with Liszt’s “Paraphrase de concert sur ‘Rigoletto,’” composed in the late 1850s. Opera arias were the pop songs of their day, and this piece followed a popular tradition of incorporating those arias into virtuoso showcases for instrumentalists.

Gone with the Moon

From the Food Vault Dept.: By the time I wrote the review of Luna 61 you see below, that restaurant had only another two years left. Chef-owners Debra and Peter Maisel moved to Burlington, VT, where they opened Revolution Kitchen – their third vegetarian restaurant together – which they ran for nine years before easing into semi-retirement. Where Luna 61 once prevailed in Tivoli, NY, you’ll find an ice-cream shop. Not quite the vegetarian cuisine I seek for nourishment.

                                                                                               

A CROWD FILLED THE SIDEWALK in front of the restaurant, a crowd that spilled into the street and seemed intent on a vintage yellow VW convertible that puttered nearby. It was an odd sight in this sleepy little town at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, but revealed itself as we walked closer to be a film crew. The shot was set, following an attractive fair-haired woman who piloted the car from its parking space.

“They’re filming something for German television,” said a woman who stood in front of the restaurant Luna 61. “Doesn’t look like she knows how to drive a stick.”

The VW lurched from its spot, stalled, was re-started and lurched again. I looked at the restaurant hours, posted on the door. “We open in about half an hour,” the woman said. “But you’re welcome to sit out here and have a drink.”

A half-dozen wooden tables sit in front of the restaurant. Although the buildings on this stretch of street are close together, the sense, as we sat, was of pleasant intimacy. Even with all those film-crew people hanging around, conversing in a mix of German and English.

Ulysses: A Glorious Voyage

THE MORE IN TOUCH YOU ARE with your inner monologues, the easier it is to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Easier, but still not easy. An autonomic ease informs those fragmented thoughts and abrupt subject changes, but putting them into written words reveals a terrifying jumble. Song lyrics and other quotations; the distraction of a passerby; guilt, anger, hope, regret – each of us is the sum of a culture absorbed. Make that the culture of Dublin in 1904, add more characters whose heads we inhabit, follow them through that city over the course of a single day. That’s “Ulysses.”

Scott Shepherd and Cast
Photo by Maria Baranova

A high-school teacher advised me simply to launch into the book and not allow myself to be dismayed. A half-century later I took that advice, although I had the massive Cambridge Centenary edition in hand. It reproduces the 1922 text and surrounds it with essays and annotations. I was inspired to take on this task in anticipation of seeing a version of the story on stage. By the time I was in my theater seat, I’d gotten halfway through.

New York-based Elevator Repair Service has won an excellent reputation for adapting classic works of literature for the stage. I saw “Gatz,” their version of “The Great Gatsby,” at EMPAC in Troy, NY, in 2008, two years before its acclaimed debut at New York’s Public Theater. Improbably set in a shabby office building, it opened with Scott Shepherd as a frustrated office worker who finds a paperback copy of “Gatsby” in a desk and begins reading it aloud, thus taking on the character of narrator Nick Carraway and soon drawing his fellow-workers into performing the story. Including every word of the book, “he said”s and “she said”s included.

The Rockwell goes MAD

I DON’T REMEMBER when I discovered MAD, but I know which piece of theirs first shook me out of my suburban complacency. Titled “The National Safety Council's Holiday-Weekend Telethon,” written by Dee Caruso and Bill Levine, drawn by Mort Drucker (one of his earliest pieces), it presented a TV telethon in the Jerry Lewis tradition, although with a Dean Martin caricature instead, and it begged viewers to drive recklessly in order to add fatality numbers to the tote board in order to meet the Safety Council’s quota. The piece ran in the January 1959 issue, when I was not yet three, so I must have discovered it in one of the endless reprints that MAD issued over the years. Laughing at the macabre proved liberating.

Parody Triple Portrait
by Richard Williams

“What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine” is an unprecedented exhibition now running (through October 27, 2024) at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., bringing together original artwork and other related items chronicling the history of our most influential satire magazine.

MAD was created in 1952 when writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman persuaded EC Comics publisher William M. Gaines to launch a humor book – giving Kurtzman a break from the highly popular “Two-Fisted Tales” series he’d been exhausting himself creating. MAD was a four-color comic at first, where talented artists like Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, and, especially, Will Elder were given the liberty to be as crazy as they wished. It worked.

Five rooms at the Rockwell Museum are devoted to the magazine’s artists and pages, which also means that it’s capturing over 60 years of American cultural history. But how odd it is to see those pages – some of which I recognize quite well – enshrined, as it were, as oversized wall displays with careful lighting and dignified info cards. Somebody thinks this is art!

The American Way

DRUM CRASHES OPEN THE PIECE, giving way to the low brass and a rising figure then picked up by the strings. It seems to dissipate in some filigree from the winds, but almost immediately the brass is back with another portentous figure. Orchestral texture is a key to this piece, titled “1920/2019" and written by Joan Tower. She has a long history with the Albany Symphony Orchestra, which means that we know her work through this local connection and welcome each new example of what she’s writing.

The Albany Symphony has been championing music by American composers – and new music in general – for far longer than I’ve been writing about them, which itself takes us back some 40 years. May we therefore conclude that it’s not some kind of gimmick? In fact, it’s what should be the mission of every classical-music performing group. It’s easy, both as listener and performing entity, to get mired in the popular repertory, but the purpose of this kind of music has long been both to entertain and challenge the listener. And this is what the ASO accomplished nicely in the pair of concerts I attended during their annual American Music Festival.

The Albany Symphony Orchestra with
flutist Brandon Patrick George.
Photo by Gary Gold

The full orchestra performed on Saturday, June 8, offering a well-contrasted array of works in the acoustically benevolent EMPAC Concert Hall. Tower explained, in a pre-concert intro, that the title of her work salutes the year in which women got the right to vote and the year the saw the height of the #MeToo movement. “But the title really has nothing to do with the piece,” she concluded in a characteristically humorous way.

Don’t take her joke seriously. There is a vigorous sense of empowerment as the piece builds to its finish. The big moments are gloriously big, the small – as when a solo violin muses over the throb of some winds, or a clarinet is mocked by a trumpet – have a nervous intimacy. But each of these episodes flows into the next with a sense of inevitability, a sense that builds to a satisfying finish.

What Is So Rare?

AN APPOINTMENT BOOK sits open on my desk, its two overview pages for the month of June staring back at me with pencilled appointments filling many of the squares. “Many,” in this case, being a vague term, as vague, in its way, as “most,” but my gut feeling is that the latter term might even more appropriately apply.

I’m pushing 70, “pushing,” in this case, being a vague term that nevertheless feels entirely apt, and because I’m also fat and sedentary, many of those appointment-book squares are filled with medical appointments. There turns out to be a fractal quality about elder health care, as each specialist I consult tends to send me to a sub-specialist to deal with an aspect of my condition I didn’t know was there yet which will demand a blood test and/or MRI and add yet another medication to the daily pile I swallow.

A handful of social events fill other squares; rarely now are there rehearsals and performances, but they do occur and even those can seem burdensome when nestled on those pages.

It’s only the start of June, yet the month already feels oppressive. I’m well familiar with the phenomenon that can make the anticipation of an event more annoying than the event itself – it’s the curse of many a nine-to-fiver – but even with that in mind, I can’t shake this sense of dread. Why?

Let’s try a little exercise. (This is me talking to myself. You don’t actually have to do this.) Imagine that all those appointment squares are blank. Is there a particular event you’d prefer to see listed?

Beethoven Steps Out

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Martha Argerich turns 83 on June 5, so let’s salute her with a look back at performance she gave in Saratoga Springs in 2002, when she was merely 61. She has a full touring schedule listed on her website, but we won’t see her in Saratoga again any time soon: once the powers-that-be axed conductor Charles Dutoit from the roster, we lost access to his wives, current (Chantal Juillet) and former (Argerich) as well as many other friends.

                                                                                           

THE IDEAL IS to serve the composer’s music – and thus the composer’s intentions – as well as possible. If this means subsuming yourself to an idea of what the composer might have wanted hear, then Martha Argerich wouldn’t be your pianist of choice. But her performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Philadelphia Orchestra at SPAC last week demonstrated that when a star soloist places her stamp of individuality on a work like this one, sparks fly. Good ones. The kind that revitalize a well-worn piece of music and remind us why the music became important in the first place.

Written in 1795 and revised over the next few years, the concerto is firmly in the classical form but with substantial bulges at the edges. It’s purposefully written to showcase the soloist, and Argerich put her fiery technique to good use. The opening movement has an air of classical delicacy about it, interrupted periodically by unexpected cascades of arpeggios from the soloist that the orchestra insists on shepherding back into line.

Which adds a nice edge of tension between pianist and orchestra, with Charles Dutoit exacting precise but flexible control over the group as Argerich rode the rhythm with surprising (and surprisingly effective) rubato. The slow movement revealed a level of lyrical drama I’ve never noticed before, and she charged into the finale with both guns blazing yet without sacrificing any of Beethoven’s vaunted wit.

A Day at the Clark

IT’S EASY TO OVERLOOK the outings that take you not very far. What counts as close? Living as we do in the rural wilds of New York’s farming country, between Utica and Albany, a 90-minute drive is nothing. And that’s where Williamstown, Massachusetts awaits, so we decided to make a recent day of it at the Clark.

Or, to put it correctly, the Clark Art Institute. Or, to put it historically, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, because it was that fabulously wealthy couple who collected enough significant art to decide, as they advance in years, that a museum was needed to house it. Sterling Clark was an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, alongside his brothers Stephen and Ambrose, but they were a fractious bunch and plans to put up that museum in Cooperstown were scuppered by fraternal fighting, and Sterling chose Williamstown instead.

A great Francophile, Sterling spent many years in Paris, where he met and married Francine Clary, a performer with Comédie Française. She, apparently, had the better eye for great art, and approved of paintings her husband otherwise might not have acquired.

Sterling wanted a building with plenty of natural light and the classical architecture of the Frick Collection, and went through two designers until he settled on Daniel Perry. The cornerstone was laid in 1953, and the museum opened two years later. Sterling died the following year; Francine survived him by four years.

Along with ongoing renovations to that structure, the Manton Research Center, which houses the library, was added in 1973. The Lunder Center, added in 2008, offers more galleries and a  seasonal café; the Clark Center (2014) has more gallery space as well as dining and retail areas. The artworks in the permanent collection come from a range of classic Dutch, Flemish, and Italian painters, alongside the Impressionists and other fin-de-siècle artists. Works by Renoir, Rodin, George Inness, and John Singer Sargent abound.

Brushing Up Your Shakespeare

The Bard on the Boards Dept.: Here’s a pair of book reviews that turned up in a recently discovered pile of clippings, and it’s one of the few pieces I was asked to write for the Albany Times-Union before that publication tired of me or couldn’t afford me or just plain chose to hate me. I never know for sure, but I am a very dislikable guy.

                                                                                         

SHAKESPEARE BIOGRAPHERS are hamstrung by the almost complete lack of documentation about the playwright’s life. But that hasn’t stopped them from coming out with many volumes of what amounts to educated speculation.

Giving Bill Bryson the task of writing the Shakespeare volume for HarperCollins’s “Eminent Lives” series was an inspired choice. The author of “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” among many other fine and funny books, Bryson combines a zest for research with a compelling narrative style. Which are front and center in “Shakespeare: The World as Stage” (Atlas Books, 199 pages, $19.95).

Part of the book’s fun lies in seeing how Bryson juggles those few known facts. Acknowledging that the reader is probably aware of most of them, he reinforces his discourse with the scholarship of others, from reliable writers like Sam Schoenbaum to frauds like the 19th-century fanatic Delia Bacon, who kicked off the  somebody-else-wrote-Shakespeare’s-plays movement that embarrassingly persists today.

The Vinifera Tradition

From the Vines Dept.: Sometimes your past lurks in old bankers boxes. I opened one recently expecting to see only books and found in addition a pile of clippings, including the article reproduced below. I wrote it for the Syracuse New Times in 1988, and it necessitated a very pleasant visit to the winery thus portrayed. I’d written about Hermann Wiemer before, but never visited him in situ. Wiemer sold the vineyard in 2007 to Fred Merwarth, who continues to run the operation under Wiemer’s name.

                                                                                             

AS NEW YORK STATE gains an ever-improving reputation for production of good wine, the Finger Lakes, that paw about 80 miles southwest of Syracuse, are recognized as the source of acclaimed wines made from Vitis vinifera, the grape family responsible for the distinguished wines of Europe.

 Hermann J. Wiemer. Photo
by Patricia Darbee Weirich

Vinifera has to go up against the sweet Labrusca grapes that have grown like weeds in this region for so many years, but with a spokesman like Hermann J. Wiemer at the publicity helm, it won’t be long before it predominates. And Wiemer’s winery produces vintage after vintage of award-winning varietals to back up every statement the forthright founder makes.

“I don’t think the big companies will grow vinifera,” he says. “Their attitudes are entirely different from ours. Unfortunately, they have the resources and time to cultivate what they please, but they don’t realize that the consumer is now asking for a better wine.” Wiemer is fond of characterizing New York’s plonk as reeking of the “rubber hose,” used to move the hybrid juice along its brisk production line. “It’s up to the little guys to take the risk and grow vinifera,” he says.

A native of the Mosel region of Germany, Wiemer grew up among relatives on both sides of the family who were immersed in the wine business. He arrived in this country in 1968 to work for the Bully Hill Winery, and discreetly bought 140 acres of land on Seneca Lake a few years later.

The Last Boulevardier

IT STARTED WITH a Criterion Collection closet picks video that featured Justine Triet, a director most recently known for the movie “Anatomy of a Fall.” Criterion invites filmworld-related people of renown to swipe DVDs from their closet while discoursing about their choices, and Triet selected Paul Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman,” Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” and Antonioni’s “La notte” before spotting “Presenting Sacha Guitry,” a four-DVD set (part of Criterion’s Eclipse Series, which features overlooked movies) and exulting over Guitry’s classic films.

Good enough for me! I found a copy of that collection and, not knowing what to expect, started with “The Story of a Cheat,” which Guitry wrote and directed in 1936. Unlike the many films he developed from his own plays, this one came from his only novel. Right from the beginning it declares itself a different kind of story, most of it told through flashback and narration as we see Guitry’s character slip through a number of disguises as he makes his dishonest way through French society.

For a man who scorned cinema, insisting that theater was the only viable form of such entertainment, he threw himself onto the screen with surprising and delightful innovations, enough so that he’s credited with influencing directors from Truffaut to Hitchcock to Welles – and it’s easy to draw a connection from Guitry’s use of narration to what Welles did in “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Truffaut, himself a huge, declared “Guitry is Lubitsch’s French brother.”

The Fable of the Bohemian Who Had Hard Luck

Guest Blogger Dept.: Not surprisingly, George Ade has something to say on this matter. I’m not exactly sure what this matter is, but let’s hear him out on the subject. Drawing by Clyde J. Newman.

                                                                                           

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a Brilliant but Unappreciated Chap who was such a Thorough Bohemian that Strangers usually mistook him for a Tramp.

Would he brush his Clothes? Not he. When he wore a Collar he was Ashamed of himself. He had Pipe-Ashes on his Coat and Vest. He seldom Combed his Hair, and never Shaved.

Every Evening he ate an Imitation Dinner, at a forty-cent Table d’Hôte, with a Bottle of Writing Fluid thrown in. He had formed a little Salon of Geniuses, who also were out of Work, and they loved to Loll around on their Shoulder-Blades and Laugh Bitterly at the World.

The main Bohemian was an Author. After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity. Posterity hadn’t heard anything about it, and couldn’t get out an Injunction.

Grouching

IT BEGAN HAPPENING around Hallowe’en, which is why nobody noticed it at first. Then it became one of those wryly amusing end-of-the-news stories on a local station in Anaheim, but because it was so close to Hollywood, nobody took it very seriously. A man who looked, dressed, walked, and talked exactly like Groucho Marx had been wandering the streets. As he was neither escorting any children nor begging at the doorways himself, his presence aroused suspicion – at least according to a busybody who insisted on being interviewed – but when he remained in the Groucho guise throughout the subsequent days, his wife called a nearby hospital and it made the news again. The local story was picked up by other stations across the country that shared the network, and it made its to social media as well. That’s where I noticed it.

My first experience was in an Aldi. I rounded a corner, its endcap a display of pet food, and glimpsed a man in a swallowtail coat placing items on a checkout line. He was slightly stooped and his hair was brushed back. As he turned to his cart, I saw a mustache, eyeglasses, and improbable eyebrows. I took all this in as, feigning disinterest, I proceeded up the aisle before me, processing the sight. Groucho was buying boxes of cracker assortments.

It wasn’t Groucho, of course. Some wag had chosen to adopt the garb and make-up of the comedian, possibly in a new-inspired copycat gesture. I hurried down the adjacent aisle in time to see Groucho finishing the checkout. “I had a wonderful shopping experience,” I heard him tell the cashier, adding, “but it certainly wasn’t at this fleabitten place.”

A Preferred Byas

WITH NO SLIGHT INTENDED to my family’s generosity, the ultimate Christmas present arrived early, and it came from Mosaic Records. Ten CDs devoted to the work of tenor sax artist Don Byas, ten CDs covering only June 1944 through September 1946, but showcasing a vital moment of transition in the world of jazz. This was a transition being enthusiastically explored by an artist who would then quit the United States in annoyance over his lack of recognition.

Byas was born in Olahoma in 1913 to parents who played musical instruments. By the time he reached his teens, he was playing clarinet, alto sax, and violin, and at 17 he began performing with local bands and even organized a band under his own name. Three years later he was on the west coast, now playing tenor, where he’d work with Lionel Hampton, Buck Clayton, and Eddie Barefield. That’s also where he met Art Tatum, whose work floored him.

“Art Tatum really turned me on,” Byas told jazz writer Art Taylor, who collected the interview in a book titled Notes and Tones. “That's where my style came from...style...I haven't got any style! I just blow like Art. He didn't have any style, he just played the piano, and that's the way I play.”

Given the easy manner in which Byas straddled swing and bebop, he could be termed a musical chameleon – but, as this set proves, he really wasn’t. Those were simply complementary parts of his natural voice. You hear the rhythmically adventurous swing player right from the start, as he solos in “Dance of the Tambourine,” a Hot Lips Page original. Byas follows Page’s vocal with an easygoing chorus (Page, on Mellophone, takes the bridge). But the next session, six weeks later, finds Byas rocketing along in bop mode, as “Riffin’ and Jivin’” throws fast-paced technical challenges at the crew. Trumpeter Charlie Shavers has no problem with this kind of thing, nor does pianist Clyde Hart. And dig Hart’s celeste work on “Free and Easy,” the ballad that follows.

A Fanatic’s Fantastique

More from the Concert Vault Dept.: While perusing some 1987 material, I found the following. The piece is an “advance,” written to promote an event, in this case a concert I very much wish I hadn’t missed, as I, too, am a Berlioz fanatic. I usually only post reviews, but this casts an interesting light on the Berlioz piece. Nelson remains active as a conductor, although he doesn’t seem to be holding down any regular positions at this point, preferring to travel and work throughout Europe when he’s not in Chicago or Costa Rica.

                                                                                   

Conductor John Nelson warns right from the start that you will be surprised by the “Sympbonie fantastique.”

He is presenting a version that purports to be truer to the Berlioz original than the one we’re used to hearing when he leads the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Troy Music Hall, the last concert in this season of Troy Chromatic Concerts.

“I’m a hopeless Berlioz fanatic,” Nelson admits. “And this new Behrenreiter edition is hair-raising, especially if you’re used to the old one.

“There’s a repeat in the fourth movement that has been omitted for decades, and, because that movement is a march to the scaffold, it’s even more ominous.”

Berlioz wrote the symphony as a tone-poem describing a young artist’s macabre dreams under the influence of opiates (young artists were the 19th-century French equivalent of major-league pitchers today).