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.”