Honey and Steel

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

                                                                                      

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

Arabella Steinbacher
Photo by Peter Rigaud

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

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

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

Gambling on Dining

From the Culinary Vault Dept.: Twenty years ago, I reviewed a restaurant in Saratoga Springs that seemed destined for a long run, but didn’t make it very far off the back stretch. After eight years, owner Tim Meaney put the business up for sale, telling the Times Union that winters were a struggle, and it was time to move on. As near as I can figure, the address was next home to a tapas bar calling itself “62 Beekman”; currently, it’s an Italian eatery called Taverna Novo.

                                                                                                

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, a friend of mine ran a drop-in center for kids in a storefront on Saratoga’s Beekman Street. Although he was doing good work, offering a place for teens to engage in meaningful activity, he wasn’t particularly welcomed by the neighborhood. After the program fell apart, he encouraged his board of directors to hang on to the building, predicting that the neighborhood would develop a more artistic identity. They unloaded the building anyway, for a sum they must these days deeply regret.

Because Beekman Street is doing just as my friend predicted, spawning galleries and eateries and attracting a clientele happy to get away from the busy downtown. The Beekman Street Bistro is in a building that, not too long ago, was condemned; its owner, a construction engineer, crafted its reconstruction with ideas and input from Tim Meaney and Dan Spitz, who decided to take a chance on this burgeoning neighborhood and commit to a fine-dining restaurant.

 I‘ve Got a Secret

RED NORVO STARTED HIS JAZZ CAREER playing xylophone, which isn’t a very shouty instrument, but he was forward-thinking and harmonically inventive enough to enhance any ensemble he joined or led. In keeping with his instrument, he also was quietly rebellious. He made most of his rebellious statements through music, as his 1933 trio recordings of “Dance of the Octopus” and Bix Beiderbecke’s “In a Mist” attest, but in 1942 he initiated a different kind of rebellion: He made a (technically) illegal recording.

He’d made many recordings before this date, but they were officially recorded and officially released. But at midnight on July 31, 1942, the official recording industry was shut down by a musicians strike called by union president James C. Petrillo.

Petrillo was a firebrand, so renowned and feared that his name became the punchline for popular radio comedians – and every listener knew who Petrillo was. His argument was that the radio industry was robbing his musicians through a lack of royalty payments on the recordings they aired. And he believed that recordings themselves wiped out some 60 percent of in-person gigs. The strike would end only when the major record companies – RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca – signed agreements to pay into a special fund.

Dick Baker's Cat

Mark Twain Dept.: It was the fashion, over a century ago, to entertain the public with dialect stories, which could range from the affectionate to the racially savage. This was a characteristic that ranged from stage performers like Chic Sales to writers like Mark Twain (who also took to the stage). Here’s a fine example of Twain’s facility with the genre and familiarity with the mysterious wisdom of cats.

                                                                                                

ONE OF MY COMRADES THERE — another of those victims of eighteen years of unrequited toil and blighted hopes—was one of the gentlest spirits that ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple Dick Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-Horse Gulch. He was forty-six, grey as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever brought to light—than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted.

Drawing by B. Kliban

Whenever he was out of luck and a little downhearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something). And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that there was something human about it—maybe even supernatural.

I heard him talking about this animal once. He said:

"Gentlemen, I used to have a cat here, by the name of Tom Quartz, which you'd 'a' took an interest in, I reckon—, most anybody would. I had him here eight year—and he was the remarkablest cat I ever see. He was a large grey one of the Tom specie, an' he had more hard, natchral sense than any man in this camp—'n' a power of dignity—he wouldn't let the Gov'ner of Californy be familiar with him.