Keeping It in the Family

From the Food Vault Dept.: There’s some back-and-forth to the Lanzi family’s restaurant history. A Lanzi’s Restaurant opened in Amsterdam, NY’s, south side in 1920, where there was good food as well as occasional organized outdoor boxing matches. Luigi and Amalia Lanzi, who founded the place, came from Agani, Italy; after working for his parents, their son Lorenzo opened his own place, named after himself, in 1956 on Amsterdam’s Union Street. Lanzi’s closed in 1985; Lorenzo’s in 1998. But Lorenzo’s five sons all went into the business, and soon enough began opening their own places. Thus we now have Northville’s Sport Island Pub, Lakeside Tavern in Gloversville, and Lanzi’s on the Lake in Mayfield, all three on the shores of Great Sacandaga Lake; as well as Partner’s Pub in Johnstown. (Find them online at lanzifamilyrestaurants.com/restaurants)

A century later, the Lanzi family opened another restaurant where their grandfather started: Lorenzo’s Southside, where Neapolitan pizza, cooked in an authentic wood-fired oven, is a specialty. My wife and I recently dined there and had a thoroughly wonderful meal, and we’re returning soon to try to pizza we missed our first time around. Meanwhile, I rummaged through the archives and discovered my reviews of Lorenzo’s from 1990 and Lanzi’s on the Lake from 1993, which you’ll find below.

                                                                                  

THERE’S NO SIGN ON THE BUILDING. Joe Lanzi shrugs and smiles as he explains: “We never needed one.” Lorenzo’s looks like the other houses on the block save for the neon Bass Ale sign in the window. It’s on one of those Amsterdam hills, looking over the Mohawk River, a location chosen by Joe’s father in 1957 and which brought most of the nine kids into the business.

My sense is that people don’t wander into the place on their own: they’re brought by friends who want to share this Amsterdam treasure. That’s how I was introduced a few visits ago, and it was a ritual I performed the night before the Travers cup race to avoid all traces of track crowds.

Ironically, we sat next to cartoonist John Caldwell and his wife – people who know their restaurants – who were showing off the place to fellow cartoonist Jack Ziegler and his wife, up from Connecticut for the Travers and no mean restaurant fans themselves. Making this the first restaurant in a few years of reviewing for which I can offer social notes as well.

All right: no sign. Visits from celebrity cartoonists. What’s the appeal? 

Are You Now or Have You Ever?

MY FATHER, who was born in 1928, extolled the 1950s as the last decade during which “the United States made sense.” As a conservative white male military vet, his opinion wasn’t surprising: he believed he’d earned part ownership of this country. Marx would have defined that ownership as exclusionary but, to my father, Marx represented communism and communism was evil.

Joseph Lattanzi and Laura Santamaria-Mendez 
Photo Credit: Brent DeLanoy/
The Glimmerglass Festival

And communists were being systematically revealed and removed from their jobs, both in Hollywood and in Congress. Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel “Fellow Travelers” is set during that era, but takes the persecution further by placing at its center two men who become lovers while working in Washington, D.C. as the spectre of being outed – and thus career-ruined – draws closer and grows more ominous.

Although the story is better known as a TV mini-series (taking the story well beyond the bounds of the book), the opera packs a greater emotional punch, because that’s what good opera does. The shrewd melding of music and words bypasses that part of the brain we use to decode novels and goes straight to our emotional nerve centers. TV writing, no matter how critically lauded, is too formulaic to allow for emotional depths. Even if ads aren’t part of your streaming service, TV writing is structured to accommodate ads.

And That’s the Way It Is

SOME YEARS AGO, The Onion, a satirical periodical, sported a headline proclaiming
“Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play in Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.” The ensuing story suggested that a community-theater director would actually set “The Merchant of Venice” in 16th-century Venice.

Gregory Feldmann, Kevin Burdette, 
and Travon D. Walker | Photo Credit: 
Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

It was a welcome jab at those who shoehorn classic theater pieces into supposedly innovative environs, and nowhere is this more apparent, in my experience, than in the world of opera. The practice seems to me to be more a creative-team indulgence than some manner of bold choice, so I was dismayed to learn that the Glimmerglass Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” would be set on a 20th-century college campus rather than 18th-century Naples. 

I’m here to eat crow. Two helpings, in fact. In the past, I have roundly criticized in-house dramaturg Kelly Rourke’s translations. I’m a stickler for correct rhyming when the original is written rhyming verse, and line endings that don’t match as intended hurt my ears. But it turns out that Rourke’s new libretto for old “Così” (title has been truncated) is a festival of witty jokes and glorious rhymes.

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.”

Footloose in Philly

From the Food Vault Dept.: Recently, I was reminiscing about the variety of restaurants I found in Philadelphia in 2008, and the crazy trip I took one evening to get from one to the next in order to sample a single entreé at each. You might want to learn about it, too, I reasoned, so here is the piece I wrote about it. Please note that this was eight years ago, so there’s no telling who’s still in business.

                                                                                            

DURING THE LONG DRIVE home from Philadelphia last weekend, my family and I visited Valley Forge and sought lunch in a nearby town. We found a street flanked on several blocks by chain stores and restaurants, but we also spotted an obviously local place promising pub food. It was so disgusting inside – filthy walls, sticky tables, apathetic servers – that we hightailed it to one of the chains and contented ourselves with an acceptable, if boilerplate, meal. 

Noodle soup at Viet Huong

It was a depressing end (on the culinary side) to an otherwise delightful weekend, during which my wife escorted my daughter to a concert by her favorite rock band at a downtown arena while I drove around South Philly that evening to check out recommended restaurants. Finding those restaurant has never been easier when you take advantage of current technology.

Having been consulted by a visiting alt-newsweekly writer in the past, I sent my own request to Drew Lazor at Philadelphia’s City Paper, and he and his colleague Felicia D’Ambrosio generously put together a list of eateries reflecting the area’s ethnic variety. The magazine’s website (citypaper.net) also has restaurant listings and a lively food-related blog. [Note: The paper folded in 2015.]

The Last of the Heath Hens

Guest Blogger Dept.: It’s refreshing to learn that, along with all of his other passions, Robert Benchley nurtured an environmental awareness, as his report on the Heath Hen reminds us.

                                                                                      

WELL, THE HEATH HEN has gone! We might as well face it. The sole surviving specimen of Tympanudius cupido, which has been hopping and flitting about the island of Martha’s Vineyard for the past few years under the fascinated gaze of the ornithologists, has disappeared, and, it is feared, has died without issue. It was not enough that the world should be tottering, its reason going, its standards gone. The Heath Hen must be taken from us.

Robert Benchley
Drawing by Gluyas Williams

We knew that it would have to happen some time, but it is hard to believe that there will never be another Heath Hen. We didn’t mind so much when we were told that the Great Auk was extinct, or the Labrador Duck, or the Passenger Pigeon. Even the news about the Eskimo Curlews (although there is hope that there are still a few Eskimo Curlews left who are just playing possum or sulking) didn’t give us that sinking feeling that we experienced when we heard about the Heath Hen. No more Heath Hens – ever! Thank God, John James Audubon did not live to hear that gloomy pronouncement. (He missed it by just three-quarters of a century.)

It seems only yesterday that I saw the Heath Hen at Martha’s Vineyard. She looked as well then as she ever did, but she never was what you would call a robust bird. They did not keep her captive. She was too proud a spirit for that. 

The Old Song and Dance

From the Vault of the Distant Muses Dept.: Alongside the restaurant review I posted last week was a handful of other pieces of mine that appeared in Metroland in 1987. I chose three of them to illustrate the variety of goings-on in the Albany, NY, area back then. The Boys Choir of Harlem ceased operations in 2007, as Wikipedia is happy to inform you. Pianist Pola Baytelman continues to perform and record, and although Alvin Ailey died two years after my piece appeared (my writing had nothing to do with it), the dance company he founded continues to thrive.

                                                                                                 

YOU GO BACK TO 1968 to find the beginnings of the Boys Choir of Harlem, when Dr. Walter J. Turnbull and Ruth Nixon started a small choir in the basement of Ephesus Church in the well-known Manhattan district. Then the church burned down the following year.

The Boys Choir of Harlem

They moved to a local community center and had to endure a lack of heat in the winter. And their travels continued: in 1975 they were at the Church of the Intercession; in 1984 they got their first real home, an entire floor in what was P.S. 68, giving them classrooms, office space -- and proper performance areas.

An independent day school for girls was founded there in 1979; next year a similar co-ed program will be started.

But that’s hardly all that’s been happening with this active group. A year ago this month they performed on a TV special with Harry Belafonte. In June, Dr. Turnbull was given the Presidential Volunteer Action Award at the White House.

Newbie at the Hot Pot

From the Food Vault Dept.: Below is a review I wrote in early 1987, when I was about six years old. At least, that’s how it looks to me as I read it today. I’d been reviewing restaurants for only a few months, which was only about a year into my tenure of writing professionally about anything. I was (and am) a self-taught writer, and figured that my few years cooking professionally qualified me for the food-review gig. But Japanese food was new to me. Sushi was new to me (as you’ll see). And the phenomenon of shabu-shabu, also known as steamboat and hot pot, was completely new. I’ve had wonderful meals of it since, and even bought my own pot to offer it as at-home dinner treats. Sugi is long gone, and the space it occupied has gone through many incarnations over the years, including Charlie’s Corner, State Street Station, and Gar-Bo’s. 

                                                                                                   

“Is this your first time to order shabu shabu?” the waitress asked. Yes, I told her. “Oh, okay. Many people who are not used to shabu shabu don’t like beef in seafood broth.”

Shabu shabu

You can’t intimidate me that way. Not even in a Japanese restaurant. Octopus, for example, looks disgusting on a plate. But sit me down beside someone who says “yuck” and you can bet I’ll be smacking my lips over the cephalopod.

The place: Sugi, a busy little restaurant the Schenectady side of the intersection of Route 7 and State Street. The time: A recent Saturday, early evening.

Dining rooms don't get much less assuming. This is your basic paneling-with-drop-ceiling joint, but dressed with charming Japanese screens and fans to mask the plainness.

And there's a sushi bar at the far end of the room to capture the eye, with a handful of chairs for the dedicated eaters of the raw fish delicacies.

Taking It on the Chen

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Fifteen years ago, violinist Ray Chen performed in Schenectay, yet another example of a rising star being snagged for a local performance early enough in that career ascendancy to make such a booking possible. I thought we could have made him feel more welcome.

                                                                                      

Ray Chen

WHERE’S YOUR BACKBONE, PEOPLE? I’m talking to you, the audience at Ray Chen’s dazzling recital last week. The violinist finished with a Wieniawski finger-buster that spewed wicked spiccato, left-hand pizzicato, harmonics true and false and other virtuoso hallmarks, a spectacular finish to an astounding program. You leapt to your feet, applauding madly, and Chen and pianist Andrew Tyson returned and bowed and returned and bowed again.

Then Chen pulled a fast one: He played a slow one, “Melodie” by Gluck, a Fritz Kreisler arrangement of a flute tune from “Orfeo ed Euridice.” It’s a beautiful display of violin tone and interpretive gentleness, but, as an encore, it does more than that. It calms the audience, robbing them of the furor that the finger-buster provoked. 

And you applauded, albeit in a more restrained manner, and even before they were offstage after their second set of bows that time, you packed up your hands and toddled home.

Enriching the Hall

From the Comedy Vault Dept.: Back in my reviewing heyday, I presented myself as someone able to write knowledgably about many different disciplines, usually the snooty ones, but I enjoyed forays into realms like comedy, popular song, and even offbeat subjects like ice skating. Here’s a look at Rich Hall’s stop in Schenectady in 1990. Hall dipped into the SNL universe for a season and since has been busy writing plays (at his ranch in Montana) and living and working in London.

                                                                                  

RICH HALL'S APPEARANCE at Proctor’s Theatre Thursday night was presented in the guise of comedy, and it’s true that he worked a lot of delightfully-entertaining bits into his set. But he’s really, down deep, a humorist, following a tradition too few comics know about these days.

I haven’t seen him on television and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to share in the instant recognition factor – and that there’d be inside jokes I wouldn’t get.

It wasn’t like that at all. Hall works the audience with easily-recognizable situations – like so many others, he has his own dog and cat routine – but he’s also got a fascination with language that leads him into a territory of free-association once the province only of people like George Carlin.

Like Carlin, Hall explores the sound and sense of words. They differ markedly in matter, however. Carlin shocks by going for the jugular of taboos and chills the audience into laughing at itself. Hall’s is a warmer approach, making friends with the crowd and inviting them into the banter.

Courting the Farmgirl

From the Concert Vault Dept.: Baritone Sanford Sylvan displayed such virtuosity as he moved through his 30s that his resume included appearances with major opera companies and orchestras throughout the world, and the creation of roles in two acclaimed John Adams operas: “Nixon in China,” in which Syvan sang the role of Chou En-lai, and then the title role in “The Death of Klinghoffer.” We were fortunate enough to see him several times in the Albany area, including performaces as part of what was then known as the Schenectady Museum-Union College concert series. He was based in Manhattan but long associated with Boston, and he spent sabbatical time in Scotland. When he died in 2019, at the age of 65, his New York Times obituary failed to mention, among his survivors, the man he married in 1996. I reviewed his 1984 Union College recital here; below is a recently unearthed review of his 1994 visit, with Schubert’s “Schoene Muellerin.”

                                                                                            

SUPPOSE YOU FINALLY GET this attractive farmgirl to pay attention to you, then she suddenly throws you over for some hidebound hunter. Do you punch him out? Sue him?

Sanford Sylvan

If you're a self-pitying German poet, you rush home and write verse about it, ending up with the lullaby sung to you by the brook you flung yourself into. 

I haven't checked to see whether Wilhelm Mueller was actually being autobiographical in his cycle of 23 poems, published in 1820, but the sorrow and sentiment in “Die Schoene Muellerin” shines through a reading of bare texts and erupts into a magical marriage of music and verse in Schubert's famous setting of all but three of the poems.

The Schenectady Museum-Union College Concert Series had a later-than-usual finish as baritone Sanford Sylvan and pianist David Breitman were at last able to present this cycle. Measles – that dreaded Capital District word just now – postponed the concert until last night.

Which meant no other hardship than that we got to see a gorgeous sunset through the high windows of the Union College Memorial Chapel as Breitman opened the program with the Drei Klavierstücke, D. 946, by Schubert.

Jazzing the Classics

FOR A FEW DECADES during the last century, when classical music was a familiar part of the musical landscape, many jazz bands borrowed tunes with pleasing results. John Kirby’s sextet recorded several such examples (his Schubert Serenade is a knockout), and Freddy Martin set lyrics to those strains. Harry James played the Bumblebee; Woody Herman did the Sabre Dance. The practice has fallen off a great deal since then, but two recent recordings remind us that, as bassist Mark Wade puts it, “A good tune is a good tune.”

Wade’s trio performs on “New Stages” (Dot Time), a fifteen-track collection that takes some unusual turns through the classical repertory, while pianist Ted Rosenthal’s trio (and guests) explore eleven songs on “Impromp2" (TMR), so-named because it’s a follow-up to his 2010 collection of classical-informed pieces. 

Both collections share rhythmically compelling, harmonically inventive approaches to the music under consideration and, remarkably, given the breadth of source material out there, they also share a single piece: Chopin’s Waltz in A-Flat Major, Op. 69 No. 1, known to many as the “Farewell.” 

Rosenthal’s version was fashioned as a vehicle for Ken Peplowski, in one of the clarinetist’s final sessions (see Chip Defaa’s tribute to Peplowski in the March issue). It opens with a straightforward reading of the tune by Peplowski in duet with Rosenthal, who gives a light swing to his first solo passage; without deviating very much from the structure of the piece, Peplowski and Rosenthal alternate 16-bar passages, diving behind its innocent sweetness to embellish the melody with increasing urgency before Peplowski calms it again and brings it home.

Galway Dazzles, Flute Sparkles

Critical Drubbing Dept.: A few weeks ago (in this piece), I recounted my journey from a snotty, full-of-himself critic to a somewhat less-snotty, still rather full–of-himself critic, and I cited a concert by James Galway as one of the turning points in my attitude. I tried searching for the actual review with no success; naturally, it sprang to light when I wasn’t looking for it at all. Like so much of what I had published in 1986 and earlier, the original computer files are long gone, so I’m relying here on a tearsheet that lingered in my files. I wish I’d gotten over berating the audience for applauding between movements by then; now I’m just happy to learn that we’re all awake. Here’s that review.

                                                                                          

HIS GOLDEN FLUTE sparkling in the spotlight, James Galway dazzled a near-capacity crowd at Proctor's Theatre, where be performed with the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada Monday evening.

Galway served as soloist and conductor, and his music alone radiated the charm that the television audience knows from his talk-show appearances. Thanks to that exposure, he is a known quantity on the classical stage and thus draws people who might otherwise think twice about spending ticket money. His program similarly comprised known or accessible pieces, a splendid starting place for the novice coecertgoer.

The first suite from Handel's Water Music was the opener. Galway has a lean but enthusiastic conducting style —  not for him those flailing Bernstein arms — and he shaped his ideas along conventional and acceptible lines. The orchestra responded with appropriate energy, although there were the spotty problems that suggest a not-well-warmed-up group. There were no surprises in this very familiar work until the hornpipe movement busted loose with a wonderfully quirky but ompletely sensible rhythm; Galway probably has an Irish insight other conductors would be wise to learn.

Big Bands are Victorious

THE FIRST BATCH OF V-DISCS shipped to military fighters overseas on Oct. 1, 1943. Less than two years later, we won the war. Many other elements contributed to this victory, of course, but let’s not short-change the power those records must have had.

Mosaic Records celebrated this unique catalogue category with the release in 2024 of a massive set of V-Disc small-group sessions and the promise that a big-band set would follow. It’s here. It’s ten CDs of excellent-sounding music by top-flight bands and a few who never gained that category but should have. 

Right off the bat what invites celebration is the restoration quality. Those discs were meant to be played beside bunk and rack and even out in the field using the spring-wound phonographs that were shipped with the discs (along with packets of extra steel needles). And you got a lot of music: These discs were cut with more grooves per inch than usual to allow for up to six minutes of music on a 12-inch side.

The program continued until May, 1949, at which time the companies producing them destroyed all of their discs and masters. Service men and women were forbidden to bring them home, but with over eight million of those platters circulating overseas, many were bound to find their way back. There are stories of scofflaws having their collections confiscated, and at least one offender did jail time.