Be Seeing You, or Where are the New Blog Posts?

“BUT YOU KNOW it’s going to end the same way again!” my father would complain. “His face comes at the screen and the bars close across it!”

I don’t think Patrick McGoohan’s TV series “The Prisoner,” which aired in the U.S. on CBS in 1968, effectively spoke to him. But I, a disaffected 12-year-old, found incredible resonance in each maddening, enigmatic episode. McGoohan’s Number Six fought the oppressive bureaucracy of The Village, a colorful seaside resort where you’d expect to find M. Hulot but instead were surrounded by a population in which you couldn’t tell the fellow-prisoners from the warders.

Sixteen of the series’s seventeen episodes aired that summer, omitting one with an American Western setting that the censors insisted cut too close to the political bone (this was, after all, still the era of J. Edgar Hoover).

But the series still included a fascinating attempt to uncover Number Six’s secret – why he resigned from what we assume was a secret service job – by manipulating his dreams (“A, B, and C”), a fantastically clever episode in which Number Six is led to believe he’s another agent brought to The Village to confound Number Six (“Schizoid Man”), a compelling use of Bizet’s “L’Arlesienne” Suite, among other tools, to drive the Village leader, Number Two, crazy (“Hammer into Anvil”), and a fairy-tale chase in which Number Six is led by a Mystery Woman into a booby-trapped nursery rhyme-themed village (“The Girl Who Was Death”).

"Hit Those Streets at Halftime"

From the Vault Dept.: For many years, no Troy Music Hall concert could begin without Fire Marshall John Tilton’s no-smoking warning. “Fire exits are located on all sides of the building,” the speech began, if I’m remembering correctly, but it was delivered only after Tilton acknowledged the applause he invariably received. The hall got more serious or something and the speeches stopped. Tilton has long since retired and moved to Maine. Concerts there have never been the same.

                                                                                 

HE’S APPEARED ONSTAGE at the Troy Music Hall more often than any other performer. Not to sing or play an instrument, but to deliver a deadly serious message: don't smoke in the hall.

John Tilton
Photo by Gigi Cohen

John Tilton is a professional firefighter. He's been on the force for 15 years. And for 15 years he has opened for each and every Troy Music Hall event. “I took it over from another fellow,” he says, “who got a little tired of it.”

Now Tilton feels he’s part of a family of audience and performers who return to the hall often. “You get to know people. You see people in the audience year after year. And the performers, they’re pretty good people too.”

The speech he delivers is always – or nearly always – the same. “If I try to change it, the people get mad.” And the crowd loves it. “Sometimes, if the show is bad, they’ll say, ‘I should’ve left after your speech.’”

With a mixture of hand gestures and perfectly placed inflection, Tilton gets the point across with a little humor. “And it’s a proven fact,” he says. “You don’t get any smoking around there. The people remember.”

Thy Neighbor’s Spittoon

From the Bookshelf Dept.: As a writer for Esquire and the NY Times, Gay Talese made his name with colorful, well-researched articles about all aspects of American life, particularly when resonant with his own Italian-American background – as his well-known pieces about Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio will attest. He spoke in Albany in 1987, reading an excerpt from Unto the Sons, which was published in 1992. Here’s my report, including the final two paragraphs lost upon publication to a Schenectady Gazette editor’s knife. (But I still made eight paragraphs.)

                                                                                                

“A TURNING POINT in my career took place after a disaster in Albany,” says Gay Talese, author of the controversial examination of American morals, Thy Neighbor’s Wife.

Gay Talese.
Photo by Joyce Tenneson

He spoke last night at Albany State University under the auspices of the New York State Writers Institute, his first visit to the city since 1959. Back then he was sent from Manhattan to cover the state legislature for the New York Times.

“I was writing what we called `human interest’ stories,” he explained, “and I was doing it well enough that they decided to let me cover the senate and assembly. The feeling around the Times was that I was a good feature writer, but that I should be more serious.”

His awe at the august chambers found a focus in the many spittoons Talese discovered beneath the seats of the senate. “They were in 48 of the 56 places, these lively-looking but empty brass bright spittoons. I thought, `This is going to be exciting.’”

The disaster occurred when the editorial desk rewrote story after story, eliminating all nuance of character and description. To fight back, he wrote shorter and shorter pieces, eliminating his byline (given only to stories of at least eight paragraphs), until an angry editor summoned him back to the city and put him to work writing obituaries.

The Night-Watch and the Would-Be Something Awful

Guest Blogger: George Ade. Keeping the English language safe and pure always has been a priority for bluenoses, who found their beezers suitably tweaked when Chicago newspaperman Ade (1866-1944) enjoyed great success with his Fables in Slang. The tale below was collected in Ade’s book People You Know in 1903, with illustrations by John T. McCutcheon.

                                                                                                   

ONCE THERE WAS A full-sized Girl named Florine whose Folks kept close Tab on her. Any night-blooming Harold who presumed to keep the Parlor open after Midnight heard low Voices in the Hallway and then a Rap on the Door. If Florine put on her Other Dress and went to a Hop then Mother would sit up and wait for her, and 1 o’clock was the Outside Limit. Consequently Florine would have to duck on the Festivities just when everything was getting Good. Furthermore she would have to warn Mr. Escort to behave himself when they drew near the House.

Florine

“Nothing doing at the Gate,” she would say, warningly. “It’s Dollars to Dumplings that the Girl Detective is peeking out to get a line on my Conduct. She has her Ear to the Ground about four-thirds of the Time and if any one makes a Move, then Mother is Next. If Father takes a Drink at the Club and then {38} starts Homeward on a fast Trolley, Mother knows all about it when he is still three Blocks from the House. What’s more, she is a knowing Bird and can’t be fooled by Cloves or these little Peppermint Choo-Choos. The only time when Mother kisses Father is when she wants to catch him with the Goods. Look Out! This is our Corner.”

As soon as they had landed at the Gate, little Florine would say in loud, clear Tones that would carry as far as the Sitting-Room Window, “Oh, Mr. Gilblitz, I have had a most charming Evening, and I wish to thank you most heartily.”

Whereupon the Escort, standing 8 Feet away, with his Concertina Hat in his Hand and the Face in the Moonlight beaming with child-like Innocence, would come back thusly: “It’s awfully good of you to say that. Good Night.”

Million Dollar Trio

THE RECENT PROCTORS THEATRE visit of the hit show “Million Dollar Quartet” reminded me that the same sum had been bruited six years earlier in parallel context. The quartet comprised Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins in an unplanned meeting at the Sun Records studio in 1956. In 1950, Life Magazine gave the moniker “Million Dollar Trio” to pianist Arthur Rubinstein, violinist Jascha Heifetz, and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, who got together for a series of concerts and recordings. It was a short-lived association. Heifetz and Rubinstein quarreled, it’s said, over billing, although a film made of the group contains a staged argument that suggests it may have been for publicity purposes. In any event, it got me to dreaming what the Broadway show about this ensemble might be like . . .

                                                                                          

SCENE: RCA Studios, Hollywood, 1950. GREGOR PIATIGORSKY, a tall, handsome man, is warming up on the cello he dwarfs. Producer JACK PFEIFFER, newly hired and nervous, paces the floor.

PFEIFFER: If they show up too late to record, it’s my butt that’s on the line.
PIATIGORSKY: Calm down, my friend. They’ll be here. Let me remind you why we’re here. 

(PIATIGORSKY plays Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. As the final movement concludes, ARTHUR RUBINSTEIN enters, with young, lovely JOHANNA MARTZY on his arm.)

RUBINSTEIN (Applauding): Beautiful, beautiful, Grisha!
PIATIGORSKY (Stands and bows): But it is no match for the beauty of this delightful creature! Introduce us quickly, Arthur, and I will say nothing to your wife.
RUBINSTEIN (Sotto voce): It would have been better, my friend, had you said nothing about my wife. (Full voice:) This is Johanna. She is very exotic, from Transylvania, and her violin playing is angelic and sublime.
PFEIFFER: A violinist!
RUBINSTEIN: This business is fickle. You might need her talent today.

Good News!

Lily Whiteman Makes the Pageant Semi-Finals
Miss New York Teen | 20 January 2013 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Well, Virginia, It’s Like This . . .

From the Vault Dept.: Asked to contribute to a group of pieces about falsehoods, I titled this “Fuck You, Virginia,” but Metroland’s headline creator changed it, probably wisely, to what’s heading this column. It originally appeared when my daughter was six. Today she turns sixteen and knows too well about adults and their lies.

                                                                       

I WANTED TO BELIEVE everything they said, because they were older kids and they were my friends.

My nine-year-old next-door neighbor, Kurt, was predisposed to avoid six-year-olds like me. But I was a big kid, articulate and clever, able to keep up appearances with an older crowd. When Kurt’s buddies collected, however, I felt the shakiness of my acceptance. I was the handy tease victim, the invariable monkey-in-the-middle.

None of that dimmed my craving for acceptance. The ribbing seemed an easy price to pay. We lived in northern New Jersey, in a small town long since given over to the close-together housing of Manhattan-bound commuters. But there were earlier-age remnants, like the freestanding garage set back from each house, a garage where the family’s horse once lived.

We sat inside Kurt’s garage one day in early December, puffy in winter jackets. The conversation turned to Christmas.

“I’m getting a race car,” said Kurt, and others chimed in with their anticipations. “Santa’s getting me a rocket launcher,” I said, and the others giggled and traded knowing looks.

“Santa Claus is your parents,” one of the boys said.

“He is not!” My defense probably made me red-faced. The laugher swelled.

Computers in the Wings

From the Computer Vault Dept.: Computers were becoming a bigger-than-ever deal on Broadway in the mid-90s, so, as a writer for the then-gargantuan Computer Shopper magazine, I pitched a piece about examining the technology. I figured it would get me into some shows for free. I hadn’t met the misanthropes at Broadway’s PR agency, Boneau/Bryan-Brown. In other words, I figured wrong. Enjoy this glimpse into technology as obsolete now as it was new back then.

                                                                                         

COMPUTERS BRING DIFFERENT KINDS of pleasure to the different people involved with the Broadway stage. To the Disney designers who spent $11.9 million bringing “Beauty and the Beast” to life, the $5 million worth of computer equipment give a cinematic perfection – not to say wonder – to the many effects, helping justify a $65 ticket. Computers move 1,000 pieces of scenery; computers control the miking of 38 actors and 26 musicians. And when a computer doesn't work correctly and delays the show, those musicians may end up collecting overtime pay. Which makes the musicians very happy.

"Coffee Break," from the 1995
"How to Succeed" on Broadway

Malfunctions are comparatively rare, however, which is testimony to the design and operation skill behind technology that has transformed Broadway and is in the process of changing live theater all over the world.

Linda Batwin is a partner in the video design team of Batwin + Robin (working with Robin Silvestri), whose work in multimedia over the past 12 years has always included some amount of computerization. As the control hardware has grown smaller and faster, her work has moved from corporate communications to include the Broadway stage – most notably, the ground-breaking video backdrop to “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

Don’t Be Cruel

A PRE-SHOW PROJECTION reminds us that in December 1956, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley joined Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis in the Sun Records recording studio in Memphis, where they jammed for a considerable while while a tape recorder ran. But only the most naive would believe that the show that follows bears much resemblance to what actually took place.

Million Dollar Quartet plus one

“Million-Dollar Quartet” is the Hollywood version of the session, what MGM might have given us in its heyday. Turning what was a low-key jam session featuring Presley and Perkins and Lewis into a Grand Ole Opry-worthy concert in which Cash is also featured, along with Elvis’s fictitious girlfriend, a dancer-singer named Dyanne who purrs a sultry “Fever” in an arrangement that uncannily foreshadows Peggy Lee’s version by two years.

(A historical footnote is that, as this show was being developed, the publicity prompted Marilyn Evans to reveal herself as the woman whom Elvis took to the studio that day, and offer her own recollections of the event.)

Squalor in Las Vegas

Across the USA Dept.: Another installment from the series I wrote describing a cross-country camper-bus trip my wife and I took in 1989. This was written on 18 September 1989. Since then, the Desert Inn and the Sands are no more, the Aladdin is now Planet Hollywood, and a whole new strip of even more mega mega-hotels has opened.

                                                                               

SOME THINGS ARE CLICHÉD only from a distance. Up close you find you're dealing with the real thing. At a visitor's center in Las Vegas, where we stopped to pick up some brochures, three people rushed to the counter. A middle-aged man accompanied a young couple. He spoke with an Hispanic accent. He addressed a bored-looking clerk.

Las Vegas, 1989

“Can you tell me where we can get a marriage, tonight?”

The clerk, a woman who’d heard it all before, named three locations.

“How much will it cost?”

“They pick you up in a limousine and take you to the chapel, and that’s 45 dollars. The license and everything is 27 dollars. That’s a total of 73.”

He accepted her freewheeling math with a nod of the head, arrested as she continued: “Then it’s customary to tip the minister and the driver.”

“Do we need to have the limo?”

“Oh, it’s included.”

He translated for the others, then asked, “How much do you tip? We don’t want to do anything that isn’t right.”

Mad about W.

From the Pages of History Dept.: Today’s Inauguration festivities remind me of a far less happy event, twelve years ago, which I chronicled in a Metroland cover story.

                                                                                     

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

VOTERS IN WOODVILLE, FLORIDA, were stopped by highway patrol troopers at an unauthorized checkpoint as they tried to get to the polls. In the Tampa area, voters were illegally turned away when they couldn’t produce photo IDs. As Florida’s Attorney General’s Office continues to investigate these and many other incidents, no credible explanations have been offered. In Washington, D.C., last Saturday, police threw up a roadblock to prevent protesters from finishing a march along 14th Street to a permit-sanctioned place in Freedom Plaza, along the Pennsylvania Avenue inaugural parade route. D.C. Police Lt. William Farr offered this explanation: “We had to filter out the bad guys from the good guys.” This despite the fact that a permit also had been secured by protest organizers for the parade.

Spurred by the voting irregularites in Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush and pre-election issues such as campaign financing, abortion rights and the death penalty, protesters mobilized in impressive force to greet the Bush inaugural motorcade with howls of outrage – and to make their presence known throughout Washington, D.C., in a show of force that a CNN estimate put at far greater than the many thousands who clogged the streets in 1973 to protest Nixon’s inauguration and the Vietnam War.

What’s That You’re Eating?

From the Lab Dept.: Eight years ago, I looked at some cookbooks that celebrated scientific approaches to gastronomy. Since that time, Ferran Adrià’s el Bulli has closed and Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Restaurant barely survived a novovirus outbreak. Molecular gastronomy has yet to penetrate New York’s Capital Region, and I’m having a burger for lunch.

                                                                                  

REMEMBER THE SCENE in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” when astronauts Bowman and Poole had dinner on board their spaceship? They assembled the a meal from small trays yanked out of different compartments. The contents of each tray was nearly identical, except for color, and a stylized picture guide suggested the flavor that could be expected.

el Bulli photo by Francesc Guillamet

Like so much else in that film, this has come true: you’ll find it in the upper reaches of fine dining. But it’s not pasty simulacra that you’re served: it’s flavor essences, extracted and reimagined and reassembled in spectacular ways.

I’ve yet to find this in the Capital Region, but it’s emerging in the bigger, more adventurous cities. Forget tall food and no-carbs fads: we’re looking at foam and flavor gels as molecular gastronomy moves in. A quartet of new books offers insights into this surprising cuisine.

An impressive number of critics have named el Bulli, on the coast of Spain, as the world’s best, run by chef Ferran Adrià, who has won similar plaudits. But unless you have superb connections, a seat there is snagged only during a brief reservations-taking period in October, during which the restaurant receives hundreds of thousands more requests than it can accommodate.

This is Ridgefield

Late 1920s, about the time I moved there.

Cowboy Sweethearts

From the Vault Dept.: When, some sixteen years ago, my wife decided to acquire a horse and ride again regularly, it fell to me to groom the beast. So I expanded my vocal repertory to include songs appropriate to the process, and the CDs described below certainly helped. You can get “Cool Water” or “Whoopie-Ti-Yi-Yo” out of me with little prodding. 

                                                                                        

WHAT DO YOU LEARN from four CDs of cowboy songs? That there was – and still is, to an extent – a distinct cowboy song genre as American as jazz. That an important aspect of the American identity was mythologized in these songs. And that the genre exploded into popularity so quickly that it was glamorized by Hollywood and easily turned self-referential, so that in 1975, Rex Allen, Jr., could pay tribute to his country-singer dad with “Can You Hear Those Pioneers?,” including backup vocals by two of the then-current Sons of the Pioneers.

No group exemplifies the beauty and power of the cowboy sound better than the Sons of the Pioneers, well represented across all four volumes (seven cuts, as well as solo outings by Roy Rogers and Bob Nolan). The crisp close harmony and unabashed sentiment inspired all who followed, and if you get hooked on that sound there’s a four-CD Bear Family set that gives you a well-curated dose of them. And who ever yodeled in chorus so well? “Way Out There,” Nolan’s famous train song, still exemplifies all by itself the sound – and mystique – of the west.

Yodeling is a big part of this collection, beginning with Jimmie Rodgers’ “When the Cactus Is in Bloom.” Tex Owens’ “Cattle Call” is presented in its original version and in the famous Eddy Arnold cover; Patsy Montana (whom you heard on the soundtrack of the movie “Lone Star”) warbles through “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” and Riders in the Sky tell us “That’s How the Yodel Was Born,” among many other examples.

Fiddle Me This

MY FAMILY MOVED from New Jersey to Connecticut when I was seven, placing this scared second-grader in a big, unfamiliar school. Which decided to combat my classroom boredom, just as I was starting to make some friends, by skipping me into third grade. A feature of the new academic calendar was a twice-weekly trip to a windowless room where Edmond Finaldi taught music, possibly the most thankless of all academic challenges.

It was dull, complicated stuff, much at odds with the pop tunes in which I and my coevals were bathed, but Mr. Finaldi had a routine with which the other kids already were familiar: at the end of each class, he’d click open his violin case and play something. The favorite was Paul Nero’s novelty “The Hot Canary.”

I had no idea a musical instrument was capable of such thrilling sounds. My live-music experience before this consisted mainly of hearing my father play “Für Elise” and “Rondo alla Turca” on the piano. The violin sang far more thrillingly, especially when Mr. Finaldi swept a finger high up on the E string to sound the twittering harmonics of the canary’s voice. I was mesmerized. I couldn’t get enough of it.

The following school year, we were offered musical instrument training. I chose the violin. On the first day of lessons, I joined fifty other kids in the orchestra room where fifty rented violin cases waited. “Don’t open them,” said the harried young woman in charge of us, and fifty kids ignored her and flipped open a hundred latches and scraped fifty flabby bows over two hundred untuned strings. When she got us settled and tuned and scratching the A string, we realized that this thing was work. All traces of exoticism vanished.

Georgia on My Mind

From the Vault Dept.: The Ensemble Rustavi, which was founded in 1968 and is still going strong, paid its first visit to the U.S. in 1990, and a stop at Proctor’s in Schenectady was part of the tour. Here’s my report.

                                                                                    

JUST IMAGINE: YOU’RE THE toast of the village, being courted by the area boys. They gather with you on the green, each one cock o’ the walk, and proceed to dance for your attention, punctuating the movement by flinging daggers into the ground.

Ensemble Rustavi

You’d be impressed, right?

I don’t know if this actually was a courtship ritual of Soviet Georgia, but a stylized dance with those ingredients was part of a wide-ranging ethnic showcase by the Rustavi Company, a group taking its first American tour, that drew a large crowd to Proctor’s Theatre Thursday night.

Despite the many political changes that have afflicted the country over several centuries, a strong, homogenous national character prevails. Traditional costumes may not be seen on the streets any more, but the Rustavi Company, based in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, preserves that traditional flavor in dance, music and song.

A She Hamlet

Guest Blogger: William Dean Howells. In his day (and for a long while thereafter), Howells was known as “The Dean of American Letters.” Best known for his novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, he lived from 1837 to 1920, and began his literary career as an apprentice to his father, a printer. He read everything in his father’s library, teaching himself Spanish, German, French, and Italian along the way. He became editor of the (1871–81) of the Atlantic Monthly for a decade beginning in 1871, thereafter concentrating on his writing. We met Sarah Bernhardt last week in a Booth Tarkington short story inspired by her appearance in “L’Aiglon”; we’re going to meet her again, this time as Hamlet, in a Howells essay written with elegance but betraying terrible prejudices the admission of which had no consequence at the time.

                                                                                             

THE OTHER NIGHT as I sat before the curtain of the Garden Theatre and waited for it to rise upon the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt, a thrill of the rich expectation which cannot fail to precede the rise of any curtain upon any Hamlet passed through my eager frame. There is, indeed, no scene of drama which is of a finer horror (eighteenth-century horror) than that which opens the great tragedy. The sentry pacing up and down upon the platform at Elsinore under the winter night; the greeting between him and the comrade arriving to relieve him, with its hints of the bitter cold; the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus to these before they can part; the mention of the ghost, and, while the soldiers are in the act of protesting it a veridical phantom, the apparition of the ghost, taking the word from their lips and hushing all into a pulseless awe: what could be more simply and sublimely real, more naturally supernatural? What promise of high mystical things to come there is in the mere syllabling of the noble verse, and how it enlarges us from ourselves, for that time at least, to a disembodied unity with the troubled soul whose martyry seems foreboded in the solemn accents! As the many Hamlets on which the curtain had risen in my time passed in long procession through my memory, I seemed to myself so much of their world, and so little of the world that arrogantly calls itself the actual one, that I should hardly have been surprised to find myself one of the less considered persons of the drama who were seen but not heard in its course.

Best of Broadside

From the Vault Dept.: On 12 May 2013, a scant few days after he turns 94, Pete Seeger will perform at Proctors in Schenectady with his half-sister Peggy, in what’s not only a rare joint appearance, but a rare appearance for Pete at all. It’s part of the venerable Eighth Step series, founded in 1967 and going strong in its sixth year at Proctors. Here’s a look at a CD set featuring Seeger and many other artists who stopped by the Eighth Step over the years.

                                                                                 

FOLLOWING THEIR HUGELY SUCCESSFUL reissue of the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian’s archivists have come out with what is, in effect, a sequel: A five-CD set of songs (“Anthems of the American Underground,” as the set itself proclaims) drawn from (and recorded for) the magazine that sparked the great protest songs of the ’60s and kept the flame alive through the succeeding two decades.

It’s an amazing array of artists, many of them clearly influenced by the Smith collection. Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Eric Andersen, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Janis Ian and Nina Simone are among the featured youngsters, with contributions from older hands like Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds. And the force behind it all was the little magazine founded by Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, themselves longtime activists, that debuted in 1962 with the purpose of getting “songs about our times” into as many hands as possible.

Recordings soon followed, issued through the Folkways label, some recorded in that label’s studio, others captured by a low-fi Revere recorder in the Broadside office – which was nothing more than the apartment of Cunningham and Friesen. The sound quality of the 89 selections in this set is therefore very inconsistent, but nothing is downright poor. Whatever the source, they all carry a poignant sense of immediacy in the performance and the lyrics.

A Musical Money’s Worth

From the Vault Dept.: Last weekend, David Finckel and Wu Han returned to Union College’s Concert Series to play Brahms’s Cello Sonata in E Minor and, with Finckel’s former fellow Emersonian Philip Setzer, a pair of Dvořák piano trios. It was wonderful work. It was practically a full house. Yet there was a time when these artists were still making names for themselves, as this very old, very superficial, very brief review attests. (I’m guessing that I wrote something longer that was cut during layout, but, as it predates my computer ownership, the original was typewritten and driven into Albany.)

                                                                                

WITH THE “NAME” ARTISTS pricing themselves beyond the reach of budget-conscious halls and patrons, the Schenectady Museum-Union College concert series is a better investment than ever. It always finds very talented performers who aren’t so widely known.

David Finckel and Wu Han

In the case of last Saturday’s concert, you got more than your money’s worth: There was a pre-concert recital by pianist Wu Han playing music of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. During the concert proper, she was joined by cellist David Finckel (from the Emerson Quartet) for an exciting trip through the repertory for those instruments.

Finckel began his part of the evening with Bach’s Suite No. 2 for solo cello. A good performance of solo string music benefits greatly from the acoustics at Union’s Memorial Chapel: the notes linger long enough to fill out Bach’s abstract harmonic ideas. Finckel brought a warm romantic style to the music, without suffering the excesses of Casals, and it wasn’t merely a single-voiced warmth, for he gave special tone colors to the individual phrases of each of the movements.

Nice Hangout

Date and photographer unknown