Among the Gourmets

Striking Your Fancy Dept.: The Fancy Food Show is back in Manhattan, its first revisit since 2010. I’m about to step into the giddy morass of specialty treats, putting me in mind of the last time I visited, as described below.

                                                                                                 

THEY WERE AS DIFFERENT as chocolate and cheese, the items on display at the 55th annual Fancy Food Show in Manhattan’s Jacob Javits Center earlier this week, but they had in common a handmade determination. The 2,400 companies with products on view thus tried to straddle the concepts of corporate production and small-batch precision.

Photo by Lily Whiteman

Tapestry chocolates, for instance, is an 18-month-old offshoot of Daffin’s Candies, which started more than a century ago as a small Ohio retailer and now has a series of shops in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Tapestry displayed an all-new range of tasty items that included toffee, mint and peanut butter melt-aways, chocolate-covered pretzels, and good old gourmet-styled chocolate bars with the likes of caramel or peanut butter within.

“We’re introducing everything here,” said spokesman Stan Lefes, making sure we enjoyed a range of samples. “But because this is a higher-end product, we’re looking to get into specialty retail stores.”

Chefs in the Making

Culinary students, CIA, Hyde Park, NY
21 June 2013 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

A Helluva “Town”

Tars in Bars Dept.: The world woke up to the phenomenon of Leonard Bernstein in 1943, when he made his conducting debut with the NY Philharmonic as an emergency replacement for an ailing Bruno Walter. It was a nationally broadcast triumph that landed him, the following day, on the front page of the NY Times. He was already working on the ballet “Fancy Free,” a commission from Jerome Robbins, a newly hired dancer with Ballet Theatre, which premiered the following April to great acclaim. Oliver Smith, who’d created the ballet’s scenic designed, proposed that Robbins’s basic idea, of three sailors on a 24-hour shore leave, could be turned into a musical. “On the Town” hit Broadway at the very end of 1944.

                                                                                                      

THE BARRINGTON STAGE PRODUCTION of “On the Town” is one of the finest revivals you’re likely to see in a long, long while. Director John Rando prepared for it in the best possible way: by directing the successful 2008 City Center Encores! production, from which he also brought the show’s emotional center, Tony Yazbeck, who plays the lovelorn sailor Gabey with heartbreaking intensity.

Elizabeth Stanley, Clyde Alves, Deanna Doyle,
Tony Yazbeck, Alysha Umphress and
Jay Armstrong Johnson. Photo by Kevin Sprague

Why does the show work so well? The obvious answer is Bernstein’s score. This was the first of a threesome of hit shows culminating in “West Side Story,” and it’s the most traditionally musical-theatery of them. If it seems at times like a revue, that’s not surprising – librettists Betty Comden and Adolph Green were alumni of a Greenwich Village nightclub act called The Revuers, and knew how to craft material with sophistication and wit.

Much to the annoyance of conductor Serge Koussevitzy, one of Bernstein’s mentors, the young composer was as comfortable with clubs and theater and pop songs and jazz as he was with the classics, and Bernstein unselfconsciously informed “On the Town” with rambunctious, brassy, syncopated music, while giving the score (particularly the ballet numbers) more orchestral complexity than Broadway was accustomed to hearing – what the show’s original director, George Abbott, termed “Prokofiev stuff.”

Cattle Prods and Coffin Nails

Heigh-Ho, Opera! Dept.: Although current Glimmerglass Opera artistic director Francesa Zambello has a reputation for high-concept stagings, her time in Cooperstown has curbed many of the excesses described in the review below. I anticipate the current season, therefore, with great eagerness.

                                                                                  

AS THE LIEBESVERBOT OVERTURE churns to its finish, Ryan MacPherson, as Luzio, sashays in front of the curtain and Elvis-ishly gyrates as he plays with his Elvis-like hair. He lights a (stage effect) gasper; he zips his fly. Which welcomes us to another phallo-centric Glimmerglass Opera version of a piece that either should have been treated with more respect or left to molder in deserved obscurity.

Juliet Petrus, Richard Cox,
Mark Schnaible, and Ryan MacPherson
Photo by Cory Weaver / Glimmerglass Opera

Das Liebesverbot was Wagner’s second finished opera, a piece inspired by (but rewritten from) Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. We’re shifted from Vienna to Palermo, but the new Regent, Friedrich (Mark Schnabile) remains, in Wagner’s words, “as German as possible.” He is on a campaign to shut down all entertainment, and has death-sentenced the unfortunate Claudio (Richard Cox) pursuing “free love” with his girlfriend – who, in the original, has borne him a child. But wait.

Wagner termed this a comedy, and there are flashes of Rossini-esque merriment here and there. But the piece has a somber center that unconvincingly anticipates Rienzi, its successor. John Conklin’s stage design makes excellent use of Glimmerglass’s unifying unit, which suggests Shakespeare’s Globe, but it’s put in the context of German Expressonist look that also informs costumes and lighting, making it seem at times that you’ve stumbled into Wozzeck.

Single Girls Guide

Say It with Music Dept.: We can’t have too many musicals, and with Albany’s Capital Repertory Theatre set to premiere The Sparkley Clean Funeral Singers by Lori Fischer and Don Chaffer July 9-Aug. 4, I’m recollecting another recent musical premiere there.

                                                                                          

IT’S A NOVEL APPROACH to Women’s History Month. Send Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse 150 years into the future, where she practices her matchmaking by toiling as an agony aunt – Auntie Agatha, to be specific, a long-dead Dear Abby whose column she ghosts. True to the 1960s zeitgeist (and the spirit of Helen Gurley Brown), she knows there can be more to a woman’s life than mere marriage and seeks to liberate her readership of housewives from social and sexual oppression.

Photo by Joseph Schuyler

The Single Girls Guide is an intimate (nine-actor) musical that romps through the era with a Brill Building sound, but which, thanks to skillfully written songs by Tommy Newman, doesn’t imprison itself therein. For every number with period licks and doo-wop echoes, there’s one with a more complex musical-theater construction – such as the opening, “Dear Auntie Agatha,” where every needed aspect of time, place and character is nailed even as a trio of Housewives pulls off Newman’s tricky cascade of overlapping lyrics.

And that only serves to introduce Kate Loprest as the redoubtable Emma, staring at us with steely eyes (under a red bouffant) across her typewriter, lamenting that the advice she gives only serves to make a woman a cross “between June Cleaver and Anne Boleyn.” She wants to be taken seriously as a reporter, to do “Something Important” with her life, “instead of wasting away every day giving answers/Like which fork and how to hold your knife.”

The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven

Guest Blogger Dept.: This is the first longer-than-a-quatrain poem I memorized, probably around the age of twelve. I was fascinated by the language, having never encountered such virtuoso rhyming before. Its author, Guy Wetmore Carryl (1873-1904), was by ambition a novelist, but if his reputation persists at all, it’s for the light verse that appeared in such periodicals as Life (the pre-Luce humor magazine), Harper’s, Collier’s, and many others, collected in such books as Grimm Tales Made Gay and the in which the piece below appeared, Fables for the Frivolous, published in 1898. Other delightful poems of his include “The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet,” “How Jack Found that Beans May Go Back on a Chap,” and “How Rudeness and Kindness Were Justly Rewarded.”

                                                                                                  

Drawing by Peter Newell

A RAVEN SAT upon a tree,
And not a word he spoke, for
His beak contained a piece of Brie,
Or, maybe, it was Roquefort:
We'll make it any kind you please –
At all events, it was a cheese.

Beneath the tree’s umbrageous limb
A hungry fox sat smiling;
He saw the raven watching him,
And spoke in words beguiling.
“J’admire,” said he, “ton beau plumage.”
(The which was simply persiflage.)

Two things there are, no doubt you know,
To which a fox is used:
A rooster that is bound to crow,
A crow that’s bound to roost,
And whichsoever he espies
He tells the most unblushing lies.

Backyard Musical Talent Ignored

Sadly Prescient Dept.: We roll back to 1984, near the start of my reviewing career. It took me but a few forays into the world of classical-music performances to realize how anti-provincial was the Albany area’s provincialism. At the time of Pola Baytelman’s Union College recital, reviewed below, she was an instructor at the college. She has since become Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Saratoga’s Skidmore College, where she gave the 2006 Moseley Lecture-Recital, which is quite an honor.

                                                                          

Pola Baytelman

THERE SEEMS TO BE a reverse chauvinism at work among the classical nusic audience, causing them to disregard local, established talent in favor of the headline artist who blows into town for a very fat fee. It’s the audience’s loss. Where do they think those headliners come from but areas very much like this one, culturally rich enough to allow (if not to patronize) burgeoning talent?

A recital by pianist Pola Baytelman at the Union College Memorial Chapel in.Schenectady had, sadly, none of the crowd which throngs the chamber music series there. They missed a splendid concert.

Ms. Baytelman is a piano instructor at Union. She also is a concert artist who has appeared in concert halls and with orchestras all over the world; given the polish and brio she gave to Tuesday’s performance, it is easy to understand why.

The opening selections, from “Iberia” by Isaac Albeniz, are evocations of his native Spain. The first is titled, appropriately, “Evocacion”; the second, “Fete-Dieu a Seville,” depicts the Festival of Corpus Christi. They are romantic pieces that benefitted from Ms. Baytelman’s ability to draw out the emotional content, although in the second piece she tended to get so expressive that the march-like character lost its impact in the more raucous sections.

Sunday Morning Breakfast Time

Counting on Calories Dept.: “For it’s Sunday morning breakfast time, / A time all men adore. / Why don’t the poets go into rhyme / And rave about it more?” – Cole Porter, from Jubilee (1935). I did what I could, Mr. Porter, albeit in prose.

                                                                                          

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BREAKFAST? It was supposed to be the most important meal of the day – according to the staff of the Mayo Clinic, it “refuels your body, jump-starts your day and may even benefit your overall health” – yet we now honor that concept by throwing carb-laden crap into ourselves or, worse, skipping the damn thing entirely.

In which case, you’re denying yourself a slew of benefits that the Mayo docs go on to detail. “When you eat a healthy breakfast,” they advise, “you're more likely to eat more vitamins and minerals, eat less fat and cholesterol, have better concentration and productivity throughout the morning, control your weight and have lower cholesterol, which may reduce your risk of heart disease.”

They’re not talking about an Egg McMuffin, I suspect. Although that critter is supposed to weigh in at 300 calories, you’ve got 12 grams of fat, 260 mg cholesterol and nearly a gram of salt.

They Say It's Your Birthday!

Late June 1985 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

The Days, My Friend

Gazette’s Loss Dept.: In 1990 the idea was floated around the Schenectady Gazette that I might merit a column. I wrote a few samples for the arts editor. Nothing ever came to fruition. I’ve posted other examples here and here; below is a piece depressingly prescient. Since the departure of Charles Dutoit as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Saratoga-season music director, the programming has grown more ridiculous still. (But you can see Dutoit conduct the BSO at Tanglewood this summer Aug. 3, 4, and 6.)

                                                                                

I'M BETTING THAT Charles Dutoit is going to give the Saratoga Performing Arts Center the musical personality it needs. It’s been touch and go since Eugene Ormandy died, a man whose charisma may have been exceeding his conducting ability towards the end.

Charles Dutoit

The Dennis Russell Davies interlude of the past few summers was a proud and exciting period, forcing a bemused crowd of racing enthusiasts to confront the works of such non-mainstream composers as Lou Harrison and Philip Glass and William Bolcolm (guys still alive, yet).

Brahms and Schubert and Beethoven were in there, too, so as not to make the name-chasers too nervous. Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma have been tossed at us fairly regularly because it’s nice to see someone live whom you’ve seen on Johnny Carson.

But Dutoit has already been making comments in the same wild, no-nonsense manner he adopts with the baton. Confronted with the charge that this summer’s programming for the Philadelphia Orchestra at SPAC is too heavily weighted with warhorses, he tossed the ball right back to Philadelphia.

At Home

From the Bookshelf Dept.: Bill Bryson has a new book coming out in October. One Summer: America 1927 looks at that particular point in time to chart the overlapping stories of such luminaties as Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Shipwreck Kelly, Herbert Hoover, and even Silent Calvin Coolidge. I trust Bryson to pull this one off with ease. After all, he wove a fascinating book out of nothing more than a look at his own house, as described in my 2011 review.

                                                                                      

I KNEW THAT FALLING DOWN your own stairs at some point is nearly inevitable. I knew that it can be lethal, especially to oldsters. I didn’t know that you can blame the staircase for it. Thanks to Bill Bryson’s relentless exploration of his living space – an old rectory in eastern England – I’ve learned that “unmarried people are more likely to fall than married people, and previously married people fall more than most of those.”

As for the stairs themselves: “Poor lighting, absence of handrails, confusing patterns on the treads, risers that are unusually high or low, treads that are unusually wide or narrow, and landings that interrupt the rhythm of ascent or descent are the principal design faults that lead to accidents.”

Having chronicled such activities as a trek along the Appalachian Trail and a trek across Australia, not to mention giving us A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling Bryson had turned his engaging voice and penchant for obsessive research to the taken-for-granted aspects of life at home.

Specifically, his home, which means that we’re treated to the particulars of a time and place unique to Bryson’s life but offering resonance for anyone who’s ever wondered how the rituals and appurtenances of life at home developed.

Soaring

Guest Blogger Dept.: Once again, Booth Tarkington takes the blogger seat, with an excerpt from one of his most famous novels, Penrod. Young Penrod is in a classroom, suffering the droning of the imperious Miss Spence. He has amused himself by dipping the pigtails of Victorine, the girl who sits in front of him, in the inkwell of his desk; he has recollected the inspiringly melodramatic adventures he enjoyed during a recent, illicit trip to a picture-show. But it’s more challenging still to escape the tortures of mathematics. Enjoy this journey back to the first decade of the last century.

                                                                                           

Drawing by Gordon Grant

HALF THE MEMBERS OF THE CLASS passed out to a recitation-room, the empurpled Victorine among them, and Miss Spence started the remaining half through the ordeal of trial by mathematics. Several boys and girls were sent to the blackboard, and Penrod, spared for the moment, followed their operations a little while with his eyes, but not with his mind; then, sinking deeper in his seat, limply abandoned the effort. His eyes remained open, but saw nothing; the routine of the arithmetic lesson reached his ears in familiar, meaningless sounds, but he heard nothing; and yet, this time, he was profoundly occupied. He had drifted away from the painful land of facts, and floated now in a new sea of fancy

Maturity forgets the marvellous realness of a boy’s day-dreams, how colourful they glow, rosy and living, and how opaque the curtain closing down between the dreamer and the actual world. That curtain is almost sound-proof, too, and causes more throat-trouble among parents than is suspected.

Bolder Baroque

Liner Notes Dept.: Another in the series of program notes I wrote for Dorian Recordings, this one for a CD by the sixteen-piece Boulder Brass – Colorado based and still going strong. The CD is out of print, but this will get you started.

                                                                                             

Birth of the Brass

THE SOUND OF A brass ensemble summons an image of ceremonial splendor. If you see it set within the stratospherically vaulted sanctuary of an ornate cathedral, then you’re enjoying an image that also suits the beginnings of the brass ensemble, which first gained prominence backing Venetian choirs at the turn of the 17th century.

If the powers that were in pre-Baroque Rome had their way, no instruments ever would be allowed to intrude into the churches. Fortunately, 250 miles north of Rome in Venice, the situation was different. Venice was a freer, more adventurous city, and that included musical attitudes. Venetian composers welcomed instruments into the churches, none more enthusiastically than Giovanni Gabrieli.

We’re still a couple of centuries shy of the birth of the modern brass ensemble, but Gabrieli’s tone-painting, in combining instrumental and vocal forces – often multiple sets of them – paved the way. Unfortunately, not many instruments were as versatile as the voice back then. Keyboards, of course, and fretless strings, but of the brass family only the trombone could alter its pitch as readily as a singer. Trumpets and other horns were rudimentary, valveless, capable only of  natural harmonics.

Straw Hat Circuitry

Summer on the Boards Dept.: Once upon a time, summer was the season of an incredible array of plays presented in repertory at venues seemingly everywhere. While the number of such things has dwindled, the greater Albany area teems with promise – if you don’t mind driving to Massachusetts and Vermont and beyond. And you shouldn’t. Here are a couple of shows I reviewed at theaters that still, 26 years later, are going strong.

                                                                                        

OSCAR WILDE'S The Importance of Being Earnest meets Noël Coward's This Happy Breed in a new play at the Dorset Theatre Festival. Thom Thomas wrote Without Apologies as a whimsical suggestion of what may have happened to the main characters of Earnest some two-score years later.

And so, surprisingly, Algy is married to Gwen and Earnest has wed Cecily – not what we were led to expect as the curtain went down in 1899.

Furthermore, Algy and Gwen are making do in a smallish house in a not entirely fashionable part of London with octogenarian Lady Bracknell tucked into an upstairs room except for her weekly pilgrimage downstairs to listen to the wireless. And they let rooms to a lodger, a musician.

Into this set-up come Earnest and Cecily and their blowsy, 30-year-old daughter, Brenda, desperate for lodgings.

Byron’s Listening Den

Cool & Strange Dept.: I had the pleasure of contributing to Dana Countryman’s Cool & Strange Music! Magazine during its brief, glorious run. I wrote features about song-poems and Ian Whitcomb, and also contributed CD reviews. Here’s a pair of unlikely reviews from Issue #15.

                                                                                         

Louis Philippe: Delta Kiss/Sunshine
CDMRED 156
Cherry Red Records

An industry unto himself, Louis Philippe shares a moniker with pre-Revolution French royalty and a singing style with countless Vegas crooners who warble with Wayne Newton-esque intensity.

“Delta Kiss” and “Sunshine” put two ten-year-old albums in one two-disc CD package, and they’re two of Philippe’s more relentlessly pop excursions, with lots of easygoing percussion, not-at-all-bashful use of echo, and the Covent Garden String Orchestra for that extra taste of smoothness.

"Anything Goes"

Singing at Proctors Theatre on Cole Porter's birthday.
Photo by Patrick Dodson/Schenectady Gazette.

In Praise of Counsel

Poetry Slam Dept.: Not that I haven't enjoyed my time on the alienist's couch, but it does seem as if we're lately unable to function in any capacity whatsoever without the salve of such sessions. At least that's how it seemed when I wrote this several years ago.

                                                                                   

(To the tune of “McNamara’s Band”)

O, MY BROTHER tried some fratricide when I was only three,
My father changed my underwear, my mother watched me pee;
I had a hunch I’d hate the bunch for what I’ve undergone,
But now that I’m in counseling, I know I led them on!

There’s a counselor for him and her, and one for little Jane;
There’s one for when you’re happy and there’s one if you’re in pain;
And on the street you’re bound to meet a counselor or two,
They counsel one another when there’s nothing else to do!

It’s a splendid thing, this counseling, it crawls into your mind,
You never know what secrets all the counseling will find;
What Doctor A may say today is like the third degree,
And then it’s contradicted when you talk to Doctor B!

O, it feels so good I'd hope you would consider what I say,
And find yourself a counselor to talk to every day
To ease your pain and dull your brain and make the world look nice –
Consider me a counselor, now take my damn advice!

– 24 January 2005

Danny Rides Again

Once and Future Jazz Dept.: Dan Levinson is as protean a talent as they come in the jazz reeds department. He plays regular gigs in the NYC area, as the schedule on his website indicates, and every recording of his I’ve heard is a winner. He has performed in the Capital Region many times; here’s my account of small-group concert in 2005.

                                                                                        

BY THE TIME THE BAND got to “Fidgety Feet,” they were in such a swinging groove that each solo topped the one that came before, topped it in inventiveness, intensity and that looseness of rhythm that would give any metronome a nervous breakdown.

Dan Levinson | 30 September 2005
Photo by Andrzej Pilarczyk

Dan Levinson is a Manhattan-based clarinet and sax player with a passion for vintage jazz and the chops to play any of it in any style. At Friday night’s performance as part of Schenectady’s “A Place for Jazz” series, he sounded like Goodman, he sounded like Pee Wee Russell, he even, during his solo in “Satanic Blues,” aped the style of Sidney Bechet without the nervous vibrato. And that was just on clarinet.

Protean though his playing can be, he also sounds like Levinson, a player who has assimilated those classic styles and sees them through a post-bop lens. He can reharmonize a solo in a surprising way (although it’s arguable that Bix Beiderbecke already was doing that in 1924). As a leader, he assembled a septet of some of the finest players from his neighborhood and ours and led them through a series of tight, tricky arrangements paying tribute to a group that performed and recorded together for one year only, in 1939.

. . . And Everything Nice

From the Spice Rack Dept.: My kitchen is a wonderland of herbs and spices, from the commonplace to the exotic, expanding each time I experiment with a new cuisine or pass another street-fair display of possibilities. Here’s my 2006 disquisition on the topic.

                                                                                        

SPRING CLEANING, in my house, starts in the kitchen. Even as I’m tossing out crusty old jars of Gulden’s and those desiccated piles of capers that collect in the corner of the fridge, I’m considering the most formidable of my culinary battlegrounds: the spice cabinet, which also serves as an extended pantry.

Street Fair, NYC | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

It’s a cabinet not far from the stove (bad idea number one: storing the spices near heat), with three shelves of herbs and spices, tea and powders in a mish-mash of old jam jars, tiny Tupperware caskets and crumpled glassine bags. They’re arranged in something that once was alphabetical order, a habit I’d might as well confess to, but that order deteriorates with each fancy meal.

Consider, first, the herbs and spices. I grew up, as you probably did, with a spice rack in the kitchen, a rack that boasted a dozen and a half identical containers cheerfully labeled and faded with age – especially the spices themselves. For years I thought paprika was a tasteless powder of dull orange, and didn’t see its brilliant redness until I got into the restaurant business.

My American Diary

Guest Blogger Dept.: Here’s a curio by Noël Coward, the first chapter of Terribly Intimate Portraits, published in the U.S. in 1922, reworking material from A Withered Nosegay, published earlier that year in the U.K., and adding what’s below. I won’t annotate the references because you should do your own damn research.

                                                                                         

SATURDAY

Noël Coward, author of My American Diary
Drawing by Lorn MacNaughtan

I felt that some sort of scene was necessary in order to celebrate my first entrance into America, so I said “Little lamb, who made thee?” to a customs official. A fracas ensued far exceeding my wildest dreams, during which he delved down – with malice aforethought – to the bottom of my trunk and discovered the oddest things in my sponge bag. I think I'm going to like America.

I have very good letters to Daniel Blood, Dolores Hoofer, Senator Pinchbeck, Violet Curzon-Meyer, and Julia Pescod, so I ought to get along all right socially at any rate.

It would be quite impossible to give an adequate description of one’s first glimpse of Broadway at night – I should like to have a little pocket memory of it to take out and look at whenever I feel depressed. I shall feel awfully offended for Piccadilly Circus when I get back.

God! How I love frosted chocolate!