Reverenza!

From the Vault Dept.: My list of favorite operas is headed by Verdi’s “Falstaff.” My list of favorite performances includes Richard McKee’s turn as the lusty knight, performed with the Lake George Opera in 1990. Here’s my review.

                                                                                

Verdi’s “Falstaff” is a transitional work that masks its forward-thinking character with an incredibly bubbly humor. On the surface it looks like a bass-baritone’s tour de force. Dig a little deeper and you discover an ensemble piece to which everyone must give of their best_especially the conductor.

David Kellett, Richard McKee, and Gary Aldrich
Photo by Rusty Ridell

Revived by the Lake George Opera Festival Saturday night, it brought back Richard McKee, star of the 1976 production. This is a man who was born to sing Falstaff, and if, as I suspect, God has a taste for Italian opera, McKee’s tasks in Heaven will include frequent performances of this piece.

And because there are only two more performances – 8 p.m. Wednesday and Friday – you really should ignore the rest of this review and just order yourself some tickets. This is the kind of performance that will delight all fans of good musical theater and could even make an opera-loving convert out of you.

One secret is to have a great Falstaff, of course, but there’s much more. What’s transitional about the piece is that it looked beyond the tradition (helped by Verdi) of opera as a bunch of big moments to a more dramatically-unified style. That Verdi should have chosen a comedy to accomplish this is an even greater testimony to his genius.

One That Got Away

Per yesterday's post, not everybody I sought to interview accepted that request. But none turned me down as charmingly as Peter De Vries, whom I invited to be interviewed on radio back in the days when I did that.

Shearing Delight

From the Vault Dept.: There were several years during which I interviewed an impressive parade of talent in various worlds of music and theater, and most of those conversations were pleasant, if usually perfunctory, experiences. But I remember George Shearing as by far the kindest, most accessible interview subject of all. Wish I’d been given a longer word-count for the piece.

                                                                                         

AT FIRST, IT SEEMS AS IF GEORGE SHEARING is going to be all business. But when you talk to the renowned jazz pianist for any length of time you hear his sly sense of humor sneak through. “The first thing you probably want to know is how a show like this gets put together,” he says. He’s speaking by telephone from Manhattan, anticipating tomorrow’s (Friday, April 12) Proctor’s Theatre concert titled “A Gathering of Friends.”

George Shearing | Photo by Andy Baker

“First Joe Pass comes out and does a half-hour of solo guitar. A half hour of solo guitar?” Shearing echoes his statement with mock astonishment. “Yes. We figure if it’s good enough for Segovia, it’s good enough for Joe. Then (bassist) Neil Swenson and I go out and do the remainder of the first half. We take an intermission and then Neil and Joe Williams’ drummer go out together and then Joe and I go out and do some numbers. Then I have the privilege of bringing Joe Pass out again for a big finale with all five of us working.”

The quintet has been touring this show for the past few months, just now making its way along the east coast. The program has become fairly well set along the way, “although we probably have a choice in each segment for one or two substitutions here or there. That’s at the discretion of the performers – one of the Joes or me.”

It's a Battlefield

THEATER OFFERS AN IMMERSIVE POTENTIAL that even the most ambitious 3D IMAX presentation can’t touch, based on the presence of living actors in a real-time realization of the conflicts and joy that inform all lives.

Sipiwe Moyo and Tricia Alexandro
Photo by Enrico Spada

Director Kristen van Ginhoven’s realization of “In Darfur” placed the troubling play in the midst of an audience seated on barstools and lawn chairs of varying height, the construction-site set dressed with the flimsiest of props and flats and halogen lamps. We were encouraged to enter early to accustom ourselves to the environment; we would not be allowed in if late.

Amidst the nervous pre-show chatter, one couple set themselves up with charming equanimity in a front-row pair of low chairs, each with a Sunday NY Times section, looking for all the world as if they were on the nearby Tanglewood lawn. Unwittingly, they embodied the type for whom Times reporter Maryke (Tricia Alexandro) is struggling to get a story about the genocide she has witnessed in Darfur on the coveted front page.

Playwright Winter Miller was herself a Times reporter who accompanied Nicholas Kristof to that part of Africa in 2006. She shrewdly fashioned a work that exemplifies the horrors of the slaughter through its effects on a handful of people – chief among them Hawa (Sipiwe Moyo), a university-educated Darfur native who teaches English but is swept up in the atrocities committed by government-sponsored terrorists.

The Making of a Red

Guest Blogger Dept.: Noting how vigorous a role unreasoning fear played in yesterday’s election results, I have invited Robert Benchley to address a threat that might even be worse than ebola.

                                                                                             

Robert Benchley

YOU COULDN’T HAVE ASKED for anyone more regular than Peters. He was an eminently safe citizen. Although not rich himself, he never chafed under the realization that there were others who possessed great wealth. In fact, the thought gave him rather a comfortable feeling. Furthermore, he was one of charter members of the war. Long before President Wilson saw the light, Peters was advocating the abolition of German from the public-school curriculum. There was, therefore, absolutely nothing in his record which would in the slightest degree alter the true blue of a patriotic litmus. And he considered himself a liberal when he admitted that there might be something in this man Gompers, after all. That is how safe he was.

But one night he made a slip. It was ever tiny a slip, but in comparison with it De Maupassant’s famous piece of string was barren of consequences. Shortly before the United States entered the war, Peters made a speech at a meeting of the Civic League in his home town. His subject was “Interurban Highways: Their Development in the Past and Their Possibilities for the Future.” So far, 100 percent American. But, in the course of his talk, he happened to mention the fact that war, as an institution, has almost always had an injurious effect on public improvements of all kinds. In fact (and note this well – the government’s sleuth in the audience did) he said that, all other things being equal, if he were given his choice of war or peace in the abstract, he would choose peace as a condition under which to live. Then he went on to discuss the comparative values of macadam and wood blocks for paving.

Votes for Sale

The Play Within

ALFRED HITCHCOCK FAMOUSLY TOLD Francois Truffaut that he regretted the flashback he put in the movie “Stage Fright.” It showed an incident one of the characters was describing, but the character was lying. As Hitchcock discovered, it left audiences feeling betrayed.

Caroline Calkins, Elizabeth 'Lily' Cardaropoli,
Marcus Kearns, and Luke Reed.
Photo by Enrico Spada.

The play “Private Eyes” has stories to tell – stories that usurp one another and contradict one another even as they build on one another in pursuit of the elusive concept called “truth.” It’s set in the world of theater – giving us theater within a theater, in other words – in which what’s played out in the play-within-a-play can return as the action of the play itself. (Not surprisingly, “Stage Fright” also is set in the theater world.)

It’s a relatively light-hearted romp, with the issue of marital infidelity at its core. Matthew and Lisa are actors who are married to one another, although the opening scene gives us Matthew auditioning Lisa, as if she’s a stranger. Luke Reed and Caroline Calkins portray the couple, and it’s a credit to their acting skill (and direction by Jonathan Croy) that the plausibility and complexity of their relationship deepens as the script’s many reversals begin to kick in.

Enchanted Night

From the Bookshelf Dept.: I ran into Steven Millhauser at a pizza joint near Saratoga Springs a couple of years ago – he still teaches at Skidmore – but I hadn’t the courage to actually buttonhole him and reveal myself as a fan of his work. I probably should have. How often do authors of literary fiction get recognized in public. Here’s a piece I wrote the after seeing him in person the first time.

                                                                                            

THE NEW YORK STATE WRITERS INSTITUTE quietly launched its summer series of workshops, lectures and readings at Skidmore College with an appearance by Steven Millhauser, author of “Edwin Mullhouse,” who read from that novel and a collection of short stories.

Steven Millhauser
Photo by Jerry Bauer

And did nothing else.

The 50-minute presentation was as rich as it was terse: not the usual style of this Institute, which provokes writers into conversation – often to the speaker’s stultification. Millhauser, a tall, thin man with a shiny dome of a forehead and authorial mustache, is a writer, not an actor, but he’s a splendid writer whose words become festival enough to embellish a somewhat dry manner of presentation.

“Edwin Mullhouse” (properly, “Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright”) is a delightfully weird novel that spoofs academic biography as we hear Jeffrey’s account of the short life of his gifted friend, Edwin. With its zestfully-rendered detail and luxuriant wit, it’s been compared to the English-language work of Nabokov. In many ways it resembles Nabokov’s funniest novel, “Pale Fire,” another purported biography comprising the wild plundering of a lengthy poem for clues to the poet’s life.

Lily Reflects

25 October 2014 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

A Hallowe’en Story

From the Crypt Dept.: Back, back, back to the days when Metroland Magazine passed off my fiction as serious writing, and a tale cobbled from a few stray incidents. The dogs, by the way, were Bassett Hounds.

                                                                                                  

SURE, I'D YEAR AFTER YEAR anticipated donning costume and mask and shaking the neighbors down for sweets each October 31st, but there comes a time in a fellow’s life when he has to put away childish things and assume a man’s estate. This happened to me one particular Hallowe’en that I remember too well. I was ten.

My little brother (a skinny, whiny, conniving wretch with a permanently runny nose and voice like a rusty screen door) was going out yet again in a clown suit, a costume he adopted annually with little change in makeup. We were invited to finish our trick-or-treating at the home of Arnold Winterhaven, the spoiled kid who lived at the end of my street with a family that “summered abroad” each year to the disgust of my parents and their friends.

Still, “If Arnold wants you to go to his house,” my mother said, “I really think you should. That way I won’t have to feed you dinner.”

Mom was a quiet believer in the redistribution of wealth, and if she couldn’t practice overt socialism, the least we kids could do to oblige her was to scrounge a few meals off the rich.

Music for Postmoderns

WHAT MAKES TAYLOR SWIFT’S song “Shake It Off” turns out to be Swift herself. Had my initial exposure to it been video-free, sparing me from the sight of her song-long hissy fit, I might have warmed a bit more to the piece, but YouTube is the too-easy music-finder these days. It’s also where I discovered the Postmodern Jukebox cover of that song, a single-camera recording in one long take, where the song is transformed into Motown-inflected R&B thanks to crooner Von Smith, brass and backup singers, and the high-energy arrangement by keyboard wizard Scott Bradlee.

Postmodern Jukebox
Photo by Michael Webber

Not surprisingly, this was the program closer at PMJ’s Capital Region debut, a performance at the Tory Music Hall last Saturday. The variously sized ensemble has rocketed to fame over the past year thanks to its unprepossessing but compelling videos, and is in the midst of a tour taking them around the country and beyond.

Bradlee is a protean jazzsmith, moving easily from stride to funk, as dynamic a soloist as he is comfortable in the ensemble. His arrangements for that ensemble – clarinet, trombone, bass, and drums for the Troy date – capture not only the spirit of particular moments in pop music’s history, but also an aggregation of styles; thus, he might punctuate a straight-ahead rhythm and blues with a spare Basie-inflected break.

Symptom Recital

Guest Blogger Dept.: Sometimes mere 
words aren't enough to describe a 
complicated state of mind. In the hands 
of a master versifier, however, 
sometimes they are.

                                                                                         

I do not like my state of mind; 
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind. 
I hate my legs, I hate my hands, 
I do not yearn for lovelier lands. 
I dread the dawn's recurrent light; 
I hate to go to bed at night. 
I snoot at simple, earnest folk. 
I cannot take the simplest joke. 
I find no peace in paint or type. 
My world is but a lot of tripe. 
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted. 
For what I think, I'd be arrested. 
I am not sick. I am not well. 
My quondam dreams are shot to hell. 
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore: 
I do not like me any more. 
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse. 
I ponder on the narrow house. 
I shudder at the thought of men. 
I'm due to fall in love again.

-- Dorothy Parker 

Cohoes-ESIPA Co-Producers

From the Theatrical Vault Dept.: Here’s a crazy idea – let a couple of professional area theaters get together on a production. Wait; there’s only one around here now. Ah, well. Here’s a taste of what it used to be like in the Albany area.

                                                                               

OUT IN MOSCOW, it seemed like a better and better idea. Pat Snyder, producing-director of the Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts, reacted to the idea of a musical version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” like so many others: how on earth do you make that work?

But a recording of the short-lived off-Broadway production convinced her. Trouble was, she got back to the U.S. to discover that another producing-director, just down the street (so to speak), had snagged the show already, and Bob Tolan would be bringing it into the Cohoes Music Hall as a Heritage Artists production.

Those are some of the circumstances that led to what promises to be an auspicious collaboration between the two theater groups as ESIPA and Heritage Artists combine to produce “Yours, Anne” February through March.

“We had a slot for an unannounced musical,” says ESIPA's Ron Nicoll, “and this looked like a good opportunity to expand both of our audiences.”

Much, Indeed, Does He Make Me Love Him

From the Vault Dept.: Elsewhere on these e-pages, you can find program notes I wrote for a number of Dorian Recordings CDs. Before I got involved in that pleasant task, I was introduced to the label and its excellent output both through the CDs themselves and by seeing some of the artists in concert. Here’s my review of one such event.

                                                                                               

MY FAVORITE EARLY-MUSIC FANTASY lets me eavesdrop on a concert performance from centuries ago, letting me see and hear pre-Renaissance stuff as it actually was essayed. Although Altramar has yet to release its first Dorian Discovery CD (release is imminent), any group that’s good enough for Dorian is good enough for me, and I was delighted to attend last Sunday’s concert featuring this four-member group.

It wasn’t what I expected. Early music groups like to get informal, show off their stuff, throw in a Lennon-McCartney arrangement. Altramar took us back to medieval Iberia and kept us there. I’ll never make that time-travel trip, so I’m happy to substitute this concert as the next best thing.

From the first number – a reshoyut, or pre-prayer prayer from the 11th century – we were in a realm of passion and austerity. The song was begun quietly by tenor David Stattelman, who sings in a clear, resonant voice that worked beautifully in the acoustically sensitive Music Hall. As they segued into the cantio Dum pater familias, instrumental accompaniment was the throaty vihuela de arco, a violin ancestor, played by Jann Cosart, and singers Angela Mariani and Chris Smith joined in.

Five to a Bed

25 October 2014 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

The Art of Melancholy

THE BELCEA QUARTET opened the Union College Concert Series last Thursday (Oct. 16) with a trio of quartets, big-master pieces that offered no plangent threats to nervous ears – but that rewarded attentive ears (or at least my sensationalist-seeking ears) with compelling insights into the comparative worlds of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.

Belcea Quartet; photo by Ronald Knapp

Mozart’s Quartet in F Major, K. 590, kicked things off with the cruelest of opening passages: three measures of unison playing. Four instruments ascending slowly up the home key’s tonic triad, then coursing quickly down the scale. What we heard was so sure-footed as to sound unremarkable. It wasn’t, and the lush tone suggested by those unison notes shortly blossomed into a high-spirited conversation between violin and cello, as viola and the other violin sang an accompaniment of stuttering eighth notes.

Violist Krzysztof Chorzelski leaned in a little towards Axel Schacher (second violin) as they gave shape to these passages, as if there were something conspiratorial about what they were up to. Perhaps there was: Corina Belcea’s violin phrases seemed to tease responses from Antoine Lederlin’s cello, and the opening movement as a whole came across as a duet for the outer voices.

A Dog’s Tale

Guest Blogger Dept.: Mark Twain’s A Dog’s Tale began as a story in the December 1903 Harper’s Magazine; reproduced below is the version expanded into a small book the following year. It’s Twain as his sentimental and political best, and I hope it saved an animal or two.

                                                                                          

Chapter I.

Drawing by W.T. Smedley

MY FATHER WAS A ST. BERNARD, my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian. This is what my mother told me, I do not know these nice distinctions myself. To me they are only fine large words meaning nothing. My mother had a fondness for such; she liked to say them, and see other dogs look surprised and envious, as wondering how she got so much education. But, indeed, it was not real education; it was only show: she got the words by listening in the dining-room and drawing-room when there was company, and by going with the children to Sunday-school and listening there; and whenever she heard a large word she said it over to herself many times, and so was able to keep it until there was a dogmatic gathering in the neighborhood, then she would get it off, and surprise and distress them all, from pocket-pup to mastiff, which rewarded her for all her trouble.

If there was a stranger he was nearly sure to be suspicious, and when he got his breath again he would ask her what it meant. And she always told him. He was never expecting this but thought he would catch her; so when she told him, he was the one that looked ashamed, whereas he had thought it was going to be she. The others were always waiting for this, and glad of it and proud of her, for they knew what was going to happen, because they had had experience. When she told the meaning of a big word they were all so taken up with admiration that it never occurred to any dog to doubt if it was the right one; and that was natural, because, for one thing, she answered up so promptly that it seemed like a dictionary speaking, and for another thing, where could they find out whether it was right or not? for she was the only cultivated dog there was.

End of Stone

From the Back of the Fridge Dept.: Here’s a reminder of a long-gone eatery that eventually became the also now-defunct Milestone Restaurant (which was the guise under which the accompanying photo was taken). I’m leaving in a huge error I just spotted – and which seems to have bypassed editors and readers until now. The discount hardware store mentioned blights the landscape with ... a secondary color.

                                                                                 

I RECENTLY TRIED TO BUY a lawn tractor from one of those huge discount hardware stores whose primary color blights the landscape, and, after fighting for attention from the barely sentient customer service drone, eventually got a lawn-and-garden android to speak to me. What scotched the sale was his boast, when I asked for the time, that he never wore a wristwatch. The correct answer, as any good server knows, is, “Excuse me for a moment while I find that out for you.”

A more recent view of the
dining room's interior.

I learned it early and well in my waitering days because it was directly tied to my tip, and I made a fantastic amount of money at some white-linen joints in Fairfield and Westchester Counties. This quality of service is missing from all but a few local restaurants – it’s the biggest shortfall in what I see of the business here – but I was delighted to find it well in place at the new Stone Ends.

Reopened in November by former owner Henry Junco in partnership with Quintessence’s Jimmy Scalzo, Stone Ends now boasts a (fairly) northern Italian menu, overseen by chef Paul Persico. But it’s much more than that. It’s once again a standard setter for fine dining around here.

Knickerbocker Holiday

From the Vault Dept.: I just ran across a bunch of pieces I wrote for the Schenectady Gazette about Albany's then-newly opened Knickerbocker Arena, which opened January 30, 1990, with a performance by a drunk Frank Sinatra. I've reproduced two of those pieces below to provide a twinge or two of nostalgia. As you might imagine, much of what I've detailed below has changed.

                                                                                                                                                                           
EIGHTEEN THOUSAND PEOPLE RARELY AGREE on everyday subjects like politics and parking, but face them with the extraordinary and you can gather together a lot of faces. Now that the Capital District’s Knickerbocker Arena is providing the space we need some extraordinary events to fill it.

They’re on their way.

Abany's Knickerbocker Arena

Frank Sinatra is an entertainer whose own influences are as eclectic and varied as those whom he has influenced over the years. Citing Jascha Heifetz and Tommy Dorsey as two of those who shaped his style, his singing has shaped the interpretive technique of musicians of all disciplines and category. He’s also a top-notch actor and songwriter and a good person to have as a friend. That he’s opening the arena with a gala concert Jan. 30 says it all. There will be black ties and gowns and probably a sweatshirt or two.

What you see on TV when you see Bill Cosby has little to do with what he’s really all about. Sure, there’s the hit series, but he started that to combat the wasteland of prime-time programming. What he offers best is simply a point of view. A point of view that is devastatingly funny. He sits back in his canvas chair, rolls a cigar in his fingers and talks, and tells us about things, familiar things, that we never analyzed in such a fashion. He’ll be at the Arena on Feb. 2.

One Batch at a Time

From the Tech Vault Dept.: What could be less fascinating than an old computer article or an old book review? Why, an old review of a computer book! Here you go.

                                                                                          

FOR MANY BEGINNING COMPUTERISTS, batch files are an introduction to programming. They offer a reward for achieving a little DOS knowledge by automating repetitive command-line activity; even better, they provide some DOS insulation when you get into more sophisticated procedures like batch-file menu construction.

The much-vaunted DOS limitations then become obvious pretty quickly. Conditional branching depends on a weak set of IF ... THEN possibilities, and information input and output is crude and restricted.

Enterprising programmers overcome those weaknesses by writing utilities to take up the slack, and Ronny Richardson has thoughtfully searched out and collected a batch of them in a guide that describes hundreds of utilities and packs almost 200 of them on an accompanying diskette.

The most common such utility is the little ASK program that used to come with the Norton Utilities (and it’s described in this book): it allowed the batch file to ask the user a multiple-choice question and assign an ERRORLEVEL value to the response, which then sent the batch file to an appropriate branch. ASK is now part of Norton’s souped-up Batch Enhancer, but this book stresses the fact that many similar cousins exist – with greater or lesser enhancements. If the one that sounds most appealing isn’t on the enclosed disk, it’s probably on a BBS somewhere.