Goode for Beethoven

From the Vault Dept.: Here’s a look back to the opening concert of Union College’s 2007 season, when pianist Richard Goode burned up the Steinway.

                                                                                          

RICHARD GOODE GAINED AS MUCH ACCLAIM AND ATTENTION as a classical-music artist is likely to get with his recordings of the complete piano sonatas by Beethoven, a formidable journey that he traversed with uncommon brio.

Richard Goode | Photo by Steve Riskind

We had a taste of that last week when he closed the first half of an impressive recital with Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata, that warhorse of warhorses. Sighs of audience recognition punctuated the beginning of the piece, with its measured right-hand triplets and plaintive left-hand drone, a sense that probably turned to surprise (it did with me) as Goode established a brisk tempo and unusually relentless pulse.

Too fast? Not to my taste. There’s a “To be or not to be” quality to the opening of that sonata: It’s so famous that you’re tempted simply to get it over with. But I didn’t hear that in Goode’s approach, which pulsed with appropriate wistfulness, avoiding the too-easy route of shrouding the movement with melancholy.

This approach made more meaningful the little scherzo that follows, a lighthearted interlude that sets you up for a big, Beethoven surprise: the tumultuous finale, bursting forth with the fury of a tantrum and finishing so fortississimo that the Steinway’s strings seemed to be banging into one another.

Untitled

3 July 1989 | Watercolor by Gerian Williams

Cato in Cooperstown

“ET IN ARCADIA EGO” is inscribed on one of the trompe l’oeil stones forming the backdrop to Cato’s encampment in north Africa. “I am in Paradise,” the phrase suggests, and it’s an inscription often found on a tomb. Cato has fled after defeat in the battle of Pharsalus, and is pursued by his fellow-Roman and ambitious opponent Caesar.

Photo by Karli Cadel

At this point, these two have accumulated a lot of tumultuous history, so it’s not surprising that we seem to have arrived in medias res as the curtain rises on Vivaldi’s Cato in Utica. As it happens, there’s also an entire first act missing, so the Glimmerglass Festival’s production—the work’s American premiere—gives us a cinematic intro to the six characters and what they’re doing before launching the piece.

The info is projected onto a crimson scrim during the opening Sinfonia (itself taken from Vivaldi’s earlier opera L’Olimpiade) as the cast presents itself in silhouette, and the action takes place against a golden-red ruin behind which is desert and the setting sun, the sky an incongruously lovely Bouchard.

The bloody and the pastoral inform the text as well, as when Arbace, the Prince of Numidia (countertenor Eric Jurenas) advises Cato’s daughter, Marzia (soprano Megan Samarin) why she needs him as her husband: “If the lamb goes to pasture without the shepherd/One day she may go astray/And perhaps there will emerge/From its den or from the woods/Some savage beast/Who will devour her.”

Best Beth’s

What’s for Dinner? Dept.: I made a brief return to the restaurant-review business this week so I could extol an out-of-the-way place called Elizabeth’s in Pittsfield, Mass.

                                                                                         

SEEK THE SOUL OF AN ONION and you’re easily led astray. Its pungency is distracting and can drive you to tears. It tends to reveal its sweetness only under duress. Tom Ellis splits a Spanish onion and opens a world, softening its hemispheres with olive oil and honey before baking its sugars to the fore. It’s culinary homeopathy, resulting in an earth-brown confection, crisp at the edges, releasing flavors you never guessed were there before. As the menu insists: “Guys, a little wine, honest bread and ‘the onion’ and maybe, just maybe, she (or he) will be your baby tonite.” And $7 is a bargain price for a seduction tool.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Tom and Elizabeth Ellis have been helming Elizabeth’s, in Pittsfield, for nearly 30 years, an unexpected eatery on an unexpected street where a compact menu of Italian-inspired fare reflects Ellis’ honest, down-to-earth involvement with his ingredients.

Such as goes into the sausage he makes. “It starts with Berkshire pork, and I add herbes de Provence,” he says. “Personally, I like it spicy, but I tone it down for the customers. You can always add spice to the sauce. You had it with the polenta—”

This I did, a $24.50 dish that would have been overwhelmed by the perfect slice of polenta it sported were it not for the cataclysmic burst of flavor from every bite of the meatstuff.

It’s Good, But . . .

COULD IT BE A MASTERPIECE? Is it possible that this thing, fashioned from whole cloth by one or more creative souls, has achieved a rare level of finished perfection?

It’s hard to tell. Most of the critics have been divergent in their opinions, each of them finding some manner of fault. The one who lauded it with unstinting praise seems – what? Uninformed, perhaps, lacking the critical apparatus to see through its surface sheen and into its faults.

This is the problem with our culture of dismissal. Intelligently appraising a work of art requires enough intelligence to understand the work in the context of time in which it was created and the context of similar pieces, and the experience of repeatedly encountering the work and its ilk.

How does a critic convey the extent of that intelligence and experience? It gets written into the review, where that context can be described and well-chosen comparisons can support any critical argument. It also helps if the review demonstrates a facility with writing, because that gives momentum to the review. Solecisms (and stupidity) get in the way.

But the culture of dismissal offers a facile shortcut. Decorate your appraisal with an adverse criticism and you’ve demonstrated penetrating insight. No contextualizing needed. In fact, specificity is the enemy of such dismissal. “She’s good, but isn’t she a little old for the part?” tells us nothing. Actually, it tells us plenty, but it’s telling us about the critic, who, by leaving the argument unsupported, is parroting the received attitude of a youth-obsessed, marketing-driven society. Something like “I would expect a character of that age to be more spontaneous in movement and less guarded in speech” redirects the criticism from ad hominem to advice that’s more legitimately couched in opinion.

Cliburn Collected

From the Recorded Vault Dept.: Back in 1989, we still were looking for significant recordings from the LP era (and earlier) to make their way to compact disc. The Van Cliburn CDs described below have since been re-reissued, in better sound, and collected in multi-CD sets both cheap and costly, so you’ll have no trouble at all acquiring what’s mentioned.

                                                                                           

A GREYING BUT STILL BOYISH-LOOKING VAN CLIBURN stares at us from the nearly-identical covers of these five recently re-released recordings; pictured elsewhere on the jackets are photos of the very boyish, almost spindly-looking kid who rode the crest of a Moscow competition to immense fame, then to a near-oblivion that he only recently is climbing out of.

These records are therefore testimony to what was and to what we may expect. The lineup of accompanying artists is a testimony to greatness of what can now bee seen as a bygone era: Eugene Ormandy conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra and Fritz Reiner leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for all of the concertos included in the set.

The five recordings – issued on compact disk and cassette – are sold separately but have been promoted as a set. They contain the following works:

Chávez y su Mundo

YOU CAN COUNT ON THE BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL for textural extremes. Last Saturday’s programs ran a gamut from a charming sonata for guitar and harpsichord by Manual Ponce to the outsized, relentless Piano Concerto by Carlos Chávez, the composer around whom this year’s program was built.

Carlos Chávez, drawn by
Miguel Covarrubias

Chávez was a terrific choice. Mexico’s best-known composer remains little-known north of the border, despite a strong presence on the North American concert scene a few decades ago, a presence at Tanglewood, and an enduring influence on Aaron Copland and others. If some of his work sounds Copland-esque, it turns out to be the other way around.

The first full day of the program began with a morning panel titled “Culture and National Identity: The Case of Mexico,” that began with a tour of the post-revolution muralists, Diego Rivera most notable among them. As Hunter College professor Lynda Klich explained, these artists were charged with creating a new identity for the country, one that integrated indigenous people into the social fabric. Thus was born the “revolutionary trinity” depicted in those murals: the peasant, worker, and soldier.

In the musical realm, works like Chávez’s Sinfonia india and (his student) José Pablo Moncayo’s Huapango have become the sound of Mexico’s concert music—although Cornell’s Alejandro Madrid stressed that these too were written to order, encouraging the audience to buy into a manufactured national identity. But nationalism is always practiced from a distance, Columbia anthropology professor Claudio Lomnitz confirmed, and requires constant translation.

Seeing Green

Glen, NY | 12 August 2015
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Sam As It Was Before

From the Food Vault Dept.: Here’s my account of my first review of Sam’s in Albany, an institution well deserving of its solid reputation. The “Dorothy” referenced below actually was the midwife, Vicki, who caught Lily during the homebirth that we weren’t officially supposed to have had – thus the anonymity.

                                                                                                   

YOU NEVER WANT GOING OUT TO DINNER to be a chore, but I was feeling bogged down by a relentless schedule. “I need to eat,” said my friend Dorothy. “Bring the baby with you.” My wife was working late, and enviously approved the plan–which is why my infant daughter and I met Dorothy at Sam’s one evening shortly before the restaurant’s recent vacation.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

This baby, who was born at the end of January, is still good for enough reasonably quiet behavior to allow for a meal, although I’m loath to take her into hardcore white-linen restaurants. Sam’s seemed a natural, because good Italian restaurants–the ones I term neighborhood joints, in the best possible sense–are family run and tend to celebrate the family. And this certainly was the case at Sam’s.

Salvatore “Sam” Rappoccio came to this country from Montemurro in 1956. He comes from a family of restaurateurs, with other establishments as close as Lenox and as far as Italy and Brazil. So it was natural that the grocery store he opened in 1965 should have evolved into a restaurant, which it did by way of a brief life as a pizzeria.

“Sam saw the supermarkets coming,” says his daughter, Carmella. “That’s one reason he changed his store into a restaurant, which he opened in 1971. It’s been remodeled three times since then. And I was literally born into this business.” She’s the one who greeted us on our way in, in fact, and checked to make sure our dinners were good. And praised my baby, which always wins points.

Light Years

NATURE IS SHAMELESS about offering its beauty, leaving it up to us to interpret the aesthetics. It’s easy to take it for granted—to stop looking and to see very little. Joe Schuyler never stopped looking, and Nature rewarded him with an abundance of beautiful raw material that he transformed, through lens and light and composition, into arresting stories wholly given over to natural elements. And he found a great place to do this.

Photo by Joseph Schuyler | from Truro Light

He photographed people and products, cityscapes and political rallies, and the best of them are dynamic and profound. But Nature inspired him to an even more profound level of accomplishment because the canvas is leaner. Free of faces and brick and steel, it rewards more richly the skilled use of light. And light is what Truro, Mass., has in complicated abundance.

The 116 portraits in Truro Light chart a journey across a strip of land that’s four miles wide at its widest, rising to curl around Cape Cod Bay until it gives way to Provincetown at Cape Cod’s tip. The quality of light reflected by ocean and bay inspired a unique painters’ colony to thrive in Provincetown, and the challenge of capturing that light is shared by lensmen such as Schuyler.

Cookin'

Provincetown, MA | 3 August 2015 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Unholy Mother

WHEN SAINT CATHERINE ADDRESSES the audience in Jane Anderson’s new play Mother of the Maid, it’s with the easy familiarity of someone versed in the current century’s attitudes. Then she introduces us to Joan of Arc, a 15th-century farm kid having saintly visions. It’s one of the delightfully anachronistic touches Anderson created for the piece because, as she explains, “I needed to shake it up to get it as far from Shaw as possible.”

Jane Anderson and Matthew Penn
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Mother of the Maid is having its world premiere at Shakespeare & Company, bringing Anderson back to the stage after significant work in television and film—including the teleplay for the mini-series Olive Kittredge, which just won the Emmy Award-winning writer another Emmy nomination.

But she’s delighted to return to this less-lucrative world. “I come from theater,” says Anderson. “It’s where my heart is. I’ve been lucky enough to write things for film and television that also come from my heart. As artists, I don’t think we should ever divide between them, because all of these mediums are strong and very, very exciting. Theater offers those beautiful, thrilling relationships that start in the rehearsal room and then continue with the audience.”

Superhero

Provincetown, MA | 31 July 2015 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Hitting the Street

From the Musical Vault Dept.: I discovered the King’s Singers in 1982 and continue to admire not only their repertory of Renaissance material but also their many arrangements of material you wouldn’t think would work for six voices and the commissions they’ve made. Their occasional forays into schlock seem to be behind them, and I’m not including in that category such effective material as “Good Vibrations” and “Blackbird.” Here’s my review of a CD that also includes the equally admirable percussionist Evelyn Glennie.
 
                                                                                             

AFTER TWENTY YEARS of strong, innovative music making, the six-man King;svocal group went through a protracted personnel upheaval and seemed to be repeating a tiresome novelty repertory to death. They switched record labels, settled on a roster of performers, and each successive release got better.

The latest, Street Songs, is what this group is all about, and it’s as good as anything they’ve ever done. This despite the fact that you see marketing written all over it. They’re paired with Evelyn Glennie, one of BMG Classics’ current money makers, and the CD’s title comes from a song cycle by Steve Martland, who has enjoyed a vogue as a writer of loud, accessible music.

But the high point of the disc is the group’s re-recording of “Lalela Zulu,” a suite of six songs written for the group over 20 years ago and first recorded as part of a monster tenth anniversary concert. Although the new version lacks the antic verve of a live recording, it hangs together better musically and is every bit as exciting–and the songs themselves, with music by Stanley Glasser and texts by South African writer Louis Nkosi, each song reflecting a different aspect of Zulu life in Johannesburg.

Ciao Bound

From the Fridge Dept.: Fourteen years ago, we visited a Chatham restaurant called Ciao, as described in the review below. It doesn’t seem to have been in a favorable location. Among the restaurants that since have come and gone in that space are Chaseo’s, MJ’s Sports Bar and Grill, and the Clock Tower Grill (because you could see the town’s clock tower from there). But Susan, my wife, has an even longer history with it, as noted below.

                                                                                            

MY WIFE IS A SPENCERTOWN NATIVE who has seen her little town and its surrounding area transmogrify into yet another outpost for Manhattan exurbanites. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the Chatham restaurant we recently visited. Susan recalled a night, twenty-five years ago, when she met a cousin (with much more of an inclination to whoop it up than Susan ever sported) at a shabby saloon near Chatham’s downtown.

Downtown Chatham, with Clock Tower

“There was nothing pretty about the place,” she recalls. “It had absolutely no decor. So I walked in and ordered a whisky sour.” This threw the bartender into a panic. She saw the man surreptitiously consult an Old Mr. Boston’s guide, then try to follow its instructions to make this simplest of mixed drinks. “He’d probably never been asked for a whisky sour before. And I saw that, all down the bar, everyone was drinking beer.”

Refurbished a year ago by new chef-owner Salvatore Taccetta, it’s now called Ciao and it’s presenting a nice range of Italian cuisine. Taccetta moved from New York City, where he had a restaurant called Il Giardinetto.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL is presenting Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” as its musical-theater offering this season, and it’s an excellent choice both because Bernstein worked as well in that genre (which is to say, with genius) as he did in every other he took on, and because “Candide” itself has had such a topsy-turvy history that it benefits from any good production it can get.

David Garrison and Andrew Stenson in "Candide."
Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.

Good production? This one should be required viewing for any fan of musical theater. It’s a lesson in how imaginative, dynamic staging gives life to every moment that helps build a momentum that heightens the excitement of the work.

Festival artistic director Francesca Zambello helmed this one, sculpting a satisfying, often surprising arc to each scene. A good example is the celebrated “Glitter and Be Gay,” sung with virtuosic ease and a deft sense of character by Kathryn Lewek. She revealed two sides in this staging: the aria was introspective and ranged emotionally from anger to remorse; her face and movement showed us the diffidently manipulative beauty caught in her own snare of deceit. By the end of it, as she scattered jewelry across the stage, the number had built to peak both musical and dramatic – and it’s tough for the drama to compete with that tune.

Air for the E String

A recent issue of  Metroland aggregated the thoughts of its various writers about those times when technology seems to have gone too far. I challenged myself to come up with something that didn’t involve a personal computer. (Yes, the Snark qualifies as a computer, but you know what I mean.)

                                                                                    

ONE OF THE GLORIOUS MYSTERIES of music lies in the fact that each note contains the seeds of its own harmony. An overtone of a fifth lurks in that sound, more prominent than other overtones, reinforcing the structure of the diatonic scale, in which the progression from that fifth back to its root tone is the resolution that brings most pieces of music to a satisfying end. Yet if you tune a piano according to those overtones alone, two Cs played together at each end of the keyboard will clash. The tuning system that’s been used for several centuries is, in that sense, artificial.

My biggest achievement as a young violin student came not through superficialities like mastering left-hand pizzicato (which I haven’t) or a clean spiccato bow stroke (ditto), but in learning to tune the instrument by ear. The violin’s four strings have intervals of a fifth between them. (It’s the same with viola, cello, and bass.) Although my rental instrument came with a pitch pipe, my teacher, Mr. Finaldi, eschewed the thing, getting his A from the carefully tuned piano in his living room and tuning the other three strings merely by listening.

These days it’s rare to see any stringed instrument without a Snark perched on its neck. Play an open string and this little gadget listens to it and offers a pitch meter that indicates how far out of tune you are and which direction is needed to adjust it, and then it glows a cheerful color to tell you you’re home. It’s so handy that there are many knockoffs available, and the inevitable phone app has followed.

Gunning for You

The Long Walk, Opera Saratoga

AS BRIAN CASTNER and three of his fellow Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialists are driving back to base from yet another mission while deployed in Iraq, the tension of the moment is jolted by a pigeon. It lands on their Humvee. Over the orchestra’s rumbles and squeals, the quartet sings in beautiful close harmony about the nature of their relationship. This is, says one, the place where he belongs.

Daniel Belcher and
Heather Johnson

Back home in Buffalo, Castner still perceives danger, and the first act of The Long Walk ends with the image of him sitting at the top of the stairs of his house, cradling his AK-47, guarding his children from—what?

Adapted from a memoir by Castner, the opera—receiving its world premiere with these Opera Saratoga performances—is a shattering, very moving portrait of mental imbalance, right up there with Wozzeck in its use of music and lyrics and the tools of theater to explore the contrasting, contradictory facets of a war-damaged soldier.

Like Wozzeck, it’s episodic and makes intelligent use of musical form. But where you might expect again an atonal approach, The Long Walk is surprisingly lyrical, with solo moments suggestive of late Strauss.

Baritone Daniel Belcher, in the role of a lifetime, is Castner, a pleasant-looking average Joe who is running as we meet him, running, he explains, through the is to escape the was. Not that there’s any escape.

Al Together

From the Vault Dept.: Al Gallodoro was nearly 90 when I saw the concert reviewed below. His amazing career included stints in the orchestras of Paul Whiteman and Arturo Toscanini. He recorded with the Dutch ensemble The Beau Hunks. He appeared as a street performer in “The Godfather, Part II.” And at Caffè Lena, he still wielded his sax like the master he was.

                                                                                       

YOU EXPECT, WHEN HEARING A JAZZ SAXOPHONIST TODAY, to hear some trace of the Big Influences. At the very least, there will be Coltrane and some Lester Young. There are exceptions: Scott Hamilton bypasses Trane in a sound that channels Ben Webster. And Al Gallodoro goes back even farther, with a sound that’s squarely in the Jimmy Dorsey-Frank Trumbauer camp.

Al Gallodoro

Like Trumbauer, Gallodoro fashions solos that extend the harmonic range of the tune in question without taking you far from its melodic center. Performing last Saturday at Caffè Lena, he and pianist JoAnn Chmielowski ran through a batch of standards and surprises that thoroughly delighted the far-from-capacity crowd. An added bonus was the two numbers in which they were joined by Addie Boyle, of Addie & Olin fame.

Gallodoro opened with a romping “All of Me” that set the pattern for many of the tunes to follow: a fairly straightforward but swinging statement on sax for 32 bars, then a hot chorus in which Gallodoro let loose a torrent of notes that played with the outer reaches of the harmony of the changes. Unlike many post-bop players, he’s not reharmonizing the tunes but rather finding the fun and tension in exploring 11ths and 13ths and such. Next a solo chorus by Chmielowski with a fluid, often single-line left hand and chord blocks in the right, followed by another piano solo in which she syncopated the left-hand rhythm into something approaching a habanera. And finally Gallodoro wrapped it up with another hot chorus that went stratospheric, typically and improbably ending on a high concert E-flat.

Woods So Wild

The Magic Flute, Glimmerglass Opera, July 10

The Magic Flute is a mess of an opera that defies narrative convention, keeps you guessing at who’s the good guy, and lets the wrong person rescue the ingenue, among many other weirdnesses. None of which has curbed the insane popularity of the piece. It has great tunes, but you expect that from Mozart.

Sean Panikkar as Tamino
Photo by Karli Cadel

Re-setting its time and place is so irresistible to opera directors that it’s become a potentially embarrassing fetish, but the production that opened the Glimmerglass Festival’s current season takes us to a forest with Native American overtones, on a glorious set by Troy Hourie, whose impressive artwork also can be found on the Festival grounds.

Director Madeline Sayet didn’t stage the overture until its very end, for which I’m grateful, and even then it was a necessary device to show Tamino’s transition from the fury of the modern business world into the forest where the magic would occur. Sean Panikkar sang splendidly in that role, maintaining a wide-eyed innocence even as he takes on the challenge of rescuing a maiden whose portrait causes him instantly to fall in love.

He meets Papageno, originally a birdcatcher, now a hunter, incongruously costumed in camo and blaze orange. Ben Edquist, who was Jigger in last season’s Carousel, has a dynamic, acrobatic presence and a voice to match. This is the role that Mozart’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, wrote for himself, giving himself two great solos and an endearing duet, among other numbers. Edquist was more than up to the task – literally more, slipping into the tendency to telegraph the jokes in the texts.