Hots to Trot

From the Food Vault Dept.: An entertainment arena opened in Albany, NY, in 1990. Originally monikered the Knickerbocker Arena, fiscal sponsorship deals have lured it through different names. I wrote a series of articles about it for the Schenectady Gazette in advance of its opening, two of which are here. Here’s an entertaining third, which was supposed to be about the foodservice at the arena, provided by what was then known as ARA Leisure Services, and now is the behemoth Aramark, which provides the overpriced, mediocre food at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, much (if not all; it’s hard to find confirmation) of the SUNY college system, and many other such places around the world. Here’s the note I attached to the piece when I submitted it: “The outfit providing the in-house food at the Knick Arena was singularly uncooperative in providing information, never returning calls and getting downright belligerent by Friday. I offer the following as a much more enjoyable substitute.” The lede, by the way, is complete fiction.

                                                                                   

WHEN MY FATHER FIRST TOOK ME to the Saratoga Racetrack I was much too young to appreciate the subtleties at work. On the one hand there was the beauty of the racehorse itself to be considered; on the other, Dad's deft maneuver to get out from under Mom’s financial supervision and fling a few dollars luckwards – all in the name of my education.

I fear that most of his money went to shutting me up, however, because I discovered something that consoled me then and has since been a mainstay of my sporting and entertainment travels: concession stands. While to some people “hot dogging” is a form of ski travel, I use it to describe my tendency to eat my way from event to event. I have hot dogged from ballpark to theme park across the country, and I look forward to doing so in Albany next month.

Nine-Miles Delicious

WHAT SHOULD BE THE COST of a healthy meal? We know that it’s going to be more expensive than what we’re accustomed to paying, whether in supermarket or restaurant, although that’s a reality that I, at least, try to hide from. You can see the difference in your fruits and vegetables, but it’s the pesticide-laden produce that sparkles so gorgeously.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

The camaraderie at a farmers market eases the pain. It’s less painful to slip those extra bucks across the counter when the amiable person behind it is the one who grew your lettuce. It’s more abstract at a restaurant, of course, where higher food costs are reflected in a higher bill, and you’re also paying for the ambiance and service.

But when you see the setup at Saratoga Apple, you’ll realize right away that you’re going to get a bargain. And you are. And you do. Twenty-five dollars for a four-course meal is an exceptional value for the home-grown fare that you get. The fact that it’s not served on anything fancy actually complements the rustic feel of the event.

9 Miles East is the farm that has been serving weekend dinners at Saratoga Apple. Not surprisingly, that’s also its distance from Saratoga Springs. “My wife and I started 9 Miles East in 2005,” says co-owner Gordon Saks, “with 29 acres and a commercial catering kitchen. Now we have 35 employees.”

Saratoga Stately

From the Vault Dept.: Thirty years ago, the Saratoga-area newspapers went into puff-mode overdrive with pieces about the city and its racetrack during the summer, and I contributed a few of those pieces. The one below was part of an improbable photo spread – improbable because nothing dims the charm of a house portrait more than black-and-white newsprint, Garry Brown’s photographic prowess notwithstanding. You can find current views of the properties mentioned on Google Maps Street View. I note that all of the addresses given in the piece (and the original captions, which I didn’t write but which I reproduce here) omit the “north” in what should be North Broadway; I have no idea why this happened.

                                                                                            

UNTIL FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT demonstrated that you could remove walls and even hide the front door and still have a good-looking house, American architecture featured a continual reinterpretation of things European.

QUEEN ANNE: The Kilmer House, 722 Broadway,
was built in 1887 and is a fine example of the Queen Anne
style with its many varied features – turrets and gables,
spindles and bands, wood, terra cotta, stained glass,
and differing kinds of roof. Photo by Garry Brown.

Old houses in Saratoga Springs offer an amazing array of styles, reflecting the changing tastes of an affluent turn-of-the-century town that was lucky enough to suffer a financial decline during the recent decades when similar cities razed such buildings.

One of the pleasures of a day or two in the city is the chance to perform old-house detective work and identify the styles that were once so fashionable. In the realm of Victorian design, this city offers an example of just about every notable style – and these examples have even rated a mile's worth of North Broadway houses to gain National Register of Historic Places recognition.

Two architects who contributed heavily to Saratoga's 19th century look of opulence were R. Newton Brezee and Samuel Gifford Slocum, both of whom were born in New York State and maintained Saratoga offices.

Banking on Banks

From the Actual Vault Dept.: For many years I was quite happy to write to order, so long as the checks came in, and I produced a number of pieces for the dry-as-dust Capital District Business Review. Here’s one that presents a very nostalgic picture of the area’s banking industry just before all the interstate banking laws were changed. Wish I’d made a few of the investments suggested below!

                                                                                        

TIME WAS WHEN INVESTING IN A BANK was something done by nervous elders looking for security. It was absolutely safe, promising a small, steady increase in earnings.

But in this decade there have been a slew of banking deregulations that have changed small-town banks into branches of big-city conglomerates, and not without substantial profit for savvy investors.

“If you had bought 500 shares of Citizen’s Trust of Schenectady back in 1950, it would have cost you $500. Today, you’d have KeyCorp stock worth $125,000,” said Michael Brockbank, who owns Brockbank Investment Research, an investment advisory firm in Schenectady.

The history of that stock is a history of the changes characterizing all banks. Citizen’s Trust became National Commercial Bank, which became Key Bank N.A., a part of KeyCorp.

“The dramatic rise in value only occurred in the last ten years as we’ve entered an era of banks acquiring other banks and going on to become holding companies,” Brockbank said.

Mark the Polo!

From the Vault Dept.: Saratoga Polo is about to begin its season, a tradition that begin there in the first year of the 20th century. Thanks to a search through the Saratogian’s clip files (this was back in the filing-cabinet days) and a piece in a 1902 Harper’s Weekly, I assembled the story below. The photo came from Harper’s, too, but the Gazette never returned the original – what you see is a scan of a clipping. Saratoga Polo lost its facility in 2020, and as of 2024, its future is bleak. But here's where you might find updated information: The Saratoga Polo Association.

                                                                                      

RACING ALWAYS STEALS AUGUST’S ATTENTION, but the ancient sport of polo is again attracting notice in Saratoga Springs. When it was introduced here, 88 years ago, it was front-page news. Ten years ago it returned after a break of almost 45 years, and it is again bringing the world’s best players to a small, lavishly-maintained lawn just over the city line in Greenfield.

From left: Kingdon Gould, Jay Gould, Benjamin Nicoll,
and George Jay Gould. Photographed in
Saratoga Springs, July 1902.

In the very early days of the sport, a player simply assaulted an opponent with his horse or anything else that was handy, but dignity and skill replaced brute power as the game evolved. It’s not surprising to realize how little polo has changed throughout the century; what is surprising is to see how little its social aspect has altered. The millionaires and royalty may not take to the field so much, but the air of glamor remains.

William Collins Whitney furnished the original field, near a popular golf club, in 1901. For the first season, professional teams competed for the Hitchcock, Ballston, and Sanford Cups. A year later, over 200 polo ponies arrived in Saratoga during August.

The Sound of Silents: The Charles Chaplin Film Music Anthology

MY FIRST VIEWING OF “CITY LIGHTS” took place in a midtown-Manhattan revival house in the mid-1970s. I went to a midday showing with a high-school friend who had landed a job with a nearby ad agency. The half-filled theater was populated by men, mostly, men in business suits, taking, I suspected, an extra-long break from the workday.

What knowledge I had of Chaplin’s movies was gained from TV showings of his silent shorts, movies that had been mangled over the years and were interrupted by commercials. I fell in love with them anyway.

“City Lights” transported me to a very different place. Now I was enjoying Chaplin’s work with an audience around me, raising the delight factor even as the shared laughs caused the timing of the gags to land as they were intended. Released in 1931, it was a silent movie thumbing its nose at the newly born talkies. But it wasn’t at all silent.

Chaplin long had been telling his stories with little or no dialogue. Part of his genius lay in using the constraints of the screen and the versatility of framing and cutting to convey or heighten the emotional changes that inform the universe he evolved. He knew that pathos and comedy effectively complement each other, and combined them to greatest effect in “City Lights.”

Dinner and a Movie, Maybe

From the Food Vault Dept.: Somehow I managed to experience a dinner-and-a-movie venue in Saratoga Springs without actually seeing the movie, and I was very kind about the food weendured. But this was in 1997, when the world was young. The place endured for at least a decade, but it succumbed to Saratoga’s upscale pretentions, and is now an Embassy Suites. Which was the only photo I could find of the complex.

                                                                                    

“SPORTS BAR? I HATE SPORTS BARS,” I muttered as we pushed our way into the place. Too much football regalia. Too many TV screens. Too much – but then I spotted the baseball stuff. Baseball stuff is good. And I’m too much of an Anglophile to resist a dartboard, even if I don’t take a crack at it myself.

What's there now.

My wife and I were in the Broadway Joe’s half of Joe O’Hara’s sports and movie complex, in the former Grand Union at Congress Plaza, a half-block down East Congress Street from Broadway, across from Congress Park.

Our intention: to check out the dine-while-you-watch movie theater. Our problem: we weren’t really crazy about seeing any of the listed movies.

The politest way to get from the sports bar to the theater is to go outside: there are separate entrances. (You could squeeze by the ticket counter, but I hate dislodging service staff trying to get their work done.) “Here for Star Trek?” asked an usher/waiter.

The Century Club

AS WE CONTEMPLATE the implications of the life-changing choices we make, we’re dogged by a persistent worry: What will the neighbors think? For Joan and Stevie, recently settled in a Florida condo-style residence, it’s more than a worry. Their new neighbors start by mistakenly occupying Joan and Stevie’s residence, and it goes downhill from there as scatterbrained Helen and imperious Ray undermine what little remains of the other couple’s sense of well-being.

Kevin McGuire, Colleen Corcoran,
and Keith J. Conallen.
Photo by Richard Lovrich

Richard Dresser’s “100 Years,” which is getting its world premiere in a production by Troy Foundry Theatre, puts us not too far into the future as two couples contemplate the implications of a life-changing decision they’ve made. They have signed up (at great expense) to undergo a mysterious process that requires them to live in this cookie-cutter community and consume nine large portions of some kind of shake each day, shakes that seem to have all the appeal of a dose of Miralax.

“I don’t like all the rules here,” Joan declares early on, and it’s easy to see how stifled she feels. Colleen Corcoran has a beauty of a role with this character. Her relationship with husband Stevie (Keith J. Conallen) is, on the whole, a happy one, but we see a credible range of contention and discontent as they grapple with their odd new life and odder new neighbors. Conallen also conveys the complexity of such a relationship, as well as deftly giving us a character who isn’t as tough as he’d like us to think.

And just as we’re getting used to them, the neighbors appear. Helen is Raymond’s second wife. His first, she explains, died in a sinkhole, an accident that “didn’t have to happen, but, then again, what does?” In order to marry Ray, Helen gave up her job consulting for trauma victims – “Talk about a growth industry!”

Heil, Brooklyn!

HIS FIRST INKLINGS of the immediacy of Nazi atrocities took place in a neighborhood bakery, in 1956, where the four-year-old Bobby Rosen spotted the tattoo on the forearm of a woman working the counter and coaxed a whispered explanation from his mother. This opens an awareness of the ubiquity of such signs in his neighborhood, and why “A day never passed when I didn’t hear somebody express an opinion about the Nazis – usually my father,” a World War II veteran who was particularly infuriated by the sight of German-designed cars. “Yeah, we all hated the Nazis,” Rosen continues, “and if anybody didn’t, he kept his fool mouth shut about it.”

Rosen describes his boyhood in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in his new memoir Bobby in Naziland (Headpress). It’s his third book, following the best-selling Nowhere Man, an account John Lennon’s final days, and Beaver Street, a look at the porn industry as experienced by Rosen when he was an editor of erotic magazines.

Bobby in Naziland takes an episodic stroll through a Jewish neighborhood that seemed stuck in its own kind of timelessness, colored by the multi-directional progression of prejudices reported throughout the book. Anyone who is German is, of course, a target, which for Rosen included his building’s super, Mr. Kruger (“My father called him ‘that damn Kraut’”). “We also routinely beat the shit out of his blond and suspiciously Aryan-looking twin sons ... who were my age.”

But there also were Catholics to despise, and Poles and Puerto Ricans. “It was garden-variety bigotry, inane and vicious at the same time.” What Tom Lehrer parodied in his song “National Brotherhood Week” played out for real in Flatbush, where “everyone ... I knew hated black people – Jew and goyim alike.” Although racial integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers made it seem as if the borough “were some kind of racially harmonious mecca,” in truth it was bad enough that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had to be applied to Brooklyn as well as the former Confederacy.

Can’t Help Falling

From the Opera Vault Dept.: We’re gearing up for summer opera season, so here’s a re-visit to a time, thirty years ago, when the NYC Opera performed in Saratoga Springs each summer. When the NYC Opera existed at all.
                                                                                        

THE NEW YORK CITY OPERA’S opening production of their short Saratoga Performing Arts Center season this year was marred only by two adversities: the weather, about which no one is able to do much, and the perennially unkind acoustics, about which ditto.

Marilyn Mims

Other than that, it was a glorious trip to that fancified Paris of “La Traviata” Wednesday night with a die-hard crowd that sloshed into the amphitheater to share in the magic of Verdi’s masterpiece.

Marilyn Mims and Walter MacNeil sang the roles of Violetta and Alfredo, the lovers whose affair, you get the feeling, is doomed the moment she starts coughing in the first act.

The opera is a soprano’s showcase, both in talent requirement and the skill with which the part is written. Mims did a lovely job transforming herself, during the first act, from a live-for-the-moment character into a woman seriously touched by Alfredo’s attention. She echoes the elements of two of his first act arias and then launches into two difficult arias, back to back: “Ah fors’e lui che l’anima” and “Sempre libera,” all of which was sung with strength, precision and a keen sense of grace.

Lesson Number One

Guest Blogger Dept.: Hello again, Mr. Benchley! The estimable Robert is here again with a piece that’s more timely than ever.

                                                                            

FRANKLY, I AM NOT MUCH OF A HAND at machinery of any sort. I have no prejudice against it as such, for some of my best friends are of a mechanical turn of mind, and very nice fellows they are too. But the pencil sharpener in our office is about as far as I, personally, have ever got in the line of operating a complicated piece of mechanism with any degree of success.

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

So, when George suggested that he teach me to run his car, it seemed a reasonable proposition. Obviously, some one had to teach me. I couldn't be expected to go out and pick the thing up by myself, like learning to eat olives. No matter how well-intentioned I might be, or how long I stuck at it, the chances are that I never could learn to drive a car simply by sitting in the seat alone and fooling around among the gadgets until I found the right ones. Something would be sure to happen to spoil the whole thing long before I got the hang of it.

The car was, therefore, brought out into the driveway at the side of the house, like a bull being led into the ring for a humid afternoon with the matador. It was right here that George began to show his true colors, for he stopped the engine, which was running very nicely as it was, and said that I might as well begin by learning to crank it, as I probably would spend seven-eighths of my driving time cranking in the future.

Sky Lights

From the Vault Dept.: It was pretty cutting-edge when I wrote about this melding of music and lights at the Schenectady Museum and Planetarium in 1987. Everything has moved on since then – including Raytel founder Alan Jackson, who co-founded an outfit called Voxon that’s exploring 3D volumetric display.

                                                                                            

YOU SIT BACK AND OBSERVE the stars of a clear, dark night. The throb of music begins: drums, twangs and vocal of a Pink Floyd number. A red beam of light hits that sky, wiggles, expands to a shimmering beam, forms the pattern of a singing face. Behind it a mosaic of iridescent green winks in a changing geometry, a spider-web twisting to the beat.

The sky is the inside dome of the Schenectady Museum Planetarium; the lights are the lasers of Raytel, a Troy-based company presenting a new Visual Music Festival at the Museum on Nott Terrace Heights at 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13, and continuing through the following weekend.

Alan Jackson, founder (and licensed laserist) of the company, began building robots when he was a child. “In 1976,” he says, “I was getting interested in building computers. At the same time I saw a laser show and decided that was what I wanted to do.”

He has combined his talents into the design and construction of the units that form the basis of shows that have been presented throughout New England and as far away as Arizona and Oregon.

Sweet Meet

WHAT BECOMES APPARENT as you examine the exhibition, Like Sugar, is that the exhibition is all around us, all the time. What Skidmore College’s Tang Museum has done is isolate a number of elements – sweet, bittersweet, and merely bitter – to resonate with our sugar-infested world, and remind us of its loathsome past.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

“I’ve always been aware that sugar had a powerful draw for me,” says Sarah Goodwin, a Skidmore professor of English who helped organize the show. “It must have been a good twenty years ago, there was a women’s study group that used to hold brown bag lunches where we’d discuss something of interest to us. I proposed the topic of sugar, and there was a very lively discussion that day from different disciplinary perspectives. So when the Tang Museum was opened as an interdisciplinary space, about sixteen years ago, I thought we should do a show about sugar. But I wasn’t thinking about it being so informed by contemporary art. I didn’t realize how much there would be!”

Drive-Worthy Vehicles

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Once upon a time, the saving grace of laptop computers (in the days when laptop computers required somewhat more than a lap’s-worth of real estate, until they were supplanted by a form factor termed “notebook,” which now has pretty much taken over the laptop arena, with strong insurgency from the netbooks) was going to be the PC Card, or PCMCIA card, which fit into a standardized slot but allowed you to add a modem, network connection, GPS device, and even an extra hard drive. But components got smaller and USB came along. The PC Card now is a thing of memory – and a subject of my quarter-century-old piece below, written for Mobile Office magazine.

                                                                                           

IN A RARE EXAMPLE of technology moving in complementary directions, the price of hard disks is dropping almost as quickly as the size of programs is swelling. The result: adequate disk space need not be a problem.

Unless you’re carrying a portable computer. A 200 megabyte hard disk seemed more than generous as newer, sleeker, faster machines emerged. Now, even with disk compression, those drives fill up far too quickly. Replacing the hard disk in a notebook computer is costly and wasteful – you’re left with an orphaned drive. Fortunately, another technology is also hurrying to keep up with the situation. The PC Card market is finally settling into something reliable and, better still, predictable. We’ve seen an efflorescence of modems and network devices in the PC Card form factor; now hard disks are joining the class.

The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) is the standard-setting consortium that established parameters of size and compatibility; their efforts are finally giving us cards that are truly interchangeable. Hard drives follow the Type III form factor of 10.5mm in height, allowing the manufacturers to fashion a complete but incredibly miniaturized unit complete with the rugged packaging needed for something that’s frequently handled.

Stranded on a Davenport

Guest Blogger Dept.: We deserve a visit from H. Allen Smith. He was a newspaperman in the 1920s, a Mark Twain devotee who won his own fame as a humorist in the 1940s thanks to his best-selling memoir Low Man on a Totem Pole and the many wonderful books that followed. I wrote about him here, when I went searching for his Alpine, Texas home. Here’s one of his Low Man stories.

                                                                                    

NEWSPAPER SHOPS, LARGE AND SMALL, accumulate fantastic personalities and weird behavior patterns. I once knew a Washington newspaperman who suffered from the delusion that Herbert Hoover had bladders on his feet. The first time I met him we were fellow passengers aboard the ill-starred Morro Castle in its maiden run from Newport News to New York. He kept calling me aside, telling me he had an important piece of inside information to give me if I’d promise not to print it. Then he would reconsider and decide to nurse his great secret for a while longer.

At last he came to my stateroom and after looking up and down the corridor to see that he had not been followed he stepped quickly inside, closed and locked the door and announced that he was ready to spill it.

“Herbert Hoover has bladders on his feet,” he said, spacing the words out for emphasis.

“No!” I exclaimed.

“It’s the God’s truth,” he said.

“How do you know he has bladders on his feet?” I demanded, pretending to be skeptical in the face of such a staggering statement.

Seriously Fortunate: The Armadillo

From the Food Vault Dept.: I tried to combine my longer trips with restaurant reviews back in the days when I took long trips and wrote restaurant reviews, and here’s an example of such: a nifty Mexican restaurant in Kingston, NY, that’s still very much in business.

                                                                              

SHE’D ALREADY BOUGHT AN UPSTATE HOUSE, upstate in this case being Kingston, as defined relative to Manhattan. “I’m a child of the first Woodstock generation,” says Merle Borenstein, “and I love the area. So I bought this place, but I’m still working in the city.” Working in the restaurant business, as it happens, managing a prestigious operation. “I’m vacation in my upstate home, thinking I’d like to run a restaurant in the area. But I didn’t tell anyone.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

“So this customer comes in one day, a regular customer at the Manhattan restaurant, and he says to me, ‘I have a space I’d like to rent to someone who’ll know how to use it.’ And wouldn’t you know, it’s in Kingston!”

Borenstein looked at it. “It had nothing! No kitchen! It was a bar in the 1890s, I was told, but at this point the neighborhood was run down and brutal. A tough neighborhood, they told me! I looked at it and said, ‘I’m from Brooklyn. It looks fabulous.’”

Thus the Armadillo Bar and Grill opened in May, 1987. “You know how you’re supposed to have six months of salary and other expenses in the bank? We had nothing. We opened with a fundraising event, for Hospice, and it did very well. And we’ve been going ever since. We’re very seriously fortunate. And we’ve stayed small.”

Regaining Your Roots

FOR BROTHERS DAVID AND DAN PODOLL, one of the solutions to the economic stresses of operating their North Dakota farm turned out to be heirloom seeds. The brothers’ farm has been in their family since 1953, with wheat and turkeys providing their main revenue stream. But their ability to continue farming in southeastern North Dakota had been hit by shifts in both economics and weather, and conventional approaches were no longer succeeding, at least on the small scale the Podolls practice.

They’re one of three farm families located in three different parts of the United States, profiled by Lisa M. Hamilton in her engaging book Deeply Rooted, Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness (Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA, 2009). The common threads are devotion to the land and innovative approaches to maintaining it, usually in the face of resistance from those too steeped in what passes for tradition to see how tradition is failing.

“Revenue from three acres of seeds roughly equals that from the farm’s three hundred acres in grains,” Hamilton notes, and the heirloom seeds that the Podolls are producing are cultivated to flourish in less-than-ideal conditions. They include a medium-sized watermelon they named “Dakota Rose,” alongside Dakota Tears onions, Dakota Black popcorn, and Uncle David’s Dakota Dessert squash.

But the enemy of the heirloom seed and the Podolls’ approach to farming is the incredibly profitable world of corporate science. Monsanto (now a division of German pharmaceutical company Bayer AG), a leading developer of GMO technology, sells patented single-use seeds, the purchase and use of which obligates the farmer to a draconian set of rules and restrictions.

The Digital Decision

From the Tech Vault Dept.: There’s a rain barrel outside my house that has spawned a large sunfish, swimming within. I was going to blast it with my .22, but decided it would be easier to regurgitate the column below. I believe that everything referenced in it is completely obsolete. Even me – I certainly no longer resemble that photo!

                                                                                            

ABOUT FIVE YEARS AGO, I tested a then-representative pile of digital cameras for Computer Life magazine, concluding that they all were pretty good in delivering images of mediocre resolution – good enough for Web pages, say, but not what you’d use to archive vacation memories.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

A few hundred dollars would buy you an entry-level camera; for professional applications, such as magazine photography, you’d have to spend well up in the thousands.

As is inevitable, the technology has improved – and it’s improved pretty amazingly. I looked at a few current models that are priced in the hundreds and found cameras that are easier to use, more versatile and capable of producing very high-resolution output. Let’s look at the best of those, as well as what you can do with those photos you take.

Olympus, well known for its traditional cameras, got into the digital biz early and evolved a series of cameras that have been in the forefront where features, price and ease of use are concerned (but keep in mind that pricing in this realm is well above that of the film-camera cousins).

The Grand Mississippi Babes Mill

From the Record Shelf Dept.: All right, CD shelf, but even what sounds more up-to-date is charmingly antiquated. At any rate, here’s a look back some thirty years at a pair of significant releases of music by now-forgotten American composers.

                                                                                    

FERDE GROFÉ WROTE MUSIC in a self-consciously “American” vein, trying to achieve the same formal identity European composers were perceived as having. Victor Herbert was one of those European composers (born in Ireland, trained in Germany), but ended up in America, promoting American composers even as he continued to write his successful operettas.

“Babes in Toyland” (1903) and “The Red Mill” (1906) are about as American as you’d find on the musical stage at that time, which is to say that they’re very German even as they ape the then-popular French operettas that were so successful in England. The nicely recorded Naxos CD offers two suites, proving how thoroughly Herbert’s catchy tunes insinuated themselves into the musical language. We know them as folk tunes, and when “March of the Toys” wraps up the “Toyland” suite, we’re comfortably back in a childhood state of mind.

War and Pieces

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Pianist Gary Graffman, who turned 90 last October, is still active as a teacher and performer (and numbers Lang Lang and Yuja Wang among his distinguished students. Here’s a look at a visit he paid to New York’s Capital Region nearly fifteen years ago.

                                                                                

BIRTH, DEATH, THE THREAT OF WAR, the aftermath of war – the programmatic or circumstantial elements of the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s triumphant performance at the Troy Music Hall last week touched on topics never more relevant than today, painting them through the emotional abstraction of music. Which may be the most compelling emotional manipulator of all.

Gary Graffman | Photo by Charles Grove

By the time Ravel’s “Concerto for the Left Hand” kicked into gear, with piano and orchestra merrily jazzing along, the effect was very uplifting. An excellent melding of soloist and orchestra gave the work both excitement and transparency.

By way of background, pianist Paul Wittgenstein (philosopher Ludwig’s brother) had his right arm shot away during World War I, and thereafter built up a commissioned repertory of left-hand-only piano works that included concertos by Prokofiev, Britten and, of course, Ravel, who wrote his contribution alongside his other (two-handed) piano concerto.

Wittgenstein also paved the way for soloists like Gary Graffman and Leon Fleischer, both of whom became right-hand-disabled at their career peaks. Graffman (who has himself commissioned works from Ned Rorem and William Bolcom), now president of the renowned Curtis Institute, has lost none of his performance fire, and, unless you could see the keyboard as he played, you’d easily forget the work’s dexterous restriction.