Power and Authority

From the Classical Vault Dept.: These hot, moist summer days put me in mind of just a such a day thirty-five years ago, when my wife and I journeyed to a park in Schoharie County that shared space with a power-generating dam. That’s where we heard a fine concert by the ever-resourceful Catskill Conservatory Chamber Players, as I explain below.

                                                                                            

OUT ON ROUTE 30, just past Blenheim, there is a state park on a reservoir used by the New York State Power Authority as a pumping station. Beside the park, the authority has a visitors center that features a done-over barn equipped with literature and displays to explain just what it’s doing in the big concrete buildings visible beside the lake.

NY Power Authority Visitors Center

Saturday there was electricity of a musical kind generated in the barn as the Catskill Conservatory Chamber Players gathered for a concert that featured the premiere of Conservatory founder Carleton Clay’s new woodwind quintet.

There seems to be some antipathy between classical music and air conditioning or so it seemed last weekend. The noisy fans in the barn were shut off for the performance and the stage lights were hot but, as Schoharie County Arts Council president Janet Brennan observed when introducing the players, at least this concert wasn’t being rained out – as was the case with outdoor events that evening.

Staying Sharp

From the Vault Dept.: Here’s a piece I stumbled across while seeking something else on the internet, reminding me that somem of the goodies strewn across its fabulous breadth years ago may still be there to haunt you. This appeared on a Metroland magazine blog.

                                                                                           

I AM TRENDY only by accident. Sometimes I’ve been in a place for years and the retro-seekers catch up. (Hats, for example.) Sometimes we arrive independently. It seems that I am no longer as alone in my passion for the Blackwing pencil as I was when its manufacture was ended. The choice of many illustrators from the 1930s on, it also attracted a fan base of writers (Steinbeck among them) and composers (Bernstein, Sondheim).

They are now manufactured by Palomino, and I have stocked up. I like to draft the stories I write by hand. As Sondheim points out, the soft pencils need frequent-enough sharpening to keep you from drowsing. And the sharpener itself is an impressive two-stage affair in which you first achieve a rough-hewn cone, then, in the second hole, hone it to a potentially lethal point.

I can’t say that it’s improved my writing. But it feels good to get away from the computer every now and then.

– Metroland Tech Life Blog, 17 September 2015

Grandma

WHAT DO WE KNOW about H. W. Hanemann? That he lived from August 8, 1895, to September 2, 1968. That he wrote the screenplay for “Flying down to Rio,” as well as “The Great Jasper,” “Rafter Romance,” and “The Meanest Gal in Town,” all from the 1930s, but only the last-named offering the – what’s the opposite of “timeless”? Whatever it is, that’s what describes Swedish-dialect comedy of El Brendel. We know that Hanemann wrote books, and that two of them are “As Is, a Book of Miscellaneous Revelations” (1923) and “The Facts of Life, a Book of Brighter Biography.” And that he wrote songs, many of them spoofs of past-century weepers. The songs appeared in “Judge” magazine, and were collected in a volume titled “Heart-Wrecking Songs.” The most enduring of them seems to be the one performed below, which I first heard in a lively Spike Jones version.

Opera on the Grass, At Last

WHILE SOME MUSIC VENUES are opening to audiences, opera – especially as presented by an institution like The Glimmerglass Festival – needs to plan ahead. Way ahead. They lost a year, of course, as did we all, but they spent it planning a careful return to live programming that could take advantage of the Festival’s beautiful grounds.

Eric Owens and Lisa Marie Rogali
Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival

And as music by Mozart filled the air, as a dignified and friendly Sarastro settled into a fancy chair, we were ushered into a new Glimmerglass era. “Glimmerglass on the Grass,” in fact, featuring a season presented on a specially built outdoor stage, with socially distanced seating on the facing lawn.

An ever-changing forecast was borne out by the mix of sun and clouds that greeted the 11 AM “Magic Flute” performance last Saturday, but it was a good backdrop for a fast-moving production that came with its own plentiful thunder. Glimmerglass resident artist Eric Owens – who has been a great success in productions from several previous seasons here – sang and spoke the role of Sarastro, also offering narration that helped trim the piece down to the 90-minute, intermission-free length that characterizes all of this summer’s productions.

Blow, Ye Winds

I HOPE THAT COMPOSER JOSEPH FENNIMORE has still more recordings that have been made of his works over the years. Every so often, but not often enough, a CD is released that offers another handful of those gems. The latest, “Blow,” is a collection of works for winds and piano. As Fennimore writes in the accompanying notes, “Winds marry better with piano than strings ... Strings have their undeniable place in the instrumental Pantheon given the repertory they command but it takes at least three of them in unison to mitigate one player’s monotonous vibrato.” Take umbrage as you will, cat-gut scrapers, but Fennimore’s music makes convincing arguments in favor of reeds, horn, and flute.

His Clarinet Sonata dates from 1968 and was recorded eight years later. It’s a twelve-minute piece that kicks off with Poulenc-like merriment; the movement that follows, marked Moderate, is a captivating byplay between clarinet and piano as they trade wistful phrases, seeming to dance away from the resolution that, of course, overtakes their tired selves at the end. They recover for a fast finish – it is, in fact, marked Fast – characterized by the deliberate uncertainty of trills and truncated phrases. But it is, again, a dance that gives way to a dreamlike middle before whirling us to a delightfully syncopated finish with a wistful tag. Clarinetist David Niethamer and pianist Charles Schneider were the worthy interpreters here.

Given the grab-bag nature of this collection, it’s no surprise to find a variety of performers represented. What’s surprising, however, is the protean nature of Fennimore’s voice. The Sextet for Woodwind Quintet and Piano premiered at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1985, the year it was written; what’s on this disc was recorded two years later at Loudonville’s Siena College. Fennimore’s voice changed during the 17 years that separate this from the Clarinet Sonata – or he at least consulted a contrasting muse.

Benny Rides Again

From the Music Vault Dept.: We just enjoyed a performance in my town by Dan Levinson and His Palomar Trio with superb vocalist Molly Ryan – their first live gig since the start of the pandemic shut-down. Which got me nostalgic for a big-band appearance Dan and Molly – and fellow Palomarians Mark Shane (piano) and Kevin Dorn (drums) – made in the area in 2009.

                                                                                    

DOESN’T IT SEEM LIKE ONLY YESTERDAY when Benny Goodman and his band scored such a success at the Palomar Ballroom that the Swing Era officially started? All right, then. Maybe I live in a different era. But whatever your perspective, music of the late 1930s was characterized by the punchy, brassy arrangements of the likes of Fletcher Henderson, himself a bandleader, and Jimmy Mundy, and played by the bands of Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw and many, many others.

Dan Levinson
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Performing the tunes called for tremendous virtuosity, and gave us a generation of players still revered for their skill. It’s something of a shock to realize that there’s a current generation of musicians able and eager to play in that style, and can bring to life music heretofore trapped on decades-old recordings.

Clarinetist Dan Levinson is a musical chameleon whose specialty is channeling styles as far back as the ’teens. His heart seems to be in the ’30s, though, and he plays music of that era both with a small group (his Swing Wing) and large ensembles like Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks.

For this event, he fronted James Langton’s New York City All-Stars, a fifteen-piece band sporting the caliber of player Goodman would have been delighted to hire. The program opened as Goodman would have opened it, with a short, rousing “Let’s Dance” that he took almost immediately into “Bugle Call Rag,” a Mundy arrangement that quickly showcased many of the individual players.

The Spirit of Philidor

HERE’S ANOTHER of my video collaborations with Musicians of Ma’alwyck, in which we imagine a visit by composer-chessmaster François-André Philidor to Albany’s Schuyler Mansion to meet General Lafayette – where he meets a more portentous personage instead. With Ethan Botwick as Philidor and Steven Patterson as du Mortier.

Back to Tanglewood

From the Classical Vault Dept.: More summer venues have announced their 2021 seasons, and Tanglewood will be back with the kind of programming you expect – the kind of programming that drew me there 35 years ago to write the review that follows.

                                                                                

The lush lawn at Tanglewood just got its summer crewcut as the Boston Symphony Orchestra season got under way with two concerts by guest conductor Charles Dutoit. Saturday’s was a slam-bang beginning.

Charles Dutoit

The 200th birthday of composer Carol Maria von Weber was saluted with the overture from his opera Der Freischuetz and the Piano Concerto No. 2 in E-flat. The overture is a staple of the orchestral repertory and offers the better groups a display of dynamics and color. Dutoit, best known as music director of the Montreal Symphony, has a terrific hand for bringing out just those characteristics.

The drama of the overture was brought out nicely by Dutoit’s treatment of the piece as a voiceless aria; like Mozart, Weber informed his melodies with a singing quality. A thickly textured sequence for horn quartet is a mean thing to hand the horn-players so early in the concert but these players were superb.

Malcolm Frager was the concerto soloist. A Tanglewood favorite for more than 20 years, he brings a zest to his playing that is the true essence of virtuosity. The Weber concerto provides plenty of opportunity to strut the technical stuff and Frager pulled it off pretty much without a hitch –  the bobbled couple of notes in the faster passages are worth mentioning only to illustrate the risks he takes to achieve his effects, something many other artists should try.

What They Had Laid Out for Their Vacation

Guest Blogger Dept.: George Ade’s famous Fables tended to get longer as their popularity grew and his column spread through newspaper syndication. But here’s an unusually shorter one that seems appropriate to the season ahead.

                                                                               

A MAN WHO HAD THREE WEEKS of Vacation coming to him began to get busy with an Atlas about April 1st. He and his Wife figured that by keeping on the Jump they could do Niagara, Thousand Islands, Atlantic City, The Mammoth Cave and cover the Great Lakes.

Getting Busy with an Atlas
Drawing by Harry Smith

On April 10th they decided to charter a House-Boat and float down the Mississippi.

On April 20th he heard of a Cheap Excursion to California with a stop-over Privilege at every Station and they began to read up on Salt Lake and Yellowstone.

On May 1st she flashed a Prospectus of a Northern Lake Resort where Boats and Minnows were free and Nature was ever smiling.

By May 10th he had drawn a Blue Pencil all over a Folder of the Adirondack Region, and all the Hotel Rates were set down in his Pocket Memorandum Book.

Ten days later she vetoed the Mountain Trip because she had got next to a Nantucket Establishment where Family Board was $6 a Week, with the use of a Horse.

No Child Left Behind

From the Vault Dept.: The Glimmerglass Festival is on the brink of opening again, after the inevitable Covid-inspired summer off. Plenty of info to be gained at their website, and keep in mind that the reduced season has its own seating challenges as well. But they tend to do such things well, as was the case a decade again ago when I penned the below.

                                                                                     

MURDERING YOUR CHILDREN always grabs headlines, and Greek mythological Medea long ago grabbed the title of most famous filicide. Her story varies from source to source, but by the time Luigi Cherubini got hold of it, she was a sorceress who’d already murdered her own brother in aid of her beloved Jason, of fleece-hunting Argonauts fame. Cherubini was a Beethoven contemporary whose music was lauded by that composer, and his work on this opera, which premiered in 1797, shows unexpectedly forward-thinking musical techniques.

Alexandra Deshorties
Photo by Julieta Cervantes

The opera has been tinkered with over the years, acquiring an Italian text (it was written in French) and musical recitatives set by Franz Lachner. As the Glimmerglass Opera production proved, the piece packs a wallop, especially when in the hands of a talent as strong as Alexandra Deshorties.

The title role gives her a grand entrance and an even bigger exit, but the heart of the piece is her struggle to justify the horrible, revenge-driven act she’s contemplating. Deshorties skillfully mined the edge of madness written into the part, reinforcing subtle messages in the music without ever going over the top.

Brick-Oven Harvest

From the Food Vault Dept.: It’s been a decade since the review below ran in Metroland, and I’m pleased to note that the restaurant is still going strong.

                                                                          

THE OVEN IS AN ARRESTING SIGHT. It’s Le Panyol Model 120, if you want to get technical about it, from a French company that dates back to the 1840s and specializes in refractory earthenware products fashioned with a special white clay called terre blanche that’s quarried on the edge of Provence.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

“I did a lot of research to find it,” says Harvest & Hearth chef-owner Peter Michelin. “And I spent a couple of days in Maine learning how to cook in an over like this, at a cooking school called Stone Turtle run by Michael Jubinsky.” Jubinsky is a legend in hearth-cooking circles, and his classes sell out months in advance.

Harvest & Hearth’s most recent incarnation was as Chameleon on the Lake, but it’s undergone a remarkable change inside and out. Some of it is subtle – I didn’t realize that a drop ceiling was gone until Michelin pointed it out – some dramatic, like the glistening wood floors. But nothing tops the sight of that oven, poised like a large stone Dalek at one end of the dining room, its mouth a rictus of dancing flame. Pizzas go in and mere moments later emerge, transformed into crisp, bubbling pies.

When You’re Smiling

WITHOUT MUCH FANFARE (that came across my desk, at least), Sony Classics released a lavish 120-CD box set of conductor Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra recordings. Ah, but it’s more and less than that. Less insofar as it includes not a single one of the maestro’s many stereo essays with that orchestra; more because it gives us his mono-era legacy, a cornucopia of recordings many of which have long been unavailable.

The question often posed by others has been: Was it worth it? This is where the rickety Ormandy legacy comes into play. He led the Philadelphians for 44 years, taking the reins from the flamboyant Stokowski. He maintained the lush sound for which the orchestra already had become famous, with an always-distinguished array of first-chair players to tackle any tricky solos.

Ormandy’s musicianship is rarely impugned, but his work has often been damned with faint praise, with suggestions that there’s a mediocrity about his interpretations. Even the opening paragraphs of Wolfgang Stähr’s booklet essay in the set make needless apologies for Ormandy’s conducting.

In none of the reviews of this set that I’ve encountered is there unalloyed praise. On a classical-music Usenet discussion group, comments have been snotty, if not downright brutal – but such groups are best avoided if you’re looking for considered discussion. So what on earth is wrong with this set?

The Kenmore Audition

ANOTHER ONE OF my collaborations with Musicians of Ma'alwyck, here envisioning an audition that could have taken place at Albany's fabled (and, lately, reopened) Kenmore Hotel, now a banquet house with living spaces.

This Little Piggie

NOTHING YOU READ HERE will prepare you for the experience of watching “Gunda,” the new film from Russian director Victor Kossakovsky. It’s about animals, in particular a pig whose name gives the movie its title. But she, and her litter, and the chickens and cows we will also see, aren’t presented in verdant colors with heart-tugging music and a dulcet, reassuring narrator. The animals are not anthropomorphized into our comfort sphere; in fact, it is the viewer who’s presented with animal characteristics. And if you don’t recognize the plot of the story right away, that’s only because you’ve been fed so many movies with an identical sequence of tension-to-resolution gimmicks that you’re inclined to regard the day-to-day life of an animal as boring. “Gunda” proves it’s anything but.

The long, long opening sequence gives us an image of a barn wall with a smaller entryway, in which lies the unmoving head of that pig. Eventually, her silhouette is eclipsed by the succession of busy piglets. She’s giving birth. As this becomes apparent, we move inside.

Because the film is black-and-white, it never becomes a paean to Nature’s Beauty. “We started in color,” says Kossakovsky, “but there was too much to see, and it looked like postcards. When we took the color out, you could see the personalities.” Thus we concentrate instead on the animals we’re shown, usually in close-up and at the level on which the animals live.

The Cards

Guest Blogger Dept.: We had the opening chapter of Barry Pain’s masterful Eliza a few weeks ago; let’s see how she and her fussy husband are faring in the second chapter. (Drawing below by Wallace Goldsmith.)

                                                                        

ABOUT A YEAR AGO Eliza and myself had a little difference of opinion. I mentioned to her that we had no visiting-cards.

“Of course not,” she said. “The idea of such a thing!” She spoke rather hastily.

“Why do you say 'of course not'?” I replied, quietly. “Visiting-cards are, I believe, in common use among ladies and gentlemen.”

"He seemed to think
it was not essential."

She said she did not see what that had to do with it.

“It has just this much to do with it,” I answered: “that I do not intend to go without visiting-cards another day!”

“What's the use?” she asked. “We never call on anybody, and nobody ever calls on us.”

“Is Miss Sakers nobody?”

“Well, she's never left a card here, and she really is a lady by birth, and can prove it. She just asks the girl to say she's been, and it's nothing of importance, when she doesn't find me in. If she can do without cards, we can. You'd much better go by her.”

“Thank you, I have my own ideas of propriety, and I do not take them from Miss Sakers. I shall order fifty of each sort from Amrod's this morning.”

“Then that makes a hundred cards wasted.”

The Louis Armstrong Legacy

MOSAIC RECORDS, that scrappy little jazz-reissue house that specializes in offering handsome, thorough, excellently remastered sets, has been very attentive to the Louis Armstrong legacy. First there were six CDs covering the Decca recordings of the All-Stars from 1950-58, then all of the (pre-All-Stars) Decca studio recordings from 1935-46 (six CDs). Most recently we switched labels (as Armstrong did) to get the All-Stars recorded live between 1947 and 1958 for Columbia and RCA (a whopping nine discs) ... which set the stage for what happened next.

The latest Mosaic Armstrong release stays with those two labels (now both owned by Sony, which makes such reissues easier) but goes back to studio recordings – specifically, seven discs’ worth that cover the last of his big (and I do mean big) band recordings for RCA, and three concept albums he cut for Columbia. All material that’s been reissued before on the original labels, but not in audio quality like this, not with fantastic liner notes like this – and not with so many compelling extras.

The RCA years begin with a session put together to feature Esquire magazine’s 1946 jazz-poll winners, a list heavily influenced by the magazine’s columnist, Leonard Feather, who also helmed the recording session. And I’d like to salute Ricky Riccardi, who wrote the excellent booklet text (about whom more later) for his clear-eyed appraisal of Feather’s tiresome, meddlesome nature. There was a man who set himself up as a jazz savant in order to impose his own limited-interest opinions – and some mediocre songs – on a public looking for guidance.

Ballet Gets Modern

 From the Terpsichorean Vault Dept.: No ballet at the Saratoga Performance Arts Center this summer, and I fear we’re getting accustomed to that, as dance in general recedes from public view. Here (as you suspected would be the case) is a look back, to what was going on there in 1988.

                                                                                    

WHAT HAS 40 YEARS brought to us in the world of American Music?

If Tuesday night’s offerings of the New York City Ballet’s American Music Festival are any indication, new works benefit from a considered look over the shoulder. The program at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center included a new piece that harkened back to an old one, an old one that still sounds new, and a new one that tried self-consciously hard to sound newer than new.

Helene Alexopoulos

Leslie Stuck’s “Behind the China Dogs,” which had its Saratoga premiere, is a modernist work that never lets you forget how modern it is. It’s also pretty funny.

Choreographed by William Forsythe, artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet and frequent collaborator with Stuck, it takes a fill-in-the-blank approach to what’s avant-garde. “Behind the China Dogs” could as easily be titled “Under the Tattersall Sofa,” except that it would deprive us of the accessory of several sculpted dachshunds stoically guarding the upstage area.

The costuming is the tip-off. With a corps of men dressed in black shorts, checkered vests and grey socks, how solemn an enterprise can this be? The women similarly lampoon formality with an illusion of evening gown suggested by leotard and body stocking.

Impassioned Threesome

From the Classical Vault Dept.: It was a rare treat to see and hear the Golub-Kaplan-Carr trio perform in 1984. They were a top-notch group essaying the heart of the piano trip repertory, but pianist David Golub died of lung cancer in 2000 at the age of 50. Violinist Mark Kaplan teaches at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and performs as a soloist and inchamber ensembles; cellist Colin Carr is professor of cello at the Royal Academy of Music and continues pursuing a solo career. Here’s the brief, interview-free advance I wrote, followed by the review itself.

                                                                                 

THREE YOUNG INSTRUMENTALISTS decided not long ago to interrupt their solo activities for a few weeks each year to combine their talents as the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio, presenting the best of the repertory for the ensemble piano, violin and cello.

This trio will appear at Union College’s Memorial at 8 tonight in a program of trios by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Brahms.

Pianist David Golub has performed with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and others here and abroad; he also has spent summers at Aspen, Marlboro and Ravinia. Violinist Isaac Stern called him one of the most gifted musicians I have met in many years of music making.”

Violinist Mark Kaplan’s list of appearances is similar to Golub’s. He also has performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and others.

English cellist Cohn Carr came to the music scene in this country as a winner of the Young Concert Artists’ International Auditions. He was a first-prize winner of the Naumberg Cello Competition in 1981 and of the 1982 Piatigorsky Memorial Award. He is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory.

Dinosaur Dubbing

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Here’s another tech oldie, my how-to about compiling a videotape from your existing footage by using a 1994 software program to supervise the jockeying through individual segments that are then transferred ... it’s exhausting even to write this. And I can assure you that the result was just as primitive-looking as the process suggests.

                                                                                       

REMEMBER THE TORMENT of sitting through yet another slide show as Dad brutalized captive guests with scenes from last summer's beach trip? Every single shot he took was jammed into that projector, no matter how poorly cropped or focused it was. With one of those awful I'm-getting-too-old epiphanies, I realized that I've been inflicting the exact same pain on my guests, but the means of torture has changed. Today, they're forced to suffer through my videotapes.

And every scrap of footage is intact. Every time I accidentally pushed the start button and filmed two minutes of floor tile. Every shaky sequence of passing scenery. Had I not been asked to write about VideoDirector, all my long-suffering friends would have had to buy it for me. I can't live without it now.

VideoDirector is an elegant product because it gives you the means to edit tapes with your computer without consuming your hard drive in the process. Since you aren't actually capturing video, the computer simply functions as a control center to aid in the editing process, miraculously compiling choice material from those teeming tapes into well-paced episodes.

I had already tried video editing with my camcorder and VCR; a good VCR can pause and resume quickly, but controlling the camcorder is much more difficult, especially when you're trying to tweeze a two-or three-second scene out of a sequence. Fortunately, some camcorders have a special jack built in that allows them to be controlled by another machine—which can be a computer.

The Nominalization of Barbecue

From the Culinary Vault Dept.: Twenty years ago I was well into a barbecue craze that had me buying a succession of smokers and perfecting my dry rubs and sauces. Ironically, it also steered me away from barbecue restaurants, as I tended to enjoy my own fabrications more – but I remember Jr.’s BBQ in Burnt Hills as a particularly fine eatery. It’s long gone, replaced at that site by place selling sheds.

                                                                                     

BARBECUE INSPIRES SUCH PASSION in its fans that what once was adjective or verb is a richly portentous noun to those in the know. The only adjective regularly allowed beside it is “good,” and “good” means nothing less than excellent.

Generic Pulled Pork Photo

More elusive than good barbecue, it seems, are good barbecue restaurants. So it was a shock to discover that Jr.’s (that’s “Junior’s”) has been in operation for nine months, in a venerable Burnt Hills location that started life as a speakeasy, became one of the first establishments to sport a liquor license post-Volstead Act, then went on to become various restaurants, most notably Silvestri’s and Felicia’s.

Now it’s owned by Tom and Kristle DiPietro and it’s a seven-day-a-week barbecue joint that also serves sandwiches, wings, great desserts and a full spectrum of slow-roasted meats.

Because that’s the whole point of barbecue. You want to turn a tough cut of meat tender with a lengthy cooking process, and you want to impart flavors of smoke and a tangy marinade. Thus there are methods of grilling and smoking and roasting to use separately or in combination, the key ingredient being time.

Tom DiPietro has put a lot of that into the restaurant business, in which he’s been employed in one capacity or another for 33 of his 46 years. And he displayed his adeptness the evening I visited with family and a friend because mid-week business was slow enough for him to work it nearly alone.