Daily Blague

The sound of music creeped in my ears this morning, as I was sorting through the Times. I whistled for a bit before recognizing what I was whistling as Brahms's Violin Concerto. Suddenly mad to hear it (this is why I have a lot of CDs - I never know what I'm going to be mad to hear), I put on Itzhak Perlman's recording for EMI. And although I knew every note, the concerto was entirely new. I had never heard this before. How voluptuous, how art nouveau the music sounded! Could this really be Mr Last Classicist? Was it possible that Brahms was all about nothing but pleasure?

Moments like this, when a familiar thing re-presents itself in an almost shatteringly new light, don't happen often anymore, and I'm treasuring it.

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The other day, at Barnes & Noble in Union Square, following another great brunch at Blue Water Grill with Ms G and her Beau, I found a recording of Così fan tutte that I didn't know existed. (Or, if I knew, once upon a time, it was long ago, and I'd completely forgotten it.) Recorded in Berlin in 1962, it features a great cast under the direction of Eugen Jochum, who in my opinion didn't record nearly enough of the Viennese classics. (Or, if he did, they weren't released here.) Here's the cast:

Fiordiligi	Irmgard Seefried
Dorabella	Nan Merriman
Despina	Erika Köth
Ferrando	Ernst Haefliger
Guglielmo	Hermann Prey
Don Alfonso	Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

I've only listened to the recording once, so I won't characterize it, but it struck me as musical, as if Jochum had set out to make the most beautiful recording of the opera. Così is generally regarded as one of Mozart's very best scores, and the arias are indeed wonderfully colored by instrumental flashes. But Così is above all a sublimely funny opera, and in comedy timing is everything.

How would I rank this recording alongside the ten others in my library? (Yes, ten - I counted.) Ranking will have to wait - maybe forever. I don't have a favorite Così. I grew up thinking that the Schwarzkopf/Böhm recording was the apex, even though I knew that most music lovers preferred Schwarzkopf/Karajan. My first recording was the very heavily cut della Casa/Böhm. Until Sunday, my most recent acquisition was the surprisingly satisfying Fleming/Solti live recording.

What will I listen to next? I think it's time to haul out the 1952 Metropolitan Opera recording, Steber/Stiedry - in English. The translation by Ruth and Thomas P Martin is spry enough to be bearable. The great Richard Tucker sings Ferrando. 

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For years, Kathleen has had a compilation CD called Fire Island Classics/DJ Michael Fierman. She puts it on sometimes when she's organizing her closet. I've always liked the first cut, "The Whistle Song," by Frankie Knuckles, and the penultimate one, Sunscreen's "Looking at You." Yesterday morning, while we were both doing stuff in the bedroom, I noticed that Kathleen went to the machine to skip through one cut; I didn't know which. Later, I listened to the CD while I was tidying the room, as I do on Saturdays, and I heard the song that Kathleen cut through. It was "Hold On To My Love," by Jimmy Ruffin. In the album notes, it is described as an "anthem," and I can see why. It's a simplified, disco-fied version of "Unchained Melody." I listened to it about twenty times. Now it's an ear worm.

What a good, Twenty years after the rest of the world is so over a song, I get it. 

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A friend has pointed out me that the ending of "Between My Legs" quotes that of the title song from The Phantom of the Opera. A little more research digs up an entry on a Rufus message board that helpfully points out that the Phantom recites lines much like the ones that I've copied. Of course: the river underneath the town that only I know all about is the sewer of Paris.

What is Rufus up to?

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"Between My Legs," the fifth entry on Release the Stars, starts out as a driving rock song with a motif rather than a tune, and the sardonic iteration of its title. The thrust of the verse seems to be that the singer and the person whom he is addressing are out of sorts, mismatched, never in the same place at the right time. Rufus's tone is world-weary but his singing is fairly straight.

Then comes the puzzling chorus, which promises that, when the world comes to an end, all the addressee has to do is to call Rufus, who will arrange an "exit as it all is happening." The language of the chorus is far more poetic than is that of the verse, and it is set to a series of rising phrases that also suggest a hymn, even though the insistent rock beat continues unimpeded. Arpeggiated chords suggest a playful halo, and backup singers contribute a gospel note.

There is a second verse, and a second chorus, and then the song opens up into something completely different. Rufus describes his exit strategy thus:

'Cause there's a river

Running underground.

Underneath the town towards the sea,

That only I know all about.

On which from this city we can flee.

The music to which this is set is exalted and anthemic, even though the first three lines are accompanied only be noodling guitars and reverberation. On the word "sea," the driving rhythm recurs, utterly transformed by the new atmosphere. In the background, trumpets and horns flourish regally. As if all of this weren't far enough away from the song's beginnings. the actress Sîan Phillips - Reverend Mother in David Lynch's Dune - recites the exit lines with unabashed staginess, as if to faux-scare little children. When she gets to the last line, Rufus sings it overhead. The ending, scored to sound something like a carousel organ, and swinging majestically and uncomplicatedly between tonic and the augmented fifth, is as massive, in its way, as the finale of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony.

What it all means, I have no idea. But what interests me is the way that Rufus has of transforming songs by taking them off in unforeseen but absolutely convincing directions. The most brilliant of such songs is "Memphis Skyline," from Want Two: when the main part of the song is over, a dissonant note on the piano heralds the shimmering apotheosis of the Orphic lyrics. Here in "Between My Legs" as well, the songwriter strikes the note of apocalyptic metamorphosis.

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The new Rufus Wainwright album, Release the Stars, arrived yesterday. I listened to it while I was tidying up the blue room. I liked it, but nothing really grabbed me, until the penultimate song, "Sanssouci," which I listened to no fewer than thirty-three times. I even got the yodel down.

The words are somewhat kinky (this is, after all, Rufus), but the tune is primo pop. I just want to be where this song is.

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The music season is nearly over, which means that it's time to order tickets for next year. Last year, owing to the general unsteadiness of domestic affairs (Kathleen was looking for a new job), I didn't get round to ordering tickets until the fall, and so I didn't get everything that I wanted, and when I did get tickets, they weren't always the good seats that I prefer. I aim to do better this year; why, only yesterday, I renewed our Orpheus at Carnegie subscription. We've had seats T1 and T3 in the "prime parquet" - the orchestra - for years, except for two seasons when we were exiled to T5 and T7, as a penalty for having renewed very late. I'd like to move up a few rows, but I think that some sort of charitable donation will be required. T is fine, though, and we're on the left-hand side of the auditorium, which is always very important, as you can't see a pianist's hands if you're sitting on the right side.

My system, as it were, is to start with what I most want to hear and work my way down the list. I like to have one evening in Avery Fisher Hall - that's enough. I'm very fond of Zankel Hall; this past season, I attended baroque concerts there; next year, I'll be looking for something different. And then there's the Met, which has the advantage of being in the neighborhood. If there's something compelling at City Opera, I'll get a pair of tickets. I've only been to Alice Tully Hall once in my life, or maybe twice. It ought to be clear from this that, while I like to hear music in concert or recital, I don't want to do so too often, because overexposure is a terrible danger. I want every concert to be special in some way - special for me - and by and large that's what they are.

Ordering tickets last season, I decided that it was time to encounter the Jordi Savall phenomenon. Mr Savall is a Catalonian viola da gambist, which means he plays a cello-like instrument (only slightly smaller) that he supports on his legs. Most Europeans abandoned the instrument in the Seventeenth Century, but the French remained attached to it well into the following century. Mr Savall sometimes brings his early-music ensemble, Hesperion XXI, to town when he comes, but this year his brought only two colleagues, under the banner "Barcelona." I got a pair of tickets to the second of his two concerts at the Met, which finally came round the week before last.

Kathleen, busy as ever, was in no mood for a concert, but she decided to go anyway, just for the sane-making break; she has learned, moreover, that I don't get tickets for her if I doubt that she'd really enjoy the evening. (For this reason, I enjoy a lot of German chamber music by myself.) And she really did enjoy the evening - more than I did, in fact. I'm not sure why. I could tell that something quietly extraordinary was happening on stage, but I couldn't feel it. I'd love to say that I'm open to a wide variety of musical experiences, but it wouldn't be true. When I don't get something, though, I just leave it. There is no point in trying to figure out why you don't get something - because you don't get it! You might as well ask why you don't find a given popular movie star truly attractive. There's nothing wrong with the star and there's nothing wrong with you. Everybody can't like everything. I'm hammering at this because it's so obvious, and yet so hard to learn, and to accept.  

¶ Barcelona, at Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.

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Orpheus Chamber Orchestra presses onward with its demonstration that conductors are perhaps unnecessary. Listening to the orchestra play Schumann's Second Symphony, a serious if idiosyncratic entry in the catalogue of Important German Symphonies, was about as exciting an experience as I could stand in a concert hall - or anywhere else, for that matter. It was odd, odd, odd, to hear the music and not to see a conductor. How was it happening? What if someone went astray? What if someone led a whole section astray?

I wanted Kathleen to attempt a description of violinist Janine Jansen's gown, but she's not here, so I'll have to essay one myself. Ms Jansen is a pretty, fit, medium-tall young woman, and she plays with her knees (so to speak). Her gusto brought the hem of her voluminous tulle skirt to the floor fairly regularly; ordinarily, it hovered at her instep (she was wearing highish heels). The bodice of the gown was like nothing so much as a Roman breastplate, but without the shoulders. A serious fashion statement, and definitely not your standard concert-artist couture. Oh, and she played the Mendelssohn e-minor really well, too. 

¶ Orpheus at Carnegie Hall.

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Beyond what I've read in the Times over the past ten years or so, I don't know anything about Gérard Mortier, but I know that I don't like what he stands for. The incoming head of New York City Opera represents everything that makes me sorry I'm alive today, when theatre directors don't trust composers and librettists to have been sufficiently "creative." There is nothing to do with, say, Così fan tutte other than to follow the notes and the stage directions. City Opera's current production of this Mozart opera succeeds not because of the sophomoric staging and set design but because the singers are gifted and fit. For the most part, they look and sound like lovers. (The opera's subtitle is "La scuola degli amanti" - the school for lovers.)

I was off M Mortier the moment I heard that he did not intend to fight for a new home for City Opera. The New York State Theatre, like the other buildings in Lincoln Center, ought to be torn down. Why do Americans not only make but insist upon denying having made such terrible mistakes? Vietnam! Iraq! Lincoln Center! I could go on... If City Opera is to complement the Metropolitan Opera, it ought to be small - or smallish. A house of fifteen hundred seats, say. With a thrust stage for the singers and the orchestra backstage. Minimal props - nothing to get in the way of fine singing. No conductors, no directors, no lighting designers - none of that crapage! Just opera.

Some days, I am very tired of life.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art's MMArtists - Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert - closed their spring season with an interesting program of music by Schubert, Schoenberg, and Brahms. I wish I could get tickets for their next season, which will feature Beethoven, right now, because I know which seats to ask for.

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For a few more weeks, WNYC will make it possible to listen to last week's Orpheus concert. I hope that you'll find the time to hear it. It certainly doesn't sound like Carnegie Hall on the computer, but you'll get some idea of what I've been raving about for years. I wish I knew how to make a permanent recording!

Here's what I thought.

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Joshua Bell's bout of busking in the Washington Metro is old news by now, but a friend sent me the link to the WaPo story by Gene Weingarten, and I thought back to Mr Bell's Mostly Mozart concert last summer, and how thrilling it was to hear him and his friends play Mendelssohn's Octet.

Somewhat more to the point, however, I remembered the cellist who was playing one of Bach's cello suites - every bit as demanding, I should think, as the Chaconne that Joshua Bell played in the Metro - in a passageway in the West Fourth Street IND station. I was on my way to lunch with Édouard, the week before last. I heard the cellist long before I saw him, and by the time I saw him I recognized that he was playing very, very well. I walked past him but stopped at about ten paces. I doubled back. I grabbed all of the singles that were in my pocket and dumped them in his instrument case. I walked away hurriedly; I'd be just on time if I didn't dawdle. So far as I could tell (what with my immovable neck), the cellist never looked up. I didn't look at him, either. I have no way of knowing whether he regretted having to play in the subway as much as I did.

I'm not a fan of music in the subway. The acoustics are all wrong; in tiled expanses, music reverberates painfully. And then there is the (sad) fact that most of the musicians, all of whom have auditioned before some sort of MTA panel, are usually okay at best. All right: they're good. But good isn't good enough, not in this town. I always feel like the Penelope Wilton character in Woody Allen's Match Point. How long do you keep trying at something before you accept that you're not cut out for it?

The cellist at West Fourth was definitely good enough. I'd have paid to hear him perform. So I did pay to hear him perform. Maybe someday I'll get to enjoy his music-making in a more congenial setting.

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Bach and still more Bach: this time, played by Orpheus at the Temple of Dristan. That's what visitors to the museum used to ask to see - perhaps they still do. Another mass solecism: "Where are the Oscar Mayer Galleries?" (It's André Meyer.)

I feared that the adamantine surfaces of Dendurland would make hash of Bach's counterpoint, but the music sounded lovely. I happened to pick a seat on the aisle that the musicians used to come and go - one of the neatest things about Orpheus is that the musicians walk on all at once, like a wave of commuters at Grand Central, only carrying instruments. I got to take a good look at many half-familiar faces.

¶ Orpheus at the Temple of Dendur.

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As I was taking a break during the interval at last week's New York Collegium concert, I overheard someone complain that a program consisting of three Bach cantatas was "a bit much." Not for me, it wasn't. These works have a bottomless appeal for me. I don't like them equally - I don't even know most of them at all, or well - but their relentless transformation of liturgical utility and formal complexity into the most seriously delightful music ever written never ceases to amaze me.

When I got home, I thought I'd check out the library to see if I had any recordings of the the three works, BWV 22, 23, and 75. And what do you suppose I found? I found that these three connected cantatas have all been recorded together as Volume 8 of the impressive Bach Collegium Japan series on BIS. I bought a lot of these back in the late Nineties, all at once, so it's no wonder that I never got round to knowing this recording. I have to wonder if it inspired Mr Parrott's programming.

Sadly, the program announced that the Collegium, which has been somewhat strapped for funding recently, will not offer a subscription series next season. That's an awful blow. Where are all those hedge fund zillionaires?

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There was plenty of whooping and hollering at last Friday's chamber recital at Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Met. The occasion was the second of the MMArtists' three programs this season. The ensemble consisted of four men and one woman, and they had not quite worked out the dress code. Jennifer Frautschi wore a dressy dress and heels to match. She looked ready for a deluxe cocktail party, minus the jewelry. The men wore jackets but not ties, and, while they weren't quite scruffy, they were taking casualness to the point beyond which it slips into carelessness. I'm not sure whether we're in a transitional era or whether people are in a mood to experiment. There is a liberated, Sixties air. But there weren't any thirtysomethings playing Brahms at this level in the Sixties, I never heard them.

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On balance, last Thursday's two hours of baroque music, most of it by Antonio Vivaldi, was just a tad excessive. It didn't help that I couldn't see. No more seats on the side of the mezzanine for me! (The boxes on the main level are great.)

The good thing about the length of the concert was that Ms NOLA and I didn't get to the Brooklyn Diner until minutes before ten o'clock, which is when the restaurant begins offering late-night Eggs Benedict. That's always just what I want.

When dinner was over, we walked to the subway station alongside Carnegie Hall, Ms NOLA to board the Q and I to wait for the first train to come along on the other track. I got home minutes before Kathleen did. 

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At Angela Hewitt's recital last Thursday, Ms NOLA stayed in her seat during the interval, and when I came back from my customary errand she told me that people had been walking up and staring at the piano as if they'd never seen one before. Well, I told her, they haven't. I certainly hadn't. Emblazoned on the side of the box, instead of the usual lyre and "Steinway," was FAZIOLI. I've read about this magnificent upstart piano manufacturer, located north of Venice, but I've never heard one of its instruments.

In a word, Wow.

Angela Hewitt was no slouch, either.

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Finally, it's snowing. Since I don't have to leave the house, shovel a sidewalk, or drive a car, I'm quite content. I can enjoy snow the way children do. What I love most about snowfall is the deep quiet. Even in Manhattan, noises are hushed. Only the occasional gust of wind makes a sound.

Continue reading "Let It Snow" »

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After Friday night's concert at the Met (our Met, the museum), Kathleen and I skittered in the cold to a trattoria on 84th near Madison, the Caffe Grazie. After a while, I realized that the couple of the next table had been to the same performance, and I ventured a remark. We were soon in deep conversation about the evening. I was assured that Edward Arron, the Artistic Coordinator of MMArtists (whom we'd just heard), is the son of the late Judith Arron, the great director of Carnegie Hall before her untimely death of cancer. I'd been hoping that he was just a nephew; what a load it must be to know that there's a beautiful performing space in Manhattan that was your mother's idea, and that that was supposed to be named after her - until a couple of richnicks came along and bought the naming rights to Zankel Hall.

Here's my report. Op. 34 is worth your time!

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On Saturday night, Kathleen and I went down to the Blue Note, on West Third Street, to hear The Crusaders. Kathleen was already a big fan of The Crusaders when I met her nearly thirty years ago, and she was eager to catch them in their first appearance at the club since 1986. She made reservations for the second set, which was scheduled to begin at ten-thirty but which, in the event, started much closer to eleven. By then, we were wedged into tight seats in the corner nearest the bar. We'd thought that getting to the club at 9:30 or so would net us a good spot in the first-come-first-served line that's the unavoidable downside of an outing to the Blue Note. The sidewalk is less than capacious, and the weather is usually unpleasant. It wasn't too bad on Saturday night, but we arrived at 9:40, and were well back in the last quarter, perhaps the last fifth, of the line. (We had never been to the Blue Note on a Saturday before.) Hence the lousy seats. We both ended up standing alongside our chairs.

Only two of the original Crusaders are still in the band, pianist Joe Sample and sax player Wilton Felder. Nils Lundgren has come on board to play the trombone, along with drummer Steve Gadd and bassist Nicklas Sample (the pianist's son). So far, so good. These capable musicians were all very evidently on the same page. The surprise was the appearance of Ray Parker, Jr, on the guitar.

Some other time, I'll tell you why I think that "Jack and Jill" is the greatest pop song of the Seventies. It initially appeared on Raydio, Mr Parker's first album, along with the amazingly transgressive "Let's Go All The Way" (every teenaged girl's father's worst nightmare). A very gifted blues guitarist, Mr Parker wasn't an obvious fit, and he didn't get to do much, either. I wondered, in fact, if this might be the Ray Parker, Jr Rehabilitation Tour, with the musician being grateful just for the chance to appear on stage. He wasn't given a solo until the penultimate number, "X Marks The Spot," and by then I was pretty impatient to hear him let it rip. Let it rip he did, however, and for the first time that evening I found that I had simply fallen into the music.

The houseful of serious Crusaders fans got what it came for, an hour or so of bluesy jazz that pulled off the neat trick of being brightly assertive and laid-back at the same time. Wilt Felder and Nils Lundgren turned in a series of bravura solos that drew enthusiastic applause, while Joe Sample attacked his keyboards with untiring vigor. I think I might have had a better time without the distraction of waiting to hear Ray Parker, Jr.

I know that I'd have had a better time, as would almost everyone in our quarter of the room, without the distraction of a couple of dateless young women, one of them a willowy blonde, who lost interest in the music early and required a massive hushing from the surrounding tables to remember where they were. I wish I could say that such bad behavior at the Blue Note came as a surprise.

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Fossil Darling (né PPOQ) just called from the desk with the following "question."

Johann Sebastian,

How long is your passion?

This was followed up by the brilliant, music-lover's query, "Is the St Matthew Passion long?"

Did I ever tell you that Fossil is deaf? Yes, he is.

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In the middle of November, just before flying off to St Croix for Thanksgiving, Kathleen and I took in a performance of Mozart's Così fan tutte, which, as everyone must know by now, is my favorite opera. I don't see it often, though, because it's so easy to screw up. The plot still makes people uncomfortable - which just shows you how prim and pious Americans can be about romantic comedy. Here is my take on the story: vacationing in Naples, two ladies from Ferrara meet two young officers and, in somewhat creaky but more recent parlance, start going steady. They don't fall in love at all; they're like middle-school students going through motions they don't entirely understand. All of this happens before the opera begins, but it is implied by every detail of the opening scenes. The young lovers are shown to be silly kids, now florid about their "perfect" mate, now necromantic. Their cynical old friend, Don Alfonso, decides to show them how just how silly they are. He makes a wager with the officers that, if they pretend to go off to war, and then show up in exotic costumes, they'll have no trouble each winning the other's girl's heart. The officers accept the bet with alacrity, to show the old misery just how wrong he is.

But of course he's not wrong. The boys come back in their Albanian (Turkish) outfits, and throw themselves into love-making with great vigor. It is unlikely that this was how they won the ladies originally. Their overtures are initially repulsed, of course, but this only redoubles their zeal. The long and the short of it is that the girls eventually fall in love, genuinely this time, in response to such ardor. And eventually the boys stop acting. Why do people overlook this? Why do the boys appear to forget which side of the bet they're on? When Ferrando makes his last-ditch effort to conquer Fiordiligi, he's in earnest. Winning a bet is the last thing on his mind, and, if you can't hear that, you're deaf.

So there is no real confusion at the end. Even though the libretto does not specify who ends up with whom, the music, if only people would listen, is unambiguous. Even Guglielmo, who claims to wish that he were toasting his friends with poison, is more genuinely engaged by the final arrangement than he was at the start, when all he could do was make preposterous claims about his lady-love's fortitude. Even though the final-scene marriages are a sham (officiated by a housemaid in drag), they represent the ultimate couplings.

Continue reading about Così fan tutte at Portico.

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Two weeks ago, during a busy week, I had back to back chamber concerts, first at Zankel Hall and then at the 92nd Street Y. They were very different evenings, but almost equally enjoyable.

On the Tuesday, I heard Ton Koopman lead the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra in two works by JS Bach, the Musical Offering and the Coffee Cantata. Something, in short, for everybody. The cantata is a sort of chamber opera in which a grumpy old papa tries to get his fetching daughter to abandon the (then burgeoning) coffee craze. After numerous threats, she at last concedes - but it's a sham concession, since her new husband is going to have to allow her to drink all the coffee she wants. As such, it's a domesticated version of the very popular buffa plot exemplified by La serva padrona, and about the only instance I can think of of Bach's following fashion. Klaus Mertens sang the part of the father in a heroic basso, while Bettini Pahn as the daughter showed a lovely soubrette voice. Tenor Otto Bouwknegt, as the fiancé, sang with a strong but pleasant voice.

As for the Musical Offering...

Continue reading about chamber music at Portico.

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The second concert of Orpheus's season at Carnegie Hall, on Saturday night, featured pianist Jeremy Denk, a musician whose Web log I have followed for some time. At the last Orpheus concert, I buttonholed Mr Denk and introduced myself. So I was hoping to be very impressed by his performance. Good intentions, however, were swept away by the excitement of hearing him play the most substantial of JS Bach's solo concertos, The Concerto in d, BWV 1052. I listen to this work every day, it seems, but on the CD that is parked my carousel, Anton Heiller plays the harpsichord. Mr Denk's fingers spun the twanging glaze of the solo part into beautifully etched phrases that tumbled sometimes with, and sometimes against, the string orchestra. The pianist commanded his instrument with something like the nonchalance of a great jazz pianist. He can't have been unaware of playing in Carnegie Hall, but he appeared to be as comfortable as if he were playing for friends at home. And, again like a jazz musician, he made it all look easy. Jeremy Denk's playing is about the music, not about the difficulty of the music.

One is easily inclined to think of jazz when listening to Bach's keyboard music, and vice versa. Where pleasing listeners is supposed to be important, Bach substitutes an obsession with the possibilities of inversion and variation. To play the music well, a pianist must share some of Bach's curiosity. Mr Denk went so far as to create the illusion of extemporization - quite a feat, considering the familiarity of this chestnut. My mind never wandered for even a moment.

The program opened with the first of Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, and closed with the second. I seem to be hearing the Brandenburgs with some frequency these days, but I'm pleased to note that they are no longer baroque bon-bons suitable for aural wallpaper. Last year, I heard all six, played on one-voice-per-part lines. Orpheus's approach may have been more conventional, but the results were completely fresh. The horn players were so brilliant in the first movement of the First Concerto that I joined in the applause that burst out when the movement was over, a no-no that triggered pained and querulous glances from the ancient couple sitting in front of me. Ordinarily, I have to hope that the custom of waiting until a work is completely over to applaud is in good health, but the horn players' bravura was extraordinary. (The little variation for horns and oboes in the fourth movement wasn't quite so perfect.) The soloists in the Second Concerto were members of the orchestra, so of course they were terrific. I wish I knew their names. (I wish that Orpheus would publish a facebook at its Web site.)

Composer Stephen Hartke was on hand to receive the ovation that me the world premiere of his Brandenburg Afternoons - a work written for the same unusual forces that Bach calls for in the First Brandenburg. It may have helped that Melissa Mell, a cellist, indulged us with a bit of music appreciation in advance. I'm not sure how important it is to know that the violas and the cello in the first movement of this engaging piece represent boats bobbing in a marina, but if such tone-painting get people to pay attention, then it can't do any harm. I have no hesitation about describing the work's concluding saraband as darkly romantic. Mr Hartke's music may be tonally modern, but it remembers where it has been and known where it is going. I hope that Orpheus will record Brandenburg Afternoons.

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Like any good resort, the Buccaneer Beach Hotel retains a rota of musicians to provide nightly entertainment. During our short visit, the music has never been too loud, and the performances have always been good of their kind - very good, really. But nothing prepared us for Steven Katz, the guitarist who took the stage (such as it is) on Tuesday evening. We could hear him from our front door before we walked up hill to dinner, but we didn't really pay attention until we'd been seated and served. Then we noticed that he was extremely gifted. In the middle of the second set that we heard, he tossed out a feeler to see if anyone would mind some "classical" music. I didn't hear anybody's else's response because I was too loudly shouting that I wouldn't mind. Whereupon Mr Katz launched a sequence that began with Dowland and ended with Villa Lobos. I can't claim to be an aficionado of the guitar, but I know a virtuoso when I hear one, and Steven Katz could play anything, anywhere, and thrill his audience. What he is doing in St Croix, or the Virgin Islands, or the Antilles Greater and Lesser, is, from a personal standpoint, none of my business, but the question is not musically impertinent.

Mr Katz has produced a CD on which he plays his own compositions, and if you have any interest in great guitar, visit this site and get yourself a copy.

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The other day, I came across the lyrics to a Cole Porter song that I'd never heard of, and still haven't heard.* The song is called "The Physician," and it was written for Nymph Errant, a show of 1933. Here's the final refrain.

He said my vertebrae were "sehr schöne,"

And called my coccyx "plus que gentil,"

He murmured "molto bella"

When I sat on his patella,

But he never said he loved me.

He took a fleeting look at my thorax,

And started singing slightly off key.

He cried "May Heaven strike us,"

When I played my umbilicus,

But he never said he loved me.

 

As it was dark,

I suggested we walk about

Before he returned to his post.

Once in the park,

I induced him to talk about

The thing I wanted the most.

He lingered with me until morning,

Yet when I tried to pay him his fee,

He said, "Why, don't be funny,

It is I who owe you money,"

But he never said he loved me.

I've been stewing over this cleverness for a couple of days, and I've concluded that, once again, Cole Porter has nailed a truth about romantic love. It is always sparked by aspects of the beloved - usually aspects a lot more superficial than patellae and umbilici. A physician, of course, is trained to size up all the evident aspects of a patient without allowing them to form the image of a desirable person, but the rest of us, when we encounter an attractive detail, are more likely than not to see what other attractive details might be on offer. Given enough attractive details - unlike Porter's doctor - we eventually fall in love

Even love at first sight is not as immediate as it seems. I like to say that I fell in love with Kathleen before the first sight. The sound of her laughter, coming from the row of desks behind me, made me turn around pronto. "Wow," I felt when I saw her. "I've got to get to know her better!"

Does anyone know the song? Can anyone hum a few bars?

*In Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics, edited by Robert Kimball (Library of America, 2006).

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Owing to the poor health of its founder and leader, Reinhard Goebel, Musica Antiqua Köln is on its farewell tour. The band, which specializes in the German Baroque, made a number of fine discs for Deutsche Gramophon Archiv, and I've enjoyed a few of them for years. Better late than never, however, I caught the band at Zankel Hall earlier this month. Ilia Korol was the dashing guest leader, and contralto Marijana Mijanovic sang three of the items on the program.

Continue reading about Musica Antiqua Kön at Portico.

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The other day, I made fun of Kathleen for trying to get dressed while dancing to "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'," the Scissors Sisters hit that, now that I've read the fine print, appears to be an Elton John anthem. Yes, that's Sir E at the piano. I don't mean to take anything away from the Scissors Sisters. On the contrary, I think that Elton John has finally found a band.

Anyway, "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" may be a difficult song for getting dressed, but it's almost ideal for making the bed. Making the bed, with its constant crossings from side to side, always reminds me of the altar boy that I never was. And, lke so much British pop, "Dancin'" is haunted by the memory of rousing hymns. My music theory is totally kaputt, but I'm reckless enough to venture that musicians from the Moody Blues to Sting to the Alan Parsons Project have infiltrated pop music with the holy subdominant. You can hear it in "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'," especially if you're making the bed.

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Kathleen left for the office a few minutes ago, and silence descended upon the apartment. We had listened to the Scissors Sisters sing "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" at least seven times. Kathleen certainly felt like dancing. She could hardly get dressed, she was so busy shooting her arms into the air.

The CD, Ta-Dah, has arrived, so now we can sing along, because we know what the words are. But what do they mean? Who is "old Joanna"? After living with me for far too long for her own good, Kathleen actually proposed Johann Sebastian Bach. What I want to know - salacious beast that I am - is whether, rather than dancin', the singer would prefer to engage in a three-way:

I'd rather be home with the one in the bed till dawn with you.

(Not the most tripping of lines, except when sung.) But, as Kathleen said, this is a dancin' song, not a thinking song.

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It was only a matter of time. My first YouTube link. The Scissors Sisters sing "I Don't Feel Like Dancing," while doing nothing but.

Having run into this fantastic video at two sites (Meanwhile, Marginalia), and having discovered that Kathleen is a fan, and having ordered both SS albums from Amazon, I found that I still had to do more. Chalkenteros rightly points to the BeeGees and to Roxy Music as influences, but Kathleen and I hear a lot of George Michael as well.

And you thought I was an old fart.

(Thanks, Aaron!)

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Afterward, I couldn't believe that I'd done it. We were at Carnegie Hall last night, at the first concert of the new Orpheus season. 

At intermission, two thirtysomethings who had been sitting four rows ahead of us were joined by a friend. He stood leaning on the back of the seat behind him, facing the rear of the hall, as he chatted. I was standing in the aisle, beside my seat, waiting for the other people in the row take their seats before sitting down myself. From snippets overheard, I hypothesized that the visitor might be pianist Jeremy Denk, who will be performing at Orpheus's next concert, and who also keeps a very intriguing Web log, Think Denk. Mr Denk has posted a snapshot of himself at the blog, something that hastened the identification process.

Qua pianist, he was safe from my attentions. Qua blogger, however - quite another matter. Still, I had to work up the nerve. When he left his friends, appearing to my mistaken ears to decline their offer to join them in an adjacent, empty seat, I let him pass right by. When I turned to see where he'd gone, I'd lost him. But, lo, suddenly there he was again, returning to his friends. I caught his eye, tried to look as harmless as possible, and asked him if he might be who I thought he was. He very affably said that he was, and he shook my outstretched hand as I told him that I was "R J Keefe, Daily Blague," effectively taking it for granted that he would know what that meant. He registered recognition, although it may have been simple politeness. I made a remark to show that I'd read his latest entry (indeed, I'd been thinking about it while hypothesizing), said that I was looking forward to hearing him in December, and then let him go. He couldn't have been nicer.

The encounter firmed up my resolve to make some additions to the main-page list of links to other sites. A recent exchange with Steve Smith, author of Night After Night, inspired me to make an exception to my general rule, which is that I don't link to monothematic blogs. Blogs exclusively devoted to music and concertgoing would seem to fall under the ban, but in fact it's impossible to write at any length about music without being very person, however inadvertently. If you're at all interested in serious music, I'm sure that you'll find the sites that I've listed under the rubric "I Musici" interesting.

As for the concert....

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The news from the Deutsche Oper Berlin will make everybody crazy for a while, but I hope that something can be learned from the episode. Two things, actually.

First: it's time for opera directors to stop fooling around with operas, to refrain from changing the period of their settings and adding gratuitous (silent) bits just to make some sort of "point." The only point that opera has is beautiful singing that is also psychologically true, and the visual aspects of the experience are distinctly subordinate to the auditory. Every now and then, there's a true spectacle, but for the most part operas speak vividly to the blind - as thousands of opera lovers who have never actually seen an opera can attest. Larding a production of Mozart's Idomeneo - which tells a story related to the Homeric epics - with the severed heads of major religious figures (Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and the opera's own deus, Poseidon) is simply flabbifying.

Second, and much more important: it's time for a time-out on Western-Muslim critiques. Notice that I do not say "Christian-Muslim," for this is very definitely a post-religious argument on one side. Or, better, an argument about whether there can be a post-religious discussion at all. There is indeed a clash of cultures going on, even if it's not quite the one that Samuel Huntington writes about.

What's at issue is the right of an individual to determine his or her own sexual life. The sooner we all come to see this, the quicker we'll get to where we need to be next. Muslims deny the right, as human beings have done for most of their existence. The Western recognition of the right remains provisional: many in the West - many in the United States - do not recognize it. We need to consolidate our side of the argument, coming to terms with Westerners who persist in patriarchy. Until the West works out a deal with patriarchalists, whether by granting them a geographical territory in which to practice their beliefs, or, as sometimes seems likely, by simply reverting to patriarchy itself, we have no business spreading "democracy," which, currently in the West, necessarily means equal rights in most secular matters for women.

A good place to start would be convincing Europe's Muslim leaders that members of their flocks have the right to reject Islam, while at the same time allowing behaviors, such as the wearing of head scarves, that are obviously more cultural than religious in nature. The hard but more essential place to start is finding jobs for all those North African kids.

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At the moment, I'm reading, mostly, two very different books - although perhaps they're not as different as I might think. Both involve headstrong charmers, people who can't keep their feelings to themselves. They walked the earth together for a few years, and they both had international careers.

Firstly, I am reading Jane Eyre, for the first time. Aside from Shirley, I haven't read Charlotte Brontë. I read her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights when I was a teenager, and I didn't like it very much. I regarded Jane Eyre as a novel for girls, by which I mean: not a novel for adults. And indeed I have yet to encounter a passage that a mature person might construe differently from an adolescent. (And reconstruction is what Jane Austen is all about in the end - her novels are always age-appropriate because they have the knack of growing up with you, taking on shades of meaning that would be utterly lost on a high-school student, or even on a thirty-something.) But Jane Eyre is so basic a novel in the experience of literate women that I thought I really must have it for myself. It is not bad, and it is not boring. The injustices to which Jane is subjected at the start, and at the Lowood Institution until it is reformed after the typhus outbreak, seem cartoonish, not because they're absolutely implausible but because they seem designed to rouse the indignation of good-hearted girls. But the narrative voice, as in Shirley, is anything but predictable. Brontë does nothing to hide her cosmopolitan character. That's enough to hold my interest. At the moment, I've just reached Thornfield and Miss Fairfax and Jane's nice little room. I'd have to have lived under a rock all my life not to know what is going to happen, but for once I'm letting Jane herself tell me.

The other book that I am reading is Rodney Bolt's The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte: Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America. And it is a remarkable life. Even without the Mozart connection (Da Ponte's principal claim to fame), Da Ponte's story would be incontournable. As Mr Bolt quite rightly points out, Da Ponte was born in the twilight of a medieval empire (Venice) and died in the dawn of the hyperpower (the United States). He is buried in Queens probably not five miles from where I write. Who'd a thunk it?

The most amazing little fact that I've swallowed in The Librettist of Venice is that Pietro Metastasio (né Trapassi; the pseudonym is a hellenicization), the doyen of eighteenth-century opera librettists, composed music for each of the arias that he penned. He never showed the music to anyone, though; the exercise was only for making sure that the text was singable. Imagine!

And there's one other really remarkable thing about Mr Bolt's book. He includes a color reproduction of a portrait of Mozart, by Johann Georg Edlinger, that was discovered in "late 2004." How this picture has stayed out of the papers during the bisesquicentennial of Mozart's birth (250 years) is amazing to me. It shows what Mr Bolt describes as "the effects of high living," and as an image its power to smash the Meissen idea of Mozart is unsurpassed. The wonder of Mozart is that he was a male human being just like me - and yet! He was not some angel-made-flesh. He liked to party. He was much worse at cash flow than I am. And when the picture was painted, in 1790, he was probably clinically depressed.

Are you ready?

Continue reading "Current Reading" »

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What a loser I am. It's Saturday night, and I'm home - finishing up a Ring cycle. As though it were some sort of casserole, I suppose. I had no intention of listening to important music two weeks ago when I put on Das Rheingold. I love the sound of Das Rheingold, and one thing leads to another. So I did listen to the Ring, all of it, on the impromptu, pretty much as if it were pulp fiction, which is really the only way to hear this incredible drama. "Greatness" needs to scraped away from it - but then who will listen?

Kathleen came home at the end of Act II of Götterdämmerung- the moment when Verdi and Wagner, what's the phrase, get close, as planets - and she said to me, as though I were having my teeth extracted, "What are you listening to!?"  Only the greatest act of opera that there is.

Is there anybody else out there for whom the "Immolation Scene" - as the last bit of the Ring used to be known - is a cleansing bar of soap? Something that makes you feel really pure afterward - the opposite of what Tristan und Isolde does.

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The burnish deepens with time. A year from now, this will be the souvenir of a beautifully polished chamber concert that I attended last Sunday, something that will perhaps make readers feel a stab of regret for having unaccountably seen fit to do something else.

"Joshua Bell and Friends" - that's what the Mostly Mozart mailer said. And it was correct, as long as you understand that Mozart and Mendelssohn are posthumously numbered among the friends. Along with composer/bassist Edgar Meyer, who unlike the other names in the program was able to stand up for a bit of applause.

Performers are always saying that X - the work that they're about to play - is one of their favorite compositions. They mean it, at least at the time. But when Joshua Bell sang atop seven colleagues in Mendelssohn's Octet, I knew that he has loved this music for a long time. He would play it more often if it were easier to conjoin two string quartets.*

The program was very simple. A Mozart piano quartet (there are two; tonight's was the first, in g, K 478), then a work commissioned for Joshua Bell and written by his choice of composer, Edgar Meyer. After an intermission, the Octet. The Mozart, which I thought I knew very well until this evening's performance, was played by Mr Bell with violist John Largess and cellist Edward Arron, forming a piano trio that played as such against Frederick Chiu's piano. I've been listening to this work for more than forty years, but until this evening it was a chamber piece for four players. Tonight, I heard it as a piece for two groups.

I'm not going to say anything about Concert Piece for Violin until I've heard it again - except that the second of the four movements made me think of hummingbirds. That's how fast Mr Bell was playing, and how softly and easily. Mr Meyer seems to have digested Debussy, Ravel, and other French masters.

Mendelssohn's Octet is the most astonishing example of precociousness that the West has to offer. Nobody, but nobody, has ever produced its aesthetic equal at the age