Rudolf Serkin

by Peter Cates

Rudolf Serkin

Back during my college years, I considered Rudolf Serkin (1903-1991) my favorite pianist. He played with a most engaging combination of rhythmic muscularity, musical virtuosity, and fervent heart and soul in whatever work he was giving his total attention to. I grew up with his Columbia Masterworks LP of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic from 1962 (It contained recording session photos including one of Bernstein smoking a cigarette – he smoked four or five packs a day, had suffered from emphysema since he was 29, and was carrying air the last two years of his life before he passed away in 1990. For what it’s worth, Serkin was not smoking.). The performance blazed and roared with fiery passion and ethereal beauty especially in the slow 2nd movement. Other more lyrical performances of that work seemed tepid by comparison. Nowadays, I find the Emperor can stand a variety of approaches and have a few dozen different recordings.

I have previously written of my enthusiasm for the Brahms 1st Concerto and was then very dogmatically opinionated in musical preferences, and considered Serkin the finest interpreter of it. In April, 1974, I was the classical record buyer for the Kenmore Square Discount Records and heard that Serkin would be collaborating with the Boston Symphony under its then recently appointed music director Seiji Ozawa at Symphony Hall the next day in a Sunday afternoon pension fund concert. I called the box office and found out that tickets were still available, took a $2 cab ride to and from the hall, and, having only $20 to get me through the following week, paid $10 for my ticket, subsisting on baloney sandwiches with mustard on white bread until the following Friday pay day.

I had seen Serkin on television and was captivated by how he would hum at the piano and conveyed such joy. His hand movements were phenomenal to observe and my seat in the balcony would provide a view of them.

Before the Brahms, Ozawa conducted vibrant performances of Maurice Ravel’s showpieces, Menuet Antique and the complete Mother Goose ballet. After intermission, Serkin entered on stage with the conductor and, from his posture on the bench, seemed tired and frail during the five minute orchestral introduction. However, just before his entrance, the pianist sat up erect, flexed his fingers and gave the performance of his life. I was shaking with goosebumps and tears.

He recorded the piece four times – with Fritz Reiner and the Pittsburgh Symphony in 1946, twice with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra – 1952 and 1968, and with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1961. I have all four and cherish them for different reasons. Serkin was rarely satisfied with his recordings and welcomed the challenge of re-doing them, as did Artur Rubinstein.

Most of Serkin’s recordings can be heard on YouTube. His son, Peter Serkin (1947 – 2020), was also a very distinguished pianist.

Robert P.T. Coffin

More from Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s essay, Kennebec Crystals:

“Women swept past, little crepe bonnets cocked over the left eye and eyes like jets and blue diamonds. The ice was marked off into lanes, the racing sleighs came out. Horses came up the river, neck and neck, the flowers of their breaths festooned each side of them like garlands hung from high head to high head. Whips cracked, and shouts sent out long echoes each way. The chipped ice shone like splinters flying from a rainbow. Young men had young arms around waists of only 18 inches, and young people started off on the road to matrimony on the thinnest of bright steel shoes.”

More next week.

Of related Maine history interest is the Facebook page, Old Pictures of Forgotten Maine.

Sergei Prokofiev

by Peter Cates

Sergei Prokofiev

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) and Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) are, for me, the three most outstanding 20th century composers to have emerged from Russia. I have written previously of Rachmani­noff and Shostako­vich and would like to focus on Prokofiev.

He was a child prodigy as a composer and pianist, dazzling many but also antagonizing them with his arrogance. For example, in performance classes, he would keep lists of his classmates’ mistakes.

His first ballet Chout earned praise from Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel; later he and Stravinsky had a falling out for a few years but Stravinsky considered Prokofiev the greatest 20th century composer, next to himself.

In 1918, he left Russia because the chaos from the Revolution was leaving Prokofiev with little means of earning a living. With the permission of the People’s Commissar, he headed for the United States and achieved success as a pianist. He would also reside in France for several years but, for some mysterious reason, moved back to the Soviet Union in 1936, just as Stalin’s bloodbaths were cranking up.

His music did find favor with the authorities most of the time. However, in 1948, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) were severely criticized by the government for ‘degenerate formalism’ in their music, the kind of criticism that could have deadly implications for them and their supporters. Such attacks were random, depending on Stalin’s fickleness and paranoia. Prokofiev made a sincere apology and then went on composing as he pleased.

During the early 1920s in Paris, Prokofiev met and married a Spanish singer, Lina Codina (1897-1989) with whom he had two sons, Sviatoslav (1924-2010) and Oleg (1928-1998). Starting in 1940, he began an affair with writer and librettist Mira Mendelson (1915-1968) and divorced Lina in 1947 to marry Mira (the courts ruled his first marriage as null and void because Prokofiev married his first wife in Germany and never asked the Communist government for permission.).

Three months after the divorce, Lina was arrested for espionage because she tried to send money to her mother in Spain. After nine months of interrogation, she was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor in Siberia and released in 1956, leaving Russia for good in 1974.

Because of high blood pressure and other health problems, Prokofiev suffered from frequent dizzy spells and, in 1945, fell, hitting his head on a staircase. He was forced to cut his composing activities down to one hour a day. He died on March 5, 1953, the same day as Stalin. Only 30 people attended his funeral, Shostakovich among them, while his coffin had to be carried by hand to the burial site because no hearse was available due to the lavish spectacle of Stalin’s funeral (among his pallbearers were Mao Zhedong (1893-1976) visiting from China, and KGB chief Laventiy Beria (1899-1953) who would be shot nine months later.).

The composer’s music was distinguished by tart, caustic and bracing rhythms, uniquely captivating harmonies and shimmering melodic beauty. For getting acquainted purposes, I would recommend his very famous Peter and the Wolf, 3rd Piano Concerto, 5th Symphony and Romeo and Juliet ballet. My special favorites are the sizzling Scythian Suite and 3rd Symphony from his earlier years and the magnificent 6th and 7th Symphonies from after World War II. Youtubes of his music are in plentiful supply.

Before he returned to Russia for good in 1936, the composer visited Walt Disney studios, in Hollywood, and was filmed playing music from Peter and the Wolf.

He became a devout Christian Scientist in 1924, believing it beneficial to his high strung personality.

He was also an accomplished chess player.

A quote – “I detest imitation!”

Robert P. T. Coffin
continued

Next paragraph from Robert P.T. Coffin’s essay, Kennebec Crystals:

“February came in murky. But the trotting horses of the Kennebec barns swung around at last and headed north: the thermometer went below zero and stayed there. Everybody began to breathe, again, and the grindstones started singing.”

Take note of the author’s ability to vivify the local scene of more than 150 years ago. One can picture the icicles hanging off beards, lips and nostrils, the inhalations of ‘murky’ air and the grindstones lifting their grating voices in harmony as the sparks fly in those work spaces.

More next week.

Arthur Fiedler

by Peter Cates

The Boston Pops

John Williams

A very good 1982 Philips cassette, Pops Around the World, features the Boston Pops under its former Music Director John Williams (1932-) playing seven Overtures – two from the U.S. and from Russia, and one each from France, Italy and Austria.

The American Overtures are Leonard Bernstein’s for his musical Candide and one Williams himself composed for the 1972 movie, The Cowboys. Bernstein (1918-1990) created a rambunctious romp testing the technique of every player with its rapid-fire tempos and cross-rhythms.

The Cowboys Overture, composed before Williams achieved greater fame and fortune with his soundtracks for Star Wars, Superman, Jurassic Park and many etcs., has an appealing ambiance and evokes the sights and sounds of the Old West in an manner similar to the Brooklyn-born composer Aaron Copland through his own Rodeo and Billy the Kid ballets and soundtrack for The Red Pony.

The Russian Overtures are those of Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) for Ruslan and Ludmilla and Dimitry Kabalevsky (1904-1987) to his 1938 opera Colas Breugnon, which became a smash hit at its premiere in Leningrad with the Soviet authorities and boosted Kabalevsky’s own standing with them, most likely enabling him to avoid being purged by Stalin as an ‘enemy of the people’; while Glinka became the first Russian composer to win acclaim in his own country.

France is represented by the Bronze Horse Overture of Daniel-Franois Auber (1782-1871), Italy by the Overture to An Italian in Algiers of Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) and Austria by the Boccaccio Overture of Franz von Suppe (1819-1895). All three of these composers frequently conveyed roller coaster wit and high spirits in their music, one of several reasons their melodies were often heard in the old cartoons.

John Williams’s grandparents ran a department store in Bangor. His father Johnny Williams was a well-known percussionist during the Big Band Era.

Williams and his predecessor Arthur Fiedler (1894-1979) never met in person but did speak by phone.

This album was also released as an LP and compact disc. Some overtures may even be on YouTube; I checked and saw the Bronze Horse available.

Robert T. Tristram Coffin (continued)

Continuing with paragraphs 4 and 5 of Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s essay, Kennebec Crystals:

“Then next day the January thaw came. Teachers went all to pieces as early as Wednesday in the week. Doctors used the whip on their horses as they clattered over the steaming ruts. Shopkeepers did not throw in the extra pilot bread but tied up the bags and bit off the twine. The big bugs behind the Ionian porticoes put aside the Annals of Tacitus and took down the Magnalia Christi Americana of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Small boys lost their tempers and kicked the jackstraws their bachelor uncles had whittled out in the shape of oars and eelspears all over the floor. Farmers sat down to Indian pudding without any salt hake to season it off.

“Young Timothy Toothtaker decided not to ask Susannah Orr a certain question until mayflower time or later. And he stopped spooling new rungs for her future bed.”

by Peter Cates

Robert P. Tristram Coffin
continued

Robert P. Tristram Coffin

Continuing the weekly series of paragraphs from Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals:

“Then a sharp blue wind came up out of the northwest, the mercury in the thermometers tumbled. The pines roared on into the dark, the stars snapped in the skies like sapphires. Good weather for future soldiers, Napoleon once remarked. Napoleon be hanged! So thought the farmers along the Kennebec, who were up in history as they were down in their pork barrels. There were enough small pairs of pants running around their farms already. What they needed was nights to breed that life-giving ice which would keep the small thighs in the trousers going. Good freezing nights for starting the crop of the water.”

Third paragraph next week.

Paul Whiteman

Paul Whiteman

On December 15, 1922, Paul Whiteman (1891-1967) and his orchestra recorded a pair of fox trot arrangements of two songs — Ivy (Cling to Me) composed by James P. Johnson (1894-1955) and Isham Jones (1894-1956); and I Gave You Up Just Before You Threw Me Down, by Bert Kalmar (1894-1947) and Harry Ruby (1895-1974).

Whiteman was often criticized for the sameness of his dance music arrangements but I have found the piles of his shellacs and other records quite enjoyable. The musicians performed with perky rhythms, savory phrasing and, at times, imaginatively improvised detail within the sometimes constricted trotty parameters that might be lacking in the foxy element.

James P. Johnson was an African-American barrelhouse pianist from New Jersey. Isham Jones was one of the early ‘30’s big band leaders who left a number of very good 78s. Coincidentally, Jones was born January 31, 1894, one day before James P. Johnson.

Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote such songs as I Wanna Be Loved By You which was immortalized by Betty Boop and Who’s Sorry Now, itself a megahit MGM 45 for Connie Francis in 1957. They were the subject of the classic 1950 MGM musical Three Little Words, starring Fred Astaire (1899-1987) and Red Skelton (1913-1997) as the songwriters.

ZeroZeroZero

ZeroZeroZero is a recent crime drama series that premiered on Amazon Prime February 16 with a package of eight episodes. It depicts the activities of Mexican cocaine dealers; Mexico’s semi-corrupt military fighting the dealers, often murderously, while taking cash as well; a New Orleans family who owns a fleet of container ships and acts as middlemen between sellers and buyers; and the elderly mafioso big scale buyer in Calabria, Italy, whose grandson is secretly planning to feed Grandpa to his sow and take over that family business while pretending to be loyal and loving.

I watched the first two episodes this past weekend and am now hooked.

by Peter Cates

James Joyce

James Joyce

Fifteen years ago, I binged for a couple of months on the Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941) and read his first novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the short story collection Dubliners. The reading experience was, to put it mildly, intense.

Joyce’s singular achievement was to render the total life experience of Dublin, Ireland, in all its aspects and without any of his own personality intruding, as all great literature is achieved. He was perhaps most well known for his novel Ulysses, which devotes its several hundred pages to one day in the life of Stephen Dedulus, and Leopold and Molly Bloom. It is almost impossible to read because of its stream of consciousness technique with several events, impressions, and conversations occurring all at once, yet it has sold millions of copies.

I would recommend the Dubliners for beginners, especially its longest story, The Dead, which depicts an annual Christmas dinner party hosted by two elderly sisters. Beneath the festive hospitality is a terrifying sense of life going nowhere; Joyce’s genius was in the arrangement of particular details of food, chit chat, and good fellowship against the mood of desolation. One scene describes the impressions of the nephew of the two sisters, Gabriel, as he notices them entering the drawing room:

“His aunts were two small, plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect, her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shriveled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.”

The two women are leading lives of blighted banality, which this annual party does little to alleviate.

I close with some verses from Joyce’s lengthy poem, Chamber Music:

“Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair,
I heard you singing
A merry air.

“My book was closed;
I read no more,
Watching the fire dance
On the floor.

“I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom.

“Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair.”

As a young man, James Joyce learned the Norwegian language just so he could read the collected works of Norway’s famed playwright Hendrik Ibsen in the original tongue.

He was a fanatical taskmaster on himself and would be happy if he came up with seven words that met his approval during a 15-hour workday.