by Peter Cates

Tchaikovsky

Symphony No. 5
Paul Kletzki conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra; Columbia Masterworks, MM-701, six 12 inch 78s; recorded November 13 and 14, 1946.

Tchaikovsky finished composing his 5th Symphony in 1888; along with the 4th and 6th (Pathetique) Symphonies; it expresses the most intense extremes of emotion, ranging from harrowing despair to jubilation. The composer himself was manic and tormented his entire life by self-doubts and depression. These three symphonies mirror them but have memorable melodic material and development which have sustained their popularity in concert halls and recording studios since their composition. I have lost track of the number of recordings I have of them.

Tchaikovsky visited Hamburg, Germany, in 1888 and 1889 and was hosted by a locally-prominent music teacher Teodor Ave-Lallemant (1806-1890) during the first trip before he completed the symphony. The two struck up a fast friendship but had a most interesting conversation regarding the older man’s feelings about Tchaikovsky’s music.

Ave-Lallemant felt that the composer’s pieces heard then, which included the Serenade for Strings and 1st Piano Concerto, were horrendous sounding but blamed its lackings more on Russia’s cultural backwardness than on the composer. He insisted that Tchaikovsky had the makings of a great composer if only he would move to Germany to absorb its inspiring traditions.

Tchaikovsky wrote in his journals that “Evidently Herr Ave-Lallemant harbours a deep prejudice against Russia, and I tried as far as I could to mitigate his hostile feelings towards our country, which, incidentally, this venerable Russophobe did not actually express openly but merely allowed to shine in his words. We parted as great friends.”

He dedicated his 5th Symphony to Ave-Lallemant and conducted its German premiere on his 1889 trip to Hamburg. Sadly, the gentleman was too ill to attend and died the following year. Tchaikovsky’s German publisher wrote a letter to the composer conveying the news and the following comment:

“Good Herr Ave-Lallement has died. The most distinguishing event in his life was in any case that which put his name on your 5th Symphony. He accorded you his full sympathy. ”

Paul Kletzki (1900-1973) conducted an especially beautiful performance that was suffused with poetic lyricism and the 1946 recording can be heard on YouTube. Kletzki grew up in Poland and, while he was fighting for his country during its war with Russia, a bullet grazed his skull while all too many of his comrades were killed. Later he fled the Nazis but his parents and a sister were murdered during the Holocaust.

Every recording I have heard of him is quite good and many of them can also be heard on YouTube.

He died on March 5, 1973, after collapsing during a rehearsal with the Liverpool, England, Philharmonic.

by Peter Cates

The old, very brittle 78s continue to give the greatest pleasure with their noisy surfaces, brief three to five minute playing sides and vivid sense of history, unmatched by LPs, CDs, and streaming. As so many people are still throwing boxes of them into dumpsters, they do call me and make offers I just can’t refuse.

Here are a few such documents of working musicians who once walked the earth and shared their art with others:

Cecile Chaminade

Serenade Espagnole
Fritz Kreisler, violinist, accompanied by pianist Carl Lamson; Victor, 64503, ten inch acoustic shellac disc, recorded June 22, 1915.

French composer/pianist Cecile Louise Chaminade (1857-1944) achieved fame as a composer for her very tuneful music and keyboard prowess during the era when women were still looked down upon or condescended to. The composer of Carmen, Georges Bizet (1837-1875) examined some of Chaminade’s pieces when she was only eight years old and predicted that her talent would take her far.

Despite early encouragement and progress, she experienced wrath from her father who disapproved of her musical studies.

Chaminade performed her music to acclaim in her own country, Great Britain and the U.S. and recorded several piano rolls which can be heard on youtube. Inevitably, as she grew older, she composed fewer pieces and died in relative obscurity in Monte Carlo at the age of 87, although financially she was set for life.

In 1913, she was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, a prize set up by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 for outstanding accomplishments and was the first female composer thus honored.

I have written before about violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1963) who recorded a quite elegant performance more than 100 years ago of Chaminade’s Serenade Espagnole (Spanish Serenade), a piece just under three minutes long with a charming melody. He was accompanied by his pianist of many years, Carl Lamson (1878-1966).

This record can also be heard on YouTube.

William Mcdonald

Asleep in the Deep; In a Hundred Fathoms Deep
Columbia, A986, ten-inch acoustic disc, recorded September, 1911.

The online 78 discography research link had the recording date for this shellac but no information on bass singer William H. Macdonald. The two songs, Asleep and A Hundred Fathoms Deep were frequently sung and recorded 100 years ago but are rarely heard today. They refer to what every ocean explorer knows as Davy Jones’ locker and are very stirring ballads that were expressively sung.

Russian Symphonic Choir

conducted by Basile Kabalchich- Dance ! Gypsy ! (Czecho-Slovakian Dance Song); Volga Boatmen Song; Victor 20309, recorded January 6, and October 26, 1926, 10-inch 78.

Basile Kabalchich’s Russian Symphonic Choir was an ensemble of six sopranos, four contraltos, four tenors and five basses who recorded a batch of 78s for Victor between 1926 and 1927 of folk songs and orthodox church music from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, its studio venue being a converted church in Camden, New Jersey. These performances were very spirited to a feisty, fierce level and contributed to a jewel of a record.

Billy May and his Orchestra

Fat Man Boogie
My Silent Love; Capitol 1794, ten-inch 78, recorded 1951.

Jazz/pop arranger and conductor Billy May (1916-2004) collaborated with Frank Sinatra on several of his classic albums for Capitol and Reprise and was one of the singer’s three principal arrangers, the other two being Gordon Jenkins and Nelson Riddle. His utilization of smoky brass and sultry rhythms gave such Sinatra LPs as Come Fly With Me a legendary durability that still attracts listeners .

The two instrumentals, Fat Man Boogie and My Silent Love, make for riveting examples of May’s arranging skills.

Billy Mays was known for imbibing one or more bottles of booze during recording sessions with Sinatra and a number of other singers from the Great American Songbook years, including Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Nancy Wilson, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, etc. He also worked with the man of a 1,000 cartoon voices, Mel Blanc and comedian Stan Freeberg. Highly recommended is the YouTube of a 1951 featurette of Mays and Blanc for Capitol records about the process by which records are manufactured.

David Street

I Don’t Care Who Knows; Nevada Victor 20-1683, 10-inch 78, recorded June 1945.

Actor/singer David Street (1917-1971) achieved some renown on radio, and records and in a few films during the 1940s yet nothing stuck. Until I discovered this record in one of my 78 boxes yesterday and got curious, his name was new to me.

Three names on the record intrigued me- Street’s arranger Frank De Vol who conducted numerous records for Doris Day and some good pop orchestra LPs for Capitol and Columbia; and the gifted songwriters Jimmy McHugh (I Don’t Care Who Knows) and Walter Donaldson (Nevada).

Street had a solid voice in the romantic crooner tradition of Crosby, Sinatra and Como, yet unlike them, not a particularly distinguished one. Still the record is a nice one in the vintage pop category.

 

 

 

by Peter Cates

Warren Harding

During this political season, I was re-reading the rambunctious Baltimore Sun correspondent H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) on one of our great former occupants of the White House ­– the, for me, ever-fascinating Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923) whose administration was beset by challenges of a unique nature, in particular the Teapot Dome scandal. Books such as the late Francis Russell’s biography, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, abound in pro and con details, while historian Paul Johnson’s Modern Times makes a convincing case for Harding as an underrated president.

Anyways, Mencken comments that Warren G. “takes first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English I have ever encountered.”

The essayist continues developing his main idea in the next paragraph:

“More scientifically, what is the matter with it? Why does it seem so flabby, so banal, so confused and childish, so stupidly at war with sense? ….That answer is very simple. When Dr. Harding prepares a speech, he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.”

This article can be read in its entirety by googling H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding and scrolling down to H.L. Mencken on Balder and Dash.

Mencken did interview Harding and his wife, Florence (1860-1924), who was known as the Duchess; he wrote that Harding exuded charismatic charm and that the Duchess was a very handsome woman.

A worthwhile quote of wisdom from Harding’s inaugural speech – “Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much from the government and at the same time do too little for it.”

A highly recommended viewing experience is the five seasons of HBO’s series The Wire which ran from 2002 to 2008. It takes place in H.L. Mencken’s home town of Baltimore, Maryland, and deals with the tribulations and small victories in the drug war, the city’s shipyard docks, City Hall, the schools and the Baltimore Sun newspaper’s working conditions.

Bill Haley and the Comets

Fractured and Pat-a-Cake
Essex, 327, ten-inch 78, recorded in 1952.

These two early examples of rock music were recorded two years before Bill Haley (1925-1981) hit success with the 1954 Rock Around the Clock and are similarly rocking good examples of rock and roll during the Eisenhower years. Later after Haley moved to Decca records, he unsuccessfully sued Essex for unpaid royalties.

 

 

by Peter Cates

Alfred Kazin

A few years ago, I wrote about the biography of Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), one of the finest writers on literature and any other subject he turned his attention to.

In 1988, Knopf published his huge coffee table volume, A Writer’s America, which is a celebration of his lifelong fascination, come horrible Hell or glorious high water, with the American landscape. Chapter 5, entitled Power Centers, devotes several pages to Washington, D.C.; the following two paragraphs might be of interest to a few readers:

“Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980), Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, spanned the Washington scene from T.R. to Ronald Reagan. Late in life, she described Washington as ‘a small, cozy town, global in scope. It suits me.’ Such superior raillery was unknown to New York, Boston, Chicago. In Los Angeles, it would not have been understood at all. Mrs. Longworth understood (as did Henry Adams [grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams – two former presidents, brilliant historian and notorious misanthrope and gossip, 1838-1918]) that the romance of Washington was the show it put on. In a way totally unlike the development of other American power centers, Washington LOOKED consistent, all of a piece along its white Roman fronts. It was what the founders had hoped for, perhaps the only thing that the wildly heterogeneous America of the late 20th century could look up to – a CENTER.

“Behind the marble columns and the extraordinary museums that late Wash­ington provided on a scale inconceivable even during the New Deal (the rumor then was that the capital had returned from Wall Street to Washington), the business of Washington was compromise, the deal. Everyone in the halls of Congress was involved with everyone else in Washington – lawyers, columnists, bureaucrats. There was not much fine literature about Washington, but there was certainly a lot of information, much in the form of confidential ‘leaks’ from governmental big shots to newspapermen. Washington was the inside story.”

One immediately notices Kazin’s hoarding of enough topics of interest to fill a library – the Roosevelts, dead American presidents after Teddy up to and including Reagan, D.C. as both small town and global center, the raillery of other urbane urban power centers, the Adams family, Greek and Roman architectural styles in the nation’s capital, etc. A number of other American writers have been hoarders, catalogers, collectors of U.S. related items – the irreverent H. L. Mencken of our buffooneries, F. Scott Fitzgerald of lifestyles of the rich, Ernest Hemingway of fishing, hunting, bullfights, wars and other athletic contests.

William Faulkner mined his little piece of Mississippi dirt for every ounce of golden ore in the novels Sanctuary, Light in August, As I Lay Dying and Sound and the Fury. Stephen King used tricks from classic horror story writers to cast our Pine Tree state of Maine in it, Salem’s Lot and Bag of Bones.

P.S. Alice Roosevelt was Teddy’s oldest child, from his first wife who died at 23 very shortly after Alice was born, and, like her father, had a strong mind of her own. When Teddy and her stepmother wanted to send her away to a private girl’s boarding school in New York City, Alice threatened them with outrageous behavior and humiliation; they let her go to a day school.

When her father, as president, was receiving a visitor in the Oval Office, Alice intruded three times until he threatened to throw her out the window. She backed down. He then informed his guest that he couldn’t run his daughter and the nation, too.