by Peter Cates

A Kiss Before Dying

Recently I viewed a 1956 film noir, A Kiss Before Dying, starring Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward, both still living at 92; Virginia Leith (1925-2019) and Jeffrey Hunter (1925-1969).

From the visual perspective, it was a very good United Artists technicolor experience. The wide shots of the college campus, the small city downtown and the magnificent desert cliffs of the four corners horseback riding trails of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona were skillfully done.

The movie was based on a 1953 novel of the same name by Ira Levin (1929-2007) whose Rosemary’s Baby and Stepford Wives were also transformed into successful films.

The plot concerns a college student, Bud Corliss (Wagner), who is pursuing a gold-digging courtship of a wealthy heiress, Dorey (Woodward), and she becomes pregnant. She is also madly in love with Corliss and desires marriage even if her father were to disown her, but a lack of reciprocation leads Corliss to planning a murder.

He forges her signature and mails a suicide note to Dorey’s father. Then, under pretense of taking her to the City Hall marriage bureau on the 12th floor (knowing that that office is closed during lunch hour), he suggests that the two of them, while waiting for the office to re-open, walk up to the rooftop balcony to enjoy the view, upon which he pushes her off the roof.

For “lack of any real evidence” – admittedly a point which stretches credulity, the murder is ruled a suicide by the authorities.

A few months elapse during which Corliss worms his way into the affection of Dorey’s sister Ellen (Leith) without her at first knowing of his connection with Dorey, but the plot thickens and I will leave off here.

I have generally found Robert Wagner’s acting to be overrated and his portrayal of Corliss does little to change my mind. The gifted Joanne Woodward considered Dorey her worst role but I found it a convincing, sympathetic depiction.

Virginia Leith was also very good at conveying charisma in sister Ellen’s personality, while Jeffrey Hunter as a tutor at the college who was working with Dorey, Mary Astor (1906-1987) as Bud’s mother and George Macready (1899-1973) as Dorey and Ellen’s father all did very good work.

Hunter was superb as John Wayne’s co-star in the 1956 John Ford classic The Searchers and the 1960 Hell to Eternity in which he portrayed the World War II Marine soldier Guy Gabaldon (1926-2006) who talked over 1,300 Japanese soldiers and civilians into surrendering during key battles in two of the Pacific Islands.

Mary Astor’s most famous role may have been as the murderess in Humphrey Bogart’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon.

Macready frequently portrayed either polished villains or temperamental men of wealth.

Berlin-born Director Gerd Oswald (1919-1989 and, as far as I know, no relation to John F. Kennedy’s assassin) did generally good work, except for the bland Wagner, and was most renowned for episodes of such TV shows as Perry Mason, The Outer Limits, Bonanza, The Fugitive and Gentle Ben.

by Peter Cates

Marcelle Meyer

Pianist Marcelle Meyer (1897-1958) was one of a superbly gifted group of pianists born between 1880 and the beginning of World War I, among whom other personal favorites include Artur Schnabel, Artur Rubinstein, Wilhelm Backhaus, Wilhelm Kempff, Edwin Fischer, Eduard Erdmann, Robert and Gaby Casadesus, Walter Gieseking, Rudolf Serkin, Shura Cherkassky, Oscar Levant, Dame Myra Hess, Sir Clifford Curzon, Sviatoslav Richter, Clara Haskil, Monique Haas, Claudio Arrau, Wanda Landowska, Friedrich Wuehrer, Cutner Solomon, Vladimir Horowitz, Cyril Smith.

The reason for this shopping list is to provide names of keyboard artists whose recordings can be found on Youtube so that the hopefully curious can indulge themselves and lead others, thus increasing the market for classical music which has shrunk to even lower levels (down from roughly 30 percent in previous decades to two per cent in this age of attention deficit disorder ignorance).

Born in France, Meyer started lessons at the age of five with her older sister Germaine and entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11 for further studies with the legendary pianists Alfred Cortot and Marguerite Long.

She drew the attention of composers Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy, who coached her in the interpretation of his Preludes just before he died in 1918.

Meyer championed the works of several other 20th century composers both in France and elsewhere in Europe.

But her finest legacy might lie in her revival of interest in a handful of baroque and 18th century composers such as Bach, Scarlatti, Couperin, Rameau, Haydn and Mozart when she began recording their music during the 1940s.

I have been recently listening to a 17 CD set of Marcelle Meyer, Complete Studio Recordings 1925-1957 (Documents 600209) which can be bought inexpensively from online vendors. It features her playing of the above mentioned composers along with Emannuel Chabrier, Rossini, Schubert, Spanish composers Oscar Espla, Isaac Albeniz and Manuel de Falla, Richard Strauss, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc.

She played with the most extraordinary emotional warmth, delicacy and inspired one on one connection with the listener. Some of her most beautiful playing was found in the records of Bach, Scarlatti and Rameau where an undercurrent of melodic line was conveyed which eluded other pianists.

On November 17, 1958, Marcelle Meyer died suddenly, at the much too young age of 61, of a heart attack while playing piano at her sister Germaine’s apartment.

Youtube contains a 1956 broadcast of her phenomenal rendition of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the underrated Volkmar Andrae conducting the Suisse Romande Orchestra in Geneva, Switzerland.

by Peter Cates

Back during eighth grade in 1964, I was hungrily eager to hear every record of classical music that I could beg, borrow, buy, barter for; and one neighbor was kind enough to loan the Arturo Toscanini/NBC Symphony RCA Victor Red Seal LP of Beethoven’s 5th and 8th symphonies, that I auditioned on another neighbor’s hi-fi which was quite superior in sound to the $32 manually operated phonograph I owned.

I was already quite familiar with the 5th Symphony via an old Columbia Masterworks set of five 12-inch 78s, conducted by Bruno Walter (1876-1962) with the New York Philharmonic.

I remember the black and white photo of Walter raising his arms in the air and conveying, in his stern eyes, that he meant business; Leonard Bernstein called him one of the great saints of music with a sweet gentle spirit and wearing silk gloves but beneath those silk gloves was an iron fist and a sneaky snakiness in Walter’s ability to look out for number one.

But Walter was a truly great conductor on the same level as his close friend Toscanini (1867-1957) and his recording of the 5th had a combination of dramatic power and nicely contrasting poetry while Toscanini’s performance had the excitingly riveting volatility of a sledgehammer.

Back to my first encounter with the 8th Symphony. Toscanini and his players tore into the first movement and fully communicated its growling jubilation, Beethoven being a 100 percent manic depressive.

This symphony had its first performance in 1812 in Linz, Austria, where the composer was visiting his brother Johann, enjoying his hospitality and, at the same time, trying to break up a relationship Johann was having with a woman whom Beethoven considered a lowlife. The situation and how it was resolved makes for hilarious reading.

The second movement is a perky dance with the bassoon taking center stage with its staccato notes.

The third movement is labeled as a Menuet but its beauty is a passionate outpouring of the heart, as opposed to a graceful elegant dance, with some very eloquent, almost heavenly writing for the strings.

The final movement is a vivacious highly spirited romp for the entire orchestra.

A similarly exciting performance of the 8th was an early 1960s one conducted by the arch perfectionist, SOB, taskmaster George Szell (1897-1970) with the Cleveland Orchestra while another one from 1957 with Andre Cluytens (1905-1967) conducting the Berlin Philharmonic has a more relaxed sedate quality that works beautifully, this Maestro being one who was quite underrated during his own lifetime.

While the 7th Symphony is a colossal masterpiece with the much shorter 8th seeming to a number of listeners anticlimactic, Beethoven himself considered the 8th immensely superior to the 7th.

by Peter Cates

Arlo Guthrie

During my senior year at Kent’s Hill boarding school the spring of 1969, I lived in Wesleyan Hall dormitory and was acquainted with a fellow whose father was a wholesale record distributor.

He provided me with five LPs for sale at $2 each and gave me several days to audition them.

They were as follows:

Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant devoted an entire side one to his satirical account of an environmental incident which, for purposes of space, will not be recounted here, while the flip side had five songs of very minor charm.

His father was folk singer Woody Guthrie whose most famous song was This Land Is Your Land.

It was also the basis for a movie.

In recent years, Guthrie announced that he was retiring, at 74, from performing and touring, aptly stating that it was time to hang up the “Gone fishing” sign.

He also scored a hit with the beautiful Steve Goodman folk ballad The City of New Orleans 50 years ago.

Rod McKuen

The second LP was one by singer/poet songwriter Rod McKuen (1933-2015) whose recordings and books sold hundreds of millions of copies. His singing was not exactly beautiful after he all but des­troyed his vocal chords as a much younger man working in night clubs.

His most famous songs are Seasons in the Sun which was a hit for the Kingston Trio; Love’s Been Good to Me covered by Frank Sinatra who devoted his LP, A Man Alone, to McKuen; and the English lyrics for Jacques Brel’s If You Go Away.

I am particularly fond of If You Go Away while my father enjoyed Stanyan Street. Glenn Yarborough of the Limelighters devoted several albums to McKuen .

McKuen lived in a large Spanish-style house on Southern California’s Pacific coast and owned a humongous record collection.

Burt Bacharach

Number three was the original Broadway cast recording of Burt Bacharach’s Promises Promises. Jerry Ohrbach and Jill O’Hara did top notch starring and singing roles, Ohrbach with She Likes Basketball, A Fact Can Be a Beautiful Thing and the title song which was a megahit for Dionne Warwick while Jill O’Hara’s Knowing When to Leave was and remains to this day a show stopper.

Bacharach recently celebrated his 94th birthday.

Ray Coniff

The 4th album was one of the Ray Conniff (1916-2002) Singers performing mid ‘60s hits such as My Cup Runneth Over and Winchester Cathedral.

Conniff was one of the finest jazz trombonists during the ‘30s and ‘40s and can be heard in quite a number of old recordings of small combos from those years, especially with clarinetist Artie Shaw.

During the 1950s, Conniff worked side by side with Mitch Miller at Columbia records producing numerous discs by such singers as Tony Bennett, Marty Robbins, and Johnny Mathis.

Along about then, he formed the Ray Conniff Singers as a means of providing sophisticated easy listening albums for its huge market, as did Andre Kostelanetz, Percy Faith, Paul Weston, Nelson Riddle, Hugo Winterhalter, etcs.

And he utilized a number of the same men who were part of Mitch’s Sing Along Gang because every one of them could sight read music.

Mary Hopkins

The last album was a solo LP featuring the wonderful Mary Hopkin singing her classic Those Were the Days and covers of other vintage hits-examples being Ray Noble’s Love is the Sweetest Thing, Inch Worm and There’s No Business Like Show Business. It was released on the Beatles’ own label, Apple records. She is still living at 74.

My friend was one happy camper when I handed him a $10 bill.

 

 

 

 

by Peter Cates

Frances Alda

Born in New Zealand, soprano Frances Alda (1879-1952) became a big star at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC, recorded a batch of Victor acoustic discs including duets with Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) and was married to Met manager Gatti-Casazza for several years.

A two sided , ten inch Victrola (527) features her very sweet singing of two longtime favorite selections, the native American love song, By the Waters of Minnetonka and the spiritual Deep River.

Both sides can be heard via Google.

Beatrice Harrison

A blue label ten inch Victor from 1924 (45072) features English cellist Beatrice Harrison (1892-1965) playing two charming pieces, David Popper’s Spanish dance To My Guitar and Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov’s Slumber Song from the opera May Night.

Harrison came from an incredibly talented musical family; one sister being a pianist, the other a violinist.

Beatrice attracted the attention of elite musical figures in English society- composers Sir Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius and Arnold Bax, each of whom composed works with her in mind; and conductors Sir Henry Wood, Sir Thomas Beecham (he called Harrison “That talented English lady”) and Sir Adrian Boult.

She recorded Elgar’s Cello Concerto in 1920 and 1928 with the composer conducting and did concerts with Sir Henry Wood several times at the Queen’s Hall in London, including the night before it was destroyed by the Luftwaffe.

Many of her recordings can also be heard via the internet.

Victor Herbert

Another blue label Victor record, 45170, has the composer/conductor/cellist Victor Herbert (1856-1924) leading Victor Herbert’s Orchestra in Charles Wakefield Cadman’s At Dawning and Poupee Valsante’s The Waltzing Doll. The ensemble consisted of very gifted musicians who gave beautiful performances on a sizable number of very fragile shellacs under Maestro Herbert.

In 1924, he died suddenly of a heart attack while at the doctor’s office.

Radiex was one of several dime store record labels which sold for a quarter per disc. A 1926 78 release contained a Great American Songbook classic staple, the Harbach/Hammerstein /Jerome Kern “Who” and the obscure but nicely composed “I’m Glad You’re Happy Again” sung the pseudonymous Mister X, whom research has determined to be any one of several singers.