by Peter Cates

Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett

I have read very little of Maine writer Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) but that little includes a story I very much consider a masterpiece, The White Heron. It depicts a nine-year-old girl, Sylvia, who lives with her grandmother on a farm in a seaside community based on the ones near Jewett’s native South Berwick, such as Wells Beach, Ogunquit and Kittery.

Sylvia has the daily task of driving a cow back from the woods surrounding the house for milking. While doing so, she hears from a visiting hunter that he has seen a white heron, which is a rarity in Maine:

“‘You would know the heron if you saw it….A queen tall white bird with soft feathers and long thin legs. And it would have a nest perhaps in the top of a high tree, made of sticks, something like a hawk’s nest.'”

The description of Sylvia climbing 100 feet or more to the top of an adjoining pine tree atop the highest ridge to get a closer look at the heron and its nest constitutes one of the scariest passages in a story for any reader such as myself who suffer from vertigo:

“Sylvia’s face was like a pale star, if one had seen it from the ground, when the last thorny bough was past, and she stood trembling and tired but wholly triumphant, high in the tree-top….Westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church steeples, and white villages; truly it was a vast and awesome world.”

Nebraska novelist Willa Cather (1874-1948) once commented that My Antonia was heavily influenced by Sarah Orne Jewett’s own sense of place.

The Mississippi writer Eudora Welty (1909-2001) wrote the following about place in fiction: “the goodness-validity in the raw material of writing…the goodness in the writing itself-the achieved world of appearance, through which the novelist has his whole say and puts his whole case.”

In her depiction of Sylvia’s own peak experience atop those dangerous heights, Sarah Orne Jewett achieved a magnificent sense of place.

Takashi Asahina

by Peter Cates

Takashi Asahina

Japanese conductor Takashi Asahina (1908-2001) achieved renown in his native country throughout most of his lifetime but was little known elsewhere until the early 1990s when he was 85.

I found out the general details during a phone interview with former Chicago Symphony manager Henry Fogel. He was visiting friends in Japan and invited to attend a symphony concert. He told of witnessing an elderly gentleman hobbling to the podium and figuring that the concert would be nothing special.

He quickly found out that this presumption was erroneous. The scheduled work was the Alpine Symphony of Richard Strauss, a piece demanding not only the usual 100 musicians, but also extra brass and percussion including a wind machine, and an organ.

And the moment the elderly gentleman lifted his baton, sheer power and magic occurred. Henry told of being so unexpectedly stunned by an unknown conductor that he went to a record store in Tokyo and spent $250 or more on every recording of Asahina that was in shock.

Daniel Barenboim

Upon his return to Chicago, he told then- Music Director Daniel Barenboim of his experience and suggested Asahina for a guest conducting gig; to which Barenboim smiled skeptically. Pulling out a CD of one of the Bruckner Symphonies, he then pleaded with that Maestro to just listen for 20 minutes.

After 10 minutes, Barenboim told Henry to engage Asahina for three weeks of guest appearances. Those concerts were a hit with orchestra players and audiences.

A CD of Mahler’s hyper intense and gorgeous 6th Symphony features Asahina conducting the Osaka Philhar­monic, one of several orchestras he regularly appeared with in Japan. He gave a performance that built from beginning to end with an astute balancing of rhythm, dynamics and subtlety of detail.

At the Symphony’s first performance during the early 1900s, the composer was a nervous wreck before it began, wringing his hands and crying like a baby.

YouTubes abound of Asahina’s broadcasts and are well worth exploring.

Bernstein and Rodzinski in 1943.

by Peter Cates

Meatloaf

Meatloaf

Rock singer Meatloaf, born Marvin Lee Aday, died this past weekend from covid at the age of 74. His 1977 album Bat Out of Hell has sold 65 million copies worldwide, still logging in annual sales of 200,000. In recent years, he guest-appeared on the BBC comedy show Benidorm and the CBS’ Elementary.

I need to confess that the title Bat Out of Hell quashed any interest in hearing his music making, much as the music making of such late ‘70s groups as Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath. But his singing on Benidorm was appealing and he will be missed by many.

Artur Rodzinski

Artur Rodzinski

Artur Rodzinski’s recording legacy is represented by a number of discs on my shelves and one of his finest is the 1945 Columbia Masterworks album of Wagner’s complete Act 3 of Die Walkure with the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera chorus performing the roles of Valkyrie warriors and soprano Helen Traubel (1899-1972) as Brunnhilde and baritone Herbert Janssen as Brunnhilde’s father and king of the Norse gods, Wotan.

The eight 12-inch 78s contained a magnificent one hour stretch of music that encompassed a large dynamic and emotional range evoking both tenderness and wrath.

Because this conductor had fired his fair share of bad musicians from both the Cleveland Orchestra and New York, he got his share of death threats and carried a loaded pistol to rehearsals, which he knew how to use.

Leonard Bernstein

During Rodzinski’s tenure as music director in New York from 1943-47, he invited Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), who would himself become music director in 1958, to become his assistant. But their relationship soon soured.

Both men had huge egos. Bernstein would try to upstage Rodzinski publically. One time, he was giving a lecture with the piano while Rodzinski was observing from the back and yelled, “Artur, come turn pages for me if you’d be so kind.”

He also gave interviews and statements to the press and got more favorable reviews than the older man. Finally, Rodzinski lost his temper, grabbed Bernstein by the throat and threw him against the wall. Bernstein commented later that Rodzinski was as strong as a bull.

However, Rodzinski was a loving husband and father (his widow Halina published a memoir of their life together) and was a secret pal to more than a few musicians going through hard times.

by Peter Cates

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph V. Williams

I first became attracted to the music of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) back during high school when I heard a recording of his London Symphony at a friend’s house and shortly after ordered it by mail from King Karol Records in New York City, now long closed.

The London Symphony was composed in 1920, is the second of his Nine Symphonies and is a celebration of the panoramic beauty of London. He used the full orchestra to convey its sights and sounds – the early morning awakening of the city, the streetcars and trolleys rushing its citizens to work, the hush of quiet side streets during the afternoon lull and at twilight, and the movement of ships down the Thames River towards the ocean. The Big Ben Clock chimes its 12 notes at the end of the Symphony in an exquisite manner.
The Barbirolli recording is available on YouTube.

Other works of VW well worth hearing include the other eight symphonies, especially the 1st or Sea Symphony for chorus and orchestra, the 3rd Pastoral Symphony, Symphonies 5 and 6 from the World War II decade. His ballet Job, the operas Pilgrim’s Progress, the Lark Ascending for violin and orchestra and his arrangements of English hymns and folk songs, etc. All on YouTube.

Stephen King

Stephen King

Maine’s own Stephen King’s latest novel Billy Summers deals with a hit man who only shoots truly bad guys. The story line deals with a two million dollar contract in front of a heavily guarded courthouse and the … but enough said.

President Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge

YouTube also has several news reels showing former President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) at work and on vacation. Because he was very gifted with managing the government with low taxes and a man of few words, he would be worthy of further study by those currently in power.

Truman Capote

by Peter Cates

Truman Capote

Truman Capote (1924-1984), when asked in a 1957 interview which can be read in Malcolm Cowley’s fascinating anthology Writers at Work, if he “read a great deal,” replied: “Too much. And anything, including labels and recipes and advertisements. I have a passion for newspapers – read all the New York dailies every day, and the Sunday editions, and several foreign magazines too. The ones I don’t buy I read standing at news stands. I average about five books a week – the normal-length novel takes me about two hours. I enjoy thrillers and would like someday to write one. Though I prefer first-rate fiction, for the last few years my reading seems to have been concentrated on letters and journals and biographies. It doesn’t bother me to read while I am writing – I mean, I don’t suddenly find another writer’s style seeping out of my pen. Though once, during a lengthy spell of reading Henry James, my own sentences ‘did’ get awfully long.”

Capote’s reading of newspapers may partly explain his trip to Kansas two years later when the Clutter family was murdered and the six years after writing In Cold Blood.

Introduction to Benidorm

After finishing the final episodes of Last Man Standing recently, I was introduced by a friend to the BBC comedy series Benidorm which, to put it mildly, is over the top, quite twisted and perverse in its humor and very frequently hilarious in its depiction of Brits on vacation at a Spanish seaside resort.

Bruno Walter

Bruno Walter

The great conductor Bruno Walter left two studio recordings and a broadcast of Dvorak’s 4th Symphony; his 3rd one, released the year this much beloved Maestro died, at 85, in 1962, is a charmingly-paced and phrased performance of a Symphony that, more than any other, sounds like the countryside meadows, streams and woods on the most beautiful day of the year, only equaled by Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

While Dvorak was in London conducting the English premiere of this piece in 1890, his friend Hans Richter, who led the Viennese premiere which the composer missed, wrote him a letter stating, “Certainly you would have enjoyed this performance. We all felt it was a splendid work, and consequently we were all enraptured. Brahms had dinner with me after the concert, and we drank to the health of the unfortunately absent father of No. 4. Vivate sequens!”

When the first four previously unnumbered Symphonies were assigned 1 through 4 during the mid ‘60s, this one became #8.

I have the original LP, which also contains the Brahms Academic Festival Overture. Walter’s Columbia Symphony studio musicians consisted of members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Columbia Masterworks MS 6361.