Valeria Zorina

by Peter Cates

Soundmaps Extended Realities

Valeria Zorina, violin and Evgeny Sinaiski, piano
Oehms Classics OC 492, CD, recorded May 1-5, 2019, in Madrid, Spain.

Although she has not yet set foot in the United States, Moldavian violinist Valeria Zorina has concertized extensively in England and Europe to tremendous and deserved acclaim. The late violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) mentored Valeria during her earlier years while Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013) and Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007) are among the conductors who have collaborated with her in concert. Since 2015, she has taught at a conservatory in Madrid, Spain.

Just released in early July, Valeria’s CD, Soundmaps Extended Realities, is a collaboration with Russian pianist Evgeny Sinaiski in which she takes a different approach from the usual recital.

Valeria Zorina has chosen six composers whose pieces have gone beyond the usual tuning of a violin at E, A, D, and G to achieve what is called scordatura, itself defined in the Harvard Dictionary of Music as “Abnormal tuning of a stringed instrument in order to obtain unusual chords, facilitate difficult passages, or change the tone color.” Having an unusually brilliant level of technique and musicality, she has tuned her instrument to the specific dimensions of each work and achieved very inspired results.

The six composers are Eugene Ysaye (1858-1931), Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704), Louis Franz Aguirre (born 1968), Franz von Vecsey (1893-1935), Giacomo Platini (born 1967), and Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921).

Belgian violinist/ composer/ conductor Ysaye is represented by his Poeme Elegiaque, a very passionate 14 minute piece for violin and piano that has a certain sadness in keeping with its elegiac quality of remembrance of a departed loved one.

Ysaye was taught by the violinist/composers Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881) and Henryk Wienawski (1835-1880) whose own Concertos personify the 19th century romantic virtuoso tradition, both of them tremendously captivated by Ysaye’s ability to draw sounds out of the violin that nobody else could.

Ysaye recorded several discs during the acoustic era as a violinist and as Music Director of the Cincinatti Symphony and several can be heard on youtube.

The German baroque composer Biber is represented by the 9th Rosary Sonata known as the Carrying of the Cross and a piece combining sublime spiritual beauty with fascinating sororities in its tunings.

The Cuban composer/conductor Aguirre’s Four Nocturnes With Masks, from 2017, are four minutes in duration. They consist of Winter, Dies Irae, Adoration and Dust of Snow and each Nocturne is a tribute to another composer – Gyorgy Kurtag, Manuel de Falla, Olivier Messiaen and Morton Feldman.

They powerfully and poetically evoke a stark middle of the night atmosphere of spooks going bump in the night and convey why Aguirre is not only a major figure in his native country but also in Europe.

Vecsey’s Nuit du Nord is a gem of extraordinarily poignant beauty and one I have shared often with several friends to the house. Vecsey studied with Joseph Joachim who was a very close friend of Johannes Brahms. Recordings of his playing can be heard on YouTube also.

The Italian composer Platini provided his Four Souvenirs, from 2018, and another example of the combination of bleakness and beauty in music of the 21st century, although with a quieter, more subtle range of dynamics than those of Aguirre .

Saint-Saens arguably most well-known piece Danse Macabre has the kind of tuning that tellingly contributed to its diabolical quality in which Death plays his fiddle at midnight on Halloween and calls all the skeletons from their graves to dance all night until the rooster gives his dawn cocka-doodle-doo wakeup call.

This CD has sustained several hearings and comes with an A-plus recommendation.

PT Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals continued…

Next paragraph from Robert PT Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals, an essay on the harvesting of ice from the Kennebec River:

“Then the field of the harvest was marked off for the game of wealth to be played there. Men walked with gougers tracing the line their narrow plows made straight as a die across the river. After them came the horse-drawn gougers cutting a deeper double furrow. Another army of men took up the game at right angles to the others, crisscrossing the wide fields. And then the sawyers came, slow with their loads of shoulder muscle and woolen shirts. They set in their saws and began the cutting of the gigantic checkers from the checkerboard on the hard Kennebec. The men stood to their work with both hands on the handles each side of their long tools, going down, coming back, fifty men keeping time as they ate into the stuff that meant their life, bed, and board, and fodder for their cattle. It was a sight to see the gates – ajar mustaches swinging like pendulums, gold and dark, and the breath in them changing to icicles as they worked. Every so often the picks spoke, and the sawed lines lengthened ahead of the sawyers. Noon saw a dozen checkerboards marked out on the river. One notable fact about the tools of the ice industry on the Kennebec is this: they were the only tools that were good enough to remain unchanged from the beginning of the industry to the end of it.”

To be continued…

Raymond Burr

by Peter Cates

Perry Mason
Season 4

Season 4 of Perry Mason had a particularly compelling episode, The Case of the Misguided Missile, which was first aired May 6, 1961. It dealt with a missile launch and provided some background footage at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in central California, and now renamed Vandenberg Space Force Base. The missile explodes in midair and the cause is a bolt that had been tampered with.

The story de­picted the tensions between the civilian scientists of the company which built the missile and the Air Force military that results in the murder of the lead investigator, a captain who has an abrasive personality combined with unimpeachable honesty. The plot has the usual several suspects, a defendant who has Perry Mason as his attorney and, given the circumstance, a court martial which is fascinating in its details of procedural and very careful weighing of the evidence.

Simon Oakland

Simon Oakland did an outstanding performance as the officer who is murdered. Interestingly, he started out as a concert violinist but then detoured into theater in New York City with success and then to Hollywood with a long list of movies and television programs to his credit. A notable appearance was his portrayal of the psychiatrist in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho.

The actor died of cancer on August 29, 1983, one day after his 68th birthday.

Fans of the movie West Side Story may remember Oakland as the formidable policeman Lt. Schrank.

P.T. Coffin’s Essay
Kennebec Crystals continued

Continuing with Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals and its account of Maine’s most renowned winter industry before the invention of refrigerators:

“The men crowded into the river lodging houses of Hallowell and Gardiner, Pittston and Dresden. They unloaded and stowed their dunnage in their temporary homes for the next few weeks. They armed themselves with picks and gougers and saws. Each man had his favorite tool tucked under his quilted arm. They descended on the cold harvest floor with horses and sons in a great host.”

To be continued…

Petula Clark

by Peter Cates

Petula Clark

I Know a Place
Jack and John. Warner Brothers 5612, seven inch 45 vinyl disc, recorded 1965.

Now 88, singer Petula Clark achieved fame in England and Europe before hitting paydirt over here. Downtown, This Is My Song, and Don’t Sleep in the Subway are megahits for the best reasons-they are beautiful songs beautifully sung. She had producer Tony Hatch working the arrangements enhancing her singing numerous times. In fact, if she ever made a bad record, I don’t know of it.

I Know a Place may be my favorite of the group with its spirited rhythms and upbeat musicality. It took a few hearings to like the B side, Jack and John, but it too exudes charm.

In 1968, she hosted a tv special and sang a duet with Harry Belafonte during which she locked arms with him. A representative of the sponsor Chrysler wanted another take used in which Clark stood at a distance from Belafonte because he feared a backlash in the Deep South. Clark refused, she destroyed all other takes of the duet, and the special made television history , receiving an Emmy nomination.

Continuing with Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals:

“In the clear dawn next day, along a hundred roads that led down to the Kennebec, farmers were trudging, mustaches hanging down to the woolen mufflers like the tusks on the walrus. Brown mustaches, golden ones, black ones, gray ones and white. But every one in front of a man. And behind them steamed their wealth, on its own feet. Tall, sinewy sons, out of school for good and on the doorstep of manhood and marriage, horses with hides like scrubbed horse chestnuts, big of hoof and billowy of muscle, fattened on corn, sharp shod, with long calks of steel that bit into the frozen ground. Here you could reckon up a man’s prosperity in solid tangible things, as in the days of Jacob and Laban. Goods with the breath of life in them. Like Job’s. The richest man was one who had nine or ten strong men to follow the swing of his creasing trousers in ringing ironed shoes. Or three or four spans of horses with the morning star in their forehead and the music of steel under their feet. So the wealth of the Kennebec came down to the harvest of Maine’s best winter crop in the eighties.”

More next week.

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A note on Vassalboro, Maine, history, the Cates Country Store (which was in family hands from when it was built in 1824 to when it was sold in 1971 to new owners) had ice deliveries from a horse drawn wagon well into the 1920’s. A gentleman, who drove such a wagon and knew my grandfather, Harold Cates (1881-1953), his father George Henry Cates (1852-1938) who ran the store for 65 years from 1873 until he died and other relatives employed in the store, used to park his car down by the Civil War monument during the early 1960’s to read his newspaper and I made his acquaintance. His name was Oscar Tubbs, he lived on the Cushman Road in Winslow in an old house with a long driveway and he told some fascinating stories about those years.

Connie Francis

by Peter Cates

Connie Francis

Now 83 years old but still active, Connie Francis is a living legend in pop music. Her 1957 megahit, the lovely Bert Kalmar/Harry Ruby Who’s Sorry Now, was one truly fine song, made extra special by CF’s totally sincere rendition, even if a tad smothered by sentimentality. That year, American Bandstand featured her lip-singing it and, as a six year old, I remember wishing, just momentarily, that she would adopt me as her little boy on a single Mom basis – LOL !!!

BTW, with respect to Kalmar and Ruby, the 1950 Fred Astaire and Red Skelton musical biopic, Three Little Words, also from MGM (Hmm, interesting coincidence), and about the two songwriters, had a very stirring and expressively different performance of WSN by Gloria De Haven, very much in the Peggy Lee/Julie London tradition.

Exciting is a set of 12 very classic pop standards – Time After Time; Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s Come Rain/Come Shine; a very personal favorite, There Will Never Be Another You; Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, of which my copy of the late Karen Chandler’s early ‘50s Coral 45 is the gold standard; That’s All; All By Myself, etc. She performs with heartfelt expression but her timing and phrasing is sometimes leaving me wanting something more, an elusive nuance and magic that such balladeers as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme and Doris Day had aplenty. But I really liked her singing of Time After Time. And the arrangements of the gifted Ray Ellis, like those beautiful ones for many of the Johnny Mathis late ‘50s hits, enhanced the album.

For me personally, the worst record she may have released – and one of the top ten worst in recording history, was the 1963 Brylcream Sing Along with Connie. First, it was an insult to the finest Sing Along group then popular, namely Mitch Miller’s. Secondly, the arrangements were hokey, cornballish and, most obviously, a rush job of rush jobs, much like most Christmas albums and TV specials. Thirdly, the Brylcream commercials flooded the American Bandstand. And finally, those little dabs made men’s hair greasier and grosser – forget pursue, the gals would all avoid ya!

The album would also impact the 1963 Christmas of the greater Cates family groups in the vicinity – the price for the record, when first released, was $1 when one purchased a tube of the ointment. Within a week, the price was down to ten cents without the required extortion.

A most “thrifty,’ well-to-do relative whose anonymity shall be honored in this instance, like the other sleeping dogs, bought a pile of the 10 centers and flooded every household with a copy as his way of good will to all men and women. Even after 30 years, no other copies of a record flooding the rubbish sales and Goodwills would be in such mint plus condition.

However, the story doesn’t end there. Rare record shops had their copies priced at 20 bucks and more by the mid ‘80s.

The singer’s life would be shattered by two horrific events. In 1974, a rapist would bust into her room at a New Jersey motel and brutally assault her, never to be found to this day. In 1981, her brother was murdered by two Mafia hitmen.

But her ability to move on and bless so many both here and abroad is only one of the reasons she is so worthy of honor for her life’s work.

Several selections, maybe the whole album, can be heard on YouTube, while prices on the Amazon page start at $4.39 for LP and $6.80 for CD.