REVIEW POTPOURRI – Conductors: Charles Munch, Walter Bruno, Pierre Monteux

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Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Charles Munch, Walter Bruno, Pierre Monteux

Charles Munch

Continuing with my on-going fascination with the great conductors of the past, I encountered a group photo of Charles Munch (1891-1968), Bruno Walter (1876-1962), and Pierre Monteux (1875-1964), who established the still existing Domaine School in Hancock for conducting students just over 80 years ago. The occasion for this get together at Carnegie Hall’s green room was all three maestros conducting the NBC Symphony in a 1958 memorial concert for its former music director Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957), each of them featured in one piece.

Youtubes of each of the three conductors guesting with the NBC include a very good late ‘30s Mahler 1st Symphony, with Walter ; a 1953 Beethoven 7th with Monteux; and a Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin with Munch also from 1953, along with several others.

The NBC Symphony was created as a radio orchestra in order to lure Toscanini back to the United States from his native Italy where he was living since resigning as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1936 after seven brilliant years there. The NBC broadcasts have never been surpassed for long-term popularity.

However, by 1954, Toscanini, although still in good shape, was pressured to resign and his last three years would see a decline in health.

According to Monteux’s daughter, Toscanini and her father admired each other’s art; while Walter and Toscanini had been friends for decades, the older man once stated that “whenever Walter conducts a piece, he melts all over the place.” Munch appeared several times with NBC at Toscanini’s invitation.

Walter Bruno

I recently listened to a Columbia Masterworks cassette, MYT 38473, of Bruno Walter conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s Linz and Prague Symphonies. This orchestra was a studio group assembled around 1959 to 1960 and consisting of Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians when Walter was living out his remaining years in Beverly Hills.

The Linz, #36 among the 41, is a sweetly melodic and graceful work suited nicely to Walter’s “melting” music making; the more perky Prague, #38, receives a decent performance but lacks the perky excitement of a 1960 London Symphony recording conducted by Peter Maag. Still, this is a very enjoyable pair of performances that have worn well.

A highly recommended performance from Pierre Monteux is a Brahms Second Symphony, the first of four different recordings, in which he led the San Francisco Symphony in a 1945 Victor Red Seal recording. This symphony has a sunny outdoorsy quality and Monteux drew out its beauties with a very exquisitely phrased spontaneity.

Pierre Monteux

A favorite Munch recording from the mid-’60s is a Nonesuch LP featuring two different Iberias, the first by French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and the second by a native of Spain’s Catalonia, Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909). Munch conducted the Debussy Iberia with a special flair for its pulsating rhythms and colorful instrumental effects and achieved a similar magic with Albeniz . As far as I know, Albeniz and Ernesto Halffter are the only two Spanish composers Munch ever conducted.

The album jacket mentions that Albeniz composed his Iberia in Paris whereas Debussy only spent a few hours in Spain to witness a bullfight, but the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla adored Debussy’s Iberia because its music evoked the Spain he knew so well.

I own many Toscanini recordings of outstanding merit and one I have returned to often during the last 40 years is a 1947 broadcast of French composer Hector Berlioz’s complete Romeo and Juliet Symphony which RCA Victor Red Seal first issued in 1967 and, as far as I know, still available on CD and accessible on YouTube.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Eli Oberstein

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Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Eli Oberstein

Eli Oberstein

Recording producer Eli Oberstein (1901-1960) was mentioned some months ago in a column about early 78 and LP budget labels. Oberstein had worked for Victor during the 1930s and helped start its 35 cent Bluebird label with country music artists and then bandleaders Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, which was hugely successful when 78s cost a dollar or more.

Unfortunately, he was fired for some shady business dealings, and began his own company, United States Record Corporation, in 1939, which had various inexpensive subsidiary labels such as Varsity.

A year later, the company went bankrupt. In 1948, he revived the Varsity label and began issuing LPs at el cheapo prices. The source material was often pirated from other labels and the artists listed were more often than not pseudonyms.

Lately, I have listened several times to a ten-inch LP from the label (Varsity LP 27) released in 1951. The music consists of George Bizet’s L’Arlesienne Suite #1 and Ambrose Thomas’s Mignon Overture.

Despite the very scratchy surface noise of my well worn copy and the primitive fidelity of the record itself, I enjoy it immensely. The Bizet music is equal in vibrantly colorful and beguiling sonorities and rhythms to the composer’s masterpiece opera Carmen while the Thomas Overture is a graceful and melodic piece more often performed by itself while the opera Mignon is rarely staged these days.

The listed National Opera Orchestra is non-existent; the unknown conductor and musicians played with tremendous power and beauty.

Gospel Greats

A 1987 cassette (Deluxe DLX-7791), 24 Gospel Greats, features George Jones (1931-2013) singing a generous selection of sacred tunes with his uniquely individualistic honky tonk vocalism that was exemplified in such secular country classics as the 1959 White Lightning.

They include I’ll Fly Away, Leaning on the Everlasting Arms (a favorite of the murderous preacher portrayed so well by Robert Mitchum in 1955’s The Night of the Hunter), The Old Rugged Cross and a large number of unfamiliar songs.

Penguin Dictionary

The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations has one from the long forgotten Samuel Smiles (1812-1904)- “We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”

Bob Cummings

Bob Cummings

The late ‘50s comedy show Love That Bob, starred Bob Cummings (1910-1990) as a photographer who is also an insatiable ladies man and who is being constantly haranged by his widowed sister to settle down. He also doubles as the photographer’s grandfather who is also a ravenous flirt.

The hilarious comic situations and delivery make it one of the half dozen most incredibly entertaining comedy shows in TV history.

 

 

 

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REVIEW POTPOURRI – Poet: Roberta Chester

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Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Roberta Chester

Still living in her 80s, poet Roberta Chester has written articles for different newspapers in Maine and taught English at UMO, College of the Atlantic and in Israel.

With respect to the Pine Tree State, she wrote the following in the 1989 Maine Speaks anthology:

“Now that I live in Maine, the intense beauty of the Maine landscape has been a constant inspiration. I can’t think of a better place to be a poet than Maine, where each of the seasons arrives with so much passion that all of our senses are awakened. If we’re poets we have to respond.”

One poem of Ms. Chester that is included in the above-mentioned anthology, Succoth (Bangor 1982), alludes to an episode of antisemitism, although where and when remains unclear.

But first a little context.

Succoth is a harvest holiday celebration directly following Rosh Hashanah and the Yom Kippur day of fasting in an outdoor hut in which people are feasting and living. The shofar or ram’s horn is blown to announce beginning of the fast on Yom Kippur in which sins are atoned and resolutions made with hope that each individual remains in the Book of Life for the coming year.

The shul is another name for synagogue.

Now the poem:

“After the last blast of the shofar
and the hard fast, the promises
and prayers for a good year,
it takes us by surprise
when we are in the season
of apples and honey cakes
and wine, when we eat in huts
open as birds to the stars,

it takes us by surprise
to see a swastika
drawn on the wall of the shul,
painted red and razor sharp
the women whisper,
there can be no mistake.
They know the sign.

It makes me think
we have been found out
although we’ve been here
for years, our candles shining
at the windows, the smell of challah,
the bittersweet sounds of Shabbas songs
escaping from out the windows and doors
and into the streets between the bridge
and the old brick church.

It takes us by surprise
and yet the trouble is so old
it echoes in my blood
with the sound of my grandfather
climbing the stairs of a building
on the lower east side
and pressed against the wall
by someone with a knife
who held the blade
against his neck and said,
‘Swear, swear you are not a Jew,
and I will let you free!’

And from my grandfather who refused
just as they were both surprised
by an angel in disguise who opened a door
in that long, dark hall,
I learned never to be too much in love
with a roof over my head,
that houses are made of sticks and glass,
that they break like the works of our hands,
and that we should be ready to fly
up into the night with parcels and children
and scrolls under our arms
on the back of the wind.”

Disney anthology

In 1976, Ronco released an LP anthology, The Greatest Hits of Walt Disney, featuring 24 original soundtrack recordings and also including song lyrics and eight cutouts of Disney characters (Ronco R-2100). Like other anthologies from the label, it was heavily promoted on television. The selections include Bare Necessities, Whistle While You Work, A Spoonful of Sugar, Ballad of Davy Crockett, Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, etc.

Humphrey Bogart

Humphrey Bogart

I recently rewatched for the 50th time the classic Humphrey Bogart 1946 film classic The Big Sleep via a nicely mastered DVD. Bogart as detective Philip Marlowe, his fourth and last wife Lauren Bacall as the “spoiled, exacting, ruthless Vivian Sternwood who falls in love with Marlowe and, among the distinguished cast, cowboy star Bob Steele and character actor Trevor Bardette, as two cold-blooded killers contributed vividly to its infinitely rewatchable qualities, with Henry Hawks directing and Mississippi novelist William Faulkner providing the script.

 

 

 

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REVIEW POTPOURRI: Editor Clifton Fadiman

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Clifton Fadiman

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Clifton Fadiman

In his 1941 anthology Reading I’ve Liked, editor Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999) wrote why he felt that so many children’s books are terrible:

“The trouble with these juveniles is that their authors are greatly interested in children and not at all interested in themselves.”

Having enjoyed many of the Golden Books, basal readers, etc., between six and nine years old, I was particularly fascinated by picture storybooks depicting life on a farm with a variety of two- and four-legged creatures and vividly remember one such book from second grade entitled Farm for Sale – it dealt with a married couple fed up with city life who take a ride in the country, find a ready-made farm, purchase it and live happily ever after. The drawings of the animals, pond, pasture and the farmhouse, especially after nightfall, drew me into its spell and fed into this three-year enthrallment with farms in the Vassalboro of my childhood.

And I never stopped to notice whether these authors were interested in me or themselves.

Until sixth grade, the only other reading that interested me were books and magazines where the pictures outnumbered the words.

Such examples were a Classics Illustrated edition of Gene Stratton Porter’s Pollyanna with illustrations from the 1960 Walt Disney production starring Hayley Mills, Jane Wyman, Adolf Menjou, Agnes Moorehead, etc.; A Pictorial History of the American Presidents by John and Alice Durant; and issues of Life, Look, TV Guide and American Heritage magazines.

During sixth grade, my first novel without any pictures was Penny Nichols and the Knob Hill Mystery, which I read twice. But I don’t remember its author. And, again, I never noticed whether the authors were interested in children or in themselves, my only concern being to continue reading the books and magazines.

During seventh and eighth grade, I gradually discovered the joys of collecting books through the Scholastic Book Club and local outlets such as Waterville’s long gone Farrow’s Bookstore, later renamed Canaan House at Main and Temple Streets and devoured George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, numerous Hardy Boys mysteries, Horatio Alger rags to riches novels and Reader’s Digest magazines and condensed books.

Now 60 years later (with a few thousand titles too numerous to mention during the intervening decades), I am reading Alfred Kazin’s Journals , Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, Joseph Conrad’s Letters and Michael Korda’s biography of Eisenhower while dipping into numerous other volumes.

Collecting both books and records have become lifelong addictive hobbies impossible to break. And, with reference to Fadiman’s comment, I still could care less whether the authors are interested in us adult children or in themselves, only that they are interesting.

For what it’s worth, I did slog through Fadiman’s anthology of more than 900 pages from April 22, 2000, to August 11, 2002, and its mix of classic writers with long forgotten ones, along with Editor Fadiman’s comments, proved a very interesting, at times long-winded, experience, along with at least five or six other books I had going at the same time.

The classic writers included Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, James Thurber, Maine’s own Sarah Orne Jewett, and E.B. White.

Fadiman himself was a judge for more than 50 years for the Book of the Month Club, reviewed books for such publications as the New Yorker, was the host of Information Please on radio and later television, and edited several additional anthologies, including The Lifetime Reading Plan.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Richard Himber

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Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Richard Himber

Richard Himber

A two LP set, Richard Himber and his Ritz-Carlton Hotel Orchestra Featuring Joey Nash (RCA Bluebird, AXM-5520, released 1975) contains 32 recordings from the 1934-35 years of 78s that were originally released on the ten-inch discs of that decade by RCA Victor’s subsidiary 35 cent Bluebird label.

Prior to the establishment of this Orchestra, Richard Himber (1899-1966) had been a violinist for Sophie Tucker’s hotel jazz band and then in charge of bookings for Rudy Vallee (whose own megahit of the 1920s, Stein Song, helped put his alma mater, the University of Maine/Orono, on the nationwide map).

Joey Nash (?-2000) was Himber’s lead singer from 1933 to 1935. Himber also hired such musicians as Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Bunny Berrigan for the Ritz engagements.

The records feature some very beautifully arranged performances in which sophisticated rhythms are blended with sweet melodic textures and solo instrumental details from the harp, strings, woodwinds, etc. Joey Nash had a consistently appealing tenor voice and knew how to put a song across. Himber’s Orchestra was basically hired by hotel management to play music for its patrons to dance to but many of them preferred to simply listen.

Some very fascinating liner notes were provided for the 1975 re-issue by Joey Nash on the trials and tribulations that he observed and personally experienced before the Orchestra hit paydirt.

A few details:

– Himber was a bit of a con man promoting pipe dreams of stardom, classy hotel bookings and nightly radio broadcasts nationwide , meanwhile paying nothing.
– Its first broadcasts from the Essex House had the players housed in a rancid basement storage room for old hotel furnishings and assorted trash.
– A saxophone player busted Himber’s nose in a moment of arrogance.
– Other musicians received summons for alimony.
– One violinist brought his German shepherd to work where it chewed up a songbook and howled on a nationwide duet with the clarinettist.
– A musician was attacked by the angry father of his pregnant girlfriend.
– When the Ritz broadcasts became a success, the orchestra was earning $4,000 weekly.

Among the Great American Songbook classics on the album are Stars Fell on Alabama, Tea for Two, What a Difference a Day Made, Avalon and Winter Wonderland.

In later years, Himber had a traveling band giving free outdoor concerts on a flatbed truck and got sponsorship from Pepsi Cola. During one of these concerts in 1966, he collapsed from a heart attack and died a few hours later at the age of 67.

Himber once stated, “Remember that vanity rules the world.”

The above recordings can be heard via YouTube.

REVIEW POTPOURRI – Conductor: Carlo Maria Giulini

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Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Carlo Maria Giulini

Carlo Maria Giulini

Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini was born May 9, 1914, and passed away June 14, 2005. He displayed talent by the age of five on the violin, but took up the viola as an adolescent, was gainfully employed in Italian radio orchestras, and had priceless opportunities to observe an array of some of the greatest conductors of the last century – Wilhelm Furtwangler, Arturo Toscanini, Victor de Sabata, Bruno Walter – Giulini once commented that Walter had a unique gift for making each musician feel important, Fritz Reiner, and Hancock Maine’s summer resident/teacher Pierre Monteux.

Giulini was taking up conducting himself and getting a few engagements but World War II broke out and he was conscripted into the Italian army. Being a pacifist, he couldn’t bring himself to kill enemy combatants, especially alongside German soldiers, and became a deserter, going into hiding until the allies removed Mussolini from power and drove out the Germans. During the period of hiding, his face was displayed on posters all over the countryside with orders to shoot on sight.

After the war, Giulini got numerous engagements as a guest conductor, and in 1949, was rehearsing a lesser known opera by Franz Joseph Haydn at La Scala; Toscanini happened to look in, stayed for the rehearsal, and used his influence to solidify Giulini’s engagement as La Scala Music Director Victor de Sabata’s main assistant at that opera house, eventually replacing Sabata when the older man’s health failed.

In 1955, Chicago’s own arch perfectionist Fritz Reiner told his players just before he went away for the summer that the very talented young man Giulini will be conducting them for the orchestra’s outdoor festival at Ravinia and the players will be finding the young Maestro a very gifted musician.

Years later in a New York Times interview, Giulini told of meeting Reiner just once in the lobby of a Viennese hotel and having a pleasant chat for 15 minutes.

Giulini’s working methods were quite lengthy and carefully detailed but singers and musicians enjoyed working with him because he knew exactly what he was doing yet had a very pleasant supportive personality, unlike such tyrants as Reiner, Szell, Toscanini and others. He considered them colleagues and friends and that he and they were servants of the great composers – Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Verdi, Mahler and a handful of others, he being also highly selective of which piece to focus on.

For example, he conducted Tchaikovsky’s 6th or Pathetique Symphony but the 5th Symphony made him physically ill.

In 1979, I attended a concert at Boston’s Symphony Hall in which Giulini conducted the touring Los Angeles Philharmonic, of which he was music director from 1978 to 1984, in a program consisting of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and the Dvorak 7th, two works which he adored and brought something truly beautiful that Sunday afternoon. I own the three recordings he did of the Pastoral and both Dvorak 7ths and they are all good for different reasons.

Two highly recommended operas that Giulini recorded during the 1980s were Verdi’s Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, both with tenor Placido Domingo singing important roles and, even though he had a voice I didn’t usually care for, he sang with beauty and power while still in his 40s.

During roughly the same decade, Giulini refused all engagements for two to three years when his wife Marcela suffered a series of strokes and stayed home to take personal care of her until she recovered.

Many of the Maestro’s recordings can be heard via YouTube and other Internet sources.

A quote by the Maestro on working with people:

“What matters most is human contact. The great mystery of music making requires real friendship among those who work together. Every member of the orchestra knows I am with him and her in my heart.”

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Adolph Hitler; Composer: Otto Klem­perer

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Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Adolph Hitler

Adolph Hitler

In the interest of getting a few columns ready a few weeks ahead of time, I am writing this one on April 20, the 135th birthday anniversary of one of the two most evil dictators of the 20th century (the other being Joseph Stalin), namely former German chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).

William Shirer

My earliest exposure to Hitler’s life came via a short paperback, The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler, by William L. Shirer (1904-1993) which I bought for 25 cents through the TAB Book Club when I was in sixth grade during the 1962-63 school year. John Kennedy was still president and his father, who was appointed Ambassador to Great Britain in the late 1930s, for some mysterious reasons by FDR, was one of Hitler’s biggest fans, much to the disgust of FDR who eventually fired him, and of son Jack who would quietly leave the room whenever his father was spouting politics.

Shirer’s book was based on the much longer 1961 Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which has sold millions of copies and was a Book of the Month Club selection. Much of the material was based on the author’s years as a journalist in Berlin from 1934 to 1940. More than any other correspondent during those six years, Shirer personally witnessed the triumph of evil in its various manifestations and brought to his writing an immediacy most others lacked.

He authored several other books on these experiences – Berlin Diary, End of a Berlin Diary, The Nightmare Years, Twentieth Century Journey, etc.

In 1934, once Hitler was establishing himself after being “democratically voted in by the people,” Shirer wrote in the Nightmare Years what he was witnessing in Berlin:

“Platoons or companies of brown-shirted storm troopers of the S.A. and black-coated guards of the more elite S.S. were constantly marching through the streets, their jackboots echoing on the pavement. I was warned that anyone on the sidewalk who did not pause to salute their standards and flags was liable to be beaten up on the spot. I soon learned to duck into a shop when they passed.”

In 1940, Shirer received word that the Gestapo was planning to arrest him on trumped up charges of espionage and execute him, and got out in the nick of time.

Spencer Tracy

Most highly recommended is a viewing of 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg dealing with the trial of four Nazi judges by an American military tribunal and starring Spencer Tracy as the presiding chief justice, Burt Lancester as one of the Nazis and an all star cast that includes Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, William Shatner, etc. Spencer Tracy stole the show.

A particularly disturbing aspect of the film was the several Germans who denied knowing about the death camps. And other pertinent historical issues were referenced – the beginnings of the Cold War, the temporary closing of Berlin by the Russians and the Berlin Airlift of 1948 in which food and other necessary supplies were parachuted by American planes.

And finally a haunting scene of Tracy as the Judge walking by himself through the outdoor amphitheater where Hitler had his rallies communicated powerfully.

Otto Klemperer

Otto Klemperer

Werner Klemperer

I have been listening to an eight CD set of the great Otto Klem­perer’s 1960s studio recordings of Bach’s B minor Mass and Saint Matthew’s Passion, Handel’s Messiah and the Beeth­oven Missa Solemnis, each of which is a masterpiece. Klemperer (1885-1973) was already in his 80s and still conducting at a peak level. Warner Classics 9 93540 2.

Klem­perer’s son Werner portrayed Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes.

These recordings can be heard via YouTube.

 

 

 

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REVIEW POTPOURRI – Novelist: Gerard Robichaud; Singer: Tony Williams; Movie: White Heat; Violinist: Fritz Kreisler

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Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Gerard Robichaud

Gerard Robicaud

Novelist Gerard Robichaud (1908-2008) was born in Québec, moved with his parents to Lewiston as a child, returned to Québec at 18 to study for the priesthood and practice writing stories during his spare time, but then left the priesthood to return to Lewiston in 1928 and over the next twenty years began developing further as a writer .

Maine Speaks contains a chapter, The Bad One, from Robichaud’s 1961 novel Papa Martel which easily stands on its own as a short story. The setting is a 1920s mill town, Groveton (strongly resembling Lewiston) and depicts a French Canadian family living in a very crowded apartment.

A local priest talks the parents into taking in a 17-year-old orphaned girl who’s been very difficult to manage. What gives this story a special quality is how the situation unfolds in a most unusual manner; how again people are so seldom what they seem; and how clouds have surprising silver linings.

The orphan Bad One Sophia ends up engaging the family and community in a most endearing manner while there are the elements of sly humor, local color, snappy dialog and unspoken attitudes that are the meat and potatoes of any good story.

In an interview, Robichaud summed up his own approach as a writer- “I wanted people to be better than they were after they read the story.”

A choice four lines of dialog between the family patriarch Louis and the priest Father Lebois before the parents make any decision:

“And this little girl?” Louis asked. “How old is she?”

“Just seventeen,” said Father Lebois sadly, “and already the boys chase her. It’s a pity, but she’s also very beautiful. “

“At seventeen,” Louis murmured, “everybody is beautiful.”

Tony Williams

Tony Williams

Tony Williams (1928-1992) was lead singer for the Platters from 1953 to 1959 and contributed to the group’s extraordinary success with such hits as The Great Pretender and Jerome Kern’s Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.

In 1957 as a solo singer, he recorded a seven-inch 45 (Mercury 71158) of two selections – Let’s Start All Over Again; and When You Return, its melody being that of Danny Boy/Londonderry Air. And they were vocally top notch doo wop style arrangements.

White Heat

James Cagney

White Heat is a 1949 film noir classic starring James Cagney (1899-1986) as the psychopathic gangster Cody Jarrett, Margaret Wycherly (1881-1956) as the equally formi­dable Ma Jarrett and a superb supporting cast that included Virginia Mayo, Steve Cochrane, Edmund O’Brien, Fred Clark etcs. and astutely directed by Raoul Walsh.

Fritz Kreisler

Fritz Kreisler

Two acoustically recorded 12-inch shellacs present two violinists who shared the same birthday of February 2 and ex­changed greeting cards.

Fritz Kreisler (1875-1963) recorded Dvorak’s Humoresque (Victor Red Seal 74180) in 1919 and played with his justly famed unique delicacy and exquisite lyricism. In 1947, he closed his violin case for good.

Jascha Heifetz

Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987) recorded Sarasate’s splendid virtuoso piece Introduction and Tarentelle (Victrola Red Seal 74626) the previous year at the age of 17 and even then displayed the total technical and musical supremacy as possibly the greatest violinist who ever lived. Itzhak Perlman once commented that Heifetz again and again could do bowings and phrasing that he and other violinists could never do.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Streisand’s “Highlights”; Tenor: Charles Harrison; & Creatore’s Band

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Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Highlights

Barbra Streisand

Highlights (Columbia CT 52849) is a 1992 cassette of 24 selections from the massive 1991 four CD set, Just for the Record, of almost 40 years of Barbra Streisand’s singing with a few vocals from composers Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers, and Michel Legrand, and singers Judy Garland, Neil Diamond and Ray Charles.

Streisand has consistently given magnificent performances of so many Great American Songbook classics and contemporary selections.

Here is You’ll Never Know via both a 1955 recording when she was 13 at the beginning of side 1 and a duet from 1987 at the end of side 2 with herself in 1955. Other classics include Cry Me a River, Get Happy, Happy Days are Here Again, People, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, Come Rain and Come Shine, etc.

It is a very good musical textbook for young voice students on what to choose for material and how to develop their technique.

Charles Harrison

Charles Harrison

Tenor Charles Harrison (1878-1965) recorded many shellacs for various labels including Columbia, Edison, Victor, Vocalion, etc., and did many of the classic pop standards of the day – I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, Peggy O’ My Heart, Avalon as well as sacred and opera selections.

A 12-inch acoustic shellac record (Columbia A5348), from November 4, 1911, featured him performing an aria Lend Me Your Aid, from Charles Gounod’s opera The Queen of Sheba.

Harrison didn’t have what one might call a beautiful voice, like Caruso, Mario Lanza and Luciano Pavarotti, etc., but he did sing with intelligence, conviction and a naturalness of phrasing that was very enjoyable.

Charles Gounod (1818-1893) wrote one masterpiece, Faust, among his dozen operas, the others being for me uneven in quality but having some charming arias.

The Queen of Sheba (La Reine de Saba) was premiered in a magnificently opulent production at the Paris Opera in 1862 but rarely performed since then; the first recording of the complete opera was a live Italian production in 2001 while the U.S. premiere occurred in 2018 via a concert presentation in Boston by Odyssey Opera.

Creatore’s Band

Guiseppe Creatore

Columbia A5364 is another 12 inch shellac with Creatore’s Band giving very expressive performances of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus from the Messiah and the hymn Nearer My God to Thee. The two sides were recorded in 1908, originally released as one-sided discs and, around 1918, as the two-sided record.

The leader Giuseppe Creatore (1871-1952) organized the Band in the early 1900s after moving to the United States from Italy. Due to his musical gifts and flamboyant personality, he and the Band experienced incredible success and got $5,000 for each concert.

A son Luigi Creatore (1921-2015) partnered with Hugo Peretti as Hugo and Luigi and they did numerous arrangements during the ‘50s and ‘60s for pop artists, including Peter Nero and Perry Como, at Roulette and RCA Victor.

All of the above recordings can be heard on the Internet.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: the Gingersnaps & Alfred Tennyson

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Gingersnaps

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Gingersnaps

A 1956 seven-inch 45 (Kapp K-226X) features the Gingersnaps, four women from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who had been friends in high school. They perform two novelty bubblegum pop songs, Gingerbread; and Lenny! Lenny! This record was for me an intriguing historic curiosity because, having been born in 1951, the ‘50s have remained an immensely fascinating time warp.

The father of one of the women was friendly with the Chordettes, also from Sheboygan, whose megahit records Mister Sandman; and Lollipop Lollipop each sold over a million copies in 1953-54 and helped these singers get bookings for concerts and recording sessions, although only this record and two or three other discs were released.

Musically speaking, the vocals and arrangements weren’t half bad, the women singing with sincerity, but the results were derivative and sounding too much like their fellow Sheboygans, the Chordettes.

Two other groups with the name Gingersnaps need to be mentioned to avoid confusion. One is an African-American blues group of singers from the Deep South who signed a contract with RCA Victor in 1945 and recorded a few 78s, the second consisting of musicians from Ukraine who started performing as an electronic rock group in New York City in 2019.

Alfred Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson

Alfred (Lord) Tennyson (1809-1892) published a book length poem In Memoriam in 1850 as a tribute to a close friend Arthur Henry Hallam who died from a stroke in 1833, at the age of 22. The poem was not only a powerful elegy about the loss of a friend but also a critique on the “modern age” in England during the age of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) when religious faith was increasingly seen as being replaced by hard cold materialism, prosperity and scientific progress. Thus a certain cynicism and despair among more sensitive souls was on the rise.

This cynicism and despair is touched on quite brilliantly and astutely in some verses on the life of a couple who have been married for decades and these verses just might resonate in the world we live in today:

“These two-they dwelt with eye on eye,
Their hearts of old have beat in tune,
Their meetings made December June,
Their every parting was to die.

“Their love has never passed away;
The days she never can forget
Are earnest that he loves her yet,
Whate’er the faithless people say.

[But then this note of marital happiness is pretty much destroyed by the next verse in which there is so often one spouse who loves still and is no longer loved in return, just co-existing, and getting the raw end of the deal. The cold fish husband in the marriage is still living with the loving wife, he still loves her, but he’s just not showing it any longer. ]

“Her life is lone, he sits apart,
He loves her yet, she will not weep,
Tho’ rapt in matters dark and deep
He seems to slight her simple heart.”

Tennyson implied a certain sarcasm about the oafish husband being “rapt in matters dark and deep” and seeming “to slight her simple heart.” This poet conveyed a tough yet needed realism about marriage among our ancestors, the perils of living under the same roof for decades and the suffering so often occurring between husbands and wives having to live under that same roof. And he articulated these thematic concerns with power and eloquence.