by Peter Cates

Henry Burr

Over Yonder Where the Lilies Grow/Hugh Donovan – The Rose of No Man’s Land; Columbia A2670; ten inch acoustic 78, recorded October, 1918.

I have written before about Harry McClaskey (1882-1941), alias Henry Burr, who recorded prolifically 100 and more years ago, while another singer Charles Harrison (1878-1965) alias Hugh Donovan is featured on side 2 of the above, very old record. The two songs were written out of different aspects of World War I from 1914-1918, also known erroneously as The War to End All Wars, and make this record a document of some historical interest.

Over Yonder Where the Lilies Grow is akin to the more famous war poem, In Flander’s Fields, a region of Belgium where two different Battles of Ypres were fought and much loss of life occurred on both sides. The song’s lyrics evoke sadness in the first three lines – ‘Last night I lay a-sleeping a vision came to me/I saw a baby in Flander’s maybe/It’s eyes were wet with tears’, etc. The song mentions the lily of France/Fleur de-Lis and ‘the land of long ago’.

The Rose of No Man’s Land pays tribute to the Red Cross nurses who risked their lives helping the wounded in often makeshift, dangerous settings. ‘It’s the one red rose the soldier knows/It’s the work of the master’s hand/It’s the sweet word from the Red Cross nurse/She’s the rose of no-man’s land.’

Both tenors did very good work here; the tunes were sticky sweet pleasant.

Charles Harrison studied with a New York City voice teacher Frederick Bristol (1839-1932) who operated a summer music camp in Harrison, Maine.

Alice Nielsen

By the Waters of Minnetonka/From the Land of Sky Blue Water; Columbia A1732; ten inch acoustic disc, recorded February, 1915.

Soprano Alice Nielsen (1872-1943) scored huge success on the opera and vaudeville stage with her appearances in Boston, New York City, London and Italy. She recorded opera arias, oper­ettas, popular tunes and hymns. One megahit was a shellac of Home Sweet Home.

The above two selections were popularized by many other singers in concert, on the radio and via records. And, like Charles Harrison, she too studied with Frederick Bristol. By another coincidence, she had a summer home in Harrison, Maine, which later became a dancing school.

Marcella

The Netflix suspense series, Marcella, has Anna Friel portraying a London detective and giving one of the most powerfully sustained performances over the series 24 episodes that I have seen from anybody. Highly recommended.

 

 

 

by Peter Cates

Brahms
2nd Piano Concerto

Artur Schnabel, pianist, with Sir Adrian Boult conducting the BBC Symphony; Victor, M 305, six 78 discs, recorded 1935.

The leaflet for this set of fragile records contains a most intriguing opening paragraph:

“Johannes Brahms came by his love for music naturally, for his father ran away from home several times in order to pursue the study of music. Quite naturally when Johannes, born May 7, 1833, showed talent, his father was willing to give him instruction. Soon the boy was turned over to other teachers, one of whom lamented the fact that the youth would be a fine performer, ‘if only he would give up this everlasting composition.’ ”

Pianist Artur Schnabel (1882-1951) met Brahms once through his teacher in Vienna, Theodor Leschetizky (1830-1915), who numbered Polish pianist and patriotic freedom fighter, Ignace Paderewski (1860-1941), among his many later famous pupils; Schnabel’s encounter with Brahms was on a nature walk.

Schnabel left recordings of both Brahms Piano Concertos and a few solo pieces. What was always for me most uniquely captivating about Schnabel’s playing was its playfulness combined with very convincing and communicative musicianship, whether of Brahms or of this pianist’s large number of recordings of Beethoven Piano Concertos and Sonatas. Other pianists , for all of their wonderful qualities, rarely conveyed this playfulness, and spontaneity. Schnabel made the piano seem a very easy instrument to play well. A few missed or bad notes, let alone memory lapses, rarely phased him in concerts.

Schnabel moved to Berlin as a young man after several years in Vienna, feeling rightfully that opportunities for teaching and performing were greater there. He was a free spirit, he fathered an illegitimate daughter whom he didn’t know about for several years, he played pool until the middle of the night and slept until noon, and, due to limited finances, he would buy a beer at city bars in order to eat the free bread rolls with mustard for frequent meals.

The above recording has been reissued on CD and can be heard on YouTube.

Killing Eve

I highly recommend the very suspenseful and funny first two seasons of the BBC show, Killing Eve, starring Sandra Oh as the MI6 investigator, Eve Polastri, and Jodie Comer as a skilled assassin, Villanelle. These two characters develop a love/hate attraction that proves very distracting to their chosen profession.

Two other superlative performances in the series are Fiona Shaw as Eve’s supervisor, Carolyn Martens, and Henry Lloyd-Hughes as the devious billionaire, Aaron Peel. The series can be seen on the Hulu channel.

Wallace Stevens

American poet, successful Hartford Connecticut insurance executive and very conservative Republican Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) wrote poems that I found consistently tough to read and teach yet still fascinating. During a vacation in Key West, Florida, Stevens got into a fistfight with novelist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) at a cocktail party and, being paunchy and portly, he was easily punched to the floor.

One worthwhile quote is from his poem, The Emperor of Ice Cream, one most apt for this time of year – “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

by Peter Cates

English writer H. E. Bates

The prolific English writer, H.E. Bates (1905-1974), published his novel The Purple Plain in 1947 and it was made into a 1954 film starring Gregory Peck, of which I have only the vaguest memories when it was shown on one of the Sunday-Afternoon-at-the-Movies programs of Maine’s channel 8 during my youth of the very early ‘60s. The author spent some time in World War II Burma and was inspired to write this novel.

The main character Forrester is a very skilled pilot flying medical personnel and supplies around the country amidst dangerous conditions. He is also battling with his own personal demons and taking on very dangerous missions more out of a death wish.

The reasons lie mainly in losing his wife during a honeymoon dance at a London nightclub when a bomb lands on it from German warplanes. He miraculously survives but is tormented by the gamut of depression and survivor guilt since then.

He is already stationed in blisteringly hot Burma at a desert medical station, where he and a colleague Blore share a tent as their living accommodations, when the novel opens. He then meets a Burmese nurse Anna and their professional relationship starts to blossom into something special. Meanwhile a Japanese bombing raid has all hands on deck and Forrester is doing doctoring, too. But he and Anna are having joyful moments too and his will to live increases.

Halfway through the book, Forrester is flying himself, Blore and his navigator Carrington elsewhere when the plane crashes in the middle of the desert. All three men survive miraculously, but Carrington’s legs are badly burned; Blore and Forrester sustain some burns but are forced to carry the navigator while trying to walk 30 miles to safety with a thermos of water and little else for nourishment; and several chapters of survival in the desert ensue. The book concludes with triumph.

What makes the novel special was Bates’s gift with words ­– those details that kept me reading, that created sympathy for, and identification with, the characters. Examples abound but I only have room for a few:

“He felt himself to be lost in the center of a vast and dusty arena blistered by relentless sun.”

“Before he could say anything more, she turned away and began to walk back along the track. She turned and smiled for a moment and he lifted his hand, standing for a moment or two longer to watch her go.”

Now the last sentence of this 308 page novel.

“Outside, the plain was purple in the falling dusk, and the long day was over.”

by Peter Cates

Victor Red Seal recordings

A few Victor Red Seal recordings from the years of easily breakable 78 shellac discs.
Bruckner Symphony No. 7; Eugene Ormandy conducting the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra; Victor, M-276, eight discs, recorded January 5th and 7th, 1935.

Before his 44 years as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) served in Minneapolis from 1931-1936 and made a number of records for Victor between January 16, 1934 and January 16, 1935. The 7th Symphony of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) is a magnificent one of almost 60 minutes and scored for large orchestra with some of the most heavenly beautiful moments from a composer who was also a superb organist. When the Symphony was premiered in Vienna in 1886, the Waltz King, Johann Strauss Jr. (1825-1899), sent the following reply in a telegram – “Am much moved. It was the greatest impression of my life.”

Ormandy’s recording was one of tremendous beauty and power and still holds up well.

Wagner Die Feen Overture

Albert Coates conducting the London Symphony Orchestra; Victrola 11455, one disc, recorded in 1932.

Wagner completed his first opera, the infrequently performed Die Feen, when he was 20 years old. The Overture is decently listenable but far from the depths of his later masterworks. However, conductor Albert Coates (1882-1953) made a convincing case for it and drew tremendous playing from the London Symphony.

Coates was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to an English businessman and his Russian-born wife and established a reputation in both England and Russia before World War I, serving as music director of the Russian Imperial Opera for five years before the 1917 Revolution. The Bolshevik government did keep him working but, by 1919, starvation threatened living conditions there, Coates fell ill, so he and his family left Russia, just barely making it to Finland and back to the United Kingdom.

Wagner

Rienzi Overture and Gotterdammerung Closing Scene; Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra; Victor 6624/6625; 2 discs, recorded 1927.

Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) was one of only two conductors (the other being his successor in Philadelphia, Eugene Ormandy) who recorded from the pre-1924 acoustic era to the four-channel quadraphonic one of the 1970s. Also, like his younger colleague, he left hundreds of recordings of an encyclopedic range of composers and some of his best records were the ones of the music of Richard Wagner (1813-1883). I cherish his Victor 78s of excerpts from his operas Parsifal – the Prelude and Good Friday Spell – and his Synthesis of Tristan and Isolde moments.

The above 1927 ones of Wagner’s heart-warmingly vibrant Rienzi Overture and the conclusion of Gotterdammerung (itself being five hours long and the fourth and last opera in the 16-hour Ring cycle) have a surging intensity, beauty and savagery that is implicit in the music itself, through which Stokowski doesn’t try to impose his own individuality and mannerisms as he did often in other recordings.

On June 14, 1912, Stokowski conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in an all-Wagner concert featuring the soprano Lillian “Lady” Nordica (1857-1914), who was born in Farmington, Maine, and lived her first eight years there.

Ernestine Schumann-Heink

Stille Nacht (Silent Night); Victor 88138, one disc, recorded 1908.

Contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936) recorded prolifically, beginning as early as 1900 and her rich warmth and disciplined technique enabled her to sing very nicely through her last years, when she appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in Wagner’s Lohengrin at the age of 71, and had her own weekly radio show. Since I enjoy Christmas music any time of the year, preferably in small doses, I find this acoustic record from 112 years ago a good example of her ability to breathe new life into old songs and opera arias. Starting in the mid-1920s, she sang Silent Night on the radio every year during the Yuletide season.

During World War I, she gave concerts for the U.S. war effort and had three sons serving in our navy; she also had one son from her first marriage in Germany who was still living there and who was drafted into the Kaiser’s own submarine service.

by Peter Cates

Twilight Zone

Episode 150, “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” first aired on CBS April 24, 1964.

I saw this episode when it first aired 56 years ago and again last night (Sunday, June 14) on Netflix. Before setting down any thoughts, I offer a plot summary.

A young urban couple, Bob and Millie Frazier, wake up in a strange bedroom after attending a countryside party and trying to take a shorter route back to the city. Things start getting weirder when everything in the house and outside village, including a tree, squirrel and patch of grass prove to be cardboard or paper and only a little girl’s voice can be heard. Any spoiler on the ending will not be provided.

I was alone at home during the first viewing and still remember being spooked out by its small town setting, so similar to my hometown of East Vassalboro, Maine, and to the other quiet, charming, boring villages of so many other childhoods; Twilight Zone’s creator and host Rod Serling (1924-1975) had an extraordinary gift for blending the terror and pity that was called for millenniums ago by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, in his Poetics on Drama as essential to any narrative. Serling also used this episode and so many others as parables on the evil, injustice and bad behavior so consistently occurring in the world then and now .

Barry Nelson (1917-2007) and Nancy Malone (1934-2015) give A-plus performances as the couple in conveying the entire gamut of emotions, including bewilderment, hope, fright, frustration and endearing love and affection for each other. Nelson was eulogized by his agent as “a very believable, naturalistic actor;” Nancy Malone moved on to directing and producing and became the first female vice-president in charge of television at 20th Century-Fox.