by Peter Cates

Miscellany!

Placido Domingo

Opera singer Placido Domingo, who’s 79, has tested positive for coronavirus. We can all hope he will be fine, as people even older are recovering from this. But we need to continue with the suggested safety steps, too.

While on the subject of Domingo, I have some of his recordings – various complete operas, single arias, and three tenors collaborations with Pavarotti and Carreras. He also has had a long, professional singing career and seems to have paced himself, as opposed to some singers who ruin their voices earlier. His Cavaradossi on the Leontyne Price Puccini’s Tosca set conducted by Zubin Mehta is a good introduction to his artistry.

Dean Martin

Dream with Dean
Reprise LP, August 1964 release.

Dean Martin was a singer of talent, even if not on the same level as Frank Sinatra. He phrased with intelligence, suavity and an astute sense of timing.

This album featured him in a small jazz combo setting, accompanied by four very fine instrumentalists – guitarist Barney Kessel, pianist Ken Lane, bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Irv Cottler. Dino sang such staples as My Melancholy Baby, Fools Rush In, I’ll Buy That Dream and a scaled down, subdued Everybody Loves Somebody plus eight additional selections. And it can be heard on YouTube.

Gene Krupa and His Orchestra

It’s Just a Matter of Opinion; That’s My Home
Columbia, 37067, ten-inch 78, recorded mid-1940s.

Gene Krupa (1909-1973) was a truly gifted musician on the drums who expanded their boundaries from mere rhythm to outstanding artistic virtuosity on the 1930’s hit recording, Sing Sing Sing, by Benny Goodman’s orchestra. At various times during the ‘40s and ‘50s, Krupa led his own orchestra and recorded a number of 78s for Columbia Records.

Both sides feature the very good jazz singer, Buddy Stewart (1922-1950), who is joined in It’s Just a Matter… by Carolyn Grey, who was heard often during the big band days. The songs are not well-known staples but they are quality listening in their vocal and instrumental arrangements.

Krupa played frequent battles of the drums with friend Buddy Rich in concert and recording. He also struggled with heroin addiction but overcame it. Buddy Stewart was killed in a car accident at 27 while on a road trip to New Mexico to be with his wife and child. Carolyn Grey is still living at 98.

by Peter Cates

Schumann

Abendlied and Traumeri
with Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops. RCA Victor Red Seal , 12-0017, 12-inch 78 shellac record, recorded 1940s.

German composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856) composed masterworks of symphonies, concertos, solo keyboard, chamber music, choir and lieder. Pieces to introduce anyone new to his music would include the Rhenish Symphony with its evocation of the Rhine River, in Germany, the Spring Symphony in its opening brass fanfare and the sense of re-birth that begins every March 21, and the three sublime Concertos for piano, violin and cello.

Schumann was also one of the most important music critics of the 1800s, along with his contemporary in France, composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). And he wrote a review of Brahms’s music in 1853, when that composer was only 20, hailing him as a savior of European music.

He and his wife, Clara, also accepted Brahms as a new member of the family. Sadly, Schumann died in a hospital three years later where he was committed after his manic/depressive struggles overtook him and he jumped into the Rhine attempting to drown himself. An older sister had committed suicide 30 years earlier in 1825. But Clara and Brahms would be lifelong friends until she died in 1896.

Arthur Fiedler was music director of the Boston Pops from 1930 until his death in 1979, at the age of 83, and made hundreds of recordings for RCA Victor and then the German-based Deutsche Grammophon/Polydor label starting in the late ‘60s when he, the Boston Pops and the regular Boston Symphony switched over.

Schumann’s Abendlied, originally composed for four-hand piano, and the very well-known Traumeri, from the composer’s solo piano Kinderszenen or Scenes of Childhood, were arranged for orchestra and given very hauntingly exquisite performances by Fiedler and his players. I have many Boston Pops recordings from the Fiedler years but I cannot think of a better one than this gem.

This past Saturday, March 7, the Waterville Opera House had the Met production of Handel’s early opera, Agrippina, by delayed broadcast of a week. The plot involves sex, politics and off-and-on friendship and romance. Agrippina, the devious wife of the Roman Emperor, Claudius, was sung by Joyce di Donato. Other singers were Brenda Rae as Poppea, Kate Lindsey as Poppea’s heartthrob Ottone, Matthew Rose as Claudius etc.

This production changed the original grim story into a comedy with very suggestive humor, and situations and a frequently scantily clad Brenda Rae in her role as Poppea. Comments on the visual details end here. The music and singing were exemplary.

Wagner’s magnificent opera, The Flying Dutchman, is scheduled for this coming Saturday, March 14, starting at the usual time of 12:55 p.m.

by Peter Cates

John Greenleaf Whittier

After barely making ends meet for decades, Quaker poet/abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) hit paydirt in 1866 with the publication of Snowbound, an account of an 1800s family stuck inside the farmhouse during a beautiful blizzard and getting some quality time during its duration. I plan to write about him and other New Eng­land poets from his lifespan years in future columns, along with the sustaining of a commitment to Maine ones that has been on-going. The richness of the New England literary landscape in both its major and minor poets is beyond measure.

This week, I present several verses from another poem of Whittier’s, Amy Wentworth, in which he traces a heroine he modeled on those to be found in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, early colonial society of the 1600s, a group of people less Puritan than that of Boston, Massachusetts:

Her fingers shame the ivory keys
They dance so light along;
The bloom upon her parted lips
Is sweeter than the song.

O perfumed suitor, spare thy smiles!
Her thoughts are not of thee;
She better loves the salted wind,
The voices of the sea.

Her heart is like an outbound ship
That at its anchor swings;
The murmur of the stranded shell
Is in the song she sings.

She sings, and smiling, hears her praise,
But dreams the while of one
Who watches from his sea-blown deck
The icebergs in the sun.

She questions all the winds that blow,
And every fog-wreath dim,
And bids the sea-birds flying north
Bear messages to him.

She speeds them with the thanks of men
He perilled life to save,
And grateful prayers like holy oil
To smooth for him the wave.

Notice Whittier’s gifts as a storyteller in these verses and a general theme of true love!

For what it’s worth, before Whittier’s success with Snowbound, with which he made $10,000, he was supposedly quite lacking in social graces and wasn’t attracting the interest of women at all. After success, he was bombarded with marriage proposals and one woman went so far to buy a house next to his farm in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to have him within easy reach of her tempting tentacles.

by Peter Cates

The great pianists Peter and Rudolf Serkin

Peter Serkin (1947-2020) and his father, Rudolf Serkin (1903-1991), achieved fame as classical pianists of immense distinction. I saw each of them perform twice in concert and found their musicianship quite special for different reasons. Before writing about Peter, who died recently of pancreatic cancer, I will share experiences of his father.

My first encounter with Rudolf Serkin was via a 1960 Columbia Masterworks recording of the Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, which my mother bought as a member of the Columbia Record Club in Terre Haute, Indiana. The piece, written in 1881, more than 20 years after the composer’s 1st Concerto, is filled with grandeur, passion, beauty and knuckle-busting virtuosity – just the sort of music Rudolf Serkin reveled in.

He dove into it with full-fledged commitment and joy, ripped into its furies ferociously and coaxed its more poetic moments, especially in its tender 3rd movement Andante with the solo cello passages, as though his own life depended on it.

I saw him perform twice at Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1974. He was a small man with small fingers that he had to relentlessly train to span octaves, unlike pianists with larger hands who met those technical challenges more easily. And he was a joy to watch; he would sing with his hands and body, jump up and down on the piano stool during the more dramatic passages and hum constantly.

One concert was a pension fund one with the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa and featured the Brahms 1st Concerto which, as far as I was concerned, he played better than anyone else. (It happens to be my favorite piano concerto, I have well over 80 recordings of it including the four different ones that Serkin did and each one of them has at least something good.)

The second concert was an all-Beethoven recital with the 1st and 32nd Piano Sonatas and Diabelli Variations. That Sunday afternoon, Symphony Hall was packed and I was one of several seated on the stage.

Peter was a taller man, he had bigger hands and he conveyed a more relaxed manner at the keyboard. He also favored different repertoire from his father and performed much 20th century music, unlike the 18th and 19th century composers that drew the elder Serkin’s attention. But the son did record six Mozart Concertos, Beethoven’s transcription of his Violin Concerto and a recording of the Brahms 1st Concerto, which is among those I haven’t heard yet.

I saw him play the Ravel Piano Concerto with the Washington D.C. Symphony under Christian Badea at its Kennedy Center, in 1979, and a double bill of the Mozart 16th Concerto and Igor Stravinsky Capriccio for Piano and Winds with the late Sergiu Comissiona conducting the Houston Symphony at Jones Hall, in 1987, during the years I lived in that city. He was the personification of cool, calm and collected at the keyboard and played beautifully.

A couple of asides. Rudolf Serkin once announced that he was taking a winter sabbatical to study the Haydn String Quartets. When asked by friends why, he replied, “Because they are beautiful.”

Meanwhile, Peter listened to such rock bands as the Grateful Dead and would retreat to the Cave in his house which contained his record collection of over 3,000 LPs.

by Peter Cates

Gilbert and Sullivan Weekend

The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company; London, 430144-4, cassette, selections recorded between 1959 and 1973.

Playwright Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) and composer Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842-1900) began a collaboration that produced 14 comic operas from 1871 to 1896, several of which are still produced often around the world. They were noted for the combination of Gilbert’s witty lyrics and Sullivan’s melodies. The story lines involved thinly-veiled satires on the customs and attitudes of 19th century English society and the then-reigning and wonderful Queen Victoria was one of their biggest fans.

The premieres and long runs were bankrolled by businessman, Sir Richard D’Oyly Carte (1844-1901) who founded the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, which has produced many stagings and recordings of the Gilbert and Sullivan works, still doing so to this day. The company established the state of the art Savoy Theatre, in London.

Gilbert and Sullivan themselves were micro-managing perfectionists who had the right balance of strictness and wit to get everybody’s best performances, having little tolerance for prima donnas and sloppiness of detail .

The selections on the above cassette come from H.M.S. Pinafore, the Mikado, Yeomen of the Guard, Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, and the Gondoliers, and feature at least two examples of the team’s famous patter songs, which demand tongue-twisting singing- Pinafore’s I Am the Monarch of the Sea and Penzance’s I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General, both of them sung by the very gifted John Reed (1916-2010), who is joined by soprano Elizabeth Harwood (1938-1990) in a special favorite of mine, the Yeoman of the Guard’s I Have a Song to Sing, O!

I can’t finish without offering a few quotes from G & S:

H.M.S. Pinafore – “What, never? No, never! What, never ? Well, hardly ever!”

Pirates of Penzance – “I don’t think much of our profession but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest!”

Princess Ida – “Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.”

“Man is nature’s sole mistake.”