by Peter Cates

From Edward Lear, 1812-1888, the gifted poet of nonsense verse from London:

There was an Old Man of Three Bridges
Whose mind was distracted by midges;
He sate on a wheel, eating underdone veal,
Which relieved that Old Man of Three Bridges.

A record has been left of the first Thanksgiving in New England being held in Popham Colony on October 4, 1607, with local Native-American tribes who later survived the brutal Maine winter that year in the forest with better results than the colonists living by the coast. More info on Google and other sources.

Highly recommended listening, if not previously heard:

The first Bert and I mid-’50s release with speaker Marshall Dodge and Robert Bryan doing sound effects with his voice.

My favorite Jefferson Airplane album, After Bathing at Baxter’s, and still available on CD since its 1968 release. Its music has a sustained balance of ‘60s rock and beauty few others have maintained from then.

Conductor Eugene Ormandy, 1899-1985, led the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1938 to 1980 and left 900 or more recordings with it and more composers in them than all other conductors. His birthday anniversary is November 18. I highly recommend his recordings especially of Rachmaninoff’s music. The composer recorded HIS Piano Concertos 1, 3, and 4 with Ormandy and the 2nd one with Ormandy’s predecessor, Leopold Stokowski in 1929.

 

 

 

 

by Peter Cates

Herb Alpert

Magic Man
A&M records, SP-3728, LP, recorded 1981.

Now 84 years old, trumpeter Herb Alpert staked his claim to fame back in the early ‘60s with the series of Tijuana Brass albums that sold in the millions as vinyl LPs and continue to do well in CD formats. His A&M label has been home to Sergio Mendes and HIS Brazil ’66, Procol Harum, the Sandpipers, the Carpenters, Burt Bacharach, Janet Jackson, etc.

Magic Man is best described as soft jazz/pop. Alpert utilized a full rhythm section; synthesizers; conventional piano, and Rhodes, and other electric pianos; harp, guitars; his own trumpet and other brass; special percussion instruments including marimbas, vibes, bongos and congas; strings; and vocalists, including himself.

This album consists of eight selections, including the title song, itself a huge hit. All of them are captivating in some fashion; my particular favorites are Secret Garden, with its bass/guitar weavings; the vintage pop classic, Besame Mucho, which contains hypnotic bongo/conga sounds; and a lovely ballad, I Get It from You, sung by Alpert. All of them can be heard on YouTube .

Since 1973, Herb Alpert has been married to Lani Hall, former lead singer for Brazil ’66; its leader, Sergio Mendes, married her replacement, Gracinha.

From E.B.White’s 1942 book, One Man’s Meat, about November on his farm in Maine: ”The wind blew from the South­east and brought rain and the dreariest landscape of the fall. For several hours after arising, everything went wrong; it was one of those days when inanimate objects deliberately plot to destroy a man cleverly ambushed, and when dumb animals form a clique to disturb the existing order.”

by Peter Cates

Elizabeth Coatsworth

“Outwardly I am 83, but inwardly I am every age, with the emotions and experiences of each period.”

Born in Buffalo, New York, the writers Elizabeth Coatsworth (1893-1986) and her husband, Henry Beston (1888-1968), lived in an early 19th century farmhouse, Chimney Farm, alongside Damariscotta Lake, in Nobleboro, Maine. She wrote over 90 books but her most famous one was the children’s novel, The Cat Who Went to Heaven, which won the 1930 Newbery Medal. I am most familiar with her 1976 autobiography, Personal Geography, in which she shares her experiences such as living on the farm with her husband and her world travels during her youth. Her writings, whether for children or adults, celebrate the majesty and mystery of life, especially in Maine, and very compassionately about cats and other similar creatures caught in a storm in her poem, This Is a Night, here in its entirety:

This is a night on which to pity cats
hunting through dripping hedgerows,
making wet way
through grasses heavy with rain,
Their delicate stepping
tense with distaste,
their soft and supple coats
sodden, for all their care.
This is a night
to pity cats which have no house to go to,
no stove, no saucer of milk, no lowered hand
sleeking a head, no voice to say, “Poor kitty.”
This is a night
on which to weep for outcasts, for all those
who know the rain but do not know the shelter.

Henry Beston was a mentor to my late Uncle Paul Cates and they all visited back and forth between Chimney Farm, in Nobleboro, and the Cates’ one, in East Vassalboro. I met them twice, 1960 and ’65, and was charmed by their kindness and warmth. Being then a record collector, I asked them if they had records and a record player. Elizabeth replied with such effusive happiness that they had acoustic 78s and a player they cranked and, quoting her, “it has a wonderful simplicity.” Her expression of those words has always stayed in my memory.

More about them in later columns.

by Peter Cates

In last week’s column, I wrote about the pianist Glenn Gould and mentioned his classical hit record, the 1955 Bach Goldberg Variations for Columbia Records but failed to mention another million seller, his 1981 remake of the same work, of which many of his fans, including myself, also consider basic to any collection.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Born and raised in Portland, Maine, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was arguably the most well-known American poet of the 19th century. Many one-room schoolhouse children memorized such poems as Paul Revere’s Ride and Psalm of Life, a learning experience that is, unfortunately, not part of most curriculums these days.

Longfellow had a gift for evoking the sense of wonder behind everyday life. Its reality could be boring, routine-ish, sad, almost unbearable, yet, if a person had an open mind and heart, life had its silver linings and rainbows.

One of his contemporaries stated, when the poet was still living, “There is something so tender, so gentle, in the nature of Mr. Longfellow that his poems imbibe it bountifully and it brings them home to the heart, not the mind alone, and what the heart loves and admires will linger long before time can obliterate it.”

One of his poems, A Passing Thought, is a nice example of his tender, gentle nature in dealing with life’s challenges :

“O what a glory doth this world put on
For him who, with a fervent heart goes forth
Under the bright and glorious sky and looks
On duties well performed and days well spent!
For him the wind, ay, and the yellow leaves
Shall have a voice and give him eloquent teachings.
He shall so hear the solemn hymn, that Death
Has lifted up for all, that he shall go
To his long-resting-place without a tear.”

The Longfellow House is a well-known tourist attraction, in Portland, Maine.

by Peter Cates

Budapest String Quartet

Op. 59, No. 3
Budapest String Quartet, Columbia MM-510, 4 12-inch 78s, recorded September 15, 1941.

The Budapest String Quartet began in 1917 when Budapest, Hungary, was a major center for classical music education with composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly and violinist Jeno Hubay and others. Four unemployed instrumentalists founded it and gave its debut concert in December of that year.

Previous personnel issues, finances and other such obstacles of living confounded the group. The life stories of every member in the lengthy Wikipedia article make fascinating reading.

After years of just barely escaping destruction at the hands of evil governments in war-torn Europe, the quartet members were finally able to settle in the United States and achieve much success with their concerts, recordings and teaching that would last for the remaining years until they disbanded as a group in 1967. They had already recorded discs for RCA Victor since 1932 but left that company in 1940 to record for Columbia Masterworks with greater success in worldwide fame, record sales and spreading chamber music gospel.”

The Budapest String Quartet for its last three decades consisted of first violinist Josef Roisman, 1900-1974; second violinist Alexander Schneider, 1908-1993; his older brother, cellist Mischa Schneider, 1904-1985; and violist Boris Kroyt, 1897-1969.

The Beethoven String Quartet listed above, like the composer’s other works, has a concentration of power, beauty, harmonic development, and rhythm and, above all, a range of human emotion that is unique . The string players were in peak form in this 1941 78 set and I have listened to it often in recent days,

A large number of other performances are available to hear on YouTube and elsewhere and free for auditioning.

The sixth season of Black List just became available on Netflix. I have already watched three episodes in a row.