by Peter Cates

Dana Andrews

Dana Andrews

Actor Dana Andrews (1909-1992) had considerable screen presence in such classic 1940s films as The Ox-Bow Incident, Laura, State Fair, The Best Years of Our Lives and, a special favorite of mine more for Susan Hayward (1917-1975) than for Andrews, the 1949 My Foolish Heart.

1956 brought Beyond a Reasonable Doubt where he winds up on Death Row with a surprising plot twist at the end. 1965’s satire on the funeral home racket, The Loved One (very loosely based on an Evelyn Waugh novel), had Andrews appearing as an U.S. Air Force colonel being given a tour of the casket room by Jonathan Winters as the “Divine Reverend Wilbur Glenworthy”.

A 1958 LP, And God Said (Epic 5LN 3534), features Andrews as the narrator of a Biblical music presentation on the Old and New Testaments and his spoken words were delivered with vivid resonance while the music itself, sounding a bit like the special and rather schmaltzy church cantatas so often heard in the Protestant churches of my 1950s childhood, was composed by Dickson Hall, sung by the Frank Raye Singers and arranged and conducted by James Peterson, all of whom are names previously unfamiliar to me but who did good work.

The album has illustrations of scenes from the Bible – the creation of light , Cain slaughtering his brother Abel, the 40 days and nights of rain, etc. Its main attraction is that of a time warp 1950s period piece.

When I was still living in Houston, I taught a course in American literature for Houston Community College at its Bellaire High School campus then utilized, as were other middle and high schools, for its evening programs. The school corridor had photos of a former principal who was a brother of the actor.

Another historic detail – the auditorium of the high school was used as the venue for a concert of Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony during its 1950 nationwide tour.

Arturo Toscanini

Arturo Toscanini

Speaking of Toscanini, his 1953 RCA studio recording of Dvorak’s New World Symphony with the NBC players has a bristling intensity well worth hearing and is accessible on YouTube .

A trumpet player in the Orchestra told of a performance of the Brahms 4th Symphony, a work the Maestro devoted a lot of painstaking labor on and conducted numerous times, leaving also an NBC studio recording and broadcasts with the BBC and Philharmonia Orchestras in London.

The gentleman stated the performance of one evening was perfection, except for barely noticeable details in which the brass section at the end of two quarter notes failed to cut off half of the second note. They were summoned to the Maestro’s dressing room.

For at least 20 minutes, Toscanini paced back and forth, back and forth.

Then he said, “You all go home tonight, eat dinner, be with family, go to bed. Me, I can’t do any of that. I keep hearing those two notes without the cutoff. I toss and turn all night, suffering because of those two notes without the cutoff. ”

The musicians were then allowed to leave.

by Peter Cates

Leonard Bernstein

Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro gave a somewhat superficial depiction of the marriage of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein while biographies of David Ewen, John Gruen and Joan Peyser filled in some facts and personal, at times biased observations, Gruen providing fascinating interviews as well.

I am going to provide a list of recommended recordings from the great man and leave biography and anecdotes for another day.

To begin:

1958 – Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet coupled with Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, his first studio recording with the New York Philharmonic, had an extraordinary combination of savage excitement, highly controlled discipline and exquisite beauty.

1962 – Beethoven’s 5th Symphony received a performance that, to this day, has been equalled by such conductors as Karel Ancerl, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Reiner, Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Herbert von Karajan, Eugene Ormandy, Andre Cluytens and a few others but never surpassed for rehearings over the last 50 years and is, for me, the best record he ever did of any Beethoven Symphony, although the 1972 Boston Symphony youtube and the 1980 ones Bernstein conducted of the same composer’s Pastoral Symphony scored some very lovely points. Bernstein achieved in the 5th a breathing spaciousness and gripping intensity that was exquisitely forged.

1963 – Bernstein recorded Dvorak’s 7th Symphony, which is my favorite of all his 9 magnificent Symphonies, and gave a performance in which his wild, frantic, very sentimental side, qualities that ruined other recordings of various works, came off very well and during the past 60 years, I have worn out two or three copies of the LP.

1965 – Bernstein recorded Mahler’s intensely emotional 5th Symphony and mastered its manic/depressive moods to an extraordinary degree. It is my favorite of all his Mahler recordings, although his 1966 London Symphony set of the composer’s 8th with a thousand voices and huge orchestra is one always worth getting to know. Plus the New York Philharmonic Mahler 4th with soprano Reri Grist is a gem.

Finally the 1961 soundtrack of his musical West Side Story with Marni Nixon’s exquisite soprano dubbed in for Natalie Wood’s Maria and the vibrant ensemble work of others is, by a narrow margin over the original 1957 Broadway cast recording, an album that stands the test of time.

All the above are on YouTube.

Robert Patrick

Actor Robert Patrick portrayed a very convincing Homeland Security government agent of upright integrity and supportiveness on the 4 seasons of Scorpion and a deadly corrupt chief of security on the current 8 episode season of Reacher.

From Rumford native Tom Fallon’s poem Work Piece:

“Noise continuous: keep
the machine running:
what time is it:
what time is it
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Noon, sandwiches. Eat.”

A very powerful depiction of the grueling paper mills of Maine’s industrial age.

by Peter Cates

Smith Ballew

Smith Ballew

Native Texan Smith Ballew (1902-1984) had a dance orchestra with which he recorded batches of 78s back during the 1930s. One was a 1935 ten inch shellac (Con­queror 8441) containing a very expressive performance of a Great American Songbook standard, Isle of Capri, in which he also sang as lead vocalist.

Smith Ballew acted in several 1930s westerns and his singing voice was dubbed in for that of John Wayne in 1934’s The Man From Utah.

One very noticeable quality of Ballew’s orchestra was the alert clarity and richness of the woodwinds. This was characteristic of several dance bands during the ‘20s and ‘30s, particularly those of Jean Goldkette, Paul Whiteman, Fred Waring, Richard Himber, Ray Noble, George Olsen etc., an especially rich period for such orchestras ; unfortunately, collectors of these old breakable records are not as common as those of African-American blues and jazz performers and these shellacs are often quite easy to find at junk shops and flea markets.

Interestingly several years ago, a mail order auction site mentioned having come into possession of a collection of some 150,000 78s of both American and British dance orchestras as part of the estate of a wealthy San Francisco lawyer. From what I have heard, many of those records are still awaiting bids.

The above-mentioned Con­queror disc’s side two had the dance orchestra of Sicilian born Vincent Rose (1880-1944) performing a decent rendition of Shirley Temple’s megahit On the Good Ship Lollipop with singer Dorothy Brent; the only information I can find on her is that she was featured on radio during the early 1930s and there is a 1932 photograph. In addition her voice sounded like that of a little girl Shirley Temple’s age.

Rose himself was an accomplished songwriter and his creations include Avalon, Linger Awhile and Blueberry Hill, which Fats Domino recorded in 1956 and which sold several million copies.

Conqueror was a mail order record label owned by Sears, Roebuck. My Uncle Ben Cates told me of ordering the label’s 78 of Gene Autry’s Silver Haired Daddy of Mine for 75 cents when he was in sixth grade.

Ava Gardner

Ava Gardner

Actress Ava Gardner (1922-1990) came from a very poor family of tobacco sharecroppers in North Carolina. Through a set of circumstances too long to go into, a photograph of her snapped by her brother-in-law came to the attention of an MGM talent scout who arranged for her to be filmed walking back and forth and arranging flowers in a vase.

When studio boss Louis B. Mayer saw the results, he commented, “She can’t act, she can’t sing, she can’t talk, she’s terrific.” Gardner immediately got a contract and coaching in acting, singing and speaking. After years of bit parts, she achieved fame as a femme fatale in the 1946 suspense thriller The Killers with Burt Lancaster, based on an Ernest Hemingway short story.

I remember her most vividly in 1952’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro with Gregory Peck and based on another Hemingway short story.

I have an MGM ten inch 78 of Gardner singing Bill, and Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine from her appearance in the Studio’s 1951 musical Showboat, and with exquisitely winsome beauty. She also starred in Mogambo with Clark Gable and which was directed by Portland, Maine, native John Ford, whom she referred to as “The most evil man on earth. I adore him.”

I have been recently listening to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 14th String Quartet which was beautifully played on a 1930s Columbia Masterworks 78 set by the Roth Quartet. That set and another one from the early 1930s by the Wendling Quartet can be heard via YouTube and are highly recommended listening experiences.

by Peter Cates

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt

As I am writing this on May 5, I wish to pay tribute to conductor Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt who was born on this day 124 years ago and passed away on May 28, 1973, at the age of 73 .

Some background: he recorded a number of 78s for the Telefunken label during the 1930s, worked during most of the Hitler years, yet avoided Nazi party membership; in 1936, for obvious reasons of safety, he sent his Jewish wife and their two sons to live in England and was separated from them until the end of World War II.

He conducted with a clear beat and an astute sense of the beauty and power in a piece of music, and recorded distinguished Beethoven Symphonies 3, 4, 7 and 9 with the Vienna Philharmonic during the 1960s. The 3rd Symphony, better known as the Eroica, had an especially spellbinding quality in its blend of heroic nobility, pulsating rhythmic pacing and melting lyricism rarely equalled by the many other performances in its recording history.

I also highly recommend a Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony from the early 1950s with the Hamburg Radio Orchestra, a recording which I listened to yesterday.

Jascha Horenstein

While on the subject of celebrations in May, I wish to point out that May 6 is the 126th birthday of conductor Jascha Horenstein (1898-1973) while May 14 is the 139th of Otto Klemperer (1885-1973); Schmidt-Isserstedt, Horenstein and Klemperer are three of six conductors who died in 1973, the others being Karel Ancerl, Istvan Kertesz and Paul Kletzki. 1973 was a horrible year for the loss of truly great conductors.

May 7 commemorates the birthdays of composers Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). In 1889, Tchaikovsky was in Hamburg, Germany, for a performance of his 5th Symphony. Brahms attended the rehearsal, initially disliked the piece but then grew to like it.

A piece of Brahms that I listened to over the weekend was the Alto Rhapsody that he composed out of his secret love for Julie Schumann, the daughter of fellow composer and mentor Robert Schumann and his wife Clara (1820-1896), an attraction that caused Brahms much inner sorrow, only intensified when Julie became engaged.

The Rhapsody was scored for either mezzo-soprano or contralto, a men’s chorus and orchestra. Brahms told Clara and Julie to consider it a Bridal Song/wedding gift. The recording I listened to was a 1962 Angel LP featuring mezzo soprano Christa Ludwig with Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, and a performance of uniquely spellbinding beauty.

A younger friend of Brahms was conductor Felix Weingartner who recorded the composer’s 4 Symphonies along with Beethoven’s 9 on 78s over a 15-year period from 1925 to 1940. A particular favorite is his interpretation of Beethoven’s 5th which I have played several times since July. Weingartner died at the age of 79, on May 7, 1942.

On May 7, 1747, the 62-year-old composer Johann Sebastian Bach arrived in Potsdam, Germany, at the expressed invitation of Frederick the Great to perform for the Emperor, himself a composer and musician of considerable talent. The visit resulted in two masterpieces from the composer before he died in 1750 – the Musical Offering and the unfinished, sublimely inspired Art of the Fugue.

The above music and performances can be heard via YouTube.