by Peter Cates

Just browsing

Recently I have been browsing through volumes of the Library of Universal Knowledge, published in 1880, not so much for information on any particular subject but for how it was discussed in 1880.

A few examples-

“Infant, in English law, means every male and female under the age of 21.”

“Augusta, the name of two considerable cities in the United States. 1. A. is the capital of Maine, situated on both banks of the river Kennebec, which is here crossed by a bridge 520 feet long. Its latitude is 44 degrees 19 minutes north., and longitude 69 degrees 50 minutes west. …. Up to A. the river is navigable for sloops from its mouth, a distance of 43 miles in a straight line; while a dam, constructed immediately above the city, enables steamboats to ply more than 20 miles above as far as Waterville. ”

2. Augusta is the second city in Georgia, on the Savannah, 231 miles from its mouth.”

“Augustulus, Romulus, the last emperor of the western portion of the Roman empire. His name was Augustus, but the diminutive title under which he is universally known was given him by the Romans on account of the essential littleness of his character.”

“Adultery – in some of the United States, Adultery is made criminal by special law; in some it is not so recognized; in some the act itself is not a crime; but open and continued Adultery is.” [Whatever this means – the English language might not have been as simple to understand in those good old days 145 years ago. ]

I noticed that Beethoven, Berlioz, Verdi and Wagner are listed but not Brahms.

“Waterville, a village of Maine, on the right bank of the Kennebec river, at Ticonic falls, 82 miles north north central from Portland. Around the falls are clustered saw-mills, plow, axe, hoe, and scythe factories, machine-shops, tanneries, etc. Waterville has a Baptist college, with 100 students, and a library of 15,500 volumes, an academy, etc. Population in 1876, 4,000.”

Luisa Tetrazzini

Luisa Tetrazzini – Swiss Echo Song; Victrola Red Seal 88311, recorded 1918, 12 inch one-sided acoustic shellac disc.

Soprano Luisa Tetrazzini (1871-1940) had the kind of vocal agility and beauty of tone and phrasing that left her listeners awestruck. I own a batch of her records and include her among my top favorite singers of very long ago with Caruso, McCormack, Evan Williams, Elsie Baker, Olive Kline, Amellita Galli-Curci, Nellie Melba (with whom Tetrazzini had a long-sustained feud.) and Rosa Ponselle.

The Swiss Echo Song is a silly trivial piece yet Tetrazzini transforms it into a precious gem by the phenomenal beauty and perfect pitch of her trills, top to bottom notes and phrasing.

Personality-wise, she was much loved by her colleagues but could throw a fit with agents, and recording producers, demanding exorbitant fees for her appearances on stage and in the studio. When it came to grudges or slights, Luisa never forgot or forgave.

One touching anecdote though – she and Caruso had the deepest personal affection for each other. When the tenor took ill during his last year (he died in 1921 at the age of 48), he sent her a note with the following words: “I am waiting for you with open arms, waiting every moment to salute you with a golden note.”

Unfortunately, Tetrazzini was never able to visit him.

by Peter Cates

MobLand

A new Paramount series MobLand depicts the activities of Conrad Harrigan, a gentlemanly head of a crime family in London and his calculating, slightly shrewish wife Maeve, both portrayed with consummate persuasion by Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren. The gentlemanly quality masks a ruthless cold-blooded evil and greed as he decides that fentanyl is far more profitable than heroin and guns.

Harrigan’s fixer, Harry da Souza, is constantly putting out fires, dealing with contentious cohorts, threatening potential witnesses and dealing with his own family issues at home, including agreeing to see a marriage counselor with his wife, Jan. Tom Hardy and Joanne Froggatt do superb work as the couple.

I have only seen the first of what will be a ten weekly episode series , and highly anticipate viewing the second which is available as of tonight, April 6.

Charlie Barnet

Charlie Barnet – The Heart You Stole from Me-F.T.; Murder at Peyton Hall-F.T. Bluebird 11292, ten inch 78, recorded 1942.

The F.T. denotes fox trot.

Charlie Barnet (1913-1991) was one of the finest musicians to emerge during the Big Band Era of World War II. In 1989, I first discovered him through reading George T. Simon’s immensely interesting 1968 encyclopedic volume The Big Bands in which the author commended Barnet for the intelligence and very listenable musicality.

In short, Barnet was on the same high level as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Glen Gray, Woody Herman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton and a few others. A short time later, I purchased an RCA Bluebird cassette re-issue of roughly 20 sides from the original 78s. I played that tape numerous times, became familiar with his two lead singers Bob Carroll and Lena Horne and discovered what an oasis of beauty and excitement the Big Bands were.

The above two sides were typical of Barnet’s own quality control standards and can be accessed on YouTube along with numerous other sides of the bandleader.

Johnny Carson once mentioned on the Tonight Show a special fondness for Charlie Barnet’s Band.

George T. Simon was the much younger brother of Richard Simon (1891-1960), the co-founder of the publisher Simon and Schuster; and the uncle of pop singer Carly Simon. The author mentioned visiting Benny Goodman during the ‘60s at Goodman’s palatial Connecticut mansion. Because he was walking with a cane in recovery from surgery, Goodman insisted that Simon feel free to use his swimming pool at any time for its health benefits.

Simon’s journalistic connections were such that Frank Sinatra wrote the introduction to Simon’s book and recommended to would be readers that, if any family or friends wanted to borrow the book, to tell them to buy their own copy.

Sarah Vaughan

Sarah Vaughan – Sarah’s Golden Hits; Mercury, cassette.

Although Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990) was often labeled a jazz singer, she resented the label, loved all kinds of music, and brought elements of all kinds of music to her singing. Several musicians claimed that her vocal range was wide enough to where she could have been a successful opera singer like Leontyne Price.

Frank Sinatra contended that listening to her singing made him want to slit his wrists. (Much like when Fritz Kreisler first heard Jascha Heifetz, he and all other violinists might as well break their fiddles.)

This cassette includes a special favorite Broken Hearted Melody, Misty, Autumn in New York, Whatever Lola Wants, the perpetually charming Make Yourself Comfortable and seven other classics.

Sarah Vaughan passed away from lung cancer in early April 1990 just shortly after her 66th birthday. Her close friend Ella Fitzgerald was so grief stricken that she went into a lengthy period of mourning.

by Peter Cates

Sir Eugene Goossens

Sir Eugene Goossens (1893-1962) conducted the Rochester Philharmonic during the 1920s; succeeded Fritz Reiner as Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 1931 to 1946; moved to Australia to lead the Sydney Symphony for ten years until forced to resign in 1956 due to his involvement with a woman who practiced witchcraft and other bizarre activities (just a year after he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth) ; and returned to England feeling emotionally disgraced.

Interestingly he still conducted English orchestras and made several very exciting LPs for Everest Records and EMI, some of the latter released here on Capitol Records when it was still marketing classical music before signing the Beatles in 1964.

Goossens’s Everest LPs included especially magnificent performances of Respighi’s Roman Festivals, a hyper colorful showpiece that displays the full orchestra in all its sonic glory, and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, itself a masterpiece of rhythmic eloquence from the composer’s last ten years.

I own several 78 sets of Goossens that were released in the U.S. on both Victor black label and Red Seal between the late ‘20s and early ‘40s. They include Tchaikovsky Nutcracker excerpts and the 1812 Overture with the Royal Opera Orchestra of Covent Garden, a vibrantly expressive Schumann 4th Symphony from Cincinatti and the Grieg Peer Gynt Suite #1 from another London Orchestra.

Some of these earlier recordings were dismissed if not ignored by so-called music critics “in the know” who usually didn’t know what they were talking about; Goossens always conducted with sound musicianship and ability at conveying the inner meaning of a piece.

His family background included both a father and grandfather who were also conductors and named Eugene, Sir Eugene being Eugene III. He was the oldest of five children, each of whom were talented musicians.

Brother Adolphe was a French horn player of great potential but was tragically killed in the World War I Battle of the Somme in 1916 at the age of 20.

The remaining three siblings, oboist Leon and two sisters Marie and Sidonie who were harpists lived well into their 90s, Sidonie living three centuries (1899-2004) making it to 105 and for decades principal harp in the BBC Symphony.

Two BBC Maestros, Sir Adrian Boult and Pierre Boulez praised Sidonie’s “reassuring presence, irreproachable professional conscience and faultless attitude” and were very close personal friends. As a sideline she and her husband raised chickens and pigs on their 400 acre farm.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007) chronicle the perceptions of a very active historian of the 20th century United States in both its progress in social and political change and its lack of change. He taught for decades at Harvard and was one of the inner circle of intellectuals working in the White House during President John F. Kennedy’s Thousand Days, itself the title of his account of that period before Dallas ended it on November 22, 1963.

Two letters capture Schlesin­ger’s innate Democrat party loyalty. In a 1958 letter to a now forgotten journalist/diplomat, he displays a concern about then Vice-President Richard Nixon’s proclamation of himself as the “new Nixon” who is more congenial and less sleazy than the Nixon who threw dirt at his opponents in the 1946 and 1950 Congressional races, both of which he won.

Schlesinger writes, “Plainly, if the Democrats have any sense, they must do something to combat it before 1960 [the year Nixon ran against Kennedy for the White House and lost by a narrow margin].” But then Schlesinger admits quickly that, despite a lot of possible solutions being thrown around, it would be wasted efforts and that, “in the end, Nixon will have to destroy himself.”

In September, 1960, Schlesinger sends a more positive note to Jackie Kennedy, “I think that Nixon’s ugliness is going to boomerang before too long. ” A month later in the televised Nixon/Kennedy debates, Nixon’s 5 o’clock shadow worked against him compared to Kennedy’s smoothly shaved youthful charisma.

Elsewhere Schlesinger had some misgivings about the conservative William Buckley’s world view yet the two were friendly.

With the radical leftist Noam Chomsky, Schlesinger heavily trashed Chomsky’s 1969 book American Power and the New Mandarins in a Chicago Tribune review and some time later wrote that Chomsky “begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook.”

by Peter Cates

Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman won an Oscar for best actor in 1971’s The French Connection yet interestingly was almost the last choice for the role of NYC Detective Popeye Doyle after it was turned down by Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, Peter Boyle, James Caan, etc.

Based on Robin Moore’s investigative book of the same title, it chronicles the efforts of the New York City Police Department and FBI to confiscate a huge shipment of heroin arriving by ship from French drug dealers and to arrest the ringleader Alain Charnier, nicknamed “Frog One,” who has traveled to the City to meet with American distributors and who is portrayed with suave elegance by Fernando Rey.

The superb cast included Roy Scheider as Doyle’s partner Russo, Marcel Bozzuffi as Charnier’s #2 man “Frog Two” Nicoli, and Eddie Egan, the real life Popeye Doyle, as Doyle’s supervisor.

I have seen the film only once when it first hit the theaters more than 50 years ago but still remember its minute by minute tension and suspense- two scenes in particular. First, Doyle is walking on the street towards a young mother pushing her baby in the carriage. From out of nowhere several deafening sniper rifle shots kill the mother, narrowly missing Doyle. He espies the assassin Frog Two who has decided on his own to kill Doyle against the more cautious Frog One’s orders.

Secondly, Doyle pursues the sniper via a high speed car chase alongside an elevated train which Frog Two has seized control of at gunpoint, shooting a conductor in cold blood. Doyle shoots Frog in the back when he tries to escape .

The cinematography with its shots combining the gritty mean streets, the Brooklyn docks and the elegant five-star restaurant where Frogs One and Two are dining while Doyle and others are conducting surveillance was very compelling.

Hackman’s colleague Roy Scheider (1932-2008) did superb performances in Marathon Man, Scorpion and 52 Pickup. Fernando Rey (1917-1994) was memorable as an honest South American diplomat in 1970’s The Adventurers, itself panned by most reviewers on its release as trashy but which I found a highly entertaining soap opera spectacle while agreeing that it was trashy. Rey also appeared as an Italian anarchist confined in a concentration camp in Director Lina Wertmiller’s 1974 Seven Beauties.

Finally Eddie Egan appeared in 1972’s Prime Cut as an inner circle Mafia businessman who hires a gangland enforcer portrayed by Lee Marvin to go “straighten out” a double-crossing underling who runs a mid-western slaughterhouse for more than just hogs and a sex trafficking business with underage girls, against the orders of the leadership. The underling is portrayed with a certain self-deprecating humor by none other than Gene Hackman.

Evelyn Waugh

English novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) once stated – “The opinions of the young are not necessarily the opinions of the future.”

Kitty Kallen

Kitty Kallen – Star Bright (Mara); Gently Johnny – Decca, 9-30267, recorded 1957, seven-inch vinyl 45.

Kitty Kallen (1921-2016), after scoring the big band hits I’m Beginning to See the Light; and They’re Either Too Young or Too Old, moved on to an ex­qui­sitely rich period in early 1950s pop singing with Little Things Mean a Lot, In the Chapel by the Moonlight and Jerome Kern’s I’m Old Fashioned.

1957’s Star Bright and side 2’s Gently Johnny didn’t hit any top 40 lists but Kitty’s phenomenally and uniquely lovely singing transformed both songs into little gems with her Decca conductor Jack Pleis’s arrangements. Around that time, she suffered a nervous breakdown and withdrew from live appearances for a couple of years, although she continued some recording.

In 1959, Columbia Records legendary Mitch Miller arranged a session for Kitty in which If I Give My Heart to You became a hit.

Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet – Serge Kousse­vitzky conducting the Boston Symphony; Victor Red Seal DM-347, three 12-inch 78s, recorded December 28 and 29, 1936.

After several failed performances resulting in constant revising since 1870, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) finally experienced the world premiere of his tone poem Romeo and Juliet in all its completed perfection at an 1886 concert in Tiflis, now known as Tbilisi, Georgia, under the direction of composer/conductor Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859-1935).

Serge Koussevitzky conducted a typically high quality interpretation in which powerful dramatic outbursts were blended with rich instrumental sonorities, lyrical details and responsive playing from his 105 Boston Symphony musicians whom he cajoled, brow beat, pleaded with and screamed at for most of his 25 years as music director from 1924 to 1949.

A one side bonus in this album is Sibelius’s Maiden with the Roses from his Swan White incidental Music.

 

 

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by Peter Cates

The Cathedrals

The Cathedrals – Masters of Gospel; Riversong 84418-2876-4, 1992 cassette.

The Cathedrals is a gospel men’s quartet in the tradition of the two most well known ones from the Deep South – the Blackwood Brothers; and the Statesmen.

This cassette is a generously filled anthology of 15 previously released selections- such titles as As It Was In the Days of Noah, Take This Whole World, Blood Washed Band, An Old Convention Song, etc., with scholarly notes on the background of each selection.

The four gentlemen sang in a festive, fervent manner, the results making for conducive listening one side at a time. And there are times when well sung gospel tunes make for great listening, hence my attraction to hearing this tape.

Bellini

Bellini: I Puritani; Riccardo Muti conducting the Ambrosian Opera Chorus and the Philharmonica Orchestra of London with a cast that includes soprano Montserrat Caballe, tenor Alfredo Kraus, and baritones Matteo Manuguerra and Agostino Ferrin etcs.; EMI CLASSICS 077776966328, recorded July-August 1979, three compact discs.

Opera composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) attended a production of Rossini’s Semiramide in 1824 while studying music, in Naples, Italy. A friend who accompanied him later wrote that “Bellini was so affected upon hearing it that…he…explained…in words of sad discomfort, that it seemed to him impossible to write good music in the face of that classic music by Rossini.”

Fortunately for musical posterity, the young man freed himself from this inhibition and would compose several very good operas, including the masterpieces Norma, La Sonnambula and the especially magnificent I Puritani before he died, at 33, from what was described as amoebic dysentery. During his last years, his operas had become popular in Paris and he was idolized in its social circles.

Puritani is most notable for the streams of melody in its arias, duets, vocal ensemble, choruses and orchestral writing. This 1979 recording features beautiful singing from Caballe, Krauss, Manuguerra, Ferrin and others while the conducting of Riccardo Muti, still active in his 80s, was among the best he achieved during those early years in his 30s – within a year, he would replace Eugene Ormandy as music director of the Phildelphia Orchestra.

Rusty Draper

Rusty Draper – The Shifting, Whispering Sands; and Time; Mercury 70696, seven inch 45, recorded 1955.

Pretty much forgotten in recent years, country singer Rusty Draper (1923-2003) had a few hits on Mercury records during the mid 1950s along with a TV show which featured other country singers. The Shifting Whispering Sands was among Billboard’s top 20 in 1955 and is sung with a concurrent story line narrated by Draper which combines wisdom about the shifting sands in the passage of time with corny sentimentality; Billy Vaughan did a best selling cover of it for Dot records. Side 2’s Time is a throwaway.

Draper sang decently but not memorably with the very good David Carroll’s arrangements.

Rossini

Rossini: Stabat Mater- Fac Ut Portem (Oh, Endow Me); contralto Louise Homer; Victrola Red Seal 88132,12-inch one-sided acoustic shellac, recorded 1908.

Louise Homer (1871-1947) concertized several times in Portland and Bangor, according to the memoirs of her husband Sidney, and had a richly expressive contralto voice.

Starting in 1907, she recorded arias of Gluck, Handel, Saint-Saens and Mendelssohn; one of the best Star Spangled Banners and several hymns with soprano Alma Gluck (1884-1938) for Victrola Red Seal. And a large number of them make for wonderful listening.

The above Rossini selection from his Stabat Mater is a gem, despite the acoustic fidelity.