by Peter Cates

Masterpieces of Eloquence

A 1905 twenty five volume set, Masterpieces of Eloquence, contains a May, 1812, speech from Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) which conveys a certain megalomaniacal arrogance as his armies were rampaging Central and Eastern Europe already on their way to Moscow:

“Soldiers, – The second war of Poland has begun. The first war terminated at Friedland and Tilsit. At Tilsit Russia swore eternal alliance with France and war with England. She has openly violated her oath, and refuses to offer any explanation of her strange conduct till the French Eagle shall have passed the Rhine and consequently shall have left her allies at her discretion. Russia is impelled onward by fatality. Her destiny is about to be accomplished. Does she believe that we have degenerated? that we are no longer the soldiers of Austerlitz? She has placed us between dishonor and war. The choice cannot for an instant be doubtful.

“Let us march forward, then, and, crossing the Niemen, carry the war into her territories. The second war of Poland will be to the French army as glorious as the first. But our next peace must carry with it its own guarantee and put an end to that arrogant influence which for the last fifty years Russia has exercised over the affairs of Europe.”

As with dictators in later years, Napoleon truly believed he would experience greater glory and power and invoked such words as “destiny, dishonor, peace”; but within less than two years before the Corsican’s defeat at Waterloo, his armies would begin reckoning with some setbacks, a major one the Russian winter in which its temperatures would make those of Maine seem like ones in the Bahamas.

The place names mentioned in Bonaparte’s speech are in the Austrian/Eastern Europe region.

The Masterpieces of Eloquence also contains speeches from such an array of orators as Rene Chateaubriand, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and De Witt Clinton.

Beethoven Sonatas

Beethoven Sonatas 13 and 20; Rondos #1 and 2, Rage Over a Lost Penny; and Variations on the Turkish March. Hugo Steurer, pianist; Urania URLP 7033, LP, recorded 1952.

Pianist Hugo Steurer (1914-2004) was more well known as a teacher in Germany and later in England and left very few recordings. This one of Beethoven piano music reveals an artist who played with a natural understated quality, avoiding the slam bang theatrics of certain keyboard superstars. And these early 50s performances can be heard on YouTube.

Beethoven 9 Symphonies; Overtures- Fidelio, Leonore #3, Egmont, Coriolan, Creatures of Prometheus, Nameday, King Stephen, and Consecration of the House; 12 German Dances; and Wellington’s Victory. Kazuyoshi Akiyama conducting the Hiroshima Orchestra, Tobu TBRCD 0113-0118, six compact discs, 2001-2003 live performances.

Maestro Kazuyoshi Akiyama (1941-2025) conducted the Vancouver Symphony, the Albany Symphony and New York City’s American Symphony for several years beginning in the 1990s and did outstanding work with Japanese orchestras during a career lasting well over 60 years until he suffered a fall at home in late January, 2025, and died a few days later.

Beethoven’s 9 Symphonies abound in very good performances, proving their unfathomable depths of beauty; Akiyama conducted them with rhythmic excitement, grace and elegance and held his own against the cycles of Toscanini, Walter, Jochum, Karajan and, more recently, Van Zweden and Sir Simon Rattle. The Overtures, German Dances and the showpiece Wellington’s Victory were delivered with flair.

Tobu and Weitblick are Japanese CD labels that have made available various broadcasts from the past featuring Carlo Maria Giulini, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Georges Pretre, Kurt Sanderling and others no longer with us conducting orchestras in Europe and Japan, a number of which I own. And the quality of music making and recorded sound is consistently high. So often conductors and orchestras prefer a live audience over the cold studios to achieve excitement.

Jill Corey

Jill Corey – Exactly Like You; I Told a Lie to My Darlin’. Columbia 4-41068, seven inch 45, recorded 1957.

Pop vocalist Jill Corey (1935-2021) was a regular on 1950s Your Hit Parade and a comedy variety show Johnny Carson hosted on local TV in Los Angeles.

She had a feisty in your face style of enthusiasm and each of the two above selections are examples of corny novelty pop songs of the mid-1950s with skilled arrangements from Columbia’s Jimmy Carroll who worked with Mitch Miller in numerous sessions there and at Golden Records; and from Ray Ellis who scored some of Johnny Mathis’s greatest hits – Chances Are, Twelth of Never, Small World, A Certain Smile, etc.

Corny pop songs, and me being sometimes in a 1950s time warp of my childhood, very enjoyable corny pop songs.

In 1963, the gifted singer Andy Williams included Exactly Like You on his very highly recommended Days of Wine and Roses album where I first heard it in seventh grade.

by Peter Cates

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Camden’s Edna St. Vincent Millay , like so many gifted poets, lived out her life span at a very high pitch and suffered a nervous breakdown in her 50s, dying of a heart attack at the age of 58, in 1950.

Maine Speaks contains a particularly eloquent The Buck in the Snow which combines a celebration of the wintry woods and the creatures that inhabit it with the grim reality of death and the sorrow it may cause to its fellow creatures:

“White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe
Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,
Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow.

“Now lies he here, his wild blood scalding the snow.

“How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing, -a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow-
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.”

Penny Serenade

A 1941 film Penny Serenade depicts a couple who fall in love and get married after they meet at a record shop. Recurring scenes of different 78 records are juxtaposed with events in their life as they confront earning a livelihood , adopting a baby girl and navigating tragedy when they lose their daughter due to a sudden illness when she’s only six years.

The movie is a good old-fashioned tear jerker yet never quite descending to sticky gooey sentimentality because of the skillful direction of George Stevens and the consummate acting of Cary Grant (1904-1986) and Irene Dunne (1898-1990) as the married couple. It’s at times long-winded but still sustains attention for me, having seen it at least ten times.

Interestingly both Cary Grant and Irene Dunne considered it the best film they ever achieved.

Brahms

Brahms: Symphony #2 – Sir John Barbirolli conducting the New York Philharmonic. Archipelago ARPCD-0559, compact disc, November 29, 1962, broadcast.

Archipel is a pirate label that has released a number of unauthorized broadcasts of great classical musicians. It is also a label that I frequently enjoy because a number of these musicians are favorites, especially such conductors as Sir John Barbirolli (1899-1970) whose broadcasts are otherwise unreleased and unavailable to such fans as myself.

After Arturo Toscanini resigned as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1936 after completing seven highly successful years, the very young Barbirolli had already developed a reputation as an outstanding conductor, one whom violinists Fritz Kreisler, and Jascha Heifetz and pianist Artur Rubinstein enjoyed working with. The Philharmonic search committee members had evaluated a few other candidates who for one reason or another weren’t chosen or available so they settled on Barbirolli.

He made a good impression with the players, the concert goers and the management and recorded 78 discs for both Columbia and Victor; the recordings of the Sibelius and Brahms 2nd Symphonies along with the Schumann Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin are outstanding examples.

New York Herald Tribune music critic Lawrence Gilman who always found much to praise in the Maestro died suddenly in 1939 and was replaced by Virgil Thomson who detested Barbirolli’s music making and choice of reperoire – in two instances, Barbirolli championed the music of Sibelius and Ralph Vaughan Williams, both of them composers Thomson disliked and trashed in his reviews .

These and other aggravations led to Barbirolli choosing to resign his position in 1943 and he and his wife returned to England on a merchant Marine convoy which was in constant danger from torpedoing German subs.

He took over the struggling Halle Orchestra in Manchester and transformed it into a world class ensemble.

Barbirolli did return to the United States during the 1950s and ‘60s guest conducting the Boston Symphony and his former New York Philharmonic at the invitation of Leonard Bernstein – hence the above 1962 Brahms, itself a very good one pulsating with agile rhythms and shimmering instrumental detail.

In an interview, Barbirolli once stated that he would not conduct a piece until he had studied the score for two or three years – as he stated “it was part of my very bone and marrow.”

For a few years, Sir John was also Music Director of the Houston Symphony.

Two of his admirers were his New York predecessor Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski. In fact, Barbirolli’s father before he emigrated to England from Italy had played during the 1880s in Milan’s La Scala Opera Orchestra and one of his colleagues was then-cellist Arturo Toscanini who with Papa Barbirolli and two other members enjoyed playing string quartets during their leisure time.

On July 29, 1970, Sir John Barbirolli died at home from a heart attack. He was 70.

Another item on the above CD is the New York Philharmonic in a February 9, 1958, performance of the Brahms Academic Festival Overture under another former Music Director Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) who conducted with a joyous slam bang intensity. And like Barbirolli, he too was trashed by the critics. Unlike Barbirolli, a number of Philharmonic musicians treated him with disrespect and took advantage of his kindness in loaning money to those in need by borrowing money they didn’t need and never repaying it.

Here at the house I have other New York Philharmonic Brahms’ 2nd Symphonies conducted by Artur Rodzinski, Bruno Walter, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, Zubin Mehta and Kurt Masur, each scoring different points.

by Peter Cates

Christmas music recommendations

Some Christmas music recommendations:

1. Perry Como Sings Merry Christmas Music; RCA Victor, 20-1968-71, four 10 inch 78s, recorded mid-40s.

With Russ Case’s very soft toned arrangements for chorus and orchestra, Mr. C’s own delivery of That Christmas Feeling, I’ll Be Home for Christmas and Little Town of Bethlehem, along with five other selections, had that kind of scrupulously rehearsed vocalism that always made his singing seem so easy.

2. Richard Tauber, tenor with organ and bells and singing in German-O Sanctissima; Silent Night. Parlophone, RO 20164, 10 inch 78, recorded 1930s.

Tenor Richard Tauber was most noted for singing Viennese operettas, such as Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow and, before his early death from cancer in 1947, had the dynamics, the high notes of both power and beauty, and the delicacy of phrasing that communicated.

On this shellac, the two classic carols are phrased with exquisite elegance.

3. Eydie Gorme and the Trio Los Panchos – Navidad Means Christmas. Columbia CL-2557, 12-inch LP, recorded early 1960s. Eydie Gorme (1928-2013) recorded two to three albums with Trio Los Panchos, one of the most gifted groups of Mariachis to hit the limelight.

Their collaboration in Latin-American Christmas songs is a bejeweled example of their artistry.

4. Christmas Hymns and Carols – Trinity Choir. Victor-35712, 12-inc, two-sided acoustic shellac disc, recorded October 3, 1921.

During the acoustic and early electrical recording eras from World War I to about 1930, the Trinity Choir was a name used by Victor to any number of different groups of singers quickly assembled. And very often, great singing was achieved by these ad-hoc groups.

Quite often the singers were already recording under their own names and maintaining solo careers in the studio and on stage.

Due to the immense amount of research since the internet age, the personnel and recording data on so many of these old discs can be accessed on Google, as on this two sider from October 3, 1921, when Victor was doing most of its recording in an old church in Camden, New Jersey.

The singers included Lucy Isabelle Marsh, Elsie Baker, Olive Kline, Lambert Murphy, Reinald Werrenrath and Charles Harrison, each of whose records are on my shelves here and which are frequently enjoyed as they each had magnificent voices. Josef Pasternack conducted the chorus and his name appears on a number of orchestral discs from this era with the studio Victor Symphony Orchestra.

The Xmas carols and hymns gathered not only included the well-known Joy to the World, We Three Kings, O Little Town of Bethlehem, Silent Night, The First Noel (misspelled on the label as Nowell), and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen but also some long forgotten but very beautiful numbers – Christians Awake, The Angels and the Shepherds, Calm on the Listening Ear of Night, and A Joyful Christmas Song. The Choir sang very beautifully, seeming to truly know what they were singing, unlike the once over lightly, very boring performances of Christmas music during the last 50 years.

Most of the above recordings can be heard via Youtube.

by Peter Cates

Giacomo Puccini

On Saturday, November 22, a Metropolitan Opera production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme, originally presented live on November 8 at other cinemas and venues worldwide, was replayed at Downtown Waterville’s Maine Film Center.

Since La Boheme is currently my favorite opera and the shelves in my house are bulging with numerous recordings of the complete work and excerpts, I made it my business to see it.

The story line depicts four men – the poet Rodolfo, a painter Marcello, a would-be philosopher Colline and the amiable hanger-on Schaunard – all sharing a garret in 1830s Paris and living in dreadful poverty yet basically cheerful, conniving any financial assistance from those with deep pockets, in particular a wealthy old man Alcindoro whom the perpetually flirtatious Musetta is stringing along and who is the on again/off again girlfriend of Marcello.

Rodolfo falls in love with a neighbor Mimi who makes paper flowers of exquisitely crafted beauty but is in frail health.

The production is based on a 1981 staging by director Franco Zeffirelli (1923-2019) and which originally starred soprano Teresa Stratas and tenor Luciano Pavarotti in a PBS Live from Lincoln Center TV special. Unlike several more recent opera productions which, in order to save money, have 18th and 19th century characters dressed in 21st century clothing and a few chairs and tables on stage, the Zeffirelli one had everything on stage during each of the four acts recreating 1830s Paris – the street crowds, clothes, buildings, shops, vendors etcs., a magnificent recreation of history. (During the two intermissions, the backstage crew was seen shifting the various stages with levers and other tools and displaying well-timed precision in the maneuverings.)

The ensemble performance was very nicely sung and played. Armenian soprano Juliana Grigoryan, at the very young age of 25, displayed a vocal richness and stage presence that was quite mesmerizing, especially in the up close camera angles in the Act 4 when Mimi is on her death bed.

Tenor Freddie De Tommaso was a very good Rodolfo and deployed the high notes more than adequately, although no threat to the recordings of Caruso and Bjoreling, both remaining unsurpassed as Rodolfos and in every other Puccini opera.

Baritone Lucas Meachem’s Marcello, mezzo-soprano Heidi Stober’s Musetta and bass Jongmin Park’s Colline stood out as superb vocals and characterizations, Meachem and Stober almost stealing the show in Act 2’s outdoor cafe scene with their comedic timing and verbal spats – “You toad!” “You witch!” – yet these two do reconcile most eloquently by the end of the opera to an unwaveringly committed relationship.

Maestro Keri-Lynn Wilson guest-conducted a very responsive Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

The libretto of Boheme was derived from Scenes from a Bohemian Life by Parisian writer Henri Murger (1822-1861).

Upcoming Met Opera Encore presentations:

December 6 – Richard Strauss’s Arabella.
December 20 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

All shows begin at 12:55 p.m. Tickets are $19 for adults, $17 for seniors, military, students, $16 for kiddos 12 and under.

The box office is 207-873-7000.

Recommended recordings of Boheme:

Albanese/Peerce/Toscanini, 1946.
Tebaldi/Prandelli/Erede, 1951.
Callas/Di Stefano/Votto, 1956.
Freni/Gedda/Schippers, 1963.
Freni/Pavarotti/Karajan, 1974.
De Los Angeles/Bjoreling/Beecham, 1956.

by Peter Cates

You Belong to Me

A 1941 film, You Belong to Me, is thematically a romantic comedy in the old-fashioned, very marketable Hollywood tradition and stars two of its even then very marketable cinematic presences, Henry Fonda (1905-1982) and Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990).

The plot consists of Fonda’s spoiled rich Peter who is skiing much too recklessly down a slope and suddenly topsy turvys, skis and all, just narrowly avoiding colliding with Stanwyck’s Helen, a highly-accomplished general practitioner who is on vacation but otherwise very committed to her career.

Peter’s fall lands him not only upside down but buried in the snow with only his ankles showing.

Of course, Peter lives and, with a few bruises, is okay but he instantly falls in love with Helen and does his fake hypochondriac best to keep her around. One thing leading to another, he persuades Helen to marry him.

After the honeymoon, they arrive back at his fully luxurious palace of a mansion with a domestic staff ready to attend to every need and whim, when the inevitable period of adjustment arrives with a bang.

Peter is the emotionally needy little boy who wants his wife pretty much to himself while Helen is ­ and she gave him fair warning before marriage – also committed to her patients and they include men who are acquaintances of Peter. Problems and jealousy ensue.

However, there is a happy ending with Peter deciding to lead a life of purpose and meaning through investing the family fortune on a much needed charity hospital for the poor that is already on the verge of bankruptcy.

Peter will manage the day to day business details while Helen is the wonderful doctor and they give up the mansion for simpler accommodations in their greater new found happiness.

Despite the charismatic Fonda and Stanwyck, the movie skated on very hokey thin ice, with a lame script, lame jokes and lame just about everything else.

Where credit is due – the black and white cinematography of the opening scenes on the ski slope – the far off stunt skier for Fonda and then the up close Fonda himself, complete with skiing goggles, yodeling his downhill racing; the expansive shots inside Peter’s mansion; the grounds in which actor Edgar Buchanan (1903-1979) as the gardener Billingsley expounds to Peter on the meaningful mysteries of the soil; and the inside of a department store where Peter, under an assumed name, successfully lands a job in the men’s tie department.

Memorable Henry Fonda films include Young Mister Lincoln, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache and Mister Roberts, each directed by Portland Maine native John Ford (1894-1973); Advise and Consent; Yours, Mine and Ours; Gideon’s Trumpet; and On Golden Pond, which takes place in the Belgrade Lakes, but was shot in New Hampshire.

The only other Barbara Stanwyck movie I have ever seen is Sorry, Wrong Number! in which she plays a bedridden wife whose house has been invaded by an intruder.