REVIEW POTPOURRI – Author: Larry McMurtry; TV Show: Elementary; Composer: Gustav Mahler

/0 Comments/in /by

Larry McMurtry

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Larry McMurtry

Novelist Larry McMurtry (1936-2021) was perhaps most well known for Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, and The Last Picture Show. His 2008 books: A Memoir is an account of his adventures as a voracious reader, book collector (he would eventually amass a personal library of 28,000 books) and dealer in rare and-not-so-rare books.

He describes growing up on a ranch in the vast West Texas spaces, at least 18 miles from the nearest town and his family being plentifully self-sufficient with raising cattle, hogs and chickens and growing vegetables for their food supply during the depression.
However, books were another matter:

“Of books there were none….it puzzles me how totally bookless our ranch house was. There must have been a Bible, but I don’t remember ever seeing it. My father did read the range cattle books of J. Frank Dobie, but the only one I remember seeing in our house…was The Longhorns, which I borrowed for my father from Mr. Will Taylor, a wealthy and elderly oilman who lived in a great mansion just south of our hay field.”

McMurtry later bought the mansion and used it to house his library.

Highly recommended for those who love, read and collect books.

Elementary

I have been bingeing on Elementary, another take on Sherlock Holmes, with the very consummate starring roles of Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes, Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson, Aidan Quinn as a chief of detectives Captain Thomas Gregson (Quinn was in Waterville during the filming of Empire Falls and portrayed David Roby, one of the two sons of Paul Newman’s character), and Jon Michael Hill as Detective Marcus Bell.

The setting is the 21st century New York City and depicts Holmes and Watson’s roles as consultants for the Manhattan Police department and Sherlock’s super-human intuition for solving the continually odious murders in each of its seven seasons from 2012 to 2019 on CBS and now available on Hulu.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler

Depending on my mood, I shift back and forth between the 3rd and 5th Symphonies of the ten that Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) left us. YouTube has quite a number of performances of the 3rd which I have lately been enjoying. Recently the Bucharest, Romania, Enescu Festival 2021 hosted a very exciting Mahler 3rd with Paavo Jarvi conducting the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, chorus and the very good contralto Wiebke Lehmkuhl.

Unfortunately that one is not available yet on YouTube but a video broadcast of Paavo from 2008 can be seen.

Here at the house are over 40 different Mahler 3rds, including two different ones of Leonard Bernstein, Bernard Haitink, Klaus Tennstedt, Jascha Horenstein, Erich Leinsdorf, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Rafael Kubelik plus single ones of Heinz Rogner, Herbert Kegel, Sir Simon Rattle, Esa Pekka Salonen, Semyon Bychkov, Michael Gielen, Riccardo Chailly, Claudio Abbado, Vaclav Jiracek, Benjamin Zander, Pierre Boulez, Richard Burgin, Carl Schuricht, Antoni Wit, Maurice Abravanel, James Levine, Andrew Litton, Armin Jordan, Jesus Lopez-Cobos etcs. Each one scores points and I hope that this list of Maestros might instigate curiosity about the 3rd and other compositions.

Continuing with Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals:

“The geese were coming back early, up along Merrymeeting, that same spring, before the middle of April. And in late April that best day of all the spring on the Kennebec came, when the first boat arrived, the Boston steamer, with the star on her smokestack and her whistle tied down all the way from Swan Island to the Cobbosseecontee, waking the dead and the hills with her news of spring at last. There was not a church bell in the five towns that wasn’t ringing. Women in bombazine waved handkerchiefs. School was let out for the day and the hills were alive with children.”

More next week.

REVIEW POTPOURRI – Author: H.L. Mencken; Film: Cop Land

/0 Comments/in /by
Peter Catesby Peter Cates

H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken

The delightful scoundrel H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote the scholarly and hilarious Treatise on the Gods in 1930 and revised it in 1946. Like so much of Mencken’s writing, it is very biased, scores points both intentionally and unintentionally in spots, reveals blindness in other spots, and was never intended to be taken very seriously.

In his 1943 On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) spoke of Mencken’s popularity among the younger generation of the bootlegging 1920s:

“As it was, he not only rallied all the young writers together and imposed his skepticism upon the new generation, but also brought a new and uproarious gift for high comedy into a literature that had never been too quick to laugh….Mencken proved that one could be ‘a civilizing influence’ by writing like a clown.”

Mencken’s own passage on the conflict between love your neighbor as yourself and loving yourself shows his devious wit:

“So long as it was believed that the end of the world was at hand it all was well enough to be poor and humble, but when years of uncertainty began to stretch ahead every man of any prudence had to take thought for his own security and that of his family. Thus the Beatitudes were forgotten and the immemorial game of dog-eat-dog was resumed.”

Cop Land

One highly recommended film, the 1997 Cop Land, depicts a group of New York City’s men and women in blue, the community they live in across the George Washington Bridge, and the harrowingly moral ambiguity in their conduct both on and off the job.

It even takes on the dimensions of a Shakespearean tragedy in its gritty realism, hopeless cynicism and the struggles to do what’s right.

The cast included Robert de Niro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Sylvester Stallone, Janeane Garofalo and Annabella Sciorra, along with others, in one outstanding ensemble performance.

Also highly recommended is Howard Shore’s very eloquent soundtrack.

Robert PT Coffin’s essay
Kennebec Crystals continued

Continuing with paragraphs from Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals:

“That year the Hudson did not freeze over ‘til March. The betting of the Maine farmers had been three to one against its doing so. They won their bets. The rival river, the only rival the clear blue Kennebec had among the rivers of earth, had lean-kine stalls along its banks that year of our Lord. The Lord had been good. The Kennebec ice farmers heaped great towers of the harvest outside their houses and covered them with spruce boughs and sawdust, for extra measure. The Knickerbocker Ice Company lost nothing. For they owned most of the icehouses along both the Hudson and the Kennebec. All ice was ice to them. The Kennebec crop was better than the Hudson, in fact, for the water in the Maine river was clearer and purer. Kennebec ice stood at the head of all ice. It was the Hudson ice cutters who lost. But if Peter was robbed, Paul was paid. The Kennebec farmers went back to their hens and heifers with wallets stuffing out their trousers and their sons’ trousers, after the $4-a-week lodging and eating bills had been paid. The grocers canceled whole tomes of ledgers. The schoolteachers kept their patience right up to ‘Horatius at the Bridge’ in the Friday afternoon’s speaking. New barrels of pork and flour came home to the high farms on the whistling runners of the horse sleds. And barrels of halibuts’ heads and broken-bread. Active Frost stopped moving his checkers when his foreman turned to take a shot at the spittoon. And Timothy Toothaker asked the question when he brought his Susannah the first bunch of mayflowers. They were married and setting up housekeeping on new pine floors and in the new spooled maple bed before the catkins were gone from the popples.”

To be continued next week.

REVIEW POTPOURRI – Novelist: Mary McCarthy; Conductor: Karl Bohm

/0 Comments/in /by

Mary McCarthy

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Mary McCarthy

Novelist Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) summered in Castine for years and received honorary degrees from Colby College, in Waterville, and Bowdoin College, in Brunswick. She possessed a feisty, at times savagely critical brilliance as seen in her novels and essays.

I have read two of the novels, 1954’s A Charmed Life and 1963’s The Group, which became a bestseller and was turned into a Hollywood film.

A Charmed Life is a thinly disguised fictional depiction of her brief marriage to the renowned and fascinatingly brilliant essayist and critic Edmund Wilson (1896-1972) and not very flattering.

For reasons of space, I will mention one detail. He used to lock her in their bedroom for two-and-a-half hours to force her to write.

She also flirted, as did many other intellectuals, with communism during the 1930s depression but broke off with those who supported Joseph Stalin.

In the 1960s, she travelled to North Vietnam and wrote two books in which she claimed that the Viet Cong were not brutal at all in their treatment of civilians, a point of view that has been rightfully refuted and rebuked.

She appeared on the Dick Cavett Show in 1979 and caused controversy and a lawsuit brought against her by playwright Lillian Hellmann (1905-1984); McCarthy charged Hellmann’s Memoirs with being nothing but lies, “even her a’s, an’s and the’s were lies.” Her allegations about Hellmann engendered much investigation by journalists, proved McCarthy to be telling the truth and led to a decline in Hellmann’s reputation.

One of McCarthy’s three younger brothers was the actor Kevin McCarthy (1914-2010) who achieved fame as the star of the 1956 movie classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and who gave a consummate performance as a serial killer in a 1968 guest appearance on Jack Lord’s Hawaii Five-O.

Karl Bohm

Karl Bohm (1894-1981) left many fine recordings as a conductor. One particular LP (Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft 139159, early 1960s) contains the Mozart Sym phonies 26, 31 (known as the Paris Sym­phony) and 34. Bohm’s conducting of the Berlin Philharmonic yielded performances of bracing rhythmic energy, the most savvy phrasing, exquisitely underscored detail and graceful elegance.

Bohm did conduct in Germany during the Hitler years and supported several of his policies. Somehow, he did get de-nazified after World War II by the Allies and, very strangely, became bosom buddies with composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990).

Robert PT Coffin Kennebec Crystals
continued

Continuing with paragraphs from Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals:

“And the steel-bright days went by. No thaws came by to erase the grooves in the checkerboards. The icehouses were filled to their eaves and the last tier roofed in the aisles between the cakes. Roughage was heaped over all. The doors were closed and sealed.”

To be continued.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Harry C. Browne

/0 Comments/in /by
Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Harry C. Browne

A ten-inch acoustically recorded shellac, Columbia A2179, featured singer and banjo player Harry C. Browne (1878-1954) performing Balm of Gilead, while side two contained another banjoist Fred Van Epps (1878-1960) playing Southern Medley, comprised of such quaint tunes as Old Folks at Home, Jordan Is a Hard Road to Travel, Kentucky Home, Clime Up Chillern and Carve that Possum.

Harry C. Browne was a native of North Adams, Massachusetts, and fought with his home state regiment in the Spanish American War. He was also a noted actor and appeared in several staged productions, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (whose author Kate Douglas Wiggin attended Gorham Female Seminary, now University of Southern Maine, and whose home in Hollis still exists and can be seen in a Google photograph) and later found his way to Hollywood where he starred in several films during the silent era.

Browne was a very active campaigner for the Democratic party and, in 1914, was offered a diplomatic post by then Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) which he declined.

During the late 1920s, Browne was an announcer for CBS radio.

He started recording for Columbia records in 1916, scoring a hit with Turkey in the Straw; that selection’s initial title was horrifically racist and won’t be mentioned here.

Balm of Gilead was recorded later the same year on October 16; side two was set down for posterity on November 29.

Fred Van Epps was the father of jazz guitarist George Van Epps (1913-1998), one of the busiest studio session players for various LP record labels.

Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals continued

Continuing with paragraphs from Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals:

“Inside, men caught the thundering cakes and switched them, this one to the right, this one to the left, to their places. The walls of cakes rose gradually, aisles of air spaces left between the walls of solid crystal. The workers here were in their shirt sleeves. They were the youngest of the men, sons more often than fathers. Their work made them glow inside like cookstoves. The sweat ran down their faces. They stood by the cataracts of ice and flung the bright streams each way, stepping as in a dance to keep clear of a blow that would shatter their bones. The work was like the thunder of summer in their ears, thunder all day long. And the house filled up with the cakes. Square cakes piled as even as the sides of a barn, true and deep blue in the steaming dusk. The men walked between walls of Maine’s cold wealth.”

To be continued.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Symphony Sounds from the Colby Campus

/0 Comments/in /by
Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Symphony Sounds from the Colby Campus

Century Custom Records, once based in Cape Elizabeth, released an LP, Symphony Sounds from the Colby Campus, an anthology of live performances of the Colby Community Symphony Orchestra conducted by its late Music Director Ermanno F. Comparetti during the 1970-1971 seasons.

The selections were as follows:

The opening Allegro of Bach’s 4th Brandenburg Concerto with flutists Jean Rosenblum and Marion Agnew, and violinist/concertmaster Mary Hallman.

Habanera from Bizet’s opera Carmen, as sung by mezzo-soprano Dorothy Spurling, who died in 2020 at the age of 88 and who frequently appeared in concerts on campus during those earlier years.

Another opening Allegro movement from Spring in Vivaldi’s 4 Seasons, again played by concertmaster Hallman.

Frescobaldi’s Toccata in D minor performed by the full orchestra.

Vio Che Sapete from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, sung by Spurling.

Finally, the very famous 1st movement of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 performed by Tibor Yusti who taught piano at the college and gave a successful recital at New York City’s Town Hall, in 1961, that was reviewed by the New York Times.

The orchestra consisting of performers at the professional, semi-professional and amateur level gave spirited renditions .

Since 1959, I have attended Colby Symphony concerts at the Waterville Opera House, Waterville High School Auditorium, Colby’s Lorimer Chapel and its now-demolished Wadsworth Field House.

Back during the 1960s, I remember the college’s former President, Dean Robert Strider, gave commentary at a few concerts and sang the baritone solos in a performance of the Brahms German Requiem.

Two other former concertmasters, Max Cimbolleck and Geza Fiedler, along with Fred Petra who was gifted at playing both the trumpet and double bass in the orchestra, were family friends and music teachers of myself and other family members.

Other acquaintances listed among the personnel were violist Church Blair, cellists Dorothy Reumann, Anthony Betts and Gratia Laws, John Wheeler on French horn, flutist Jean Rosenblum and harpsichordist Adel Heinrich.

* * * * * *

Robert PT Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals continued

Continuing with paragraphs from Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals, on the harvesting of ice, Maine’s former major winter industry:

“The afternoon saw the first great checkers of ice lifted from the checkerboards. With heaving of cant dogs and picks, the square crystals came up into the splendid sunshine, sparkling like emeralds shading to azure in their deep hearts, with sections of whole rainbows where the edges were flawed. Layer on layer of brightness, layers of solid winter to go into the hot heart of summer in faraway cities and scorching lands. Long canals opened up into dark water, and men poled the cakes down to the ends where other men caught them with cant dogs as they came, hoisted them up on the ice, slued them to the runways. Chains clanked, the hooks bit into them, and up they flashed along the high lines of steel and plunged into the icehouses.”

Continued next week.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Baritone Oscar Seagle, Soprano Marie Tiffany

/0 Comments/in /by

Oscar Seagle

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Baritone Oscar Seagle, Soprano Marie Tiffany

Baritone Oscar Seagle (1877-1945) was one of the best selling recording stars for Columbia records during the post World War I years of the acoustic era. He recorded two hymns for the label on a 10-inch shellac in 1921 – I Love to Tell the Story and Nearer My God to Thee (the one being played by musicians on the Titanic as it was sinking).

Seagle was accompanied by four men described as the Columbia Quartette, with an accompanying orchestra. He sang both hymns beautifully and with conviction.

In later years, he started a music school in New York’s Adirondacks.

Columbia A3354.

Soprano Marie Tiffany (1881-1948) and contralto Elizabeth Lennox (1894-1992) recorded Barcarolle, translated as Oh, Night of Love, from the opera, Tales of Hoffmann, by French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), also on a ten inch acoustic shellac, in 1921; side two contained Miss Tiffany’s rendition of Jules Massenet’s (1842-1912) Elegie. Both have been commonly recorded staples since those years and I thought I could care less about ever hearing them again until I played this record. Both sides were sung with a vibrant beauty and freshness as though they had just been composed.

A number of recordings by both ladies can be heard on YouTube but not these, unfortunately.

Brunswick 5040.

Continuing with Robert PT Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals:

“Then the workers went to the shores and ate their cold ham and bread and broke the crystals in the top of their jugs and drank the sluggish milk. They built fires to toast their thick soles and sat on the leeward side chewing their quids of tobacco in the heat and haze of the smoke that made the tears run from their eyes. Fathers and sons broke into cakes and frosty doughnuts the wives and mothers had made. Apple pie with splinters of ice.”

More next week.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Soundmaps Extended Realities

/0 Comments/in /by

Valeria Zorina

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Soundmaps Extended Realities

Valeria Zorina, violin and Evgeny Sinaiski, piano
Oehms Classics OC 492, CD, recorded May 1-5, 2019, in Madrid, Spain.

Although she has not yet set foot in the United States, Moldavian violinist Valeria Zorina has concertized extensively in England and Europe to tremendous and deserved acclaim. The late violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) mentored Valeria during her earlier years while Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013) and Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007) are among the conductors who have collaborated with her in concert. Since 2015, she has taught at a conservatory in Madrid, Spain.

Just released in early July, Valeria’s CD, Soundmaps Extended Realities, is a collaboration with Russian pianist Evgeny Sinaiski in which she takes a different approach from the usual recital.

Valeria Zorina has chosen six composers whose pieces have gone beyond the usual tuning of a violin at E, A, D, and G to achieve what is called scordatura, itself defined in the Harvard Dictionary of Music as “Abnormal tuning of a stringed instrument in order to obtain unusual chords, facilitate difficult passages, or change the tone color.” Having an unusually brilliant level of technique and musicality, she has tuned her instrument to the specific dimensions of each work and achieved very inspired results.

The six composers are Eugene Ysaye (1858-1931), Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704), Louis Franz Aguirre (born 1968), Franz von Vecsey (1893-1935), Giacomo Platini (born 1967), and Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921).

Belgian violinist/ composer/ conductor Ysaye is represented by his Poeme Elegiaque, a very passionate 14 minute piece for violin and piano that has a certain sadness in keeping with its elegiac quality of remembrance of a departed loved one.

Ysaye was taught by the violinist/composers Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881) and Henryk Wienawski (1835-1880) whose own Concertos personify the 19th century romantic virtuoso tradition, both of them tremendously captivated by Ysaye’s ability to draw sounds out of the violin that nobody else could.

Ysaye recorded several discs during the acoustic era as a violinist and as Music Director of the Cincinatti Symphony and several can be heard on youtube.

The German baroque composer Biber is represented by the 9th Rosary Sonata known as the Carrying of the Cross and a piece combining sublime spiritual beauty with fascinating sororities in its tunings.

The Cuban composer/conductor Aguirre’s Four Nocturnes With Masks, from 2017, are four minutes in duration. They consist of Winter, Dies Irae, Adoration and Dust of Snow and each Nocturne is a tribute to another composer – Gyorgy Kurtag, Manuel de Falla, Olivier Messiaen and Morton Feldman.

They powerfully and poetically evoke a stark middle of the night atmosphere of spooks going bump in the night and convey why Aguirre is not only a major figure in his native country but also in Europe.

Vecsey’s Nuit du Nord is a gem of extraordinarily poignant beauty and one I have shared often with several friends to the house. Vecsey studied with Joseph Joachim who was a very close friend of Johannes Brahms. Recordings of his playing can be heard on YouTube also.

The Italian composer Platini provided his Four Souvenirs, from 2018, and another example of the combination of bleakness and beauty in music of the 21st century, although with a quieter, more subtle range of dynamics than those of Aguirre .

Saint-Saens arguably most well-known piece Danse Macabre has the kind of tuning that tellingly contributed to its diabolical quality in which Death plays his fiddle at midnight on Halloween and calls all the skeletons from their graves to dance all night until the rooster gives his dawn cocka-doodle-doo wakeup call.

This CD has sustained several hearings and comes with an A-plus recommendation.

PT Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals continued…

Next paragraph from Robert PT Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals, an essay on the harvesting of ice from the Kennebec River:

“Then the field of the harvest was marked off for the game of wealth to be played there. Men walked with gougers tracing the line their narrow plows made straight as a die across the river. After them came the horse-drawn gougers cutting a deeper double furrow. Another army of men took up the game at right angles to the others, crisscrossing the wide fields. And then the sawyers came, slow with their loads of shoulder muscle and woolen shirts. They set in their saws and began the cutting of the gigantic checkers from the checkerboard on the hard Kennebec. The men stood to their work with both hands on the handles each side of their long tools, going down, coming back, fifty men keeping time as they ate into the stuff that meant their life, bed, and board, and fodder for their cattle. It was a sight to see the gates – ajar mustaches swinging like pendulums, gold and dark, and the breath in them changing to icicles as they worked. Every so often the picks spoke, and the sawed lines lengthened ahead of the sawyers. Noon saw a dozen checkerboards marked out on the river. One notable fact about the tools of the ice industry on the Kennebec is this: they were the only tools that were good enough to remain unchanged from the beginning of the industry to the end of it.”

To be continued…

I’M JUST CURIOUS: 12 things to always remember

/0 Comments/in /by
by Debbie Walker

I believe I found this material on Facebook, a social website, and I really wanted to share it. I don’t know who the original author is but I liked the thought behind this. And, of course, I had to add a few of my own thoughts. Any thoughts or comments you have I would be glad to hear from you.

1. The past cannot be changed. If we were able to change the past, we would lose some of the lessons we needed. What we don’t think of is in our quest to redo the past we would also lose some of the things you weren’t considering.

2. Opinions don’t define your reality. I will listen to anyone’s opinion, if I agree then it is part of my reality already. If I don’t agree I just ignore it. We all make mistakes. From those mistakes we learn. These are what makes our realities.

3. Everyone’s journey is different. No one is in the exact same spot in their journey. Everyone’s journey is different, that’s what makes us who we are, makes us all special. We might be the same age, in the same income bracket and may even have similar goals in life. Fortunately, the way we accomplish it is what makes our journey different.

4. Things always get better with time. Most injuries get better with time, most illnesses get better with time, grief and losses get better with time. Usually even our children get better with time!

5. Judgments are a confession of character. You will only know the character of a person through three things. (a) When you live with that person. (b) When you do business/partnership/employer/employees/ or friends with that person. (c) Any reason to spend a lot of time together. Character says a lot about a person, and that character is being judged, often, before you meet someone.

6. Over thinking will lead to sadness. Overthinking is focused on the past, specially the bad things that have happened or unfortunate situations that a person wishes had gone differently. Sadly, it is not just something you can ‘shake off’. The sadness or depression usually requires a little help, not just wishing.

7. Happiness is found within. According to my dictionary, True Happiness is enjoying your own company and living in peace and harmony with your body, mind, and soul. It’s for being truly happy you neither need other people nor materialistic things. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. I think we look for other people to make us happy rather than doing it for yourself. Such as: My husband doesn’t have a clue what I would love for Christmas. My suggestion is to purchase a couple of your most wanted items, buy them and put them in his hands to wrap. I doubt he will be unhappy and you will get what you wanted without disappointment.

8. Positive thoughts create positive things. Explains itself.

9. Smiles are contagious. I believe in smiling, especially when I have eye contact with anyone, strangers, and all.

10. Kindness is free.

11. You only fail if you quit. Or…If you don’t try at all.

12. What goes around, comes around. A person’s actions or behavior will eventually have consequences for their behavior.

Contact me at DebbieWalker@townline.org Thanks for reading and have a great week.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Perry Mason

/0 Comments/in /by

Raymond Burr

by Peter Cates

Perry Mason
Season 4

Season 4 of Perry Mason had a particularly compelling episode, The Case of the Misguided Missile, which was first aired May 6, 1961. It dealt with a missile launch and provided some background footage at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in central California, and now renamed Vandenberg Space Force Base. The missile explodes in midair and the cause is a bolt that had been tampered with.

The story de­picted the tensions between the civilian scientists of the company which built the missile and the Air Force military that results in the murder of the lead investigator, a captain who has an abrasive personality combined with unimpeachable honesty. The plot has the usual several suspects, a defendant who has Perry Mason as his attorney and, given the circumstance, a court martial which is fascinating in its details of procedural and very careful weighing of the evidence.

Simon Oakland

Simon Oakland did an outstanding performance as the officer who is murdered. Interestingly, he started out as a concert violinist but then detoured into theater in New York City with success and then to Hollywood with a long list of movies and television programs to his credit. A notable appearance was his portrayal of the psychiatrist in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho.

The actor died of cancer on August 29, 1983, one day after his 68th birthday.

Fans of the movie West Side Story may remember Oakland as the formidable policeman Lt. Schrank.

P.T. Coffin’s Essay
Kennebec Crystals continued

Continuing with Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals and its account of Maine’s most renowned winter industry before the invention of refrigerators:

“The men crowded into the river lodging houses of Hallowell and Gardiner, Pittston and Dresden. They unloaded and stowed their dunnage in their temporary homes for the next few weeks. They armed themselves with picks and gougers and saws. Each man had his favorite tool tucked under his quilted arm. They descended on the cold harvest floor with horses and sons in a great host.”

To be continued…

REVIEW POTPOURRI: How Music Grew in Brooklyn

/0 Comments/in /by

Maurice Edwards

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

How Music Grew in Brooklyn

Maurice Edwards; Lanham, Maryland; Scarecrow Press; published 2006; 380 pages.

This hefty book of at least 10 pounds could rightfully be considered a coffee table book. A history of the Brooklyn, New York, Philharmonic, it was also a labor of love for its author Maurice Edwards (1922-2020) who had been involved with the Phil­har­monic since its official beginning in 1954, later becoming executive director before retiring during the mid ‘90s.

His successor in the executive position suggested that Edwards write a history of the orchestra, its connection with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and its impact on the lives of so many music lovers in the surrounding communities. He responded as follows:

“Not being a musicologist, a historian, or even a music journalist, I was flattered but a bit humbled by the very idea. Was I qualified for the job? Would that be true retirement? Was I not rather ready for a respite?

“Yet, realizing that I could never fully sever all relations with the orchestra I had lived with for so many years and indeed helped develop, I decided that maybe it was not such a bad idea after all, and I accepted the challenge.

“I soon found myself turning into a veritable ‘Phantom of the Orchestra’, haunting the Brooklyn Academy of Orchestra where the Philharmonic was housed until seven years ago [1999], plowing through the orchestra’s irregularly kept archives (often mixed up with the Academy’s), refreshing my memory through the perusal of old programs, board meeting minutes, newspaper minutes, newspaper articles and reviews, and interviewing some of the survivors of the rocky journey of this nonprofit arts organization through the wiles, guiles, and hazards of the for-profit business world. All of this began to tell its own story to me, namely, How Music Grew in Brooklyn: A Biography of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and so I proceeded to record it.”

Prior to 1954, the classical concerts in Brooklyn were happening as early as the 1850s with the arrival of immigrants from Europe who were gifted performers needing a livelihood, the listeners who were eager to hear music and the wealthy patrons who bankrolled the concerts. Early conductors included the very colorful charletan Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860) and his protegé Theodore Thomas (1835-1905).

Jullien went to debtor’s prison after his return to France and rightfully for swindling would-be investors but was gifted as an orchestra trainer. Thomas was simultaneously music director of one of the earlier Brooklyn Philharmonics, the New York Philharmonic across the East River, and his own Theodore Thomas Orchestra; he provided ample work for his core players in all three groups, developed adventurous programs of works both old and knew and courted wealthy investors before he left for the Chicago Symphony position in 1890.

After 1954, the orchestra’s Music Directors were Siegfried Landau until 1971, Lukas Foss from 1971 to 1990, Dennis Russell Davies through 1996, and Robert Spano to 2004, each one of these Maestros gifted musicians and adventurous programmers who didn’t believe in playing it safe, unlike too many conductors of major orchestras in recent years who program the same 50 works over and over. From 2004 to when the orchestra disbanded , due to much less financial support, in 2012, its conductors were Michael Christie and Alan Piersen whose work I am unfamiliar with.

Edwards was not a great writer but he was thorough in his documentation of programs, the ups and downs of its history, and the almost ad nauseam quoting of media coverage. In conclusion the book depicted an important orchestra which contributed much to the appreciation of live classical music concerts among all age groups, not just those over 60.

Edwards was married to the wonderful Romanian poet Nina Cassian (1924-2014).

From RPT’S essay Kennebec Crystals

“Tramps, even, were coming. And all the black sheep of a hundred faraway pastures, beyond Maine, were swinging off the sides of freight cars in the chill gray of the morning. Drifters from far beyond New England.”