by Peter Cates

Lee Marvin

For me, Lee Marvin (1924-1987) was one of the most consistently fascinating actors to grace the movies and television. He was considered a director’s dream because he instinctively knew how to move for the camera. And his ability to convey character was formidable.

Some background on his life is in order. He and his older brother Robert were both named for the ancestral family fourth cousin, Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Another ancestor from 200 years further back than General Lee, Matthew Marvin, emigrated from England in 1635 and helped in establishing the city of Hartford, Connecticut.

Marvin took violin lessons as a youngster. Also, to quote a May 1964, article in the magazine Gun World entitled Elk Hunting with Lee Marvin, he “spent weekends and spare time hunting deer, puma, wild turkey, and bob white in the wilds of the then-uncharted Everglades.”

As an adolescent, Marvin attended several boarding schools in New York and Florida but was kicked out for rowdy behavior.

He joined the Marines and fought in the Battle of Saipan where most of his unit was killed, his sciatic nerve severed by machine gun fire and his foot wounded by a sniper’s bullet. He spent over a year in the hospital and was awarded the Purple Heart and five other medals for bravery, yet was busted down to private from corporal for speaking his mind too freely.

My first experience of him was as a kid when I watched his show, M Squad, in which he starred as a detective.

His portrayal of evil characters was vividly manifested in guest appearances on Wagon Train, as a sadistic wagonmaster replacement, after Ward Bond died, for two episodes and as a gunman on The Virginian. An early ‘50s TV appearance was as a serial killer on Dragnet who’s also a vegetarian.

His most famous role of venom was a majorly billed appearance in Director John Ford’s 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which he thrashed Jimmy Stewart with a horsewhip during a stagecoach holdup and squared off unsuccessfully with John Wayne. Just the way he menacingly walked into a saloon and sat with an attitudinal smirk conveyed his natural gifts as an actor.

In 1964, he and Clu Gulagher were two professional hitmen in The Killers, which was based very loosely on Ernest Hemingway’s story (the late former President Ronald Reagan very convincingly did his only role as a mobster in what would be his last film before his political career took off).

Other memorable roles – the movies Pete Kelly’s Blues, Bad Day at Black Rock, Cat Ballou, Point Blank, Paint Your Wagon, Prime Cut, Pocket Money, Violent Saturday, The Caine Mutiny, Emperor of the North, The Iceman Cometh, Missouri Traveller, Gorky Park, and The Dirty Dozen with a sequel.

He turned down the lead role of Jaws – “What would I tell my fishing friends who’d see me come off a hero against a dummy shark?”

Lee Marvin died of a heart attack on August 29, 1987, at the age of 63.

by Peter Cates

Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto in G Major

Back during the summer of 1965, the family had a General Electric table model radio which I listened to by the hour when it broadcast classical music from WMTW-FM then located in the old Poland Springs Hotel, at the foot of Mount Washington. Anyways, it regularly programmed stereo recordings as part of its nightly Evening Concert which ran for two hours from 9 to 11 p.m., except for Saturday nights when Ray Smith hosted his weekly show of big band jazz records.

As an obsessed record collector, I wanted to hear every disc that came my way and took note of piece and performer for consideration with my very limited purchasing power; I remember the thrill of discovery with certain works – the Brahms 3rd Symphony with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra and its life-affirming opening pages or the sweetly exquisite Faure’s Pelleas and Melisande incidental music via the Charles Munch/Philadelphia Orchestra album.

Usually the station avoided recordings from before the late ‘40’s LP years but, one evening, the announcer stated that an exception would be made with an RCA Victor release of a 1944 broadcast from the NBC Symphony led by Arturo Toscanini and pianist Rudolf Serkin of Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto in G Major because of its merit as a performance.

Like the Emperor Concerto, the 4th opens with the solo piano; unlike the Emperor with its bold assertive flourishes, its notes are of a gentler nature, and then the orchestra re-states the opening melody with very beguiling sonorites. The 2nd movement is a conversation between the meditative piano and the abrupt, at times abrasive orchestra which shortly leads, without a break, into the joyful concluding Finale with its knuckle-busting chords.

Serkin and Toscanini pulled it off with driving ferocity that some even considered too hectic, not including myself; the pianist would later record two distinguished 4ths with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra and leave another fine broadcast with an Italian radio orchestra that was released during the ‘80s on LP and CD.

Other superb 4ths were left by such titans as Artur Rubinstein, Walter Gieseking, Claudio Arrau, Alfred Brendel, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Van Cliburn, Guiomar Novaes, Clara Haskil, Van Cliburn, Wilhelm Backhaus, Edwin Fischer, Wilhelm Kempff, Friedrich Gulda, Artur Schnabel, Julius Katchen, Gina Bachauer, Emil Gilels, Artur Schnabel, Clifford Curzon, Glenn Gould and Leon Fleisher.

Elvis vs. Boone

In 1955, Elvis Presley was the opening act for Pat Boone in a Cleveland, Ohio, concert. In 1957, a poll was taken among teenagers as to which singer had more fans. Among boys, Boone was preferred 2 to 1 over Elvis, and 3 to 1 among girls. Both singers did have a high regard for each other and both made a number of fine records.

Winter quote from the Greek philosopher Aristotle – “To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.”

by Peter Cates

In April, 1940, Italian composer Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) conducted the La Scala Opera Orchestra and Chorus in a recording of his masterpiece, Cavalleria Rusticana, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its 1890 premiere, at the invitation of the record label, La Voce del Padrone, in a very hea­vy set of 11 breakable 78s; since then it has been reissued in LP and CD formats and can also be heard on YouTube.

The story takes place in an impoverished village and the two main characters are Santuzza and Turiddu; Santuzza is madly in love with Turiddu but he is paying more attention to an ex-girlfriend, Lola, who is welcoming his ad­vances while now married to the very jealous Alfio. Tragedy inevitably occurs in a knife fight.

Currently, it has been my favorite opera to listen to and the composer’s recording can be added to distinguished ones of De Los Angeles/Corelli and Tebaldi/Bjoreling, both of which are also on YouTube. After its premiere, it was presented 14,000 times just in Italy before World War I began, and is often, due to its one hour length, presented the same evening as Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, with its own immortal Vesti la Giubba.

The composer chose tenor Beniamino Gigli (1890-1957) as Turriddu and soprano Lina Bruna Rasa (1907-1984) to sing Santuzza. Rasa and the composer met in 1928 when he conducted her in a Cavalleria before a crowd of 35,000 people. She brought such beauty, dramatic intensity and sorrow to the role that Mascagni considered her his favorite Santuzza from then on and would not accept any other soprano in that role.

Very sadly, Lina was emotionally very fragile and suffered frequent breakdowns after the age of 25, which only worsened after her mother died in 1935. She would pull herself together for brief periods when singing but then would have strange hallucinations and periods of depression that manifested themselves in sadness and passivity. Her friends and colleagues adored her and were very protective of her. But the breakdowns increased and she made her last stage appearance in 1942. She would spend the rest of her life in and out of a mental hospital in Milan.

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I have started bingeing on episodes of the CBS TV show, Perry Mason, which was produced from 1957 to 1966. My favorite characters are Ray Collins’s Lieutenant Tragg, William Hopper’s private investigator Paul Drake and the wonderful Barbara Hale’s Della Street who was Perry Mason’s private secretary. Also, the courtroom trials were edifying lessons in procedural strategies and the most entertaining portions of the program.

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Pop singer Neil Sedaka recently posted a YouTube testifying to his recovery from Covid-19. He’s close to 82 and sang three songs, including his mega­hit Cal­endar Girl from more than 60 years ago, while accompanying himself on the piano.

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Peter Cates

Christmas classics

In 1942, Columbia Masterworks released a set of three 12-inch 78s, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, starring Basil Rathbone (1892-1967) as Ebenezer Scrooge and several other more minor actors and actresses from Hollywood’s truly Golden Age of the ‘30s and ‘40s, when work there was much more plentiful. Although the 1951 Allastair Sim black and white English film is my gold standard for this ever fascinating story, Rathbone brought a powerful, at times mean-spirited edginess to his speaking voice in this 25-minute presentation, one definitely more captivating than the recording of Lionel Barrymore (1878-1954), who drawled his way through a bit too much.

The one good guy role I remember of Rathbone was the series of Sherlock Holmes films with the perfectly cast Nigel Bruce (1895-1953) as Watson. His villains in such classics as A Tale of Two Cities, Captain Blood, David Copperfield and The Mark of Zorro were singularly persuasive as was his appearance in Spencer Tracy’s late ‘50s The Last Hurrah.

The Barbirolli Society, a label devoted to the recorded legacy of the great conductor Sir John Barbirolli (1899-1970), released a two CD set, SJB 1084-5, of an October 20, 1960, concert Barbirolli led at the very spacious Free Trade Hall, in Manchester, England, one of the most important classical music events in Great Britain during the last 50 years of the 20th century, the significance of which I hope to convey presently. The concert featured Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s 5th and Gustav Mahler’s 7th Symphonies, both of them powerful large scale pieces now commonly performed but then rarely. The BBC took a risk sponsoring the concert and pushed the envelope by combining two different orchestras, Barbirolli’s Halle Orchestra and the BBC’S Northern Symphony, both of them groups which regularly concertized in the Manchester metropolitan area. They and Barbirolli felt that this was a one time opportunity to provide at least 200 players, instead of the usual 80 to 100, that both Mahler and Nielsen hoped for in their own performance instructions.

The results were two hours of very inspired music-making and a highly recommended cd set to adventurous listeners.

The late New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliet (1926-2007) left a description of singer Tony Bennett’s rented stretch limousine, picking him and his daughter up in front of the New York City Upper East Side apartment building where he resided with his family during the 1970s: “the length of the one Jelly Roll Morton said he had to take to Central Park to turn around pulled up at the curb.”

Chevy Chase’s 1989 National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is quite riotous as a comedy film, if a bit overblown at times. Ellen Hamilton Latzen almost stole the show as the eight-year-old Ruby Sue, daughter of an impoverished brother-in-law and family who drop in unexpectedly.

 

by Peter Cates

Ten Famous Sopranos

London, OS 26206, LP, 1973 release.

This anthology makes for a wonderful introduction to the appreciation of great opera (I know some consider great and opera an oxymoron) via 10 of the finest sopranos active during the last century, although I notice two of London records finest artists Inge Borkh and Mirella Freni are missing.

Renata Tebaldi, 1922-2004, delivers a heart-rending Vissi D’Arte from Giacomo Puccini’s opera of tragedy, Tosca, in which she is pleading with God to alleviate her sorrow. During Tebaldi’s first engagement in Italy in 1944, she travelled the many miles to and from it on a horse-driven cart under heavy machine gun fire during wartime. Two years later, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini told her that ‘she had the voice of an angel.’

Joan Sutherland, 1926-2010, sings an aria from Gounod’s Faust. She made her very successful Covent Garden debut in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and was visited backstage by Maria Callas, who was a huge fan and one of her best friends. She and her husband, conductor Richard Bonynge, who’s still living, were both from Sydney, Australia.

Leontyne Price, still living at 93, had during her prime years a voice that combined sheer power and astounding beauty. She was from Mississippi and received a scholarship to study voice at Juilliard School of Music in NYC. Within a few short years, she had a recording contract with RCA Victor. Here she sings a magnificent aria from Verdi’s Aida.

Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson, 1918-2005, had lungs of steel and recorded the dramatic roles in Wagner and Richard Strauss’s crazy operas — the Wagner 16 hour Ring cycle and Strauss’s violent masterworks, Salome and Elektra. She could also give sweet renditions of Swedish lullabies.

She sings a jubilant aria from Wagner’s Tannhauser.

French soprano Regine Crespin, 1927-2007, personified a delectable refinement in her low, middle and upper vocal register.

She was also notorious for her rough and tough high standards and bad temper; during the recording of Wagner’s Die Walkure with tenor James King, he missed a cue and she kicked him on the shin.

She sings Santuzza’s heart-breaking lament, Voi Lo Sapete, from Mascagni’s gorgeous Cavalleria Rusticana, an opera that received 14,000 performances in Italy alone during the composer’s lifetime.

The remaining five sopranos are Pilar Lorengar, Zinka Milanov, Elena Souliotis, Marilyn Horne, and Gwyneth Jones who each sing, in order of appearance, arias from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, Bizet’s Carmen and Wagner’s Flying Dutchman.

In short, a record to cherish.

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Some lines from the poem Little Things by the prize-winning 25-year-old Romanian poet Anastasia Gavrilovici in an English translation by Caterina Stanislav and Vlad Pojoga:

“Maybe people really do give their best shot when they’re crushed, just like olives/ Or maybe not, what do I know, my mind is a piece of Swiss cheese through which you can hear the music of lab rats.”

W.H. Auden wrote a poem, The Age of Anxiety, during World War II. Anas­tasia’s poem mirrors the current anxiety going on due to the pandemic and other on-going issues. She is definitely a poet of interest.