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

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

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

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.

Birgit Nilsson

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.

Regine Crespin

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.

* * * * * *

W. H. Auden

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.

Cesar Cui

by Peter Cates

Cui

Orientale; Glazunov: Arabian Melody.
Hans Kindler, cello, with orchestra. Victrola 702, ten inch acoustically recorded shellac from May 27th, 1920, and December 12th, 1921.

Cesar Cui (1835-1918), along with fellow composers Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), Modeste Mous­sorgsky (1839-1881) and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), forged a bond known as the Russian five in writing music with nationalist feeling, rhythms and melodies of their country’s history, legends and folk music sources.

Moussorgsky was best known for the opera Boris Godunov, the Halloween showpiece Night on Bald Mountain and Pictures at an Exhibition. Unfortunately he drank himself into an early grave.

Borodin was a medical doctor and organic chemist and composed on a part time basis but left the justly popular opera Prince Igor with its exotic Polovetsian Dances and the delicate tone poem In the Steppes of Central Asia. He succumbed to a heart attack while attending a ball.

Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer but also taught composition to such pupils as Igor Stravinsky. His arguably most famous work is Scheherazade.

Mily Balakirev

Balakirev was a composer, pianist and conductor who left a solo piano showpiece Islamey and 1 Symphony of note and was the leader of the group as well.

Cesar Cui taught fortifications and wartime strategies at several military academies and may be the least known of the group. His Orientale for cello and orchestra was recorded two years after he died and has a plaintive melancholy and beauty rendering it worthy of popularity. Dutch-born cellist/conductor Hans Kindler (1892-1949) gave a deeply felt performance.

Alexander Glazunov was a famed teacher of composition whose most well-known student was Dimitri Shostakovich. He would unfailingly show up at concerts of his students music, no matter its quality and would sit in front row center with seemly very attentive listening. What was not noticed by many was that Glazunov stuffed his ears with paper tissue so he could be alone with his thoughts.

His very lyrical Arabian Melody also received a rapturous performance. And this old record has stood up with several hearings and can be heard via the internet.

Hans Kindler started the National Symphony Orchestra of D.C. from a small community group in 1931 and, despite the Depression, achieved extraordinary success. He recorded a batch of music on Victor 78 sets including a very exciting performance of Tchaaikovsky’s 3rd or Polish Symphony. His google images have a photo of him shaking hands with FDR.

Anton Chekhov

by Peter Cates

Anton Chekhov

The Cherry Orchard

Russian writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) conveyed an astute sense of reality in his short stories and plays , and did so with extraordinary literary artistry, powerful compassion for human beings and ruthless attention to detail. The Cherry Orchard was the last of four major plays to be completed, just six months before his death from tuberculosis.

The play deals with a family of aristocrats who have squandered their vast wealth and are forced to sell their lands, which include a huge and intermittently profitable cherry orchard, their main source of income. They are surrounded by servants and friends who mean well but the bottom line is they are all spending way too much time spinning their wheels.

What compelled me to read this play was Chekhov’s ability to see right through them in every comment and gesture as they interact with each other. He catches their blundering comments, sighs, scheming, despairs, and self-justifications but achieves this in a way through which we recognize ourselves and others and grow to care about them.

These nice folks include Lyubov, the matriarch landowner who gives into every freeloader approaching her for money; her 17 year old daughter Anya who’s under intense pressure to marry and lives in her own wishful dream world; the governess Charlotta seeking a man for decent conversation; Epikhodov, a bungling, disastor-prone clerk etcs.

Lopakhin is a wealthy merchant who wants to buy the estate and turn a profit in real estate development. Formerly a peasant whose father was a serf on the estate, he is now part of the new upper social class. But he wants to help Lyubov’s family too.

His monologue during the opening scene, as he awaits Lyubov’s arrival back from five years in Paris, reveals much about hi own character and gives a taste of why the play has appealed to millions of readers and theatergoers in its infinite number of productions in all languages since its first production in January, 1904:

“Lyubov Andreyevna has been living abroad now for five years and I don’t know how she may have changed. She’s a good soul, a simple, easy-going woman. I remember when I was a young sprout, fifteen years old, my father — he’s dead now, but he used to have a little shop in the village then — struck me in the face with his fist one day, and my nose began to bleed. We’d gone out of doors together for some reason or other and he was drunk. I remember just as though it were now, how Lyubov Andreyevna — she was still a slim young thing — here in this very room, the nursery. ‘Come, come, don’t cry your eyes away; you’ll live to dance on your wedding day, little peasant,’ says she. Little peasant! …True, my father was a peasant, and here I am wearing a white waistcoat and yellow shoes. From the sow’s ear to the silk purse… I’ve grown rich, made a lot of money, but when you come to think of it, to figure it out, I’m still a peasant.”

Isaac McLellan

by Peter Cates

Isaac McLellan

Maine poet Isaac McLellan (1806-1899) was born in Portland but grew up in Boston. He went to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, where he was friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and made the acquaintance of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

McLellan practiced law during his 20s, but soon grew bored and devoted himself to writing, hunting and fishing. His poetry and essays began appearing in newspapers and magazines and were collected in several volumes.

McLellan traveled in Europe, Egypt, and Syria and wrote about his experiences in an extensive series of Foreign Travels for the long gone Boston Daily Courier. He was interested in agriculture, hunting and fishing and had a spacious farm in the then peaceful countryside of Dorchester.

McLellan’s poem Autumn has verses that sum up the mixed blessings and beauties of the season; he also prefaces it with a verse by Longfellow which will be quoted first before his own stanzas:

Longfellow – ”‘Round Autumn’s mouldering urn,
Loud mourns the chill and cheerless gale,
When nightfall shades the quiet vale,
The stars in beauty burn.”

McLellan – “Now, in the fading woods, the Autumn blast
Chants its old hymn, – a melancholy sound!
And look! the yellow leaves are dripping fast,
And earth looks bleak and desolate around.

The flowers have lost their glorious scent and bloom,
And shiver now as flies the tempest by;
To some far clime hath flown the wild bird’s plume,
To greener woods, and some serener sky.”

McLellan’s favorite hunting grounds were in Cohasset, Plymouth and Marsh­field, Massa­chusetts, the last area being the farm of Daniel Webster, who frequently visited with McLellan (Webster’s favorite breakfasts consisted of roasted mutton, apple pie and Scotch.).

Sergei Rachmaninoff

by Peter Cates

Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Symphony

After the failure of his 1st Symphony in 1897, Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) had a nervous breakdown that lasted three years, with a loss of confidence in himself as a composer. Relief finally came when he submitted to three months of hypnosis under the supervision of Dr. Nicolai Dahl. His revived creative juices brought the hugely successful 2nd Piano Concerto.

In 1904, he assumed the position of conductor at the Bolshoi Opera House. However 1905 brought increased waves of revolutionary activities in Russia following the massacre by Czarist troops of many protesters at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg; Rachmaninoff himself cared little about politics and found the unrest distracting to his work .

He resigned from the Bolshoi in 1906 after starting work on his 2nd Symphony and moved himself and his family to Dresden, Germany, for four years, while spending summers at his in-laws’ estate in Ivanovka, Russia (that estate was 3,500 miles east of Dresden and made for a long railway round trip.). Both Dresden and Ivanovka gave the peace he needed to compose several works, such as the Isle of the Dead, his 3rd Piano Concerto and the 1st Piano Sonata. But his need to support his family necessitated a concert tour of the United States in 1909 and a prolonged separation from his wife.

The 2nd Symphony was a huge success at its 1908 world premiere in St. Petersburg and a boon to his self-esteem. It is almost 60 minutes and was often performed with cuts until 50 years ago when the complete score became the norm. As the composer did with the 2nd Piano Concerto, he poured his emotions into the Symphony and created a masterfully developed panorama of delectable melody.

It consists of four movements – the soaring Largo/Allegro moderato, a rip-roaring Scherzo, the sweet Adagio and the triumphant Allegro vivace. My first experience of it occurred during my high school sophomore year when I heard the 1959 Columbia LP of Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra (It was the Philadelphia Orchestra that gave the U.S. premiere of the symphony under the composer’s direction during his 1909 American tour and, during the ‘20s and ‘30s, Rachmaninoff recorded several works with the Orchestra as pianist with his friends, former Music Directors Leopold Stokowski and Stokowski’s successor, Eugene Ormandy, of the four Piano Concertos and Paganini Rhapsody and himself conducted 78 record sets of his 3rd Symphony and Isle of the Dead.)

A YouTube video of a 1979 performance with Ormandy, then 80, and the Philadelphians is one of the most captivating examples of a great conductor at work. Ormandy left two other recordings of the symphony, one from the early 1930s with the Minneapolis Orchestra and a 1973 one. Other distinguished ones from as early as 1928 through recent years are those of another close friend of the composer Nicolai Sokoloff, Artur Rodzinski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Alfred Wallenstein, Kurt Sanderling, William Steinberg, Andre Previn, Yuri Temirkanov, Paul Kletzki, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Leonard Slatkin, Simon Rattle, Alexander Gibson, Walter Weller, Lorin Maazel, James Loughran, Adrian Boult,Vladimir Ashkenazy, Edo De Waart, Tadaaki Otaka, Yevgeni Svetlanov, Andrew Litton, Mariss Jansons, Antonio Pappano, etc., the symphony being music that generates conductors’ best efforts.

Despite his extraordinary gifts as a pianist and conductor, Rachmaninoff was happiest when engaged in composition.