REVIEW POTPOURRI – Soprano: Lily Pons

Lily Pons

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Lily Pons

Soprano Lily Pons (1898-1976) sang at the Metropolitan Opera at least 300 times between 1931 and 1960 and had a knack for using mass media to advance her career.

My first exposure to her was via a Columbia 45 rpm extended play album that Mother played at home and which went in one ear and out the other, since my opera musical sensibilities were pretty limited during second grade (I did give every record in the house a listen, being a record-holic since the age of two, if not earlier.).

However, in seventh grade, I was developing a love for classical music and was gifted a pile of 78s by a family friend that included her Victor shellac of Caro Nome from Verdi’s Rigoletto and a Columbia Masterworks 78 set featuring 4 Arias from Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment.

I played these numerous times and find them generally unsurpassed . Lily Pons sang with exquisite delicacy, her trills and high notes were technically phenomenal and she was quite knowledgeable about the history of the operatic literature.

Evidence of this is the fascinating essay she wrote about the background of the Daughter of the Regiment, the sopranos who performed it in earlier years and its technical challenges, that was included with the 78 set on Columbia.

She recorded numerous sides for Victor Red Seal during the 1930s before signing with Columbia around the time of her marriage to conductor Andre Kostelanetz (1901-1980) in 1938. As her Columbia discs were best sellers, Victor released a set of her earlier records for them in 1943 in the certainly justifiable attempt to capitalize on her success with Columbia and one in which she would also benefit.

The set, Victor Red Seal M-702, consisted of three 12-inch 78s and a 10-inch one, and very fragile; the mix of different lengths by manufacturers even in an album with cardboard insulation around the records themselves was not particularly conducive to the prevention of breakage.

The contents were a combination of arias from operas of Mozart, Rossini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ambrose Thomas and, of course, Verdi and three semi-classical concert pieces, including a very beautiful Last Rose of Summer.

Operatic high points were an aria from Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, currently my favorite Mozart opera, and duets with baritone Giuseppe De Luca (1876-1950) in Verdi’s Rigoletto and Rossini’s Barber of Seville. The other selections failed to make an impression despite her vocal prowess, especially the Rimsky Le Coq D’Or Hymn to the Sun in which her trills and gentle dynamics failed to communicate the haunting Oriental mystery of that Russian opera aria.

Pons and Kostelanetz divorced in 1958. During the ‘50s and early ‘60s, she made guest appearances on such TV shows as the Ed Sullivan Show and What’s My Line.

Lily Pons died of pancreatic cancer in a Dallas, Texas, hospital in 1976. She was 77.

Legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker once compared the lyrical beauty of fellow musician Johnny Hodges in his own playing of the soprano sax in Duke Ellington’s band to the singing of Lily Pons.

Many of her recordings and broadcasts can be heard on YouTube.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon B. Johnson

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Lyndon B. Johnson

The 36th President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973) was, for good and bad, one formidable leader during his five years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

During October/November 1960, I vividly remember the two individuals and their running mates in the battle for the White House – Repub­licans Richard Nixon (1913-1994) and Massachusetts Senator/UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (1902-1985) versus Kennedy and Johnson. Every East Vassalboro school day in Susan Brondmo’s fourth grade classroom, I was bringing clippings of political cartoons from the Waterville Morning Sentinel for the morning current news show and tell; I may have monopolized the board on the wall with my offerings.

Anyways, the Cates tribe had been Republicans for decades, so I never shirked my loyalism.

Meanwhile, Uncle Charlie Rodis, who had married into the family the previous July, grew up in a Greek-American family of Democrats, in Portland; for reasons known only to God, he had never discussed politics and encountered stone cold silence at the Thanksgiving dinner when expressing jubilation about the new president.

To my little boy’s sensibilities, Nixon, despite his uncouth five o’clock shadow, and the pleasantly smiling, consummate gentleman Lodge epitomized true honesty and integrity while seemingly forthright but not quite trustworthy, Kennedy struck me the wrong way; Johnson came off as a smiling gross pig. Thus, I concluded that adults would use common sense and vote Republican.

Nixon won by a very narrow lead, so we thought; within 24 hours, Chicago Mayor Richard Daly’s Cook County machine swung the victory to Kennedy.

On November 22, 1963, aboard Air Force One, Johnson was sworn in as president with grief-stricken widow Jackie Kennedy at his side and he exuded the finest nobility and serious demeanor in his photo. I now trusted him.

Buildings of books, magazines and other documents chronicle Johnson’s legacy. He did sincerely wage war on poverty with his Great Society and shepherded the 1965 Civil Rights Bill.

Johnson also escalated and prolonged the horribly bloody Vietnam War , a conflict that still divides people very sadly (I am personally pleading the Fifth on whether it was worth it).

A very worthy reading experience is The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson by Princeton professor and historian Eric Goldman (1916-1989) who served from 1963 to 1966 as a special advisor to the president.

At first their working relationship was congenial, although Goldman was never part of the inner circle. Only later when the controversies increasingly swirling around Johnson and a lack of understanding by Goldman as to what was expected of him ended his work at the White House. The book was published in 1969.

Also worth dipping into is the multi-volume, still unfinished biography of Johnson by Robert Caro.

REVIEW POTPOURRI – Musician: Carl Stevens; The Lotus Club

Carl Stevens

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Carl Stevens

Carl Stevens was the professional name of trumpeter Charles H. Sagle (1927-2015). A 1959 Mercury LP, Muted Memories, featured him with a group of four outstanding session players performing a dozen pop classics.

They include Cole Porter’s I Concent­rate on You, Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer’s Jeeper Creepers, Cy Coleman’s Witchcraft, Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Younger than Springtime , etc. The accompanying musicians included Bobby Christian (1911-1991) on percussion, guitarist Frank D’Rone (1932-2013), John Frigo (1916-2007) on bass and pianist Dick Marx (1924-1997). For those who wish to explore further, each of the four have recorded albums under their own name for Mercury and other labels.

On the surface, the music here might sound like typical background music at a bar or restaurant but, if one listens closely, he/she would hear different shades of phrasing provided by an assortment of mutes and the sharing of solo spotlights among the five musicians.

My copy of the album is on Mercury’s budget priced Wing label whose various classical and pop reissues were found often in downtown Waterville’s long gone dime stores such as Center’s and McClellan’s for $1.47 when I shopped for records at the cheapest possible price. Nowadays, some of the recordings of all five musicians can be heard via YouTube, including the above album.

Lotos Club

The Lotos Club

The Lotos Club was founded in 1870 as a gentleman’s club for the promotion of literature, art, music and other cultural topics; still in operation in New York City, it would eventually honor women with membership.

A 1911 book, Speeches at the Lotos Club contains after dinner speeches from the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, composer Richard Strauss and Mark Twain, and many long forgotten luminaries.

Current members include soprano Renee Fleming, cellist Yo Yo Ma and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.

In a speech given January 11, 1908, Mark Twain reminisced about his very happy recent trip to England and then stated, “that you know you can’t understand an Englishman’s joke, and the Englishman can’t understand our jokes. The cause is very simple, it is for the reason that we are not familiar with the conditions that make the point of the English joke.”

 

 

 

 

REVIEW POTPOURRI – Authur: James Thurber

James Thurber

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

James Thurber

James Thurber (1894-1961) achieved a much deserved hilarious notoriety for his writings and cartoons via the New Yorker. With respect to his cartoons, Maine’s own E.B. White, while still working at the magazine’s Manhattan office as an assistant editor, found some of Thurber’s sketches in the wastebasket and published them, later commenting that they could stand on their own as artistic expressions.

One notable book, Thurber’s Dogs, collected his writings and drawings celebrating those real and imaginary canines; a paragraph conveys the precisely honed wit and clarity that Thurber achieved so often:

“My inherent fairness and open mind led me to admit that some dogs have been known to let people down, or stand them up, or exasperate and even distress them by unpredictable behavior. I even went so far as to confess that some of my own dogs had double-crossed me for a total, as I put it then, of sixteen or eighteen times, but I quickly added that the basic fault was, in almost every instance, my own.”

Two other highly recommended books are My Life and Hard Times, recounting his childhood growing up in Columbus, Ohio; and The Years With Ross, documenting the years of working with the legendary founder and editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross (1892-1951).

A frequently anthologized sketch from My Life is The Night the Bed Fell which can be read on Google.

In the Years With Ross, Thurber comments on the huge thick mane of hair on Ross’s head which made my woman comment that she wanted to take off her shoes and walk barefoot through it.

When Thurber was seven, he and a brother were playing William Tell. His brother’s arrow missed the apple and took out one of Thurber’s eyes. The resulting neurological damage is believed to have caused increasing blindness during Thurber’s later years.

Thurber also wrote that his mother was one of the greatest comedians he ever witnessed. She once pretended to be paralyzed at a revival service and then jumped up screaming, “I’m healed.”

REVIEW POTPOURRI: John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy (AI generated)

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

John F. Kennedy

The 35th President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) was a most vivid, vibrantly alive presence on the family Philco TV set from when I first saw him debate Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994) during October 1960, it being a very cold Friday night, to the assassination in Dallas; I remember Kennedy’s highly strong Irish Boston accent and debonair appearance versus Nixon’s coarse bass speaking voice and the derailing 5 o’clock shadow.

On Election Day in 1960, my 4th grade East Vassalboro School teacher Susan Brondmo all but declared Nixon the winner and everyone in class applauded, except one girl whose family was both Catholic and Democrat. The following day when the Illinois vote came in, she was the only one smiling.

Key events during Kennedy’s 1,000 days in office have been chronicled in detail – the inaugural ceremonies with Robert Frost reading a poem for the occasion (Frost was a dyed in the wool Republican and a huge fan of Eisenhower but was thrilled to be invited by Kennedy that freezing snowy day in January 1961); the Bay of Pigs fiasco; First Lady Jackie’s televised tour of the White House; the enrollment of the first African-American student, James Meredith, at the University of Missisippi, with the National Guard called in; the, for me personally, nightmarish week of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Kennedy’s phenomenal charm at his press conferences; and finally November 22, 1963.

One occasion just a month before Dallas was Kennedy’s visit to the University of Maine/Orono when Dr. Lloyd Elliot was president there and which I watched on TV.

A 1975 book, Conversations With Kennedy, by former Washington Post editor Benjamin C. Bradlee (1921-2014), provides fascinating anecdotes of a close personal friendship between the two men and their wives, beginning in 1958 when Kennedy was still a Senator and he and Bradlee were neighbors.

A few examples:

Early in his campaign, Kennedy admitted to feeling strange about running for the Oval Office himself but then stated that “I stop and look around at the other people who are running for the job. And then I think I’m just as qualified as they are. ”

Joe Kennedy Sr. was testily against his son running in the 1960 West Virginia primary because of its hostility to Catholics. Kennedy ran anyways and won; he and Jackie invited the Bradlees to fly from D.C. to Charleston for a victory celebration and the very bumpy ride terrified Bradlee’s wife Tony and JFK’s sister Jean Smith who kept screaming for her husband Steve.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy consulted with Nixon, with whom he had similar views about the Cold War, but expressed relief that Nixon wasn’t president at the time.

Kennedy was friendly with Ed Muskie and the two went sailing off the Maine coast. He loved the ocean but otherwise preferred city life to the countryside.

As overnight guests at the White House, the Bradlees once witnessed the president wandering around in his night shorts wondering aloud what life was like in that mausoleum known as the Kremlin while the couples were watching an NBC special on it.

Kennedy had a deep admiration for Vice-President Johnson’s talents as a political sharpshooter but found LBJ’s presence at times creepy.

Kennedy sometimes enjoyed listening to gossip on other politicians.

Adlai Stevenson’s reputation as an intellectual may have been overrated. Kennedy read 10 books for every one that Stevenson read.

During the weekend when the country was grieving, Bradlee and his wife were at the White House and witnessed long time Kennedy family friend Dave Powers helping to assuage Jackie’s grief at odd moments with stories of hilarious moments during the 1960 campaign, but then the tragedy would intrude again from the TV coverage and all the other details.

The concluding paragraph – “Jackie was extraordinary. Sometimes she seemed completely detached, as if she were someone else watching the ceremony of that other person’s grief. Sometimes she was silent, obviously torn. Often she would turn to a friend and reminisce, and everyone would join in with their remembrance of things forever past. There is much to be said for the wake. Led by Dave Powers, this one was more often than not surprisingly cheerful, and always warm and tender. “

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Elsie Baker & Frederick Wheeler

Elsie Baker

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Elsie Baker
Frederick Wheeler

A ten-inch acoustic Victor shellac disc presented the duet of contralto Elsie Baker (1883-1971) and baritone Frederick Wheeler (1877-1951) performing There Is Nothing, Dear, I Wouldn’t Do for You from a vaudeville musical revue, All Aboard, produced by comedian Lew Fields who was part of the early 1900s comedy team, Weber and Fields ; and the Orpheus Quartet singing The Girl in the Gingham Gown, which came from a Hippo­drome production, America.

The Girl in the Gingham Gown was recorded October 3, 1913, at the former church in Camden, New Jersey, which Victor used during the World War I years and on into the 1920s; the Baker/Wheeler duet, October 6 of the same year.

Elsie Baker was not only a wonderful contralto with many shellac records to her credit but also an actress on stage and intermittently in silent films and talkies. She even appeared in one of the Ma and Pa Kettle films from the early ‘50s and did a cameo appearance in Jack Lemmon’s hilarious 1964 classic Good Neighbor Sam.

Frederick Wheeler

Baritone Frederick Wheeler recorded for a number of labels in addition to Victor, including duets with his wife, the wonderful soprano Elizabeth Wheeler (1875-1971); I own a ten-inch 78 featuring him and a tenor named Ballard singing a now forgotten but then very popular Nativity classic Star of the East which was recorded during the 1920s for the Sears Roebuck Silvertone label and which can be heard via YouTube.

The Orpheus Quartet consisted of bass William F. Hooley (1861-1918), baritone Reinald Werrenrath (1883-1953), and tenors John Barnes Wells (1880-1935) and Harry Macdonough, a pseudonym for John Scantlebury Macdonald (1871-1931). All four vocalists were high-calibre singers and each of them recorded frequently, both as soloists and as part of different quartets.

The reason for pseudonyms was because these singers recorded so often and for so many different labels that the record labels feared that over exposure might lead to a decline in record sales.

Both sides of this Victor disc were very quaintly pleasant music, even if forgettable, and can also be accessed on the Internet. But I admit to a bias for dusty old 78s.

A footnote – the Hippodrome, during its early 20th century first three or four decades, hosted concerts, circuses and various other large scale extravaganzas and could seat over 5,000 people. The Wikipedia article makes for some interesting reading.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s finest poems is My Lost Youth, originally published in his 1858 volume, The Courtship of Miles Standish. Having been raised in Portland, the poet wrote some verses that evoked what must have been for him the then unspoiled beauty of the Pine Tree State’s city by the sea.

“Often I think of the beautiful town/That is seated by the sea;/Often in thought go up and down/The pleasant streets of that dear old town, /And my youth comes back to me./And a verse of a Lapland song/Is haunting my memory still:/’A boy’s will is the wind’s will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts’….

Longfellow powerfully poeticizes certain geographic details of the city – the harbor; “the black wharves and the slips…sea tides tossing free….Spanish sailors with bearded lips…the beauty and mystery of the ships…magic of the sea.”

The poet then evokes his boyhood memories of the city’s wonderful Deering Oaks:

“I can see the breezy dome of groves,/The shadows of Deering’s Woods;/And the friendships old and the early loves/Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves/In quiet neighborhoods.”

Being also a realist even when being a outpouring romanticist, his ability to balance these sides of himself is one of his greatest strengths as a thinker in poetic form and he writes here:

“There are things of which I may not speak;/There are dreams that cannot die;/There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,/And bring a pallor into the cheek,/And a mist before the eye.”
But Longfellow grandly concludes in a bittersweet wistful manner:

“And Deering’s Woods are fresh and fair,/And with joy that is almost pain/My heart goes back to wander there, /And among the dreams of the days that were,/I find my lost youth again.”

The poem is included in the 1989 Maine Speaks anthology.

Two recent viewing experiences:

Christopher Walken

The 1997 Suicide Kings featured a cast in which the only actor familiar to me was Christopher Walken. He also gave the only decent performance as a Mafia kingpin who is kidnapped by a group of college age idiots and held for ransom.

The film was highly recommended by movie reviewers. I disagree, having found it, except for Walken, a bore.

Another viewing experience is the TV series Madmen, which ran for seven seasons on AMC from 2007 to 2014.

It is a skillfully produced period piece drama depicting the 1960s world of Madison Avenue advertising agencies and their constant high pressure work environments, complete with constantly fascinating period details and surroundings – the dialog, clothing, cars, city streets, constant cigarette smoking indoors and outdoors, suburban gossip, adulteries, very small screen TVs, department store interiors, etc.

The acting of the entire cast is superb; and yes, two performances stand out – those of one agency CEO and founder portrayed by the great Robert Morse (1931-2022) and January Jones who gives an eloquent nuanced characterization of the wife of one of the ad men. She conveys the harrowing emotions of a woman leading a life of quiet desperation.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: The President’s favorite music

Dwight D.Eisenhower

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

The President’s favorite music

RCA Victor released a one lp anthology during the mid-1950s entitled The President’s Favorite Music; I purchased a copy of it for $2 at a record store in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1966, when Lyndon Johnson was president. Of course, the center of attraction on that record was the 34th former President Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), not the 36th one.

The cover photo featured the smiling likable Ike and his lovable First Lady Mamie (1896-1979), while the back contained a paragraph of the president stating a batch of cliches about the importance of music in American life.

The contents of the album (which would not have been released without Eisenhower’s approval relayed through his friend, the CEO of RCA Victor, General David Sarnoff (1891-1971)), consisted of two Bach pieces, Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, an aria from Verdi’s La Traviata, selections from Porgy and Bess, Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave Overture, the Johann Strauss Die Fledermaus Overture and Marian Anderson singing He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands – all of them beautifully performed. It was a record I played many times back when my record collection numbered at 200 discs.

The album listed other favorite pieces of the president but the only one that sticks out in my mind is the Brahms 4th Sym­phony, one of my top ten favorites.

Eisenhower was also a huge fan of Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, a very fine singing group, and he and Mamie watched their TV show every Sunday night.

When it came to books, Eisenhower was an omnivorous reader of Zane Grey westerns and military history, particularly the Civil War. Back in the 1960s, historian Stephen Ambrose was teaching at an obscure community college in rural Louisiana.

One evening, he received a long distance phone call from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. On the other end was Eisenhower who was phoning from the farmhouse where he and Mamie had retired. He told Ambrose that he had just finished that author’s book on an obscure Civil War General.

Eisenhower then invited Ambrose up to visit for a few days, to be his official biographer and to grant exclusive access to all of his papers.

Many books have been written about Eisenhower’s World War II leadership as a general and of his presidency from 1953 to 1961. One of the best is Michael Korda’s 2007 biography Ike: An American Hero which is one of the most balanced bios ever written and filled with fascinating anecdotes.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Sopranos Rosa Ponselle & Barbara Maurel; Composer Serge Prokofiev; Conductor Eugene Ormandy; Singer Gene Pitney; Remington

Rosa Ponselle (left), Barbara Maurel (right)

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Rosa Ponselle
Barbara Maurel

A 1919 Columbia ten inch acoustic 78 rpm shellac has a very lovely duet of sopranos Rosa Ponselle (1897-1981) and Barbara Maurel (1889-?) performing the very well-known funeral hymn Abide With Me, which was often sung as a special number on non-funeral church Sundays by my father and three of his brothers during the GOLDEN DAYS of my little boy years growing up on China Lake’s non-swimming East Vassalboro side.

This and two other recordings of it, the megahit Victor Red Seal 1915 shellac by soprano Alma Gluck (1884-1938) and contralto Louise Homer (1871-1947); and a 1997 YouTube by Leslie Garrett with a magnificently huge choir and orchestra can be heard via YouTube.

Serge Prokofiev

Serge Prokofiev

Russian composer Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953) struggled for well over 20 years with his opera War and Peace and subjected it to frequent revisions, especially when cordially requested to do so by the Central Committee of the Stalinist Soviet Union; portions of it were performed a few times in both small and large halls but a full-scale production was delayed until six years after Prokofiev’s death when a 1959 Bolshoi Opera premiere occurred.

A friend, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007), premiered the Cello Sonata and a couple of other pieces. By 1970, Rostropovich had also taken up conducting and, during the mid-1970s after he and his family had been forced to leave the Soviet Union because of his friendship with the exiled novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he was appointed music director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC.

In 1986, Rostropovich recorded the complete War and Peace in Paris with a cast that included his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, in one of the lead roles on an Erato set of four compact discs. The music is wide-ranging in its emotions with a massive orchestra augmented by extra brass, percussion and simulated artillery fire sound effects in its depiction of Napoleon’s early 1800s invasion of Russia. There are grand marches, choral numbers, moments of sublime beauty, and the colorfully abrasive rhythms and sonorities that exemplify Prokofiev’s compositional genius.

Eugene Ormandy

Eugene Ormandy

A 1957 Columbia Masterworks monaural LP, ML 5261, features the consistently great Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) conducting the Philadel­phia Or­chestra in a group of colorful show pieces of classical music- Smetana’s Moldau, Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz, Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, and three excerpts from Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust. The record has been out of print for decades but its contents can also be heard on YouTube.

Gene Pitney

Gene Pitney

Singer Gene Pitney (1940-2006) achieved much success among adolescents with such early ‘60s rock and roll hits Town Without Pity, and Only Love Can Break A Heart. His 1966 LP Blue Gene (Musicor MM 2006) has his rough-edged but riveting renditions of Burt Bacharach’s 24 Hours From Tulsa – for me, the best item on the album with Bacharach doing the arrangement; the very high quality title song; and covers of I’ll Be Seeing You, Autumn Leaves, Answer Me My Love, Maybe You’ll Be There (a hit for Gordon Jenkins in 1948 on a Decca 78) etc.

Remington

Remington was the first inexpensive classical record label and started issuing its $2 releases in 1951. A 1952 three record set of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto was taped in Florence by names known only to opera buffs but ones who were very good – baritone Ivan Petroff as the hunch-backed, vindictive title character, soprano Orlandina Orlandini as Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda, and tenor Gino Sarri as the Duke who comes courting Gilda on the sly because he is detested by her father.

It is also an opera breathing with phenomenally beautiful arias and other set pieces and choruses and its story line gets on with it.

Erasmo Ghiglia conducted the ensemble of soloists, choristers and orchestral musicians in Florence more than 70 years ago and it too is available for listening on YouTube.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Music Potpourri

Frederic Chopin

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Frederic Chopin

Polish-born Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) composed his incredibly beautiful two Piano Concertos when he was 20. The first one was my favorite of the two for decades while the second didn’t particularly thrill me until more recent years.

As usual with my favorite pieces, I have collected duplicates of the two Concertos and one in particular of the second stands out. It is a Columbia Master­works LP , ML 4135, the first American release of a 1946 English Columbia recording featuring two Polish artists, pianist Witold Malcuzynski (1914-1977) collaborating with Paul Kletzki (1900-1973) conducting the then-newly created Philharmonia Orchestra of London which producer Walter Legge (1906-1979) assembled mainly for recording purposes.

The second movement Larghetto is one of my top five favorite piano concerto second movements for its exquisite notes – the other four being those of the Brahms 1st Piano Concerto, the Beethoven 3rd and Emperor and the Rachmaninoff 2nd. Malcuzynski and Kletzki conveyed a feeling they were laying their hearts and souls out there with just how closely they submitted to communicating its divinely inspired ebb and flow.

In 1940 Malcuzynski and his wife escaped from Nazi-occupied France to Portugal in a sealed train car; Maestro Kletzki left Poland during the early 1930s but lost his mother and two sisters during the Holocaust.

A biographer of Chopin, James Gibbons Huneker (1857-1921), wrote the following about the music from the composer’s last years of failing health: “Forth from his misery came sweetness and strength, like honey from the lion.”

Bob Crewe

Bob Crewe

Singer Bob Crewe (1930-2014) raised a large sum of money to finance his first record of two quite forgettable songs, Don’t You Care and Pride, with arranger Gil Evans and his orchestra, which was released as a ten-inch 78 rpm in 1953 (BBS 118).

Crewe later achieved fame as a songwriter of late ‘50s hits such as Silhouettes, Walk Like a Man, and Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You. He also produced a batch of songs for the Four Seasons. In 2014, he died in a nursing home in Scarborough.

Evans later arranged for jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

Haydn Symphonies

Vilmos Tatrai

A pair of Haydn Symphonies, Numbers 7 and 49, were given very sprightly performances by Vilmos Tatrai (1912-1999) and the Hungarian Chamber Orchestra on a 1967 LP on the high quality Qualiton label (LPX 1103). Qualiton records had a huge distribution center in Queens, New York, which was started by a Hungarian lawyer named Otto Quittner (1924-2011) who supplied me with a number of review copies for my columns in the now-defunct Sweet Potato music publication in Portland before I moved to Houston in 1980 for 16 years.

Connie Francis

Connie Francis

The Very Best of Connie Francis (1937-) features 15 of her megahits from the late ‘50s to the early ‘60s, including, of course, Who’s Sorry Now, Among My Souvenirs, Where the Boys Are, Second Hand Love, My Happiness, etc. Despite the sticky sweet sentimentality of some of these songs, she sang them beautifully and received good arrangements.