REVIEW POTPOURRI: Looking back, Part 4

by Peter Cates

Continuing with memories – when I applied at the personnel office of Jordan Marsh, I remember seeing three teenage boys sitting bare-chested, wearing cheap looking hats, giggling among themselves, smoking cigarettes one after another, the sign of “No smoking” apparently not applicable to those who can’t read.

Meanwhile, I was wearing a sports jacket and other gussied up apparel.

I remember a rather blotchy red-faced gentleman with longish silver-colored hair, slightly paunchy, entering the inner sanctum office and calling in the three bare-chested gentlemen one at a time, spending five or ten minutes with each one considering their highly experienced qualifications .

I was then called in and, after the interviewer looked over my application which I forgot to mention had already been submitted to a secretary in the room, he asked what area I was interested in. I, of course, stated the record department.

After additional questioning, he told me to walk across the street to the third floor office of the Annex manager Mr. Leslie Black. Meanwhile, he would call that individual telling him to expect me.

I entered a small office with two men occupying it, both attired in gray suits, one wearing glasses. He is Mr. Black while the other man is Mr. Paul Eames. While Black, after graciously shaking hands is looking over the application which had been miraculously and invisibly transmitted, Eames inquires about Maine and recounts memories of fishing trips to Kennebunkport.

Black then offers me a position in the record department and tells me to report for two days of employee training classes the following Wednesday morning early at 8 a.m.

I report back to the personnel manager who expresses hope that I will be staying with them for a while. He then calls somebody else to chew them out for verbally abusing employees on their watch and for refusing their lunch breaks.

More memories next time.

Listening to Overtures

As a rule, I find listening to an entire album of Overtures more tiring than one two- or three-hour opera however longer than the Overtures together.

In live symphony orchestra concerts, the programs usually consist of an Overture followed by a Concerto; the first half lasting roughly 45 minutes before a 20 to 30 minute intermission for musicians and audience.

Then the orchestra returns for the major work, usually a well-known Symphony often by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and possibly Sibelius or one by Mahler that lasts just under an hour.

Recently I listened to two albums, each containing four Overtures.

The first was a Musical Heritage Society cassette with the late Claudio Abbado (1933-2014) conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the 4 Overtures that Beethoven composed for his opera, Fidelio. They consist of Leonore #1, Leonore #2, Leonore #3 and the Fidelio Overture, it being the one that begins the opera.

The others are supposed to be spread out between the acts. Most modern productions don’t even bother with the three Leonores because of the extra excessive length of a given evening.

However, all four Overtures, if individually spread out over four days, are worthwhile active listening with much powerful drama and beauty and Abbado and his Vienna players conveyed that powerful drama and beauty. The recordings come from the mid-1980s. At the time Abbado was Music Director of the Vienna State Opera.

A Forum stereo LP from the late ‘50s features Jean Martinon (1910-1976) conducting France’s Lamoureux Orchestra, of which he was Music Director from 1951 to 1957, in four Overtures of Hector Berlioz- The Corsair, the Roman Carnival, King Lear, and Beatrice and Benedict.

Each of these four, as with those of Beethoven, are individually rewarding listening, Berlioz especially gifted at blending spirited rhythms and perky details with quieter passages of tremendous beauty for emotional contrast. Again, all four the same evening is overload.

For me, Martinon is one of my top ten or 12 favorite conductors who was especially colorful with French composers ranging from Berlioz to Debussy and Ravel, etcs. but also interpreted the Germans and Russians well. I have a very exciting Tchaikovsky Pathetique Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic and Dvorak Slavonic Dances with the London Symphony. And his conducting of these Overtures was very very satisfying.

In 1963, Martinon succeeded Fritz Reiner as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony for five years until 1968. Unfortunately, anyone succeeding Reiner was going to be criticized because Reiner with his kind of brilliance was next to impossible to replace, as Martinon, despite his own talents, found out. A story for another day.

P.S: Martinon guest conducted the Boston Symphony a number of times and in January, 1966, traveled with the Orchestra to Portland’s Merrill Auditorium where he was photographed with the President of Bowdoin College. It would have been for me a once in a lifetime experience if some adult could have driven me the short 70 miles from East Vassalboro to Portland, but I was 14, already stuck in boarding school and much too poor to afford tickets. Also, blizzard conditions prevailed the evening of the concert. One of those moments of true musical greatness here in Maine, the equivalent of Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony appearing six years earlier in Burlington, Vermont.

(Read Part 3 here.)