George Szell, Devoted to Mozart
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I promise—and this is a promise I will try to keep—that I won’t keep on about how beautiful and fulfilling these Original Jacket Collection boxes are as items (though they are) and will instead turn to the content, the music. Conductor and pianist George Szell spent almost 35 years helming the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, making that group what it remains today, a national treasure. He was a child prodigy pianist (classmate of Rudolf Serkin in Vienna) and an accomplished composer to boot (though, alas, we know little of his music; someday there should be a box dedicated to compositions of the great performers that we don’t know, with music by Szell, Furtwangler, Dino Lipati, Koussevitzky…but I digress). Like many, he fled to America in 1939 as the War begain, eventually got a job in Cleveland, and the rest, as they say, is history. While there, he got the reputation of being something of a hardass to say the least: he played the dictatorial, unforgiving music director to the hilt, and in doing so re-invented the orchestra, Toscanini-style.
So this box is devoted to his devotion to Mozart, a composer he preferred above all others. Eric Kisch’s excellent liner notes begin with a quote from Maestro Szell in a 1963 Time Magazine cover story: “While rehearsing the Berlin Philharmonic for a recording some time ago, he worked the players so hard that their manager said ‘come, come, Szell, you’re going at this as if it were a matter of life and death.’ Szell looked stunned. ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘It is! It is!’.” What amazes me about this quote is not how old-fashioned this line of thinking can be—and I mean that as a compliment, that this music, to these people playing, mattered—but that it comes from a world where the conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra can be on the cover of Time. That is also pretty old fashioned, if you ask me. Music, it seemed, mattered then to more than just the maestro, and these boxes, in thought and deed, remind us of that more golden age than our own.
So I jumped right in, his recording of that masterpiece of Sturm und drang, the 40th Symphony. And, wow! Szell’s recording is a masterpiece of pacing and control—he is not one of those “sweaty” conductors like Bernstein or Gergiev but rather an “austere” conductor like Boulez or Barenboim. Everything is clear, everything is in the right place. The first movement is a fury, as it is supposed to be, but a controlled fury; the second a calm sea; the third, a restrained and appropriately creepy menuet; and the final, a terrifying cap on a terrifying piece (listen, especially, to the horns, which I’ve honestly never heard done quite like this before). When Lenny conducts the last movement, you get the feeling it might go off the rails; when Szell does it, you get the feeling of someone trying with all their might not to go off the rails. Like two equal but opposite actors playing Hamlet—one for the rage and madness, the other for the contempt and quiet bile—these are two excellent notions of how this masterpiece can be read.
And please, do not be fooled, as I was, that this is in fact the fifth symphony of Beethoven as it says on the back of the “record.” This is, I suspect, a long-ago misprint.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In This Blog
GEORGE SZELL PLAYS AND CONDUCTS MOZART (ORIGINAL JACKET COLLECTION)
For more information, visit www.OriginalJacket.com or Amazon.com
More on Puccini: The Complete Operas
By Daniel Felsenfeld
Like I said before, I am one of those people who loves a series, a complete edition, a one-stop-shopping experience. So the Puccini: Complete Operas box is really something because you can get all of Puccini’s fantastic operas in one place, almost his entire life’s work (minus his exquisite Mass, but I’ll not quibble) including lesser works, early works, like Le Villi and Edgar, powerful pieces until you look at the rest of the output. But the recordings here—by Lorin Maazel and the always-underrated Eve Queler and the Opera Orchestra of New York—make them shine.
In my previous post, I mentioned Tosca (Puccini’s “shabby little shocker” which is, for my money, his most perfect work because music and drama are perfectly married) is hot, apparently, being featured not only in the Bond film Quantum of Solace, but also Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk. So I went and listened (and re-listened and re-listened and re-listened) to Leontyne Price’s magnificent “Vissi d’arte” (track 12 of disc 9, or what is the second in the Tosca envelope) and was totally taken not only by the golden voice (I know, I know, this is typical opera-fannishness to rave not only about the diva but about that aria, but come on, it really is striking) but by the power of Puccini’s score in Zubin Metha’s hands. This is music that needs to be not perfectly in time to be powerful (as I learned early on when trying to conduct along to old Claudia Muzio records and finding I could not) and it flows endlessly, rapturously. But it is Act II (tracks 1-14 on Tosca’s second disc) that always grabs and clips, Puccini (to use the hackneyed cliché) at the height of his powers. Every single moment of the drama can be found in the music—shut your eyes and listen and it is not difficult to imagine what is going on. This was the act that sold me on Puccini (well, that and the Mass, but I digress…) and I’ve always defended him since.
OK, that and the powerful fugue—a fugue!—that commences Madame Butterfly. What student composer could not love that?
It really is wonderful news for opera fans, to have all these recordings in one place. Boheme led by Solti with Caballe and Domingo, Scotto in Butterfly, Anna Moffo in La Rondine, and a galaxy of stars in Il Tritico! All right there, beautifully packaged with detailed synopses included. Where on earth do I start?
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In This Blog
PUCCINI: THE COMPLETE OPERAS (Box Set)
For more information, visit www.SonyBMGMasterworks.com or Amazon.com
Fanciulla from Puccini: The Complete Operas
By Daniel Felsenfeld
How weird is Puccini’s opera La Fanciulla del West (which translates roughly as “Girl of the Golden West”). I mean, its an Italian’s Frenchfied approach to the Wild Wild West. It is hard for us Americans (or certainly for this American), whose cowboys and swinging saloon doors are part of our own mythology, to square a slightly-post-tonal verging-on-Debussy approach to this topic—we want our wide open spaces musically depicted by, say Aaron Copland or Roy Harris. But to Puccini, writing this piece when Copland was only ten (and decades before Oklahoma! or Annie Get Your Gun), and when the music world was taking in more experimental fare (leaving a number of composers of a so-called conservative stripe out in the proverbial cold), playwright David Belasco’s version of the California Gold Rush must have been as far-off and, pardon me, oriental as that same author’s Madame Butterfly.
So Puccini set this tale of love in a small California town to fulfill a commission he’d received from the Metropolitan Opera. What’s weirdest about this piece, it is probably his most musically “advanced” work in that he makes use of some of the developments composers in France were getting all the credit for: polychords (two chords layered atop one another), whole-tone scales, bitonality (music that is in two keys simultaneously). Weirder still, it is Puccini’s most Wagnerian approach to opera, fewer showstopping arias and more integrated motives. What worked for Wagner atop Valhalla also seemed apropos of the Wild West to Puccini.
Probably for these reasons, the show has never been a real hit in America (that and in Act II there is a tune that Sir Andrew so blatantly stole for his own opera about a man in a mask and a crashing chandelier that it is hard not to snigger, hard to hear past, though obviously this is no fault of Puccini’s). But it is worth hearing, and is, for my money, the Italian composer’s most compelling work. It may not make you swoon like Turandot or laugh like Gianni Schicchi, but it is a breathtakingly well-constructed and above-all intelligent work, a side-credit to a composer whose reputation for seriousness could use a little rehabilitating.
A little pause here to appreciate the composer himself. All through school I was an inveterate opera lover, but these were colors I could not often fly because it betrayed a lack of seriousness. Popularity, especially in the opera house, was the watchword of the sellout, and this relegated a number of brilliant composers like Verdi, Bellini, Wagner (even!), Britten, Glass and of course Puccini to the heap of people we were supposed to ignore. I always quietly disagreed. I mean, if one could write tunes like that, those lilting, ever-evolving endless streams of melody of which this composer seems to possess a limitless supply, weren’t you truly a great composer? This is not to mention the powerful fugue that opens Madame Butterfly, the masterful orchestration, and, yes, the motives that run through La Fanciulla like glue. This was no roar-of-the-greasepaint hack but a trained and above-all limitlessly talented composer of the authentic and curious variety.
I’ll get into the recording more in a later post, but honestly, as Dick Johnson (the role Puccini wrote for Enrico Caruso) it is hard to imagine better than Placido Domingo under the staunch and searching direction of conductor Lorin Maazel. A credit to this already-pretty-amazing Puccini The Complete Operas box.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In This Blog
PUCCINI: THE COMPLETE OPERAS (Box Set)
For more information, visit www.SonyBMGMasterworks.com or Amazon.com
Last Bow to Broadway: The American Musical
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I’d say that disc two of Broadway: The American Musical is a great outline of commercial theatre coming into its own. It was the era of true greats throwing their first stones: Leonard Bernstein (here represented for On the Town and the inimitable West Side Story, about which more later of course) and Kurt Weill in his various incarnations. I single these two composers out even though other greats are represented—Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Gershwin, i.e.—because it they represent an odd and vanished moment of the so-called “high art” tradition coming to the “low art” palaces of Broadway. Weill is a weird artist because he had many styles, both of which are typified here: his Cabaret-Opera style (Threepenny Opera) and his Broadway style (Lost in the Stars). He also wrote symphonies, string quartets, operas, etc. When he came to America, he adapted his style to fit the bill—brilliantly, effortlessly—and contributed some enduring works, though it is also the sign of the times that a collaboration between himself and fierce leftist iconoclast Bertolt Brecht (via the translation of Marc Blitzstein) could have a life on (or off) Broadway, especially when the subject matter is that of murder, prostitution, corruption, degradation and filth. Of course, it is hard for a certain segment of the population to hear “Mack the Knife,” a jazzy little number about a serial murderer (done for maximum irony) without thinking of Sinatra; worse, there are those of us who came of age a little later who cannot help but think of a singing crescent moon representing a certain fast food chain.
Leonard Bernstein is a different beast because in his famous and across-the-board influential musical West Side Story he took the opposite approach, in a way, taking contemporary classical music and forcing it to fit the commercial stage. The piece is a puzzle, intentionally or not. Listen to the whole score for hints of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Symphony of Psalms, Blitzstein’s (underrated) opera Regina, and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. It’s all there, not to mention jazz, a dodecaphonic fugue, and just about anything Lenny the omnivore could throw in and work his magic upon. Regardless of weather or not you can hear these references, Bernstein’s score (represented by the fantastic song “Tonight” sung by Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence) is beautiful, moving and touching.
Bernstein, incidentally, is also represented by “Glitter and be Gay” from the lovely-but-problematic show Candide, a spectacular song from a piece that could never quite find its footing despite many rewrites by many brilliant people like Lillian Hellman and Stephen Sondheim—too many cooks, perhaps? The song is spectacular, a “jewel aria” like no other.
It is sad that I bid farewell as a blogger to Broadway: The American Musical, because I’ve so much enjoyed not only listening to it, but also thinking and writing about it. I am sure you will too.
More, next, on the complete Puccini. Tosca is hot, apparently, being featured not only in the Bond film Quantum of Solace, but also Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In This Blog
Broadway: The American Musical
For more information, visit www.MasterworksBroadway.com or Amazon.com
I Love Kristin Chenoweth!
By Daniel Felsenfeld
Holiday records are not really my bag, for the most part. Maybe it is because I am from Los Angeles and Jewish (though as I type this, I think of Christmas as being a weirdly West Coast phenomenon; I think of the Christmas scenes from Almost Famous and the Christmas record of Aimee Mann and both of those seem to jibe in a particular way), maybe it is because it smacks of retail. But I have to confess I was charmed by Kristin Chenoweth’s A Lovely Way to Spend Christmas, but then again, I am always charmed by all things Chenoweth.
Ever since Wicked (a show to which I have a deep attachment largely because I am friends with the composer) I have been persuaded by her talent in a serious way. She is one of those performers who can sell anything—not because she’s pretty (though boy is she) or because she’s funny (though boy is she) but because there’s something so sincere and lovely about her delivery of just about everything that, in her version, even the sappiest Yuletide offering comes off as well-meant, well-heard, well-sung and just so completely well-intentioned that how can you not love it? And what a good Holiday record needs more than anything, more than classy arrangements or even excellent material, is to be meant. Wink once at the audience, and it’s all over, and Chenoweth knows this and knows it well.
Most Christmas records aim to cover the Christmas basics—“Holly-Jolly” for cheek, check, “O Holy Night” for seriousness, check, “Blue Christmas” for dark edge, check—and while Chenoweth certainly does not shy away from some fundamentals (“What Child is This”, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” or “Silver Bells”), she also takes on some less-familiar material. “Christmas Island,” for example, evokes a tropical Yule (which I approve of, as mine was always arid and warm so this is not a stretch) while invoking, say, Betty Boop or even Cyndi Lauper. There’s a playful sexiness to this one, Kristin Chenoweth square in her element. This is followed by the thoughtful and somewhat more subdued “The Christmas Waltz.”
There’s also a path to the album, a trajectory. It opens with “I’ll be Home for Christmas” and wends its way (via an hysterical “Sleigh Ride,” through the above-mentioned islands, an exotically-tinged “What Child is This?”) to a thoughtful “Home on Christmas Day,” followed by “Born on Christmas Day” and then her closing salvo. We can almost track the singer’s journey through many moods, many lands, many styles (of music and singing) to her ultimate journey, the coziness of home and wishes of peace.
Christmas, holiday family trouble aside, is supposed to be a time of optimism, of hope, of unity, and Chenoweth is nothing if not a glittering ray of positive, a lovely blonde bolt of un-ironic sunshine with an impressive three-octave range. And what I remember most fondly about her performance in Wicked was her capacity to sell a cliché—in the case of that show, the dippy and judgmental popular girl who sees the error of her ways after getting the guy of her dreams—with so much vitality and sincerity that it had layers. She does it here, too, closing her record with a medley of “Sleep Well Little Children” and “What a Wonderful World,” which in other hands might be something only the most egg-noggy among us could love, but here, even with the froth of tinkling bells clouding the sound a little, her message is pure, simple, deeply meant, and therefore full of the appropriate joy.
I suppose it might carry me through Chinatown and to the movies, the annual Jewish Christmas tradition. Not bad, not bad at all.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In This Blog
Kristin Chenoweth : A Lovely Way To Spend Christmas
Watch Kristin talk about “A Lovely Way To Spend Christmas”!
For more information, visit www.kristin-chenoweth.com or Amazon.com.
Yo-Yo Ma Celebrate & Collaborate Contest Update
Watch a special message from Yo-Yo Ma!
For more information on the “Celebrate & Collaborate with Yo-Yo Ma” contest, visit Indaba Music website or Yo-YoMa.com. (The contest ends December 31, 2008.)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Yo-Yo Ma: Songs of Joy and Peace
For more information, visit www.Yo-YoMa.com
Click HERE to learn about “Celebrate and Collaborate with Yo-Yo Ma” Contest!!
The Golden Age of Broadway
By Daniel Felsenfeld
Alright, going back. The so-called “Golden Age” of Broadway is gorgeously summarized by the third disc of Broadway: The American Musical. This collection of great great songs is a snapshot of the era where Broadway led the popular culture rather than the subsequent vice-versa. It opens with a legendary performance: Robert Preston as the scurrilous Harold Hill in The Music Man singing “Seventy-Six Trombones.” This recording proves a couple of things about this period in Broadway’s luminescence: one, that a rousing number is what any show needed, and two, that a leading man, possessed of the appropriate charisma and capacity for razzle-dazzle, did not have to be able to sing. Preston still amazes, even if he doesn’t exactly hit the notes.
After this opening smash from The Music Man, the disc continues with a deluge of songs and performances so part of the cultural landscape that it is hard to imagine there was a time in which these things were new: “I Enjoy Being a Girl” from Flower Drum Song, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from Gypsy (Ethel Merman!), Mary Martin singing “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, “Put on a Happy Face” from Bye-Bye Birdie (Dick Van Dyke!), Richard Burton singing (sort of, pace Preston) the title song from Camelot, the late-great Jerry Orbach doing “Try to Remember” from The Fantasticks, Zero Mostel from Forum and Fiddler, Carol Channing from Hello, Dolly!, Streisand singing “People”, Angela Lansbury in Mame. This is not so much a summary of Broadway as a role-call of greats, reminding me how important a lot of this music is, how unassailable and entrenched.
If I had to pick a favorite, I’d have to go with Richard Kiley’s performance of the most inspiring song ever written (and I am not—not—ashamed to admit this): “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha. It is not so much Kiley’s performance—which I am sure was great in the house but, much like much of the “singing” on this disc, leaves a little to be desired in terms of pitch—but the way he shapes the song, the way he persuades with his commitment—and this is a great song, pre-shaped, ready to reach deep into our hearts and urge us to “…march into hell for a heavenly cause.” Plus the use of the guitar always amazes me.
But now that I’ve written this, I blanche because I don’t want to sleight Lee Remick singing the title song from Anyone Can Whistle, a small wonder, both song and performance. But then, of course, as I write this, I feel I’ve neglected Anthony Newly singing “What Kind of Fool Am I?” from his Stop the World, I Want to Get Off. Or Robert Morse singing “I Believe In You” from How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying to himself. And then, of course, I pity Gwen Verdon, who burns the proverbial barn singing “If They Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity, and feel I’ve neglected her from the list because this too is the stuff of legends.
Gertrude Stein once said, pointing to her two Picasso canvases, that if she had to save one painting she’d take those two. I know how she feels. Mercifully, one need not sacrifice any of these understandably-vaunted (and here anthologized) performances. Just get the discs!
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In This Blog
Broadway: The American Musical
For more information, visit www.MasterworksBroadway.com or Amazon.com
Broadway’s Most Complicated Era
By Daniel Felsenfeld
Disc Four of the Broadway: The American Musical is the most confusing, simply because of its range. This was the 1960s and 70s, and things really began to change. For one thing, the physical place of Broadway in those days, Times Square, was a mess, a horror show of depravity. 42nd Street was a dismal row of X-rated movie theatres, strip clubs, video shops, and the sleaze fanned out. So there are a few things during this decade that actually reflect this—in different ways. That’s why you can have selections from Hair alongside selections from, say, No, No, Nanette. Annie versus The Wiz, Barnum versus Dreamgirls. Some might argue that this was when Broadway took a downturn, that this kind of thinking crossed with its later overwhelming expense led to the so-called “jukebox musicals” of today (like Movin’ Out or Mama Mia), but I think it reflects a healthy mix of curiosities, and the notion that Broadway can affect the major cultural dialogue on many fronts. Hair of course was the revolution it purported to be (I always think of Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame, who went to see Hair and came home and said “it’s over for me.” Must have been terrifying.) and spawned a number of pieces—Pippin, Godspell (conspicuously absent from these precedings), Evita, and Jesus Christ Superstar. Suddenly Broadway could rock.
This disc starts on safe ground—Cabaret (which is like echt-Brecht and Weill) and also ends there, with one of the most beautiful songs ever on the stage, “The Bells of St. Sebastien” from Nine. This lineup argues that Broadway did not entirely go to the rock revolutionaries, because here we have this straight-up composed song, closer to Puccini than anything else on any of these discs (sorry Mr. Lloyd Webber) from what was a popular and influential musical. So it is not like Broadway dissolved completely, but rather it expanded, allowing space for Dreamgirls as much as for the musicals of Sondheim or this beautiful song from Nine by Maury Yeston.
Next time, further back to the “golden age” and beyond…
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In This Blog
Broadway: The American Musical
For more information, visit www.MasterworksBroadway.com or Amazon.com
Watch Yo-Yo Ma interview on CNN!
Watch Yo-Yo Ma talk about “Songs of Joy and Peace” on CNN!
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Yo-Yo Ma: Songs of Joy and Peace
For more information, visit www.Yo-YoMa.com
Click HERE to learn about “Celebrate and Collaborate with Yo-Yo Ma” Contest!!
Broadway: The American Musical
By Daniel Felsenfeld
It seems as the Broadway Musical wanes to what many people would consider a close (insofar as it is a part of the cultural dialogue—how many times has Ben Brantley written in the Times of his longing to return to the era where Broadway led pop rather than today’s vice-versa?) retrospective adds to the piles of other retrospectives, joining together to explain, often in gorgeously packaged and slickly produced products, just how great this thing actually was. Perhaps the most successful of these is called Broadway: The American Musical, a CD set of a series on PBS by the same title (one, mind you, that any fan would want, with great pictures, intelligent notes, and excellent recordings of age-old favorites).
Now I myself am a serious composer of symphonies, chamber music, operas, etc. But I have dark roots in the theatre, as a composer, and at one early point, an accompanist and conductor. So as someone who actively participated in this world (I wrote five, I played hundreds, I listened to everything) I am free to knock it a little because I do it with secret love. So when I got the (giftable) box for Broadway: The American Musical I did not start at the beginning, but put in the final disc to hear the most recent entries. Wow. Weird.
With a Proustian rush this music that defined my adolescence came back to me hard—“Memory” from Cats, “The American Dream” from Miss Saigon, “You’re Nothing Without Me” from City of Angels, “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Miserables, “Music of the Night” from Phantom of the Opera (which once I played in a darkened theatre in the presence of Mr. Lloyd Webber)—and I had one of those experiences where I heard something that I knew intimately for the first time, because, honestly, I don’t think I’ve sat and listened to, say, anything from Cats for two decades. Not bad, not bad at all. This kind of music, from those “big box” musicals that many think ruined Broadway in the 80s, is easy to condemn, like school cafeteria food, the subway system, the postal service, but in this context of no context, there’s much to love. It is one thing to hear this music in the theatre, in the presence of a floating tire or landing helicopter or earthbound chandelier, but here, in the privacy of my room, absent expensive razzle-dazzle, these people could really write tunes! “Memory,” for all its flaws, is deeply and satisfyingly melodic (even if it remains for most a guilty pleasure). Same for the tunes from those huge hits Miss Saigon and Les Miserables, not to mention Phantom of the Opera (which, I found out, still runs on Broadway—I kinda forgot it was there).
Now, maybe I betray my age, because, for better or for worse, big-box Broadway is my Broadway so I cannot help but love it for reasons of nostalgia. In my brain, these pieces work differently because I was younger and full of adolescent wonder. (By this I mean: when I listened today, edging 40, I am surprised by how synth-pop a lot of these scores sound because in my idealized vision of them they are lush orchestral offerings.) But perhaps you are younger than I, and might have opinions on the songs later on the disc—selections from The Boy from Oz, Mama Mia, Movin’ Out, those “jukebox” musicals of plundered pop catalogues sewn together with a narrative. Perhaps this is your Broadway and you are therefore able to make more intelligent comments about “Dancing Queen”, “I Go to Rio” or “Movin Out” because to me I cannot get the sounds of the originals from my mind.
Now, as tickets to these shows can run huge dollars, I’ve only seen one of the more recent “composed” shows (Wicked, mostly because Stephen Schwartz, the composer, is a friend). So I do not know what is happening onstage in, say, The Producers (who could get a ticket to that when it was here?) or Hairspray. Or The Lion King. Perhaps I have no comments on “Dancing Queen” because I don’t see it as anything other than a stand-alone song rather than part of a story. But I will say this for the future of the Broadway Musical: if “Defying Gravity” is any indication—a powerful, potent, intelligent song that outlines an absolutely electrifying moment on stage—then the idea that we can look back at Broadway like we’d examine a corpse is not remotely true. Eras end, but with songs this moving, this creative, this powerful still being written (and listened to by sold-out nightly crowds) we may actually be on the verge of a new era rather than at the end.
After looking forward, I’ll spend a little time looking back, seeing the past through the lens of the present, defying history’s gravity as it were.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In This Blog
Broadway: The American Musical
For more information, visit www.MasterworksBroadway.com or Amazon.com