A Fast Few Weeks....

Ann was away for 18 days, taking a trip to India, one she has always dreamt about, a non-sanitized version, traveling from Delhi to Varanasi, visiting small villages and all the important destinations like the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort.  It was vigorous and demanding, more than I wanted to do, and with a small group.  Group travel has never been my "thing" so we agreed: she should go and I should stay home.  We've done that before, and being by myself is no big deal. 

She has now returned home, but the day before she left, she helped with one of the piano concerts I do from time to time at senior homes in Florida, the most recent one at the Waterford in Juno Beach, a very nice facility with continuous levels of care.

I've performed there before, but only in the assisted living wing, which was somewhat difficult as the piano had seen its better days, my having little ability to modulate loud / soft,  and even the keys sometime sticking, making it almost torture to perform.  This time I "graduated" to their auditorium which had a lovely grand piano, a pleasure to play. 

I usually write a brief narrative when I compile a program, basically to introduce the various sections and put the selections in an overall structure, but always found it off putting to have to get up from the piano to talk and then sit down again.   So Ann helped me present the narrative and even made a cell phone recording of one of the pieces I played (Moon River, even though I play other pieces better, but it just happened to be the one where she was able to unobtrusively record).

As a cell phone recording, the sound is merely passable, as is the photographic composition, but one thing it did capture was the bizarre lighting of the stage, which was put on just as I was beginning to play.  (I found it disconcerting, but the show must go on!).  So I include that video below, along with the narrative of the entire program. 

I had already performed Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Andrew Lloyd Webber programs at this facility before, so I decided to make this one an eclectic compilation of songs from the Great American Songbook, under the rubric, "Music Makes Us:"

BOB:

David Byrne in his recently published How Music Works, made a profound observation: "We don't make music; it makes us." How true. And we are sort of defined by the music we listen to. For my wife Ann and myself, it is the Great American Songbook, music we sometimes we refer to as "The Standards," many coming from our theatre and films or just pieces written for or by some of our recording artists. For this program I’ve chosen some diverse pieces from "The Songbook."  It is music our generation will always remember. I'm going to turn over the narration of the program to Ann, so I can settle here at the piano.

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ANN:

In keeping with the theme, Bob's first piece is by Joe Raposo, who wrote much of the music for Sesame Street but is perhaps best known for the work he did with Frank Sinatra and, in particular, this piece, You Will Be My Music.

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How about flying down to Rio as the next medley of pieces are by two of the best known Brazilian composes, Luiz Bonfa and Antonio Jobim? Bonfa wrote A Day in the Life of a Fool for the film "Black Orpheus." This will be followed by two pieces by the legendary Jobim, whose work has become a permanent part of the Great American Songbook, How Insensitive, and concluding with Dindi.

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From songwriters we turn to a lyricist, Johnny Mercer, who worked with a number of great Broadway and film composers. Bob is going to play a few of his best known, Once Upon a Summertime, Moon River and finally, one of our favorites, I'm Old Fashioned.

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One of the greatest jazz pianists ever, who was a composer as well, is Bill Evans. The first piece was written by him, Waltz for Debby which is followed by another in 3/4 time, How My Heart Sings (composed by Earl Zindars), and then one by a composer Evans frequently recorded, Denny Zeitlin's Quiet Now.

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Here is a thematic group of melodies, ones that are telling related stories of Youth and Love, of course favorite faire for songwriters, such as Young and Foolish, then Young Love (by the famous pianist, Errol Gardner), Can't Help Lovin' That Man of Mine (by the great Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, written for Showboat), concluding with Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers' My Funny Valentine.

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From Youth and Love we evolve to songs concerning Time and Remembrance. As Time Goes By was immortalized in the 1942 movie Casablanca. Time after Time is a classic written by the great team of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne. Then we will always think of Bob Hope when we hear Thanks For the Memory. This section will conclude with Andrew Lloyd Webber's Memory from Cats.

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We now turn to three songs, the only relationship between them is they involve body parts -- the face and the arms! But seriously, they are all beautiful melodic masterpieces. The first is the better known of the three, I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face from Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady. Then two songs -- ones not frequently heard -- I See Your Face Before Me by Arthur Schwartz (the father of Jonathan Schwartz who has long hosted a Sinatra radio program) and I Got Lost in His Arms from Annie Got Her Gun, by the legendary Irving Berlin..

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And to conclude the program, it's Time to Say Goodbye or Con te partirò which Sarah Brightman made famous with Andrea Bocelli. It's been wonderful to share this great music with you....

However, the big news: now that Ann has returned I've implored her to write about her trip for this blog, along with a selection of the very interesting photographs she took.  She's agreed! I'm very eager for her to finish her work (she is getting an idea of what I go through writing up our trips and assembling photos), as I know from her preliminary notes (mostly emails she sent me during the trip) it is going to be an exceptional piece of writing.  And here are just a couple of her photos that I edited and am posting as a teaser:

Catching Up...

The last few weeks went by in a whirlwind. During that period we took a two week cruise in the Baltic region, trans Atlantic flights to Holland and back, packing up from our summer on the boat, and then closing it up involving a myriad of operational chores best left unsaid and then driving the 1,250 miles home, 800 miles on the 2nd day -- made pleasurable by Stephen King's audio edition of On Writing read by the author himself -- arriving to assess all the work to be done in and around the house, particularly on the tropical overgrowth of landscaping, courtesy of the humid Florida summers.

The ports we visited deserve their own commentary and as I pull together photos another posting with a description of the ports will be forthcoming, but a few preliminary words on the cruise itself. We've taken many and of course beside the interesting ports, ship life and days at sea are high points to me. We try to confine our cruises to the "smaller" ships, in this case the MS Rotterdam. This particular ship accommodated "merely" 1,380 passengers on this trip, her displacement at 61,849 tons. We had been on this ship once before, almost ten years ago, through the Panama Canal. She is still an elegant ship, although refitting and updating will be needed soon.


Our cruise covered 2,998 miles (remarkable as I did not realize the region was so large). We arrived in Amsterdam after the fastest trans-Atlantic flight I've ever been on as the tail winds were over 100 miles per hour, only five hours from JFK. They served drinks and then dinner shortly after departing, turned off the lights for this "overnight" flight and it seemed as if only a half hour went by before they were turning on the lights for breakfast. At one point our air speed was 720 miles per hour. I felt like Chuck Yeager about to break the sound barrier. I hadn't flown KLM in some time, a very decent airline, but well worth the few dollars to upgrade to "economy comfort" seats.

We arrived in Amsterdam very early in the morning and had to wait several totally disorganized hours for the pre-arranged bus connection we had made through Holland America to finally depart for Rotterdam where our ship awaited. One would think that at least this part of the trip would be under control -- after all HA has done this before.

The cruise took us to Copenhagen, Warnamunde (Berlin's nearest port), Tallin, St. Petersburg, and Stockholm. We were supposed to go to Helsinki as well, but weather prevented the visit, for reasons I will explain when I write up our port visitations.

Embarking in Rotterdam, our ship life began by locating our cabin (mid ship, Ocean view), and as we live on a boat during the summer, we found it commodious by comparison --including several spacious closets and lots of drawer space!

There are so many things to do, even on a relatively small ship such as this, but our routine was to have a set dining time, a table with three other couples, nice people with whom we could exchange pleasantries about the trip, but politics and related topics were strictly off limits. After dinner most people went to the musical production shows but we discovered a great jazz trio in one of the lounges and became regulars there. Every evening they took requests from the great American songbook, the music we love so much.


The drummer (Seth) and the pianist (Jane) are a married couple who do gigs in Nantucket when they are not traveling on a cruise ship (the bass player was from Spain, hired by the ship, and fit right in). Jane is one of the best jazz pianists I've ever heard on a cruise ship and she plays requests from "lead sheets" or "fake books" which is the way I play, taking the melody line and the chords and improvising (although her skills are head and shoulders above mine). But she does all this from an iPod which has searchable PDFs of thousands of songs. I requested (among many others) the little-played "Cottage for Sale", a rendition we loved having been recorded years before by Julie London. To our amazement, Jane came up with the song immediately...

"A little dream in a castle
With every dream gone
It is lonely and silent
The shades are all drawn
And my heart is heavy
As we gaze upon
A cottage for sale

The lawn we were proud of
Is waving in hay
Our beautiful garden is
Withered away.
Where we planted roses
The weeds seem to say..
A cottage for sale"

Jane's style is so reminiscent of Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson. Her voicings are superb. In fact she played several Bill Evans pieces, including Waltz for Debby. These are not the kind of offerings one normally finds on a cruise ship. More information on Seth and Jane can be found here.

When I am away from everyday life while cruising, particularly the day to day gyrations of the market and politics and my beloved computer, reading becomes a pleasure, interrupted only by port visits, the obligatory meals, and jazz delights. The rest of the world goes by as contact is mostly limited to CNN International on board, a 4 page summary of the New York Times, and, of course, occasional, but very expensive and slow, Internet connections via satellite. Still, I tried to keep up with the baseball scores and the pennant races while on board, and the latest machinations of the approaching presidential election.

While away it seems that President Obama proposed a job-creation, infrastructure-fixing plan, with tax implications for the wealthy, one that was immediately shot down by the Republicans. How one can be so against a more progressive tax structure -- albeit with fixes of loopholes and some of the complexity along the way -- while 46 million Americans are living at the poverty level is beyond me. We had lunch with a woman one day who pontificated that half of Americans don't pay any taxes and that is why we should have a flat tax (very regressive in my mind). Hence, politics and the economy were off limits discussions (for me at least -- no sense on such a trip). However, on board I managed to see parts of the "Republican presidential debates" which were laughable as moderated by Fox, most candidates invoking God and the Constitution as their very own personal, exclusive allies.

So it was no wonder, off with the TV and on to some good reading. The first one I tackled, sort of an underground classic for which I thank my blogger friend, Emily, was J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country. This is written in the tradition of Thomas Hardy, a wonderful tale about a medieval mural of the apocalypse which was painted on the ceiling of a church in the countryside somewhere in England and whitewashed over. The man who is hired to restore the painting, in the process, resurrects his own soul in the bargain. He is separated from his wife, Vinny, and recovering from his experiences during WWI:"The marvelous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head with anything but uncovering their wall-painting for them. And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War and the rows with Vinny had done to me and begin where I'd left off. This is what I need, I thought -- a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won't be a casualty anymore. Well, we live by hope." It is a little gem of a redemptive novel.

From the sublime to the entertaining I picked up another Jonathan Tropper novel, This is Where I Leave You. Here is yet another clever novel by him, the focal point of which is our hero, Judd Foxman, sitting a seven day shiva with his dysfunctional family, as his marriage is falling apart. Tropper is known for his smart witty dialogue and this novel delivers. Although comic, Tropper is an observer of the manners and mores of modern times and I almost think of him as a Jane Austin type, delectable to read, with stinging observations. For example, this is his riotous description of sitting shiva (sat on chairs lower than their visitors) on one particular day: "The parade of weathered flesh continues. Sitting in our shiva chairs, we develop a sad infatuation with the bared legs of our visitors. Some of the men wear pants, and for that we are eternally grateful. But this being late August, we get our fair share of men in shorts, showing off pale, hairless legs with withered calves and thick, raised veins like earthworms trapped beneath their flesh who died burrowing their way out. The more genetically gifted men still show some musculature in the calf and thigh areas, but is more often than not marred by the surgical scars of multiple knee operations or heart bypasses that appropriated veins from the leg. And there's a special place in shiva hell reserved for men in sandals, their cracked, hardened toenails, dark with fungus, proudly on display. The women are more of a mixed bag. Some of them have managed to hold it together, but on others, skin hangs loosely off the bone, crinkled like cellophane, ankles disappear beneath mounds of flesh; and spider veins stretch out like bruises just below the skin. there really should be a dress code." A laugh a minute because it is so true.

My final novel for the cruise was one I've been saving for years for the right moment, a mass market paperback edition, small and portable, although some 500 pages, so ideal for carrying on a trip -- Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline. I've read most of Conroy and when he writes autobiographical material, he is at his best. I'm sure many of the episodes he chronicles in this book, one about a boy coming of age in a military college in Charleston, SC, come right out of his own life experiences. It is powerful and fast-moving, a page turner, beautifully written, Conroy being one of our most lyrical writers today. It is about the true meaning of honor, a painful lesson our protagonist, Will McLean, learns in the real world. Will is not from the elite society of Charleston as are some of his classmates. He is on scholarship as the point guard on the basketball team, as was Conroy himself was when he went to school. Although Conroy's autobiographical My Losing Season primarily deals with that subject (basketball), well worth reading, this novel devotes only a dozen or so pages to the topic, but perhaps the most vivid, accurate ones I've ever read about playing the game. Still, it is the beauty of his writing that glued me to the pages of this novel: "The city of Charleston, in the green feathery modesty of its palms, in the certitude of its style, in the economy and stringency of its lines, and the serenity of its mansions South of Broad Street, is a feast for the human eye. But to me, Charleston is a dark city, a melancholy city, whose severe covenants and secrets are as powerful and beguiling as its elegance, whose demons dance their alley dances and compose their malign hymns to the far side of the moon I cannot see. I studied those demons closely once, and they helped kill off the boy in me."

Thanks to these three novels, the jazz trio, my ship time was spent in good company (and with Ann of course). Ann wrote a detailed email to her friends about our trip, describing each port, and I am going to draw heavily from her observations when I get around to editing and selecting photographs, as well as adding my own thoughts.

But I will say one thing as a teaser for a future piece. The high point was St. Petersburg where we hired a private guide for two ten hour days. One cannot tour Russia without a Visa or a registered travel guide (or one of the ship's bus tours, which we did not want to do). Our guide turned out to be as stunningly beautiful as she was knowledgeable, a graduate of St. Petersburg University, with a degree in Art History, and with excellent English skills. Each place of visit was accompanied by her knowledgeable narrative. It started with an early morning visit to the Peterhof Palace, with its lush gardens and magnificent furnishings, these two exterior photos hardly do it justice, but, as I said, this is merely foreshadowing of a more detailed account in a later entry.


















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Copeland Davis Redux

Last night we attended a performance in our subscription series to the Florida Sunshine Pops Orchestra, always a delightful time with a fine orchestra backing up, usually, Broadway-tested singers. These performances, including last night's, are normally under the direction of the orchestra's maestro, Richard Hayman, who is now in his nineties and enjoying his well earned reputation as one of the legendary arrangers of songs from the Great American Songbook.

A talented husband and wife team, Bev and Kirby Ward, joined the orchestra to perform a Dancin' and Romancin' program, a fitting one for Valentine's Day, organized around the music of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers era. Ironically, the Wards, unknown to us at the time, were our neighbors when we lived in Weston, CT (they in adjoining Wilton). The story of how they met and became a team is fascinating. They put on quite a show, lots of Gershwin, singing and dancing with a great orchestra behind them, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable and professional performance.

The evening also belonged to the guest artist, Copeland Davis. When we first saw him a couple of years ago, I said "Remember that name, Copeland Davis....I will go out on a limb and predict that Copeland Davis is destined to go way beyond the Florida market." Apparently, since then he's appeared on the Tonight Show as well as Good Morning, America. It's nice to see such a prediction come true.

It seems like Davis raised his level of playing even further, if that is at all possible. With his first piece, Fly Me To the Moon, accompanied by the orchestra, he seemed to devour the piano, attacking it, producing his unique fusion style of classical and jazz. Then he followed with a solo piece, My Funny Valentine (what else on Valentine's Day?), a memorable rendition, the melody so clear within his jazz phrasing. His last piece of the night was Satin Doll. I like the way he begins to play the piano in the process of sitting down, as if he is saying "let me at it." Satin Doll is in my own repertoire, and I play it often as an exercise in dropping the fifth when playing chords in the bass. The difference between my rendition and Copeland Davis' is like comparing a Model T to a Lamborghini.

He is a marvel to hear and to watch. As Richard Hayman joked, but in humor there is much truth, he is able to play at such a level even though his fingers are still attached to his hands. As Davis played his solo, Hayman just stood at the podium shaking his head, saying, at the end, "you never know how Copeland will play a piece until he just does it." He is that kind of musician, unique in every way and with an impressive, upbeat stage presence. Catch one of his performances if you are in South Florida.

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Finishing the Hat Redux

Finished Sondheim's book Finishing the Hat but his melody lingers on.

The title of the book is a song title he wrote for Sunday in the Park With George (George Seurat, the Pointillist painter) and although that musical is after the cut off for this first volume of his "Collected Lyrics with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes," he says it is “the only song I’ve written which is an immediate expression of a personal internal experience.” And that experience is about what it means to create a work of art, "That, however you live, / There's a part of you always standing by, / Mapping out the sky, / Finishing a hat... / Starting on a hat../ Finishing a hat... / Look, I made a hat.../ Where there never was a hat."

Although now eighty years old, Sondheim still seems to be blazing new trails, with this book and the eagerly anticipated sequel which will cover the balance of his career and his continuing observations on Broadway colleagues and collaborators. (One of his criticisms of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein -- and Richard Rodgers as well --- is that at a certain point in their careers, they no longer progressed, writing their musicals with a certain formula. Sondheim allows no grass to grow under his feet!) I began this "review" (on a very personal level) before completing this first published volume, unable to contain my enthusiasm.

So I now pick up with Little Night Music "suggested" by Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. Sondheim says it gave him the opportunity to organize a musical around his favorite musical form, theme and variations, in which a theme is presented, and then follows various changes to that theme, either in key, harmony, orchestration or a more complicated musical variation to the theme which might even be unrecognizable, with a coda which usually repeats the theme in some way. His description of his meeting with Ingmar Bergman a year after Little Night Music opened, to discuss a possible collaboration on another project is priceless. Sondheim said to him: "...I have to know what you thought of the show, and please don't hesitate to tell me whatever you feel, as I have a very thick skin and I know our version is lightweight and doesn't begin to convey the depths of your movie....I'm sure I went babbling on a good deal longer, but he graciously cut me off. 'No, no, Mr. Sondheim, please. I enjoyed the evening very much. Your piece has nothing to do with my movies, it merely has the same story.' I thought: only someone with that understanding and generosity would realize, must less say, such a thing. and then came the kicker: 'After all, we all eat from the same cake.'"

Sondheim's most recorded song (over five hundred) is from this show, "Send in the Clowns." Paraphrasing Sondheim, it used to be the song, not the singer that made a song, but in this pop generation, it's now the singer (or song group) not the song. It was amazing to him that the song won the Grammy Award of the Song of the Year in 1975, the last song to do so from a musical. Per Sondheim, "The success of 'Send in the Clowns' is still a mystery to me."

The Frogs, with which I was completely unfamiliar, is an experimental piece he was asked to write for the Yale Repertory Theater, "one of the most deeply unpleasant professional experiences I've ever had." The producer was one of the worst kind: "the academic amateur." But he admits "it offered me a chance to harangue an audience, to use a chorus a cappella to make sound effects, to write massed choral music, and to indulge in vulgarity, adolescent humor and moral preachment, just like Aristophanes."

With his Pacific Overtures Sondheim moved to a new level in his fusion of music and lyric, using the structure of Haiku poetry in his lyrics, his dedication to the principle that "less is more." I've never seen Pacific Overtures although Ann had when it first opened on Broadway and when I asked her what she thought, she said that at the time it was so different from anything else she had seen, she didn't know what to think other than she knew it was a work of genius.

It is all part of Sondheim's quest to "finish the hat." In this musical Sondheim has the opportunity, however, to "thumb his nose" at Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan) with a piece from the show "Please Hello": As he said, "I...would like to point out with suitable pride that the lyric is historically accurate as an account not only of the succession of arrivals but of the specifics of each country's demands. The music, unsurprisingly, is a series of pastiches: Sousa march, Gilbert and Sullivan patter, Dutch clog dance, Russian dirge and French can-can. In the interests of thumbing my nose at Gilbert, I summoned up a meticulous series of inner rhymes without distorting syntax, syntax distortion being a feature excused by his fans as part of his style, but something which I deplore, as I deplore it in Hart, Gershwin and Coward."

Ann & I were at a dinner party and we were talking about Sondheim's next work in the book, Sweeny Todd, and I was surprised by their unanimous abhorrence of the musical. Although I understand an aversion to some of the gruesome scenes, I think they were simply not getting it, lyrics and music perfectly synchronized, one existing for the other. Perhaps it is because unlike the classic musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, some Sondheim musicals do not let you merrily exit afterwards humming the melodies. But Sondheim haunts and certainly his love of suspense music, the macabre, and his less than sympathetic view of mankind (Rodgers and Hammerstein's musicals always ending on an uplifting note in spite of any darkness that might inhabit part of their musicals), comes through in Sweeny Todd, off-putting to the audience in its graphic violence, "blood" even spurting as far as the orchestra pit in some performances. How can an audience which loves an Rodgers and Hammerstein's buoyantly optimistic "There's a bright golden haze on the meadow" reconcile itself to Sondheim's bleak "There's a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And it's filled with people / Who are filled with shit"?

Sondheim describes the work as a "dark operetta" and really a "movie set for a stage" so it is no wonder that Tim Burton's translation of the musical to screen starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter is considered (by Sondheim) to be the most successful adaptation of one of his works for the silver screen. The movie is remarkable as neither Depp or Carter had ever sung before. Singing Sondheim is difficult enough for trained singers as his lyrics come fast and furious in many songs with few spells for breathing. In fact, the DVD edition of the movie is the perfect way to see Sweeny Todd, turning on English subtitles, sort of like reading the libretto of an opera while the performance is underway. It's the best method of fully appreciating what Sondheim accomplishes with this and his other opera-like musicals.

Finishing the Hat concludes with his Merrily We Roll Along, which reminds me a little of Company, as it is a contemporary urban piece, also about friendships, and somewhat autobiographical as it concerns a songwriter. ("In my heyday as a young songwriter, I played many requests at many parties through the short attention span of the requesters and suffered many opinions of producers and directors who felt that their credentials demanded that they have something critical to say.") Although there are memorable pieces in the musical, it closed after only a handful of performances, but with subsequent revivals, Sondheim tweaked it over the years.

The time line of the play is in reverse as our songwriter (Frank) devolves from being a rich Hollywood type to his beginnings on Broadway. It has one of my favorite Sondheim songs, "Not a Day Goes By" sung with two different meanings, first as Frank's final plea of love when his wife wants to divorce him and then in a reprise as a love song on their wedding day. Because of the reverse time line, it is the complete opposite of the usual reprise (think of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "People Will Say We're in Love" or "If I Loved You").

"Not a Day Goes By" is one of the many pieces I regularly perform by Sondheim. Although his music is best appreciated with his lyrics, that song reminds me of the other wonderfu,l frequently melodic, pieces by him that I enjoy playing as piano solos. True, there are others that do not work as solos, but I think Sondheim gets a bad rap for not being melodic. As I play mostly from "fake books" (which provide melody and chords and it is left to the pianist to improvise everything else) I have limited choices of Sondheim pieces. Still, there are many in my repertoire. Sondheim confesses a penchant for "list songs" (as do many other lyricists, think again of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things" from Sound of Music which we just saw brilliantly performed at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre) and so, I am concluding with my own list, those Sondheim songs that I like to perform, all from The Ultimate Broadway Fake Book .....

Anyone Can Whistle (Anyone Can Whistle)
Being Alive (Company)
Broadway Baby (Follies)
Company (Company)
Good Thing Going (Merrily We Roll Along)
I'm Still Here (Follies)
In Buddy's Eyes (Follies)
Johanna (Sweeny Todd)
Little Night Music (Little Night Music)
The Little Things We Do Together (Company)
Losing My Mind (Follies)
Not a Day Goes By (Merrily We Roll Along)
Not While I'm Around (Sweeny Todd)
Pretty Women (Sweeny Todd)
Remember? (Little Night Music)
Send in the Clowns (Little Night Music)
Side By Side By Side (Company)
Someone is Waiting (Company)
Sorry-Grateful (Company)
Waiting for the Girls Upstairs (Follies)
Who's That Woman? (Follies)
You Could Drive A Person Crazy (Company)

Senseless to the Sublime

The last two nights make me think of Franz Kafka's The Hunger Artist, in which a famous fasting artist is on display in a circus menagerie, the crowds pushing past him to get to watch the lions stalk and feed. "He immediately got an earful from the shouting of the two steadily increasing groups, the ones who wanted to take their time looking at the hunger artist, not with any understanding but on a whim or from mere defiance—for him these ones were soon the more painful—and a second group of people whose only demand was to go straight to the animal stalls." It is a highly symbolic story of how artists sacrifice themselves for their art and the general public's ignorance of what great artistry demands and preference for sensational pursuits.

One of the reasons we live in this area of Florida is for the cultural diversity it has to offer. True, it does not have the advantages of a London or a New York in its breadth or consistently high quality, but knowing where to go can uncover some wonderful cultural events. Case in point, our favorite small theatre where we never miss a production, Palm Beach Dramaworks. But the largest theatre in the area is West Palm Beach's Kravis Center for the Performing Arts and we've seen some fine musical revivals there over the last several years, South Pacific standing out in my mind, and some special programs such as when Sondheim visited for an evening discussion of his works.
Admittedly, it was with some trepidation that we got tickets for the Kravis’ production of Beauty and the Beast but Ann had tried to see the Broadway version, liked some of the music, and never could get tickets so we were hoping that this touring production would at least be on par. Tuesday night we saw the opening and it was so dreadful that we left at intermission. This review gives some of the details although it is actually very restrained in its criticism.


It is a Disney dumb-down production presumably for the kiddies, with one dimensional slapstick characters, but, amazingly, most of the adult audience seemed to be laughing at the childish humor which at best rose to the level of a sitcom. The fact that a Beauty and the Beast could flourish for so long on the Great White Way says much about the public's taste in musicals. We should have known better!

The following evening we sought redemption, having long ago booked tickets for a series we have followed for years, Keyboard Conversations ® with Jeffrey Siegel at The Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach. These are "unique concert-plus-commentary format in which he speaks to the audience about the music before performing each work" in their entirety. Wednesday night was one of the most demanding programs we've ever heard this highly-acclaimed American pianist perform, tackling three of the most difficult pieces written for the piano by Johann Sebastian Bach (Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903), Samuel Barber (Fugue from Piano Sonata, Op. 26), and Ludwig Van Beethoven (Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 --- the "Appassionata). Mr. Siegel playfully calls the program "Three Great B's Bach, Beethoven and Barber" (the latter B normally reserved for Brahms, but this is the 100th birthday celebration of Barber, one of America's leading composers, a contemporary of Bernstein and Copeland). In addition he played two of Barber's "Excursions" which I had never heard and reminded me so much of some of Gershwin and Copeland.

The physicality of the performance was astounding. As I play the piano myself, I have a special appreciation for what Siegel accomplished last night, performing the entire program without sheet music, keeping up with the tremendous technical demands of these pieces. Indeed at the end of the night, when he conducted his traditional audience question and answer portion of the program, he seemed, justifiably, physically spent, perhaps like the artist in Kafka's story. But this audience was brought to a standing ovation in appreciation.


Antidote du jour.......

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God, the Ninth, and Nine-Eleven

How does one reconcile the destructive events of 9/11 with the creative force of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony both coming into being in the name of God? As Friedrich Shiller’s Ode to Joy concludes -- the basis for Beethoven’s massive choral addition to the symphonic form -- “Do you sense the Creator, world?/Seek Him beyond the starry canopy!/Beyond the stars must He dwell.” And no doubt the hijackers on that fated day believed they were performing a sacred duty for their “Creator.”

I’ve been reading John Updike’s last short story collection, My Father’s Tears, interspersing those stories with other things I read, treating them like the little gems they are. Since 9/11 though I’ve made it a point to avoid anything about that horrible day, just because it is so raw in memory. We could see the columns of smoke 50 miles away in Connecticut on that crystal clear day.

So it was some trepidation when I realized that Updike’s story “Varieties of Religious Experience” is about that very day; beginning with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.” (He was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.) To get through this story, written from various perspectives (including a woman on the ill fated flight that crashed in PA), I had to continually take deep, slow breaths, just to control my anxiety. Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details, but there is the constant unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day. One knows where it is all going, and if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, organized religion seems so hypocritical, a crutch or a means of justifying anything. One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:

Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books – Kierkegarrd, Chesterton – read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building – its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds – would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?

I could not get the thought of 9/11 out of my mind Sunday when, for the first time in my life, although I had listened to various recordings in the past, I saw, heard, became immersed in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, a magnificent, ambitious undertaking of the Palm Beach Opera, performed at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.

Long ago in a college music history/theory course we reviewed Beethoven’s 9th and I had a copy of the score. It was the most complex piece I had ever seen, the orchestration for different sections being a mystery as to how everything can be brought together in one coherent entity. Four well-known opera soloists and four different choruses joined the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra. There were hundreds of people on stage. If there is a God, he/she/it is embodied in that Symphony, the purest ethereal expression of reverence and joy I have ever witnessed. Could it be that the same species that concocted a 9/11 could create such a masterpiece, and written by just one man who was deaf as well? So, for me, those are the bookends of this first decade of the 21st century, the infamous, wanton destruction of life and normalcy at the beginning, and beholding Beethoven’s intensely spiritual 9th Symphony at the end, contradictory undertakings in the name of “God” and mankind.
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Google Gall

Microsoft has been called the Darth Vader of the software world but watch out, Google is gaining ground. I’m pretty POed at Google as I’ve relied on Google Pages to host music links for my blog, a process which, for the non-techie, is complicated enough, without Google suddenly pulling the plug on me. For months I’ve been receiving an occasional email from Google alerting me to their intention to “move” my links to a new location, “Google Sites,” implying this will be automatic without any concerns on my part. Nuts, I thought, still another thing to learn, but OK, I’ve gone this far and I can do that.

However, this is not going to be automatic by any stretch of the imagination and, contrary to previous communications, this change will apparently render my music links inoperative. Here is their most recent email:

Dear Google Page Creator User:

As was previously announced, Google will soon be discontinuing operation of the Google Page Creator product. We will be migrating your Page Creator sites over to Google Sites so that they continue to operate with no work on your part. However, we've identified you as using Google Page Creator to host files that Sites doesn't support. We are writing to inform you that, as part of this migration, if you take no action to address this, your hosted files will likely break. If they are important then we suggest you move them to a different hosting service.

Contrary to what was posted in the blog post, the shut down and migration of Google Page Creator has been extended and will begin in a few weeks.

Thank you for your patience during this migration.

Sincerely,

The Google Sites Team

Google, Inc.

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View, CA 94043

You've received this mandatory service announcement email to update you about important changes to your Google Page Creator account.

Had I understood their intent months ago, I would have sought an alternative solution when I had broadband access. We’re now living on our boat and I’m dependent on a wireless dialup with slower speeds and bandwidth limitations. Therefore, these links will fail at a certain point. Thanks Google.

I’ve identified the music and their locations and here is a list, something I have to do anyway as a first step to address the matter:

Music: Annie’s Waltz. Location: Annie’s Waltz

Music: Ol’ Man River and Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’ Location He jes' keeps rollin’ along

Music: Not A Day Goes By Location: West Palm Beach Hosts Sondheim

Music: Smile Location: Music For Our Times

Music: Love is Here to Stay and Selections from Porgy and Bess Location: Practice Sessions

Once I find a solution to the problem Google is leaving me with, I will correct the links. In the meantime, they may not work. Sorry about that!

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Practice Sessions

A couple of months ago Ann and I saw a remarkable piano concert at the Norton Museum of Art , Alexander Wu performing a program of Fascinating Rhythm: Music of the Americas, 20th century pieces by composers from Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and as the title implies, works of Gershwin, including his Three Preludes.

The highlight after the intermission was his virtuoso performance of Fantasy on Porgy and Bess, an arrangement by Earl Wild of Gershwin’s classic opera, as a solo concert piano composition. It is an extraordinary piece: delicate and powerful at the same time, and extremely difficult to play, befitting the talents of Gershwin himself who was a gifted pianist in addition to his genius as a composer. Rare is the composer who can transcend both the popular and classical worlds and one can only wonder where his gifts would have taken him had he not died at only 38 of a brain tumor.

After the concert I met Mr. Wu and asked him about the difficulty of the piece, something he acknowledged. Unfortunately, he had not yet recorded Fantasy on Porgy and Bess (he said he will in the future), but I found one by Graham Scott, Wild Fantasy, which includes other Gershwin pieces as well. So I bought it as a downloadable MP3 and now have the pleasure of listening to Wild’s magnificent arrangements.

It is hard to explain what it is like to passionately love something you think you are on the cusp of being able to do yourself, but the remaining distance between where you are and your goal is only an illusion of closeness. You are looking through the ocular lens of the binoculars, whereas, in reality, your age and ability renders the real view through the objective lens, your dream much, much more distant in reality.

We’ve all been asked the question of what ideally you would have done with your life if you could wave that proverbial magic wand. I’ve always answered the question unhesitatingly: a jazz pianist and not too close behind a baseball pitcher. Luckily, what I actually did do professionally, publishing, would have been third choice.

Well, my pitching days are long over and the Yankees will have to go it alone without me. On the other hand the piano is something one can play for life, and since retiring I have devoted more time to it, even having recorded two CDs in a studio, just so I have something for friends and family.

After hearing the Wild arrangements I focused more effort on playing some of the music from Porgy and Bess, but my interpretations are marred by my limitations as a pianist, and while I can practice from here to kingdom come, there is just so far I can go without the requisite skills to even remotely go to the place where Wild, Wu, and Scott can bring Gershwin, not to mention the composer himself who was a highly accomplished performer. In fact Gershwin said in a preface to his own arrangements in the Spring of 1932: “Playing my songs as frequently as I do at private parties, I have naturally been led to compose numerous variations upon them, and to indulge the desire for complication and variety that every composer feels when he manipulates the same material over and over again. It was this habit of mine that led to the original suggestion to publish a group of songs not only in their simplified arrangements that the public knew [from traditional sheet music], but also in the variations that I had devised.” Just one look at those “variations” reveals the technical difficulty of his arrangements, the confluence of his jazz roots and his classical training.


The hands of the master, himself, George Gershwin

Nonetheless, I wanted to record my own practice attempts. The CDs I’ve recorded were in a studio, all relatively short pieces in a controlled environment, so they don’t sound half bad. But for my “practice sessions,” I wanted an inexpensive digital recorder for home recording, a means to establish a baseline, something I can try to improve upon over time. Therefore, I bought a Sony Digital Voice Recorder with 1GB Flash Memory that handles MP3 recording and playback and plugs directly into a USB port (and is not much larger than a USB storage device). Talk about “practice sessions” – just getting up to speed with this technology was daunting in itself.

And listening to these home recordings, so far removed from the idyllic conditions of a studio, with all the “warts” of background noise, the turning of pages of sheet music, and the mistakes, none of which can be airbrushed out with editing software, is painful for me. And as I can no longer sight-read music other than the melody line, I have to sort of make up arrangements as I go along. But Wild’s arrangement of Porgy and Bess obsessed me, so I continued to practice six songs from Porgy, playing them without pausing with little transitional phrasing, recording them on the Sony. Because of upload limitations I had to divide one such practice session (although played continuously) into two digital files, and here they are, “warts and all,” the first including Summertime, My Man’s Gone Now, I Got Plenty O’Nuttin’, and the second including Bess You is My Woman Now, It Ain’t Necessarily So, and I Loves You Porgy.

As we live on a boat over the summer, I will be without my piano and any means of making improvements, other than studying some theory, until next fall. In fact, this blog will be brief or go silent for a while, as we will be in transit. Perhaps next season I will take the lessons I should have had decades before, become less reliant on the sustain pedal (something Gershwin criticized amateurs for when playing his compositions), and take time to practice scales, something I haven’t done since I was a kid. But it will be difficult breaking bad habits, so I will be looking to make small improvements and have no illusions about making major leaps.

I’ll conclude this entry with my studio recording of Gershwin’s Love is Here to Stay, the last song Gershwin ever wrote. He and Ira were working on Samuel Goldwyn’s film, The Goldwyn Follies in Hollywood even as his headaches were increasing to the point of his having to be admitted to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on June 23, 1937. He died only a few weeks later. The range and volume of Gershwin’s work are staggering for such a short life; his brother’s lyrics say it all…

Love is Here to Stay

It's very clear
Our love is here to stay;
Not for a year
But ever and a day.

The radio and the telephone
And the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies,
And in time may go!

But, oh my dear,
Our love is here to stay.
Together we're
Going a long, long way

In time the Rockies may crumble,
Gibraltar may tumble,
They’re only made of clay,
But our love is here to stay.


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