My father told me last night that he wished he did not have to go to Zurich on Saturday.
He does not look forward to the long flights, traveling alone, and he does not look forward to being away from home for six days by himself.
If it were possible, he would love for us to go with him. If we were to go with him, he would enjoy traveling to Zurich very much.
That’s why he asked us to travel with him to Hamburg last year. It turned a tedious three-day business trip for him into a magnificent two-week family vacation for all of us.
My father loved our vacation in London, too (all of us loved our vacation in London). He loved traveling with my mother, and he loved traveling with my middle brother and with Josh and me, and he loved the historical and cultural attractions we explored. He loved every minute of our time in London. It was one of the best vacations he ever had.
However, he is tired of traveling by himself on business. Whatever excitement business travel offers has long since disappeared for him. In fact, I think he has always detested business travel, except for those trips to the East Coast that provided him with an opportunity to visit my older brother and me while we were in school in the East.
I wish my father did not have to go to Zurich. This is his favorite time of year: he loves autumn weather, and he loves college football, and he loves getting ready for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. One week of that will be taken away from him this year.
One comfort is that he will only be gone for six days. Another comfort is that he will return on the same day that my brother from Denver arrives, and one day before my older brother and his family arrive. When he returns from Zurich, my father will be able to settle in and enjoy a two-week visit with everyone.
My father also told me last night that he and my mother have missed not seeing much of Josh and me since we returned from our Columbus Day weekend in New York.
Josh and I have only seen my parents on weekends since Columbus Day, and on one of those weekends Josh and I stayed home, catching up on things (although we did go see “The Seagull” with my parents the Friday night of that particular weekend).
Happily for my Dad, he will get to see lots of everyone, for two whole weeks, after he returns from Zurich.
He is pleased that Josh and I will stay with my mother during his absence. This will prevent him from worrying about her, and worrying about her trying to do too much before everyone arrives for the holidays. He knows that Josh and I will help her, and that we will do the difficult work, and that we will be present to look out for her.
There is one good thing about my father’s trip to Zurich: he will get to hear Humperdinck’s “Konigskinder”, a work he loves very much, under a good conductor (Ingo Metzmacher) and with an excellent cast (one of which will be Jonas Kaufmann). He bought a ticket for the evening performance of Wednesday, November 7.
Otherwise, in the evenings, he will just stay in his hotel room and read.
I am glad he will only be in Zurich five nights.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Bach-Haydn-Schubert-Brahms-Sibelius-Nielsen
For the last couple of weeks, Joshua and I have been listening to six compact discs when we have been at home and had a little time to spare.
Bach’s “The Art Of The Fugue”, performed by The Canadian Brass, on the Sony label
Haydn’s String Quartets Nos. 39-41, performed by the Kodaly Quartet, on the Naxos label
Schubert’s Masses Nos. 2 and 6, performed by various soloists and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Robert Shaw, on the Telarc label
Brahms’s Complete Organ Music, performed by Kevin Bowyer, on the Nimbus label
Sibelius’s Symphonies Nos. 3 and 5, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis, on the RCA label
Orchestral music of Carl Nielsen, performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Myung-Whun Chung, on the BIS label
I had listened to The Canadian Brass “The Art Of The Fugue” disc when I was in high school, and I recall that I hated the disc back then. I probably was too young to appreciate such great music at the time, because I love this disc now, and Josh loves it, too.
The Canadian Brass arrangement of this profound abstract masterpiece is very effective—“The Art Of The Fugue” works beautifully in this particular arrangement for brass quintet. The differing timbres of the brass instruments, no doubt, assist the listener in following the dense counterpoint and make it possible for the listener to play all fourteen contrapunctus movements straight through, in succession, without suffering fatigue.
Contrapuntus Number 14 is performed, unfinished, as Bach left it. After a pause, the disc concludes with a performance of Bach’s final Chorale Prelude, BWV 668, “Vor Deinen Thron Tret Ich Hiermit”, a suitable summation for a most satisfying listening experience.
Given that “The Art Of The Fugue” was never intended to be performed, it is amazing how well this composition works in performance, no matter the arrangement. I think that the arrangement used by The Canadian Brass is as good as any I have ever heard. Josh and I have listened to this disc over and over and over with the greatest of pleasure.
I believe the performance to be excellent. The Canadian Brass made many fine discs in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and those discs demonstrate that The Canadian Brass was an exceptional group of musicians, capable of playing a wide range of repertory at the highest level. The Canadian Brass was a serious group of musicians entitled to a serious audience.
And yet, after a period, the group more or less fell from view—and I think I know why this happened.
The Canadian Brass programmed its live concerts so as to appeal to a mass audience, not to the serious musical public. Instead of programming its concerts along the lines of, say, the classic string quartet, The Canadian Brass chose to program its concerts in the manner of a Peter Schickele evening, offering a series of routines perilously close to Vaudeville. Such an approach did not stay fresh for long and did not provide a formula for long-term success.
It was a gigantic mistake for The Canadian Brass to “dumb down” its live appearances. By doing so, the ensemble alienated and ultimately turned away its natural audience, at which point it was left with no audience at all. The ensemble would have enjoyed a larger and more devoted audience—and an audience with some longevity—had it adhered to more traditional programming, offering purely musical rewards.
I attended a Canadian Brass concert only once. That was enough for me. The shtick that emanated from the stage between numbers was not amusing—and the audience groaned more than it laughed—and the musical program was very unsatisfying, if not deadening.
The concert began with a couple of Bach arrangements before moving on to a gruesome twenty-minute stage skit with music, written especially for the group. The skit provided each member of the ensemble with both dialogue and music. It was not funny, and it was not musically enriching.
After intermission, the audience was treated to extended 1940’s big band excerpts, followed by a few Broadway tunes, followed by a couple of hymns.
It was certainly the least interesting evening I ever spent in a concert hall. I can fully understand why The Canadian Brass lost its audience.
There were many young musicians, studying brass instruments, in attendance at that particular concert. Those young musicians were almost grief-stricken. They had been looking forward to hearing these magnificent brass instrumentalists play Gabrieli, not Glenn Miller. I never saw such a disillusioned group of young persons in my life.
The Naxos disc of Haydn quartets features numbers 4-6 of Haydn’s “Prussian” Quartets, Opus 50, written in 1787, shortly after Mozart had written his remarkable set of quartets dedicated to Haydn. Two of the quartets are “named” quartets: Number Five is titled “The Dream” and Number Six is titled “The Frog”.
I love Haydn quartets, and I think I could listen to Haydn quartets every day. Haydn’s music is endlessly inventive. It is also exceedingly humane, probably more so than the music of any other great composer. In addition, Haydn certainly had more wit than any other great composer. Is there any other composer whose music so readily induces smiles?
Josh and I have loved listening to these quartets immensely. This disc is a joy from start to finish. The performances are excellent. The Kodaly Quartet has recorded many Haydn quartets for the Naxos label, and each Kodaly Quartet Haydn disc I have heard has been excellent.
The disc of Schubert masses involves one very early mass, from 1815, and Schubert’s final effort in the form, from 1828. In the recording, different soloists are used for each mass.
The Mass No. 2 features Dawn Upshaw, David Gordon and William Stone as soloists. The second mass is Schubert’s most tuneful mass, and the easiest to perform. It is very simple, very joyful, very brief and very direct. Its emotional range is limited, as is its orchestration (strings and organ), and it poses no problems for the listener. It is the most “songful” of Schubert’s masses, and much of the writing is homophonic and near-strophic in nature. Shaw’s performance is very nice.
The Mass No. 6 is another thing entirely. This is one of the incomparably great works that occupied Schubert during the final year of his short life, a year in which his music acquired a depth of feeling and a range of expression that is almost unparalleled in the history of Western music. It is possible that this is the very greatest mass ever written.
The Mass No. 6 is much more complicated than the Mass No. 2. It is a mass on the grandest possible scale, much more complex in its choral part-writing and orchestration and use of form—there is lots of counterpoint—and much freer in its emotional range than the earlier effort. The choral parts are extremely difficult to perform, and the orchestration owes an obvious debt to Weber’s orchestral wizardry in “Der Freischutz”. Schubert’s Mass No. 6 is a work on the same exalted level as Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” and, as a composition, it may be superior to Beethoven’s landmark work because Schubert’s work reveals greater humility and greater humanity.
The Atlanta performance of Mass No. 6 is a huge disappointment. Whereas Mass No. 2 was well within the capabilities of the Atlanta musicians, Mass No. 6 is simply beyond them. An accurate presentation of the notes is all these musicians can muster—and that is not enough in late Schubert. A performance of Mass No. 6 must offer drama, and glory, and consolation, and despair, and resignation, and peace. The Atlanta performance offers 55 minutes of blandness.
Like the Telarc recording of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” by these same forces, the Schubert Mass No. 6 reveals Robert Shaw’s limitations as a musician and as a conductor. Shaw was a fine choral trainer, but as a conductor he had a very limited range of expression, and very little sense of drama. Works with rhetorical content and works filled with profound feeling did not fare well under his baton. A listener with no other acquaintance with late Schubert, hearing this recording, would never guess that Schubert’s Mass No. 6 is one of the highest summits of Western music.
Schubert masses are not often performed in the United States. One reason for their rarity is that only the very finest choruses can sing these works at a high standard. Another reason is that good Schubert conductors seldom work in the United States. This is our loss.
The soloists in Mass No. 6 (there are two tenor parts) are Benita Valente, Marietta Simpson, John Humphrey, Glenn Siebert and Myron Myers.
I hope that Franz Welser-Most programs and records this work before he leaves Cleveland. I also hope that Manfred Honeck programs this work when he takes over in Pittsburgh. Both of those conductors could do this work justice.
Both Josh and I found the disc of Brahms organ music to be somewhat boring.
The disc contains Brahms’s most famous organ work, his Chorale Preludes, Opus 122, Brahms’s final completed work, and not published until five years after his death. The eleven preludes are all contemplative, with slow tempos, and with restrained and subtle harmonies, compiled of simple melodic fragments borrowed from ancient Lutheran sources. In a church service, interspersed with prayers and readings and psalms and responses, these preludes would no doubt have their intended effect of quiet spirituality. For a listener to hear all eleven preludes in succession, however, is not a particularly rewarding experience. All eleven preludes quickly begin to sound alike, and the sameness of the material makes it hard for the listener to sustain a high level of interest.
The disc also includes three organ pieces written in Brahms’s youth: a fugue, and two preludes and fugues. These works are more overtly dramatic than the chorale preludes, but they nonetheless are of minor interest except to organ scholars or Brahms scholars. Both versions of the fugue and both versions of “O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid”, one of the eleven chorale preludes, are included on the disc.
It is odd that Brahms, who spent his entire life studying (and editing) the works of Bach, was not a more effective writer for organ. I doubt that Josh and I will return to this repertory very soon.
Brahms’s organ music was all written with the great Baroque church of Saint Michaelis, in his native Hamburg, in mind. In his youth, Brahms had contemplated a career as an organist, and Saint Michaelis was the primary church of Brahms’s youth.
When we were in Hamburg a year ago, we had visited the magnificent Saint Michaelis four times. Its interior is grand and stately, although restrained compared to Baroque church interiors in Rome and Munich. The interior is completely white.
For our first visit, we had explored the interior and exterior of the church, and afterward we had attended the daily Noon organ recital, at which all three organs were played for five minutes each. As we learned, that daily event also involved prayers and psalms and readings between organ pieces, and it turned out to be a lovely thirty-minute midday service, one of the most pleasant surprises of our trip to Hamburg. The church was almost full that day—and it was full, not with tourists, but with local Hamburgers, which suggested that people living and working in the immediate area often attend the midday event. One of the organ pieces played that day was one of the Brahms chorale preludes.
For our second visit, on a Saturday night, we heard a performance of Brahms’s German Requiem, performed in the actual church for which the work was written and in which it was premiered. The performance was by a fully-professional orchestra and chorus, and it was a very moving experience for us, as we sat in the sacred space and listened to the Requiem in the brilliantly-illuminated church. Apparently a late November performance of the Brahms Requiem at Saint Michaelis is an annual Hamburg event. There will be a performance this year on Saturday, November 24. The baritone soloist will be Matthias Goerne. I wish we could attend.
For our third visit, we attended Sunday morning service, into which was incorporated a performance of a Bach cantata.
For our final visit, we visited the church museum and the enormous church crypt, which runs the full length and breadth of the church structure, after which we took the elevator to the top of the church spire. It was a dark and rainy and windy day, and it was almost frightening for all of us to stand on the highest platform, as the wind whipped us around the open space, forcing us to hold onto iron bars protruding from the spire. It was cold, and wet, and we were freezing, and we did not stay on the platform very long, even though the views over Hamburg were breathtaking. We would like to go back some day and enjoy the view again, but on a sunny and pleasant day. What I remember most about that view was how enormous—and unpleasant—was the nearby World War II flak tower, too impregnable to blow up after the war, too ugly to ignore and too sinister to admire.
Josh and I chose the Sibelius and Nielsen discs because we had not listened to any Scandinavian music for almost a year.
The Colin Davis disc of Sibelius symphonies is impressive, at least in part.
The performance of the Sibelius Symphony No. 3 is extremely fine, one of the finest performances of the work on disc. This is the symphony in which Sibelius broke away from the late-romantic symphonic model derived from Tchaikovsky, and it is a work of startling originality. Sibelius virtually reinvented symphonic form in this work and, exactly 100 years after its premiere, the Symphony No. 3 remains a work of astonishing invention and freshness. It was with the Third Symphony that Sibelius declared an end to the 19th Century, both in terms of symphonic form and in terms of abandonment of overt romantic content.
The performance of the more popular Fifth Symphony is not so fine. Davis does not build the first movement well—it lacks inevitability, and a steady buildup of tension, and a perfectly-timed climax, and a proper release of tension that leads inexorably to the second movement. Further, Davis loses control of the symphony halfway through its closing movement—the musicians lose the pulse of the music, and the pauses between the final chords seem contrived and unfelt, and the symphony does not reach a satisfying conclusion so much as simply come to a clumsy end. It is a very unsatisfying performance of a work that, admittedly, is very hard to bring off.
Major musicologists have devoted entire careers arguing over the structure of this magnificent work, without consensus, and major Sibelius conductors have offered vastly different views of this work over the years.
Unlike Leonard Bernstein or Herbert Von Karajan or Eugene Ormandy, each of whom somehow managed to arrive at a coherent personal view of this work, Colin Davis has always seemed to grapple with this score, searching in vain for his own personal vision of the music. The Fifth Symphony has always been the weak length in Colin Davis Sibelius cycles, and it is possible that this work will always elude him, as it has eluded so very many other conductors over the years. Early this year, Josh and I heard Osmo Vanska conduct the Minnesota Orchestra in this work, and Vanska offered a similarly-problematic performance of this symphony, with many of the same weaknesses present in the Davis reading.
The Nielsen disc contains performances of the “Maskarade” Overture, the Clarinet Concerto and the Symphony No. 3 (“Espansiva”). Olle Schill is the soloist in the concerto, and Pia Raanoja and Knut Skram are the vocalists in the symphony.
This is one of the great Nielsen discs in the catalog. Chung is a great Nielsen conductor, and this is one of those lucky recordings in which everything came together beautifully during the recording sessions.
Chung’s Symphony No. 3 is as good as any on disc. It may be the highlight of his (unfinished) Nielsen cycle. It has momentum and expression in equal measure. The Clarinet Concerto is Nielsen’s most interesting and most original concerto, and this is probably its finest performance on disc. The “Maskarade” Overture receives a thrilling performance, putting to shame its competition on disc.
The playing of the Gothenburg Symphony is excellent throughout. Since the stewardship of Wilhelm Stenhammar early in the 20th Century, the Gothenburg Symphony has been Sweden’s finest orchestra and, until the rise of the Oslo Philharmonic under Mariss Jansons, it was Scandinavia’s finest orchestra, too. Chung’s guest appearances in Gothenburg in the 1980’s were always viewed as a high point in the orchestra’s history, and his Nielsen discs with the orchestra amply confirm this.
The sound on this disc is extraordinary, probably because of the recording locale. The Gothenburg Concert Hall, despite its very peculiar shape, is one of the acoustic wonders of the world, on a par with if not superior to Vienna’s Musikverein and Boston’s Symphony Hall. The sound on this disc is almost miraculous—clear, resonant, rich, luxurious. It is as fine as any orchestral recording ever made.
Bach’s “The Art Of The Fugue”, performed by The Canadian Brass, on the Sony label
Haydn’s String Quartets Nos. 39-41, performed by the Kodaly Quartet, on the Naxos label
Schubert’s Masses Nos. 2 and 6, performed by various soloists and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Robert Shaw, on the Telarc label
Brahms’s Complete Organ Music, performed by Kevin Bowyer, on the Nimbus label
Sibelius’s Symphonies Nos. 3 and 5, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis, on the RCA label
Orchestral music of Carl Nielsen, performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Myung-Whun Chung, on the BIS label
I had listened to The Canadian Brass “The Art Of The Fugue” disc when I was in high school, and I recall that I hated the disc back then. I probably was too young to appreciate such great music at the time, because I love this disc now, and Josh loves it, too.
The Canadian Brass arrangement of this profound abstract masterpiece is very effective—“The Art Of The Fugue” works beautifully in this particular arrangement for brass quintet. The differing timbres of the brass instruments, no doubt, assist the listener in following the dense counterpoint and make it possible for the listener to play all fourteen contrapunctus movements straight through, in succession, without suffering fatigue.
Contrapuntus Number 14 is performed, unfinished, as Bach left it. After a pause, the disc concludes with a performance of Bach’s final Chorale Prelude, BWV 668, “Vor Deinen Thron Tret Ich Hiermit”, a suitable summation for a most satisfying listening experience.
Given that “The Art Of The Fugue” was never intended to be performed, it is amazing how well this composition works in performance, no matter the arrangement. I think that the arrangement used by The Canadian Brass is as good as any I have ever heard. Josh and I have listened to this disc over and over and over with the greatest of pleasure.
I believe the performance to be excellent. The Canadian Brass made many fine discs in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and those discs demonstrate that The Canadian Brass was an exceptional group of musicians, capable of playing a wide range of repertory at the highest level. The Canadian Brass was a serious group of musicians entitled to a serious audience.
And yet, after a period, the group more or less fell from view—and I think I know why this happened.
The Canadian Brass programmed its live concerts so as to appeal to a mass audience, not to the serious musical public. Instead of programming its concerts along the lines of, say, the classic string quartet, The Canadian Brass chose to program its concerts in the manner of a Peter Schickele evening, offering a series of routines perilously close to Vaudeville. Such an approach did not stay fresh for long and did not provide a formula for long-term success.
It was a gigantic mistake for The Canadian Brass to “dumb down” its live appearances. By doing so, the ensemble alienated and ultimately turned away its natural audience, at which point it was left with no audience at all. The ensemble would have enjoyed a larger and more devoted audience—and an audience with some longevity—had it adhered to more traditional programming, offering purely musical rewards.
I attended a Canadian Brass concert only once. That was enough for me. The shtick that emanated from the stage between numbers was not amusing—and the audience groaned more than it laughed—and the musical program was very unsatisfying, if not deadening.
The concert began with a couple of Bach arrangements before moving on to a gruesome twenty-minute stage skit with music, written especially for the group. The skit provided each member of the ensemble with both dialogue and music. It was not funny, and it was not musically enriching.
After intermission, the audience was treated to extended 1940’s big band excerpts, followed by a few Broadway tunes, followed by a couple of hymns.
It was certainly the least interesting evening I ever spent in a concert hall. I can fully understand why The Canadian Brass lost its audience.
There were many young musicians, studying brass instruments, in attendance at that particular concert. Those young musicians were almost grief-stricken. They had been looking forward to hearing these magnificent brass instrumentalists play Gabrieli, not Glenn Miller. I never saw such a disillusioned group of young persons in my life.
The Naxos disc of Haydn quartets features numbers 4-6 of Haydn’s “Prussian” Quartets, Opus 50, written in 1787, shortly after Mozart had written his remarkable set of quartets dedicated to Haydn. Two of the quartets are “named” quartets: Number Five is titled “The Dream” and Number Six is titled “The Frog”.
I love Haydn quartets, and I think I could listen to Haydn quartets every day. Haydn’s music is endlessly inventive. It is also exceedingly humane, probably more so than the music of any other great composer. In addition, Haydn certainly had more wit than any other great composer. Is there any other composer whose music so readily induces smiles?
Josh and I have loved listening to these quartets immensely. This disc is a joy from start to finish. The performances are excellent. The Kodaly Quartet has recorded many Haydn quartets for the Naxos label, and each Kodaly Quartet Haydn disc I have heard has been excellent.
The disc of Schubert masses involves one very early mass, from 1815, and Schubert’s final effort in the form, from 1828. In the recording, different soloists are used for each mass.
The Mass No. 2 features Dawn Upshaw, David Gordon and William Stone as soloists. The second mass is Schubert’s most tuneful mass, and the easiest to perform. It is very simple, very joyful, very brief and very direct. Its emotional range is limited, as is its orchestration (strings and organ), and it poses no problems for the listener. It is the most “songful” of Schubert’s masses, and much of the writing is homophonic and near-strophic in nature. Shaw’s performance is very nice.
The Mass No. 6 is another thing entirely. This is one of the incomparably great works that occupied Schubert during the final year of his short life, a year in which his music acquired a depth of feeling and a range of expression that is almost unparalleled in the history of Western music. It is possible that this is the very greatest mass ever written.
The Mass No. 6 is much more complicated than the Mass No. 2. It is a mass on the grandest possible scale, much more complex in its choral part-writing and orchestration and use of form—there is lots of counterpoint—and much freer in its emotional range than the earlier effort. The choral parts are extremely difficult to perform, and the orchestration owes an obvious debt to Weber’s orchestral wizardry in “Der Freischutz”. Schubert’s Mass No. 6 is a work on the same exalted level as Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” and, as a composition, it may be superior to Beethoven’s landmark work because Schubert’s work reveals greater humility and greater humanity.
The Atlanta performance of Mass No. 6 is a huge disappointment. Whereas Mass No. 2 was well within the capabilities of the Atlanta musicians, Mass No. 6 is simply beyond them. An accurate presentation of the notes is all these musicians can muster—and that is not enough in late Schubert. A performance of Mass No. 6 must offer drama, and glory, and consolation, and despair, and resignation, and peace. The Atlanta performance offers 55 minutes of blandness.
Like the Telarc recording of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” by these same forces, the Schubert Mass No. 6 reveals Robert Shaw’s limitations as a musician and as a conductor. Shaw was a fine choral trainer, but as a conductor he had a very limited range of expression, and very little sense of drama. Works with rhetorical content and works filled with profound feeling did not fare well under his baton. A listener with no other acquaintance with late Schubert, hearing this recording, would never guess that Schubert’s Mass No. 6 is one of the highest summits of Western music.
Schubert masses are not often performed in the United States. One reason for their rarity is that only the very finest choruses can sing these works at a high standard. Another reason is that good Schubert conductors seldom work in the United States. This is our loss.
The soloists in Mass No. 6 (there are two tenor parts) are Benita Valente, Marietta Simpson, John Humphrey, Glenn Siebert and Myron Myers.
I hope that Franz Welser-Most programs and records this work before he leaves Cleveland. I also hope that Manfred Honeck programs this work when he takes over in Pittsburgh. Both of those conductors could do this work justice.
Both Josh and I found the disc of Brahms organ music to be somewhat boring.
The disc contains Brahms’s most famous organ work, his Chorale Preludes, Opus 122, Brahms’s final completed work, and not published until five years after his death. The eleven preludes are all contemplative, with slow tempos, and with restrained and subtle harmonies, compiled of simple melodic fragments borrowed from ancient Lutheran sources. In a church service, interspersed with prayers and readings and psalms and responses, these preludes would no doubt have their intended effect of quiet spirituality. For a listener to hear all eleven preludes in succession, however, is not a particularly rewarding experience. All eleven preludes quickly begin to sound alike, and the sameness of the material makes it hard for the listener to sustain a high level of interest.
The disc also includes three organ pieces written in Brahms’s youth: a fugue, and two preludes and fugues. These works are more overtly dramatic than the chorale preludes, but they nonetheless are of minor interest except to organ scholars or Brahms scholars. Both versions of the fugue and both versions of “O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid”, one of the eleven chorale preludes, are included on the disc.
It is odd that Brahms, who spent his entire life studying (and editing) the works of Bach, was not a more effective writer for organ. I doubt that Josh and I will return to this repertory very soon.
Brahms’s organ music was all written with the great Baroque church of Saint Michaelis, in his native Hamburg, in mind. In his youth, Brahms had contemplated a career as an organist, and Saint Michaelis was the primary church of Brahms’s youth.
When we were in Hamburg a year ago, we had visited the magnificent Saint Michaelis four times. Its interior is grand and stately, although restrained compared to Baroque church interiors in Rome and Munich. The interior is completely white.
For our first visit, we had explored the interior and exterior of the church, and afterward we had attended the daily Noon organ recital, at which all three organs were played for five minutes each. As we learned, that daily event also involved prayers and psalms and readings between organ pieces, and it turned out to be a lovely thirty-minute midday service, one of the most pleasant surprises of our trip to Hamburg. The church was almost full that day—and it was full, not with tourists, but with local Hamburgers, which suggested that people living and working in the immediate area often attend the midday event. One of the organ pieces played that day was one of the Brahms chorale preludes.
For our second visit, on a Saturday night, we heard a performance of Brahms’s German Requiem, performed in the actual church for which the work was written and in which it was premiered. The performance was by a fully-professional orchestra and chorus, and it was a very moving experience for us, as we sat in the sacred space and listened to the Requiem in the brilliantly-illuminated church. Apparently a late November performance of the Brahms Requiem at Saint Michaelis is an annual Hamburg event. There will be a performance this year on Saturday, November 24. The baritone soloist will be Matthias Goerne. I wish we could attend.
For our third visit, we attended Sunday morning service, into which was incorporated a performance of a Bach cantata.
For our final visit, we visited the church museum and the enormous church crypt, which runs the full length and breadth of the church structure, after which we took the elevator to the top of the church spire. It was a dark and rainy and windy day, and it was almost frightening for all of us to stand on the highest platform, as the wind whipped us around the open space, forcing us to hold onto iron bars protruding from the spire. It was cold, and wet, and we were freezing, and we did not stay on the platform very long, even though the views over Hamburg were breathtaking. We would like to go back some day and enjoy the view again, but on a sunny and pleasant day. What I remember most about that view was how enormous—and unpleasant—was the nearby World War II flak tower, too impregnable to blow up after the war, too ugly to ignore and too sinister to admire.
Josh and I chose the Sibelius and Nielsen discs because we had not listened to any Scandinavian music for almost a year.
The Colin Davis disc of Sibelius symphonies is impressive, at least in part.
The performance of the Sibelius Symphony No. 3 is extremely fine, one of the finest performances of the work on disc. This is the symphony in which Sibelius broke away from the late-romantic symphonic model derived from Tchaikovsky, and it is a work of startling originality. Sibelius virtually reinvented symphonic form in this work and, exactly 100 years after its premiere, the Symphony No. 3 remains a work of astonishing invention and freshness. It was with the Third Symphony that Sibelius declared an end to the 19th Century, both in terms of symphonic form and in terms of abandonment of overt romantic content.
The performance of the more popular Fifth Symphony is not so fine. Davis does not build the first movement well—it lacks inevitability, and a steady buildup of tension, and a perfectly-timed climax, and a proper release of tension that leads inexorably to the second movement. Further, Davis loses control of the symphony halfway through its closing movement—the musicians lose the pulse of the music, and the pauses between the final chords seem contrived and unfelt, and the symphony does not reach a satisfying conclusion so much as simply come to a clumsy end. It is a very unsatisfying performance of a work that, admittedly, is very hard to bring off.
Major musicologists have devoted entire careers arguing over the structure of this magnificent work, without consensus, and major Sibelius conductors have offered vastly different views of this work over the years.
Unlike Leonard Bernstein or Herbert Von Karajan or Eugene Ormandy, each of whom somehow managed to arrive at a coherent personal view of this work, Colin Davis has always seemed to grapple with this score, searching in vain for his own personal vision of the music. The Fifth Symphony has always been the weak length in Colin Davis Sibelius cycles, and it is possible that this work will always elude him, as it has eluded so very many other conductors over the years. Early this year, Josh and I heard Osmo Vanska conduct the Minnesota Orchestra in this work, and Vanska offered a similarly-problematic performance of this symphony, with many of the same weaknesses present in the Davis reading.
The Nielsen disc contains performances of the “Maskarade” Overture, the Clarinet Concerto and the Symphony No. 3 (“Espansiva”). Olle Schill is the soloist in the concerto, and Pia Raanoja and Knut Skram are the vocalists in the symphony.
This is one of the great Nielsen discs in the catalog. Chung is a great Nielsen conductor, and this is one of those lucky recordings in which everything came together beautifully during the recording sessions.
Chung’s Symphony No. 3 is as good as any on disc. It may be the highlight of his (unfinished) Nielsen cycle. It has momentum and expression in equal measure. The Clarinet Concerto is Nielsen’s most interesting and most original concerto, and this is probably its finest performance on disc. The “Maskarade” Overture receives a thrilling performance, putting to shame its competition on disc.
The playing of the Gothenburg Symphony is excellent throughout. Since the stewardship of Wilhelm Stenhammar early in the 20th Century, the Gothenburg Symphony has been Sweden’s finest orchestra and, until the rise of the Oslo Philharmonic under Mariss Jansons, it was Scandinavia’s finest orchestra, too. Chung’s guest appearances in Gothenburg in the 1980’s were always viewed as a high point in the orchestra’s history, and his Nielsen discs with the orchestra amply confirm this.
The sound on this disc is extraordinary, probably because of the recording locale. The Gothenburg Concert Hall, despite its very peculiar shape, is one of the acoustic wonders of the world, on a par with if not superior to Vienna’s Musikverein and Boston’s Symphony Hall. The sound on this disc is almost miraculous—clear, resonant, rich, luxurious. It is as fine as any orchestral recording ever made.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Columbus Day Weekend
Tomorrow night Joshua and I and my parents will fly to New York to spend the three-day holiday weekend with my older brother and his family. My brother from Denver will join us in New York.
We are all very excited, because none of us has seen my older brother and his family since the first week of July.
Most of the weekend will be spent visiting and playing with my nephew, who will be two years old very soon. It is hard for me to believe that he is almost two years old. To me, it seems like he was born only a few months ago.
On Saturday night, Josh and my mother and I plan to attend a performance of “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “I Pagliacci” at New York City Opera. Neither my father nor my sister-in-law is interested in attending this double dose of melodrama, but I enjoy a little Verismo now and again, and so does my mother. We have very little opportunity to hear Cilea or Giordano or Leoncavallo or Mascagni or Ponchielli in Minneapolis. Josh will enjoy the hokum, too, I believe.
My brothers and Josh and I are thinking of visiting the Statue Of Liberty and Ellis Island on Sunday morning. As unlikely as it seems, none of us has ever been out to either Liberty Island or Ellis Island. This should be the perfect time of year for us at long last to make the trip. The summer crowds will have departed and the weather should be beautiful. If we go ahead with our plans, we will take the first ferry of the morning so that we can visit both attractions at leisure and still be able to get back to my brother’s place in time for a late lunch.
This weekend, we will also figure out our Thanksgiving and Christmas plans.
It will be lots of fun.
We are all very excited, because none of us has seen my older brother and his family since the first week of July.
Most of the weekend will be spent visiting and playing with my nephew, who will be two years old very soon. It is hard for me to believe that he is almost two years old. To me, it seems like he was born only a few months ago.
On Saturday night, Josh and my mother and I plan to attend a performance of “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “I Pagliacci” at New York City Opera. Neither my father nor my sister-in-law is interested in attending this double dose of melodrama, but I enjoy a little Verismo now and again, and so does my mother. We have very little opportunity to hear Cilea or Giordano or Leoncavallo or Mascagni or Ponchielli in Minneapolis. Josh will enjoy the hokum, too, I believe.
My brothers and Josh and I are thinking of visiting the Statue Of Liberty and Ellis Island on Sunday morning. As unlikely as it seems, none of us has ever been out to either Liberty Island or Ellis Island. This should be the perfect time of year for us at long last to make the trip. The summer crowds will have departed and the weather should be beautiful. If we go ahead with our plans, we will take the first ferry of the morning so that we can visit both attractions at leisure and still be able to get back to my brother’s place in time for a late lunch.
This weekend, we will also figure out our Thanksgiving and Christmas plans.
It will be lots of fun.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Safe, Happy And Content
We are all safe, and happy, and content, and having a wonderful time, with only five more days of explorations before we come home.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
"London Assurance"
A week from tonight, at this very time, we will all be en route to London. In fact, around this very hour, we should be having dinner over Newfoundland.
I am trying to get some projects completed at work before our trip, and I will not be writing again until after our return from London. I will not have time, before we go, to complete the three “assignments” Joshua mentioned in his blog.
All of us are exceedingly excited about our trip. My brother cannot wait, as he loves London above all other cities. My parents cannot wait, as they look forward to fifteen days exploring London’s history and art and architecture in an organized and leisurely fashion, something they have not been able to do since before my oldest brother was born. Joshua cannot wait, as this will be only his second trip to London and as he wants to experience more than London’s essential tourist attractions, which is all he witnessed on his previous trip.
I, of course, cannot wait, either. Like my brother, I love London above all other cities. I also want my parents to experience an enriching, stimulating vacation—and one free from worries and any potential hassles, since my brother and Josh and I will be there to look out for them. I also cannot wait for Josh to learn to love London as I do.
For us, one week from tonight, our summer will be over. When we return, the college football season will be under way, and Josh will be at his new job, and we will all start to plan for the autumn holidays.
Where does the time go?
I am trying to get some projects completed at work before our trip, and I will not be writing again until after our return from London. I will not have time, before we go, to complete the three “assignments” Joshua mentioned in his blog.
All of us are exceedingly excited about our trip. My brother cannot wait, as he loves London above all other cities. My parents cannot wait, as they look forward to fifteen days exploring London’s history and art and architecture in an organized and leisurely fashion, something they have not been able to do since before my oldest brother was born. Joshua cannot wait, as this will be only his second trip to London and as he wants to experience more than London’s essential tourist attractions, which is all he witnessed on his previous trip.
I, of course, cannot wait, either. Like my brother, I love London above all other cities. I also want my parents to experience an enriching, stimulating vacation—and one free from worries and any potential hassles, since my brother and Josh and I will be there to look out for them. I also cannot wait for Josh to learn to love London as I do.
For us, one week from tonight, our summer will be over. When we return, the college football season will be under way, and Josh will be at his new job, and we will all start to plan for the autumn holidays.
Where does the time go?
Thursday, August 16, 2007
The Perils Of Biography
Joshua and I have been reading three books, all biographies, sharing them back and forth between us. One is on Maximilien Robespierre, one is on George III, and one is on Andrew W. Mellon.
“Mellon: An American Life”, by David Cannadine, was commissioned by Paul Mellon, Andrew’s only son. Cannadine is a British biographer who was granted full access to the Mellon archives.
This biography took Cannadine twelve years to research, and his painstaking research is on limitless display in this long volume. I have never read a biography so filled with minutiae of all kinds, ranging from personal correspondence to the most mundane business figures and business memoranda to litigation transcripts to long lists of artworks owned. Cannadine has done his research well, and he was clearly determined to place the fruits of his research conspicuously before the reader.
Amid all this proliferation of detail, however, Mellon the man does not so much get lost as fail to make an actual appearance—although some reviewers have speculated, unkindly, that there was no human being there in the first place.
This is ungenerous. Only a very skilled and talented man could have founded and managed such vast enterprises as Mellon Bank, Alcoa and Gulf Oil, and served as Secretary Of The Treasury for the longest such tenure in our nation’s history, and amassed the finest personal art collection ever assembled in the Western Hemisphere (an art collection that was to serve as the core for The National Gallery Of Art in Washington, an institution founded and funded by Mellon).
Why cannot Cannadine capture Mellon the man? Part of the problem, I think, is that Cannadine relied too much upon the recollections of Paul, whose views of his more famous father were ambivalent at best. Paul clearly harbored grievances against his father, and those grievances are given full reign in this biography.
Another problem is that Cannadine is no fan of the rough-and-tumble world of American business and politics, at least as those endeavors were practiced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet another problem is that Cannadine has an intense dislike of American foreign and economic policies of the 1920’s (a dislike common among the British, who view that decade, correctly, as the decade of the emergence of American supremacy at the expense of Britain, a former great power forever decimated by the costs of The Great War). Still another problem for Cannadine is that he is inexpert in the fields of economics and tax and trade policies, on which subjects he espouses bizarre opinions that appear to have been learned at the knee of Ernest Bevin. Goodness!
If Cannadine were more knowledgeable about economics and American politics and American history, he may not have found it so necessary to turn Mellon—a rather marginal figure in American history, all in all—into some sort of emblem of American ills in the first third of the 20th Century. His attempt to do so is the chief failing in his book.
I wonder what Paul Mellon would have thought about this book, had he lived to see its completion and publication. I suspect that he might actually have been pleased.
“Mellon: An American Life” appears to have been “written to order”. It strikes me as a blatant effort to contrast an inhuman, relentless, driven father with a refined, noble, philanthropic son.
Further, it was a mistake, I believe, for an Englishman to have been handed this particular biographic assignment (Paul Mellon was one of America’s—and the world’s—greatest Anglophiles). This is so for two reasons.
The first reason is Cannadine’s fatally superficial understanding of American politics and history, a superficiality that quickly becomes irritating and renders all of Mellon’s genuine accomplishments immaterial.
The second is Cannadine’s unwillingness to portray Mellon’s wife as the true piece of work she was known to be, during her lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Andrew Mellon’s wife—Paul Mellon’s mother—was British, and the disastrous marriage that ensued between these two incompatible souls may be blamed largely upon Mellon’s British wife: a notorious liar, notoriously unfaithful to her husband, notoriously spendthrift with his money (as was her equally notorious family), and notorious in her endless efforts to embarrass him and make his life as difficult as possible. Cannadine tries to turn Mellon’s British wife into a sympathetic figure—was this another requirement of Paul Mellon, who may have wanted to see his mother portrayed in a favorable light before he died?—but Cannadine utterly fails in this effort. Mrs. Mellon cannot help but be revealed as the harridan she was, no matter how hard Cannadine tries to scrub her clean and sponge her off.
An American biographer of Mellon would not have made two such fateful errors.
A significant after-effect of a biography like Cannadine’s is that it inhibits any other biographer from taking another look at the subject for at least another generation. What major publisher will finance a second Mellon biography to correct the deficiencies in this one? This unlikely volume, sadly, will serve as the authoritative guide to Mellon for the next twenty or thirty years. Mellon, and the American reader, deserve better.
Until then, scholars of the period may benefit from the wealth of factual detail presented in this book, but they must look elsewhere if they want to compile an objective and full-dimensional portrait of Mellon the man and Mellon the legacy.
“Mellon: An American Life”, by David Cannadine, was commissioned by Paul Mellon, Andrew’s only son. Cannadine is a British biographer who was granted full access to the Mellon archives.
This biography took Cannadine twelve years to research, and his painstaking research is on limitless display in this long volume. I have never read a biography so filled with minutiae of all kinds, ranging from personal correspondence to the most mundane business figures and business memoranda to litigation transcripts to long lists of artworks owned. Cannadine has done his research well, and he was clearly determined to place the fruits of his research conspicuously before the reader.
Amid all this proliferation of detail, however, Mellon the man does not so much get lost as fail to make an actual appearance—although some reviewers have speculated, unkindly, that there was no human being there in the first place.
This is ungenerous. Only a very skilled and talented man could have founded and managed such vast enterprises as Mellon Bank, Alcoa and Gulf Oil, and served as Secretary Of The Treasury for the longest such tenure in our nation’s history, and amassed the finest personal art collection ever assembled in the Western Hemisphere (an art collection that was to serve as the core for The National Gallery Of Art in Washington, an institution founded and funded by Mellon).
Why cannot Cannadine capture Mellon the man? Part of the problem, I think, is that Cannadine relied too much upon the recollections of Paul, whose views of his more famous father were ambivalent at best. Paul clearly harbored grievances against his father, and those grievances are given full reign in this biography.
Another problem is that Cannadine is no fan of the rough-and-tumble world of American business and politics, at least as those endeavors were practiced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet another problem is that Cannadine has an intense dislike of American foreign and economic policies of the 1920’s (a dislike common among the British, who view that decade, correctly, as the decade of the emergence of American supremacy at the expense of Britain, a former great power forever decimated by the costs of The Great War). Still another problem for Cannadine is that he is inexpert in the fields of economics and tax and trade policies, on which subjects he espouses bizarre opinions that appear to have been learned at the knee of Ernest Bevin. Goodness!
If Cannadine were more knowledgeable about economics and American politics and American history, he may not have found it so necessary to turn Mellon—a rather marginal figure in American history, all in all—into some sort of emblem of American ills in the first third of the 20th Century. His attempt to do so is the chief failing in his book.
I wonder what Paul Mellon would have thought about this book, had he lived to see its completion and publication. I suspect that he might actually have been pleased.
“Mellon: An American Life” appears to have been “written to order”. It strikes me as a blatant effort to contrast an inhuman, relentless, driven father with a refined, noble, philanthropic son.
Further, it was a mistake, I believe, for an Englishman to have been handed this particular biographic assignment (Paul Mellon was one of America’s—and the world’s—greatest Anglophiles). This is so for two reasons.
The first reason is Cannadine’s fatally superficial understanding of American politics and history, a superficiality that quickly becomes irritating and renders all of Mellon’s genuine accomplishments immaterial.
The second is Cannadine’s unwillingness to portray Mellon’s wife as the true piece of work she was known to be, during her lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Andrew Mellon’s wife—Paul Mellon’s mother—was British, and the disastrous marriage that ensued between these two incompatible souls may be blamed largely upon Mellon’s British wife: a notorious liar, notoriously unfaithful to her husband, notoriously spendthrift with his money (as was her equally notorious family), and notorious in her endless efforts to embarrass him and make his life as difficult as possible. Cannadine tries to turn Mellon’s British wife into a sympathetic figure—was this another requirement of Paul Mellon, who may have wanted to see his mother portrayed in a favorable light before he died?—but Cannadine utterly fails in this effort. Mrs. Mellon cannot help but be revealed as the harridan she was, no matter how hard Cannadine tries to scrub her clean and sponge her off.
An American biographer of Mellon would not have made two such fateful errors.
A significant after-effect of a biography like Cannadine’s is that it inhibits any other biographer from taking another look at the subject for at least another generation. What major publisher will finance a second Mellon biography to correct the deficiencies in this one? This unlikely volume, sadly, will serve as the authoritative guide to Mellon for the next twenty or thirty years. Mellon, and the American reader, deserve better.
Until then, scholars of the period may benefit from the wealth of factual detail presented in this book, but they must look elsewhere if they want to compile an objective and full-dimensional portrait of Mellon the man and Mellon the legacy.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Mozart-Rossini-Bartok-Kodaly And Choral Music
Joshua and I have kept the following six discs in our player for the last week and more, and these discs have, by and large, provided us with a very rewarding listening experience.
Mozart Harmoniemusik, performed by The Amadeus Ensemble under Julius Rudel, on the Musical Heritage Society label
Rossini’s complete opera, “L’Italiana In Algeri”, performed by Darina Takova, Jennifer Larmore, Laura Polverelli, Raul Gimenez, John Del Carlo, Allessandro Corbelli, Carlos Chausson, the Choeur De Grand Theatre De Geneve and the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra under Jesus Lopez-Cobos, on the Teldec label
Music for String Orchestra by Bela Bartok, performed by the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra under Adam Fischer, on the Nimbus label
Orchestral Music of Zoltan Kodaly, performed by the Montreal Symphony under Charles Dutoit, on the Decca label
A disc of choral music, “Appear And Inspire”, performed by The Robert Shaw Festival Singers under Robert Shaw, on the Telarc label
The disc of Mozart Harmoniemusik provides very agreeable listening. It includes the Harmoniemusik from “Abduction From The Seraglio” and “The Magic Flute”, two of Mozart’s most enchanting operas, arranged for woodwinds and string bass.
Josh always loves listening to music performed by winds or brass, because he spent so many years playing in high school and junior high school bands, and he loves this disc. The tunes are captivating, and hearing this familiar music in woodwind arrangements is totally delightful.
Johann Nepomuk Wendt made the arrangements from “Abduction From The Seraglio”, and Wendt’s arrangements are vastly superior to the work of Joseph Heidenreich, who provided “The Magic Flute” arrangements. Although the same instrumentation is used in both sets of Harmoniemusik, Wendt’s set has greater piquancy and sustains the listener’s interest much more than Heidenreich’s, whose arrangements seem bland by comparison—even though “The Magic Flute”, of the two operas, has by far the greater music.
The performances are OK, but I can imagine performances with greater tonal luster and character and wit.
Josh and I chose to listen to “L’Italiana In Algeri” because The Minnesota Opera will present the opera this Fall, and Josh and I plan to attend a performance. Vivica Genaux will sing Isabella in the Minnesota production, and we are eager to see and hear the presentation. We heard Genaux in recital in Saint Paul in June, and we thought that she was a very fine singer.
As a general rule, I am not particularly interested in Rossini operas. He was a musician of genius, and a composer of genius, but his operas do not hold my attention. For me, there are too many longueurs in Rossini’s works for the stage, and the dramatic conventions of the Italian stage of the time were corrupt and they are unconvincing for a modern audience. Whenever I listen to a Rossini opera on disc, or whenever I attend a Rossini opera in the theater, I am always thankful when the work at long last reaches its conclusion.
Many music-lovers find Rossini comedies to be captivating, but Rossini comedies have always left me impatient and uninvolved and uninterested. Antonio Pappano says that the only Rossini comedy worth reviving is “The Barber Of Seville”, and that the other Rossini comedies should remain in a drawer. I do not share this view, because I think that “La Cenerentola” and “Le Comte Ory” (and “Il Viaggio A Reims”, which shares much of its music with “Le Comte Ory”) are superior, musically, to “The Barber Of Seville”.
Nonetheless, all of these works are of limited interest to me, and my lack of interest has only been exacerbated by the fact that I have never managed to attend a good Rossini performance anywhere. Each Rossini performance I have ever attended was fraught with problems, whether in the singing, the orchestral playing, the conducting or the staging (or some combination of all of the above).
From a purely musical standpoint, I admire Rossini’s late opera seria more than his comedies, because Rossini uses an expanded orchestra and a more “Germanic” orchestration in his late opera seria and because he uses more extended musical forms in his late opera seria. However, from a purely dramatic standpoint, his opera seria, early or late, are not, in general, convincing or satisfying.
From both a musical and a dramatic view, Rossini’s operas—comedies and opera seria—are very, very difficult to perform well. Each work requires virtuoso singing and virtuoso playing and virtuoso conducting and virtuoso staging in order to work, and such singing and playing and conducting and staging seldom go hand-in-hand.
The Teldec “Italiana” set is enjoyable, and performed at a high level. Jennifer Larmore is the star of the set, and her singing is clean and lively and full of fun. Larmore is a good exponent of Rossini style. The coloratura poses no problems for her, and yet the coloratura is never allowed to slip into mere instrumental note-spinning. Instead, for Larmore, the coloratura serves a comedic and dramatic purpose. It is obvious that Larmore was having a grand time during the “Italiana” recording sessions. Her work here is the only reason to listen to this set of discs.
Any performance of “L’Italiana In Algeri” stands or falls with its Isabella and its conductor. It is Jesus Lopez-Cobos, a conductor I generally admire, who lets this set down. The recording features clean and lively playing, but it lacks drama and point and excitement and momentum. Further, the orchestra never glistens as it should in a Rossini comedy. The recording is akin to a concert performance—it is like a sequence of discrete, unrelated numbers that do not cohere into a fully-satisfying whole. There is no whiff of the theater in this performance, and no sense that a dramatic event is under way.
And for “Italiana” to sustain the listener’s interest, the opera must move. It must go somewhere. There must be a point to the flurry of notes as they pass by. And Lopez-Cobos does not succeed in turning this recording into a dramatically-convincing listening experience.
Conductors in competing sets of “Italiana” do no better, with one exception: Claudio Abbado managed to bring this opera fully to life on disc in his famed Deutsche Grammophon recording with Agnes Baltsa. Abbado succeeded in capturing the giddiness and mounting excitement of Rossini’s opera, as well as its moments of repose, and he managed to combine these two elements into a successful dramatic entity. The listener’s attention never wanes in an Abbado performance of a Rossini comedy, and yet Abbado’s Rossini is more expressive, with a wider emotional range, than the Rossini of his peers. Abbado, alone of today’s conductors, seems to hold the key to success in a Rossini score.
For the most part, Josh did not like “L’Italiana In Algeri”. Aside from Larmore and a few of the funnier bits, he found the opera to be boring. However, he was happy to become familiar with the score in order to make our upcoming visit to a live performance more meaningful. We earnestly hope that “L’Italiana In Algeri” will succeed in its Minnesota Opera staging.
“L’Italiana In Algeri” will be the second Rossini opera Josh and I will have heard at The Minnesota Opera. Last season, we attended a performance of Rossini’s opera seria, “La Donna Del Lago”, and we sort of enjoyed it, but primarily because of the presence of Ewa Podles, who was indeed very imposing. I attended another Rossini performance within the last year, when I attended a performance of “La Cenerentola” in Houston. This is more Rossini than I would normally wish to hear within such a short period of time.
The Bartok disc contains the Divertimento For String Orchestra and the Music For Strings, Percussion And Celesta. These are good, solid performances, but not the last word in finesse—and not the last word in Bartok performance, either, for that matter. The performance of the Divertimento is better than the performance of its more famous coupling. There is a touch of opaqueness in the recorded sound that inhibits listening pleasure.
The Zoltan Kodaly disc includes his four most popular orchestral works: the “Hary Janos” Suite, the Dances Of Galanta, the Dances of Marosszek and Variations On A Hungarian Folksong (”The Peacock”).
I have always believed that Kodaly was a major composer, and I have never heard a composition by Kodaly that was not first-rate. This includes his orchestral works, and his choral works, and his works for solo instruments and small ensembles. The music of Kodaly is not played much in the U.S., and it should be. His music is colorful, and bold, and virtuosic, and expressive.
His music is also highly original, a quality for which Kodaly receives no credit in the English-speaking world. (Among other things, Kodaly was one of the originators of the “Concerto For Orchestra” form as we understand it today, and he wrote one of the finest works in this genre he helped create.) Kodaly borrowed virtually nothing from his Central European forebears. Inspired by Hungarian folksong, he created his own compositional forms virtually from scratch.
According to those who knew him, Kodaly was an extremely spiritual man, but also entirely impractical, and completely out-of-step with the realities of his own time and place.
Kodaly continued to compose during the darkest days of Budapest’s history. In the latter stages of World War II, when Germany, dissatisfied with Admiral Horthy’s foot-dragging on the “Jewish question”, occupied Budapest and began liquidating its Jewish population, Kodaly wrote his great Missa Brevis (and actually premiered it in the cloak room of the Budapest Opera House while The Battle Of Budapest—which destroyed eighty per cent of Budapest and resulted in more than 40,000 civilian deaths—raged in the streets outside the Opera House).
Kodaly continued to compose during the Communist period, mostly undisturbed by party officials. Unsure of his political views, newly-installed Communist officials initially planned to execute him, but they quickly retracted Kodaly’s execution warrant, realizing that he was not only harmless but that he was malleable, as well, and of possible use to the new regime. As a result, party functionaries showered Kodaly with official honors and official positions, and they allowed him to work in peace until his death in 1967 at the age of 85.
Although Kodaly’s music has largely disappeared from North American concert halls, his music continues to be recorded with some frequency. The Montreal/Dutoit recording was released in 1996. It was one of the last of the Montreal/Dutoit recordings, issued shortly before Decca stunned the music world in 1997 by terminating the contracts of several prominent Decca artists, including Charles Dutoit. Those terminations were a harbinger of what was to become widespread in the classical music world just a few years later.
Personally, I was not surprised at the time Decca walked away from Montreal/Dutoit. By the time Decca ended its association with him, Dutoit had already recorded almost all of the repertory for which he was suited and he was already moving into repertory in which he had nothing special to offer. The Kodaly disc is a good example of a recording that need not have been made.
The recording quality is excellent—clear, brilliant, spacious—and the playing is clean if not quite distinguished. However, the performances lack spice, and grit, and bravura, and élan, and rhythmic abandon, qualities all of which are essential for performing Kodaly’s orchestral music. Instead of offering a ravishing Hungarian goulash spiced with paprika, Dutoit serves up Canadian mutton. Kodaly’s music does not come to life when performed in such a bland and faceless manner, and Dutoit’s Kodaly compares unfavorably with the recorded Kodaly performances by Eugene Ormandy and George Szell, both of whom were masters of this repertory. I can understand why this disc received no attention when it was issued and why it went out of print almost as soon as it was released.
The Robert Shaw disc is very special. It was recorded by participants in one of Shaw’s summer choral institutes in France, and it is amazing to hear what Shaw could achieve with a pickup group of singers in only a few weeks of work.
The singing is ravishing, and I am in awe at how well-blended the choral sound is. I am not sure that I have ever heard finer choral singing in my life, at least from a medium-sized group.
There are six works on the disc: Britten’s Hymn To Saint Cecilia; Debussy’s Three Chansons De Charles D’Orleans; Ravel’s Three Chansons; Poulenc’s Un Soir De Neige; Henk Badings’ Chansons Bretonnes; and Dominick Argento’s I Hate And I Love.
All of these works are incomparably well-written for chorus, except for the Argento, which does not display the same fluency and command of writing for massed voices as do the Britten, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Badings compositions.
The Debussy and Ravel songs are sublime, and the Britten and Poulenc works are not too far behind that unmatchable standard. The Badings is a minor masterpiece, I believe, and I was very pleased to make this work’s acquaintance, as it was the sole work on this disc that was new to me.
The longest work on the disc is the Argento, a work commissioned by and written for The Dale Warland Singers, the Twin Cities-based group that was long the finest chorus in the Upper Midwest until it disbanded upon the retirement of Mr. Warland a few years ago. Argento is a Minneapolis-based composer, and I have met him several times, and he is a very nice man, but I have never responded to his music and I have always disliked I Hate And I Love, which strikes me as frivolous and lacking musical tension and genuine wit. I do not know what Robert Shaw found in this particular composition that made him want to spend time with it.
Shaw was a wonderful trainer of choruses, perhaps the best America ever produced. He could do wonders with massed voices.
As an interpreter, however, Shaw was nothing special. His performances always tended to be bland and under-characterized.
Those tendencies, happily, are not present in this disc, probably because the works recorded are fairly short and somewhat self-effacing. All of the works on the disc are either reflective or very restrained in their emotions, and Shaw’s very understated approach works well with such music. High drama is not called for in these works, and Shaw’s expository style of conducting proves exemplary for this material.
I think this is one of the finest discs Robert Shaw ever recorded. Josh and I have listened to this disc over and over and over, with the greatest of pleasure and admiration.
I can fully understand why Shaw is so much missed.
Mozart Harmoniemusik, performed by The Amadeus Ensemble under Julius Rudel, on the Musical Heritage Society label
Rossini’s complete opera, “L’Italiana In Algeri”, performed by Darina Takova, Jennifer Larmore, Laura Polverelli, Raul Gimenez, John Del Carlo, Allessandro Corbelli, Carlos Chausson, the Choeur De Grand Theatre De Geneve and the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra under Jesus Lopez-Cobos, on the Teldec label
Music for String Orchestra by Bela Bartok, performed by the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra under Adam Fischer, on the Nimbus label
Orchestral Music of Zoltan Kodaly, performed by the Montreal Symphony under Charles Dutoit, on the Decca label
A disc of choral music, “Appear And Inspire”, performed by The Robert Shaw Festival Singers under Robert Shaw, on the Telarc label
The disc of Mozart Harmoniemusik provides very agreeable listening. It includes the Harmoniemusik from “Abduction From The Seraglio” and “The Magic Flute”, two of Mozart’s most enchanting operas, arranged for woodwinds and string bass.
Josh always loves listening to music performed by winds or brass, because he spent so many years playing in high school and junior high school bands, and he loves this disc. The tunes are captivating, and hearing this familiar music in woodwind arrangements is totally delightful.
Johann Nepomuk Wendt made the arrangements from “Abduction From The Seraglio”, and Wendt’s arrangements are vastly superior to the work of Joseph Heidenreich, who provided “The Magic Flute” arrangements. Although the same instrumentation is used in both sets of Harmoniemusik, Wendt’s set has greater piquancy and sustains the listener’s interest much more than Heidenreich’s, whose arrangements seem bland by comparison—even though “The Magic Flute”, of the two operas, has by far the greater music.
The performances are OK, but I can imagine performances with greater tonal luster and character and wit.
Josh and I chose to listen to “L’Italiana In Algeri” because The Minnesota Opera will present the opera this Fall, and Josh and I plan to attend a performance. Vivica Genaux will sing Isabella in the Minnesota production, and we are eager to see and hear the presentation. We heard Genaux in recital in Saint Paul in June, and we thought that she was a very fine singer.
As a general rule, I am not particularly interested in Rossini operas. He was a musician of genius, and a composer of genius, but his operas do not hold my attention. For me, there are too many longueurs in Rossini’s works for the stage, and the dramatic conventions of the Italian stage of the time were corrupt and they are unconvincing for a modern audience. Whenever I listen to a Rossini opera on disc, or whenever I attend a Rossini opera in the theater, I am always thankful when the work at long last reaches its conclusion.
Many music-lovers find Rossini comedies to be captivating, but Rossini comedies have always left me impatient and uninvolved and uninterested. Antonio Pappano says that the only Rossini comedy worth reviving is “The Barber Of Seville”, and that the other Rossini comedies should remain in a drawer. I do not share this view, because I think that “La Cenerentola” and “Le Comte Ory” (and “Il Viaggio A Reims”, which shares much of its music with “Le Comte Ory”) are superior, musically, to “The Barber Of Seville”.
Nonetheless, all of these works are of limited interest to me, and my lack of interest has only been exacerbated by the fact that I have never managed to attend a good Rossini performance anywhere. Each Rossini performance I have ever attended was fraught with problems, whether in the singing, the orchestral playing, the conducting or the staging (or some combination of all of the above).
From a purely musical standpoint, I admire Rossini’s late opera seria more than his comedies, because Rossini uses an expanded orchestra and a more “Germanic” orchestration in his late opera seria and because he uses more extended musical forms in his late opera seria. However, from a purely dramatic standpoint, his opera seria, early or late, are not, in general, convincing or satisfying.
From both a musical and a dramatic view, Rossini’s operas—comedies and opera seria—are very, very difficult to perform well. Each work requires virtuoso singing and virtuoso playing and virtuoso conducting and virtuoso staging in order to work, and such singing and playing and conducting and staging seldom go hand-in-hand.
The Teldec “Italiana” set is enjoyable, and performed at a high level. Jennifer Larmore is the star of the set, and her singing is clean and lively and full of fun. Larmore is a good exponent of Rossini style. The coloratura poses no problems for her, and yet the coloratura is never allowed to slip into mere instrumental note-spinning. Instead, for Larmore, the coloratura serves a comedic and dramatic purpose. It is obvious that Larmore was having a grand time during the “Italiana” recording sessions. Her work here is the only reason to listen to this set of discs.
Any performance of “L’Italiana In Algeri” stands or falls with its Isabella and its conductor. It is Jesus Lopez-Cobos, a conductor I generally admire, who lets this set down. The recording features clean and lively playing, but it lacks drama and point and excitement and momentum. Further, the orchestra never glistens as it should in a Rossini comedy. The recording is akin to a concert performance—it is like a sequence of discrete, unrelated numbers that do not cohere into a fully-satisfying whole. There is no whiff of the theater in this performance, and no sense that a dramatic event is under way.
And for “Italiana” to sustain the listener’s interest, the opera must move. It must go somewhere. There must be a point to the flurry of notes as they pass by. And Lopez-Cobos does not succeed in turning this recording into a dramatically-convincing listening experience.
Conductors in competing sets of “Italiana” do no better, with one exception: Claudio Abbado managed to bring this opera fully to life on disc in his famed Deutsche Grammophon recording with Agnes Baltsa. Abbado succeeded in capturing the giddiness and mounting excitement of Rossini’s opera, as well as its moments of repose, and he managed to combine these two elements into a successful dramatic entity. The listener’s attention never wanes in an Abbado performance of a Rossini comedy, and yet Abbado’s Rossini is more expressive, with a wider emotional range, than the Rossini of his peers. Abbado, alone of today’s conductors, seems to hold the key to success in a Rossini score.
For the most part, Josh did not like “L’Italiana In Algeri”. Aside from Larmore and a few of the funnier bits, he found the opera to be boring. However, he was happy to become familiar with the score in order to make our upcoming visit to a live performance more meaningful. We earnestly hope that “L’Italiana In Algeri” will succeed in its Minnesota Opera staging.
“L’Italiana In Algeri” will be the second Rossini opera Josh and I will have heard at The Minnesota Opera. Last season, we attended a performance of Rossini’s opera seria, “La Donna Del Lago”, and we sort of enjoyed it, but primarily because of the presence of Ewa Podles, who was indeed very imposing. I attended another Rossini performance within the last year, when I attended a performance of “La Cenerentola” in Houston. This is more Rossini than I would normally wish to hear within such a short period of time.
The Bartok disc contains the Divertimento For String Orchestra and the Music For Strings, Percussion And Celesta. These are good, solid performances, but not the last word in finesse—and not the last word in Bartok performance, either, for that matter. The performance of the Divertimento is better than the performance of its more famous coupling. There is a touch of opaqueness in the recorded sound that inhibits listening pleasure.
The Zoltan Kodaly disc includes his four most popular orchestral works: the “Hary Janos” Suite, the Dances Of Galanta, the Dances of Marosszek and Variations On A Hungarian Folksong (”The Peacock”).
I have always believed that Kodaly was a major composer, and I have never heard a composition by Kodaly that was not first-rate. This includes his orchestral works, and his choral works, and his works for solo instruments and small ensembles. The music of Kodaly is not played much in the U.S., and it should be. His music is colorful, and bold, and virtuosic, and expressive.
His music is also highly original, a quality for which Kodaly receives no credit in the English-speaking world. (Among other things, Kodaly was one of the originators of the “Concerto For Orchestra” form as we understand it today, and he wrote one of the finest works in this genre he helped create.) Kodaly borrowed virtually nothing from his Central European forebears. Inspired by Hungarian folksong, he created his own compositional forms virtually from scratch.
According to those who knew him, Kodaly was an extremely spiritual man, but also entirely impractical, and completely out-of-step with the realities of his own time and place.
Kodaly continued to compose during the darkest days of Budapest’s history. In the latter stages of World War II, when Germany, dissatisfied with Admiral Horthy’s foot-dragging on the “Jewish question”, occupied Budapest and began liquidating its Jewish population, Kodaly wrote his great Missa Brevis (and actually premiered it in the cloak room of the Budapest Opera House while The Battle Of Budapest—which destroyed eighty per cent of Budapest and resulted in more than 40,000 civilian deaths—raged in the streets outside the Opera House).
Kodaly continued to compose during the Communist period, mostly undisturbed by party officials. Unsure of his political views, newly-installed Communist officials initially planned to execute him, but they quickly retracted Kodaly’s execution warrant, realizing that he was not only harmless but that he was malleable, as well, and of possible use to the new regime. As a result, party functionaries showered Kodaly with official honors and official positions, and they allowed him to work in peace until his death in 1967 at the age of 85.
Although Kodaly’s music has largely disappeared from North American concert halls, his music continues to be recorded with some frequency. The Montreal/Dutoit recording was released in 1996. It was one of the last of the Montreal/Dutoit recordings, issued shortly before Decca stunned the music world in 1997 by terminating the contracts of several prominent Decca artists, including Charles Dutoit. Those terminations were a harbinger of what was to become widespread in the classical music world just a few years later.
Personally, I was not surprised at the time Decca walked away from Montreal/Dutoit. By the time Decca ended its association with him, Dutoit had already recorded almost all of the repertory for which he was suited and he was already moving into repertory in which he had nothing special to offer. The Kodaly disc is a good example of a recording that need not have been made.
The recording quality is excellent—clear, brilliant, spacious—and the playing is clean if not quite distinguished. However, the performances lack spice, and grit, and bravura, and élan, and rhythmic abandon, qualities all of which are essential for performing Kodaly’s orchestral music. Instead of offering a ravishing Hungarian goulash spiced with paprika, Dutoit serves up Canadian mutton. Kodaly’s music does not come to life when performed in such a bland and faceless manner, and Dutoit’s Kodaly compares unfavorably with the recorded Kodaly performances by Eugene Ormandy and George Szell, both of whom were masters of this repertory. I can understand why this disc received no attention when it was issued and why it went out of print almost as soon as it was released.
The Robert Shaw disc is very special. It was recorded by participants in one of Shaw’s summer choral institutes in France, and it is amazing to hear what Shaw could achieve with a pickup group of singers in only a few weeks of work.
The singing is ravishing, and I am in awe at how well-blended the choral sound is. I am not sure that I have ever heard finer choral singing in my life, at least from a medium-sized group.
There are six works on the disc: Britten’s Hymn To Saint Cecilia; Debussy’s Three Chansons De Charles D’Orleans; Ravel’s Three Chansons; Poulenc’s Un Soir De Neige; Henk Badings’ Chansons Bretonnes; and Dominick Argento’s I Hate And I Love.
All of these works are incomparably well-written for chorus, except for the Argento, which does not display the same fluency and command of writing for massed voices as do the Britten, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Badings compositions.
The Debussy and Ravel songs are sublime, and the Britten and Poulenc works are not too far behind that unmatchable standard. The Badings is a minor masterpiece, I believe, and I was very pleased to make this work’s acquaintance, as it was the sole work on this disc that was new to me.
The longest work on the disc is the Argento, a work commissioned by and written for The Dale Warland Singers, the Twin Cities-based group that was long the finest chorus in the Upper Midwest until it disbanded upon the retirement of Mr. Warland a few years ago. Argento is a Minneapolis-based composer, and I have met him several times, and he is a very nice man, but I have never responded to his music and I have always disliked I Hate And I Love, which strikes me as frivolous and lacking musical tension and genuine wit. I do not know what Robert Shaw found in this particular composition that made him want to spend time with it.
Shaw was a wonderful trainer of choruses, perhaps the best America ever produced. He could do wonders with massed voices.
As an interpreter, however, Shaw was nothing special. His performances always tended to be bland and under-characterized.
Those tendencies, happily, are not present in this disc, probably because the works recorded are fairly short and somewhat self-effacing. All of the works on the disc are either reflective or very restrained in their emotions, and Shaw’s very understated approach works well with such music. High drama is not called for in these works, and Shaw’s expository style of conducting proves exemplary for this material.
I think this is one of the finest discs Robert Shaw ever recorded. Josh and I have listened to this disc over and over and over, with the greatest of pleasure and admiration.
I can fully understand why Shaw is so much missed.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
A Lot To Get Done
On Saturday afternoon, my parents and Joshua and I are going to catch the Guthrie Theater “Private Lives” that we were scheduled to attend the night of the bridge collapse. We all decided that Saturday afternoon would be an ideal time to see the show, so we will go to the 1:00 p.m. matinee.
We leave for London three weeks from today, and we are starting to get excited.
We have a lot to get done between now and then, and I think we are going to get started this weekend.
Joshua and I have some things to pick up for our trip, so I think he and I will do some shopping on Friday night.
On Saturday morning, we will do some yard work at my parents’ house while my parents are taking care of some personal business.
After the Guthrie matinee on Saturday, Josh and I will have dinner at my parents’ house and after dinner we will help my parents get some things ready for London.
On Sunday, after church, we all have a family function to attend with my mother’s relatives. After that is over, I think that Josh and I will go back with my parents to their house and help them with a few other small things that need some attention.
The summer is almost over, and I cannot believe how quickly it has passed. It seems like Memorial Day was only two or three weeks ago, and yet the college football season will be upon us before we know it.
Josh has made some major decisions with reference to his career plans, and he may write about those things when he is ready to do so.
We leave for London three weeks from today, and we are starting to get excited.
We have a lot to get done between now and then, and I think we are going to get started this weekend.
Joshua and I have some things to pick up for our trip, so I think he and I will do some shopping on Friday night.
On Saturday morning, we will do some yard work at my parents’ house while my parents are taking care of some personal business.
After the Guthrie matinee on Saturday, Josh and I will have dinner at my parents’ house and after dinner we will help my parents get some things ready for London.
On Sunday, after church, we all have a family function to attend with my mother’s relatives. After that is over, I think that Josh and I will go back with my parents to their house and help them with a few other small things that need some attention.
The summer is almost over, and I cannot believe how quickly it has passed. It seems like Memorial Day was only two or three weeks ago, and yet the college football season will be upon us before we know it.
Josh has made some major decisions with reference to his career plans, and he may write about those things when he is ready to do so.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
A Colossal Failure
My parents returned safely from Denver today.
My brother was an excellent host, as I knew he would be.
Most of the time during their visit, my parents simply visited with my brother in his condo. There is not much to do in Denver—it is “a frightful cow town”, according to my mother, and my brother readily agrees with her—and my parents long ago had seen pretty much everything worth seeing there.
My brother did take my parents out to dinner on Saturday night, and on Sunday afternoon he took them to see the new Libeskind building, which my parents had seen during its construction phase. Otherwise, however, they all stayed in all weekend. My mother did some cooking for my brother, and they all watched a couple of movies on DVD, and they talked about our upcoming London trip and other things, and the weekend passed too quickly.
My parents had been very curious to see the completed Libeskind building, because they had seen it so many times during its construction phase and because they had read the disastrous reviews of the building when it opened last October.
My father’s judgment: “The New York Times was kind”. He was referring to the New York Times architecture critic’s celebrated review of the Libeskind building, which declared the building to be a spectacular and colossal failure, inside and out.
My mother’s judgment: “It looks like a shopping mall. Maybe they can take advantage of that, and finally unload all of that Remington stuff.”
The new Denver building has veritably destroyed Libeskind’s reputation, as many have noted (some with glee). I don’t think that Libeskind’s reputation will ever recover from such a major disaster.
Paul Goldberger has written that one of the problems with the Denver building was that there was no person on the Denver Art Museum’s Board Of Trustees who was knowledgeable about art or architecture, and who could have pointed out some of the more glaring deficiencies in the design and demanded that certain changes be made. Goldberger, somewhat uncharitably, pointed out that a building so problematic could never be erected in a “first-tier” city, where talented board members are abundant.
The repercussions are not expected to end anytime soon. According to the art press, the Director of the Denver Art Museum is expected to get the ax very, very soon—and things at the museum are in such a dismal state, widely-known within the field, that Denver will not be able to attract anyone serious as a replacement.
Tonight my parents drove to our apartment straight from the airport. The dog was very glad to see them, and they were very glad to see him. The dog was jumping up and down in excitement as soon as he heard my father’s car, so Joshua and I took him outside to greet my parents as soon as they stepped from the car.
“Didn’t you feed this poor little thing?” my mother asked us, in jest, as the dog practically climbed all over her and my Dad.
Joshua and I gave my parents a nice dinner: barbecued chicken, and potato salad, and baked beans, and sweet corn, and cole slaw. We had orange cookies for dessert.
As soon as dinner was over, my parents went home. They wanted to get settled in, and unpack, and read their mail, and get the dog settled in, before bedtime.
Tomorrow night, Josh and I will play basketball, but the rest of the week should be uneventful. We loved having the dog with us, but we are also looking forward to a little peace and quiet. In a small apartment, he can be exhausting.
My brother was an excellent host, as I knew he would be.
Most of the time during their visit, my parents simply visited with my brother in his condo. There is not much to do in Denver—it is “a frightful cow town”, according to my mother, and my brother readily agrees with her—and my parents long ago had seen pretty much everything worth seeing there.
My brother did take my parents out to dinner on Saturday night, and on Sunday afternoon he took them to see the new Libeskind building, which my parents had seen during its construction phase. Otherwise, however, they all stayed in all weekend. My mother did some cooking for my brother, and they all watched a couple of movies on DVD, and they talked about our upcoming London trip and other things, and the weekend passed too quickly.
My parents had been very curious to see the completed Libeskind building, because they had seen it so many times during its construction phase and because they had read the disastrous reviews of the building when it opened last October.
My father’s judgment: “The New York Times was kind”. He was referring to the New York Times architecture critic’s celebrated review of the Libeskind building, which declared the building to be a spectacular and colossal failure, inside and out.
My mother’s judgment: “It looks like a shopping mall. Maybe they can take advantage of that, and finally unload all of that Remington stuff.”
The new Denver building has veritably destroyed Libeskind’s reputation, as many have noted (some with glee). I don’t think that Libeskind’s reputation will ever recover from such a major disaster.
Paul Goldberger has written that one of the problems with the Denver building was that there was no person on the Denver Art Museum’s Board Of Trustees who was knowledgeable about art or architecture, and who could have pointed out some of the more glaring deficiencies in the design and demanded that certain changes be made. Goldberger, somewhat uncharitably, pointed out that a building so problematic could never be erected in a “first-tier” city, where talented board members are abundant.
The repercussions are not expected to end anytime soon. According to the art press, the Director of the Denver Art Museum is expected to get the ax very, very soon—and things at the museum are in such a dismal state, widely-known within the field, that Denver will not be able to attract anyone serious as a replacement.
Tonight my parents drove to our apartment straight from the airport. The dog was very glad to see them, and they were very glad to see him. The dog was jumping up and down in excitement as soon as he heard my father’s car, so Joshua and I took him outside to greet my parents as soon as they stepped from the car.
“Didn’t you feed this poor little thing?” my mother asked us, in jest, as the dog practically climbed all over her and my Dad.
Joshua and I gave my parents a nice dinner: barbecued chicken, and potato salad, and baked beans, and sweet corn, and cole slaw. We had orange cookies for dessert.
As soon as dinner was over, my parents went home. They wanted to get settled in, and unpack, and read their mail, and get the dog settled in, before bedtime.
Tomorrow night, Josh and I will play basketball, but the rest of the week should be uneventful. We loved having the dog with us, but we are also looking forward to a little peace and quiet. In a small apartment, he can be exhausting.
Monday, August 06, 2007
A Weekend At The Lake
Joshua and I took the dog up to the lake this weekend. We thought he would have a better time up there than if we stayed at home.
And I think he did have a good time. Josh and I played with him out in the yard, and we took him on walks, and we fed him grilled steak and grilled chicken. He seemed to be entirely happy and content.
Josh and I really did not do much this weekend. We did some reading, and we swam, and we tried to catch up on our sleep. To do so, we had to go to bed early each night, because we knew the dog would not allow us to sleep late—6:00 a.m. is about the latest the dog will allow us to sleep before he starts carrying on. When he is ready to start his day, we have to be ready, too. Trying to ignore him does not work—he stands on top of me, and licks me, and after a couple of minutes he starts barking, two feet from my ears. There is no way anyone can sleep through his commotion, and he knows it.
My parents are having a nice visit in Denver. Josh and I talked to my parents last night, and they are enjoying their visit very much. My brother is a perfect host, and he is taking excellent care of them.
Josh and I also talked to my brother in New York last night. My brother and his wife have houseguests: my sister-in-law’s parents arrived late Saturday afternoon from London. They will be in New York for the next three weeks. They are there to see their grandson, of course, and they are having the time of their lives, since they have not seen him in a year. My nephew has warmed to his British grandparents very quickly this visit, unlike last year, when it took him several days before he became accustomed to their presence. My sister-in-law said that my nephew has welcomed his maternal grandparents much more easily this year because he is a year older and because she and my brother kept telling my nephew that his other set of grandparents was coming for a visit. My nephew probably did not understand precisely who this other set of grandparents was, but at least he understood the concept that someone was arriving for a visit, and he was prepared for it. I hope that they all have a wonderful visit over the next three weeks.
Josh and I also talked to Josh’s family last night. Last week, Josh’s family arrived home safely—and exhausted—from the long baseball road trip. Josh’s family enjoyed the trip, all in all, but Josh’s Dad said that none of them would want to repeat such a trip any time soon—it was a long trip, and a lot of driving, and a lot of baseball games, and a lot of nights in hotels, and a lot of restaurant food, and he said that everyone was glad to be home. He said that everyone needed a vacation after such a long trip!
Nothing much will be going on with Josh and me this week. We will have the dog with us tonight, and tomorrow night my parents will return from Denver. Tomorrow night, Josh and I will have my parents over for dinner, after which they will take the dog home. There is nothing else on our schedule for the rest of the week.
And I think he did have a good time. Josh and I played with him out in the yard, and we took him on walks, and we fed him grilled steak and grilled chicken. He seemed to be entirely happy and content.
Josh and I really did not do much this weekend. We did some reading, and we swam, and we tried to catch up on our sleep. To do so, we had to go to bed early each night, because we knew the dog would not allow us to sleep late—6:00 a.m. is about the latest the dog will allow us to sleep before he starts carrying on. When he is ready to start his day, we have to be ready, too. Trying to ignore him does not work—he stands on top of me, and licks me, and after a couple of minutes he starts barking, two feet from my ears. There is no way anyone can sleep through his commotion, and he knows it.
My parents are having a nice visit in Denver. Josh and I talked to my parents last night, and they are enjoying their visit very much. My brother is a perfect host, and he is taking excellent care of them.
Josh and I also talked to my brother in New York last night. My brother and his wife have houseguests: my sister-in-law’s parents arrived late Saturday afternoon from London. They will be in New York for the next three weeks. They are there to see their grandson, of course, and they are having the time of their lives, since they have not seen him in a year. My nephew has warmed to his British grandparents very quickly this visit, unlike last year, when it took him several days before he became accustomed to their presence. My sister-in-law said that my nephew has welcomed his maternal grandparents much more easily this year because he is a year older and because she and my brother kept telling my nephew that his other set of grandparents was coming for a visit. My nephew probably did not understand precisely who this other set of grandparents was, but at least he understood the concept that someone was arriving for a visit, and he was prepared for it. I hope that they all have a wonderful visit over the next three weeks.
Josh and I also talked to Josh’s family last night. Last week, Josh’s family arrived home safely—and exhausted—from the long baseball road trip. Josh’s family enjoyed the trip, all in all, but Josh’s Dad said that none of them would want to repeat such a trip any time soon—it was a long trip, and a lot of driving, and a lot of baseball games, and a lot of nights in hotels, and a lot of restaurant food, and he said that everyone was glad to be home. He said that everyone needed a vacation after such a long trip!
Nothing much will be going on with Josh and me this week. We will have the dog with us tonight, and tomorrow night my parents will return from Denver. Tomorrow night, Josh and I will have my parents over for dinner, after which they will take the dog home. There is nothing else on our schedule for the rest of the week.