Assassins, A Little Night Music, etc. from Sondheim “The Story So Far”
By Daniel Felsenfeld
Personally, I like theatre to go to extremes. In college, I loved Tenessee Williams, Wedekind, Joe Orton, Howard Barker, Howard Korder, the Peter Brook production of Marat/Sade, and Bertolt Brecht (especially his collaborations with Kurt Weill). They seemed to not just show the same thing onstage that we could see in life but with snappier dialogue, but seemed to aim for a particular kind of catharsis that needed to be achieved through discomfort, if not actual pain. Sondheim skirts this kind of discomfort—Sweeney Todd is gloriously garish, but it is a horror movie; Company raises issues that must have been really confusing to the chattering class in 1970s New York; Pacific Overtures deals boldly with the Moloch of Americanization through Asian fable—but never really quite gets there, not, at least, until Assassins, which for this reason alone stands it as my favorite show by the great theatre genius.
The two tracks from this show included in The Story So Far scratch only the surface of how truly extreme this show really is. The first, “Everybody’s Got the Right to be Happy” features a carnival barker (shades of Lulu or Poulenc’s Mammeles perhaps?) begging the desolate souls who will come to be presidential assassins to come in and commit their crimes. He beckons, for example, John Hinkley, to “come and get the prize with those big blue eyes / skinny little thighs and those big blue eyes,” a reference to Reagan’s would-be assassin and his obsession with a certain actress in the film Taxi Driver. Gross, but entrancing; uncomfortable, yes, but makes a point, a beautiful one, about the way in which people are taught to think that the mere fact that “…everybody’s got the right to be happy” might entice the less sane among us to murder.
Even creepier is “The Ballad of Booth,” a soulful aria from the man who shot Lincoln. Booth is the star of Assassins (“here comes our pioneer” they all beam as he enters), his exploits being so important that he needs a balladeer to tell his tale. Like Kurt Weill jazzing up MacHeath in Mac the Knife (it has always baffled me as this clever little number about a brutal and unrepentant murderer has made the rounds, even announcing the fact that MacDonalds would stay open late countrywide; sometimes I feel we do live in a surrealist painting). S ondheim gives Booth cause, soul, and some of his most aching melodies. On the run, Booth the actor dictates to his sideman the reasons he shot the president (though the Balladeer disagrees: “…they say it wasn’t Lincoln John / you merely had a slew of bad reviews”). He begs for his story to told, how he “…killed the man who killed my country,” and how the “…nation can never again be the hope that it was.” But then he twists, “…how the union could never recover / from that vulgar, high-and-mighty, nigger lover / never” and wham! Sondheim has twisted the knife, led us down a particular path and then dumped some horrors from the mouth of he who sang it. We almost believe him, and it gets us to question a lot in ourselves. Booth loses us here, though he continues, but the lingering agreement we felt with him does not flee so quickly. Catharsis through discomfort. And then, Sondheim gives us another twist, as suddenly the Balladeer is able to mock Booth as a madman whose cause was asserted against him (“…Lincoln who got mixed reviews / because of you John now gets only raves”). Exquisite, morally complicated, all set to fingerpicking, old-timey music.
Other tracks on this set traffic in Sondheim’s trademark irony—“Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music, one of the lovlies non-love songs ever written; “Pretty Lady” from Pacific Overtures, gorgeous trio about sailors finding “love” in a brothel; and “The Ladies who Lunch” from Company, a nice little light rumba about a dying breed of upper-crust bitches—but none so gloriously ugly as those from Assassins. I personally remember a planned revival in New York some years ago, called off immediately following 9/11. I guess people were not ready to be ironic about dead presidents.
The Podcast about this show isn’t until January 20th, so I’ll be back to remind you then. Don’t miss it, as this really is an extraordinary piece of difficult theatre. With some really catchy tunes…
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In This Blog:
Stephen Sondheim: The Story So Far …
Click HERE to listen to the Stephen Sondheim Podcast Series!!
Daniel Felsenfeld on WNYC Tonight
I wanted to alert readers that yours truly will be the guest on WNYC’s program EVENING MUSIC on Wednesday, October 1, as part of their Bernstein proceedings and I’ll be talking about Mass. The piece is a hot New York topic because of an upcoming performance of the piece at Carnegie Hall but, as I’ve written before, keeps current and in fact anticipates the current—much of what we call modern music could not exist without it. I’ll be speaking about the “crisis” mode of the work (“crisis” being a hot topic these days, of faith, of economy, of autonomy, of the country) and how Bernstein uses the notion of a musical crisis of direction to describe a larger lack of faith, a searching nature, a wandering direction. Hope you all tune in!
You can find out more—or listen, when the time comes—by clicking here.
Stephen Sondheim’s “The Story So Far…”
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I. Am. So. Excited! As a longstanding admirer of Stephen Sondheim, the great theatre genius who made poetry out of urbane bitchiness and who brought music of a certain harmonic spikiness to the mainstream, I was thrilled when this gorgeous boxed set arrived at my doorstep. Sony’s Sondheim: The Story So Far… is simply a beautifully packaged, carefully contrived tribute to a still-vital composer who changed the face of the American stage. Admirers of Sondheim run deep and wax rhapsodic—I recall being at a musicology conference some years ago and attending a panel devoted to his work in which hardened and often-stuffy academics who spend their life ferreting out Gregorian Chant or writing entire books on a few measures of Beethoven took the stage and beamed. A coming out party, in a way, as I’d never heard someone at a panel devoted to, say, Mozart, saying things like “I mean he’s just plain good.” Sondheim just inspires admiration on a certain level.
In later posts I will go into the specifics because honestly I cannot listen to this enough for me. But as a general overview, this box is pretty much aces. There are some obvious choices— “America” from West Side Story (the show that made him famous), “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music (his only bona-fide “hit”), and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from Gypsy—but the box is best for its goodies, its nod to the fans (guilty!) who probably already have all these cast albums. For example, for years I’ve been dying to hear the entirety of the essentially-lost made-for-TV musical Evening Primrose. Much as I love the version with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, it is nice to hear it as it was written, for the composer’s close friend Tony Perkins. (If neither he nor Charmain Carr sing as well as Mr. Patinkin or Ms. Peters, that doesn’t really matter—this version of this odd little show is important to hear, as much a slice of a bygone era as a musical event; and this era should by no means be bygone.) And wow, to hear Mel Torme singing “Live Alone and Like It,” a song that never made it into the film Dick Tracy (am I right about that?), is worth the price of admission.
It is, of course, the real ephemera that gets this fanboy riled up. Disc Four is a Sondheim completist’s dream, containing music that has only until this point been lines of descriptions in this or that biography or available on this or that obscure compilation or concert album: Incidental music to Arthur Laurents’ play The Enclave, “Truly Content” from Passionella (though this is available on one of the two Sondheim Sings discs issued in the past few years on P.S. Classics—but you truly have to be a hardcore fan to own these…), “Water Under the Bridge” from the Rob Reiner movie Singing Out Loud (whatever happened to it?), and the incidental music to Invitation to a Waltz. I will get more into this because I am one of those people who looks for the extras. I like a rounder picture sometimes…
The Story So Far also contains a generous sampling of photographs, testimonials, and explanations of certain songs from the composer himself. The final product is, in short, delicious.
And as an added, interactive bonus, Sony is producing a series of Podcasts—the Masterworks Broadway Podcast Theatre—to coincide with this release. So allow me, your blogger, to inject a little of that smug, critical, I’ve-heard-this-which-is-unavailable-to-mere-mortals bluster to say that they contain some pretty remarkable stuff that will be rolled out as the months go on, through the beginning of February. Important people in the Sondheim-verse weigh in on things, from his musical collaborators like Paul Ford (a pianist who has worked with Sondheim for years) or Paul Gemigniani (conductor and orchestrator) to his theatrical collaborators like Patti LuPone, Elaine Stritch (who does still wear a hat, I discovered), Mandy Patinkin or a certain Angela Lansbury and another certain Bernadette Peters. Plenty of chatting with the man himself as well. It is a banner month for fans of both Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein.
The first Podcast airs on Tuesday, September 30th, and it is a nice introduction to Sondheim. Fans of course will love it, but if you remain unconvinced (or just haven’t listened yet) this might be a good place to start. Sondheim speaks about his overall intentions in the theatre (to write things that are not confusing), with delightful and thoughtful endorsements by no less than Angela Lansbury, Frank Rich (the former “Butcher of Broadway”), Lonny Price, and Laura Benanti.
Much much more later…
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In This Blog:
Stephen Sondheim: The Story So Far …
Click HERE to listen to the Stephen Sondheim Podcast Series!!
That Classical Groove
View the O’Reilly Street E-card!
By Daniel Felsenfeld
Sometimes when classical musicians jazz it, the results can be embarrassing. So I confess a little trepidation when I popped in James Galway’s record O’Reilly Street, a collaboration with the Grammy-lauded Cuban group Tiempo Libre. Big Surprise! Really. If you like 1960s jazz of the Guaraldi variety (think Charlie Brown) then you will love this record. And another thing: Mr. Galway acquits himself admirably, playing out of his ken with respect and unbridled enthusiasm.
I think the trick that makes this record work is the fact that Mr. Galway is both playing to and riffing on his strengths. The record’s first cut, “Fugace” (watch the video here) makes the point in a wild and all-over-the-proverbial-map way (meant as a compliment, incidentally). Galway and Tiempo play one of Claude Bollings’ Jazz Suites (Mr. Bolling was himself an accomplished French pianist and composer), which starts off seeming innocent enough—spirited, but pretty straight-ahead. And then, almost without warning, the tone shifts from Le Jazz Hot charming to Afro-Cuban hot, the beat kicks in, and suddenly we are treated to a playful (but sincere and, again, very respectful) interchange between Mr. Galway and the band. The results are vastly attractive, a true crossing over of genres. Palpably, there is great love in the room (and after I wrote this, I sought backup—watch this and you will believe me!).
After a few more Bolling interpretations, some new compositions by Jorge Gomez—Tiempo Libre’s pianist and leader—which do similar things to the Bolling splashworks, taking baroque tunes (or the notions of baroque tunes) and turning them on their ear. But to me, the album’s highlight comes in the final track, “Badinerie,” which is Mr. Gomez’s take on the famous flute lick in Bach’s Second Orchestral Suite (for those who saw the film Hilary and Jackie, this is the bit that made Ms. Dupre’s sister realize her limitations). Interpolation and puckish delight are the watchwords of this reading. A darling, serious, lovely, sincere and thoughtful take on a familiar tune—not trying to better it, but trying to speak of it in a particular cross-cultural way.
Now the purists may scoff (they always seem to) because these great musicians aren’t in their particular little style boxes. But I scoff back, because O’Reilly Street, for all of its virtues and virtuosity, is just plain fun. How often do we get to say that?
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In This Blog:
Sir James Galway & Tiempo Libre: O’Reilly Street
Click here to watch the promotional video of O’Reilly Street
Bid for VIP tickets to see Yo-Yo Ma, Sony OLED TV, and more!
Join in the musical majesty of the world-renowned Carnegie Hall!
You are invited to bid for tickets to the Sony Philharmonic Orchestra featuring Yo-Yo Ma, sets of tickets to see the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, a private musicale featuring Midori, as well as an OLED Television!
As the winning bidder of this auction lot, you’ll receive tickets to some of the most highly anticipated events this year, including:
- The Sony Philharmonic Orchestra event on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 8 p.m.:
- 2 VIP concert tickets in Prime Parquet Seating
- Access to the invitation-only VIP reception
- Yo-Yo Ma Catalog
- Large promotional poster from the event to commemorate your experience!
- Program Details: The Sony Philharmonic Orchestra with Daniel Harding, Conductor, featuring Yo-Yo Ma, Cello, performing DVORAK Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104, BERLIOZ Le Corsaire Overture and TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 5
Other events you will have access to:
- 4 Tickets to an exclusive, private musicale featuring Midori on November 14, 2008 (location TBD). The evening, which will benefit Midori & Friends music education programs for underserved students throughout New York City, will include cocktails, dinner and a performance by world-renowned violinist Midori.
- 2 Tickets to the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on Sunday December 7, 2008 at 2 p.m. Program: Golijov: Ainadamar (”Fountain of Tears”), featuring Robert Spano, conductor and Dawn Upshaw, soprano. For more information, please visit: http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/box_office/events/evt_10902.html?selecteddate=12072008
- 2 Tickets to the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 2 p.m. Program: All-Mozart: Symphony No. 35 “Haffner”, Piano Concerto No. 15 K.450 and Symphony No. 41 “Jupiter.” The performance features Roberto Abbaddo, conductor and Andreas Haefliger, piano. Please visit more info: http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/box_office/events/evt_10860.html?selecteddate=02222009
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2 Tickets to the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 2 p.m. Program: All-Previn: Violin Concerto “Anne-Sophie”, Concerto for Violin and Viola (world premiere), selections from A Streetcar Named Desire and The Giraffes Go to Hamburg. Andre Previn, conductor; Renee Fleming, soprano; Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin; Yuri Bashmet, viola will be featured. Check it out at more info: http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/box_office/events/evt_10333.html?selecteddate=04262009.
But that’s not all!
You’ll also receive an Organic LED (OLED - Organic Light Emitting Diode) television to view your favorite performances from your own collection at home. The OLED TV sets itself apart from other devices with outstanding contrasts, color reproduction, fast response time, high brightness, energy efficiency and unrivaled picture resolution. What’s remarkable: the OLED is only 3mm thick — that’s just the size of 3 credit cards! For more on this technology, visit http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=8198552921644539854.
Terms:
Experience cannot be resold in part or in full. Transportation and accommodations are not include. Meet and greet with talent is not included.
This auction ends at 3PM Eastern Time on October 10th, 2008. Please visit CharityFolks.com to submit your bid. Good luck!
Pictures at An Exhibition, played by William Kapell
By Daniel Felsenfeld
For those of us who grew up listening to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in its orchestrated form, the piano version takes a little getting used to, especially in a weathered recording such as William Kapell’s on the William Kapell reDiscovered set. Perhaps you are more accustomed, in the opening “Promenade” movement, to the solo trumpet in the Ravel orchestration—or, if you are a connoisseur, perhaps you favor Stokowski’s low strings (as I do). Either way, it behooves the listener to remember that, like it or not, this is first and foremost a piano work, and what it takes to carry it off—especially in light of the more known, writ-large versions—is a pianist with the force and shading of an orchestra, a pianist like William Kapell.
I especially like certain moments of this dusty, stitched-up performance from half a century ago (please listen through the scratches and jumps; it is well worth it, and a masterful job of preserving an important document that would be otherwise lost to us)—the frantic ending of “The Gnome”, the Prokofiev-like biting playfulness in the “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks”, and of course the overblown hauteur of the final movement “The Great Gate of Kiev.” (And I will refrain from Semitic ire over the mere existence of the “Samuel Goldberg & Schmulye” movement; it was a different era). Wow, could Mussorgsky peal those bells! It is all through his opera Boris Gudonov, and resonates at the end of this work, especially in Kappel’s mighty performance. There are points where I swear there are two or even three pianists, but it is only the lone Kapell, working his magic.
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In This Blog:
William Kapell reDiscovered - The Australian Broadcasts
Listen to the NPR coverage of Kapell reDiscovered in All Things Considered.
For more information about the reDiscovered series, visit www.sonybmgmasterworks.com.
Bach Suite in A-minor, from Kapell reDiscovered
By Daniel Felsenfeld
Sometimes if you love classical music you have to put up with some things that are old. That’s just the nature of the beast—the music is old, and from time to time, despite the best efforts of studio engineers, recordings can be wonderful but just not up-to-the-minute in terms of technology. But most often, if something has been preserved and issued, there’s something worth listening for, which is certainly the case with William Kapell reDiscovered. I’ll elaborate on other tracks later (the Rachmaninov! Those pictures at that Exhibition!), but what I love most of all from this two-disc set is the Bach suite in A minor. Like Glenn Gould’s Bach, this is music about multiple strands coming together wherein a performer has to be two, three or even four separate people with only their ten fingers to make it happen. And as the scores are free of things like dynamics, tempi, the normal things that tell a musician how best to perform a piece of music, much is left to the performer. Kapell’s Bach is a pellucid view of this masterpiece, delicate when it needs to be, sometimes forceful (but not macho or overbearing, as can be the case), sometimes pensive, sometimes playful. Little subtleties define this performance (the way his bass tends to move at a slightly different pace than the upper parts giving a feeling of weightlessness and surprise; the way voices commingle, separate, and commingle again), a gift to us half a century on.
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In This Blog:
William Kapell reDiscovered - The Australian Broadcasts
Listen to the NPR coverage of Kapell reDiscovered in All Things Considered
For more information about the reDiscovered series, visit www.sonybmgmasterworks.com.
Joshua Bell’s The Four Seasons CD Giveaway
Win a Copy of Joshua Bell’s The Four Seasons!!
Sony Classical and Strings magazine present your chance to win a free copy of the Grammy® Award-winning violinist’s first recording of Vivaldi’s classic. Visit Strings magazine’s homepage at http://www.allthingsstrings.com and enter now! This special giveaway ends October 20, 2008.
For more infomation, visit www.JoshuaBell.com.
Final thoughts on Leonard Bernstein: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
With sadness, I come to the end of my posts about the Bernstein Conducts Bernstein: Original Jacket Collection. I could spend months on these records, in grand exegesis of the personal meaning of all of these works, the spectacular quality of the composition, or the puzzle that was Leonard Bernstein. I could spend pages on my own personal responses to Candide, Mass, the three Symphonies, Trouble in Tahiti, On the Town, and the Serenade. And I could write a book about West Side Story, which not only changed me but changed Broadway long before I was born. There is so much more to say.
So instead, about these boxes: I cannot say enough good about them. In an era where ritual seems destined for the wayside, these throwback sets offer a comforting glimpse of what once was. In an age when records—or “records” as some older hands might call them—can be remotely on your cell phone and transmitted instantly to your earbuds, when the stores that sell CDs struggle to stay in business, the Original Jacket Collection(s) are kind of like the show Mad Men, steeped in another time without over-selling the romanticism of it all. Like records, only smaller. It is a simple idea, exquisitely done.
Of all the boxes I’ve heard—those by Caballe, Heifetz, Perlman, Ormandy and this one—the Bernstein is the standout. Maybe it is because of my deep connection to this music (Lenny made me want to be a composer), or maybe it is because of the range of the work contained within? Maybe it is because this is one of the few boxes devoted to a composer and not just a performer—and I am a composer? Or maybe it is just me in line with the Sony notion: taking someone back to when they first discovered music. The memory of opening those magical discs, putting them on, and being dazzled by the new world each piece opened; replacing the discs, after careful listening, knowing those otherworldly sounds would still be there, wrapped in guarding sheets of cardboard and paper. The Bernstein’s Original Jacket Collection that takes me back the hardest. For a violinist, it might be Perlman; for the lover of symphonies, it might be Ormady; pianists will no doubt treasure Sony’s Gould package. Whichever your preference is, these sets can afford you the engulfing luxury of nostalgia. We who love classical music, so often reported as dying or dead, can use it.
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In This Blog:
The Original Jacket Collection: Bernstein Conducts Bernstein
For more information, visit www.OriginalJacket.com.
For information about upcoming Bernstein Festival, visit www.BernsteinFestival.org.
Serenade from Leonard Bernstein: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I grew up in Orange County, specifically in a small “town” called Placentia. I use “town” in scare quotes because it tends to conjure up Agee-like images of general stores and nosy neighbors, but that was not the case. More a suburb that rolled easily and unnoticeably into the next, so it wasn’t like we knew the mayor and were up on all the gossip. Far from it. And as I am a family of non-musicians, classical music did not figure—I had to discover it on my own. There is no Placentia Philharmonic, no string quartet, no National Opera of Placentia.
I spent a lot of my youth at the piano, composing, playing, singing. When I decided, after reading a biography of Leonard Bernstein, that I too wanted to be a composer/conductor/pianist, I sought a teacher, and found only Micah Levy who then led the Orange County Chamber Orchestra, a group he’d founded. I studied scores with him, waved a stick around while he played the piano, sang a lot (he insisted I be able to sing each part of all the scores I was learning, so I know the viola part of Mozart’s 29th Symphony pretty well), but most thrillingly, I watched him put together a concert of his own, stem to stern. On this program was a piece I’d never heard: Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade a violin concerto written after Plato’s Symposium. Now maybe it was because this was my first experience with an orchestra in person—really (I was 19); maybe it was because I found the violinist, Stephanie Chase, rather fetching (quite pretty and a brilliant player); or maybe it was the odd power of this gleeful piece that seared itself on my memory, but this is truly one of those works that can make this boy from the music-free provinces crack a smile.
The piece, found here on the same disc as the Second Symphony, the “Age of Anxiety” (about which more in a later post) is the usual Bernstein stew—a melange of styles, gorgeously done as usual (especially as played here by Issac Stern)—but what’s most fascinating is its literary roots. The Symposium is Plato’s vivisection of the concept of love; he comes mostly to praise it. Read another way, it is a lot of hip, brilliant and gay Greeks getting together to rave about love while mightily intoxicated. (Incidentally, and this is more deserving of the parenthesis than any other thing I’ve ever written, this is also the piece that inspired the song “The Origin of Love” in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.) Bernstein’s piece, which does not have a formal relation to the text but is rather a more glancing afterimage of the piece. It is divided into five movements, based on the seven speakers Plato immortalized (I always wonder why poor Alcibiades makes the cutting room floor). To me, the most gorgeous music can be found in the fourth movement, “Agathon,” the adagio. Agathon praises both love and God, and Bernstein offers a slow burn of great and blistering intensity to match. But aside from this one movement, the work is mostly what one might call “frothy,” burgeoning with elegant and witty music, almost a tribute to Mozart done with thicker harmonies. Even the sweet, cloying opening melody (which issues from the solo violin, the only concerto I can think of that starts this way—though I will no doubt be proven quickly wrong) has a lightness and tranquility to it that might be called decidedly Mozartean. (And wow, can Issac Stern do this bit justice.)
Not to read too much into it, but can anyone else, in the final movement, hear the drunken dragginess of great minds too-besotted with the Dyonisian juice? It is the music of trying to rally out of a hangover, and managing to do it! And while the piece is not intended as a work of proper “program music” in that it does not tell a story in the narrative sense, it does give a sense of both the seriousness and the buoyancy of Plato’s masterwork. And it offsets the “Anxiety” of the symphony, about which, as I so often say, more later.
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In This Blog:
The Original Jacket Collection: Bernstein Conducts Bernstein
For more information, visit www.OriginalJacket.com.
For information about upcoming Bernstein Festival, visit www.BernsteinFestival.org.