A nice compliment?

A few weeks ago I heard from a colleague about a friend who had called in during a recent talk show I hosted. The friend had never called such a show before and was nervous. We get a lot of calls so its hard to remember a specific guest. This woman was so pleased with her call and the show that she reported "Christopher took my radio cherry!"

You can't make this stuff up.

The Moon

It's forty years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Do people get thrilled any more? By anything? Yes, sports victories are great. I kvell to great music making. It may not be the same music you like but I get the thrill. 9/11 united us all in horror.

But when was the last time when the entire world, or at least all of the US was united, or at least felt untied in a shared 'high'. I can't think of much past July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. It's good to see him,at 80, making the news and talk show rounds. I don't think he had done that before. Neil Armstrong seemed to have been reclusive, and good for him. Maybe he 's a humble man who felt he had a job to do, and did it. But hot dog her was not...in fact none of the Apollo11 astronauts followed up with spousal abuse or drunk driving charges, the kind of shit we worship hearing about on the news today. No disrespect, but non stop coverage of the death of Michael Jackson insults heroes like these astronauts. Just my opinion. If you want to honor Michael Jackson, buy and enjoy his music.

I was 13 years old on July 20, 1969. I was Camp Miramar in Duxbury, MA. We all stayed up late wot watch the moon landing on the one 18" black and white TV. Younger campers fell asleep. I didn't. I'm so glad to have this memory. I wish everyone could, and share in an hones to God thrill. I wish younger people -40 and under!- could summon this memory and remember how amazed we all were that man had landed on the moon.

A Pie in the Face

It's funny when the Three Stooges throw pies, and it was a laugh riot growing up watching Bozo the Clown take a pie in the face, but on the evening news? Could it happen today? It did in 1977. Most people today don't remember Anita Bryant, but I remember the buttons people wore: Anita Bryant Sucks Oranges (and worse). She was the beauty queen turned singer who made it her mission to repeal gay rights. I hadn't thought much about her. Why would I? She was a thirty five year has been at least. But recently I watched Milk, starring Sean Penn. Harvey Milk was assassinated along with the Mayor of San Francisco in 1978. Milk had been the first openly gay politician. This was while Bryant was touring the country saying gay people, because they didn't reproduce were busy recruiting your children to join them. In other words, abbracaddabra and a kid with no such inclination ever becomes homosexual because of gay pixie dust. Thus spake Anita, and people took it seriously. More frighteningly, people still do. Google Anita and you'll find a lot of vitriol and a fair amount of recent admiration. I had forgotten how vicious she was, and how ignorant. It was frightening that such nonsense got such play.

Anita was "pied" at an airport in 1978. By this time her credibility, both as a well compensated spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Association and, as a singer and as an activist was waning. She became ridiculous. It's one thing to be opinionated and passionate, it's another thing to be stupid. Even your friends lose patience.

I never like to see anyone vilified for their views, much less assaulted. But go ahead, ask me to feel sorry for her. Just ask me.

EDWARD DOWNES and EDWARD DOWNES

Edward Downes has been in the news this week. The British born conductor (1925) long associated both with the BBC and the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, traveled with his wife to a clinic in Switzerland where the couple, under medical supervision, took their own lives. Sir Edward was 84, nearly blind and deaf and immobilized by old age. Lady Downes was in the final,painful stages of cancer. The couple had been married fifty years and decided to go out peacefully, together. I applaud them.

But I've had some e mails of sympathy! I never met Sir Edward Downes. I wrote my doctoral thesis on the critical writings of Edward Downes (1911-2001) the long time host of the Texaco Opera Quiz. MY Edward Downes was a critic and musicologist. I was able to find through his scrapbooks years of musical criticism he wrote for the Boston Evening Transcript in the late 1930s. I've also been able to write about his life based on recorded interviews I had with him in New York in the mid 1990s. There are TWO Edward Downes in music. Both honored and influenced many by lives of devotion to music. God bless them both.

Edward Downes's writings and my comnents of him can be found if you search the early years of this blog. My paper on his life, with all the interviews and excerpts from his critical writings can be accessed as follows:

go to www.ohiolink.edu/etd

Type my name in the search function: Christopher Purdy
Edward Downes: A Life in Music and the Media will come up.

I'm right brained!

The Columbus Dispatch recently published a fine column by Dennison W. Griffith, President of Columbus College of Art and Design. He discusses the importance of encouraging right brain people and references a book called "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future." Now I admit,especially as I spend this week at home with house and yard chores to despairing at my incompetence at same. How many Christophers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. Christopher can't screw in a light bulb. Christopher will break the borrowed lawn mower by putting oil in the gas tank; he washes blues and greens with whites and everything on hot water with lots of soap (do you want it clean or not?) He'll put liquid dish soap in the dish washer and enjoy the endless bubbles and froth and don't even get him near trying to fix a computer. Who knew laptops needed a power source? Doctorate or not, he can't find the ON button.

But by Christ, Christopher can sell the arts. He can't play or sing or dance but he can sell. He can talk about Bruckner and Monteverdi and Beethoven and Verdi and Bellini and he can get people to listen and laugh and enjoy and here's the greatest gift of all that Christopher gets to enjoy and not everybody does: He gets to see the lights go on. He gets it when people get it. When a tune or two notes or an idea flashes across a cranial tabula rasa and invades, takes root and grows into a great tree of passion and joy and love. Christopher gets to do that. Christopher-that's me is right brained. He can't do math or linear logic and would rather skip tasks that make sense, that are logical and necessary and important to know. He-that's me-doesn't follow recipes, and in the ten minutes of typing this has had to check twice that right brained is what he meant: intuitive, emotive, empathetic reasoning (otherwise called creativity) as opposed to left brained, favoring science, technology and math. Forget it. I burn the toast. But I can play you a little Schubert and get out of the way!

Find this article at www.dispatch.com. Arts education would provide right balance
by Dennison W. Griffith, July 5 09. I'm quoting him in this piece. And the book Mr. Griffith references is (again), "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" by Daniel Pink.

I'd like to stay longer, but have to go turn up the Gesualdo madrigals in the other room while I get ready to milk the chickens. No kidding.

P.S. The spell check took much longer than the writing. And still there will be typos....

O CARTUSIA

Kassie Rose, WOSU's sublime book critic has a terrific blog called www.thelongestchapter.com, and on it she provides a list of 54 of the "Great Books". She did this for her own birthday, as a present to herself, offering the titles that have changed her life. I recently hosted an Open Line broadcast where Kassie was a guest,and she reiterated that "An Infinity of Little Hours" by Nancy Klein Maguire is a must read.

I read it. I'm so glad I did. My long standing attraction to monasticsm and the cloistered life turns out to be a lovely fantasy. After reading this I realize now I could never live the life. Maguire uses records, archival material and interviews to reconstruct the path of five novices in the Carthusian charterhouse at Parkminster, England. Soldiers for God are one thing-these are full scale warriors. The life of silence is lonely and demanding, and one either finds the fortitude to continue or one does not. It seems one is always cold, tired, hungry and dirty. Four of these men left. All went on to successful lives, as did the monk who stayed. The monks live alone in cells-really multiple room dwellings, however modest. They leave the cell three times a day for offices in the church. On Sundays the community eats together-vegetarian, no dairy during Lent. There is no conversation. You could live years in the cloister and barely recognize the men around you, much less know them. Quanitaevly figure 20 hours of alone time per day. Its a life or prayer and mediation, and it is the life of a warrior, of an athlete, of a strongman (and woman-there are Carthusian nuns). Several of the monks break down. And I'm glad I'm not the only one worried about passing gas in church. The very, very few people in this world suited to such a life are either very blessed or have a screw lose. I'm thinking blessed. If you type in Carthusian on youtube you'll get some compelling video, but I doubt Maguire's book would have been possible fifty years ago. There was simply no access. Even now the Carthusians have web sites (!) but among the "FAQs" about visitors the reply is always, Not Possible.

All of us can live a life of prayer and many of us should strive to pray more, and mean it. The Carthusians, who were brutally persecuted as Henry VIII was wooing Anne Boleyn, have a legacy of courage and strength on which to draw, and they find the way to persevere. I'm so glad I read "An Infinity of Little Hours" by Nancy Klein Maguire, and I hope you'll read it too. I didn't feel cheered or comfy or encouraged at the end. I felt unsettled and disoriented and a little sad. Which may be the point!

Again, Kassie Rose's blog is www.thelongestchapter.com

Michael Jackson

Sad.
It seems to me as if he lived and died like an unloved eight year old.
For all that talent, he was still the kid nobody wanted.

IRAN

While following the horror shows going on in today's Iran, I'm reminded of an interview I did a year or so ago with Kathryn Koob. Ms. Koob was one of the Americans held hostage in Iran in 1979-the infamous 444 days. She's a woman of great faith and guts and I enjoyed talking with her. I'm tempted to call her again and ask for her assessment of what's going on today, but it sounded to me as if she'd moved on with her life quite nicely. Meanwhile, if you are interested, my interview with Ms. Koob is on line at

www.wosu.org/interviews

Scroll on down.

Do you think I should call her again?

Anne Frank at 80

Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929. I would have liked to have remembered her eighty years to the day. There's a lot to remember, and a lot to be grateful for in that short life. I consumed her diary when I was a kid. I hope my daughter did the same (she'll never tell me). There's a great website devoted to Anne Frank's legacy and I recommend a visit: www.annefrank.org.

It is always good to think of Anne and what her words mean when nutcases run lose to spew filth on the web and barrel into holocaust museums with guns. That a play about Anne Frank and Emmet Till was to be performed at the museum just a few hours after the shooting is a terrible irony. My daughter and her school visited the Holocaust Museum a few years ago. She read Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meeting" at school. This morning I was glad to read on the Anne Frank site that Miep Gies, who helped shelter Anne and her family, is in good health at age 100.

Time to read "The Diary of Anne Frank" again. Can it be read too often?

Great Book: THE HELP

THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett

I want to recommend this new novel by Kathryn Stockett.
I'm only half way through it, but its the best fiction I've read in a long time.
Though its presented as a novel, every page rings so true that it would read convincingly as a non fiction examination of race relations in the deep South in the 1960s. The worlds of white society and the African American help intersect on every page, and as the begin to cross things get dicey. Most of the whites were raised by African American women. Abiliene is raising Mae Mobely, whose Mother is indifferent to her. The point is made that these children get love and nurture from "the help", then grow up to be like their Mamas. James Meredith, Rosa Parks and Medgar Evers frame the context of this book. It's 1962. Mrs. Parks has already refused to move to
the back of the bus, and Mr. Evers has just been murdered.

I'm still reading so I'll say no more for now. Except that I want my daughter to read this book.

CATHOLICISM: BLAST FROM THE PAST

Monastic life has always intrigued me. I am old enough to remember, barely, the pre Vatican II days of the Catholic church. During a kiddie mass back in 1964 we all knelt with the Grey Nuns hovering nearby, while a priest droned on about all "the changes." I remember his tone and the look of some of the nuns. Within a few years the nuns were in mufti. A few years after that the nuns were gone and so was I.

(This same church, Sacred Heart, Lexington MA, attracted a lot of negative comment a few years back when during the remodeling they got rid of the pews and the kneelers...were they saying no kneeling to pray allowed?)

So I am both horrified and fascinated, and drawn to the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. They are a religious order of sisters and brothers, with a school, out in Massachusetts. The St. Benedict Center was the later home of one Father Leonard Feeney. He was known for his rants on Boston Common fifty and more years ago, preaching one theme: Extre Ecclesia Nulla Salus. Without the Church there in No Salvation. He meant the Roman Catholic Church. He was saying out loud what was the accepted dogma when I was very young. Eventually Feeney was driven to a remote part of Central Massachusetts and that's where his adherents are today. The sisters are in the full traditional habit. The Latin Tridetene Mass is the only one celebrated. There's a busy school, there are publications and there's no use for gays, protestants, Jews, abortion rights, stem cell research...there's room only for Roman Catholic dogma. No argument, no debate. The orders don't look crowded, but they are active.

Do they anger me? No. As I said, I'm fascinated, even if I just can't go there. I wonder how many stay? Commitment and strength there certainly is, but total acceptance of any dogma without the opportunity of argument or free thought do not rounded adults make. And it seems that any group proclaiming themselves THE ONLY and better than embraces divisiveness and separation. Well, God bless 'em I guess. I'll pray that they learn to embrace their views and listen to others. Still, it touched me to know the Latin mass is still said, and that there are religious willing to live the dogma fully. I guess.

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS: His Hollywood Years by Cari Beauchamp

Here's a fresh look at the Kennedy patriarch via his years in the movie business, c. 1920-1930. Self- invented as "the world's youngest bank president" (His father was on the board of the bank) Kennedy was smart enough to realize early the profit potential of moving pictures. By the early 1920s he had snapped up distribution rights first throughout New England and later nationally. At one time he controlled FBO-later RKO, First National and Pathe, all major players in film production and distribution. Cari Beauchamp brings a film historian's knowledge of the time, a business professor's understanding of the intricacies of finance and manipulation, both of stock and more importantly, of people.

Kennedy's most notorious Hollywood collaboration embraced the bedroom and the film studio. Gloria Swanson was the undisputed Queen of Hollywood during Kennedy's years as a player. And play they did! With her finances in disarray, Swanson turned to Kennedy for a bailout and fiscal management. Their affair tore the place up! Fifty years later Gloria Swanson claimed that the Archbishop of Boston, William Cardinal O'Connell, told her to give Kennedy up, that she was "an occasion of sin".
A publicist would run with that today! Business wise the liaison was a disaster. "Queen Kelly" was supposed to be the epic crown to Gloria's career. But director Erich von Stroheim let his porno fed imagination run away with him. Expenses mounted and hours of film were unusable. The project was scrapped with Gloria left to foot the bills. Kennedy went back East.

There's a pattern there. Old Joe goes in for the kill , pockets the profits and leaves others to clean up and pay up. Somehow we can't feel sorry for Gloria. Glamour goes a long way and Swanson didn't appear impoverished when she died at 84. Fred Thompson is another story. A likable, truly nice guy, Thompson was parlayed into an early screen cowboy career. He literally signed himself over to Joe Kennedy and his career died. So did Fred, of a purported aneurysm on Christmas Day, 1927.

Cari Beauchamp's expertise takes us right back to the silent era. We are in on the meetings and in on the affairs and gloat over the take and see Kennedy emerge as a fascinating, brilliant player with no conscience. (The young JFK is quoted, "We lived great in the 1930s. I learned about the depression at Harvard")
You won't put this book down.

Unlikely Disciple

I tend to salivate with glee over any effort to debunk the religious right.
Along comes a book by twenty year old Kevin Roose called "The Unlikely Disciple".
While a sophomore at Brown, Roose took a semester's leave to study at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA.

Roose describes himself as a pacifist Quaker from Oberlin, Ohio.
Since I'm a pacifist Quaker outta Catholic schools in Boston 100 years ago, I thought myself and the young Kevin could gloat and salivate together, and get along fine.

Boy, was I wrong.

Make no mistake, this book chronicles support groups for chronic masturbators, and makes no bones (okay bad pun) about Liberty's rampant homophobia. There's also the little issue of "If you're not saved, you're going to hell, even if you are Mother Teresa". I could shake my head, but I realize that I was taught the same thing forty years ago. (Pray for our lovely Jewish neighbors. Offer it up.) We all need to grow up, me included.

Roose humbles me by his sense of fairness. No, I doubt he's planning to buy a house on the Liberty campus. An Unlikely Disciple is very well written, fair, compassionate and funny. He likes a lot of the people he meets at Liberty and you will, too.
It's a good book more about what joins us than what separates us. You go, Kevin!

Still, its hard to imagine Mother Teresa as "not saved". Sigh.

RENEE FLEMING AT DENISON

Her bio calls her the "people's prima donna", and Renee Fleming brought her beauty, her fine voice and a sharp and endearing stage manner to Swasey Chapel at Denison University on April 14th. I took bets we'd see a red dress before the end of the evening. She began in elegant black, but after intermission I won my bet, or at least half of it. (Crimson).

The opening Handel arias were skimmed through. They reminded me why I want so much to join the many who worship this artist, but can't quite get there. The diction was mushy, the notes were touched, the line was choppy and the sometimes the cutes took over. But Fleming won my heart with her performances of three songs, written for her, by Henri Dutilleux. (M. Dutilleux is completing a fourth song for this set, Le temps l'horloge-all four will be recorded in Paris next month). This was music that didn't care about intrinsic beauty, and Fleming ran with the opportunities to be dramatic in one phrase and understated in the other. The poets were Jean Tardieu and Robert Desnos, the latter a resistance fighter who died just after the liberation of Auschwitz. His haunting "Le disparu" (here called Dernier poeme) was set by Poulenc. Dutilleux's is a bit more forward, and very compelling. I'll be buying Fleming's soon to be completed recording of these works.

John Kander's Letter From Sullivan Ballou completed the first half; here the diction was spot on, and the over used dreaminess, the opaque quality I find troublesome in Fleming's voice was nowhere to be heard. A friend commented, "She's thrilling when she just opens her mouth and for Christ's sake sings!"

Fleming told us that Richard Strauss was her desert island composer. She performed five of his lieder, including Fruendliche vision, Standchen and Zuiegnung, but she didn't live them. There was never a connect from the lovely woman singing prettily to the guts of each lied. Arias from Manon Lescaut and the redoubtable O mio babbino caro were the evening's first nod to balls to the wall opera. I give Fleming high marks indeed for ending the printed program with a rousing and sexy aria from Zandonai's Conchita. Still, the morbidezza and the trashiness needed to excel in such music just were not there(listen to Maria Caniglia)

The five encores included Summertime, a parody of My Funny Valentine in the style of Beethoven, and I Could Have Danced All Night (with audience participation). The evening ended with an exquisite performance of Strauss's Morgen. Here, we saw and heard the artist. Fleming told us that pianist Hartumt Holl "is an orchestra". Indeed he was. His was the passion sometimes lacking in the singer. No matter. The packed out house cheered and roared and I doubt anyone in the hall had less than a fine time. For all my grouchiness, she's a gorgeous and intriguing artist. But I wish she would just for Christ's sake open her mouth and sing.

QUAKER MEETING

I've been attending the North Columbus Friends Meeting (Quakers)
for the past two years. There's a peace and a camaraderie there I find both comforting and attractive. The task of sitting in silence waiting for the light for an hour each week is enormously difficult. Its a good exercise for me; not to speak but to listen and not to speak unless I feel truly led. I find it very difficult. Spiritual bench pressing of at least 250 lbs, not that I've ever done that1

At a pot luck meeting last night, Quaker worship was discussed. NCFM has what is called an Unprogrammed meeting. You sit in silence. People speak only when they feel compelled to do so. No clergy, no sermon, no prayers, no structure. Its the lack of structure I find exhausting! But it also forces you to make choices, to be a spiritual grown up. You have to take the responsibility to empty yourself out and to really listen, both to others and to what is going on with you. I wasn't raised to be quit and listen for God. I was raised to participate in ritual and embrace dogma, with no thought for questions. This is a new challenge for me. I haven't gotten the hang of it yet, but I'm enjoying the people, the peace and the opportunity.

LA SONNAMBULA or WHERE WERE YOU 40 YEARS AGO?

....I was twelve, and in the Hynes Civic Auditorium in Boston-the War Memorial in those days-hearing Joan Sutherland (not yet Dame Joan) and Marilyn Horne together in NORMA.* I never forgot it, down to Miss Horne's low cut costume.

Speaking of boobs (remember, I was twelve) I went backstage where I did not belong afterward to see Miss Sutherland. She was very nice and very large and I was chest high to her and she had on a low cut dress, too, with lots of powder down there and I thought I'm meeting Joan Sutherland and all I can do is look at her boobs because they were, well, so...... present.

But I digress.

The Met HD "La sonnambula" with Natalie Dessay, Juan Diego Florez and Michele Pertusi
was the greatest singing I've heard since that day back with Dame Joan's boobs in Boston. Go ahead, laugh. I may not get out much anymore. But I know exquisite tuning when I hear it, and the duets between Natalie and JDF were superb. The two ladies 40 years ago sang Norma like nobody's business. I still haven't forgotten it.
Same thrills last Saturday Dessay and Florez in the Sonnamubla duets. Magnificent, great, stunning. Made me forget the staging nonsense going on all around it. Ripped up papers indeed! And the whole "One singular Sensation" dance number back of "Ah, non giunge"! Please.

This made me wonder what Dame Joan Sutherland or Miss Marilyn Horne would have done if, while sing the finale of Tancredi (the sad one) or Orlando Furioso or Norma or La sonnambula some director had decided to have a chorus line dancing waving flowers in back of her.
Go ahead, ask.I dare you!

The best I can say for the staging is that it didn't ruin the music for me.
I've never SEEN La sonnambula and as of today I guess I still haven't, but I certainly did hear a vocal feast.

*It was April 22, 1970. Okay, ALMOST forty years ago. And I was thirteen.

MADAME BUTTERFLY'S PUPPET

Last week the Metropolitan Opera shared its production of Puccini's Madam Butterfly to the world, via a live HD presentation beamed into cinemas. I saw it in Worthington, Ohio. The staging by the late Anthony Minghella's (I've resisted headlining this "Minghella's Butterfly") has been admired except for one point. Butterfly's child, Dolore (Sorrow) is played by a puppet...dressed in a sailor suit, the size of a three year old, manipulated by three onstage puppeteers. The concept was greeted with hoots of dismay on all the opera yakky boards before and after the premiere.

I don't know how the puppet 'reads' in the far spaces of the Met, but I was heartbroken. I thought the puppet was terrific. I focused completely on Butterfly's tragedy. Instead of waiting to see how the diva in question (the intense Patricia Racette)fared with the music, I saw her as a real character having to give up her child. I loved the use of space and color in the production-minimal sets-and felt Minghella kept the drama front and center. And the puppet was haunting. This production of Butterfly is one of the few Met shows now selling to the walls.

MET OPERA HD: ORFEO ED EURIDICE

I don't think I've ever seen Gluck's great opera Orfeo ed Euridice. I'll see it this Saturday when the Met presents it in HD in movie theaters. I'm looking forward to this production: First, to hear Stephanie Blythe, a rich-voiced contralto and a scrupulous musician in the title role. I'm eager to hear how James Levine, whom I've never heard in music pre- Mozart, shapes this score. Mark Marris's staging has won critical handstands. His interpretation of Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" sprang entirely from the music. I suspect his staging of Orfeo will do the same.

Here are some notes I was asked to write for local audiences:

ORFEO ED EURIDICE
Music by Christoph Willibald Gluck
Libretto by Raniero da Calzabigi
First performance: Burgtheater, Vienna, October 5, 1762

The myth of Orpheus, the great singer whose love for his wife sends him to Hades in search of her, to whom the gods promise Euridice's return on the condition he never look at her until safely back in the mortal world, was the subject of the first opera we know about, Jacopo Peri's "Euridice" (1599). Monteverdi's great "La favola d'Orfeo" is the oldest opera you are likely to encounter today, and Gluck's version of the same tale 150 years later is one of the oldest operas still performed.

The original, from 1762, was written for castrato. The opera was revised by Gluck several times, most notably in 1774 for Paris, where the local disdain for castrati led Gluck to re compose the title role for haute-contre, the high French tenor. Hector Berlioz revised Gluck's score for mezzo -soprano Pauline Viardot Garcia in 1859. There exist many performing editions of Orfeo ed Euridice, in French, Italian and German. What is never lost is Gluck's simple, deeply moving music and a story of love and loss that resonates today.

Christoph Gluck (1714-1787) is called the reformer of opera. His famous
"Introduction to Alceste" (which may have been written by Calzabigi) puts forward the need to simplify operatic plots and to rely on melody to tell the story:

"I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situation of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless supply of ornaments...I believe that my greatest labor should be devoted to seeking a beautiful simplicity..."

The Metropolitan Opera's current production was planned for Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson. Her untimely death in 2006 robbed us of what should have been a sensational performance. The staging is by dancer-choreographer Mark Morris, with costumes destined by Isaac Mizrahi. A perfect blend of old and new! In the title role we hear a young American force of nature, Stephanie Blythe. She recalls Louise Homer (1871-1947), the Pittsburgh born contralto whose twenty performances of Orfeo conducted by Toscanini at the Met between 1910 and 1914 put this great work firmly on the map in America. Mr. Morris and conductor James Levine use Calzabigi's original Italian language text, with Berlioz's adjustment of the vocal line for female contralto. The work is performed in one act without intermission.

MET HD-LA RONDINE

Metropolitan Opera presents Puccini's LA RONDINE
live in HD in movie theaters worldwide, Saturday, January 10th.

LA RONDINE
(The Swallow)
Music by Giacomo Puccini
Libretto by Giuseppe Adami
after Alfred Maria Willner and Heinz Reichert

Premiere: Monte Carlo, March 27, 1917

By 1910 Giacomo Puccini was on top of the musical world.
La boheme, Tosca and Madama Butterfly were international sensations.
The earlier Manon Lescaut has plenty of admirers. La fanciulla del West had just opened a the Metropolitan in New York, with Enrico Caruso and Emma Destinn. The audience was lukewarm but the newspapers were writing that Puccini had outdone himself.

What next? After love and death in Napoleon's Rome, or Nagasaki, or the California mountains, what could be left? Puccini had several projects in mind, including Marie Antoinette. Paris did win out as the setting of the composer's next opera, but not the tragic French-Austrian Queen. Instead, Puccini was going to write an operetta for Vienna. A German language libretto was was re shaped and translated into Italian, and La Rondine was born. World War I scuttled the Viennese premiere. La Rondine's first performance was in Monte Carlo, starring Gilda dalla Rizza and Tito Schipa. The audience and press were polite.

Soprano Angela Gheorghiu has called La Rondine, "Traviata without the heartbreak."
In the Parisian setting we meet Magda, the rondine-or swallow-of the title. The cynical poet Prunier tells Magda that just like a swallow she will fly away only to return home. Magda is a kept woman who meets a nice young man from the country. When he asks to marry her, she leaves him, realizing such a marriage would ruin his life.
No bloodshed, but a lot of pathos. At La Rondine's New York premiere in 1928, with Lucrezia Bori and Beniamino Gigli, critic W.J. Henderson wrote, "It is the afternoon off of a genius."

If the story is on the slim side, the opera does have Puccini's exquisite gift for melody. The first act 'Sogno di Doreta' is unforgettable. Magda follows this up with the wonderful 'Ore dolce e divine'. The second act waltz and ensemble are usually applauded o the rafters. Henderson conceded that "The Waltz in Act II will go the rounds. The phonograph will seize it. The radio will air it. The night clubs will do strange things with it." All that came to pass. But La Rondine lacked the blood and guts of Puccini's earlier operas, and the music was considered sentimental. The Metropolitan gave La Rondine only 17 times between 1928 and 1936. The first widely available recording, with the magnificent Anna Moffo, wasn't published until 1967.

Three recodings followed (buy the Moffo on RCA). La Rondine has been heard in Chicago, London, New York (conducted by Alessandro Siciliani at the New York City Opera) Vienna and Paris. Her recording of Doretta's aria made Leontyne Price a star. Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna have starred in Nicolas Joel's staging in London and San Francisco. These artists and this prodution return Puccini's score to the Metropolitan for the first time in over seventy years. Listen to the music. This afternoon off of a genius is a melodic score that would have defeated anyone else.

MET OPERA HD-THAIS

It was a few weeks ago but here are some notes I was asked to write for THAIS-
before the recent Met Opera HD presentation w. Renee Fleming and Thomas Hampson.

______

THAIS
Opera in three acts
Music by Jules Massenet
Libretto by Louis Gallet
Based on the novel by Anatole France

Premiere: Paris, Opera-comique, March 16, 1894

Take a hedonistic novel by Anatole France, add a composer with a bent for sensuality and an eye for feminine pulchritude, an exotic locale, a fascinating leading lady and voila:Jules Massenet's opera Thais ruled at the box office of the Opera-comique in Paris for years after its first performance in 1894.

Thais was a smash in Paris, especially when Sybil Sanderson sang the title role.
California born, the beautiful Sybil reportedly had a clear and attractive voice and looked well in Thais's costumes, both in the beginning of the opera as a courtesan and at the end, as a nun. She knew how to expire prettily in the arms of the baritone-monk Athanel, who chases Thais with the fervor of Jerry Falwell, seeking to "return this soul to God" in the fourth century, A.D.

Sybil Sanderson died young, reportedly from alcoholism and morphine addiction. She was succeeded as Thais by Scots-American soprano Mary Garden (1874-1967). Not for our Mary an early death. Her career embraced silent films and lasted on stage until the mid 1930s. Late in life she made the rounds as a lecturer, noting that "Massenet's love making was impossible." Mary even in old age knew how to get attention. No one denied her on stage potency, but her singing was controversial. "Miss Garden sang last night", wrote one critic. "Discussion of it is not agreeable." (Garden's few recordings, some over 100 years old, are lovely) Mary's American debut was as Thais-it was forgotten that it was the opera's American debut, too. The New York Times on December 14, 1907 noted the importance of the opera and Miss Garden's fame but added, "as a singer she improves upon acquaintance."

The source of the opera is a novel by Anatole France, winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature. Anatole France's text arguing the merits of paganism and sensuality v. Christianity and religious obsession changing into sexual obsession was powerful in its day. Massenet need a stage vehicle and wanted to capitalize on Sanderson's charms and box office clout.

Geraldine Farrar (1882-1967) brought Thais to the Metropolitan in 1918. She was said to have disliked the role. Geraldine was a looker and a big star herself, but the public preferred Mary. "A faint and shadowy substitute" sniffed The New York World. It's true that Thais as an opera depends on a powerful leading lady. But a baritone with a warm, masculine voice is also a requirement. Over the years, Maurice Renaud, John Charles Thomas, Clarence Whitehill and Sherrill Milnes have led us to Thomas Hampson. Renee Fleming, our heroine today, is an artist of beauty and style, and unlike Mary Garden, her singing gets critical hosannas. And let's not forget Beverly Sills, the heroine of the Metropolitan's last Thais revival, thirty years ago. It was late in Sills's career, and her retirement was already announced. The staging was disliked. The diva herself had a savvy publicist float a rumor that Beverly as Thais would dance nude. This gave Sills the perfect opportunity to appear on every TV chat show and laugh:
"You'd have to call this opera THIGHS, honey."
Mary Garden was smiling in heaven.

A TO-DO WITH THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC

Gilbert Kaplan conducted Mahler's Symphony number 2, the Resurrection with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall last December 8th. This was a one night only benefit for the Orchestra's pension fund. From all reports there was a full house and a large and apparently satisfied audience. The New York Times was respectful. Trombonist David Finlayson reports on his blog (see www.davidfinalyson.com) that the people on stage weren't as happy. Kaplan, a multi millionaire has been conducting this Mahler Symphony as an amateur for the last 25 years, with two recordings and over fifty performances to his credit. My dear friend Jane Struss sang with him in South America over twenty years ago. I remember her struggles to get the necessary visa from consular offices in New York, not to mention her comments at Kaplan's rehearsals. Like him or not, Kaplan has put this Mahler Symphony into the popular culture, where it may or may not belong.

Finlayson has made an emperor has no clothes argument, that Kaplan was a hopeless conductor and that the audience, Mahler and certainly the New York Philharmonic deserved better. A lot of people agree with him and a lot of people don't. Kaplan doesn't pretend to be a seasoned conductor-it is only this one piece he conducts, and his two recordings are available to be heard and and judged and enjoyed.

"His continued appearances are an affront to all "real" conductors who have toiled relentlessly for the recognition the truly deserve," writes Finalyson. He in turn is being attacked as a snob and an ingrate. He's carrying all the comments on his blog. Ominously he himself has posted nothing since December 18th. Over in London, Norman Lebrecht is huffing and puffing away in support of Kaplan (I never miss Norman's blog: www.normanlebrecht.com-am I the only one in the world without his own website...and who is this Facebook person anyway?)

Years ago I went on air and decried the local symphony for importing Charlotte Church. She was the little girl who trilled Estrellita and Over the Rainbow in a toneless falsetto. Oprah called her the voice of an Angel. I guess Oprah had never heard Joan Sutherland. I said that such an appearance was disrespectful to the serious musicians on stage and to the loyal audience supporting them. I made myself no friends. People were irate. The symphony management told me off. Charlotte came, sang, sold out the house and made them money. Well and good. You know what? I don't take it back. I don't regret it.
Gilbert Kaplan has spent a lot of his own money making Mahler's music widely available. Good for him. Now let others conduct it. I wonder whatever happened to Charlotte Church?

Check them out for yourself:

www.davidfinlayson.com
www.normanlebrecht.com

And try to find Jane Struss. What an artist!

www.cfa.harvard.edu/~rschild/jane.html

THE ELECTION: JANE STRUSS REPORTS FROM BOSTON

Great lady, artist, mezzo -soprano Jane Struss sends this report of election night:

THE MOMENT

We were at a young friend's house, who is a community organizer, now at the Heller School at Brandeis and he had a projector with different stations screened on the wall. All the 20-somethings had gone...they didn't remember the awful election of 2000 when we went to bed thinking to wake up to President Gore and got something else instead. We weren't about to leave until McCain made his concession speech. So there were me and Rudy, both Davids, Hank and David's father (an Episcopal priest who is a riot...and he had brought a bottle of good whiskey and one of champagne for either eventuality. We ended up with the champagne, thank God, but we each had to try a little whiskey...I still can't stand the taste.) When they announced for Obama at 11:01 I started crying, as did everyone else, as we watched the crowds in Chicago and Jesse Jackson standing there with tears streaming down their cheeks and looking like he couldn't believe the miracle. I called my granddaughter Heidi in Utah, who had been so excited about the election and her first time voting and she was asleep! How innocent they are in a way, and how idealistic too. Then McCain's very gracious concession speech, then drove home to hear Obama's. A message on the machine from my 11 year old granddaughter Elizabeth: "Where are you Nona, Grandpa, he won, he WON!" This form an 11 year old in Flagstaff, AZ. Afterwards great noise from Harvard Square...apparently streets blocked off and everyone crowding into them. I sort of wish we'd gone down, or at least out to Mass. Ave. Rudy and I certainly didn't sleep much. Anyway, in the words of my student Abby Rockefeller (and she should know) "I took my first real breath in 40 years." It really is a new day when anything is possible (in the best sense). And in Michael Moore's words: "Wow! Wow!!"

Much love, Jane

ELECTION DAY COVERAGE

I sent out an e mail to friends all over the country asking them how the voting process was going in their neighborhoods. I didn't ask for political affiliations and I tried hard not to proselytize. Here are some responses:

______________________

GROVE CITY, OHIO: We voted early, on Friday at 5:30 in the morning. The line was long and though no obvious electioneering was going on, I had a strong sense of Democratic leaning in the crowd. Not to mention we were among the color minority in line, which is an odd and yet appreciated experience having grown up in white middle class America.

NEW YORK CITY: Dirty trix. Voter fraud. Fascist chicanery. Let us pray. But to whom or what?

BROOKLINE, MA: No problems at all where I voted this morning: arrived at 9:20, was on my way to work 40 minutes later, which is the same amount of time it typically takes in my neighborhood. ....totally sick of paying attention to polls, commentators, etc.

TUCSON, AZ: I was at OSU for grad school in 1969-70 and was vice chair of the local chapter of the SDS, organizing a dozen bus loads of Buckeyes for the Vietnam moratorium in Washington, DC in Nov.'69....Arizona is actually in play for Obama. I voted early so avoided today's long lines. I'm a lawyer volunteering for Obama and I have had no calls today about any serious problem at the local polls.

CALIFORNIA: I had no wait when I went to vote between 3:30 and 4:00, actually had a choice of two booths. The line where I was to sign my name was more than halfway down the page and every name above mine was marked as having received a mail-in ballot. The state is expecting more than a million voters over the 2004 level. There was lots of sign waving on street corners as I went about my day...An article in today's paper is predicting tomorrow as the biggest "day after Christmas" letdown. The presents were more interesting before they were opened.

VIRGINIA: Thank you, Ohio. Virginia helped too, turning Blue for a nice change from its customary Red.

WEST CHESTER, PA: I did what the collective wisdom called for....waited for the poor bastards who have to commute to work to finish their early AM voting. I arrived at the polls five minutes before nine. I had peed...and brought a book, a tiny portable TV, my blackberry, bottled at er and a snack. I wore my most comfortable shoes, but left home the little fold up camp stool...that was a little to geek wimp. I was ready to vote! MY polling place is typical Chester Springs....located in a private country school. I had amazing parking karma...a young woman who was leaving told me the wait was two hours. She was appropriately dressed to stand in a long line with heels that would only be loved by a fan of "sex and the City". OUCH. But you had to give her credit, she voted and she wore her Dolce and Gabbanas.....Everyone i line was animated and uncharacteristically chatting with everyone and anyone as a long wait was anticipated. To my astonishment a poll worker came down the line to tell us that anyone whose name was between N and Z could move up to the right....My vote experience lasted all of ten minutes. I took my time to fill in EVERY vote and went over it three times to make sure my vote COUNTED with a SHOUT when it went through the scanner. My receipt was torn off the bottom of my vote and I took it in both hands like I had been handed the original copy of the Declaration of Independence.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK: I just learned that two members of my family voted for McCain and two didn't vote at all. I am horrified. HORRIFIEDDDDDDD!

WAYLAND, MA: Voted after the commuters, at ten. No lines in our leafy village, but a steady stream of people at the town building. All the UUs were out, singing sixties songs and marshaling the sign hoisters....one of these good Christian types tried to draft me into the UU choir, nothing doing buddy, my choir days are over.
We all awaited the arrival of local state senate hopeful, on Ms. Orozco, for whom we have worked and upon whom we have showered our largess. A greenie. No show. Phooey. I just realized I voted with my Obama button in plain sight which is against the law but I assume vote will count. Nobody wrestled it from my grandmotherly boozum....Not that voting Dem around here means much. But it was sooooooo satisfying to make my little Sharpie marks...Maybe I'll finally sleep tonight; hopefully after the long awaited dance in the streets.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: The war is over. We have overcome.

SEATTLE: I live in the bluest area of a cobalt blue city in a blue state.
This morning at 10 my son and I (my wife voted absentee) waited for 15 minutes to vote, something that has never happened to me in the 25 years I have been voting in the same precinct...I was upset about Barack's grandmother too. I thought she would hold on, as old people often do, until after the election. It must have been really painful for him, but as my assistant said maybe she thought she could do more good up there than in Hawaii.

MASSACHUSETTS: I voted at 7:30 AM, expecting a crowd...it certainly wasn't empty but no lines. Since I can walk there, I was going to take the dog but at the last minute, thought better of it. Here in MA, we voted not to get rid of the state income tax, and to lighten the crime of marijuana possession and to ban greyhound racing. I'm all in favor of dogs, but I fear the animals will jut be shipped to a state where they have fewer retirement benefits...nothing is all that simple.

COLCHESTER, CONNECTICUT: Here on the street word is that the Irish guy is going to win here. No, not the Mac guy. O'Bama. Chances are, anyway. Double digit leads in the polls, and all....My wife and I, along with out 19 year old daughter, braved the epic lines at Colchester Town Hall to cast our ballots. There was one other dad-about-town approaching the front door as we arrived....he made a big deal about how there was no line to wait in. He'd been there since 6 and the line was ridiculous. Sue and I marked the appropriate ovals on the 8-1/2 x 11 card ($.025 each the registrars told us when Cait registered last month) and fed them through the scanner. We greeted friends and neighbors and waited for our college kid to complete her ballot. Taking a long time here, what's up? Oh, turns out the kid marked a couple of names on one of the major party lines and then realized that they were endorsed by third parties, and wished she had marked those ovals instead. Oh, well. Vote and learn. I walked out of Town Hall because my oldest kid had voted. My life has served a purpose.

CHEMNITZ, GERMANY: Enough of this e mail shit. I need a telephone number! Please send me yours!

REMEMBERING STUDS TERKEL

Louis ("Studs") Terkel, broadcaster, oral historian, raconteur and Chicago fixture for over seventy years, died last Friday at the age of 96.
You can learn more about him from www.studsterkel.com.

In 2005 when he was promoting his book "And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey" I spoke to Studs Terkel. I was promised ten minutes and we went on for over half an hour. He was still quite young then, 93.
Our talk will be a podcast at www.wosu.org shortly.

Meanwhile, here are
some written selections:

CHICAGO

"I was an asthmatic little boy, eight years old when I was brought to live in Chicago in 1920. The smell of the stockyards cured my asthma right away."

In our talk, Mr. Terkel goes on to explain the 75 year love affair he had with Chicago. He made me want to move there.

RADIO

"Every radio soap opera back in those days had three gangsters.
The bright one, the middle one and the dumb one. I was always the dumb one.
And I always died, just before the first commercial break...Later hey wanted us to wear tuxedos for the studio audience. You looked like a gangster going to his sister's wedding. But I became a disc jockey before the term was invented."

ROSA RAISA and ENRICO CARUSO

"Raisa! How does someone your age know Raisa? You are the first person your age to ask me about Rosa Raisa! What a great, magnificent voice. She was the greatest Norma ever, better than Callas....She loved to sing with Caruso. He invented the gramophone, you know. Any immigrant who could scrape together a quarter could buy a recording of Caruso singing 'Celeste Aida'....

NOTE: Rosa Raisa (1893-1963) born Raissa Burchstein in Poland. Dramatic soprano.
Prima donna of the Chicago Opera, 1915-1940. Puccini wrote the title role in his final opera, Turandot for her. She sang the premiere in Milan in 1926, two years after Puccini died. Although her career was international, Raisa, like Terkel, was a Chicago institution.

ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC?

People want to know how to survive with dignity...remember I told you there was a machine that saved my life? And there's a machine that can destroy us all. And this is our choice. We live in a world of sanity. There's enough imagination in the human race to create this world that makes me, at ninety-three, live with a new kind of verve..."

POST CARD FROM COLUMBUS, OHIO

This is the first election I've really looked forward to in a long time.
Here in Columbus, Ohio we are the blue dot dead center in a red state.
My neighborhood, zip codes 43202 and 43214, is the blue dot in the center of the blue dot. It's a very blue dot,so the pundits tell you.
I'd say the lawn signs on my street and to a few streets north are evenly divided.
Go one block south, and continue on for two miles and you are Obama Obama Obama. I refer to the neighborhood as our version of Cambridge, MA when it was funky.
Same gender households, university faculty, there's even a food co-op (with labor problems!). All we need are a few Hare Krishna.

We have lines upon lines of people are voting early. Part of me thinks that its a mistake to vote early. It is such a privilege in this country to vote that it doesn't have to be comfortable of convenient. On the other hand, if more people are voting, if its giving us a huge turn out, so be it.

We have a sign in our yard for a Republican candidate for state senator. I've gotten looks. Nothing more, just looks. Said candidate was very supportive of my daughter's school and came to visit immediately when asked. He was very open to talking about special needs kids and he listened carefully and respectfully. His opponent didn't respond to the invitation. So this guy gets my vote for office.

I hope to be at my polling place at 6 am and I'll hardly be the first in line.
Good luck to us all!

DOCTOR ATOMIC

DOCTOR ATOMIC
Music by John Adams
Libretto by
Peter Sellars

First performance: San Francisco Opera, September 1, 2005
In performance now at the Metropolitan Opera
Live HD transmission to cinemas world wide, Saturday November 8th at 1 PM EST.
For theater near you: www.metopera.org


A New Englander named John Adams who writes operas might cause audiences some confusion. The composer John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1947 (and up home we say 'Woostah'). To my knowledge he's never held elected office and he's very much a man of the 21st century. His early pieces, 'Grand Pianola Music', 'Harmonium' and 'Shaker Loops' positioned him as our most performed living American composer. Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his cantata 'On the Transmigration of Souls', written for the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the 9/11 attacks. He has long left behind the label minimalist composer as his own voice has taken over, and his works enter the mainstream.

Doctor Atomic is Adams's third opera. The first, 'Nixon in China', attracted attention not just for its subject matter but also for Alice Goodman's biting libretto and the inventive staging of Peter Sellars. The Adams-Goodman-Sellars collaboration continued with 'The Death of Klinghoffer'. This opera is the subject of a recent (and brilliant) film by Penny Woolcock, who has directed Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan.

The task of setting the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb to music was the suggestion of Pamela Rosenberg, then General Director of the San Francisco Opera. Adams long ago earned the dubious title of "King of the CNN Operas". The characters you meet in his operas are well remembered by many,
and they often turned up in the papers or the evening news. What has always impressed me about Adams's operas is his insistence on the humanity of all of his characters. You may not like his politics, but Richard Nixon was presented with the dignity due the President of the United States. 'The Death of Klinghoffer' remains very controversial not only for the horrible death of the title character but for the humanity with which Goodman and Adams depicted the Palestinian hijackers. Adams and Sellars avoid caricature in 'Doctor Atomic.' Sellars ads verses of John Dunne, Muriel Rukeyser and the Bhagavad-Gita to his libretto, since these are poets and works known to jhave been dear to Oppenheimer.

Central to this opera is the relationship between Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty. Imagine the conflict, creating something whose sole purpose is destruction on a massive scale. What does the do to the inventor? To his marriage and his loved ones? What about those who support the invention and argue that its necessary for the end of war and the safety of the world? The engine of Adams's music will tell the story of these characters in an opera that will I'm sure leave you impressed, and moved.

John Adams's new memoir 'Hallelujah Junction' is a good read.
His web site is www.earbox.com

Donald Rosenberg and The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Donald Rosenberg is the highly gifted music /arts critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He's also the author of a recent history of The Cleveland Orchestra ("The Cleveland Orchestra: Second to None") that is beautifully written and a jolly good read. I'm not a regular reader of the Plain Dealer, nor of Don's pieces, but I know good writing when I read it and Don is a good writer. I'm not aware of anyone who questions his knowledge of music or professional integrity in any way.

The scandal broke late last week that Rosenberg will no longer be allowed to review
concerts by The Cleveland Orchestra. He has for years been critical of Franz Welser-Most, TCO's music director, and somebody somewhere, decided enough was enough. It apparently never occurred to those involved that Welser-Most, seasoned opera conductor in Europe he may be, has a ways to go before he can fit comfortably into the shoes of George Szell, Lorin Maazel or Christoph von Dohnanyi and Severance Hall. FWM, a good looking blond, has had his Cleveland contract extended through 2018. I'm not aware that even Toscanini was offered such terms by General Sarnoff at RCA for the NBC Symphony sixty years ago!

(I interviewed Franz Welser-Most in Cleveland a few years ago. He was highly intelligent, an enjoyable conversationalist and charming. A nice, unaffected man with a healthy sense of self worth. I've admired his latest recording, the Bruckner 8 with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. I've only heard him once in Cleveland, conducting Verdi's "Don Carlo".)

The fact remains that a highly respected arts journalist has been removed by a well respected newspaper from the only art beat in the area that matters. My apologies to the worthy opera and chamber music in Cleveland, but they lack the international reputation of The Cleveland Orchestra. Rosenberg has been accused of a lack of journalistic objectivity by some, and his reviews have been admired by others. The consensus is that Franz Welser-Most can't get a break from Rosenberg and by extension the Plain Dealer, and he's meant to be in Cleveland for the next ten years. Conductors in America are no longer deities. In fact, George Szell may have been the last one, and he died in 1970. Rosenberg's criticisms are much less rabid then those of Virgil Thomson, or Olin Downes or Chicago's Claudia Cassidy who drove one fine conductor, Jean Martinon, out of town. (Go find out more about these critics. Go read Thomson's memoir, Virgil Thomson by Virgil Thomson).
There's more available to us. good or bad you can hear La Scala, the Berlin Philharmonic or any of America's great orchestras, live in real time with a click at our desk. There's room now more than ever for an intelligent and probing response to all of these performances. Rosenberg's demotion is a tragedy. Its embarrassing for all concerned, except Don Rosenberg himself. The Plain Dealer or whoever made this decision has made themselves look petulant and childish, rather than encouraging its leading musical light to get on with it....better. The Cleveland Orchestra is a great orchestra deserving great, intelligent press and someone has just kicked an astute critic down the front stairs of Severance Hall. For shame.

To know more, go to www.nytimes.com and search Donald Rosenberg.
The story broke on Tim Smith's blog at the Baltimore Sun.
This will also be discussed on NPR's All Things Considered.
Check out that program's archive at npr.org

THE COUNTESS'S UNDERGARMENTS

Recently I read of a European based production of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro".
In Act II the director has Cherubino, the lovesick page boy, sniff a pair of Countess Almaviva's underpants. I wish I could say this kind of nonsense was new, but it's old, its real old, and it's getting older.

First problem: There is no music in this opera that would support such a vulgar and ridiculous gesture

Second problem: As titillating as it might be, and as voyeuristic as we all may be, it remains a gross thing to do and makes the audience uncomfortable.

Third and fatal problem: It robs the Countess of her dignity. Cherubino could almost be forgiven or understood, since he's meant to be a horny page boy where hormones overtake decency.

But the point of this mini-rant: every character on the stage is entitled to their dignity. Even the evil ones: Klytamnestra is still the Queen of Mycanae, not a ruined harridan who wants to kill her children (she wants to avenge the daughter her husband killed)
Baron Ochs is supposed to have horseshit stuck to his boots, but he is still a
nobleman. He's capable of all the dainty gestures expected of a man of his class in 1750's Vienna. Bardolfo and Pistola, Sir John Falstaff's slimy servants, refuse to insult a lady, but would probably filch her purse behind her back.

Just as in music every note has the right to live, so every character's self worth and self understanding,-- place!-must be understood by the audience. Every thief has his dignity. So does every monarch, priestess, soldier and serving girl.
Otherwise nobody would be moved when they go to the opera. It would just be noise.

So look, sniff the underpants in private, okay? Leave poor Mozart and his audiences alone....

HANS HOTTER ON LIEDER

I've been reading the memoirs of the German bass Hans Hotter (1908-2003)
called, conveniently, Hans Hotter by Hans Hotter (translated by Donald Arthur, published in 2006 by Northeaster University Press. The original title is 'Die Mai ward wir gegonen'-May was kind to me, a line from Schubert's Winterreise)

Hotter, in addition to telling us about his personal life and professional travels, thankfully offers some insight into the performance of lieder. On paper he's a secondary source. Seek out his recordings if you want to listen and hear the words and music from the oracles' mouth.

Here's an excerpt from pp. 236

"...a friend of Schubert's, the lawyer Dr. Leopold Sonnleithner, has passed down to us some hints from the great genius himself who created these "gruesome songs" (as he himself described Winterreise). In these hints, Schubert gives us what can certainly be regarded as authoritative answers...Schubert's friend reports, "I heard Schubert coach and accompany his songs more than a hundred times. He never tolerated violent expression in the performance of lieder. He always kept strictly in tempo except for those few passages where he himself specifically marked a tempo change in writing. The lieder singer should as a rule only relate the experiences and sensations of another person; he does not assume the role of the person whose feelings he is describing. Poet, composer, and singer must approach the song lyrically and not dramatically. Particularly in the case of Schubert's true expression, the most profound sensitivity has already been placed in the melody a such and is splendidly enhanced by the composer."

CP: Sing what's on the page. Nothing more and noting less.

So there.

I recommend this book and any of Hotter's recordings to anyone interested in learning to make music drama. Absent that, they are completely enjoyable for their own sake.

COLUMBUS SYMPHONY...WOULDN'T IT BE NICE?

I was thinking of the Columbus Symphony today, in anticipation of the Musicians of the Columbus Symphony concert set for tomorrow night at Veteran's Auditorium. The OSU Marching Band will be there, which is as savvy a piece of marketing and promotion as I've heard in a long while. They are, of course, regular participants in the CSO Summer Seasons.

I attended last Saturday's concert, conducted by Alessandro Siciliani. It was great. Crowded house, with lots of gutsy, passionate music making coming from the stage. In the intermission, I chatted with one of the CSO board members. I wondered if he felt like he was wading into enemy territory. (I didn't ask him that)
This gentleman has been a big supporter of the arts in Columbus for many years, and I'm sure there's no way he'd want to see the CSO fold. I didn't see any other board members there, but it was crowed and I don't know many of them, so for all I know the entire board could have been there. Good for them.

Wouldn't it be nice if tomorrow night the CSO Musicians, Mr. Hirokami, Mr. Beadle and all the board members in attendance could take a bow at the end of the evening, together, and in so doing signal and end to vituperation and who lives where and who cares and further signal a willingness to find some way to keep the band playing, period.

There are good and devoted people on both "sides" of this issue. Come out and take a bow. Music can do that much.

MUSICIANS OF THE COLUMBUS SYMPHONY

Musicians of the Columbus Symphony
Alessandro Siciliani, conductor
Saturday July 26 08
Veteran's Memorial Auditorium

There was already a good buzz in the hall with the downstairs seating pretty crowded when Siciliani came out to conduct this concert by the Musicians of the Columbus Symphony. Then the audience roared and leaped to their collective feet. What followed was a high octane, terrific romp through Verdi and Rossini overtures leading to a majestic reading of Finlandia. I imagine there was little or no rehearsal.
Given the emotion of the evening, its worth saying again that the band played beautifully.
One audience member remarked to me, well these overtures are like Pops pieces and I said try playing them. The evening ended with Dvorak's 4th symphony. It danced, as did the overtures. I'd like to acknowledge the beautiful playing by David Thomas, clarinet, Steve Secan, oboe, Randall Herster, flute...hell by everybody.
And say what you will, the paying public still loves Siciliani
and he clearly still loves these musicians.

Well, we've had several evenings of great music. This shows the best of our local performing arts community and a strong response from its many supporters. With everyone working at their best, maybe people can stop giving each other the proverbial finger and save this orchestra, restore these artists to their jobs and get serious about a quality of life issue for the capital city.

MORE CSO RANT

I seem to be getting grouchier than ever. I don't know if its the weather, the diet or just what, but the debacle at the Columbus symphony isn't helping my mood. Today it was reported that the Greater Columbus Arts Council is withdrawing funding, a quarter of a mill plus for the orchestra's 2008-2009 because the season has effectively been cancelled. Now you can't blame GCAC for this. They can't hold up monies that can go to other worthy organizations. I do wonder why they have never spoken publicly to encourage the orchestra's pooh bahs to either address the problems, sell tickets and get going or get out. Why hasn't GCAC said anything about anything. I sent 'em an e mail to this effect his morning. Politer in tone than I am now. But you and I both know that if there's any reply at all it will be along the "It's not our job " lines. My idea of arts advocacy is at odds with those in authority. Maybe they need to become as grouchy s I am.

LIKE ATTENDING A DEAR FRIEND'S FUNERAL....

...that's how I felt this past weekend as the Columbus Symphony played their last scheduled Classical Series concerts of the season, which will probably turn out to be their last concerts ever.
(Yes, yes we have Yo-Yo Ma en gala later this week, and a Pops
program with Marvin Hamlisch on May 31st. I'm sorry. Strike me dead if you want, but I don't want the last CSO concerts EVER to feature Marvin Hamlisch. God bless him)

The fiscal crisis at the Columbus Symphony is selling newspapers and keeping the blogs and websites humming.
The Columbus Dispatch has printed not one but two editorials telling the musicians (the product-thank you very much)to buck up and take all the pay cuts, all of the lost weeks and really everything the board can dish out to diminish the orchestra in size and quality. Stop whining and get over it.
The musicians take another view: where's the strategic plan? Where are the fundraising efforts? There's plenty of emotion from the public but how about from civic officials? The board will only negotiate further if the musicians accept horrendous cuts. The musicians will only negotiate further if these cuts are addressed. The board stance I find to be icy and patronizing. Very much the Esterhazy, use the servants entrance model. As stewards of a fifty seven year old civic organization, they clearly do not want the present Columbus symphony to succeed. Both sides vilify the other in the press. What's needed is a Dad or a playground monitor to knock some heads and get both sides talking. One has to wonder too, if CAPA , owners of the Ohio Theater wouldn't be just as content to let the CSO fail and fill the theatres with orchestra road shows. There it is folks: all music and all musicians are expendable and interchangeable.

If the board had any plan t fund raise or to improve this situation in any way, outside of firing half the orchestra they haven't made it known, it hasn't been reported or my fat ass has been under a very large rock. All they've said is, the musicians must accept these cuts. Period. If they don't, we have nothing to say to them.
Nor do they have anything we want to hear (including music, so it would seem)
Ah! Remember music? This past weekend, Beethoven, Schumann and Mendelssohn rang out splendidly. Will this-or Marvin Hamlisch-really be the end?

Look at these web sites:

www.symphonymusicians.com
www.glitteringstew.com
www.symphonystrong.com
www.adaptistration.com

SARAH CALDWELL AND THE REVOLUTION IN OPERA

SARAH CALDWELL, FIRST LADY OF OPERA by Daniel Kessler. Published June 30, 2008

Anyone wanting to know more about the art of stagecraft in opera should know these names. Google, Shmoogle or whatever but find their books and read: Stanislavsky, Wieland Wagner, Kroll Opera, Walter Felsenstein and Sarah Caldwell. They are all dead.

Today, I thrill to the work of Nic Muni, Stephen Wadsworth, Jack O'Brien, and Francesca Zambello. Peter Sellars is often fascinating but I don't always buy it. Sometimes its more about Peter than anything else (And lose the stupid haircut and the shmatte. It was cute in 1985 but most of us have moved on!)
All of them read scores. All go to the music and integrate music with text, and from this they prepare stagings.

A talented young friend who hopes for a career in opera reminded me yesterday of something I said at a rehearsal last year. I responded to another singer who said "Opera is a dying art." To which my friend quotes me as saying "Opera is primed for a revolution." I think we're in the midst of it now, a good one.

I grew up on Sarah Caldwell's productions of opera in the 1970s. Sarah died in 2006.. She had the cover of Time magazine (November 10, 1975) and was the first woman to conduct at the Metropolitan. Sarah's genius was not for conducting, not so much for stage direction, though her ideas were witty, crowd pleasing and always bound to the music. They came from the score. She read the score. Sarah's genius was surviving as long as she did-the company was "in business" from 1959 to 1990, scoring last minute funds, often in bags of singles at the last minute to get the curtain up, and in assembling gifted people around her who could be relied upon to produce exciting opera.

The singers of course, Beverly Sills, Donald Gramm, John Alexander, Shirley Verrett, Jon Vickers, John Reardon, James McCracken among them.

Her comprimario artists were extraordinary. They were first class musicians and actors. Gimi Beni, James Billings, Richard Crist, Eunice Alberts, Jan Curtis and Ron Hedlund are a few who come to mind immediately. Her sets and costumes were designed with great taste and style by Helen Pond and Herbert Senn. These two never saw a performance space they couldn't conquer. For years, Sarah didn't have a theater. She produced opera in an indoor skating rink, the gym at Tuft's University, various porno houses scattered through Boston's combat zone, and a cyclorama building. The roof may have leaked and there was never a pit but the shows went on.

Was she the first to approach opera as theater? Did the revolution in opera begin with her? No, but she continued it. Sarah told me that HER great inspiration was the German director Walter Felsenstein (1901-1975). He was stuck in East Berlin for most of his career and his work was almost never seen in the West. In the 70s Sarah brought him to Boston for some lectures and he brought with him a number of his productions on film: LEONORE, BLUEBEARD and I think CARMEN.

All of these films have just been released on DVD. Go find them. Felsenstein had a state run theater with a limitless budget and cast good voices in very interesting bodies and developed strong stage personalities in his performers. I don't remember disliking his shows musically, and I remember wanting to see each film again, immediately. He would rehearse for months at a time, until he was satisfied. I'm not saying that's the way to do it. Sarah, for all her touted theatricality, was known to nod off during a 3 a.m. rehearsal. If you added up the amount of hours spent preparing Norma or Der Rosenkavalier in Boston I'll bet it would be less than any where else. Certainly less than East Berlin.

Now, Felstenstin never had a voice that I heard in his company of the Callas-Sutherland-Corelli-Price-Tebaldi category. These great stars didn't need Felsenstein and he didn't need them. The public didn't tire of these great voices, and if they threw in an onstage gesture once in a while, great. Their main accomplishments were vocal and musical. (And what voices!) Beverly Sills was a stage animal and a singing actress to her fingertips so I put her in her own category.

Sarah was the heir to Callas in my opinion. Same with Jon Vickers. So for Felsenstein the opera was less about voices, and I believe he put the drama before the music. Interestingly, as far as I know Felsenstein did little "singer's opera.' No bel canto: no Lucia, no Rigoletto, no Tosca.

Who before Felsenstein? Wieland Wagner was shaking it up at Bayreuth in his grandfather's opera house. With minimal sets-there was no money after WWII-Wieland Wagner used the music and the text to present the characters, just as Wagner with his talk of gesamtkunstwrk had intended.

I would love to have been in Berlin in the 1920s for the productions of the Kroll Opera. Otto Klemperer was in charge there. His productions were influenced by Gordon Craig, who was the first I know about to design abstract sets, using shapes, color and lights. Thus a tree was not always a tree, and audiences were expected to use their imaginations. They were given permission to enter into the drama with the music. It could be any kind of a tree you liked. And really, what does the music tell you? What do the rests tell you? The keys? And above all the texts. Now, very few opera libretti survive as great literature. But the words are what the composers strive to illuminate and illustrate with music. So for crying out loud, study your texts ! And the historical context in which the opera was written. There are clues everywhere that the music at the last will fill in for you. Meanwhile, go find Mr. Kessler's book about Sarah Caldwell. She was crazy, irresponsible, often brilliant and one never said "Never" to her. The paychecks bounced their way down the Charles river, but when she got the curtain up, it could be enthralling.

KNOCKEMSTIFF

If you want to have your heart and your guts ripped out
and at the same time read some superb writing, go read
Knockemstiff, a collection of short stories by Donald Ray Pollock.
Mr.Pollock assures us these are fictional. The stories are set in
and around the real town of Knockemstiff, Ohio. Mr. Pollock also assures us that he grew up in Lnockemstiff
and that his parents and neighbors are all good people who would do anything to help someone in need.
I' m sure that's true and I'm relieved to hear it. Comparisons have been made to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio.
Forget it. This is brutally original. There is no love, no empathy, no pity and no whining to be found in any of these stories. Pollock writes the way a digital camera operates-with brutal honesty and clarity. His voice rings completely true.
You won't have read stories anything like these before, not from Poe, not from Hemingway, not from Shirley Jackson. You should put the book down and take a break every few pages. I tried to, I needed to come up for air. But I couldn't. I always had to peek ahead to the opening paragraph of the next story, and I was hooked all over again. It's not a long book and it doesn't need to be. There's no padding here.
This supremely gifted writer has a novel ready too. I can't wait. I may need to rest up to read it, but I can't wait. Don't miss Knockemstiff.

EDWARD DOWNES PAPER

My doctoral paper
Edward Downes, A Life in Music and the Media
may be read on line:

www.ohiolink.edu/etd/

Type my name into the search engine.

Thanks to my beloved faculty committee for their patience and brainpower:

Karen Peeler
Alan Woods
Mary Tarantino
Patrick Woliver

Thanks to Edward's friends for their help

Martha Lattimore, Father M. Owen Lee, Speight Jenkins, Martin Bernheimer

Thanks to all of you who asked over the years "How's it going with the doctorate?"

It's done.

Thanks most of all to Edward!

GEORGE JELLINEK: BUY THIS BOOK (do yourself a favor)

George Jellinek was affiliated with WQXR in New York for many years. His nationally syndicated program The Vocal Scene ran for over thirty years. I first heard Ponselle, Ruffo, Caruso, Lisitsian and many other great names on George's programs. Now he has written a memoir, "My Road to Radio and The Vocal Scene".
Do yourselves a favor and buy this book.
For me, George has always been the role model of intelligence and decency in music broadcasting.
I first met George on my Met Quiz debut (!) back in 1985.
He was already legendary to those of us who loved music and great singing.
I was selling records at Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue.
George was kind, friendly and altogether welcoming to me on that day and on any day I was privileged to be with him.
(We are hardly close friends. I don't flatter myself)
I don't think I ever heard the man say a derogatory word.
His new book is filled with warm reminiscences of may people
whose singing you have loved and I have loved.
If you want gossip of schlock criticisms this book is not for you.
Otherwise grad it.
Bravo, George!

______________________

I posted the above on the opera-l, site some days ago.
It was passed on to Geroge Jellinek who e mailed me as follows:

A dear friend called my attention to your lovely tribute. I am not in good health,
but your kind words brought back great memories and much consolation. Of course I remember you form the Quiz and other writings,
and consider you a DEAR FRIEND...

The caps are his.

So there!
But the book and say a prayer for George's health.

That's DOCTOR Big Butt, to you!!

Yesterday at Ohio State's winter commencement I officially became a DMA-doctor of Musical Arts. This after a few yeas of fun, some interesting times, help from good people and a bureaucracy that would be Orwellian if not in the end, so funny. In short, I rocked. So did a lot of people. The bureaucracy did not.

Did I march or walk or skate or what have you? I did not.
A fall on the ice last week dislocated my shoulder and has me reaching for the milk chocolate Eater eggs and jelly beans with my right hand.
In fact I'm reaching myself right back to Optifast. But this time I'll be drinking those shakes as a DOCTOR!
People ask me "What are you going to do with this degree?" Its a perfectly sensible question but it surprised me and the answer is I haven't any idea. Music therapy would require yet ANOTHER degree-dear Christ.
The DMA does me no good at WOSU. They have hit men looking for me here.
A classical music version of Laugh-In? Maybe. We'll see.

Still I guess its fun being a doctor, though its not a title I suppose I'll ever use.
The best part was finishing the Edward Downes memoir that became the dissertation.

Gotta go ice my shoulder.

COLUMBUS SYMPHONY

For people interested in learning more about the current situation with the Columbus symphony, I urge you to visit their website and download the document
The Path to Financial and Future Growth.

Go to www.columbussymphony.com.

You should also check out a new blog/website begin by a young musician at Ohio State, Mathew Brahm.

www.proudsupporterofthecolumbussymphony.blogspot.com

Mr. Brahms is putting a lot of effort into his-go look.
One thing that really saddened me was a comment by a CSO member, a fantastic musician, who said he feared repercussions if he commented on his own blog.
Ridiculous. This is a prime stakeholder and his opinions are important.
I hope this unhappy situation can at least be discussed constructively by both "sides" and their friends, all of whom have the same goal: supporting a world class orchestra in Columbus.

For myself, I don't envy artists or management. Good guys all. Lousy situation.
It was great being in the Ohio Theater Saturday night to hear the CSO w. Hirokami blow the roof off the place with Beethoven's 7th, the Vaughan Williams Fantasia and Wetherbee's elegant reading of the Korngold violin concerto.
This was first class music making. The program was held almost 20 minutes to accommodate a crowded box office with walk in business.
It was a great night. They can all be great nights! The talent is not in question, nor the willingness of a large public to turn out and applaud, and applaud, and applaud.

MUSIC AND THE MIND

If I were thirty years younger and a lot richer I'd go down to OU and get a degree in Music Therapy and start working with kids who could use music to re direct their brains toward seech, inclusion and acitvity. I may yet do it.
Oliver Sacks's new book 'Musicophilia' is fascinating and it led me to 'Music and he Mind' by Anthony Storr (Ballantine paperback c. 1992.) Storr was a British scientist who died a few years ago. He makes a deatiled study of Schopenhauer, Nietzche, Wagner, Haydn and Stravinsky in disucssing how the creative mind works and how music changes the psyche. Over and over he makes the point of music being the strongest of all the arts, since it proposes neither argument, nor takes nor evokes a position or opinion. Music can be the most accesbile of all the arts.

He quotes Zuckerlandl's Sound and Symbol:

Words divide, tones unite.
The unity of existence that words constantly breaks up
dividing thing from thing, subject from object is
constantly restored in the tone. Music prevents
the wrold from being entirely transformed into language
from becoming nothing but object, and prevents man
from becoming nothing but subject.

Storr's discussion of Freud, who wanted us all reduced to infant like perfection and absence of traume is enlightening and explains Freud's aversion to music. I've noticed this in several Freudians I knew years ago. Music was a distraction, keeping us from the nirvana of mother's breast! God!

I'll leave it there. This is not exactly stairmaster reading.
I fell off twice, destroying the house. But fascinating this book certailny is

MUSIC AND THE MIND-Anthony Storr

MESSIAH RECORDINGS

Every year at this time I'm asked about my favorite recording of Handel's Messiah and evey year I change my mind and every year I realize that my tastes don't mature, they seem to get quirkier. Of course, I can't have one favorite. I know every word and every note and so do you. These days I'm trying to listen to one Beethoven string quartet every morning, because I don't know the quartets or much chamber music at all, but as I continue to read and be fascinated by studies of music and the brain, I realize that these works define "making order out of chaos." But Messiah, comforting in its familiarty, I finds always has something new to offer. It might be helpful that no authentic final version exists. Handel used cut and paste, transpositions and added and delted arias to accomodate different singers appearing in his works. A generation later, Mozart reorchestrated the work to a German text. A century after that, Eugeen Goosens expanded the orchestration and put in instruments Handel never heard of. Messiah became a delightful noisy circus, pehpas befitting what we know of Handel's florid personality.

That said.

I'm commenting on a few sets by conductor

CHRISOTPHER HOGWOOD-- I threw this across the room when I first heard the LPS in college. Google around and you'll find this to be the first choice for a lot of people. Boy sopranos, countertenors, vibratoless strings, vibratoless sopranos! A bunch of reedy, anemic nincompoops. That's what I thought then. Now I think its beautful. You get to hear every word and every note and the fusion of the two, even in-especally in- the fast passages. Emma Kirkby's white tone sounded like a whistle to me, but now I appreciate the fine musicianship.
This would never be my only recording of Messiah.
I lack taste. But I'm older now, so the point of its music making is a comfort!


COLIN DAVIS #1 (I haven't heard his new version) This is about 35 yrs old, and was one of the first to really examine playing Messiah with smaller forces, but there is some vibrato, and there's nice warmth to the strings. Heather Harper, Alexander Young
and John Shirley-Quirk are first class soloists, and nicely balanced (see Bonynge below). This was the recording of choicee for a long time unitl displaced by the Hogwood, and the "rivalry" between the two of them helped start the HIP or Historically Informed Performance (Oy) Wars of the early 1970s. If you can find this, get it.


THOMAS BEECHAM. Ah, Sir Thomas Beecham! Musiccologists on five continents shudder in horror. Bbut this, like porn or pizza, is the quintessential Guilty Pleasure. Saxophones, harps, ballsy operatic soloists,m stately speeds, it is exactly how Messaih would NEVER be peformed like this today. It's a big marching band circus and it is wonderful. Great fun. And the soloists, led by Jon Vickers thank you very much, are not to be sneezed at. The drama of Vickers'"Comfort Ye My People" is unequaled. Go buy this, brown paper bag and all.


RICHARD BONYNGE. A party favorite Lets begin with the comedy of it. He uses a French Candaian mezzo soloist who is the most bizarre singer on record. She sings with "hot potato mouth" so there's no diction, and by Jesus doesn't she manage to go out of tune not phrase by phrase but on the same note at the same time! I thought that was physically impossible. But nope, this lady takes the prize. Her performance makes this a party disc. That's a shame because I listen to it all the itme and love it. It's over ornamented, yes-and the unfortunate Vienese tenor sings Com-FART ye my people, but the choral work is snappy. EXCEPT for this absurd retard in the middle of the Hallelujah Chorus. I like Tom Krause very much. His "The people that walked in darkness" is dramatic and moving.
And listen, admit it, who wouldn't want to hear Dame Joan Sutherland toss off Rejoice Greatly O Daughter of Zion. When she sings "Shout! O daughter of Jersualem" well yes by Christ! Bonynge keeps a bracing momentum making you want to replay this recording. But the mezzo had to be sleeping with SOMEBODY!