{"id":432,"date":"2009-02-26T14:36:33","date_gmt":"2009-02-26T18:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=432"},"modified":"2011-10-10T23:35:59","modified_gmt":"2011-10-11T03:35:59","slug":"second-entry-from-our-esteemed-dont-make-me-do-this-blogger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=432","title":{"rendered":"Second entry from our esteemed, don’t-make-me-do-this blogger"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why I Left Muncie.<\/strong> Half a dozen things to do every night without turning on a TV; Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall a stone\u2019s throw from home; the Sunday Times<\/em> on Saturday night; MoMA and the Met; theater and film; in the good old days, record stores. This title is kind of unfair to my home town because my move to New York 40 years ago was emphatically a positive one, not anything negative about Indiana. All I knew was that I, myself, didn\u2019t belong in the Lynds\u2019 Middletown U.S.A.<\/p>\n

Bells of the Hall.<\/strong> By now everybody has read that Tully Hall\u2019s Second Coming is the bee\u2019s knees. But what about the icing on the cake: the intermission bells? No, I\u2019m not kidding. Remember those exotic intermission bells at Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall? In 1965 Leonard Bernstein wanted a new signal for the audience to return to its seats, so he asked his assistant, the composer Jack Gottlieb, to select some felicitous 12-tone rows as prompters. \u201cI chose rows written by the second Vienna school, Stravinsky, and Bernstein,\u201d Jack recounted earlier this week, \u201cand recorded them on a celesta for Lenny\u2019s approval.\u201d After Bernstein retired as music director in 1969 and George Szell, who detested 12-tone music, became interim \u201cmusic advisor,\u201d the bells were replaced by what sounded like foghorns. Soon after Pierre Boulez became music director in 1971, I urged him after a concert to reinstate the bells. Boulez hadn\u2019t known about them, but he must have approved of Jack\u2019s recording because they reappeared not long afterwards. They disappeared again at some point after Boulez\u2019s departure, but now someone at Lincoln Center has had the brilliant idea to revive them at the newly reopened Alice Tully Hall. Bravo! Long may they resound.<\/p>\n

A Revelatory Onegin.<\/strong> Tony Tommasini in the NYTimes<\/em> wrote that Karita Mattila (MA\u2019s Musician of the Year, 2005<\/a>) as Tatiana was \u201ca revelation\u201d in the Met\u2019s \u201cEugene Onegin.\u201d Some critics wrote she was a bit long in the tooth. Peter Davis summed it up to me in conversation, \u201cShe\u2019s astonishing\u2014fifty and nifty.\u201d [See his review<\/a>.] The Met Tatiana I recall most warmly was the 57-year-old Mirella Freni in 1992. For me, on February 9th, the revelation was Thomas Hampson (MA\u2019s Vocalist of the Year, 1992), who made me realize for the first time what an s.o.b. Onegin is. His singing was top-notch too, as was Poitr Beczala\u2019s as Lenski. All of this fine vocalism was compromised by the flat-footed conducting of Jir\u00ed Belohl\u00e1vec.<\/p>\n

Classical Music in the Movies.<\/strong> OK, let\u2019s see if anyone is reading this thing. Classical music was a natural for the early talkies: It was cheap (no copyright problems), and it was handy seed inspiration for a composer on deadline. My first strains of Liszt, Schumann, Schubert, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky were courtesy of the movies\u2014in particular, Universal\u2019s sublimely silly horror films, which I loved and still do to my wife PK\u2019s bewilderment (\u201ca guy thing\u201d; \u201carrested development,\u201d she says). The title music for Dracula<\/em>, Frankenstein<\/em>, Murders in the Rue Morgue<\/em>, and The Mummy<\/em>\u2014all made in the early \u201930s\u2014is Tchaikovsky\u2019s sinister Black Swan theme from Swan Lake.<\/em> A veritable treasure trove of this sort of thing is the 1934 Karloff-Lugosi thriller, The Black Cat<\/em>. Its soundtrack is all classical, and I identified ten pieces when I watched it recently (on an inexpensive, decently transferred Universal DVD called The Bela Lugosi Collection<\/em>). How many classical pieces can you identify? See what you can find, and we\u2019ll compare notes.<\/p>\n

Whatever Happened to Ben Zander?<\/strong> He has made several recordings for Telarc in recent years, most notably of Mahler symphonies\u2014Nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9. But after the Mahler First in 2005, not a peep. One hopes the Seventh will show up one of these days, but like many aborted Mahler cycles, we may never get the expensive Second and Eighth, or Das Lied von de Erde<\/em>, for that matter. Too bad. Zander\u2019s Eighth at Carnegie several years ago\u2014with his Boston Philharmonic, a group of professional and amateur players\u2014was the best I\u2019ve ever heard live. Now, after nearly four years, he has turned to Bruckner\u2014the Fifth Symphony (Telarc 2CD-80706). That this distinguished recording can even be mentioned in the company of Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s extraordinary 1942 live performance (DG or Music & Arts)\u2014possibly the greatest performance of any<\/em> piece of music, ever<\/em>\u2014or Karajan\u2019s immensely powerful DG recording, speaks highly for Zander\u2019s accomplishment. As with his previous Telarc releases (all with London\u2019s Philharmonia Orchestra), a second CD contains the conductor\u2019s truly insightful comments into the music. I recommend them all.<\/p>\n