Category: MUSIC

     Michael White of the London Telegraph noted a momentous occasion this week as one of the scions of classical music finally stepped down after fifty years and turned his magnificent creation formally over to a new generation.  Though ensemble and chamber orchestra certainly pre-dated him, Sir Neville Marriner has become inexorably linked with the musical format through his creation and development of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.  The ensemble first performed in 1959, associating itself with the magnificent church built in 1726 on Trafalgar Square in London.  The structure of the group initially of the group was in the classic form of a chamber orchestra as a leaderless ensemble, with Sir Neville as its lead violinist.  Sir Neville’s mission was a specific one; to bring connection to the musical public of the works of so many composers that had found themselves swallowed in time by the classical and romantic behemoths of the 19th and twenthcentury in classical performance.  The provision of larger and larger orchestras to achieve the sonic sound requirements of symphony had biased the listener against the timbre and intimate context of ensemble playing, and had as a result, committed to the “dustbin” of history many tremendous works of music by composers who had been giants in their own time.  It is the unique achievement of Sir Neville and the St Martin in the Fields ensemble that the rebirth of great composers such as Telemann, Albinoni, Vivaldi, Boccherini, and Purcell, as well as the greater appreciation of the known giants George Frediric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, are synonymous with St Martin’s recorded performances.

     Baroque and classical musical style loosely fit the diverse musical creations of European composers from 1600 to 1800 and reflect the ornate architectural style and the dominant position of both religious life and monarchical administration dominating Europe at that time.  The music was performed most commonly in the venues of the church service or for the benefit of the royal court; public performances were not focus of the composers, whose livelihood was derived almost purely from benefactors, not ticket sales.  The period instruments, and the venues were intimate, the musical creation mathematical, precise, and introspective.  Yet, as Marriner helped the world rediscover, some off the most beautiful melodies and sonic poems were present in these compositions.  Sir Neville did not attempt to recreate the precise sound of the time on period instruments, but rather to uncover the beautiful encased musical expressions using modern instruments and performers in a fashion the modern audience could relate to and understand.   The return to rotation of such lyrical and elevating compositions as Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, Handel’s Water Music, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and Bach’s Brandenberg Concertos were made approachable by St Martin’s revitalized treatments, and became permanently linked to their performances. Having changed the public’s capacity for smaller ensemble and string orchestra play, Marriner expanded St Martin’s personality to many new territories over the years, additionally branding such diverse composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Bartok, the modern English composers such as Vaughn Williams and Britten, and format additions with wind instruments and soloists, to the St. Martin style.  St. Martin’s became the sought after deliverer of some of  the most recognizable movie scores of the past decades, producing massively popular recordings for Amadeus, English Patient, and Titanic.  Sir Neville and St. Martin’s eventually compiled a massive discography of over 500 recordings, and no musical collection is considered complete without multiple St. Martin interpretations of the entire expanse of musical expression over the last 4oo years.

     In 197o, Sir Neville Marriner left the player’s chair and assumed the conducting role of  St Martin in the Fields, creating the most identifiable music musical ensemble sound in modern recording over the past 40 years.  At age 87, he has determined the health of this prestigious group needs a new leader not an old icon, and has turned the baton over to Joshua Bell, the American musical prodigy now solo artist from Indiana, who has the challenge of maintaining this ensemble’s reputation as the leading chamber orchestra in the world.  It is no small task for Bell, given his roots in orchestral solo performance, to maintain the traditions and sound that have made Sir Neville’s little group one of the most recognizable classical music performers on  today’s musical stage.  The latest trend in chamber performance is a return to period instruments and original scores that St Martin’s evolved away from so many years ago.  It will be Bell’s obligation to remind the world why Marriner moved away from those devices on creating the modern chamber sound.  Its no longer about appealing to church leaders and amusing royalty, its about celebrating the magnificence of the music to the shared pleasure of us all.

http://youtu.be/pZ7hR_b0TIE

     The twentieth century was filled with many great classical music virtuosos brought forth by the power of the recording and television media. The gift of a audiovisual repository such as YouTube allows the faint memory of a great performer to once again for all of us to come into full bloom for his performing genius. A particular gem is the available musical moments of one Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Italy’s other great Michelangelo. Michelangeli was born in the province of Lombardy in the town of Brescia in 1920 in the northern rolling hills of Italy that seem to produce so many creative intellects. Like his fellow northerner Michelangelo, Michelangeli was capable of precision beyond the mortal man, and a difficult social nature. He was said to be incapable of a wrong note or musical “smudge”, and early in his career accused of being too technical and missing the inherent “soul” of the musical composition. The available record of Michelangeli’s performances shows how off base this interpretation was. Michelangeli was a technical virtuoso, but his base strength was as an interpreter, no where more apparent than in his unique performances of the French Impressionists Debussy and Ravel.

     Michelangeli did not enjoy public performance, but was a premier performance musician. His enormous technique and creative impulse overwhelmed any stage disdain. Television provided the perfect compromise of the quiet solitude of a studio to allow him the freedom of inward reflection, while the performance of such a personal nature could be viewed by thousands. No absolute measure of greatness exists, but greatness is clearly at work in every Michelangeli interpretation. Debussy becomes a shimmer of light splintered through forest brush, Ravel a kaleidoscope of color that rises at dawn, Brahms a quiet but inexorably powerful river of dreams.

     Arturo Michelangeli was a member of the great triad of Italian piano virtuosos of the twetieth century, along with Maurizio Pollini and Ferrucio Busoni, that helped place Italy again  at the epicenter of discussion of history’s great nursery’s of civilization.  We are reminded thourgh Arturo’s playing that the blood coursing through the western creativity is a most human one.  It is worthy of the protection of its diverse vitality in a world that continues to demand a bland globalist view of humanity.

http://youtu.be/nfQ5hOOLk1o

     May 11th marks the birthday of the man who was born in Siberia but became the American Song Machine.   Irving Berlin would be 123 years old today.  It seems somewhat silly to consider a 123rd birthday, but Mr. Berlin ,as it is, lived to 101 and was prodigious to the very end.    His story encapsulates the uniquely American Story that led so many immigrants to come to the shores of America over the last 150 years in hopes of a better life.  their journeys were framed on the singular premise that in America, you are not told who you can be, but instead, given a chance to be all you can be.  Irving Berlin was no different.  He never expressed a particularly sophisticated musical form, was self taught on the piano, never establishing the ability to play in any other key but one, and never considered lyrics anything but the musical expressions of the simplest most direct thoughts.  What Irving Berlin proved to have as an immigrant from far away shores, was the most precise ear to the pulse of the American way there ever was, or ever will be.  This very special kind of genius allowed him to fashion some of the greatest contributions to the lexicon of American music, and a body of musical scores that define America eternally.  Not bad for poor cantor’s son from Siberia.

     The horror of Berlin’s early life in Czarist Russia was not substantially improved by the family’s decision to escape Jewish persecution and emigrate to the United States.  He found himself struggling in language and connectivity with the wild streets of America, poorly trained for any job, and no real prospects for the future.  He fell back upon the family skill set of cantoring, in the new way of the New York street, singing for a penny and occasionally putting his own bawdier comments to known songs.  He discovered that he had a knack for words and that people enjoyed his stylings.  He began to perform in neighborhood bars and music halls of the lower East Side of New York, where he later stated he learned “the language of the street” that formed the foundation of his later song writing philosophy, songs that spoke to the average man and sounded ‘American’.  He was good friends with a fellow tune-smith, George Cohan, and noted when he finished a show with Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” people stopped and applauded as one, regardless of their ancestral makeup.  There was something to this American current that everybody understood and was proud of, and Berlin felt it deeply.  The recognition led Berlin to try to pen similar tunes, and soon he found himself noticed by more than the average listener.  Max Winslow, a manger of a local music publishing company, heard Berlin and sold him as a Tin Pan Alley find of great talent to his bosses.  It was no boast, and Winslow’s street find ended up making everybody very wealthy.

     The breakthrough was a 1911 miracle song, “Alexander’s Rag Time Band”.  Berlin composed it as a march, but married the elements of Scott Joplin’s ragtime influences in a very simple lyric set with a killer melody, and the legend was borne.  The song overnight reached international hit status, and Berlin was suddenly deluged with offers to right more of the same, and musicals to boot.  No 22 year old kid barely out of the pogroms of Russia could be expected to have produced such a miracle, but Berlin was not about to waste his moment, and produced song splash after song splash on the vaudeville scene.  Alexander’s Rag Time Band was so special it provided number one hits for singers in three different decades and charted 12 times over fifty years.  Now that’s hit song writing. 

     Irving Berlin found success and never looked back, publishing over 1500 songs, and a multitude of successful musicals and musical reviews.  Songs of love, comedy, patriotism, and romance poured out of him like a fountain of creativity and never really exhausted itself.  Songs like “What’ll I Do”, “Easter Parade”, “Cheek to Cheek”, “God Bless America”, “Puttin’ On the Ritz”, “White Christmas”, “Blue Skies”, “Marie”, “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, “Always”, and hundreds of others unearthed a vein of American rhythm, promise, and simple values that resonated with everyone who heard an Irving Berlin song, and became standards of all the great performers of the 20th century.  He never forgot the sentiments of his lyrics,, but bound them to melodies that held up so beautifully over time.  Berlin himself remarked, ” Its the lyric that makes the song a hit, although the tune, of course, is what makes it last.”  He worked unbelieveably hard at his craft, and though not as musically gifted, had a sophisticated sense of rhythm, melody, and harmony that he worked hard through collaborators to reproduce in enlarged scores of his music.  Sophisticated talents such as George Gershwin and Cole Porter , found him a formidable composer, and credited him with stimulating their own journeys in American jazz, song and vernacular.  Above all the music has shown tremendous “legs” over time, in that people are constantly surprised to find the infectious tune they are humming is a Berlin tune.  Irving would be gratified with their mistake, but not surprised with the staying power of his craft.

     Irving Berlin remains one of the best examples of the “everything is possible” American story, coming from nothing and leaving, a legend.  He was proud of his country, and proud to reflect it in its everyday character in his music.  He is the American success that reflects to all who come to her shores, try, and try hard, and where you are free, you can truly be.
http://youtu.be/_C4Z6tAt9Lg


http://youtu.be/a8jHyLiOplE

     The below the fold news of the day is in the musical world. The Philadelphia Orchestra, one one of the greatest vehicles in the world for the transmission of organized sound is considering a declaration of bankruptcy. Music performance has always been a precarious business, and in the mode of symphony orchestras, often a money loser. Orchestras have to fund large groups of musicians in such a way that they can maintain continuity and performance discipline, an achievement that creates a specific sound character. This takes hundreds of hours of shaping rehearsal and costs loads of money through salary and benefits. Additionally, the performance halls, conductors, score rental, concert artists, supporting personnel, concert performances, and tours to highlight that sound character to the recognition of the rest of the world is constant drain on endowments and charitable giving to maintain the whole enterprise. For lesser orchestras, the battle of the budget has always been a dicey affair.
     America has been blessed for most of the past 100 years with the presence of five universally recognized world class orchestras, known as the Big Five, that due to their prestige, recording capacity, loyal listeners, and huge endowments to be beyond the potential threats to an orchestra’s existence. The Five, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, And Chicago Symphony Orchestra have each created a very unique character of sound that is recognizable through the generations and makes each an unmatched champion of symphonic excellence recognized the world over. Of special note has been what has been referred to as the Philadelphia Sound, a special warmth and vibrancy created from what has been a tradition of virtuoso talent at every position in the orchestra. The recognition of the sound was first developed under the baton of the legendary Leopold Stokowski, who pioneered with the Philadelphia Orchestra classical recording, establishing the sound with both record and radio performances that the public hungrily devoured. The face of classical music was locked in by Stowkowski as the Philadelphia sound, when the orchestra was selected to perform the musical score for Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and the great conductor even made an animated role in the film itself. As television progressively took over as a means of delivering performance to mass audiences, an equally legendary and public savvy conductor in Eugene Ormandy took over, and led the orchestra to unrivaled fame for the next 40 years. The orchestra was America’s cultural jewel that was selected in 1973 to be the first American cultural exchange with the People’s Republic of China, initiating the return of that great nation to global interaction after years in self imposed isolation.
     The recent course of the orchestra, however, has been considerably more dysfunctional, with a succession of poorly matched muscical directors following Ricardo Muti, Ormandy’s successor, and the ballooning costs of maintaining a huge musical organization with outsized expensive talent. The final blow has been the recent recession, with significant reductions in attendance of concerts as people in harsher times finding it more difficult to pay out the 40 to 125 dollar seat per performance required by the orchestra’s budget. The endowment, at 125 million dollars, barely half of what is felt to be required to secure orchestral economic independence, is not available for budgetary shortcomings, and the donors are not lining up to fill in the gap.
     The result is the heretofore unmentionable, bankruptcy, that threatens to take one of the great icons of American classical music performance, and make it just another band of musicians. The times are painful, that’s for sure, and that which is iconic in today’s world, must compete for the entertainment dollar with considerably less iconic figures. The answer lies were it always has, in both the musicians and the public determining the appropriate economic value of securing a unique musical sound for the eternal enjoyment of the performer and those who listen to the brilliant display of humanity’s creative genius. Here’s hoping that Philadelphia, and other cities supporting great vehicles for western civilization’s most evolved invention of the marriage of organized intellect and emotive expression, find a way out of the threatening waters.
     As a tip of the hat, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, displaying the Philadelphia Sound:

     Something magical in the world of music that approaches Divine intervention occurred around the turn of the twentieth century in the the tight, crowded  tenements of New York City.  In the space of a few years, giants of lyric and melody that have defined the American Experience for over a century and have brought all of us countless hours of joy were born within a few miles of each other with almost identical immigrant American success stories and uniformly jewish heritage.  The contributions of Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Lorenz Hart, and Richard Rodgers to what has become known as the American Songbook in someways diminishes their formative contribution to the larger musical universe, the special synthesis of song and verse to the elevation of both as equal partners evoking the basest of human emotions. Gershwin and Rodgers especially were composers of serious merit apart from their popularity on the theatrical stage, but they never denigrated the marriage of lyrics and lyrical music, creating both mature musical expression that responded to the adult poetry of their lyricists.

     Richard Rodgers had a long and influential career blessed by comparatively good health amongst the other stalwarts mentioned, participating with multiple lyricists in establishing a particularly classical and symphonic Rodgers style, but the poignancy and intimacy that he was so capable of in his music saw its fullest expression in his short but fruitful collaboration with the lyricist Lorenz Hart.  Hart was a conflicted and tortured soul that struggled with personal demons that often sabotaged his success and made collaboration unpredictable and difficult for Rodgers.  The two met as classmates at Columbia, Hart studying journalism and Rodgers attending the musical institute, later renamed Julliard.  Lorenz Hart had the fragmented constitution of a true poet, sublimating an unexpressed homosexuality required of the times, barely five feet tall and convinced of his unattractiveness, finding solace in alcohol, and terminally wistful and melancholic.  Rodgers of firmer constitution, recognized early Hart’s special capacity for tying intimate poetic verse into a form particularly suited to his more orchestral and balletic musical stylings.  The result was a unique internal voice  to the songs, the statement of unstated  emotions more powerful than the singer would normally be willing to expose, if the object of the song was standing before them – a Shakespearean soliloquy for music.

     The period of collaboration between Rodgers and Hart between 1925 and 1943, ended by Hart’s premature death to pneumonia after an alcoholic binge, was the incubator of some of the most beautiful music and poetic verse marriages ever created. Standards that resonate forever to anyone who has ever felt the human need for relationship poured from their respective pens with such gems as Where or When, Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered, Glad To Be Unhappy, In A Small Hotel, Blue Moon, Isn’t It Romantic, It Never Entered My Mind, This Cant Be Love, Spring Is Here,and My Funny Valentine, among so many others.

      In Spring Is Here ,  Hart called out to the inequity and pain that the rebirth the season of spring provides out of the harsh winter, to the solitary and lonely soul who has no one with which to share spring’s eternal promise :

Spring is here!  Why doesn’t my heart go dancing?     Spring is here! Why doesn’t the waltz seem entrancing?    No desire, no ambition leads me – maybe its because nobody needs me.     Spring is here! Why doesn’t the breeze delight me?  Stars appear! Why doesn’t the night invite me?     Maybe its because nobody loves me.      Spring is here  –  I hear.

     Hart doesn’t just pour out his desperation in such words, but his internal conflict in being unable to celebrate those life experiences he felt seemed so easy for others.  Even when he notes the presence of the achievement of love, he expresses this confusion of recognition of the process of human relationship, as expressed beautifully in the verses of  Where Or When, where friends discover to their surprise that their friendship has evolved into an intimate love:

It seems we stood and talked like this before, we looked at each other in the same way then, but I can’t remember where or when…..The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore, the smile you are smiling, you were smiling then, but I can’t remember where or when.         Sometimes you think you’ve lived before all the things you lived today; things you do come back to you – as though they knew the way – oh, the tricks your mind can play!    Somethings that happened for the first time, seem to be happening again. And so it seems we have met before – and laughed before – and loved before- but who knows where or when?

     Hart can feel the pull of human intimacy and all its glory, but remains stunned by its primordial and uncontrolled force.  In some of the most musically inspired verse put to paper, Hart in Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered  links the  joy, loss of control, confusion,  and anticipation associated with love’s emotion  into the perfect synthesis.  Framed by Rodgers’ understated but hopeful musical trellis, the collaboration achieves maybe the most poignant and memorable expression of the American musical songbook :

I’m wild again, beguiled again, a simpering wimpering child again.  Bewitched , bothered, and bewildered -am I.       Couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t sleep, when love came and told me I shouldn’t sleep. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered – am I.

     Lorenz Hart said things in his verse that people quietly felt but never wanted to express because of its rawness, and Richard Rodgers brought the melancholy color and beauty to such intimate and painful expression. Bound together they become a very special whole that we are forever thankful for.  As painful as life can sometimes be, it helps to know, that someone understands in a way that elevates us all.

    

     I enter this post with an appropriate amount of fear. What can possibly be further said about the Chairman of the Board, Francis Albert Sinatra? The entire pop musical experience of the twentieth century is essentially wrapped up in the song journey of this one man. How we listen to a song, how we judge an artist’s interpretation is based on our memory and comparison to the incomparable Sinatra.  He took ownership of the Great American Songbook and never let it go, frequently producing seminal performances of a particular song then later in life re-working it from a new direction, equally as perfect and untouchable.  It is the quest for lyrical perfection in a song that drove the kid from Hoboken and allowed the world to overlook his many personal failings and difficult personality.  Sinatra never touched a song he didn’t improve in some way, and this spoke to his brilliant musicianship despite an almost complete lack of training and education, leaving high school after only 47 days.  He was, however, a musical savant, and it was this special gift that separated him from the innumerable crooners that populated the stage in the 1930’s and 40’s.  It was this special gift that in the 1950’s and 60’s drove him to rework himself from a ballad singer into a definitive interpretor of a vast expanse of music through his unique talents of story telling and perfect cadence.  He created songscapes of drama, loneliness, love, confidence, hopefulness, and despair that transcended the songs and played with the bassest human emotions.  What ever else this difficult man brought to life’s table, he left us with his death in 1998 a wealth of music that will never become outdated, and remains fresh with every repeated listen.

     Everybody has his favorite Sinatra.  There is the early Sinatra of Tommy Dorsey’s band with I’ll Never Smile Again and All or Nothing At All.  This was the 1940’s balladeer that created hysteria among young women during the war years and led to Elvis like public adulation in sold out performances at the Paramount theater in New York with screaming, fainting fans.  In the 1950’s Sinatra, facing vocal changes and a public that had moved on from his “bobby soxer” prominence completely re-worked himself in a series of thematic albums in partnership with Nelson Riddle, bringing the large band symphonic capacity and impressionistic pallets to the most intimate of songs in albums such as Only The Lonely and In the Wee Small Hours. The late 1950’s and later, 1960’s was larger than life Sinatra with albums expressing his confidence in his  special skills and America’s world prominence with a series of swing albums that produced such gems as Come Fly With Me, Witchcraft, and I’ve Got You Under My Skin.  The 1970’s and 1980’s were the age of wistful retirements and triumphant returns to the stage, with his diminishing vocal capacity more than made up with his theatrical presence and his story telling art in songs such as My Way and  L.A. Is My Lady.  Sinatra was the perfect interpreter of prose.  He understood better than any one the way words fit into sentences and their individual weight, and uniquely created a slightly off the beat cadence and delayed inflection that brought increased power to the words and emotions behind the songs.  When Sinatra sung of love, you wanted to be in love; when he sang of loss, you wanted to cry; when he sang of happiness, you wanted to fly.  These were the uncontrollable responses that Sinatra could evoke in his listener, and the special nature of his talent that will last as long as their are means of sharing his recordings, no matter what the generational distance.

     Three examples of the art of the living Sinatra are below for your pleasure.  The first is the perfect “swing” song of the 1960’s Sinatra, I’ve Got You Under My Skin,  a Cole Porter song with Sinatra performing with the best swing band ever, the Count Basie Orchestra.  The second is Sinatra the balladeer from an unexpected modern source, the great American songwriter Jimmy Webb, who I’ve expounded upon recently, in Didn’t We?  Last, is the quincentennial Sinatra song, the Johnny Mercer Harold Arlen classic, One For My Baby, performed in London in 1971, with Sinatra’s superb pianist the understated Bill Miller, performing at his side. 

     Life as a story, was never told better, than by the Chairman of the Board: