From Wax Cylinders to CDs and MP3s
November 5, 2009
So pronounced has been the response (in clicks and private e-mails; my readers seem to be shy about public comments) to the wax-cylinder recording of Robert White, that I thought I should correct any possible misimpression that his father’s repertory is the whole of his work as a performer — even necessarily central to it.
How’s this for variety?
Hayden Wood: “A Brown Bird Singing,” with Stephen Hough, pianist
G.F. Handel: “While Kedron’s Brook,” with Ivor Bolton and the London Baroque Soloists
Irving Berlin: “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy,” with Dick Hyman, piano
Irving Berlin: “Cheek to Cheek,” with Marilyn Horne, mezzo-soprano and Dick Hyman, piano
Francis Poulenc: “Fancy,” with Samuel Sanders, piano
And, just to show why he was a child star, here he is with Fred Allen and Shirley Booth on live radio, in 1948:
Thomas P. Westendorf: “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”
Not that he ever leaves behind his basic vocal orientation. After all, John McCormick had already sufficiently demonstrated the usefulness and versatility of the Irish-tenor approach to performance. And the possible variety is certainly manifest in this small sampling of Robert White’s vast discography. Not represented here is, for example, his work with the pioneering Noah Greenberg in medieval drama, or his recent recordings with Joan Morris and William Bolcom.
We Live in a New Musical World
November 4, 2009
YouTube has been an outlet into new worlds for many of us, including me, my friends and colleagues, who never dreamed that we’d have access to so many performances that were once the province of the well-connected few.
Here I note that even the notations to the right side of these postings (if you click back to the YouTube sources) can be of major musical news: musicology now comes in previously unexpected guises. Actually, this once I’ll quote the valuable (anonymous) commentary to the right — thus illustrating the value of democratizing media:
In March of 1928, Fred Gaisberg the famous artistic director of the Gramophone Company (HMV) persuaded Rubinstein to make a few test recordings. None would be released without the pianist’s permission. Those that did not have Rubinstein’s approval would be destroyed. Rubinstein had serious misgivings about recording because he had heard piano recordings that were made using the acoustic process which he said made the piano sound like a banjo. (Perhaps Rubinstein was speaking from personal experience. Circa 1910, he had recorded two selections for the Polish label Farorit. This recording is extremely rare and has never been reissued. There is a tape). Gaisberg told him that the new electrical system captured the piano tone faithfully. Upon arriving at the studio, Rubinstein was disturbed to find that one of the pianos that he was to play, a Bluthner, was not a full size concert grand.. Gaisberg encouraged him to try it. Rubinstein writes, “Well, this Bluthner had the most beautiful singing tone I have ever found. I became quite enthusiastic and decided to play my beloved Barcarolle of Chopin. The piano inspired me. . I dont think I ever played better in my life. And then the miracle happened; they played it back to me and I must confess that I had tears in my eyes. It was the performance that I dreamed of and the sound reproduced faithfully the golden tone of the piano. Gaisberg had won.” Rubinstein went on to record several other compositions, but for some reason the Barcarolle from the March session was not released. Of the compositions that he recorded that day, only the Chopin Waltz Op 34 No.1 (recorded on a full size Steinway concert grand that also was in the studio), and the Brahms Capriccio B minor Op.76 No. 2, were released. The following month, Rubinstein returned to Small Queens Hall, Studio C London, to re-record the Chopin Barcarolle on the Bluthner that had so inspired him. It is this recording that I have placed here. (Years ago I was trying out some pianos one of which was a Bluthner. It also had a gorgeous tone.)
In his biography “Rubinstein, A Life,” Harvey Sachs writes that this recording of the Barcarolle is “amazing in its mixture of quiet intimacy, melodic splendor, mounting eroticism and dazzling explosions of joy. The 1962 recording, although beautiful, pales besides it.” Harris Goldsmith, musicologist, critic, pianist, author and disciple of Artur Schnabel, disagrees. Too many rubatos, too self indulgent, too many textual inaccuracies, just too, too.
(As a personal note, my father, who was a locally-respected — and here I specify that the respect was that of a small Southern community — Chopin player, would always defer to my mother’s request for “the Barcarolle” — by which she meant this one.)
El Anti-Sistema
November 2, 2009
Look on with wonder as an American public school system that has 28,000 students in grades 4 to 6 participating in instrumental ensembles (with 116 teachers teaching them) sees the program as a fit candidate for the chopping-block. This in a county of comparative affluence, largely populated by employees of the Federal government. Do we need a better illustration of how pitched the battle for enlightened education must remain if we are even to approach the magnificent musical values and experiences with which the poor of Venezuela are endowed?
Whether a petition signed by people across the country will have any effect on such attitudes may be questionable, but the first link above provides an opportunity to test that.
Music and Upper-Body Exercise
November 1, 2009
Ever noticed how many conductors seem to live to a healthy old age?
New Medium, Old Message
October 27, 2009
Old Medium, New Message
October 27, 2009
The enormous discography of the tenor Robert White has gone out into the world (starting when he was the child star Little Bobby White) in 78 rpm, 45 rpm, LP 33 1/3 rpm, cassette, CD, and mp3. Last month, the singer had the extraordinary opportunity to record on the wax of a 1909 Edison cylinder recorder. In that early process, the sound is captured, with no electricity at all, by purely mechanical means. The recorder’s motor is powered by a wind-up spring mechanism, just as when Mr. White’s father, who preceded him in radio and recording stardom as “The Silver-Masked Tenor,” made his first recordings in 1915. Even though the electrical microphone changed the process of sound recording quite drastically in 1924, this audio file makes it clear that the old method was remarkably effective, too:
Since George W. Meyer’s song “Brown Eyes, Why Are You Blue?” was written just as electrical recording was being introduced, this may be its first outing on wax. The new performance was recorded with Vince Giordano and his orchestra (“The Night Hawks”) before a live audience direct to the cylinder. The engineer, Peter Dilg of the Baldwin Antique Center, is a specialist in historic recording devices. Thus, in Robert White (whose birthday is today), the Juilliard faculty now can boast an Amberol Cylinder Recording Artist.
You know that feeling that goes something like: “I can’t believe how lucky I am to be learning this”? I had that one a lot last week at mediabistro.com’s amazing two-day conference (called UGCX) on user-generated content for the Web. One brilliant perception was presented after another — things that I can use in many aspects of my work to multiply its effectiveness. Of course, as in most things in life, the best ideas are based on common sense applied in a new way. Probably these breakthroughs are most dramatic in media because so much is so new and self-replenishing that all the common-sense aperçus are always very far from being used up. And what has served one field or industry well may not even have been thought of in another where it can produce terrific results.
That guru of social media, Ian Huckabee, has written about his own reactions, and — as usually happens when I experience something beautiful — I wish many of my friends could have been there so we could rehash the smorgasbord of thrilling ideas together. As it is, I’ll just have to collar some of them and try to convey how important, and really practical, so much new thinking on the importance of user-generated content now is for social media and the causes and products it can promote. But relax: instead of falling victim to my enthusiastic rants, you can just check out this link and this one — not to mention this one — for some sample summaries of what went on, or Twitter using the hash tag #UCGX.
Musical Creationism at Carnegie Hall
October 18, 2009
AND THERE WAS LIGHT!
Last night John Eliot Gardiner brought his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir to Carnegie Hall to perform Haydn’s most popular choral work, The Creation (or, as this performance, sung by English-speakers for English speakers, sang it, Die Schöpfung). It was a wonderfully detailed and altogether thrilling performance, but I want to share here a couple of aspects of the evening that were not essentially musical but have much effect on the experience of music.
All too often in classical music, the performers on stage seem to forget that they are performers in any but a narrowly sonic sense. They often seem to forget that the audience is made up of people who have more than one sense and that all these ways of perceiving work together to make up our experience.
It is true that many a valuable artist is simply not gifted with anything but musical tools — musical, that is, in its narrowest possible definition; and, when the single gift is of sufficient magnificence, we’re right to be grateful for what we get. But stable, world-famous touring organizations really have no excuse not to consider how their behavior can enhance or inhibit the musical experience. (I have railed here before on the poker-face with which some musicians would seem to communicate, visually, the absence of a human soul behind their playing or singing.) This is why it brought special pleasure last evening to note the care with which, so to speak, the table was set and the meal served.
What amounted to a simple, graceful “choreography” for the singers was very striking to me. Instead of the conventional stand-up-to-sing/sit-down-to-wait-out-others’-singing that we see at oratorios, in which people bob up and down in a routine and utilitarian manner, this chorus stood in attentive union throughout the orchestral overture, with their scores out of sight in their right hands. Towards the end of that dramatic overture, the bass who was to sing the introductory recitative readied himself to sing, well before his time. When he came to the mysterious incantation (in German), “And darkness was upon the face of the deep,” there arose a mist of choral sound softly singing “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” And all that moved was that Spirit, since the chorus stood stock-still, their scores still unopened, as they led up to the most famous “special effect” of Haydn’s masterpiece, the sudden C-Major fortississimo on the word “LIGHT.”
It would be difficult to overemphasize how important someone’s simple decisions were for the the success of these marvelous moments and to that culminating coup de théâtre of the First Day of Creation that Haydn had prepared for us.
And perhaps best of all: it was entirely unobtrusive. Had I not been so experienced at both arranging and observing such details, I’m convinced that my reaction would have been an apparently “only musical” one. But surely we all know by now that it is impossible to draw tidy boundaries between the music and its accompanying actions and conditions.
The second pleasant surprise was a personal one. Because of professional reasons and the powers and motives that normally bring me to such concerts, I tend to be seated at the orchestra level (not, I feel bound to disclose, out of any grandiosity or opulence on my part). So last night was the first time in years that I have been in the balcony of Carnegie Hall. I was immediately struck by something (besides the advantages a mountain goat would have in dealing with the incline of those steep rows of seats). Turning to the old friend — an inveterate denizen of world-wide concert-life — who had procured tickets for us, I whispered: “What is it about The Creation that brings out such a young audience?” As I pronounced the words, I began to suspect the truth.
“That’s the way it always is up here, Roger.”
Oh.
While the statistics on the ages of concert attendees presumably don’t lie, this experience of being surrounded by an amazing number of really young people in singles, couples, and small groups of friends, led me to wonder how much of the gloom in music journalism about an aging classical-concert population is influenced by the writers’ sitting night after night down in the expensive seats surrounded by the folks Alan Rich used to call “Daddy and Mammy Warbucks,” when a much younger crowd is upstairs.
Talent Must Sometimes Assert Itself
October 17, 2009
From a historical account of the revolutionary 1937 Disney film Snow White:
Finding a voice suitable for Snow White was one of the animators’ hardest pre-production tasks. One day, Disney’s casting director telephoned Guido Caselotti (a well-known voice coach who was married to an Italian prima donna) to get some voice talent references. Overhearing the conversation, Caselotti’s 19-year-old daughter, Adriana, got on the phone to sing and banter in a young girl’s voice. The embarrassed father ordered her off the line, but not before the casting director had invited her to audition. After Walt heard her, the rest, as they say, was history.
And here’s the result:
