Self-promotion department

There's still time to listen to my appearance on Marvin Rosen's program Classical Discoveries Goes Avant-Garde. The mp3 files will remain on Marvin's website until August 12.

Response to our all-Carter program has been limited, but uniformly positive. Some of my friends didn't care for the music, but they thought I did pretty well, which was a relief. I felt I stammered and repeated myself, and I had these visions of listeners sitting in their cars thinking, "Who is this goofball?"

Marvin said it had been a "great show," and, more important, so did his wife, Beata, who, I am told, is his most outspoken critic, one who would never say anything just to be nice. I want to thank her, too, for driving me from the Rosen house to the studio and back. Without her, I mostly likely would have been at least a half hour late to the show. I left my house in plenty of time, but, driving up Route 1, I missed my turn off and ended up a couple of townships away. Finally, when the trip odometer hit 40 miles -- after Google Maps had assured me the journey from my home to the Rosens' was only 33 --  I decided the time had come to turn around.

I walked into the studio with about eight minutes to spare. I was feeling frazzled and very foolish, but Marvin assured me we had plenty of time, and he was right. He loaded the first CD, and there was nothing left to do but sit and chat and load up on bottled water.

The WPRB studio is a seedy, poorly ventilated, trapezoidal room in the basement of Princeton's Bloomberg Hall. The window in front of the board looks out onto an empty elevator well and, beyond, a meandering white corridor. (During On Conversing With Paradise, I went out to use the men's room and followed the corridor to its dead end before going back. I'd missed the turn, as I had on Route 1. A pattern was developing.)

The board was compact, with a pair of turntables on one side and a stack of CD players on the other. There were two foam-shrouded microphones, mounted on swivel booms. I sat at the one on the right as we faced out the studio window. Marvin told me to speak up and keep my lips close to the mike. I actually didn't hear much of the music I had brought. Marvin and I spent much of the time going over what we would talk about during our next segment. He had a list of questions prepared, and he told me in advance what he was going to ask so there would be no unpleasant surprises. Near the end of the show, he said he wanted to ask what Carter was working on these days, and when I told him I didn't know, he said he would skip it. This was not gotcha journalism. He wanted me to be at ease.

The time on-air went by quickly -- so quickly, indeed, that we didn't have time for all of the music I had wanted to play. I had hoped to finish up with Carter's Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord, but by the time the Concerto for Orchestra was finished, we had only about eight or so minutes left. Fortunately, I had brought a couple of alternates. Marvin asked me a few parting questions, and we played the "Bariolage," a six-minute piece for solo harp, which took us right up to the end of the show.

The DJ with the time slot after Marvin's cut it even closer that I had. He arrived a minute or so late, while the station ID was still playing. For a while, Marvin thought he was going to have to stay on the air.

Marvin, Beata and I had a post-mortem lunch at a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Princeton. Then Marvin went to work at Westminster Choir College, and Beata gave me a tour of their house and garden. I thought I was a compulsive collector, but Marvin owns more than 15,000 CDs. They are everywhere, except for two small rooms -- the kitchen and an upstairs office, where Beata forbids them. In the living room, they are actually a theme of the interior decor, covering an entire wall. The place smelled pleasantly of fresh-cut wood, a symptom of the endless rows of IKEA shelves.

I haven't listened to the broadcast, by the way. If I want to hear it again, I can just replay the CDs on my home stereo and avoid all the commentary.

OK, now I get it

Finished reading Lullaby last night, and this morning I suddenly realized why the plot seemed to work for me: it's an urban retelling of True Grit, with Spenser in the role of Rooster Cogburn. If confirmation is needed, consider that the name of the girl — Mattie — is the same in both books. The only iteration of True Grit I know is the John Wayne - Kim Darby film, but now I want to get to the novel, while I'm thinking of it. Springfield Township Library has a copy. I'll check it out when I return Lullaby tomorrow.

The confrontation at the T station made me think the real world is better off without Spenser, Hawk, Vinnie Morris and their ilk. Fortunately, we will not have to find out. The sort of Western shoot-'em-ups depicted in the book — good guys on one side, bad guys on the other, and a hostage in the middle — rarely if ever occur in our major cities. After the Aurora massacre, does anyone actually believe we'd be safer if well-intentioned citizens armed themselves and were willing to open fire at a moment's notice?

Spenser at 80

I've always liked Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser and Virgil Cole novels. While I never throught he was in the same league with Hammett or Chandler, he was always a fun, easy read, and I consumed his books one after another, like potato chips, barely pausing to savor one before picking up the next. After he died in 2010, his estate farmed out his characters to writers who were charged with peretuating the several franchises. The first of the new Spenser books, Lullaby by Ace Atkins, came out a couple months ago, and I'm reading it now. It is better than Sixkill, the last Spenser novel Parker wrote, but that's not saying much. Sixkill was, I think, Parker's weakest story (Catskill Eagle was his most preposterous), and at the time, it made me think that, perhaps, the author did his character a favor by dying.

The plot of Lullaby plot is absorbing enough (I'm about 100 pages from the end), but Spenser himself is much more smug, pedantic and judgmental than I remember him. I also keep asking myself, just how old are these people? Parker would have been 80 next month, and given that the Spenser was in his early forties when Godwulf Manuscript appeared in 1973, and no attempt has been made to telescope his history, he has got to be up there as well. It's hard to buy him as a tough guy anymore. (Imagine Groucho Marx, circa 1970, beating people up.) His sidekick, Hawk, is even sadder, since he tries so hard to be stylish.

Then there's Susan, Spenser's love interest. She must be in her mid-70s at least, and she’s no longer believable as the svelte goddess who turns heads every time she enters a room. There is a scene in Lullaby where she is sitting on a sofa in nothing but a sweatshirt and panties, with her feet tucked under her. It's meant to be a turn-on, but ewwww. I kept thinking of my mother. I’ve known a lot of elderly women, and they possess many stellar qualities, but kittenish sexuality is not one of them. Nor should it be.

Parker once said he dealt with Spenser's age by not dealing with it, but the time for denial is long past. The series should be either rebooted or retired.

Oh, and it there's ever another TV adaptation, may suggest Hugh Laurie and Lisa Edelstein for the leads? Loved them on House, though the series itself quickly fell to pieces.

The greatest compliment I've ever been paid

Last Friday afternoon I interviewed (to drop a name) Don Preston, the original keyboardist with the Mothers of Invention, who will appear in Sellersville Aug. 9 with a couple of Frank Zappa's other old bandmates. (The act is billed as the Grandmothers. Clever, eh?) I felt the chat went well, but I didn't know just how well until today, when, before writing the article, I called Rob Duffey, the group's manager, to verify a couple of names. Rob told me that soon after we spoke, Preston called him to say he enjoyed talking with me, and that it was "not a stupid interview." Apparently, Don has has suffered through a lot of of stupid interviews, and, therefore, when he says an interview was "not stupid," it counts as genuinely high praise. It made my day.

Minor celebrity

We like to push the extracurricular activities of the editors here at Montgomery Newspapers, and so my upcoming guest shot on Marvin Rosen's radio show is now the subject of a preview article in Ticket, our entertainment insert.

We figured if our executive editor rated an article when he signed copies of his new book, a two-hour program on EC was just as newsworthy.

In the interest of objectivity, Frank Quattrone, the Ticket editor, assigned Mary Cantell to do the story, instead of letting me write it myself. I must say it was a little disorienting to be on the recieving end of an interview, though Mary made it quick and painless, much like lethal injection. When my sister saw the article, she said she was surprised to learn that I didn't like Lawrence Welk. To be fair, my father didn't like Elliott Carter.

Evelyn Lear 1926-2012

I learn from Lisa Hirsch that the soporano Evelyn Lear died July 1. Of course, I remember her first and foremost for American Scenes, American Poets, an album of songs by Charles Ives she recorded with her husband, the late baritone Thomas Stewart. It was my first exposure to the songs of Ives and remains both a favorite recording and another one of those Columbia classics Sony has never seen fit to release on CD.

Strange, though — Lear was an American (born Evelyn Shulman in Brooklyn), but for a long time I assumed she was ... well, I know not what. My confusion was due to a minspronunciation on the Ives recording. The song "The Light That Is Felt," with text by Whitter, contains the lines "And only when our hands we lay / In thine, Oh God! the night is day." Maybe she was distracted, maybe she was uptight, maybe she wasn't making sense of the lyric, but for some reason, Lear pronounces "lay" as "lee."

And only when our hands we lee ...

Regardless, it is a wonderful rendition of a wonderful piece. When my mother died in 1999, I hired a soprano to sing it at her funeral — in large measure because of the impression Lear had made on me 25 years earlier.

Radio Date

On Wednesday, July 25, I will appear as the guest on Marvin Rosen's radio program "Classical Discoveries Goes Avant-Garde" on WPRB Princeton. We will be playing and discussing the music of Elliott Carter. Airtime time is 11 a.m. - 1 p.m. EDT. For those of you in the broadcast area (including Philadelphia), WPRB is at 103.3 on the FM dial. The show may also be heard around the world at WPRB.com, and Marvin saves his programs as mp3 files for two weeks or so (server space is limited) at his own Classical Discoveries website.
The playlist will include Carter's String Quartet No. 4 with the Composer's Quartet and the the Concerto for Orchestra with Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, as well as some shorter pieces and historic recordings.
I want you all to blow off work and listen.

Two Controversies and a Conversation

Many thanks to BH to scoring me a ticket for the premiere of Elliott Carter's Two Controversies and a Conversation June 9 at Symphony Space in New York City. The piece is an expansion of Carter's Conversations, a small double concerto for piano, percussion and chamber orchestra first played in June 2011 at the Aldeburgh Festival. The two brief "controversies" were added at the suggestion of Oliver Knussen, who conducted the premiere of Conversations. On first hearing, I'm not sure what they added to the work, since they went by rather fast. They're both fairly brief and declamatory, and I liked Conversations well enough on its own. Still, the performance was memorable. Colin Currie was the percussion soloist, as he was at Aldeburgh, and the young pianist Huebner was more than an adequate substitute for Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the other soloist for whom Conversations was written. I got to speak to Huebner at intermission. (BH seemed to know absolutely everyone in the hall that night, and he introduced me to at least half of them.) He said the piece was fun to play and not nearly so hairy as the piano music from Carter's heroic period.

Mr. Carter was there, too, in a wheelchair, and was interviewed before the performance by Magnus Lindberg. He (Carter) was pretty funny about the practical problems of writing for percussion, which he said was largely a matter of having "the poor guy" run around too much. Ultimately, he said, he just had to stop thinking about it.

The rest of the program was also very strong. My mind began to wander during Boulez' ...explosante-fixe..., but I was quite taken with Nachlese Vb: Liederzyklus, for soprano and chamber orchestra, by the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, whom I had not heard of before.

Read Steve Smith’s review.

Then listen to the concert, courtesy of WQXR.

I've tried embedding it, but it doesn't seem to want to play. Maybe you'll have better luck:



Sorry I've been offline so long. Been rather overwhelmed at work, and haven't had much focus the rest of the time. I'm leading exactly the kind of life my parents' envisioned for me, I think — long hours, low pay, no recognition, the kind of Darwinian struggle that teaches you that life is unfair and you had better dammed well pull yourself up by your bootstraps because if you don't no one else is going to and there's nothing to look forward to once the honeymoon is over and the only available comforts are religion and drink.

Yes, Adam and Betty, you were right. Happy now?

EC dreams

Had the oddest dream this morning. I was giving a lecture on Elliott Carter to a group of senior citizens. What made it strange is that what I was saying actually made sense: usually in my dreams, the talk is gibberish, but I can remember everything I said in this one - all about EC's birth, education, study with Boulanger, relationship with Charles Ives, etc. But there was a DVD playing on a flat-screen TV in the front of the room, and as the lecture went on, it got louder and louder, playing a bombastic symphony that  sounded to me a lot like  Shostakovich. Meanwhile, workmen were filling the classroom with folding chairs and other

furniture. Finally, they brought in a long armoire that blocked my view of the old people entirely. I couldn't be heard over the TV, the scraping of the chairs and all the talking, and I gave up. I stopped shouting, and, leaning back against the window sill, I said, "I'm not going to waste my voice."

The meaning seems pretty clear.

Yesterday I received in the mail Bridget Kibbey's CD Love Is Come Again which contains her reading of Carter's harp solo, "Bariolage." It's beautiful recording, both perfromance and sound quality.

OK, I don't like this

Anyone who knows me knows I dislike change, particularly when it is unannounced, and Google has just decided to change Blogger. There are lots of spiffy new features I will probably never use, and of course, it is no longer supported by the browser on my home computer, which means either all posting will have to be done at the office, or I have to plunk down fifteen hundred dollars or so for a new laptop. (Updating to Windows XP on my 11-year-old desktop, a prerequisite for a new browser, makes no sense and would probably overload the hard drive.) Right now, I am having trouble navigating the new set up. I found the "new post" tab pretty much by accident. I guess what I'm trying to say is, 1) it may be a while before I feel comfortable enough to get back to posting on an even half-way regular basis. And 2) damn you, Google, couldn't you leave well enough alone? Ugh. My life is horrid at the moment. The ceiling in my bathroom will not stop leaking, everything I own seems to be on its last legs, and I cannot afford to either move or replace anything. The last thing I need is more surprises.