Underrated Classical Musicians 2/20/20

I went to a highly mediocre concert at Carnegie Hall last night and came away disappointed enough to wish I hadn't made the trip. It was the beginning of a Beethoven Symphony cycle performed by some of the world's most famous Beethoven performers, L'Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. 

Twenty five years ago, these musicians turned the music world upside down by showing that you could play Beethoven's symphonies at Beethoven's absurdly fast proscribed tempos with no loss in the quality of the playing. Hearing them do these works in person should be a once-in-a-lifetime event, and perhaps in the next few days it will prove to be one. 

But I should have known better than to go last night: classical musicians performing cycles is always a foolhardy idea. If musicians have to prepare five or more concerts to play over the course of a week, some music will inevitably get short shrift. In a Beethoven cycle, the music that gets the shortest shrift is the worst music. In this case, works like the ballet music from the Creatures of Prometheus, Ah, Perfido! and the First Symphony. Even if you prepare it within an inch of its life, the audience won't feel the curvature of the earth change the way they will in a great performance of the Eroica (tonight) or the Fifth (tomorrow). 

Beethoven's First is a perfectly decent piece of music, sometimes even inspired (listen to Paavo Jarvi's video recording to hear it at its best), but it is not worthy of a 'giant.' If the first symphony had not been written by Beethoven, we'd be playing it roughly as often as one of the best symphonies by Hummel or Mehul. Meanwhile, it ought to go without saying, instead of lesser music by Beethoven, there's so much music more worthy of performance than lesser Beethoven that gets far far less performances than a marginal piece like Beethoven's First. 

Let's start with the 'Historische' Symphonie by Louis Spohr. I am agog at both its quality and its ambition. It's a musical tour through the styles of various generations: taking us from 1720 in the first movement, with counterpoint and pomp in the style of Bach and Handel, to 1780 in the second movement, which gives us slow music in the style of Mozart and Haydn, to 1810 in the third, a scherzo in the style of Beethoven, to 1840, which is an obviously ironic and partially disapproving parody of Wagner's Rienzi. 

In his time, Spohr was probably most renowned as a violinist, and in addition to writing literally eighteen violin concertos and three dozen string quartets, he wrote a still widely read manual on violin technique and, believe it or not, invented the chinrest (if you think 'violin hickies' are bad now....).

Spohr is not Beethoven, nobody but Beethoven is, but if you listen to his music, you will be aghast at how good this is and mystified that a work like this fell out of the repertoire so long ago.

Underrated Classical Musicians 2/21/20

Poor Luigi Cherubini. He should probably be remembered as the second-best composer of Beethoven's generation, and there is something very Beethoven-like about much of his music. But Cherubini had the unfortunate luck as an old man to be director of the Paris Conservatoire when a rebellious and temperamental, outside-the-box young man named Hector Berlioz was a student barely able to play an instrument. But Berlioz was a fantastic writer who was very funny and obviously knew music inside-out. When it came time to write Berlioz's memoirs, poor Cherubini was the sputtering, petty, buffo villain, and his posthumous reputation was ruined forever. 

But Cherubini was esteemed by even Beethoven, and had no little influence on Beethoven's music. His opera, Medea, is probably his most famous work, and was a longtime vehicle for Maria Callas. But his most influential work is his Requiem, written for the 25th anniversary of Louis XVI's execution. Without it's example, there's no Requiem as we know them by either Berlioz or Verdi, no Rossini Stabat Mater, no Mendelssohn Elijah or Walpurgisnacht. It is one of the great works of church music written in a secular era. 

Underrated Classical Musicians 2/22/20

I'm honestly thinking of trading the rest of the tickets in for something later this or next season, and either see something else or go home. The Eroica was thankfully much better, and its finale was downright great, but that Beethoven 2 (my pick for LvB's most underrated symphony) was infuriatingly terrible - a caricature of everything people accuse Historically Informed Performance of being: robotic, inexpressive, passionless, like a machine you simply turn on or off, with no musical insight to recommend it except for the timbres of different makes of instrument. A person unfamiliar with these works could come away from such performances thinking Beethoven empty noise. It's doubly maddening because the performances I heard these forces deliver in 2018 of Berlioz were once-in-a-lifetime revelations. But for Beethoven, driving to Pittsburgh to hear Manfred Honeck conduct Fidelio was such a better idea than hearing Gardiner do a complete cycle, and I will return to hear Honeck conduct the Missa Solemnis in April. Honeck is a real musician who can't seem to give a performance that isn't a celebration of musicianship. John Eliot Gardiner has better angels in his nature, but he has the natural inclinations of a musical drill sergeant. 

Now that I'm back in my friends' air B&B in Peekskill, I put on this recording from Dmitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, no doubt recorded in Carnegie Hall. Hard core classical obsessives know Mitropoulos, but however highly they rate him, they still underrate him. He is one of the half dozen or so greatest conductors of the 20th century. If some of his interpretive decisions in the last 90 seconds are questionable: who cares when so much before it is so right? Hearing a performance like this, or a Beethoven 2 by Mengelberg, or Beecham, or Harnoncourt, that lives on the edge, that burns with such searing passion, that displays so many little details of Beethoven's vision, unnoticeable in other performances, is what makes this music, what makes all music, worth listening to.

Underrated Classical Musicians 2/23/20

For forty years, the conductor Adam Fischer has operated in the shadow of a spotlight focused on his ever-so-slightly younger brother, Ivan Fischer. 

I've encountered multiple musicians who have told me without reservation that Ivan Fischer is the greatest conductor they've ever worked with, and one of the very few deserving his reputation's entirety. In comparison to some colleagues, Ivan's reputation among the public could use a bit of a boost, but compared to Adam, Ivan's as famous as Dudamel combined with Gergiev. 

If recordings are to be believed, Adam wasn't very interesting before the 21st century. But the Fischer brothers are on either side of seventy, and while Ivan is as good as ever, and has toured the world virtually every year as a headliner for the last twenty or thirty (especially in my area...), Adam has the luxury of honing his craft relatively out of the spotlight. He's known as a fine opera conductor, particularly of Wagner, who runs a summer Wagner festival in Budapest, and whose head is frequently seen in the pit of all the world's best opera houses, but otherwise making very little splash. 

But that's all changed in just the last few years. He's long since been known for a not particularly interesting recording of the complete Haydn symphonies. But now comes all the Mozart symphonies, all the Mahler, all the Beethoven. One has to imagine his recordings will soon be more numerous than Ivan's, who was always very circumspect about setting any permanent record down that he hadn't rehearsed within an inch of its life first. 

The Mozart and Beethoven is unlike any you've ever heard, it's utterly bizarre, and it's also clearly the result of decades of extremely careful thought and preparation. Some people will hate it. I adore it. Like Hermann Scherchen, this is the work of a maestro who knows these pieces so well that he's earned the right to pull things in whatever direction he wants. Ivan was always a bit of a mad genius whose interpretations could lurch from incredibly traditional to bizarre in a manner of seconds, but Adam, the 'quiet one', shorter, less charismatic and domineering, is now revealed to be even madder, and just as brilliant, and who knows, maybe the next decade or two will prove him the more brilliant Fischer...

Underrated Classical Musicians 2/24/20

Let's talk today about the world's best traditional orchestra, and probably the world's most underrated too.

The fact is, most of the great orchestras became 'GREAT' in a previous era. Classical music is unfortunately a museum, and however excellent the great names still often are, they ultimately coast on previous achievements. The trulu great ensembles that define our age are almost all period orchestras, or modern music ensembles.

But the era of the Budapest Festival Orchestra is right now, it is a 100 person chamber ensemble whose conductor does not seem to bark orders like a dictator but make suggestions like a professorial advisor. They play fewer concerts than a traditional orchestra, rehearse more, have far more opportunities for creative input, and generally play as though they're inspired to create. Rank and file players even have opportunities to be featured soloists. The love between conductor and orchestra yesterday was absolutely palpable.

Perhaps too traditional the Budapest Fesztiválzenekar is, but what a tradition! When you hear a conductor like John Eliot Gardiner, the limitations of his soul can easily be felt. Whatever his personal character, it seems clear that music which requires an open heart is very difficult for him. For the life of me, I can't understand his sterling reputation in Bach, but in ultra-theatrical music that requires an incendiary spark, Gardiner is unforgettable. The Berlioz I heard from him 18 months ago was some of the greatest music making I've ever heard in my life, but Beethoven requires an open soul, and the only part of the cycle I heard that was truly magnificent was the Beethoven 5, which was so electrifying that you felt the Earth move beneath your feet. But in less evidently flamboyant work, Gardiner often sounds flint-hearted. Not as stone-souled as he was in the 90s, but the essentials of people's character rarely change at the deepest levels.

But there are some conductors, like Ivan Fischer, who carry their souls with them. They can be electrifying, but shock and awe is not the point of their music making. In order to truly experience what's extraordinary about them, you must hear them in person. There are other larger than life ways to convey that same big-heartedness, like Bernstein or Rattle, but I have to wonder if that life-sized dignity of normalcy is ultimately not of far more value than an approach whose primary aim is larger-than-life. Conductors like Fischer and Jansons convey something far more intimate, personal, vulnerable. What was extraordinary about them could only be appreciated in person, where the sound does not emanate from the singular node of the speaker, but in three dimensions, where a hundred human beings sound together as if they were a singular unit, but each with their own voice. The main piece on the program was Dvorak's 8th symphony, and before that came a Legend, a Slavonic Dance, and a choral piece that the orchestra literally stood up and sang. This group's made many great records, but neither recording of the 8th symphony or the Slavonic Dances could possibly convey what was extraordinary about hearing them in person. Everything was so scaled exactly-to-life that what seems generic on recording is miraculous when your ears experience it in the same space as the musicians.

Orchestral life is, by most accounts, an absolutely horrible experience. Orchestral musicians are routinely listed as one of the least satisfied professions in the world. It's not hard to understand why. You are just a cog in a machine, your whole professional life is living in a dictatorship where you must accommodate the many moods of a kind of authority figure never known for their generosity or gracious acceptance of mistake or feedback. The pay is often shit and only getting shittier, the chance of repetitive stress injuries is terrible, the chance of hearing loss is even worse. Orchestras are not made for the age of democracy, so how much more of an accomplishment is it to create a different model of orchestra in a country where democracy has never taken root?

Whenever you hear a great orchestral performance, somebody in the orchestra always smiles, because they know what they're doing is special and they can't help but enjoy it (even if they're not the majority). But this was something different yet again. Fischer is nearly 70 but he looks roughly 45. The concertmaster and principal violist were clearly Fischer's contemporaries and therefore looked quite a bit older. At the end of the concert, all three looked at each other as though with extremely long and friendly familiarity, all three gave each other a surprised nod, as though they knew that what they had just played was something extraordinary, even for them. I don't think any other traditional orchestra today could do what we heard them do yesterday.

Soo......

I got thrown out of Carnegie Hall today. The truth is I completely deserved to get thrown out. 

I was late to the concert because of a late train from Upstate that I had scrambled to get to, then took an expensive taxi to Carnegie, walked up five fights of stairs to get to my cheapest possible seats, and a woman was already yelling at the ushers for not letting her take a seat while the audience was clapping merely for the conductor entering.

As a rule, I really don't like people who abuse service industry members, and here I was being the exact person I despise and feeling really good about it. 

It basically comes down to this. I have a short fuse linked to a horrible temper, and through a basic diet of certain things, including social media invective at times, I have learned through strenuous effort to control it, at least in relation to whom I was twenty or twenty-five years ago. But if you come between me and my concert tickets, I have a basic involuntary reaction to destroy you. Live music of this type is how I get my personal happiness that can tie me over for weeks at a time. When people are cut off from their most reliable source of happiness, they become animals. I've managed to rein in my temper in nearly any situation, but this is one kind of situation where I'm not sure there's much to be done.... 

So I finally got to my fifth floor seats in the second-to-last row. Completely out of breath, exhausted, and already furious. The usher said you can't go in, so I said 'watch me' and opened the door. She blocked it with her body and told me she would call security. I threatened to shout and make a scene. The idea that I might get arrested occurred, and that didn't stop me. What stopped me was the thought that I might be banned from Carnegie Hall. 

Anticipating that a scenario like this was possible. I was already fantasizing on the way there about how if they dare not let me in, I would open the door and shout about how dare this conductor who is the monarchist son of a Nazi (true) conduct Beethoven's music of liberty! And things like 'down with the fucking oligarchy' 'your complacency is bringing down the United States of America!' 'you're all responsible for global warming!' and the like. 

But instead of my heroic, Beethovenian stand on behalf of liberty, I did the least heroic thing, and let loose a torrent of abuse on the ushers, telling them they're slaves of the rich, asking them how much they're making that they clearly get their kicks from being so shitty to people, when they asked me to show my ticket I threw it on the floor and told them that they're so petty they even have to check whether or not the customers are sneaking into cheaper seats. Exclaiming 'this is why classical music is dying! In twenty years nobody will be here and its because of behavior like yours! I finally was calming down, and went to the bar on that floor to ask for a glass of water from the tap, the person at the bar told me he could only serve me bottled water, so I told person serving drinks to fuck off, I went in the corner to get a drink of water at the water fountain and they told me to go back to the door where I was supposed to sit because they thought I might go in through another door, which I was not at all planning on doing. I told the lady 'don't fucking talk to me,' so she said 'do I need to call security?' so I said 'I don't fucking care.' So she called security, I finally said 'I don't need this' and started heading down the stairs and on my way out I said to the ushers 'I hope you have miserable lives.' And finally heard the ushers lose their cool on my way out....

I'm not at all proud of how I acted. This is the conduct of a crazy person, not a decent one fighting for the little guy. But I will not deny, it felt really good to unload on the fucking music oligarchy, even if these people are the very last people responsible for it or who can influence it or control any kind of policy at all. 

I'm clearly the villain in this story, and in this case, I'm honestly kind of fine with that.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

2016 is not 2020, reality is reality, and even if they were squeakers and delegate ties: Bernie Sanders has technically won two primaries. It is what it is. Even if there's a third party challenger, if he's the nominee, I'll vote for him without hesitation in the general unless he blames any group for America's problems but the rich (and I frankly can't imagine that would ever occur to him...), even if there's a third party candidate, and even if I'd vote for very nearly anybody else in the primary (and in the primary though not the general, there would even be a 50% chance I'd vote for Bloomberg against Bernie, and I fucking hate that guy). But I frankly wonder if I'm more at peace with Bernie's victory than quite a number of his supporters. What amazes me more about the Bernie crowd than anything else this year is that, like that other crowd, victory brings them no joy or peace, it only seems to make them angrier, more paranoid, more vitriolic.

Just one-and-change example: I posted something the other day lamenting that millions of Democrats may never vote for Bernie Sanders just as millions of progressives may never vote for anyone else, even when the Democratic Party might be all that stands between us and a burning planet. One vociferous Bernie-supporting acquaintance responded to a post of mine for the first time in three years, and it only took two polite responses before he got nasty, so I blocked him. Another one who posts to my stuff fairly regularly made an argument was that the entire Democratic Party should be supporting Bernie Sanders as of this moment when there are still 1975 out of 2000 delegates left to be distributed. She surely saw that I was cutting off any political discussion at midnight the night before, and then she deliberately went against my cutoff to try to get in the last word. She no doubt knew that I'd have to violate my own ban if I wanted to respond. So after writing a barn burner in response, I simply deleted both messages. 

This experience tells me that the mindset of all too many on that side is that a person can only be 100% onboard this train, or one is the enemy. It is both unsurprising and astonishing to me that even when people are not crazy about Bernie Sanders and are trying to get others to come around, it's never enough. That is the mark of a cult mentality, we've seen it so often from so many different American conservative movements that we know its signs right away, and I can't imagine that these experiences are at all unique to me. 

I can vote Bernie, I can even phonebank and canvas for him. But what I don't know is if, in the long term, one can trust these people to be your friends, not because I don't think I can personally, I've certainly sustained many friendships with people who have very different political views from mine, but because I'm not sure I believe that they wouldn't cut me off for similarly specious and entirely political reasons, and do so without warning, before I did the same. Ideology makes people do crazy things that they'd never think themselves capable of until it happens, or ever countenance doing if they took their ideologies less seriously, and the whole time, they'd think they were merely doing what any decent human being would. 

Unfortunately, that implicates at least half the people I know in Charles Village, Remington, Ednor Gardens, Lake Montebello, Waverly and Better Waverly. So that's not a realistic option, and I have no choice but to trust in their better angels, so the only option left is to be as loud as I can to say for god's sakes, don't do this; and make them as miserable as this election is making me. 

...but they seem to be doing a decent job of that themselves.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I don't know if social media is the root of the problem, or if the problem goes much further down and social media is merely a symptom, or if social media is merely a well-placed piece of tinder next to a giant arsenal of TNT, but whether it was social media or AM radio or internet aggregators or grad student lounges, the problem is very simple: there is not a single person in this country who isn't locked in with 50 million people who want to throw them out. 

No matter how hard we seek to ignore the people whose viewpoints we excoriate, social media is an intellectual market, and it inevitably confronts us all with viewpoints which we find loathsome, and the more we try to ignore them, the more insistently they make themselves known. We therefore bifurcate into ever smaller groups of like minds who persuade one another that everyone who's not initiates into the same club are not only wrong, but wrong for nefarious reasons. 

Anyone who is sure enough of what they believe can eventually decide that the moral character of people who believe differently is so beneath theirs' that they can convince themselves to do anything at all - attack them, expel them, kill them, kill them en masse. Fortunately, most people don't generally take even one trick step down that staircase of horrors. The slippery slope argument is... slippery like that, but all it takes is one wrong choice out of a couple thousand, one moment where the chaos of the world reveals itself and there's no going back. 

The Trump election was not just an election, it was just such a moment. It was as consequential to American life as 9/11, the Kennedy Assassination, Pearl Harbor, the Fall of Communism, Black Tuesday, Fort Sumter, the sinking of the Lusitania. It was a moment from which there was no going back - whatever country America was before November 2016, it is clearly a different country now. There is no reviving something that's been dead for three years (Biden supporters take note). 

We've just had four straight years of what seems to the average American like non-stop chaos. For 90% of the world's countries, this all is business as usual, and if anything rather stable. 2020 promises to be still more chaotic. The result of the impeachment trial looks like a foregone conclusion, but even if the conclusion is foregone, before its over, there will be plenty of glimmers of hope that will probably turn out to be false. Starting with Iowa, there will be moments when Bernie supporters feel like the Presidency is just within their grasp, only for it to be yanked from him in a hundred different directions. No matter who seems to earn the Democratic nomination, be they Biden, Warren, Sanders, or even Bloomberg, there will be so much rancor between the different sides of the Democratic Party that some kind of break between the sides is going to be a serious possibility right up to the November election. The chance chance of a serious third party candidacy still very, very high, and even if there isn't a serious third-party candidate, unserious third party candidates are going to do even better than they did in 2016. And even if the extremely unlikely happens and Donald Trump is thrown out of office, why is Mitt Romney now in the Senate? He knows that there's an outside shot that Trump will lose the Presidency, and that a temporary President Pence would be a very vulnerable Republican candidate. Romney could not beat Obama, but he could very well clean house against most of the candidates who might oppose him. 

But whatever the end result of 2020, it will probably be very different than any I just mentioned. The amount of organization required for an American Presidential election is roughly on par with the plans generals make when a country goes to war. Why do they need so much organization? Because there are so many agents of chaos during a Presidential election that no one can possibly foresee the turns of events, not Steve Bannon, not Nate Silver, not even Cambridge Analytica. 

By the end of this year, however uncharitable we feel toward people we disagree with now, we are going to feel angrier by a factor of 10. Start thinking now about where this might lead. Chaos, not stability, is the baseline state of the world, and however sure you are of what you believe, do you really think you and those you love can stand erect in the winds that blow if you pursue your unshakeable beliefs to their logical conclusions? Whether now or in a generation after you see horrible things, you're going to have to forgive a lot of things that you think are unforgivable. And not just tacitly ignore those whom you find unforgivable, you're going to have to embrace them, work with them, compromise with them, let them be members of your families to whom you give your love. Yitzhak Rabin would say that you don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with the least savory enemies. The alternative is death. 

And yes, I'm sure that many of those who've read this far will say that the issues are too important, that the world is on the precipice of planetary destruction brought about by a particular point of view. But even if that notion is true (and a large part of it is), how do you fight these people who have so much power of life and death over us and clearly choose death? The answer is, very carefully, very slowly, with the knowledge that terrible things may happen along the way which we're just going to have to accept on the chance that their acceptance prevents still worse things. These are the tough choices upon which the world is made. Everything in the world dies, every society eventually crumbles, every achievement is fragile. But one of the world's few certainties is that those who promise a transformative vision of the world that radically reduces the world's evil never bring it about, and only bring about more evil, more death, more exploitation. If you're fighting a war to prevent evil's expansion, you're the good guy. If you're fighting a war to end evil, or even just AN evil, no matter what or whom you think is evil, you're the bad guy. 

So yeah, this year is going to be a huge battle for us all, and it's a battle we well might lose even if we win. The easiest way to lose a battle is to think the battle we can win rather than merely fought to a draw - the very fact that we have to fight is already tragedy in itself. Let's all manage our expectations, look out for all those we love, and try as best we can in this age where empathy is such a prized commodity, to reserve some small corner of empathy for the people we think are least deserving of it. I don't think a lot of people have contemplated the alternative, and even if they have, I think they need to contemplate it a lot more seriously.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

So we now have to acclimate to front-runner Bernie. Whatever. If Bernie is the nominee, unless he starts blaming groups of people for our problems other than the rich and perhaps the Religious Right, I will support him to the letter of the crossed t and you would never have known that I ever hated him. Even if there's a Michael Bloomberg third-party candidacy (and if Bernie wins the nomination, there very well might be), I will support any Democratic nominee to the bitter end who doesn't scapegoat anybody but the relatively more privileged, and that end will probably be bitter indeed. 

Bernie's policies are mostly fine, insofar as they have any nuance at all, I agree with 80-90% of them, and many of them are closer to my beliefs than they are to his most fervent admirers, who are well to the left of his campaign. If Bernie appears to have a chance of winning right now, that appearance is very deceptive. Once the battalion of dubious quotes and interviews appear all over the media of Bernie's support of America's enemies, every swing voter who is mulling a Bernie vote will be scared away, the tragic irony being that no American President has ever gone further into the arms of America's enemies than our current President - it's not even close, but no amount of Democratic spending will be able to countermand the private PAC-money of billionaires whom Bernie correctly points out are choking the American system, and they will bombard American mental space into submission to their agenda. 

And even if Bernie were able to keep himself in swing voter's warm feelings, what then? There remains the problem of a Bloomberg Third Party Candidacy. Look at your TV, look at youtube. Bloomberg is not at any debate, but he's bombarding the airwaves unceasingly, and is spending more on TV than all the other Democratic candidates put together (that's true, look it up). Why is that? He's clearly gearing up for a third party run. If it's Biden, he obviously won't do it. If it's Warren, he might do it, but he might not, and he knows that it's sensible not to, and his whole campaign is based on doing the sensible thing. But if it's Bernie, he probably will because he knows there's a path to victory through the American center, who is rightly disgusted by Trump and perhaps wrongly disgusted by Bernie Sanders.

And even if the impossible happened, and Bernie won, what then? A Republican congress accusing him of being a traitor to the American people? There's literally an interview circulating around the internet of Bernie on Cuban Television in the 80s, criticizing America and praising Castro. That's probably one of a dozen like it from that era. Everything we've correctly accused Trump of, they will accuse Bernie of. Even if we have the House now, we will lose it in 2022 with a Bernie presidency. They will impeach him, and they will have the votes in the Senate to remove him from office. 

And even if Bernie survived those 90% false accusations of treachery, what then? All those billionaires with all that money at their disposal, are they going to willingly let a Social Democrat President break up their businesses? They will fight with every one of their inexhaustible means to keep a Sanders presidency from compromising their business interests. Bernie would be unable to enact any part of his agenda unless Democrats controlled both houses, if anything, he would become the reason for big business to extend its corporate power still much further. And even then, there are so many Democrats in the pocket of special interests that he'd find it no less impossible than Obama ever did. 

And even if by some miracle Bernie ever got a mandate for the changes he demands, what then? All those billionaires still have all that money at their disposal, all those congressmen in their pockets, with a military and police force extremely sympathetic to their views. It doesn't take all that much to remove a head of state from office by force if 3/4ths of America's most powerful people give their permission. 

Look up Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet. That is our worst-case scenario. As far as murderous military dictators go, it can get still a lot worse than Pinochet, he wasn't Hitler, he wasn't even Castro. But he was a dictator, and he was immeasurably terrible compared to anything this country ever experienced. And it's particularly every leftist in the world who considers Pinochet scarcely less terrible than Hitler. Everybody who supported Bernie Sanders from the beginning are the people who could stand to lose the most.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

So Petrenko's Beethoven 9 is on the BBC now for free for almost another two weeks. You'll probably have to listen on headphones in order to get any real impact, but I think this is a truly masterful performance. Is it as great as the very greatest yet? Probably not, but if Petrenko and the orchestra don't kill each other in a few years, there's no reason to expect less than something near the pantheon's highest heights. There aren't too many Beethoven conductors around now who strike me as true Beethovenians - either of the fast or slow variety. Blomstedt of course, maybe Honeck, and another couple who curtail some of the story. Petrenko is certainly quicker than average, but in no danger of meeting the metronome markings, and he never shortchanges either the rhythm and dynamism or the lyricism and gemütlichkeit. Think of Harnoncourt, or Leibowitz, or Munch, but ultimately this is a 9th unlike any other. The dynamic contrasts are absolutely enormous, and the phrasing so unbelievably well-contoured. It is highly in keeping with the performance-rubric of Beethoven's own period, Petrenko never imposes late romanticism, except for an occasional rubato to make the harmony breathe, it is all within classical form, which makes the romanticism feel all the more explosive. And this is, perhaps, the greatest, most luminous, most ecstatic Adagio I've ever heard in my life - all the more so because it's precisely the opposite of Furtwangler's attempts to capture infinity by taking an infinity of time. 

I'm a huge Rattle fan, but Rattle's great strength was the 20th century. He has interesting ideas about the old classics, but he never seemed to internalize them to the point that he could make them take flight too often in the way he does more modern repertoire. Petrenko, here as nearly everything we non-Germans can hear of him so far, is much less personalized, and yet within that lack of idiosyncrasy is an ability to subordinate his personality to the exact shape of the music. Petrenko can convince you you're hearing the 'thing in itself.' A lot of people call him the best of his generation. That's a bold claim, because the generation born in the 70s could quite possibly become the most spectacular generation of maestri since any born before 1900, and we've got a while to go with them. There's no questioning Petrenko's mastery, but his way of making music takes such enormous effort and discipline that it's almost exhausting to listen to, let alone conceive how much he must prepare to make it, I think I prefer the far more naturally spontaneous musicality of someone like Francois-Xavier Roth. But even so, this is such incredibly ideal music-making, the kind of Platonic music-making of the spheres that is everything we could only conceive of being this good in our imaginations. Some of us might prefer musicians who point up elements in the music beyond what we could imagine, but this is everything music-lovers hoped Carlos Kleiber would be, and now he's the director of the Berlin Philharmonic.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000cz33

Three Popes - Two Popes - Introduction

An extraordinary thing happened in the Vatican recently. Another extraordinary thing happened in an era when we have Two Popes for the first time in six hundred years, in an era when a Pope was elected from the New World well over five hundred years past the Columbus's discovery, in an era when the molestation scandal was finally taken with seriousness so grave that, for the first time ever, a Pope allowed for priests to be held up for trial for the conduct of their ministry in legal court rather than ecumenical court, in an era when a Pope sanctioned the church for their remonstrative obsessions with issues of sex rather than attending to the achingly dire burdens of their lay faithful, in an era when the Vatican appears perpetually on the verge of changing its stances on divorce, in an era when the Pope himself speaks kindly of Liberation Theology... this is an extraordinary religious era in which the immobile Catholic Church, seemingly unchanging, unseeing, unhearing, unmoving and unmoved, hurtles toward change at a comparative light speed while, for the second time, the traditionalist wing, who stymied nearly every reform for centuries, must divine new tricks in order to keep up. 

Hurtles toward change, yet never quite gets there....

Dear Abby - Beginning

Hi Abby,

It's been fifteen years. Fifteen and a half to be exact. The last time I saw you, I was literally about to graduate college. I was so shocked to see you in Bethesda, so shy, so unwilling to face old Hyde friends, let alone to the fact that I brought a freshman to High School Prom, even to my best friend walking with me who knew so much about Hyde, that I said within five seconds that I had to go right away. The second I left, I knew how incredibly absurd I was being, so I explained what was what to Marc in a Dunkin' Donuts, we got our donut and coffee, and we came back. Thankfully, you were still there, and you knew exactly how weird it was that I ducked out from someone to whom I'd once bonded like a sister. I don't know for exactly how long we talked, but that was the last time we ever saw each other.

You did rather well in life, not just for a Hyde kid, but for anybody at all. A photographer with work featured in Time Magazine and Slate. I saw the work on your homepage, it's pretty impressive. You certainly captured things in your subjects, and why wouldn't a person as empathetic as you always are in my memory elicit anything less from a camera? Even at fourteen, you silenced a whole room of students and parents with a poem at a student poetry reading I organized for Family Weekend, and we were all so shocked into silence by the quality that all Mr. Spaeth and I could do was ask you to read it again. To this day I remember, a refrain bookended it: 'At Eight-Thirty in the Morning," all the more miraculous for coming from your girlish, Jennifer Tilly-like voice, and oh how you excoriated me for making fun of it. Most Hyde kids were not exactly sharp knives, but there always existed a brilliant minority of Hyde kids whose personalities were too strong and original for a typical school to ever find the key to unlock their.... I'm not going to use those two words.... you know which ones.... I would imagine that many of the parents in that room thought you just another Hyde kid too odd for her potential to ever truly reveal itself in anything but artificial circumstances, but whatever the vicissitudes of the real world that flummoxed so many of us after we got out of the gate, you are one of the very few who got to show the wide world a small fraction of what you were capable. And in that sense, your life is so rich in meaning and success to any of us who have yet to discover how to show all that we are to anyone but the small coterie who know us. Whatever our unique potentials,... there... I said the two words now gimme a diploma.... so many of the rest of us are still mute to the world, the stories we can tell of what we have been through and the still worse things we'd seen others endure, completely yet untold.

With all the continual news of death surrounding us from ghosts of Hyde past, I would occasionally see a new picture of you pop up on social media, and feel a little relief when I saw it. You looked so well-adjusted and happy, and I would genuinely think to myself that if even if so many of us Hyde kids would die prematurely from every kind of reckless living, at least Abby would live to be a hundred; and now you're dead from cancer, which you'd apparently been suffering from in all those pictures, and I, who've advertised many of my illnesses so publicly, who've feared for my health for so many years, who am continually amazed that I've neither left the party yet nor been forced to leave, am still here, and look to be here for at least another couple decades.

I heard of Marissa's suicide in September of 2018, and it apparently happened in November the year before, hopefully she can tell you more about what lead to it than I ever heard. Not that you two were ever at Hyde simultaneously for more than three weeks or so, but when two people die so prematurely, I imagine them meeting up in the next world with friends of friends they discover through social media. If you two haven't met up yet, track her down, you're gonna love each other. Marissa was as brilliant as you, nearly as gifted a writer and one of the most brilliant visual artists I've ever met, she was more extraverted and outspoken, and she was funnier than nearly anyone I'd ever met... Life around her was a non-stop dinner party, twelve-hour conversations at a time in which the interlocutor never came up for air, only for the conversation to resume the next day exactly where it left off.

So yes, as close as I was to you, my dear Abby, Marissa was the love of my adolescence, entirely unrequited of course - 'I could marry you Evan, but I can't date you.' An old flame whose flame was extinguished in the span of a few weeks. I literally followed her to American University in DC, it was the best decision I'd ever made, made for entirely the wrong reasons. I made the best friends of my life, graduated with honors, seemed on the cusp of a basically functional life, while Marissa fell in with a drug crowd, and dropped out after two years. We barely saw each other at Hyde, at first I thought it was because she didn't make the effort to see me, and of course I was a little hurt, but the further away we get from those years, the more I wonder if it wasn't the other way around. At some point in those years I made the very, very conscious decision that Hyde was just a mirage in the life of a nice Jewish boy who should never have ended up in so bizarre and authoritarian a place. I don't know how deliberate it was that I cut loose as many Hyde friendships as I did, but I can't imagine it was any more than 20% by accident. And so at the end of sophomore year, we ran into each other and had one last lunch where she told me she was probably dropping out and apologized to me for having so broken my heart. The two of us went back to hang out in my room afterward. I wish I could say that anything happened, but my love of Marissa was always in the abstract, and when she left, I gave her one of my prize possessions to keep, my copy of Dante's Inferno that I studied in private with Mr. Spaeth, whose advice was that if you're going through Hell, the only way out is to go all the way down. It was the last time I ever saw Marissa. My greatest regret is certainly not that I was never her lover, it was exactly the opposite; that whatever hell she was going through, I so easily let her abandon our friendship so that I could spend more time finally being the kid at the front of the class whom I thought I always was yet had so little evidence until I was twenty. Like Sage, Marissa will always be another Hyde kid for whose downfall I feel in some ways responsible, even if my guilt is totally illogical, it's just one of a thousand things for which I feel terrible guilt for what I continually pray are illogical reasons.

...I'm finding this is much too painful to keep going. I pray I can find a way through this impasse in the next little while. Until then, onto the next project.

A Quick Rundown of Mozart Requiem Recordings

There aren't a lot of 'Golden Age' performances on this list for a very simple reason. There are many great Mozartians among the 'old school.' No Mozart education is complete until they've heard Bruno Walter, Beecham, Böhm, Busch, Klemperer, Kleiber, Krips, Ferenc Fricsay, and Carlo Maria Giulini. But as great as orchestral and opera performances used to be, choral performances are quite a bit better today. So many conductors of previous ages are limited by giant amateur choirs and operatic voices. The choruses are plainly not up to the demands of the contrapuntal movements, the opera singers are plainly unable to lighten their texture and many of them can't sing softly. No matter how furious the rest of the conception, the work is compromised by heaviness of the choirs and the testudine tempi in the Kyrie and the Cum Sanctis, the inability to get soft dynamics in the Lacrimosa and the Confutatis, and the bleating operatic vibrato which ruins the blend of Mozart's textures. It is also ruined by many conductors' insistence on making the proto-romanticism of the dying Mozart into something out of Bruckner's or Mahler's Ninth Symphony, and distends Mozart to an weight he can't hold like Bernstein, Karl Bohm and Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos. A little bit of romanticism goes a long way in Mozart, and there are all sorts of arid performances from the period crowd which don't belong as well. No matter how virtuoso John Eliot Gardiner's performance, it's emotionally arid, and even that is preferable to Roger Norrington's chipper jaunt, and stunningly, Charles Mackerras struggles here too. Then there are the tasteful Mozart Requiems like Marriner and Abbado and Bruggen that are so determined not to put a foot wrong that the human expression goes missing, or the vulgar Mozart Requiems like Solti and Currentzis which are so hell-bound on being dramatic that they cut out all beauty (and let's not even get started on Nikolai Golovanov...). Mozart is so hard to play, he does not take well to playing outside his rules, and while one can successfully personalize his music, you have to preserve the sense of form and balance just about immaculately. Everything has to come through, the melodies have to soar simultaneously to that the dance rhythms have to bounce, everything in the execution has to be precise, but not so precise that the precision draws attention to itself. Every sound has to be beautiful, but not so so beautiful that beauty precludes the occasional ugly sound for drama's sake. So here are some recordings which reach the impossible. 



Transcendent:

Colin Davis/London Symphony: Fabulously dramatic playing, and truly magnificent choral singing. As close to ideal as the old conception can ever get. Davis made so many recordings of this that one has the feeling that the work was closer to him than it was to any other major maestro, but as great as the others are, next to a performance this stunning, they're all a bit superfluous. 

(note: in an earlier draft I confused the Alto release and the LSO live and a youtube recording that says 'London Symphony' when upon closer inspection, it is clearly the Bavarian Radio Symphony lead by a middle-aged Sir Colin. I stuck my foot in my mouth as I so often do and said that this was Davis's first LSO recording and better than his LSO Live recording, which is, of course, the same recording, in slightly sharper sound on the Alto label that better brings out its great qualities. Please do not doubt my integrity or good intentions, only doubt my competence.)

Nikolaus Harnoncourt/Concentus Musicus Wien (second recording): The other 'ultimate' Mozart Requiem conductor draws out the most detailed, magnificent, and terrifying orchestral playing, along with fantastically blended soloists and a very fine chorus. Listen to the strings evoke hell's flames in the Confutatis, the stab of the first trombone entrance in the Introit and the trombone's imposition in the Tuba Mirum, the surprise of the sudden pianissimo in the Dies Irae and the subsequent explosion, the French pomp of the rhythms on 'Rex Tremendae Majestantis', the rare cantabile of period strings in the Recordare, the huge dynamic contrasts in the Agnus Dei.   Of course, this being Harnoncourt, it's quite idiosyncratic. I wonder if the only true misstep among all this is the jig-like tempo in the Hostias, which is not as huge problem as it might seem since it's over so quickly... But even elsewhere, so much of this seems rewritten  it's so thoroughly Harnoncourt-ized that I'm not even sure the differences are in the completion Harnoncourt uses. But such is the nature of performance, transcendence aims past perfection and goes straight to infinity. Mozart does not usually take well to personalization, but that's because concepts Mozart had no idea about are imposed upon him. This is Mozart within his zeitgeist, unspoiled yet by the 19th century, and event he divergences from Mozart have Mozart's era coded on its DNA, and therefore the personalization sounds so much less vulgar than when done by Nikolai Golovanov or Helmut Koch. In seven words: the bony hand of death is everywhere.

Mariss Jansons/Bavarian Radio Symphony (live video): (From 2025) What a stunning surprise from a conductor who was never known for Mozart! The playing is of a level never approached by any other version: perfectly balanced, utterly dramatic and contrasted between dynamics--be warned, though, Jansons almost never places the movement's climax on the final cadence, so however dramatic, the results are extremely devotional. The choral singing covers itself in glory: a few intonation issues not withstanding, they find a previously undiscovered vocal color on every phrase. Jansons is one of the few conductors in history musical enough to incorporate the lessons of HIP entirely into traditional performance. Jansons was much better known for romantic repertoire which demands extravagance, but his true gift was in the really hard, emotionally complex stuff where there's more musical substance than adrenaline: Brahms 4, Schubert 9, Haydn 100, Bruckner 6, Dvorak 7, Mahler 7, Shostakovich 8, Also Sprach... Would that we had more Mozart from him!

Excellence:  

Thomas Hengelbrock/Bathasar Neumann (live video): (live 2025) If the soloists here didn't suck, this would number among the most transcendent recordings of the Requiem, perhaps one of the most transcendent of Mozart himself. It is... perfect Mozart playing and conducting. Flowing, yet rhythmically alive. The tinta is the color of death, yet the spirit is also full of life. 

Masaki Suzuki/Bach Collegium Japan: If the whole thing were a little slower, it would practically be perfect. Suzuki is not a huge original personality like Harnoncourt or Jacobs, but his seemingly infallible musical judgement is without precedent in the HIP world. Even the 4-minute Recordare, a movement that usually take 6 (!), works on its own terms - a dance, with such wonderful blended singing and playing. 

Mariss Jansons/Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Netherlands Radio Choir: Huge dynamic range, fantastic playing and singing, a relatively 'big' reading of course, but not nearly so big as to be unwieldy - Jansons knows exactly how to keep it all within the bounds of classical form. The Concertgebouworkest sounds slightly reduced, and the choir sounds like it's roughly three-dozen voices.  Jansons ignites a Dies Irae for all time, and no one makes the heavenly female voices of the Confutatis sound so eerie, and only Thielemann also creates such a powerful dichotomy between awe and mystery between the loud and quiet passages of the Lacrimosa. 

Nikolaus Harnoncourt/Concentus Musicus Wien (first recording): Uses the Wiener State Opera Chorus, a huge, dramatic sound that, unlike with many Kappelmaestri on previous recordings, Harnoncourt compels to sing with enormous commitment, focus, and discipline.  

Colin Davis/Bavarian Radio Symphony: Extremely dramatic and grand. Not quite the passionate forcefulness of London, but that's unrepeatable. 

Great:

George Szell/Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus: A live concert in imperfect sound, but Mozart's Requiem is the type of piece made for Szell, classic in formal proportion, romantic in sentiment. As modern as he was for his time, Szell's orientation is still at times a bit too much of the 19th century to truly lift the piece to heaven the way Davis or Jansons do, but among conductors born in the 19th century, he is perhaps uniquely distinguished and perceptive in this work. 

Josef Krips/Vienna Philharmonic (live): (From 2025) The only truly 'old school' performance that really works. It doesn't just work, it rocks. The Vienna Singverein sounds like it has 200 singers here, and they pin you to the back of the chair. The reason it works is that Krips does what occurs to no other old Viennese conductor: minimize the vibrato. Suddenly the harmonies and counterpoint is clarified. Krips, unlike the contemporaneous Bohm performance, elicits actual dynamics, phrasing and shading from his Viennese forces. Yes, it could be softer still, but compare this to the mono-dynamic Bohm who plows through every phrase with the sensitivity of a narcissist. Immediately you see, this is what so many older conductors were aiming for, but never achieved. 

Christian Thielemann/Munich Philharmonic: When it comes to tempi, Thielemann is surprisingly restrained and hands off, but with a truly enormous dynamic range - almost exaggerated, this is Thielemann after all, but tremendously effective. 

Christopher Hogwood/Academy of Ancient Music: The choir uses boys, and there are huge differences in the edition from the usual Sussmayr, whole sections are unrecognizably rewritten, and not in Jacobs's way for dramatic immediacy, but to literally improve Sussmayr's corrections and try to musicologically re-create a work closer to how Mozart would have completed it. Nevertheless, perhaps the novelty spurs Hogwood to a level of intensity one rarely expects from him. 

Colin Davis/BBC Symphony: The young Colin still a little bit too romantic and old-fashioned here, the slow movements are too slow and stately, but even before he turns forty, Davis gets so much right already, and you already have a sense that this will be the ultimate conductor of Mozart's Requiem. 

Daniel Barenboim/Orchestre et Ceour de Paris: A Wagnerian drama: huge, dramatic, exciting. Romantic Mozart done right. As only a truly brilliant musician can, Barenboim knows exactly how far to push an imposed concept without going overboard. Sure, everything is huge and slow and legato in the most Victorian manner, but Barenboim generally knows exactly how slow is slow enough (except in the Tuba Mirum...), and with such an overwhelming mass of sound he conjures, he can go slow indeed and still hold our attention. What prevents this recording from being ranked near the very highest echelon is that in the so crucial movements of the late Sequenza, this otherwise powerful, passionate, and even rather impressive large choir goes unforgivably flat. Given that this recording is 35 years old and how frequently Danny re-records, Barenboim is well-overdue for a remake. 

(Somewhere on youtube there's an excellent Ivan Fischer/Concertgebouw version from the 2016 Proms that doesn't seem to be there right now so I can't review it. It's wonderful, much better than his video version from Budapest.)

Very Good:

Rene Jacobs/Freiburg Baroque: Jacobs gonna Jacobs - he pretty much rewrites it as he goes along, some of it is the very new edition he uses, some of it is obviously Jacobs. if you dislike Jacobs, it's not for you, but there's a lot I love. The theatrical immediacy is tastable - perhaps it's almost more appropriate for Vivaldi or Handel than Mozart. In a movement like Tuba Mirum, this sort of embellished rewriting is direly necessary - it's so long and the texture so thin that there no way that Mozart viewed it as finished when he died, and Jacobs is perhaps the only plausible attempt at a completion. On the other hand, a lot of the slow movements like the Recordare don't have enough in the way of tenderness and warmth. Like Barenboim, I want to rank this much higher, but the mistakes insist upon themselves, and all the mores because, unlike Barenboim, they are ultimately mistakes of spirit, not letter. I cannot escape the feeling that as good as larger-than-life moments are, Jacobs is not interested in the warm and tender moments, and does his best to make Mozart sound like Gluck or Vivaldi. There are much worse options, but except for the Tuba Mirum and the Confutatis, it's still not really Mozart. 

Riccardo Muti/Berlin Philharmonic/Two Swedish Chamber Choirs: It's definitely too lacquered. The textures are pure Sachertorte, so high in cholesterol and sweet to the ear that one begins to suspect death comes in the form of diabetes. The Recordare is pure opera, they might as well be performing Die Meistersinger, but alongside all this voluptuousness comes passages whose touch gives off the singe of hellfire. As one might expect from Muti, the Dies Irae is one of the most fearsome on record, and the contrasts in the Confutatis are never demarcated more impressively than Muti makes them here. The bigger problem is that the Lacrimosa and Agnus Dei are too slow, collapsing under their romantic weight. Nevertheless, the whole is beautiful like a particularly gaudy cathedral; even as you're put off by the ostentation, you can smell the incense and feel the spookiness of the existential stakes. 


Peter Neumann/Collegium Cartusianum: Very intimate. It's mostly a little underpowered, and definitely too orderly - to follow this music into the sublime of the next world - the execution too precise, the phrasing too clipped, the fortes and crescendi not overwhelming enough, but it nevertheless has a true beauty. A friend of mine played me the Recordare, saying that it was a ideal 5:40 of music making, and in that movement, I found it hard to disagree. I wish there was a little more cantabile warmth in the strings when they have to sing out, but the soloists blend together with almost unprecedented magnificence and the orchestra is with them at every moment. I'm not convinced the rest is at the same level of music making, but were the rest on the level of the Recordare, or the end of the Confutatis, it would easily be a transcendent recording. 

Peter Schreier/Staatskapelle Dresden/Leipzig Radio Choir: The version I grew up on, few are more praised. I used to love it. It does everything well. Margaret Price is nothing short of angelically perfect, the Staatskapelle Dresden plays perfectly of course, the singing of the Leipzig Radio Chorus is almost beyond reproach. Aside from Theo Adam's wobbly bass-baritone, the only problem is that it's all a little too sensible and orderly. The soft sections are beautifully warm, but they're not particularly soft, and the Requiem requires truly soft playing to give the loud sections context that unleashes their full power. 

Phillippe Herreweghe/Collegium Vocale Ghent: ditto.

Savall/LCDN: It's very dramatic, a huge dynamic range, incredibly well-executed, a little rigid. 

Herbert von Karajan/Vienna Philharmonic: By Karajan's final time through the Mozart Requiem of roughly a thousand, he realized he had to trim the edges of the usual funereal Mozartian soup and create something leaner. The result, while still not quite great, does find the Mozart.

Hermann Scherchen/Vienna Symphony: The choir sucks, but Scherchen's vision is overwhelming.

I guess? If you like that sorta thing....

Bruno Walter/Vienna Philharmonic: It's muuuuuch too heavy, it's Wagnerian as hell, but it's certainly dramatic. 

I Saw Cats Four Times - So How Was The Show Mrs. Lincoln? - Final Draft

Before we start, I have to issue a correction. In the first of these two podcasts I said that Cats had run on Broadway for forty years. That was entirely incorrect, it ran on Broadway for an extremely unimpressive eighteen years, from 1982 to 2000, with only 7,485 performances, which at the time of its closing was merely the longest running Broadway show in history, grossing only 388 million dollars in Broadway ticket sales with an economic impact of 3.12 billion dollars on the city of New York. It is now, merely, the fourth-longest running Broadway show. In 2015, the show was revived on Broadway, which had a year-and-a-half long run of a mere 593 performances. On the West End in London, Cats ran from 1981 to 2002, a grand total of 8,949 performances. Tickets for closing night were so in demand that the show was broadcast live on an outdoor screen in Covent Garden. It too was the West End's longest running show when it closed. When Cats returned to the West End for a 12 week run in 2014, so in demand was Cats that the run was doubled so that 100,000 extra tickets could be sold. Six months after its closing, it was revived yet again for another three-month run to honor the overflow demand of Brits who couldn't get one of those 100,000 extra tickets. So no, Cats was not quite as huge an industry as I mistakenly believed, but oh my god... how do people love this show so much?!?!

So what of the movie itself?

The problems start at the very beginning of the movie. of course. An eighties synthesizer score clashing against extremely interwar Art Deco set design. The eighties synth is breathtakingly ugly. Over and over again, has one of those THX 1138 effects that announce 'the audience is listening'. I suppose it's supposed to remind us of caterwauling, but that would at least make sense, and it happens at all the most inopportune moments. Including in Memories, imagine, whatever you think of the song, it's one of the most iconic music theater songs of the 20th century, sung in a great performance and interrupted more than half a dozen times by (THX effect sped up). Anthropomorphic cats, stripped of their David Bowie costumes and Cirque du Soleil sets, exist in a setting that appears to demonstrate them discarded pets of Evelyn Waugh.

The cats are all naked with fur that looks more like skin tattooed on than any kind of fur, except for the cats who wear shoes! Or the cats who wear fur coats! Many male cats have bulges in wide frame that disappear in close up. The female cats, most notably Taylor Swift, clearly have nipples in wide frame but the nipples disappear from close up. Which of course begs the questionWHY DO ALL THE CATS HAVE ONLY TWO NIPPLES?!?!?!

The one human we see in the entire movie is at the very beginning, which is more I think than we ever see in the show, so this ruins any suspension of disbelief that this world might be meant for Cats and not for humans. And yet, just as in the show, every set is clearly designed as a Cat-world in which literally every building is a Cat pun. The Egyptian theater with images of Cats over the facade, a bar that seems to serve nothing but milk on a plate,  Is this a world where Cats are worshipped? Is this anthropomorsis part of a symbiotic world where Cats are basically human equals? Is it set post-nuclear apocalypse where there are barely any humans and Cats have mutated into intelligent beings who have a language of song-and-dance and collective speak - not to mention mice and cockroaches have done the same, more on them later...? Or is this just a concept green-lighted by a thousand rubber stamps with objections raised by nobody at all?

In the show, the introductory song is clearly supposed to be addressed to the audience, and sets up that Cats is basically a review show in which the audience, not the other cats, are the most crucial addressees. Yet the movie addresses the introductory song to a protagonist newly created for the movie, completely absent from the show of origin - a cat named Victoria, played by an incredibly talented and beautiful performer named Francesca Hayward who is terrifyingly smoldering even when looking surgically altered by Dr. Moreau to resemble a human cat. Even after Cats, James Corden shall continue his ubiquitous appearances in everything without so much of a scratch to his mystifying career, but the world will always remember Francesca Hayward as star of Cats so we will never hear from this new Ginger Rogers ever again. 

By the end of the opening number, it begged a number of questions I considered too obvious for the movie not to answer: Does the gang of Jellicle cats do this musical song and dance for every cat who passes by? Is it a way of enticing them to join the Jellicle gang? Is it a way of scaring them off? Is it a manner of displaying plumage and assessing potential new members or threats? And even if it isn't all that, won't they be they be seen in this clearly human city by humans who will continuously exclaim HOLY SHIT! SINGING CATS!!! Also, after hearing that word literally three-hundred times over the course of the movie and now probably twelve-hundred times over the course of four viewings, I still have one overriding question: WHAT THE FUCK IS A JELLICLE!?! 

And 'fuck' is a very important concept in this movie. All the cats look as though they're about to fuck each other, and I do mean all of them. The young ones look just as likely to fuck Judy Dench or Ian McKellen as more age appropriate ones. They constantly circle each other, caress each other, fondle each other, and rather than kiss, they simply nuzzle each other's cheeks. I would venture a guess that there is more face-nuzzling in this movie than there's been in the 120 years of cinema history; and there are moments when all the cats start a group incantation of spoken word lyrics that sounds like the orgy music in Eyes Wide Shut.   

But if all of these cats are so confident in the opening number and full of braggadocious plumage, why then do they run off with such cowardly immediacy when the villain, McCavity, makes his first appearance. And some villain: It's never established, the nature of his villainy. Is he a drug dealer? Is he a mafia don? Does he mean to send fish in the mail for every cat he kills,... or does he just eat the fish? Well,... he does appear to have a magic dust that makes himself and other cats disapparate and reappear in a place of his choosing. The properties of said dust are never established. It's never established how he acquires it, or how he can do it, or why he does it, or why he affixes some sort of whispery magic tag on his disapparations, like 'INEFFABLE!' 'MEOW!' 'MCCAVITYYYY!'. But McCavity is played by the great Idris Elba, STRINGER BELL FROM THE WIRE! In one interview, Idris Elba explained that he refused to appear in Marvel movies because they were beneath his dignity AND NOW HE'S A NAKED CAT! It was highly presumed that Idris Elba would soon be the first black James Bond. Instead, he is this...  and this is so much better, aside from being the first black James Bond, Idris Elba would eventually just be another Bond in a role defined for all time by Sean Connery, but now he will always be remembered the actor who took his reputation as the most badass actor ON THE PLANET and leveraged it to be a naked cat. 

We are then treated to roughly eighty minutes of introductory songs. 80 minutes of introductory songs you say? Indeed. And yet perhaps there is method to this madness. We need to know about the cat names because the entire musical is made up of cats introducing their names. THAT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING MUSICAL!...

The introductions truly begin with Rebel Wilson as Jenny Any-dots. How do we BEGIN to talk about this: she uses her tail as a microphone, except that the first time she uses a tail for a microphone, she's clearly using the tail of a different cat who's never seen. Perhaps she's a mass murderer cat who collects tails the way the Judge collects scalps in Blood Meridian or Buffalo Bill collects skin in Silence of the Lambs! And there's plenty of evidence that she's a psychopath! She unzips her fur only to have another coat of fur underneath her fur, did she literally skin another cat!?!?! She then sings her number with singing mice with human faces that are clearly children but who also have human hands. And then she displays her army of scaled down cockroaches that she's trained to be a Busby Berkeley chorus line, a few of which she eats during the production, and so badly do these cockroaches suffer from Stockholm Syndrome that none of them recoil in horror but imperviously maintain their march formation! And this is, somehow, considered a charming number. 

Then there's the Rum Tum Tugger song, sold by Jason Derulo with the maximum sex appeal a man can give while dressed in a cat suit. To state the obvious, Jason Derulo is a decent looking man, but not even a young Brando could sell a mid-song admiring look and comment upon his handsomeness in the mirror while he's DRESSED LIKE A CAT. As horrific as Rebel Wilson's song is, I wonder if this song is still moreso. At another point Derulo seductively dances with Francesca Hayward, who clearly is a ballet dancer among her many other talents unfortunately exhibited nowhere else to the cinema-going public but here; he lifts her leg up to his head and comes within an eighth of an inch of sucking on her toes.  At one point later in the movie he emerges from a trashcan with two female cats.   Later in the song, Mr. Derulo literally exclaims MILK! which signals that all the Cats ought pile into an establishment literally named 'MILK BAR', where nothing but milk is served onto a plate from a tap, and toward the end of the song, Jason Derulo literally pours the milk tap into the face of one of the female cats, in what one youtube critic called with absolute validity: 'A MILK FACIAL!' The catwomen fawn on him as though he could go to bed with four at a time, but that's probably inadvisable, because apparently Mr. Derulo's natural bulge was so visible through the costume that the CGI department had him neutered... where there should be a bulge there's nothing but a curve.... Derulo apparently was fond enough of his natural bulge that he tried to call out the Cats CGI for their obviously Stalinist act of artistic censorship.

This movie shows just how sad Jennifer Hudson's character is not by recounting any of her backstory, really ever, except that she once had a couple dates with McCavity. Everybody has romantic regrets... but rather than demonstrate more about why Grizabella the glamor cat is a Jellicle outcast, this movie develops an extreme fixation on Jennifer Hudson's snot; lovingly trickling down her feline brail lips. God bless this performer, she sings her huge feline heart out. It might be an amazing performance, except that then you realize that she's singing this with fur and cat ears and whiskers and who could EVER take this seriously?

There is not a single cat pun that Cats misses. It must have taken a month of brainstorming. The culprits are, of course, the comedians, James Cordon and Rebel Wilson.... This movie... has James Corden... throwing up from overeating THREE TIMES! And this is considered part of his charm. It also has James Cordon eating leftovers from every trash can in central London like a feline George Costanza! I also believe three times is the number Cordon and Rebel Wilson get hit between them in the groin, though it may in fact be four, as though Tom Hooper knew that we wouldn't find the trashcan to the groin remotely funny the first two times, so that by failing more spectacularly with each attempt - the unfunniness itself becomes funny. and if that was the director's gambit, he was absolutely right! At one point there's a bottle of champagne poured into Cordon's mouth which he laps with his tongue, and yet the spigot of CGI champagne LITERALLY STOPS MID-AIR before it hits his mouth!

And then there are the twin 'cat burglar cats,' Mongo Jerry, and Rumble Teaser. Chaotic neutral characters, neither good nor villainous, who simply break into a house, go right up to the dinner table, and use the three minutes of their song to SMEAR THEIR ASSHOLES ON THE PLATES!

We then are treated to precisely where Idris Elba kidnaps all the cats to, a barge in the middle of the Thames river. Why there? Who the fuck knows?! We just have to go with it. A great and underrated British actor, Ray Winstone, plays McCavity's henchman, Growltiger, who deserves so much better than his only song to be interrupted by MORE James Corden gags.  

Setups exist all through the movie with all the invention of: 'WHO IS THIS CHARACTER?' Followed by the song! There are all kinds of group incantation of poetic verse, because apparently cats exist in a hive mind. And somehow the outsider cat Victoria KNOWS THE WORDS TO THE INCANTATIONS IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT SHE'S NEVER MET ANY OF THEM! And though each cat has three individual names they chant the verse of the cat's three names as though they are a single, beehive-or-borg-like entity. Listen to this for just a moment  (up to 0:24) IF THEY'RE CHANTING AS A GROUP WHY DO THEY REFER TO THEMSELVES AS 'I'?!?!?!?!?

And then there is poor Judy Dench, draped in a fur coat that is exactly the same hew as her fur, so I can only assume that at some point when she'd put on a little weight she'd skinned herself yet somehow grew her fur back. Dame Judi plays what seems to be the Prime Minister of the Jellicle Cats, Old Deuteronomy, who is introduced in a song whose rhymes do not entirely rhyme, and one cannot quite blame Cats's famous lyricist, Tim Rice, for this problem because he was stuck with the daunting challenge of finding rhymes for 'Deuteronomy.' Then, some more group chants, which exist while we find Ian McKellen hamming his inner cat, he's sometimes in these group scenes, sometimes not, depending on which days they could afford him, and mid-chant, intoning in his most thespianly voice: "Meow Meow MEOOOOWWWWW!"

And then... there is... the Jellicle ball, when the Jellicle moon so puts every cat into a pagan-like trance that they dance a Feline Rite of Spring, except that the music is, of course, Andrew Lloyd Webber synth. At the end of it, a theatrical audience would naturally emit a gale force of applause. But film has no such luxury, so we merely hear the winded breath of the dancers, who sound like they've all partaken of yet another exhausting orgy. The breathing was so vivid, dear listener, that I swear I could smell the 'BO' in the theater. 

And now we get to Ian McKellen's song, as Gus, the theater cat. Even more than Dame Judy, Sir Ian clearly takes this very, very, seriously. And bless him, the greatest King Lear ever caught on film makes all kinds of thespian meows and purrs and caterwauls, he even laps water out of a bowl with his tongue while standing on two legs. Outside of the song, half his lines in this movie are so overacted that they cant be understood. But the true piece du resistance is right at the end of this song, the moment of this movie that truly made me cry-laugh. The cat audience so appreciates McKellan's performance that they don't cheer with applause or bravos or even woos, rather, a hundred cats all wail rawaawawwwwrr! That is the moment when I realized I wasn't just seeing a typical terrible movie. This is a once in a generation movie! The kind of failure that can only be created by geniuses. 

And then comes Skimbelshank the railway cat, and in some ways it's the best of all the numbers, frenetic as a train, actual momentum, relatively clever lyrics, even a relatively complex rhythm in the bridge, the only problem is that when the Cats come to the railroad, they are suddenly one third their size, no larger than rats in relation to the rails. 

And finally, we come to Taylor Swift, the alleged star of the show if one believed the billing. Reclining in a chez longe made to look like a golden moon, and sprinkling what is literally EXPLODING CAT NIP on all the Jellicle cats who are literally tranced and brainwashed into temporarily becoming Taylor Swift dancers. Taylor sings not of herself, but of McCavity, who somehow does not have much song of his own, but this song doesn't really tell us much about McCavity either. We still have no idea who McCavity is or why the other cats find him so terrifying.  So if we never learn who McCavity is, what hope have we to learn who T-Swift's cat is either? All we know is that Taylor Swift's cat cleavage is, for whatever reason, massive and generously areolaed, except in close-up shot, where nipples completely vanish, and yet again begs the question: WHY DO THESE CATS HAVE TWO NIPPLES?!?

We finally get to the 'weenie' or 'MacGuffin' of the whole thing. McCavity kidnapped all the other competing cats so that he will win the Jellicle Ball, some criminal mastermind this guy...  The annual Jellicle Ball determines which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer. What is the Heaviside Layer you ask?.....

Don't...

And when Old Deuteronomy doesn't choose McCavity, he vanishes her to the same barge to which all the other solo cats disapparated and McCavity makes 'Deuteronomy' walk the plank...

And yet, a full five minutes later, when it comes time for Magical Mr. Mestopheles to apparate her back, she is yet alive and not even wet, perhaps she finagled her way out of walking the plank to its edge, but we shall never find out how. Magical Mr. Mestopheles is apparently clever enough to transport cats from the middle of the Thames to somewhere around Leicester Square, but is he really clever enough to effect BODILY RESURRECTION FROM A MILE AWAY? Not to mention, over the course of HIS song Mr. Mestopheles sings about how he's black from the top of his ears to the tip of his tail, and all the while HE'S CLEARLY MOSTLY WHITE! Not to mention the problems of continuity shots - there's one shot where a Cat is holding a hat in her hand, only to cut to a side shot where she's holding the SAME HAT IN HER MOUTH! Not to mention yet again the issue of Jason Derulo's musical hamminess. While everybody is singing "Oh, well I never was there ever, a cat so clever as Magical Mr. Mestopheles," he literally goes off on his own falsetto solo in the middle of a unison chorus... After the reappearance of Old Deuteronomy, Mr. Mestophelees literally makes all the cards and instruments and flowers in the room float through the air as he flies though it. What a moment of triumph...

Finally, we return to Jennifer Hudson's snot. What does Memories have to do with the rest of Cats?... Well... What does any song in this movie have to do with any other? After four experiences in the theater, I have absolutely no idea what Memories is about. Traditionally, the point of music theater songs is that they can't just exist on their own, they have to move the plot forward or else they halt the plot completely. BUT WHAT PLOT DOES CATS HAVE?!? And then, of course in the middle of the song there's six of (THX)

So inevitably Jennifer Hudson's outcast cat is the Jellicle Choice. Why? Because she can sing loud. She makes her way to the hot-air balloon to ascend to the Heaviside layer. So what is the reward that Idris Elba and James Corden and Rebel Wilson and Ian McKellen sought so fervently? It is, very simply, TO BE THE VICTIM OF A PAGAN SACRIFICE!!! Jennifer Hudson ascends to the Heaviside Layer to be reborn, the moment before the movie ends, she disappears in a twinkle of light, presumably in the same moment when she suffocates from the lack of oxygen in the Earth's upper atmosphere. 

But not before Judi Dench imparts a FIVE MINUTE homily to the audience about how to address a cat atop one of the lions of Trafalgar Square. The moral of this story: (original cast recording of 'a cat is not a dog'). Which is then repeated at blazing fortissimo by feline Nuremberg. ('a cat is not a dog').

This movie is so bad that it is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It could only be made by a great director, and Tom Hooper is a truly great director. Not of movies per se, but of TV miniseries there's hardly anyone better in the world, His most famous movie is The King's Speech, which is a respectable movie in the stuffy tradition of undeserving Best Picture winners as I'm sure many of you myriads of listeners know, but his masterpiece is John Adams, a seven-episode HBO recreation of Colonial America that so far as I know is an unsurpassable rendering of Colonial American life. Whether in John Adams or in his ersatz-Shakespearean retelling of the loves of Queen Elizabeth I, Hooper's television is in the best cinematic tradition of extremely expressionist portrayals of history,  like Amadeus, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Andrei Rublev, Paths of Glory, The Seventh Seal, Ran and Rashamon, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Is Hooper's TV really that good to compete with the best of Herzog and Kurosawa? Well, very nearly, and were he to do a TV miniseries every two years he might even produce something that gets to the very highest echelon of cinematic art! In both John Adams and Elizabeth, the costumes and stories are very real approximations, but the filming is so dynamic and modern that you cannot ever think this any stuffy recreation for comfortable people. Hooper's television is jarring in manners we never think of a costume drama.

So why the fuck is he making musicals?  I have no idea except to say Long may he continue making them! Whether Les Mis or Cats, and one day it's worth doing a podcast on the terror that is Hooper's rendering of the Les Miserables musical, these are terrible musical movies in the best tradition of The Music Lovers and Lisztomania, Rocky Horror and Repo: The Genetic Opera, Cannibal: The Musical and Xanadu. All these movies are the opposite of good, but they're all worth seeing, and the only difference is that Hooper was given a budget of NEARLY A HUNDRED MILLIONS DOLLARS! Hooper should be given at least a billion dollars to make ten more musicals like Cats! LET'S SEE HOW MANY PEOPLE HE CAN OFFEND WITH MISS SAIGON! LET HIM RUIN EVERY BABY BOOMER CHILDHOOD WITH A REMAKE OF THE SOUND OF MUSIC! LET HIM MAKE THE GRATUITOUSLY SEXUALIZED DISNEY REMAKES WE ALL KNOW COULD EASILY BE MADE FROM THEM!  Because Cats is one of the worst movies ever directed, ever produced, ever seen. May we have a hundred more like it!