Tennstedt's Elektra (!!!!)

 

Here it is... the only Elektra I've ever heard that convinces me this is a serious piece of art and not just Strauss creating another moneymaking scandal for an audience he had contempt for. Sound sucks, still better than Carlos Kleiber's...

My preferred Elektra is simply not to listen... but if I must - Elektra is 1/3rd atonality, 1/3rd Mendelssohn, and 1/3rd Hollywood. It is a kind of cheap B-movie of an opera. Most of my preferred Elektra listening is not anybody else's. My favorite studio recording has always been Barenboim - which nobody likes except me. It flies by in an extremely un-Barenboim like manner, with an extra-atonality that makes it sound like Schoenberg. My Strauss maximizes all the obnoxious noises - every one of which is a middle finger to the pomposity of the Wagner crowd who took him up as heir to their savior. Strauss the joker is so far preferable to Strauss the philosopher.

Carlos Kleiber's sound is even worse than Tennstedt's. He fundamentally goes for the same atonal scherzo approach as Barenboim, but it's so sensationalized that it's much more Korngold than Schoenberg. Beecham and Steinberg both have much of that 'scherzo capriccioso character,' but Solti is just big dumb entertainment - this most famous of Elektras is a Vincent Price creeper of an opera - made into a cinema for the ears that inevitably makes you long for the real thing.... is it entertaining? Of course. Is it a serious artistic endeavor? Don't be insulting and just listen to Birgit Nilsson cackling maniacally through the reverb until the most stunning orchestral interlude Strauss ever wrote is completely subsumed by stupid laughing (or is it Regina Resnik? I always forget who's who in this opera... not that it matters when you're listening int the background....) . That recording is the best possible evidence that Strauss created this opera with complete cynicism. As for Karl Bohm, I generally have very little use for him... Karajan live is obviously explosive, but as is his way, he's also a bit wooden. Sawallisch and Bchkov are both objectively great, and I'm always glad to hear them rather than Solti or but they're Elektra as Brahms, and I just find an approach so loving creepy for such a bloody piece of music. Believe it or not, I still haven't listened to Mitropoulos or Jochum....

But this... it is ecstatic in a completely different way from what we're accustomed. Straussians will find it impossibly Mahlerian, but I'm no Straussian. It is slower than we're used to, and in that Mahlerian way, it almost sounds prayerful, like the sacred rite Aeschylus intended in which we are told truths too important to convey through any medium but the stage. Through the bad sound is ecstatic forebodding, a prediction of 20th century doom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEI_W9wD4jg

ET: Almanac

 Escape: 

Alexander Ivanovich was returning home along a prospect running parallel to the Neva. A light flew by; the Neva opened up from under the arch of the Winter Canal; on the little arched bridge he again noticed the same shadow. 

Alexander Ivanovich was returning to his wretched habitation, to sit in solitude and to keep track of the life of the sow bugs. He had left that morning to escape the crowling sow bugs. Alexander Ivanovich's observations had led him to the thought that peace at night depends on how you spend the day. You bring home with you what you have experienced on the streets, in squalid restaurants, in tearooms. 

Then what was he returning home with?

His experiences dragged after him, like a tail invisible to the eye; Alexander Ivanovich experienced the experiences in reverse order, as they retreated behind his own back. It seemed to him that his back had opened up. Out of this back, as out of a door, something like the body of a giant reared and prepared to fling itself out of him; the experiences of today's twenty-four hours. 

Alexander Ivanovich was thinking that he had but to return home and the events of the last twenty-four hours would come crashing through the door. 

He left the glittering bridge behind him.

Beyond the bridge, against the background of St. Isaac's, a crag rose out of the murk. Extending a heavy, patinated hand, the enigmatic Horseman loomed, the horse flung out two hooves above the shaggy fur hat of the Palace grenadier, and the grenadier's shaggy fur hat swayed beneath the hooves. 

A shadow concealed the enormous face of the Horseman. A palm cut into the moonlit air. 

From that fecund time when the metallic Horseman had galloped hither, when he had flung his steed upon the Finnish granite, Russia was divided in two. Divided in two as well were the destinies of the fatherland. Suffering and weeping, Russia was divided in two, until the final hour. 

Russia, you are like a steed! Your two front hooves have leaped far off into the darkness, into the void, while your two rear hooves are firmly implanted in the granite soil. 

Do you want to separate yourself from the rock that holds you, as some of your mad sons have separated themselves from the soil? Do you too want to separate yourself from the rock that holds you, bridleless, suspended in air, and then plunge down into the chaos of waters? Or, could it be that you want to hurdle through the air, cleaving the mists, to disappear in the clouds along with your sons? Or having reared up, have you, oh Russia, fallen deep into thought for long years in the face of the awesome fate that has cast you here, amidst this gloomy north, where even the sunset itself lasts many hours, where time itself in turn pitches now into frosty night, now into diurnal radiance? Or will you, taking fright at the leap, again set down your hooves and, snorting, now out of control, carry off the great Horseman, out of these illusory lands into the depths of plain-flat spaces?

May this not come to pass!

Once it has soared up on its hind legs, measuring the air with its eyes, the bronze steed will not set down its hooves. There will be a leap across history. Great shall be the turmoil. The earth shall be cleft. The very mountains shall be thrown down by the cataclysmic earthquake, and because of that native earthquake our native plains will everywhere come forth humped. Nizhny, Vladimir, and Uglich will find themselves on humps. 

As for Petersburg, it will sink. 

In those days all the peoples of the earth will rush forth from their dwelling places. Great will be the strife, strife the like of which has never been seen in this world. The yellow hordes of Asians will set forth from their age-old abodes and will encrimson the fields of Europe in oceans of blood. There will be, oh yes, there will--Tushima! There will be--a new Kalka!

Kulikovo Field, I await you!

And on that day the final sun will arise in radiance over my native land. Oh Sun, if you do not rise, then, oh Sun, the shores of Europe will sink beneath the heavy Mongol heel, and foam will curl over these shores. Earthborn creatures once more will sink into the depths of the oceans, into chaos, primordial and long-forgotten. 

Arise, oh Sun!  

*        *        *

A turquoise gap swept across the sky, while a blot of burning phosphorous flew to meet it through the storm clouds and was unexpectedly transformed into a brightly shining crescent moon. Everything flared up: the waters, chimneys, granite, the two goddesses above the arch, the roof of the four-story house; and for an instant the cupola of St. Isaac's appeared illumined; and the bronze laurel wreath flared; and the lights on the islands went out one by one. In the middle of the Neva an indistinct vessel turned into a fishing schooner; on the captain's bridge there glowed what even could have been the pipe of a blue-nosed bosun, in a fur hat with ear-flaps, or the small bright lantern of a sailor on watch. 

At this point human destinies were distinctly illuminated for Alexander Ivanovich. He could perceive; what would be, what was never to be. Thus all became clear, but he was afraid to glance into his own destiny. He stood shaken. 

And the moon cut into a cloud. . . . 

Again raggedy arms and misting strands began scudding madly. A blot of phosphorous shone dimly and indistinctly. 

A deafening, inhuman roar! Headlights gleaming, an automobile, belching kerosine, hurtled from under the arch toward the river, and yellow, Mongol mugs cut across the square. 

Andrei Bely - Petersburg

Shipway's Alpensinfonie

 

It used to be that there were only three truly great Alpensinfonien: the composer's, who could not possibly convey the full power with his Nazi-era sound. Dmitri Mitropoulos, who did it stunningly in his all too short European honeymoon after New York, and Rudolf Kempe. Kempe does not send me into ecstacies the way he does many connoisseurs, transparent textures do very little for me if they're an end in themselves... but Kempe just has a natural way about Strauss that works. Karajan? Well, it's literally Alpensinfonie from the POV of the mountain...

There are lots of decent recordings, not too many great ones. It's even screwed up by greats like Jansons, Blomstedt, and Bychkov. Kempe obviously is great in Alpensinfonie. Until recently, the only other truly great recordings were really just Haitink,, Rafael FDB, and maybe Solti. But now....

Well, since 2000, it's been more played than ever before, and oh my, so many greats who've taken up Mitropoulos's challenge. Even Welser-Most, a great Straussian, is magnificent in Munich. And then there are great recordings by youngsters Francois-Xavier Roth, Markus Stenz, Vladimir Jurowski, a great live recording from Fabio Luisi at the Proms, and oldsters like David Zinman in Zurich, Marek Janowski in Pittsburgh, and even Vladimir Ashkenazy has a pretty wonderful performance from Prague, and Ashkenazy can't conduct his way out of a paper bag. Haitink remade it in London to wonderful, Mahlerian effect, and yeah... Thielemann live in Salzburg is pretty great too (grrrrr...).

But there are two that are truly magnificent on a level beyond, and they're exact opposites. One is the Polish conductor, Kazimierz Kord, who conducts just about the quickest performance anybody ever heard. It's how Carlos Kleiber would have done it - full of diaphonous texture and virtuoso bravado. The other is nearly the slowest, by poor Frank Shipway, who was finally getting attention near 80 when he died in a car accident. Shipway should have been the great British romantic of his era - we should have as much of him doing Mahler and Strauss and Bruckner as we have of Charles Mackerras doing Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Kord has gotten fantastic press, but Shipway's Alpensinfonie got quite a drubbing in some quarters. They don't know what they're talking about. This is real romanticism, in which you follow the writer into the strangest possible places. The passion is there in the extraverted passages, but I'm sure what most critics particularly hated was how much he slowed up in the slow, introverted passages, which contain some of the most suspenseful, refulgent, purely strange pieces of musicmaking in the world, and only Shipway with his extra time gives it their full due. This is music straight out of the 2nd movement of the Pastoral or the third of the Symphonie Fantastique, if you're not risking boredom in the chase for new colors and expressive devices, you're blunting the impact of the piece.

Listen to those glowing overtones in the strings, listen to all those careful balances between the strings and the winds, listen to all those special string slides and wind 'grells', this is what it means to create a uniquely powerful vision of a uniquely powerful work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZev0g1lIo

A Plea to Baltimore

 Before I go tomorrow (Sunday) at 3 for the first subscription concert of the season, I'm going to make a plea to people in Baltimore: go to the Symphony. You'll inevitably want to go more than once. Don't do it because I need company, do it because you will never have more fun at a social event of any type than you will at the BSO, and because your city desperately needs you to go. It's completely a win/win.

You will love them, and your $25 ticket will keep one of the most important institutions in the city afloat. The Symphony is the only chance the city gets to bring in the most affluent suburban dollars. So many small businesses depend on the symphony from restaurants to antique stores to book stores to gas stations. But the people who come from the suburbs for the symphony are dying out, and as crime goes up again, curious younger generations don't want to take what they wrongly think would be a risk. The BSO's plight is a demonstration of how people are, once again, bailing on the city of Baltimore. We are already, no matter what the assurances, in danger of losing the Orioles, we can't lose both the Orioles and the BSO. The city will literally never recover.

You are literally being asked to do your civic duty by having fun. Nothing in the world is an experience like hearing a great live orchestra, and the Baltimore Symphony is one of the greatest in the country. It is literally the exact opposite of the experience you think it is - there is no reason to hear orchestral music except that it's a miracle of invention - designed to do nothing but give listeners pleasure and morale. If we lose it, we lose something just as crucial to our city as any team that plays in Camden Yards.

Putin Must Go NOW (but not for the reason you think)

 Putin's endgame is coming into view more and more, and I keep saying it even if nobody believes me. The only reason for going into Ukraine that makes sense, literally the only one, is to ruin the world economy, and we're getting closer and closer to exactly that. 1/3rd of the world's wheat comes from around Ukraine. 1/3rd less wheat? 1/3rd of the world wonders if it will have a next meal. Even if everybody always gets their next meal, the worries drive the prices of food through the roof. When food gets more expensive, the value of currency goes down, and down, and down, interest rates go up, products cease to be bought, products cease to be made, products cease to be shipped... Economics is the only sane reason to launch this war, literally the only one, and as decrepit as Putin looks, and as insane as his propaganda makes him seem, you cannot tell anyone that he has lost his sanity completely.

I may be the only person in the world who believes it, but if Putin is dying, then this is Putin's final gambit in a generation long blitzkrieg of behind the scenes misdirection and manipulation, and it may be his masterpiece. Putin never wanted Russia to conquer the world militarily, he wanted Russia to take the world through intelligence, and in the age of Trump and Brexit, he looked as though he almost succeeded. All it took was a little internet malfeasance to swing a couple hundred thousand voters in the wrong direction, and the biggest worldwide crisis since WWII was created.

Then came COVID, the ultimate destabilizing event. But once everybody realizes how unstable their world is, they try at least to lurch toward stability - just as we did after 9/11, and just as after 9/11, the appearance of our government's reliability was short lived.

From certain vantages of December 2020, covid looked as though it just might have restabilized the West.... Biden was soon to be President, Boris Johnson was clearly floundering and the new Labour leader, Keir Starmer, was and remains damn electable. Merkel was capping an historically great tenure in Germany, and Covid forced world cooperation to administer vaccines.

Everybody knew that this was all just a temporary mirage, but nobody knew from which direction the new misdirections would come. Though ultimately, everybody knew it had to come from one of two places.... Kyiv, or Taiwan....

We have two years until the next Presidential election. Even though 2/3rds of the country is desperate to not elect Trump, nobody can agree on who instead. if Trump himself seems more unelectable than ever, he's come back from just as bad, and even if he doesn't, Ron DeSantis is clearly palatable to many Republicans while in some ways running to Trump's right. Currently, there is no Democratic alternative looking viable yet, not even Biden. Germany is in political transition - there's a very good reason Putin chose the exact moment he did for the invasion, and it was because it was right as Merkel left office and the next German chancellor would have to prove their competence. Macron received a second term as French president by pure luck, and finds France as ungovernable as every French president has. Liz Truss in Britain is entirely new, but she is known for her divisive rhetoric, and all she has to do is be a divisive enough Prime Minister to enrage Labourites and a younger version of Jeremy Corbyn could easily be re-ascendant.

Putin knows all this, and what he is buying Russia is time. If he can put the world economy into freefall just in time for the next US and UK elections, what will be blamed is US leadership, and the entire foundation of liberal democracy for which the US stands. However well or ill the US lives up to its image, the only way to pass into something better than our current incarnation of liberal democracy is through a long period where any sort of liberality is threatened by dictatorship all around the world.

It is very easy to blame the person in charge for not being able to control situations where nothing can be controlled. As always, there are people blaming the US for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as though Vladimir Putin simply decided to become a supervillain because he was provoked into it. They say that if the US had not expanded NATO and gone into Russia's sphere of influence, there would be no Russian invasion of Ukraine - this, of course, goes against the last 350 years of Russian history with all its attempts to expand its territory into mainland Europe, but they don't care.... It's much easier to blame liberals who might concede some of your points than it is to blame authoritarians who would concede none of them.

NATO is what's held the world in peace and what continues to keep the world from getting destroyed. Full stop. Had NATO not been expanded to the Baltics and former Soviet satellites, Russia would have long since invaded Ukraine, then they'd have eaten up the Baltics, then Poland, then Finland, then the Balkans, then Hungary, then the Czech Republic, and now we'd be right back to exactly where we were from 1945-1990.

People say that the US backed Russia into a totalitarian relapse, ignoring that Russia was never democratic, and there has never been a single Russian head of state with democratic aims - not a one, not even Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin could have done it, but instead he fired a series of Prime Ministers, composed his inner circle almost completely of former KGB, and let them feast on the Russian industries and recreate themselves as oligarchs with monopolies. A number of Yeltsin's Prime Ministers tried to push through democratic reforms - Yeltsin fired them all.

How can NATO be responsible for Russia's aggression when, in 1997, Russia signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 which guaranteed unlimited NATO expansion? Putin's security may be threatened by its neighbors, but Russia's is not, and NATO has never threatened Russia's security by anything but the soft power of putting economic prosperity right at Russia's doorstep. If Russia were truly threatened by NATO,'s power, they could have always joined it.

Russia and the USSR reaffirmed its commitment to allowing foreign countries to choose their own foreign policies with treaties in 1945 (UN Charter), 1975 (Helsinki), 1990 (Paris), and 1997. One can blame the US for turning their own back on just as many treaties, but to blame the US disproportionately to blaming Russia for the same is basically the same as saying you hate your friends more than your enemies.

We are waiting for Putin to die. It may be in a month, it may be in ten years. But basically, Putin needs to last one more year to effect the change he wants. I still very much doubt he's going to use nukes, but he doesn't have to. Conquest of Ukraine gains him nothing, arresting the world's supply chain gains him everything, and he will go out with his objective reached - the toppling of any dream of a liberal democratic world order ushered in by the US. Every major Western country would stand on the precipice of being a repressive government of gangsters who use their economies as a pig troth to engorge a few thousand people at the top, paying their populations subsistence wages, letting them see only what propaganda tells them is going on in the world. Those who would show their populations more objective truths would be imprisoned, killed, or intimidated into silence. More prosperous countries nearby who stand in their way can always be invaded until their economies drop dead.

If Putin doesn't become a figure of history by this time next year, we have to help him.

Young Jansons

 

I realize that by sharing Mariss Jansons this is yet another final straw in which we 'jump the shark,' but, relatively speaking, this is 'young Jansons' whom I heard do the Symphonie Fantastique for the first time when I was 14, literally a month or two before his heart attack, and wondered how nobody had noticed a conductor of these capabilities. It was literally a mystical experience of the type you can only have when under the spell of adolescent hormones. David Zinman was of course excellent, but Zinman was fun. You heard Zinman to enjoy yourself, and while you certainly heard all kinds of electricity in Zinman, real otherworldly transcendence wasn't something you heard in his concerts. Temirkanov, already a guest in those years, was also great, and he certainly brought us to hidden realms, but Temirkanov was like a force of nature who couldn't or wouldn't rein in his worst instincts. Everything went in and out of focus, the precision, the balance; the same performance could have moments that were transcendent and comically bad.

I had never heard music like Jansons before, I never knew all that music could be before this. By the end of the first C-minor wind phrase, I had not a single thought in my head but the music, and every note thereafter seemed to pull me in closer and closer to some hidden realm, detail added atop detail. This was the moment I realized all that music could be, and that a childhood enthusiasm was no mere freak accident.

I used to despair of hearing Jansons records that bring us to that realm, which I used to hear all the time in the Pittsburgh Symphony broadcasts that I would make a point of never missing, at least in the year before I went to boarding school (more on that another time...). Every radio broadcast I heard had that mesmeric quality, and great as he usually was in later years, there was still something he lost when he finally went to the 'big-leagues' at 60. It was with those smaller orchestras - Pittsburgh, Oslo, Cardiff, London Philharmonic, that he shaped everything, detail by detail, into better performances than you'd ever hear from more prestigious organizations. He made these ensembles better than they ever thought they could be, and when you have orchestras unaccustomed to this level of demand - let alone from a conductor this polite, they're willing to give far more heart than the 'superstar' orchestras who supposedly prize their 'sound' the way a hawk does her eggs (meanwhile diluting their unique sounds to water...).

Mahler was not Jansons at his best, neither was the Richard Strauss at which he supposedly excelled every maestro on earth. Jansons's best was usually the repertoire in which people took him for granted. In Mahler and Strauss, not every note is necessary. But in Jansons's very best performances that I've heard (Mozart Requiem, Beethoven 6 and 7, Schubert 9, Brahms 1, Bruckner 6 and 9, Mussorgsky Songs and Dances of Death, all sorts of Tchaikovsky, Dvorak 5, Sibelius 2 and 5, Stravinsky Firebird (1919), Shostakovich 7 and 8 (why is there an emoji here and why can't I get rid of it?) . You knew exactly why every note was there. This was a musician who cared so much that it sounded as though we didn't just hear every note, but heard the reason for every note explained.

In my experience, Jansons's Mahler is a bit of a crosspurposes affair. I heard him do two Mahler symphonies live (5 and 7). 5 was great in its way, but the Bavarians sounded like they were playing Lohengrin - everything was just so heavy and bombastic. 7 was... frankly kind of terrible. I was shocked. Perhaps I was sitting in the wrong part of Carnegie Hall. Everything was in place, but so rigid that there was no sense he understood anything Mahler's mongrelschwung of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I only remember two Jansons/Mahler broadcasts being as transcendent as the rest of what I remember - one was his very first Pittsburgh Symphony broadcast of Mahler 1, the other was a Mahler 6 at the Proms with the Concertgebouw. They both were exactly what I've always remembered him being in everything else.

But then there's his Mahler 7 recordings, and they are all so different, both from that performance and from each other. The Bavarian recording was kind of trashed. I think large parts of it are magnificent, but it's a performance with a different conception than I remember. This performance from 25 years earlier is still more different yet again, 7 minutes slower than in Munich. It is as though he knew he didn't understand it and kept trying to get it right.

And yet, here, nearer to his (our) beginning, is the Jansons I remember, who seems to operate from a place beyond personality. There is no division in his musicmaking between passion and precision, classicism and romanticism, physicality and spirituality. Every detail comes through, and through it we see how every detail relates to every other detail. There are other approaches, like Kubelik and Monteux, who show how every detail can simply flow into the next in uninterrupted momentum. But Jansons is the ultimate in his approach, showing how every detail can stand on its own in perfect relation to each other, but why every detail is needed.

Jansons never quite nailed the opening, but then we get to the middle three movements, at much slower than average tempi (not Klemperer slow), and he is transcendence itself - again and again finding the exact right balances and colors - every strand of Mahler's labyrinthine counterpoint is heard, and not just heard, but meaningful. Jansons is the transcendent experience everybody said Celibidache was. Celi, with all his Buddhist renunciation bullshit, claimed he was renouncing the self, but the paws of his egoism were on every note. Jansons? You heard every detail, and live, it filled the hall just as people said Celi did, but what was Jansons's musical personality other than to say that it was simply music?

As for the finale? Jansons nearly accomplishes a singular feat of threading the needle and making us follow its organization from first to last. So much formal relationship is clarified. Does that miss the point? Well... maybe. All I can say is that I emerged from listening to this performance last night gasping. Mahler 7 has a number of good performances, but not many great ones. I don't know how many of them truly leave me truly in awe, but that's how I felt here.

I wanted this to be about a quarter this long.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bXh4x86peY

Trying to Make That List More Specific... (a beginning)

The Second Circle: (slight artistic cracks, maybe a few or some confusing spots, or dull, or irritating, that wear on multiple experiences, or perhaps it's lacking a little bit of humor, or pathos, but ultimately just as enchanting in total effect as the first circle)

Steven Spielberg: ET (movie, 1982)

Charles Ives: Symphony no. 4 (classical music, 1916)

Edward Hopper: Nighthawks (painting, 1942)

Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings (blues, 1937-39)

Robert Altman: Nashville (movie, 1975)

Louis Armstrong All-Stars: 1947 Town Hall Concert (big band jazz)

Ernst Lubitsch: To Be or Not To Be (movie, 1942)

Kara Walker: D*rk*town Rebellion (art wall installation, 2001)

George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (classical/jazz hybrid, 1924)

Nathaniel West: Miss Lonelyhearts (novel, 1933)

Charlie Smalls &.William F. Brown: The Wiz (musical, 1974)

George Lucas: American Graffiti (movie, 1973)

Shel Silverstein: The Giving Tree (children's book/poem/illustrations, 1964)

Jacob Lawrence: The Great Migration (paintings, 1940-41)

August Wilson: The Piano Lesson (play, 1987)

Cole Porter: Songbook (jazz/musical hybrid, 1928-58)

Judd Apatow & Paul Feig: Freaks and Geeks (TV show, 1999-2000)

Walt Disney: Bambi (animated movie, 1945)

Howlin' Wolf: His Best (blues, 1951-75)

Chuck Berry: The Definitive Collection (rock, 1955-1972?)

Casi Lemmons: Eve's Bayou (movie, 1997)

Edward Hopper: Automat (painting, 1927)

Ernst Lubitsch: To Be or Not To Be (movie, 1942)

Henry Cowell: Symphony no. 11 "The Seven Rituals of Music" (classical orchestra, 1954)

The Carter Family: Can The Circle Be Unbroken (country/roots, 1927-56)

Duke Ellington: Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (big band jazz, 1956)

The Best of the Staples Singers (soul/gospel, 1952-2000?)

Robert Altman: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (movie, 1971)

Maya Lin: Vietnam Memorial Wall (architecture, 1982)

Milos Forman: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (movie, 1975)

Henry James: A Portrait of a Lady (novel, 1881)

Ray Charles: A 25th Anniversary in Show Business Salute to Ray Charles (soul, 1946-71)

Martin Scorsese: Goodfellas (movie, 1990)

Steven Spielberg: Schindler's List (movie, 1993)

Philip Roth: The Human Stain (novel, 1999)

Shel Silverstein - Where the Sidewalk Ends (children's book of poems, 1974)

Robert Penn Warren: All the King's Men (novel, 1946)

Honorable Mention: Best of Sesame Street (don't know if there's any collection for the adult stuff...)

The First Circle (Perfect, artistic miracles, not a wasted moment, moving, socially relevant, funny, showing both the darkness of human nature and the goodness in humans too, and both with compassion and contempt):

Orson Welles: Citizen Kane (movie, 1941)

Matt Groening & Company: Simpsons Seasons 1-8 (animated TV, 1989-97)

Leonard Bernstein & Jerome Robbins: West Side Story (musical, 1957)

Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Seven (1920s jazz)

Stephen Sondheim: Into the Woods (musical, 1986)

Walt Disney: Pinocchio (animated movie, 1941)

Jim Henson & Company: The Muppet Show (1970s TV)

Gershwin Songbook (1920s/30s classical/jazz hybrid)

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (novel, 1925)

Spike Lee: Do the Right Thing (movie, 1989)

Henry James: Washington Square (novel, 1880)

Bill Watterson: Calvin and Hobbes (newspaper comic, 1985-1995)

Kara Walker: Gone (wall art installation, 1994)

Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio (short stories, 1919)

Thornton Wilder: Our Town (play, 1938)

The Very Best of Otis Redding (1961-67)

Maurice Sendak: Where the WIld Things Are (children's book, 1963)

Scott Joplin: Rags (1900's/10s ragtime)

Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question (classical music, 1908)

Matthew Weiner: Mad Men (TV Show, 2007-2015)

Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun (play, 1961)

FW Murnau: Sunrise (silent movie, 1927)

Stephen Sondheim: Company (musical, 1970)

Victor Fleming, Harold Arlen & Johnny Mercer: The Wizard of Oz (movie musical, 1939)

WC Handy - Complete Recordings (big band blues, 1917-1939)

Stephen Sondheim and Jules Stein: Gypsy (musical, 1959)

Rudolfo Anaya: Bless Me, Ultima (novel, 1972)

Howard Hawks: His Girl Friday (movie, 1940)

Frederick Law Olmstead: Central Park, New York (architecture, 1858)

The Essential Jimmie Rodgers (country music, 1927-33)

Duke Ellington: Reminiscing in Tempo (big band jazz, 1935)

Charles Schultz: Peanuts - the 50's and 60's years (newspaper comic)

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme (jazz combo, 1965)

Ernst Lubitsch: Trouble in Paradise (movie, 1932)

Willa Cather: My Antonia (novel, 1918)

Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1950-85)

EB White: Charlotte's Web (young adult novel, 1952)

Peter Bogdanovich: The Last Picture Show (movie, 1971)

Henry Roth: Call It Sleep (novel, 1934)

Richard Linklater: Dazed and Confused (movie, 1993)

Henry Cowell: Solo Piano Music (solo classical, 1912-1965)

Charles Ives: Three Places in New England (orchestral classical, 1911-14)

John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces (novel, 1980)

JD Salinger: Catcher in the Rye (novel, 1951)

Grant Wood: American Gothic (painting, 1930)

Ernie Barnes: The Sugar Shack (painting, 1976)

Charles Ives: Central Park in the Dark (classical orchestral, 1906)

Robin Williams: An Evening at the Met (comedy, 1988)

Woody Allen: Radio Days (movie, 1987) (sorry...)

Walt Disney Studios: Beauty and the Beast (animated movie, 1991)

Robert Frost: A Boy's Will and North of Boston (poetry collections, 1913 and 1914)

Alison Bechdel: Funhome (graphic novel, 2006)

John Frankenheimer: The Manchurian Candidate (movie, 1962)

Tenessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie (play, 1944)

Pixar: WALL-E (animated movie, 2008)

Alan Lomax and Harry Smith: Anthology of American Folk Music (1952)

Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner: West Side Story (movie, 2021)

George Balanchine: The Nutcracker (choreography, 1954)

About That List from Yesterday...

Obviously, a list like the one I mostly made yesterday is a steamingly hot pile of bullshit. Nobody can possibly get to everything, and in my desire to include everything so that as few people feel their favorites are left out as possible, there are books half-or-even quarter consumed, shows third-watched, movies I went for a fifteen-minute trip to the bathroom in the middle, music I talked to friends while listening to, and still... there's plenty to piss everybody off.

I increased the list from 120 to nearly 300 and keep finding new things I forgot to put in. One wants to be inclusive and include things which celebrate more artists and types of people than just the ones whose stories are traditionally most told - not because of political fashions, which (I won't censor myself) are 50% just fashion and much will seem dangerously silly to our grandchildren; but because what's the worth of art if it can't communicate something cathartic to a range of people wider than the demographic which created it?

But you can't put whipped cream on baloney and expect that it will taste like something worth eating to everybody but a small demographic. And even the dishes many find worth consuming are not palatable to everybody. It should be obvious when you make a list like this that the point is to say:

1. These are just my personal preferences.

2. My personal preferences are the correct ones....

Posterity may have a very different opinion from mine, and I frankly don't give a shit. The point is not to be 'right', nobody 'gets it right', the arts aren't science. The point is to say what you think is right, what you think is valuable, what you think is worthwhile for other people to experience.

I have a much too easy job, and I spend way too much of my life consuming this stuff. I may have wasted my life with it because all this is time I rather could have spent creating it. It's an enormous privilege among privileges, and however difficult I find the rest of my life, this is the great joy of my life. And perhaps it's precisely this joyful privilege makes me an inadequate consumer of it. Perhaps it warps my perspective about what's essential in it, and perhaps it yet again goes to show how out of touch the most avid consumers are with what new generations newly deem the most essential things to communicate - which always differ generation to generation according to the social concerns of this particular moment.

You want to be inclusive, but there are just those books and movies you don't see the value in even if everybody else does. If there's a lack of women and non-cisgender people on this list, it's not because they are in any way inferior creators (just having to put that proviso in makes me feel ridiculous), it's precisely because misogyny and transphobia is that deep and rife; and to my inconveniently obnoxious view, artificially boosting the numbers in cultural history is to dishonor the extent of that erasure, make it seem a smaller problem than it clearly was, and cause moderates to wonder why there's any urgency to promote diverse voices at all. Black men, gay men, may have been shut out of the mainstream, but at least they were permitted creative avenues. But women were widely shut out of every single avenue, and the disproportionate amount we suddenly tout the number of women through history who did find an avenue just goes to show how few women there really were before very recently, and how urgent it is to promote creative women in our own day. But I refuse to include the stuff I don't like. If this list has any integrity at all, you can't include the things you don't see the value in. Please don't ask me where are Alice Walker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Steinbeck, Ava DuVernay, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Jack Kerouac, Audre Lorde, Kurt Vonnegut, Octavia Butler, etc. etc. You're just going to get mad... and we all might lose enjoyment of company we value. And for that matter, no Hemingway either, no Norman Mailer, barely any John Wayne, barely any John Huston, no Raymond Carver, because if anybody proves the notion of toxic masculinity correct.... that shit's just boring...

Furthermore, there are all those sacred cows whose beef tastes rotten... Nobody can tell me Moby Dick is a great book and have me believe it - I've eaten every square inch of that whale, some parts of it four times, and however great individual passages are, half of Moby Dick is a technical manual for whaling, an experience little different than reading all the instructions for Windows XP. Nobody can tell me that Edith Wharton, that antisemitic pseudo-Victorian prig, can make the world care about her exhaustive documentations of every single trend among the 1900 dull New York rich WASP set. Of course characters find that world constricting - so do the readers, and she secretly seems to love all those arbitrary, pedantic societal rules and trends she claims to hate. Nobody can convince me they enjoy a Stanley Kubrick movie after Paths of Glory in 1957. Kubrick is pure masochism that everybody claims to love as though they should pat themselves on the back for enduring him - in Kubrick there is no joy, no humanity, no compassion. It's antisocial filmmaking done by a human machine, to be watched by machines after the rest of us are extinct. Also, **** both Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. And then there's the beatniks, the Beats, The Beats, The Fucking Beats....

Furthermore, I decided to not include all sorts of artists I love who spent a huge part of their lives abroad and whose sensibility belongs probably more to another nationality than ours: no Ernst Lubitsch - a top 5 filmmaker of all time IMneverHO, no Billy Wilder or FW Murnau, no Fritz Lang or Jean Renoir (my pick for the greatest of all filmmakers...), no TS Eliot (I'm not even sure he'd make it anyway) or Ezra Pound (fascist filth... even before Mussolini...), no Stravinsky or Schoenberg, no Beatles or great Canadian songwriters, no Chagall or Mondrian, no Auden or Thomas Mann, no Polanski or Forman, not even my favorite writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer ... etc. etc. etc.

And obviously, we're not going to tread the genre fiction ground again...

--------------------

What I value is things that express the worldview that life is a very dark thing, full of banality and boredom in the best of moments, full of suffering and malice in the worst. Life is a thing from whose darkness there is absolutely no escape. And yet, at the same time, communicates the paradox that life is something worth loving, valuing, and celebrating. There's no escape from life, and I generally don't value things that want to move us to action, because action has as much a chance of ruining lives as indolence does. Life is just something we're trapped in, but we're trapped in life together, and in spite of all the suffering, all the boredom, there is dignity, there is fun, there is friendship and love, there is

This is probably the beginning of a larger essay. If I ever get to it...

More From the Most Underrated Opera Conductor

 

Silvio Varviso doing Siegfried in Stockholm. Obviously there's no such thing as 'greatest' in anything, but Varviso, who as far as I know rarely ever did concert hall conducting, had to have been as great as any opera conductor there's ever been, and flew his entire career under the radar - simply appearing in all the world's great houses and getting ensembles to play for dear life. The tempi were almost always above average, but with rubato that never, ever got in the way of the piece's momentum. Everything under him moves as freely as an Audi, and the pacing always seems to crackle.

There are some musicians whose playing is so full of personality and character, and yet you can't tell the personality of the musicians in question. When you hear Furtwangler or Toscanini or Klemperer, you can picture exactly the kind of person who makes that sort of music. And nearly all the giants of the next generation: Karajan, Bernstein, Solti, Celibidache, Giulini - it's impossible to hear them and not picture the sort of person makes that kind of music. And yet, before his Columbia period, you couldn't possibly tell the kind of person Bruno Walter was, or Pierre Monteux. Walter would talk about the importance in a conductor of 'selfless ego', and even if his performances were full of overwhelming personality, you had no idea what the personality was. Fritz Busch was the same way, Rafael Kubelik, and perhaps more than anybody else in the history of recorded opera: Ferenc Fricsay.

But there isn't a single Varviso broadcast without that Fricsay quality, where whoever is leading the music simply inhabits it like occult telepathy. The composer doesn't matter, he gets the essentials of every major opera composer and brings out their flavor almost impeccably. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p71jowZOPz8

More on Josef Hofmann

A Beethoven 4 unlike any other in the recorded era. The 'very serious' crowd who flocked to Marlboro would hate this, but one has to figure that Hofmann's way of doing Beethoven goes back to Anton Rubinstein, who by contemporary accounts was the first pianist to truly reveal all 32 of Beethoven in all their glory. In it's way, this may be a far more serious Beethoven than all the austerity in the world.

Hofmann was clearly past his prime here (and potentially drunk...) but this is musicianship completely different from any other, and potentially a higher form of it. Listen to what Hofmann does every time there is an unexpected new tonality, Hofmann doesn't just bring out the fundamental bass which arrives us there, he brings out the entire transitional line that leads to the change. Every dissonance on which the symphonic form depends is highlighted. All sorts of inner lines are brought out, even clarified. He handbreaks all the time, but never indiscriminantly, rather to highlight a formal transition, or a diminished chord, or 9th or suspension so that there is no missing the dissonance. This, surely, is how audiences became spellbound by this music in the first place - making them into musiclovers who understand the language of symphonic form without it feeling like an impenetrable foreign language. Hofmann has clearly analyzed the contrapuntal and harmonic implications of every single note in relation to every other. The knowledge on command here is a miracle to behold. If this is a spontaneous interpretation, done differently every night on impulse as people always said Hofmann did, it is all the more miraculous.

This approach is probably better for more dramatic, self-evidently virtuoso Beethoven: I'm certainly not gonna throw out Kempff, Kraus, Firkusny, Moravec... Many passages (hardly all) seem to lack taht luminous, compassionate humanity that bespeak the ultimate musical humanism. For all his skill and genius, Hofmann was still a virtuoso out to inflame rather than console. But this is no mere exhibitionism or finger jockery, this is what romantic music making does best. Just as classicism only means something when married to romantic warmth, romanticism only means something when allied to the shrewdest intelligence, and the intelligence here is of an encyclopedic depth. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6gX7Q_ZFS4 

I doubt there has ever been a Chopin player greater than Hofmann, even before the recorded era (@#$% Cortot and his giant dump of Vichysoisse on the keys). Rubinstein was obviously great, but honestly... Rubinstein's greatest contribution is his Brahms. He is quite possibly the greatest Brahms player of all time - I remember growing up with a liner notes of him playing Brahms PC2 (still the best I've ever heard that work) in which he said that the music of Brahms is even closer to him than Chopin. I believe it. Rubinstein, great as he was, stageham as he was, was too austere a player for the ultimate in Chopin. Chopin is a populist, his music is a little bit flamboyant and not entirely sincere. It's the music of the 19th century cool kids. It's not entirely a pose, the overripe, decadent presence of death and sex in Chopin is very real - and often, like in Wagner, they seem to be dancing together. But nevertheless, Chopin's music sometimes tells lies about what love is, it tells lies about the benefits of national pride and militarism, it tells lies about the wonders of glamour. So Chopin in performance should be just a little bit neon and chintzy, and the ostentation of Hofmann is the ultimate in Chopin because it's backed by such great, ingenious, natural musical sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crG_sRwDsu0