Third Vision of Levi Charlap - Much More - 2/3rdsish

1648

Begins with 22 year old Shabbetai Zevi delivering a speech in his town of Smyrna (Izmir, Turkey). He declares that when Moshiach comes, heaven will be a wedding that never ends as Hashem marries the Jewish people. He leads a group of Smyrna Jews in song. Maybe 'Od Neshama' or 'Lavala Blanca Nina.' Meanwhile passes around a special mystical pipe (obviously opium). Everyone begins to dance and sing. 

There is a discussion among two friends of his rich, blind father, Mordechai Zevi, about Zevi's prophets from the war between Turks and the Venitian state, and about whether his son Shabbetai is a holy man or a madman, and the coming of the year 1666 when the Messiah is supposed to finally come. They discuss his recent divorce from his wife, the most beautiful Jewess in Smyrna, whom he drove crazy with his obsessive cleanliness and refusal to sleep with her. One of them takes that as a sign of his moral purity and 'cleanness', the other takes it as a sign that he's 'what the Ashkenazim call 'meshuggeh.' One says 'he may yet be the Messiah.' The other says 'he'll certainly convince himself he is.'

The first friend goes to a shul where people are discussing the holy work of Shabbetai Zevi, and the friend suggests that their Shabbetai may be the Messiah. He wins over many of them, perhaps still high on opium, who then sing their way to Shabbetai's house. At first, Shabbetai is aghast, and angrily silences them from such blasphemies. But they manage to convince him because he was born on Tisha b'Av. They remind him of his Talmudic prowess, having exceeded every Rabbi in Smyrna by the time he was fifteen. They remind him of how he was spotted three hersah out (15 km) in the Meditteranean Sea, and then swam back to shore. They remind him of his mania for cleanliness and perhaps that is indicative of the state of his spirit. Surely he is destined for greater things.  Shabbetai has a dissociative panic attack, which spurs in him an horrific vision of the scale of the Chmielnicki massacres - which they all know are impending on some scale but not that it would be on the scale it was, all of which they are given conformation the next day. This convinces him and his followers that he is in fact Moshiach. 

1661: Cairo

Shabbetai and his followers, having been exiled from years and subsequently exiled from Salonica (Thessaloniki, Greece). Having remarried, he sends his new wife out to the market, then whips himself to flaying until his body is completely bloody and scarred, and cries out in moaning. His neighbor barges in, a local Coptic Abouna (priest), who claims he had to interfere because he has never heard him whip himself and cry aloud so much. Shabbetai tells the Abouna to hold him in the manner of a pieta. He confesses has secretly lost his faith and thought of following embracing Christianity, he does not know why he whipped himself so hard except that he wanted to punish himself out of guilt and also wanted to experience what Jesus might have experienced on the cross. But the Abouna, being a true priest, tells him not to convert because so many followers are dependent on him, spiritually and financially, and might kill themselves out of grief for their loss of their leader, leaving their children orphans, or perhaps they'd kill their children - 'isn't killing children something your people are known for?'

He recounts his strange history to the Abouna. How he was eventually thrown out of Smyrna because no matter how  could not stop himself from shouting "Jehovah" all the time in front of people, including shul and during the high holidays. How he was out of Constantinople because he celebrated sukkot, pesach and shavuot in the same week. "Why distribute holiness throughout the year when you can reach a state of greater holiness by celebrating them all together? You heard what happened in Ukraine. If Moshiach doesn't come soon, something worse could happen and all the Ashkenazi Jews could disappear overnight from Central Europe as though they were never there. We can't wait for Moshiach any longer, we need him now!" He explains the belief in Tikkun Olam, not in the modern sense but in the mystical kabbalistic sense that there is a rift in the universe that must be bridged, and until it is the world will continue to everywhere be a place where flourishes violence and filth. He inveighs against the resistance of Jews to progress, to their resistance to science and philosophy (he tells about Spinoza's cherem in Amsterdam), their resistance to the liberation of women, the pointlessness of its hundreds of laws, the senseless suffering and stubbornness in the face of a world that persecutes us for clinging to outmoded norms. He begins to doubt that this god of ours even means well by his people, and chose us above all nations merely to suffer for his pleasure. 

The Abouna recounts once again about the trials of Yeshua (Jesus) at the stations of the cross and how these are not unlike Shabbetai's afflictions, and how Jesus could have departed from his mission and not served on behalf of a god who bore him merely so he could die for his father's glory, but who are we to doubt the ways of God when Jesus trusted in God's greater wisdom? Satan offered him dominion over all the earth, but Jesus refused, "the Lord your God only shall you worship, and him alone shall you serve."  While the Abouna clearly meant that Jesus's lesson is there for all of mankind to benefit, Shabbetai interprets the Abouna's lesson it as meaning his tribulations on the way to becoming Messiah. As Shabbetai sings another of his songs, the Abouna wipes, washes, and cleans the bloody floor for him. 

1662:

The arrival of his third wife, Sarah, who announces herself at a service. Orphaned in the Chmielnicki massacre of 1648-49. Supposedly brought up in Amsterdam. Tells of her orphaning in the Chmielnicki massacre, escaping the grave. Then entering  the service of a Polish nobleman whose son and heir constantly abuses her. She then escapes and goes to a convent for protection where she converts to Christianity, but she has a vision of her deceased father, who magically transports her to the Jewish cemetary of Amsterdam, the most fertile branch of Jewish life. But he tells her that she is to be the bride of Moshiach, and from the ports of Amsterdam she must sail the seas of the world to find her bashert (destined one). She, like every Jew across the earth, hears tell of Shabbetai Zevi, and now upon arrival in Cairo learns that he was again recently divorced, so she will only leave the men's section of synagogue when they are pronounced married. Shabbetai needs no convincing. 

The wedding night. He confesses his problems he has been married twice before, and she surprises him by saying she understands the problems between men and wife because she two had been married twice before. Rather than shame, Shabbetai responds with joy because there is a passage in Hoshea stating that Moshiach will marry a woman of ill repute. On their wedding night, she becomes the first wife to extract from him that he can experience pleasure only by beating himself, and so she obbliges to beat him.  

After a year of happy marriage, he has a vision of god in Cairo which convinces him he can fly. He climbs to the top of a sphinx, jumps and breaks his arm and a leg. Crosses the Sinai Desert to see Nathan of Gaza, an apothecary, about his meshuggas, (his obviously bipolar personality disorder). As he lies down on a bed as though at an old-school psychiatrist's office, Shabbetai again recounts his whole history. But this time with the added component:

Shabbetai confesses that he can only achieve gratification through 'the filth of self-mortification', and therefore must spend hours every day swimming in the sea to reclaim his purity. Furthermore, 'as a man who loves all people' he cannot help but be indiscriminate in his attractions, and as he has always believed that the old laws of the Torah are antiquated, he removes all injunctions 'as I have identified them as the source of the world's rifts and disrepair, but I can never consumate the removal of any such taboos myself.'  He knows that many people have come to him not out of any great belief in him but because of his removal of their limitations, "We have taken all fast days and made them into feast days. We have families who eat pork every shabbos. I have married brothers to sisters, I have married men to three women, I have married men to men and next month shall marry woman to woman, I have blessed temporary adulterous and pre-marital unions. The shabbos after every wedding I require every bride to come to my study and tell me of her first encounter with her husband. I have deliberately touched the intimate areas of thousands of my flock, it is even part of our priestly benediction - but only over the clothes because were I to truly touch them, I would become unclean and must clean myself again in the sea." 

 At the end of the confession, Nathan takes a pinch of a white powder through his nose, and claims that he had a prophecy that Shabbetai Zevi would come to him - which was in fact to be predicated by the extent of the letters they exchanged. Nathan says that while many suffer from his illness there is no true cure, and therefore Hashem only gives it to people to be a blessing. He offers him two drugs, one is the ancient Greek treatment for melancholia - plant called hypericum perforatum 'which frankly doesn't work very often,' the other is to truly discover whether he is the Moshiach by ingesting nasally a cocoa plant from South America which Nathan will ground into a powder and make his spirit powerful enough to speak to God himself. Of course, the cocaine convinces Shabbetai Zevi that he's definitely Moshiach. After a night of cocaine, they go to daven in a Gaza shul the next morning. Nathan of Gaza falls publicly into an OD seizure in which he seems to speak in tongues, when he returns to consciousness, he takes this as proof that Shabbetai Zevi is Moshiach and that the whole synagogue should follow him back to Cairo. The shul carries Shabbetai off on their shoulders. 

Rosh HaShanah 1663: 

It's the second day of Rosh Hashana and Shabbetai is at no synagogue and nowhere to be found. Nathan is dreading that Shabbetai is having a manic episode and may turn up anywhere, dead or alive. Sarah runs to Nathan to tell him that he's having a paranoid episode because they still have no children, and while no follower seems concerned, Shabbetai is deeply afraid, as he did not consumate the marriage with his first two wives. "How can a Moshiach not consumate his own marriage?!" They talk him down by concocting a solution: Shabbetai will address rumors by pronouncing a get (divorce) from Sarah at the musaf of Rosh Hashana. Since Rosh Hashana goes straight into Shabbos, Shabbetai will re-marry Sarah at his Friday night service, 'consumate the marriage'  so that on Shabbos morning he can produce a bloody sheet from his marriage bed. But the blood on the bed will in fact be his. 

Nathan of Gaza, now taking massive amounts of cocaine regularly, has vision of a book called The Visions of Reb Avraham HaChasid, which he in fact wrote, about visions which correspond to the description of Shabbetai Zevi - which in fact Nathan of Gaza wrote but believed he was inspired by the voice of Reb Avraham HaChasid, who is in fact his deceased grandfather. 

1665

Shabbetai Zevi, completely addicted to cocaine, arrives in Jerusalem with Nathan of Gaza and various followers, climbs the Damascus Gate and immediately proclaims himself their King. He begins by going to the Wailing Wall, holding a ceremony in which he makes all his favorites into Kings of various countries and heads of tribes. Announces that the Asarah b'Tevet fast is banned (commemorating destruction of Jerusalem). He makes his speech again about Tikkun Olam and why Moshiach is needed right now. 

Elder rabbis of Jerusalem confer. They decide to censure Shabbetai Zevi on account of his rash behavior, but no further punishment than that because this is an extremely learned man, and therefore, who knows, may be Moshiach. 

Various ambassadors write to their home countries about this man in Jerusalem who proclaims himself the Messiah, these bulletin/memos are leaked, and the rumors of this Messiah's powers redouble in every country. Many Jews and gentiles believed that there were towns elsewherewhere people no longer die, along with rumors that the lost Ten Tribes of Israel will now emerge after twenty-five hundred years of hiding and declare war on all the great powers of the world. This prompts antisemitic persecution, which prompts Jews non-committal about Shabbetai Zevi to leave their homes and make pilgrimages to Jerusalem to join Shabbetai Zevi, which creates still more paranoia and antisemitic persecution in foreign countries, which prompts still more Jews to leave.  (no idea how to dramatize it yet)

Yom Kippur Night before Kol Nidre, 1665:

Shabbetai, now in Jerusalem with at least ten thousand followers possibly many more, has finally received a shipment of the Turkish coffee he so missed in Cairo, and introduces it to his most important followers at the synagogue dinner as they prepare to daven for 24 hours without a break. Their movement, having already banned all the fast days including Yom Kippur, earns whispers of criticism of one synagogue. So Shabbetai and his followers, obviously still coked up in addition to severely caffeinated, shows up at the synagogue with his followers who begin chanting outside. The synagogue locks the door, so Shabbetai gets an axe and chops down the synagogue door. He proclaims himself the new shul rabbi and insults every member of the synagogue. He uses this moment to put the old Torah back ("You're lucky I don't take an axe to your torah."), and tells everyone that the printed bookbound Chumash is the new Torah. He then calls Sarah up to the Torah, and for the next aliyah, all the other women of the synagogue, many of whom have to be dragged and pushed to the Torah screaming against their will. He then sings a Castillian love song and says that this is now part of the weekly Shabbat liturgy. He ends by proclaiming himself with a new name, "Amirah" acronym for 'our master and king may his glory be elevated.' 

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

Need to figure out climax in Constantinople 1666

A Quick Word about Dostoevsky

 I've struggled with Dostoevsky, but with both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, hearing it as an audiobook has helped enormously. Crime and Punishment is such a hothouse that its a book I've both warmed to and found 'a bit much' and manipulative. But the more I go back to it, the more I read it, the more of a miracle it gets. It's as perfect a work of fiction as Madame Bovary or Eugene Onegin. Manipulative it might be, but on the terms of its own world, there's not a single wasted word in it. Whereas Karamazov is a collection of towering parts, a loose baggy monster with scenes and ideas that have nothing to do with each other yet thrown together, Crime and Punishment is one idea pursued from beginning to end. Marmeladov's opening monologue contains the germ of the whole novel, and it spools out like a thread from beginning to end as perfectly as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Like The Sopranos, it takes as its foundation a simple crime genre fiction that expands to wrestle the most profound questions on earth. To anybody who is suffering either from sin or being sinned against, it is a balm that tells us that something out there has heard our plights.

Always try again with the great books that don't speak to you yet. When you eventually have the life experience for it, you'll get them, and the fact that you're already familiar with them will make them speak to you that much more quickly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6F2GlrSVt8

ONL: Third Vision of Levi Charlap - Beginning

 1648

Begins with 22 year old Shabbetai Zevi delivering a speech in his town of Smyrna (Izmir, Turkey) that anticipates the Ba'al Shem Tov. He declares that when Moshiach comes, heaven will be a wedding that never ends as Hashem marries the Jewish people.  He leads a group of Smyrna Jews in song. Maybe 'Od Neshama' or 'Lavala Blanca Nina.' Meanwhile passes around a special mystical pipe (obviously opium). Everyone begins to dance and sing. 

There is a discussion among two friends of his rich, blind father, Mordechai Zevi, about Zevi's prophets from the war between Turks and the Venitian state, and about whether his son Shabbetai is a holy man or a madman, and the coming of the year 1666 when the Messiah is supposed to finally come. They discuss his recent divorce from his wife, the most beautiful Jewess in Smyrna, whom he drove crazy with his obsessive cleanliness and refusal to sleep with her. One of them takes that as a sign of his moral purity and 'cleanness', the other takes it as a sign that he's 'what the Ashkenazim call 'meshuggeh.' One says 'he may yet be the Messiah.' The other says 'he'll certainly convince himself he is.'

The first friend goes to a shul where people are discussing the holy work of Shabbetai Zevi, and the friend suggests that their Shabbetai may be the Messiah. He wins over many of them, perhaps still high on opium, who then sing their way to Shabbetai's house. At first, Shabbetai is aghast, and angrily silences them from such blasphemies. But they manage to convince him by some convoluted Talmudical argument which spurs in him an horrific vision of the Chmielnicki massacres, of which they are given conformation the next day. This convinces him and his followers that he is in fact Moshiach. 

1661: Cairo

Shabbetai and his followers, having been exiled for nearly twenty years and subsequently exiled from Salonica (Thessaloniki, Greece). Having remarried, he sends his new wife out to the market, then whips himself to flaying until his body is completely bloody and scarred, and cries out in moaning. His neighbor barges in, a local Coptic Abouna (priest), who claims he had to interfere because he has never heard him whip himself and cry aloud so much. Shabbetai tells the Abouna to hold him in the manner of a pieta. He confesses has secretly lost his faith and thought of following embracing Christianity, he does not know why he whipped himself so hard except that he wanted to punish himself out of guilt and also wanted to experience what Jesus might have experienced on the cross. But the Abouna, being a true priest, tells him not to convert because so many followers are dependent on him, spiritually and financially, and might kill themselves out of grief for their loss of their leader, leaving their children orphans, or perhaps they'd kill their children. The Abouna tells him once again teaches him about the trials of Jesus before he became the Messiah. The Abouna meant that Jesus's lesson is there for all of mankind to benefit, but Shabbetai interprets the Abouna's lessons it as meaning his tribulations on the way to becoming Messiah. As Shabbetai sings another of his songs, the Abouna wipes, washes, and cleans the bloody floor for him. 

The Best Orchestral Pictures at an Exhbition (I don't believe it...)

Welp, I found a revelatory Pictures as close to ideal as there might ever be. I don't know why I'm surprised by the source, but I am. It's not with a particularly distinguished orchestra, and he was only 32 here!

I don't know how anybody else can possibly be the greatest living conductor. I just don't know. This is what Kirill Peternko would be if he relaxed, this is what Simon Rattle would be if he disciplined himself, it's what Manfred Honeck would be if he let go of the bombast, it's what Ivan Fischer would be if he allowed himself more drama. It's musicmaking so full of personality and insight, yet of the personality of the animating musician we have no idea.

A better orchestra would sound more organ-like in the first Promenade, but listen to how he gets it to sound like a church chorale. Listen to how he gets the glissandos in Gnomus to go before the beat so that you can hear them against the melody, listen to the gorgeously warm pianos of the Old Castle with winds perfectly balanced against the espressivo strings, listen to the glottals on the wind instruments in the Tullieries and how he gets the flute to play staccatos against the oboe's legato, listen to the perfect amount of rubato in the second subject - not too much, not too little. Listen to the crescendo in Bydlo building from the distance - paced neither too slow nor too fast, with instrumental details piling one-by-one to create the impression of sad people on a rickety cart. The chirping winds in the Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks that sound perfectly and ugily aviary at piano and top speed. The pomp of Samuel Goldenberg during the Two Jews section, and while the trumpet solo for Shmuyleh could use a bit more 'antisemitic obnoxiousness', the trumpeter actually plays the correct rhythm!!! The Market at Limoges is slower than usual, but we hear so much more detail than usual because it doesn't flash by in its usual whirr. Perhaps the one weakness is the understated Catacombs, which is insufficiently terrifying. To make its proper impact, Catacombs is about overtones, it imitates the echo one gets when shouting in caves, and yet Cum Mortois in Lingua Morta is the perfect mixture of tragic and creepy. And yet the understatement of Catacombs pays off with a spectacular Hut on Fowl's Legs full of fireworks (that bass drum...), with brass that play truly staccato and still you can hear the modal harmonies loud and clear, and perhaps the most characterful, creepy bassoon solo in the central section ever captured by record.

And then there's the Great Gate of Kiev (Kyiv). There is no finer rendition on disc - not bombast, but detail. Listen to the way Stenz subdues the beginning so that it can EXPLODE in the second statement. The perfect organ quietude of the second subject's modal chorale (what key is that chorale btw???), the perfect balanced bells and gong and percussion... it's not the loudest or most sentimental, but it is so perfectly Russian.

One can otherwise imagine a more Russian performance, a more French performance, a more virtuoso performance, but no version is more insightful, characterful, musical. Pay attention to regional, local orchestras. They know that they're not quite the world's best, so they work just as hard as the big ones, if not harder; and are far less cynical and far more willing to acceed to a great conductor's requests. This is music, pure music. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdNgCekkdoI&list=OLAK5uy_lf-08tmoZ-FMrJcqK4E-AaLg4YOuwA8Ik&index=2&fbclid=IwAR3J5Xm7Sci5MK4VAV_RC3IBR_YMT4BGmha4RlU4UzeAe34mLjq5kfPaqkI

ONL: Levi Charlap's Second Vision

 Brief comic play of the Rabinical court in Amsterdam discussing what is to be done about Spinoza, trying to understand Spinoza's philosophy, which they of course find incomprehensible, and therefore think a threat. Where there is the worst agonies somewhere in the Jewish world there is inevitably a golden age somewhere else that, thanks to paranoia acquired through millenia of trauma, Jews screw up. 

Ends with Spinoza in his study, perceiving yet again the souls of dead Jewish martyrs from Spain and Portugal, which he has seen his whole life, and mistakens as natural neurological emanations. 

ONL: Levi Charlap's First Vision

 Cain is Levi's guide through Jewish history, like Virgil to Dante. 

Chmielnicki Massacre - Levi Charlap's first vision

Begins with Chmielnicki speech in which he talks about Polish subjugation of Ukrainian stock and all its people, and how the Jews are responsible for it - should have a bit of the tone of Satan's speeches to the demons in Paradise Lost. 

'The Red Ribbon.' Open on thongs slung around the necks of Jewish and Catholic women by the Tartar partisans who are led through the streets as whores after being raped by the Tartar Cossacks, all of them smeared with blood and bruises, while the town men are coerced to throw things at their women for their infidelities. (perhaps here is where to include the cat episode...)

Then the attack on Nemirov, where a rich Jew who operated as the King's finance minister owned a castle/fortress and let in the 6000 Jews. It opens on their deliberation about whether to open the gates to let in their 'Catholic friends' to protect them from the Tartar/Cossack/Orthodox partisans, but the Cossacks were right behind the Catholics, who were threatened with massacre if they did not petition the Jews to be let into the fortress. The Cossacks immediately assail the gate, slaughter the 6000 Jews except the boys and young men, rape the Catholic women, give the young men a forced Orthodox conversion then kidnap them to become their soldiers. 

Then Tolczyn where there were 2000 Jews and 600 Catholics, including the Polish nobility. The Cossack forces, being incompetent, were severely depleted as Jews went out in night raids and killed their assailants in their sleep. Cossacks secretly convinced the Polish nobility that they wanted to kill only their true enemy, the Jews (come up with the way they communicate/negotiate with each other), and once they do it, they will withdraw from the town. The Polish nobles demanded the Jews surrender their arms, the Jews, knowing they've been betrayed, consider among themselves killing the Poles. The Tolczyn Rebbe pleaded with them not to do it, because if they did, Poland and all its Catholics would rise up against the entire Jewish population and slaughter them similarly in 'a holocaust.' 'We must martyr ourselves for the Jewish people.' The Jews then negotiated to surrender all their property to the Cossacks in exchange for their lives, and drew up a contract which every Jew signed, after which the Cossacks spring a demand that they convert to Orthodox Christianity, and only then would their lives be spared. The community deliberates and the entire community chooses death. The Cossacks leave ten Rabbis alive to extort ransoms from other Jewish communities, and the Rabbis must watch as the entire Tolczyn community is buried alive while the Catholics are forced to man the shovels. 

The town of Homel, where all roughly 1500 Jews are ordered strip naked in the cold and told to choose baptism or death, they all choose death, after which each man has a sword placed in his hand and is told to kill his family. Many of the corpses are raped. 

The town of Narol, where 45,000 people and 12,000 Jews are killed. Levi watches as surviving members of the town feed on the corpses of the dead. 

The town of Czremieniec where hundreds of children are rounded up, slaughtered and thrown to the dogs while parents are forced to watch. 

The town of Brody, mercantile center of 70% Jews, is ready to be martyred, and present themselves without resistance or protest, but Chmielnicki has ordered them to be spared so that they may be taxed at 99% to finance the continued Ukrainian revolution. 

Cain and Levi discuss the historical veracity of what they see - acknowledging the exaggerations of the legends and the further exaggerations of the vision, but also noting that there were massacres in 700 towns and still far more Jewish massacres in two later wars in the next twenty years, the historical record may itself be worse. 

Back in Tolczyn, in the middle of the night, the ten rabbis are allowed nightly escape through assurances to their guards that that the world's Jews would give them special remuneration. Every night they go to the mass grave of their Tolczyn flock, and the souls of the Tolczyn congregation explode from their grave. The women and children ascend to heaven, while the souls of the men fly toward Kyiv. 

At the Golden Gate of Kyiv, Chmielnicki receives Czar Alexis the Quietest, a meek Czar to whom the charismatic Chmielnicki presents to Czar Alexis a honeyed speech about how Ukrainians and Russians are natural brothers, how it is to Ukraine's honor to have Russia as a military ally, and the age of Polish dominance of Ukraine is over. They sign an agreement providing Russian aid to Ukrainian forces, and Chmielnicki privately assures his high council that in the coming time, Ukraine can easily control Russia. Around the Golden Gate of Kyiv, the souls of the dead from Tolczyn fly around it.  

Ukraine Hot Take

 There are going to be times when the temptation for a diplomatic solution to Ukraine is overwhelming, and it's going to seem like the progressive wing of the Dems are vindicated. Look at Putin's apologists on the Right and try not to fall for the same temptation.

We have no actual military presence in Ukraine and the Ukrainians are literally willing to fight to the death because of Putin's meddling to weaken their country. The very reason we are in the situation we're in is because of Putin's meddling in our own countries, and if Putin believes he can extract much of what he wants by continued force, there is no limit to what he or his successor demands next, nor is there limit to what Xi will demand, or whoever Putin's next collaborator will be to occupy the White House (and please face it, that's probably coming very soon).

Putin has literally compromised the ability of democracies around the world to remain democracies. A negotiated settlement is an acknowledgement that we're ok with that. I can understand believing in negotiating with Putin if you believe that we are still a democracy or that we never were, but if enough of you believe in either fiction, you are in for such a shock....

Diplomacy is a tool in a big toolbox, and with people operating in bad faith, it is only useable if backed with the threat of force. So many people who advocate diplomacy as the basic solution to problems abroad have no trouble with advocating violent resistance at home like the Left's own personal Bush administration. If you've been so shielded from threats abroad that you think diplomacy is the de facto solution to the world's problems, it's because you've been shielded from the realities of the world's violence by the threat of American force.

The baseline state of the world is neither peace nor war, it's conflict that has a chance of moving into either state. If you expect that we can create a peaceful world, you don't understand humans, you don't understand conflict, and you refuse to apply the standards to dictators abroad which you hold to Republicans at home - dictators who have already accomplished everything Republicans have merely set out to do.

Personal Hot Take of the Night

 As obviously 'real me' as social media Tucker is, he is nevertheless not the real Tucker. Social media Tucker is deliberately indiscreet about real Tucker because real Tucker fancies himself a writer, to the point that it's basically 'what he cares about,' and if writers are not read, they need to continually ask why. It's all too easy to write what you want, but whatever the subject, you are only read if you forego that desire, and develop a style as best you can that emphasizes the reader over you: direct observation, plain speech, and entertainment. After ten years of daily practice, he's clearly still not particularly good at any of the three... and seems to only be truly good in moments of anger. But you do what you can to get an audience. You write in a way that hopefully enlists people to care what you have to say. It's so much easier to get people to care when you say things that are controversial, particularly these days. If you don't care whether people like you, and few people care less than Tucker, you can do that all too easily. But the really good ones get people to care about complicated things, and he's still not good enough at that to get people to do that. These pages function as a laboratory of feedback, where Tucker can measure people's responses in quantity, quality, and intensity, until Tucker discovers a proven theory of how to write for people.

So onward, more writing till y'all do, and by then, maybe a book is ready.

Dvorak 7 - A Recording Survey - Still More

  Vaclav Talich/Czech Philharmonic - 'Present at the creation.' An orchestra almost literally created to play Dvorak. It's possible that Talich got even the slight deviations from the score from Dvorak himself, and if he didn't, it's still in a style Dvorak would have recognized. By our standards it's a very romantic reading, and if you'll permit a heresy I'll say that it's objectively a bit too much, but Talich almost always 'cuts with the grain' in a way that draws attention to the music's inherent detail rather than to the interpretation. Listeners would have to wait until Harnoncourt to hear a reading of the opening where you feel so many nature effects, and unlike Harnoncourt, Talich has the sense to speed up when things get more turbulent. All throughout makes just about everyone else seem thoughtless in this score he's clearly meditated on for his entire life. The only trouble is that I don't think Dvorak meant anything quite this romantic. Without the consistent rhythmic pulse of a dance, it feels too earnest for Dvorak. Nevertheless, when Talich resolves to dance in the Scherzo, nobody, not even Sejna or Mackerras, can possibly match this expression organic as a Pilsner. A

Sejna/Czech Philharmonic - Even more than Talich, this is the unmatched authenticity of the great Czech tradition. It goes almost exactly at Dvorak's specified metronome markings, with an unmatched feel for Dvorak's folk dance rhythms with absolutely perfect rubato that only exists in the obvious transitional bars of the structure. Other orchestras make Dvorak something gruff - the Czech Philharmonic makes Dvorak a 19th century Mozart - leavening even the biggest climaxes with levitating agility, velvet warmth and spiritual grace with textures vivid enough to eat. The only problem is that there is a level of extremes missing on both ends of the dynamic spectrum which dampens the excitement, and cannot just be explained away by the relatively mediocre mono sound, but rather, the drama is simply provided by the performance going at such lightning motion. This is thing of life, an evolving organism. Just listen to that clarinet wail in the last movement.... This is true music. A+

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt/NDR Symphony, Hamburg: Wow that's a lot of rubato.... A good faith effort by musically curious North German performers to recreate the Czech style. They make a lot of wonderful Czech noises in the winds and brass, and even if the Hamburg strings can't imitate the inimitable, they have a gemutlichkeit that is entirely in keeping with Dvorak's bittersweet spirit. These were always incredibly underrated musicians, but HSI does not make matters easy in the first two movements for them with his constantly yo-yo'ing pulse. Some of this is clearly a little beyond the orchestra's fingers, and surely they could have gotten the mic closer to the timpani and trombones who barely sound present. Clearly HSI heard what Talich did and wants to chase that air of authenticity when it would probably do him better to just follow the score. I expected something much more restrained and tasteful, but they are making a full court press for schmaltz. It's a very good faith effort from an orchestra that can't possibly have played this work often, but ultimately, this is more a credible impersonation from people who know their Viennese than the real music of a forgotten people. C+

Rafael Kubelik/Vienna Philharmonic - My dirty Dvorak secret. Kubelik is my favorite conductor, and yet I don't like most of his Dvorak. Kubelik is just too tolerant of imprecision and skewed balances for this composer whose every bar dances, a fact made worse by his recording a cycle with the Berlin Philharmonic - the world's least toe-tapping orchestra. Nevertheless (and I'm a minority of one here...) this is easily his best Dvorak 7, with rubato to capture every lyricism and every excitement - even if it's not nearly as natural as in his Mahler and Janacek. Even if Kubelik doesn't always keep them together, the understanding of the Viennese for Dvorak is far, far more innate than in Berlin. The scherzo is incredibly dirty, but it speaks pristine Czech. The Viennese have a bass heavy sound lacking in Prague that adds an entirely welcome darkness. Kubelik stretches the second movement around like Furtwanglerian clay, but the biggest problem, as always in Kubelik's performances, was in the finale. He plays it as a grim piece of romantic tone painting with a lot of rhetorical rubato, when the whole point is that it's a peppy march that houses grim content. Dvorak 7's rhythms smile while its harmonies frown. An experimental Dvorak 7 with interesting ideas, but ultimately, it just wasn't Kubelik's piece. Kubelik was never an 'Upper Case R' Romantic, but a romantic he very much was, and Dvorak was secretly a classicist. Generally speaking, Kubelik's greatest strengths were in grander composers than Dvorak, and even when Dvorak speaks grandly, he speaks with understatement. C-

John Barbirolli/Halle Orchestra - If it were purely an interpretation, if orchestral playing didn't matter, this would be without parallel. I don't know what makes Barbirolli's feel for Dvorak so instinctual and beyond the Mahler for which he's so much more famous, but Barbirolli's conception is just ideal here, and, contra his reputation, rarely overstates his case except in the glorious way he lets the strings emote in forte with maximum passion and vibrato. He works to elicit the most incredible dynamic and textural shading, leaves just enough rubato to let the overtones emit their special glow over the orchestra, and lets the pacing simply flow in a manner that never lets go of the ear. It's not like the playing is at all bad, but don't expect real refinements. The only real problem is the brass and particularly the trumpets, which is is as piercing and unbalanced as the rest of the orchestra is beautifully balanced. My guess is Barbirolli just couldn't do anything about it and gave up. Barbirolli turned the strings lack of technical acumen into a virtue, making their naturally dirty sound sound like folk fiddling. In a way, it all sounds like more like a village band than an orchestra, which is, perhaps, the most authentic sound of all. Interpretation: A++, Overall: A-

Pierre Monteux/London Symphony - I'm not one for Brahmsian Dvorak, but Monteux is Monteux. The LSO of those years was a crude instrument, but Monteux endows them with a sunlit Brahmsian glow which is entirely beyond the Czech Philharmonic's inestimably great capabilities. Monteux was 84 here, and here as everywhere he has no lack of vitality, with rubato all over the place so subtle you'd never notice if you weren't listening for it. The phrases simply rise and fall as though they were assembled with nature's fractals. There is so much gentleness and introspection which a less mature spirit could never find. I do wish Monteux would take a little less time basking in the beauty of the slow movement, but when the playing is this beautiful and overtone rich, you can forgive him. And just in case you think Monteux has lost a step, he explodes in the finale like a rocket at Cape Canaveral, and yet there's the same rubato, with the same knowledge of exactly how to apply it when the spirit changes to maximize lyricism, character, and excitement. There are times when I would rate this as the greatest ever performance, but there are just so many candidates. It's just another day at the office for a conductor who radiated such pure music that every performance is endowed with an ineffable spirituality.  A    

Constantin Silvestri/Vienna Philharmonic - You really never know what you're going to get with Silvestri. It amazes me that some critics who devalue all sorts of 'emotive' artists do not find Silvestri erratic. Silvestri defines erratic. In his way, Silvestri's romanticism was as willful as anyone's. Much of what Silvestri gave us was glorious, some is deliriously wrongheaded - this falls into group 2. On the one hand Vienna Philharmonic makes lovely singing sounds, on the other, they're completely uncoordinated. They do the best they can to respond to what is clearly an enormous number of demands from the front, but Silvestri demands so many things of them that he confuses the hell out of them and can't keep a lot of the thing together - particularly the opening. At any point before 2015, a conservatory orchestra with this level of imprecision would get reamed by its conductor. Of course, the highlight is the slow movement, which for its occasional oddities is absolutely beautiful in its overdone way - Rachmaninovian perhaps.... but for the most part, this performance is just mannered in a composer who does not tolerate mannerism as well as he looks amid an orchestra that cannot keep up with its conductor. Silvestri was notorious for demanding so much rehearsal that he'd refuse all kinds of engagements if they didn't give it to him, but this sounds like however much rehearsal he got he needed twice as much. There are such truly beautiful lyric things here, but so much of this performance just falls apart. The reason, fundamentally, is that Silvestri doesn't understand that this piece is not lyricism with manic interruptions of drama. The lyricism only truly works when put in a greater context, while Silvestri is trying to savor and illuminate every possible expressive nuance along the way. That sort of mannerism is impossible in such an unmannered composer like Dvorak.  D+

Karel Ancerl/Czech Philharmonic: A

Antal Dorati/London Symphony - Dorati, as so often, belies his reputation for aggression, and so does the LSO. Hardly any conductor goes to greater trouble to honor Dvorak's impossibly specific dynamic markings, and reminds us just how much of this work is soft and lyrical even as Dorati, as ever, provides us the full measure of drama. It is a darker vision, full both of visciousness and fragility. Whether at forte or piano, and at the many gradations upon the spectrum, the orchestral balances ('chording') are so exquisitely impeccable. Has any conductor ever thought this deeply about the analytic side of this symphony and made heard its many countermelodies, accompanying motifs, crossrhythms, odd textures? The sudden dramatic tempi changes in the first movement coda are an awkward misfire, but otherwise, what is on hand here is so exquisite. It never seems self-conscious because Dorati balances this fastidious lyricism with white hot rage in the dramatic passages. One of the most poetic Dvoraks ever set down, radiating a deeply unhappy spirit. A- 

George Szell/Cleveland Orchestra - A lot of people rate this the greatest Dvorak 7. The 2nd movement IS the greatest set down, with rubato that is.... well it's a revelation. Nobody mixes the pastoral and turbulence like Szell. The rest is not on such a level. The last movement is empty virtuosity that does not even feel exciting amid all that gruffness. It's generally a very aggressive performance that, sadly, has dull sound which doesn't even let its excitement stand on its own merits. It's certainly not bad, even amid the dull sound the clarity of the Clevelanders is always a marvel, but as great as alleged it isn't. B-

Leonard Bernstein/New York Philharmonic - Lenny just doesn't really get it. He loves the melody of course, but he doesn't get the irony between song and dance. One just has the sense Bernstein thinks this is a generic romantic work by an unspecified composer - full of big tunes and loud sounds, but subtlety was not exactly Lenny's thing. The more grandiloquent, the better he got, but winking intimacy like Dvorak? D

Suitner/Staatskapelle Berlin - The dirty secret of Dvorak is that Suitner made the best cycle, capturing Dvorak's mixture of song and dance better than any Slavic conductor. 7 is not the absolute highlight (5 and 8), the last movement is simply too slow and sober to capture its turbulence. But the mixture of linear clarity and warmth is so like the Czech Philharmonic, and Suitner makes absolutely clear that Dvorak is the great heir to the Mozart and Schubert he also conducts so well. B-

Istvan Kertesz/London Symphony -  John Culshaw's soundscapes never knew a staccato they couldn't accent, a pianissimo they couldn't bring up to mezzo-forte, a string warmth they couldn't endow with a metallic ring. Far be it for me to disagree with an angry mob about this performance, but this is not even the best LSO performance by a long shot. It's unfair to compare Kertesz with mature masters like Monteux or Dorati. Kertesz would have revisited this as an older man who learned more tricks of the trade, and this is just a rough draft for what would have come later, and I do mean rough... There is just something frenetic in the opening movement that's artificially dialed up to 11. Not even in the 7th is Dvorak meant to be this aggressive. I love Kertesz, particularly in Schubert, but this reflects a gifted young musician who still relied on raw blasts of noise and speed to do what knowledge should. The real interest is in the slightly below average tempo'd scherzo, where Kertesz does as a real musician does and finds dozens of contrapuntal details generally overlooked. The slow movement is rather wooden and eventless, and the last, the movement where the conductor should be firing all the torpedoes, is almost completely sober - like Mahler six's boring cousin. C- 

Carlo Maria Giulini/London Philharmonic - Once again, I don't like Brahmsian Dvorak, but of course, Giulini's gentle humanity makes it mostly work. Giulini is characteristically slow, and crucially does not let the bass or brass stint on the dramatic weight. Nevertheless, the prevailing spirit, as so often in CMG, is elegiac and glowing, with the most refulgent, overtone laden string sound you will ever hear in this work - including Monteux's LSO. It is particularly moving in the slow movement, too often forgotten but which is the crux of the whole work. It's impossible to overlook here, he stretches it to Brucknerian proportions, making the kinship with Bruckner 6 unmistakable. It's too self-consciously profound to be ideal, this is Giulini after all, but Giulini uses every instant of that extra time for extra weight and passion. Whether this is Dvorak or Brahms or Bruckner, it is so profoundly moving. The problem is, of course, in the later movements. Giulini never passes up an opportunity to sing and passes up every opportunity to dance. Getting Giulini to dance properly is about as likely as getting Pavarotti. No amount of beautiful orchestral glow in the trio can cover up the fact that this is a conductor who doesn't want to have fun. Giulini's romantic splendor is not a substitute for Dvorak's grim ironies. In Giulini, everything means exactly what it says it means. B

Witold Rowicki/London Symphony: B+

Kubelik/Berlin Philharmonic: A performance I despise where Kubelik proves himself a bit of a self-hating skoda. Dvorak 7 is not Wagner, and yet Kubelik plays him with the Berliners as pure Walkure. I just don't get this egregious lapse in judgement. It's dramatic, sure, but Dvorak 7 is not a statement of brooding tragedy. It even has a horrible wrong note at the finale's climax in the brass. I'm not listening to this again. D-

Colin Davis/Concertgebouw: There's nothing to say that the performance itself doesn't say better. It's the other sui generis performance, which captures Dvorak's turbulence as no one else does. The dynamic contrasts are enormous, the sound of the Concertgebouw always alternating between warmth and fury. No performance is as great at showing Dvorak's ironic mix of dance and rage. The Concertgebouw, ever one of the clearest orchestras, displays a very Czech incision, with staccatos that are absolutely together. Few scherzi 'cook' like this - like a jazz band taken wing. The second movement, so clearly recalling Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, has only felt this warm under Giulini. So intense is Davis's involvement that occasionally sections of the Concertgebouw a very little bit of trouble keeping up, but otherwise, it never gets better than this. A+

Rafael Kubelik/Bavarian Radio: C+

Levine/Chicago Symphony

Vaclav Neumann/Czech Philharmonic The Czech Philharmonic in so much Czech Philharmonicness you have to spell it Ceska (with vowels my keyboard doesn't access). Never has the orchestra sounded riper, piquanter(?), woodlandier,... whatever you want to call it. The only problem is that Vaclav Neumann is clearly as disengaged an interpreter as he is skilled an orchestra builder. There is a certain cynicism in a lot of latter day Czech Dvorak performances. It's just what's expected of them in every tour, and for the #1 Prague orchestra it sounds like a delivery vehicle for gorgeous execution bereft of much insight. You compare this with Sejna and Talich, and it's just autopilot. Like Kubelik, I think Neumann was a much better Mahler conductor. It can't be denied that they make lovely sounds, but this is your pro-forma Dvorak 7. Except for some beautifully eminent contrabassoon and double bass, there's no distinguishing feature except the beautiful particularities of Czech orchestral sound during the Soviet era - captured in more modern sound. I don't doubt that makes this performance perfect in the ears of some, but some of us need a personality amid all the beautiful machinery. If Karajan or Ormandy were Czech, they'd lead a performance like this. I think I listened to the digital one but I'm not putting myself through this twice. C 

Christoph von Dohnanyi/Cleveland Orchestra: Look, I'm president of the Dohnanyi fanclub. At this point I think he and Mariss Jansons are the greatest conductors I ever heard live, and it's a sad commentary that people find him heartless. Fastidious he may be, but it's because he's one of those rare musicians who organizes music on a quantum level, and unlike, say, George Szell, consistently uses his analytical abilities to overlay his musicmaking with sincere expression. Emotionally, he is on a such a more sophisticated, specific level than most 'expressive' conductors. Dohnanyi is musicmaking for adults. This isn't just a conductor who thinks about where to play piano or crescendo, but which instruments, the exact sort of bowstroke of the strings and breath from the winds, and how every one of them will affect the music forty minutes later. That sort of depth is so much rarer than you think, and rarer still is a conductor who does it without vitiating the emotional content. Everything is thought through here - harmonies, dynamics, balances, color... with rubato perfectly calibrated to maximize the momentum and not a scintilla more. The only problem is that this is Dvorak - the world's most artless composer, who spontaneously erupts with melody and rhythm.  So there are much better Dvorak 7s, no matter what Hurwitz says. Jansons does a similar approach, and there is no questioning where Jansons's heart is here. Dohnanyi deconstructs Dvorak to its bolts, and then reassembles it piece by piece. Every line and chord weighted, every sound scrubbed squeaky clean, but whereas Jansons's heart rings out in full vibration, Dohnanyi here expresses a much more generic character. The skill by which Dohnanyi does all this is uncanny, but it's not Dvorak. Give us Davis a hundred times before this. Davis leads with instinct, not intellect. This approach is perfect for so much else, but Dvorak 7 is not the Leipzig Romantics or Second Viennese School in which Dohnanyi has no peer, and playing him with those accents only represses the work's natural expression. Along with Davis, Dohnanyi gave us the greatest of all Dvorak 6's, but for its many virtues, this is not on so lofty a plain. Otherwise Dohnanyi's Dvorak is senselessly overrated: instead, listen to him do Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mozart, R. Strauss, Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Henze, fuck... listen to nearly anything except the Bohemian stuff... because for some reason his Mahler sucks too. B

Neeme Jarvi/Scottish National - Amid all his faults, it's impossible not to love Neeme Jarvi, and all the faults are on display here, along with all the virtues. It would seem there isn't a single attempt here to play softer than an occasional mezzo piano, and as always, the tempo is setting land speed records - just when you think this is the fastest performance you've ever heard, he starts an accelerando, but the ardor, the enthusiasm, the sheer warmth and character of Jarvi's performances is always a feast taken amid the general spirit of adventure by which he assimilates ever new works into his repertoire. Amid Chandos's general bathroom acoustic, there seems no attempt to compensate by making the textures clear, but if we hear the textures, it's because they're playing with so much detail in the phrasing and specific color. The trumpets stick out like sore thumbs while the timpani and horns sound like they're placed in the Orkney Islands, every string player here sounds as though they're phrasing as a soloist while every wind soloist plays beautifully. Just like in Barbirolli, the playing is simply so confident and uninhibited. Playing under Neeme must be like manna. He must always be encouraging more engagement, more passion, more warmth. He can be about as subtle as kid cereal, but if a performance like this came from 1940, we'd refer to it as 'golden age' and say 'they don't make'em like that anymore.'  B+

Wolfgang Sawallisch/Philadelphia Orchestra - This was made in 1989 before Sawallisch became music director. I'm not even sure he'd been named music director yet. Later on, Sawallisch and Philadelphia would develop their own special magic, but except for the occasional Philadelphian string passion, there is no magic here. It's just a boring non-entity of a performance, with no distinguishing features by an American Orchestra with a Capital O. D-

Charles Mackerras/London Philharmonic - Mackerras was always great, and rarely moreso than in Dvorak, but his Dvorak 7 recordings are unworthy of him. I'm gonna slam the scrappy lightness of his second recording, but the laquered heaviness of this recording is a terrible liability. Maybe it's just the recorded sound, but the strings sound is legato/vibrato enough for Karajan, the brass sound con blasto enough for Solti. There are interesting enough moments in the second movement among the wind counterpoint and impressive things done by inner voices in the third, and I appreciate the wide dynamic range - Mackerras is no mezzofortissimist. And if I'm being honest, the finale is pretty close to masterly, but it's too late. This is a disappointment. C+

Carlo Maria Giulini/Concertgebouw - You either adjust to late Giulini's timetable, or you gnash your teeth. One good musical friend swears by this recording, but I frankly do not feel in a position to judge it. I'm hopefully not sufficiently through with life yet that those recordings speak to me by wise old maestros whose pacing matches their walking speed. I hear the beauty, I hear the serenity and wisdom, I do not hear life as its lived, or perhaps I'm relieved to know I do not yet hear life as lived by those who yet feel close to the other side. 

Mariss Jansons/Oslo Philharmonic: Since Jansons died I've again become his biggest fan (and that's saying something). I used to think Jansons's essential musicianship was lost on his recordings, but now that we can't hear him live, the care of his recordings have all sorts of qualities I used to not appreciate. In a generation of careful and hard working maestros of understated integrity, no one in his generation but Dohnanyi ever exhibited this level of care; but he was, ultimately, better than Dohnanyi. He did not have Dohnanyi's  sophistication and winks, and in the more ironic environs of modernism could seem a little lost; but within Jansons's spider web of rigor was a heart that would melt stone. I don't know if classical music has a performing artist in the recorded era who so united head and heart. Jansons makes us hear so many little details of harmony, counterpoint and texture that no other conductor notices. The dynamic contrasts and warmth of the sound puts all but the Czechs to shame. Jansons puts a few feet wrong here, not because of his hair below average tempi, but because the occasional rubatos seem pasted on rather than organic - when already you have such perfect dynamic and linear control, what use is there in changing tempo? The scherzo is particularly of below average pace - Jansons keeps a tight lid on the abandon so we may hear all those nuances usually lost in the 'shuffle', the result sounds more like a waltz than a furiant, but never in the scherzo have you heard this cat scan's worth of detail. The second movement and finales are as good as they've ever been done - full of warmth, passion, and, yes, detail. Like Monteux only moreso, Jansons's musicmaking is surrounded by this indefinable spiritual gravity that mesmerizes, note by note it pulls you ever further in until you and the music feel as one. Perhaps the result is a little bit more heart on sleeve and deliberately tragic than Dvorak meant, but so much heart is articulated here with so much intelligence. Objectively: B+ For me: A

Harnoncourt/Royal Concertgebouw: This reading has things so far beyond any other. Look at the score and listen to how many dynamics Harnoncourt honors - perhaps a far easier proposition when you look at how slowly Harnoncourt crawls through the opening, and yet the effects Harnoncourt draws, even within the markings' parameters, are so specific and subjective that there is always material of great interest. The distant horn calls, pesante landler rhythms, near-klezmerish clarinets, are almost Mahlerian. Harnoncourt, ever himself, clearly speaks Czech music with his own inimitably strong Austrian accent. The scherzo is clearly done with a greater legato and soft dynamics to emphasize it's closeness to a waltz rather than the Czech furiant dance, and yet Harnoncourt does not have the conducting technique to pull off his non-traditional reading. No matter what his changes, he's still far more authentic to Dvorak than the more internationalist style of, say, Dohnanyi. What follows is one of the truly great second movements, notation respectful while playing with free rubato that is never obtrusive and some of the most songful, expressive playing you'll ever hear in this work. The problem is the vitiated finale. Being weird is forgivable, being boring is unforgivable, and that movement is just awful. It's tragic because there is so much right and unique in this performance. No one should be ungrateful to have heard it, but you don't get Harnoncourt's strengths without his weaknesses. He is a 'musical event', a fact of music history that will never sound like anything but himself. Here, Harnoncourt is nearly as much a hinderance as a help, but it is still an absolute necessity performance for listeners who love this work to hear. B- 

Myung Whun-Chung/Vienna Philharmonic: Many people think Myung Whun-Chung the most underrated maestro of trad repertoire today, I'm not among them, but you have to recognize game where you see it, and Chung has always been good and underappreciated - a conductor who can form a vocal line and spring a rhythm with the best. I find him unsubtle among the emotionally complicated pieces that mean the most to me, but in large-scale works he finds the humanity and intimacy where others get subsumed by sound, and can of course color French repertoire as well as any Frenchman. Except for some truly bizarre splices and a small ensemble lapse in the second movement, this is a Dvorak 7 of so many virtues; but is it more than that, and does it need to be? The rubato is subtle enough to escape all but a hawk, every color in the strings is perfectly chosen, the dynamic range is unprecedentedly enormous, and in Dvorak, the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic is always appreciated. Chung understands all the nature effects of the symphony and imitates them as well as any conductor on record not named Talich or Sejna. But the heavy hand makes its appearance in the scherzo rages rather than dances, and while the spectacle under Chung's hands is basically unprecedented, it's no longer fun. The last movement is as exciting as excitement gets, but it is as though Chung has decided to bisect the symphony in half - the front end is beauty, the back end is drama, and he shuts out the possibilities for their opposites in either half. Is this an intentional artistic choice or just a gifted young conductor calculatedly impressing what will make the biggest impression? I will have to listen to a later Chung Dvorak 7 and decide. B+

Ivan Fischer/Budapest Festival: Fischer is another conductor for whom I'm 'in the tank.' Whatever he does in this particular symphony, he's one of those recent guys like Jansons or Dohnanyi, one of those Yoda-like beings who is pure music, and if you want to understand how pure his music really is, listen to what he does with Dvorak 9 - I've long since tired of its endless ubiquity, and yet this Dvorak 9 is over and above just about every one of the hundred podium stars who've recorded it, and nearly every Czech. Moments of it are so perfect that you wonder why music is not always this vivid, and yet anyone who's ever logged hours in a practice room can tell you; such a state of music the hardest thing in the world to achieve. Music is very very hard, and a true master probably gives a concert worthy of their gifts once every three performances.  As for the 7, this Brahmsian Dvorak is better than I usually give its approach credit for being, but in the face of so many great performances, it's not THAT much better. Like Giulini, Fischer sings but he too rarely dances. The vocal line is so incredibly seamless, should it be anywhere near this beautiful? The drama is deliberately soft pedaled with legatos that are admittedly beautiful and completely heartfelt. The climaxes surely have moments of great passion and force, particularly in the Scherzo, where the brute force is almost too much, but these moments come upon us so unawares that it almost feels insincere, like something the musicians calculate for effect. It's not calculated, it is simply done with an infinity of thought and study, like any true artist would. All through the first two movements, are so many luminous moments of the most delicate lyricism that cannot be conjured without the deepest feeling. One startling insight is that after such a generally delicate opening, Fischer immediately begins the second movement as though it's one long movement with two halves standing apiece with each other rather than in opposition. In the second half, drama and turbulence take over, it is almost as though Fischer's conception is that chaos gradually overwhelms beauty, or rather that war overwhelms peace. But I do not thing that is what Dvorak 7 is about. I think it's a work where the turbulent chaos is built in from the first bar, and we are sometimes granted temporary respites. But even when you disagree with Fischer, nearly everything he does is made of these insights which seem shocking, and then you realize proceed organically out of the music. The only true misfire is in the coda, where Fischer strains for all sorts of theatrical effects that would sound natural in a more effect-driven performance. This is not emphatically not my Dvorak 7. I see Dvorak 7 as a work of folk tragedy, full of the irony of sad harmonies existing amid joyful rhythms; looking backward to an oral tradition and forward to his late symphonic poems, perhaps even to Bartok and Kodaly. Fischer sees this work as a pure successor to Brahms and Schubert - a completely sincere tragedy that sings more than it dances, in which the rage is entirely real. Nevertheless, this is a Dvorak 7 worth considering that makes you (me) reevaluate a work you thought you knew backwards and forwards.   For me: B-    Objectively: A-

Mackerras/Philharmonia: Sir Charles will always have a chamber of my heart, but my estimation of him has gone ever so slightly down. The pandemic aged this listener. Snap and swing don't have quite the appeal they used to, and Sir Charles's deliberately lean palette can occasionally be as short of expression as it is long on excitement. Mackerras will always be a first class Dvorak conductor, Dvorak's truest musical grandson among maestros. Particularly in the Scherzo, there are things beyond just about everybody else (that flute ornament!). Mackerras understands what it means to 'be' Czech music beyond even what most Czechs do, and clearly, Mackerras has studied with Talich - either him or his recording, because there's nor a single effect on his recording Talich didn't do first, but in (relatively) much better sound. One problem is that the Philharmonia strings sound surprisingly small and scrappy, but the bigger problem is that Mackerras is clearly going for a very 'Czech', 'folky' Dvorak 7, full of Mackerras's eternally vibrant rhythms and 'fun'. There is no mistaking the irony of such peppy rhythms housing such grim content, but at the same time, the Philharmonia doesn't particularly understand what he's doing - they're just playing another job and Mackerras does not refine them to reflect his conception the way Monteux or Dorati would. B

John Eliot Gardiner/Royal Stockholm Philharmonic: A great maestro of the orchestra this choral master has never been, but Gardiner has learned a lot about how to conduct an orchestra since his 'sowing machine' days of the 1990s. The military precision will never leave him, but now he gives orchestras the space to breathe the phrases and harmonies, and he was always more meticulous about composer's markings than 90-95%. Dvorak 7 speaks naturally to both Gardiner's natural vitality and his explosive personality. Gardiner knows how to rage and dance both, and this choral conductor has finally learned how to make the orchestra sing, phrase, and bend the phrase. Talich and Monteux give us still more cantabile, but this is a performance that does just about everything it should. A-

Claus Peter Flor/Malaysia Philharmonic: A-

Jiri Behlolavek/Czech Philharmonic: This is a Czech Dvorak 9 I can more get behind. Behlolavek was a warmer, gemutlicher sort, who could certainly bore, but could wake up and do glorious things - a live Jenufa will ever be stored in my memory - full of tears for both me and a friend. The old sound is... well it's certainly not gone, but it's obviously lost some of its old piquancy, particularly in the strings who have lost no small amount of that hard thinness which in staccato made the strings sound like percussion instruments. Even so, the Scherzo swings and dances as never before. You can take the gut out of the strings but you can't take the Czech out of Prague (or something like that...), and this is maybe the greatest scherzo ever recorded. On the other hand, the string cantabile now has a Viennese warmth, so this is that rare Czech Philharmonic Dvorak that sings more than it dances. The second movement could use a bit more turbulence, but it has some of the most beautiful playing you'll ever hear from every section. The finale generates enormous heat and for pure idiom we haven't heard anything like it since Sejna. The only real problem is the opening, while beautifully played, it lacks vitality. Bigger mistakes than Gardiner but the glories are above all other comers. A-,  B for the first two movements, A+ for the last two 

The Four Steps of How To Write A Book

 

1. Stick to a plan

2. Suppress the urge to write about whatever captures your fancy. Avoid self-indulgent discursions.

3. Sit down at a regular time every day and determine to work according to an extremely fixed schedule.

4. Don't be Evan Tucker.

Who Do Jews Trust?

 

No matter what Trump does for Israel, he is so obviously no friend of the Jews, and I would never trust any Jew who defends Trump because of his Israel record or because his daughter married the son of that righteous among nations, Charles Kushner - and yes, there are literal millions of Jews who do it just in this country, let alone in Israel. But neither are most of the leftists who cry crocodile tears every time there is right-wing antisemitism and yet turn a thousand willful blind eyes to what goes on in their political circles' own back yard. Any Jew who goes after Israel as a unique violator of human rights over and above the 100 other countries who violate human rights as or more flagrantly is equally unworthy of other Jews' trust, and quite possibly the trust of gentiles as well. Being anti-Israel does not make anybody an antisemite, but you are antisemites' fellow travellers, and you enable it no less than 'the white moderate.' When Jews do not strike an integrated balance between the absolute universal rights of humans and the special particularity of Jews (not chosenness), many Jews will die. Jews forced each other to take sides in Greece, in Rome, in Germany, in Russia, and the results speak for themselves. Those Jews who are discredit to us will die alongside those who are a credit; and when Jews die in conspicuous quantities, it's usually a sign everybody else will too.

We are just about the last ethnic minority Trump would order into camps, but he does want us scared, just the way he wants everybody else. If a few more Jews die the way they did in Pittsburgh, that's no great tragedy to him. He knows that the mutual hatred in the Jewish community is as plentiful as every other part of this country. There are plenty of Jews that think the deaths of Jewish liberals are simply what is coming to them, and you can't tell me that there aren't plenty of liberal Jews who wouldn't take schadenfreude in the deaths of frummies - I know so much better than that, and so do you.

We must neither segregate nor assimilate, we must associate. There's a 60-90ish% chance we don't have a special destiny. But through a series of historical accidents, we are conspicuously different, the rules of our history do not apply to other peoples, and that is not up for debate. Living as a Jew means living in a permanent state of insecurity, and sometimes that means dying as a Jew.

Jews particularly don't have to fear Trump, but Trump is becoming more and more a past tense figure. We have to fear what comes after Trump, because no matter whom it looks like the next generation will go after, precedent indicates that when powerful countries with lots of Jews run into trouble, they turn their oncoming fire on the one scapegoat that is simultaneously powerful enough to bare responsibility for the current state of affairs, and powerless enough to lose that power in an instant.

Whatever Jews appear to you to be, we are not that. Whatever country we're in, our existence depends on your clemency, and when you withdraw it, there is not a single thing we can do except go to the home you're not very happy to have us in - a home perpetually threatened with annihilation where you think we shouldn't ever have been. Meanwhile, we can't go anywhere else without fearing the exact same cycle of affairs that's existed for 2000 years.

Yes, Trump defends Israel, but without defending Jews in your own country, defending Israel is meaningless. Without defending Israel, defending Jews in your own country is meaningless. We finally have the best chance we've ever had to break our history of continuous tragedy, and so many of you want to make it as hard for us as it can possibly be.

Antisemitism comes in different forms. If the term means anything at all, then it does not just mean the hatred of Jews, it means the hatred of Judaism with all its accompanying longings for Zion. It's true, Israel has veered into authoritarianism, but so has the rest of the First World in regions that are far less threatened. And it's true, Israel has conspicuous issues of racism, but so does the rest of the first world - places where the reciprocal hatred of powerless toward the powerful is so much weaker than in Israel.

Nothing exposes hypocrisy quicker than people's attitude toward Jews. If you do not understand that existence in the world is a catalogue of nuances, exceptions, conditional statements, beliefs that the world is something other than the quid-pro-quos that populate Jewish history from beginning to end, you are going to run into dozens of problems with Jews. There is no such thing as a provable belief that does not account for thousands of exceptions, and the proof of that is that Jews are still here when the world's conspired to kill us so many times. We will also survive the attempts of your movements, but as ever, only a fraction of us will make it.

Barbirolli's Dvorak 7

 

Purely as an interpretation, I don't think there can have been a greater one than Barbirolli's. The Halle has some problems in the brass, particularly in the trumpets - Sir John can't balance them and sounds as though he just gave up, but the rest of the orchestra, for all their lack of polish and flubs, sounds beautifully balanced and Barbirolli gets them to produce a thousand characterful details. In the very best sense, it sounds more like a town folk band than an orchestra. He works to elicit the most incredible dynamic and textural shading, leaves just enough rubato to let the overtones emit their special glow over the orchestra, and lets the pacing simply flow in a manner that never lets go of the ear. It's not like the playing is at all bad, but don't expect real refinements. Barbirolli turned the strings lack of technical acumen into a virtue, making their naturally dirty sound into something that sounds like folk fiddling. It's not the cleanest playing, but find fiddling of this confidence now, you won't find it among orchestral violinists.

Dvorak 7 is usually thought of as Brahmsian, or as a statement of overwhelming tragedy. It's neither. It is tragic, but it's an ironic, folk tragedy. Like klezmer or romani/gypsy music, the harmonies are tragic, but the rhythms seem to smile. The music sounds like a grim resolve to keep dancing in the face of tragedy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfzEVwzYZs4

The Greatest Monologue in Movie History?

If anybody called Lansbury's famous speech the greatest monologue in movie history, I wouldn't ever object. It is so terrifying on so many levels - not just the obvious disgusting one, but in the way it seems to foreshadow everything from the Kennedy assassination to the Trump-Russia collusion and shows just how easily we could become a place not unlike Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. The Manchurian Candidate is one of those movies so great that it always seems two steps ahead of us, and like many of the great works, it was too controversial for its own time. It was released in 1962 and President Kennedy, obviously friends with its star (Frank Sinatra), saw it and immediately declared it his favorite movie. Then he got killed. The movie was vaulted and couldn't be watched for thirty years. The US has made 44,000 movies in a little over a hundred years, there are really just a handful that get to the heart of what it means to be from here. The Manchurian Candidate is about a lot of things, but at the core, it's about how a very small number of people actually run this country, and we all basically exist at the luck of them not being psychopaths. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3ZnaRMhD_A&fbclid=IwAR2EV4zmbupMwG84zcmP7pnoYnG0IwI2nLfS6ijkI5MIX3M1xss-n0AveIE 

Dvorak 7 - A Recording Survey - Some More

 Vaclav Talich/Czech Philharmonic - 'Present at the creation.' An orchestra almost literally created to play Dvorak. It's possible that Talich got even the slight deviations from the score from Dvorak himself, and if he didn't, it's still in a style Dvorak would have recognized. By our standards it's a very romantic reading, and if you'll permit a heresy I'll say that it's objectively a bit too much, but Talich almost always 'cuts with the grain' in a way that draws attention to the music's inherent detail rather than to the interpretation. Listeners would have to wait until Harnoncourt to hear a reading of the opening where you feel so many nature effects, and unlike Harnoncourt, Talich has the sense to speed up when things get more turbulent. All throughout makes just about everyone else seem thoughtless in this score he's clearly meditated on for his entire life. The only trouble is that I don't think Dvorak meant anything quite this romantic. Without the consistent rhythmic pulse of a dance, it feels too earnest for Dvorak. Nevertheless, when Talich resolves to dance in the Scherzo, nobody, not even Sejna or Mackerras, can possibly match this expression organic as a Pilsner. A

Sejna/Czech Philharmonic - Even more than Talich, this is the unmatched authenticity of the great Czech tradition. It goes almost exactly at Dvorak's specified metronome markings, with an unmatched feel for Dvorak's folk dance rhythms with absolutely perfect rubato that only exists in the obvious transitional bars of the structure. Other orchestras make Dvorak something gruff - the Czech Philharmonic makes Dvorak a 19th century Mozart - leavening even the biggest climaxes with levitating agility, velvet warmth and spiritual grace with textures vivid enough to eat. The only problem is that there is a level of extremes missing on both ends of the dynamic spectrum which dampens the excitement, and cannot just be explained away by the relatively mediocre mono sound, but rather, the drama is simply provided by the performance going at such lightning motion. This is thing of life, an evolving organism. Just listen to that clarinet wail in the last movement.... This is true music. A+

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt/NDR Symphony, Hamburg: Wow that's a lot of rubato.... A good faith effort by musically curious North German performers to recreate the Czech style. They make a lot of wonderful Czech noises in the winds and brass, and even if the Hamburg strings can't imitate the inimitable, they have a gemutlichkeit that is entirely in keeping with Dvorak's bittersweet spirit. These were always incredibly underrated musicians, but HSI does not make matters easy in the first two movements for them with his constantly yo-yo'ing pulse. Some of this is clearly a little beyond the orchestra's fingers, and surely they could have gotten the mic closer to the timpani and trombones who barely sound present. Clearly HSI heard what Talich did and wants to chase that air of authenticity when it would probably do him better to just follow the score. I expected something much more restrained and tasteful, but they are making a full court press for schmaltz. It's a very good faith effort from an orchestra that can't possibly have played this work often, but ultimately, this is more a credible impersonation from people who know their Viennese than the real music of a forgotten people. C+

Rafael Kubelik/Vienna Philharmonic - My dirty Dvorak secret. Kubelik is my favorite conductor, and yet I don't like most of his Dvorak. Kubelik is just too tolerant of imprecision and skewed balances for this composer whose every bar dances, a fact made worse by his recording a cycle with the Berlin Philharmonic - the world's least toe-tapping orchestra. Nevertheless (and I'm a minority of one here...) this is easily his best Dvorak 7, with rubato to capture every lyricism and every excitement - even if it's not nearly as natural as in his Mahler and Janacek. Even if Kubelik doesn't always keep them together, the understanding of the Viennese for Dvorak is far, far more innate than in Berlin. The scherzo is incredibly dirty, but it speaks pristine Czech. The Viennese have a bass heavy sound lacking in Prague that adds an entirely welcome darkness. Kubelik stretches the second movement around like Furtwanglerian clay, but the biggest problem, as always in Kubelik's performances, was in the finale. He plays it as a grim piece of romantic tone painting with a lot of rhetorical rubato, when the whole point is that it's a peppy march that houses grim content. Dvorak 7's rhythms smile while its harmonies frown. An experimental Dvorak 7 with interesting ideas, but ultimately, it just wasn't Kubelik's piece. Kubelik was never an 'Upper Case R' Romantic, but a romantic he very much was, and Dvorak was secretly a classicist. Generally speaking, Kubelik's greatest strengths were in grander composers than Dvorak, and even when Dvorak speaks grandly, he speaks with understatement. C-

John Barbirolli/Halle Orchestra - If it were purely an interpretation, if orchestral playing didn't matter, this would without parallel. I don't know what makes Barbirolli's feel for Dvorak so instinctual and beyond the Mahler for which he's so much more famous, but this is perfect for Barbirolli, who, contra his reputation, rarely overstates his case except in the glorious way he lets the strings emote in forte with maximum passion and vibrato. He works to elicit the most incredible dynamic and textural shading, leaves just enough rubato to let the overtones emit their special glow over the orchestra, and lets the pacing simply flow in a manner that never lets go of the ear. It's not like the playing is at all bad, but don't expect real refinements. The only real problem is the brass and particularly the trumpets, which is is as piercing and unbalanced as the rest of the orchestra is beautifully balanced. My guess is Barbirolli just couldn't do anything about it and gave up. Barbirolli turned the strings lack of technical acumen into a virtue, making their naturally dirty sound into folk fiddling. In a way, it all sounds like more like a village band than an orchestra, which is, perhaps, the most authentic sound of all. Interpretation: A++, Overall: A-

Pierre Monteux/London Symphony - I'm not one for Brahmsian Dvorak, but Monteux is Monteux. The LSO of those years was a crude instrument, but Monteux endows them with a sunlit Brahmsian glow which is entirely beyond the Czech Philharmonic's inestimably great capabilities. Monteux was 84 here, and here as everywhere he has no lack of vitality, with rubato all over the place so subtle you'd never notice if you weren't listening for it. The phrases simply rise and fall as though they were assembled with nature's fractals. There is so much gentleness and introspection which a less mature spirit could never find. I do wish Monteux would take a little less time basking in the beauty of the slow movement, but when the playing is this beautiful and overtone rich, you can forgive him. And just in case you think Monteux has lost a step, he explodes in the finale like a rocket at Cape Canaveral, and yet there's the same rubato, with the same knowledge of exactly how to apply it when the spirit changes to maximize lyricism, character, and excitement. There are times when I would rate this as the greatest ever performance, but there are just so many candidates. It's just another day at the office for a conductor who radiated such pure music that every performance is endowed with an ineffable spirituality.  A    

Constantin Silvestri/Vienna Philharmonic - You really never know what you're going to get with Silvestri. It amazes me that some critics who devalue all sorts of 'emotive' artists do not find Silvestri erratic. Silvestri defines it. In his way, Silvestri's romanticism was as willful as Koussevitzky or Barbirolli. Much of what Silvestri gave us was glorious, some is deliriously wrongheaded - this falls into group 2. On the one hand Vienna Philharmonic makes lovely singing sounds, on the other, they're completely uncoordinated. They do the best they can to respond to what is clearly an enormous number of demands from the front, but Silvestri demands so many things of them that he confuses the hell out of them and can't keep a lot of the thing together - particularly the opening. At any point before 2015, a conservatory orchestra with this level of imprecision would get reamed by its conductor. Of course, the highlight is the slow movement, which for its occasional oddities is absolutely beautiful in its overdone way - Rachmaninovian perhaps.... but for the most part, this performance is just mannered in a composer who does not tolerate mannerism as well as he looks amid and an orchestra that cannot keep up with its conductor. Silvestri was notorious for demanding so much rehearsal that he'd refuse all kinds of engagements if they didn't give it to him, but this sounds like however much rehearsal he got he needed twice as much. There are such truly beautiful lyric things here, but so much of this performance just falls apart. The reason, fundamentally, is that Silvestri doesn't understand that this piece is not lyricism with manic interruptions of drama. The lyricism only truly works when put in a greater context, while Silvestri is trying to savor and illuminate every possible expressive nuance along the way. That sort of mannerism is impossible in such an unmannered composer like Dvorak.  D+

Antal Dorati/London Symphony - Dorati, as so often, belies his reputation for aggression, and so does the LSO. Hardly any conductor goes to greater trouble to honor Dvorak's impossibly specific dynamic markings, and reminds us just how much of this work is soft and lyrical even as Dorati, as ever, provides us the full measure of drama. It is a darker vision, full both of visciousness and fragility. Whether at forte or piano, and at the many gradations upon the spectrum, the orchestral balances ('chording') are so exquisitely impeccable. Has any conductor ever thought this deeply about the analytic side of this symphony and made heard its many countermelodies, accompanying motifs, crossrhythms, odd textures? The sudden dramatic tempi changes in the first movement coda are an awkward misfire, but otherwise, what is on hand here is so exquisite. It never seems self-conscious because Dorati balances this fastidious lyricism with white hot rage in the dramatic passages. One of the most poetic Dvoraks ever set down, radiating a deeply unhappy spirit. A- 

George Szell/Cleveland Orchestra - A lot of people rate this the greatest Dvorak 7. The 2nd movement IS the greatest set down, with rubato that is.... well it's a revelation. Nobody mixes the pastoral and turbulence like Szell. The rest is not on such a level. The last movement is empty virtuosity that does not even feel exciting amid all that gruffness. It's generally a very aggressive performance that, sadly, has dull sound which doesn't even let its excitement stand on its own merits. It's certainly not bad, the clarity of the Clevelanders is as always a marvel, but as great as alleged it isn't. B-

Leonard Bernstein/New York Philharmonic - Lenny just doesn't really get it. He loves the melody of course, but he doesn't get the irony between song and dance. One just has the sense Bernstein thinks this is a generic romantic work by an unspecified composer - full of big tunes and loud sounds, but subtlety was not exactly Lenny's thing. The more grandiloquent, the better he got, but winking intimacy like Dvorak? D

Suitner/Staatskapelle Berlin - The dirty secret of Dvorak is that Suitner made the best cycle, capturing Dvorak's mixture of song and dance better than any Slavic conductor. 7 is not the absolute highlight (5 and 8), the last movement is simply too slow and sober to capture its turbulence. But the mixture of linear clarity and warmth is so like the Czech Philharmonic, and Suitner makes absolutely clear that Dvorak is the great heir to the Mozart and Schubert he also conducts so well. B-

Karel Ancerl/Czech Philharmonic

Carlo Maria Giulini/London Philharmonic - Once again, I don't like Brahmsian Dvorak, but of course, Giulini's gentle humanity makes it mostly work. Giulini is characteristically slow, and crucially does not let the bass or brass stint on the dramatic weight. Nevertheless, the prevailing spirit, as so often in CMG, is elegiac and glowing, with the most refulgent, overtone laden string sound you will ever hear in this work - including Monteux's LSO. It is particularly moving in the slow movement, too often forgotten but which is the crux of the whole work. It's impossible to overlook here, he stretches it to Brucknerian proportions, making the kinship with Bruckner 6 unmistakable. It's too self-consciously profound to be ideal, this is Giulini after all, but Giulini uses every instant of that extra time for extra weight and passion. Whether this is Dvorak or Brahms or Bruckner, it is so profoundly moving. The problem is, of course, in the later movements. Giulini never passes up an opportunity to sing and passes up every opportunity to dance. Getting Giulini to dance properly is about as likely as getting Pavarotti. No amount of beautiful orchestral glow in the trio can cover up the fact that this is a conductor who doesn't want to have fun. Giulini's romantic splendor is not a substitute for Dvorak's grim ironies. In Giulini, everything means exactly what it says it means. B

Kubelik/Berlin Philharmonic: A performance I despise where Kubelik proves himself a bit of a self-hating skoda. Dvorak 7 is not Wagner, and yet Kubelik plays him with the Berliners as pure Walkure. I just don't get this egregious lapse in judgement. It's dramatic, sure, but Dvorak 7 is not a statement of brooding tragedy. It even has a horrible wrong note at the finale's climax in the brass. I'm not listening to this again. D-

Colin Davis/Concertgebouw: There's nothing to say that the performance itself doesn't say better. It's the other sui generis performance, which captures Dvorak's turbulence as no one else does. The dynamic contrasts are enormous, the sound of the Concertgebouw always alternating between warmth and fury. No performance is as great at showing Dvorak's ironic mix of dance and rage. The Concertgebouw, ever one of the clearest orchestras, displays a very Czech incision, with staccatos that are absolutely together. Few scherzi 'cook' like this - like a jazz band taken wing. The second movement, so clearly recalling Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, has only felt this warm under Giulini. So intense is Davis's involvement that occasionally sections of the Concertgebouw a very little bit of trouble keeping up, but otherwise, it never gets better than this. A+

Rafael Kubelik/Bavarian Radio - 

Levine/Chicago Symphony

Vaclav Neumann/Czech Philharmonic The Czech Philharmonic in so much Czech Philharmonicness you have to spell it Ceska (with vowels my keyboard doesn't access). Never has the orchestra sounded riper, piquanter(?), woodlandier,... whatever you want to call it. The only problem is that Vaclav Neumann is clearly as disengaged an interpreter as he is skilled an orchestra builder. There is a certain cynicism in a lot of latter day Czech Dvorak performances. It's just what's expected of them in every tour, and for the #1 Prague orchestra it sounds like a delivery vehicle for gorgeous execution bereft of much insight. You compare this with Sejna and Talich, and it's just autopilot. Like Kubelik, I think Neumann was a much better Mahler conductor. It can't be denied that they make lovely sounds, but this is your pro-forma Dvorak 7. Except for some beautifully eminent contrabassoon and double bass, there's no distinguishing feature except the beautiful particularities of Czech orchestral sound during the Soviet era - captured in more modern sound. I don't doubt that makes this performance perfect in the ears of some, but some of us need a personality amid all the beautiful machinery. If Karajan or Ormandy were Czech, they'd lead a performance like this. I think I listened to the digital one but I'm not putting myself through this twice. C 

Christoph von Dohnanyi/Cleveland Orchestra: Look, I'm president of the Dohnanyi fanclub. At this point I think he and Mariss Jansons are the greatest conductors I ever heard live, and it's a sad commentary that people find him heartless. Fastidious he may be, but it's because he's one of those rare musicians who organizes music on a quantum level, and unlike, say, George Szell, consistently uses his analytical abilities to overlay his musicmaking with sincere expression. Emotionally, he is on a such a more sophisticated, specific level than most 'expressive' conductors. Dohnanyi is musicmaking for adults. This isn't just a conductor who thinks about where to play piano or crescendo, but which instruments, the exact sort of bowstroke of the strings and breath from the winds, and how every one of them will affect the music forty minutes later. That sort of depth is so much rarer than you think, and rarer still is a conductor who does it without vitiating the emotional content. Everything is thought through here - harmonies, dynamics, balances, color... with rubato perfectly calibrated to maximize the momentum and not a scintilla more. The only problem is that this is Dvorak - the world's most artless composer, who spontaneously erupts with melody and rhythm.  So there are much better Dvorak 7s, no matter what Hurwitz says. Jansons does a similar approach, and there is no questioning where Jansons's heart is here. Dohnanyi deconstructs Dvorak to its bolts, and then reassembles it piece by piece. Every line and chord weighted, every sound scrubbed squeaky clean, but whereas Jansons's heart rings out in full vibration, Dohnanyi here expresses a much more generic character. The skill by which Dohnanyi does all this is uncanny, but except for his red-blooded finale, it's still not Dvorak. Give us Davis a hundred times before this. Davis leads with instinct, not intellect. This approach is perfect for so much else, but Dvorak 7 is not the Leipzig Romantics or Second Viennese School in which Dohnanyi has no peer, and playing him with those accents only represses the work's natural expression. Along with Davis, Dohnanyi gave us the greatest of all Dvorak 6's, but for its many virtues, this is not on so lofty a plain. Otherwise Dohnanyi's Dvorak is senselessly overrated: instead, listen to him do Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, R. Strauss, Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Henze, fuck... listen to nearly anything except the Bohemian stuff... because for some reason his Mahler sucks too. C+

Wolfgang Sawallisch/Philadelphia Orchestra

Mariss Jansons/Oslo Philharmonic: Since Jansons died I've again become his biggest fan (and that's saying something). I used to think Jansons's essential musicianship was lost on his recordings, but now that we can't hear him live, the care of his recordings have all sorts of qualities I used to not appreciate. In a generation of careful and hard working maestros of understated integrity, no one in his generation but Dohnanyi ever exhibited this level of care; but he was, ultimately, better than Dohnanyi. He did not have Dohnanyi's  sophistication and winks, and in the more ironic environs of modernism could seem a little lost; but within Jansons's spider web of rigor was a heart that would melt stone. I don't know if classical music has a performing artist in the recorded era who so united head and heart. Jansons makes us hear so many little details of harmony, counterpoint and texture that no other conductor notices. The dynamic contrasts and warmth of the sound puts all but the Czechs to shame. Jansons puts a few feet wrong here, not because of his hair below average tempi, but because the occasional rubatos seem pasted on rather than organic - when already you have such perfect dynamic and linear control, what use is there in changing tempo? The scherzo is particularly of below average pace - Jansons keeps a tight lid on the abandon so we may hear all those nuances usually lost in the 'shuffle', the result sounds more like a waltz than a furiant, but never in the scherzo have you heard this cat scan's worth of detail. The second movement and finales are as good as they've ever been done - full of warmth, passion, and, yes, detail. Like Monteux only moreso, Jansons's musicmaking is surrounded by this indefinable spiritual gravity that mesmerizes, note by note it pulls you ever further in until you and the music feel as one. Perhaps the result is a little bit more heart on sleeve and deliberately tragic than Dvorak meant, but so much heart is articulated here with so much intelligence. Objectively: B+ For me: A

Harnoncourt/Royal Concertgebouw: This reading has things so far beyond any other. Look at the score and listen to how many dynamics Harnoncourt honors - perhaps a far easier proposition when you look at how slowly Harnoncourt crawls through the opening, and yet the effects Harnoncourt draws, even within the markings' parameters, are so specific and subjective that there is always material of great interest. The distant horn calls, pesante landler rhythms, near-klezmerish clarinets, are almost Mahlerian. Harnoncourt, ever himself, clearly speaks Czech music with his own inimitably strong Austrian accent. The scherzo is clearly done with a greater legato and soft dynamics to emphasize it's closeness to a waltz rather than the Czech furiant dance, and yet Harnoncourt does not have the conducting technique to pull off his non-traditional reading. No matter what his changes, he's still far more authentic to Dvorak than the more internationalist style of, say, Dohnanyi. What follows is one of the truly great second movements, notation respectful while playing with free rubato that is never obtrusive and some of the most songful, expressive playing you'll ever hear in this work. The problem is the vitiated finale. Being weird is forgivable, being boring is unforgivable, and that movement is just awful. It's tragic because there is so much right and unique in this performance. No one should be ungrateful to have heard it, but you don't get Harnoncourt's strengths without his weaknesses. He is a 'musical event', a fact of music history that will never sound like anything but himself. Here, Harnoncourt is nearly as much a hinderance as a help, but it is still an absolute necessity performance for listeners who love this work to hear. B- 

Myung Whun-Chung/Vienna Philharmonic

Ivan Fischer/Budapest Festival: Here's more Brahmsian Dvorak that's better than I give it credit for being, and Fischer is another conductor for whom I'm 'in the tank.' 

Mackerras/Philharmonia: Sir Charles will always have a chamber of my heart, but my estimation of him has gone ever so slightly down. The pandemic aged this listener. Snap and swing don't have quite the appeal they used to, and Sir Charles's deliberately lean palette can occasionally be as short of expression as it is long on excitement. Mackerras will always be a first class Dvorak conductor, Dvorak's truest musical grandson among maestros. Particularly in the Scherzo, there are things beyond just about everybody else (that flute ornament!). Mackerras understands what it means to 'be' Czech music beyond even what most Czechs do, and clearly, Mackerras has studied with Talich - either him or his recording, because there's nor a single effect on his recording Talich didn't do first, but in (relatively) much better sound. One problem is that the Philharmonia strings sound surprisingly small and scrappy, but the bigger problem is that Mackerras is clearly going for a very 'Czech', 'folky' Dvorak 7, full of Mackerras's eternally vibrant rhythms and 'fun'. There is no mistaking the irony of such peppy rhythms housing such grim content, but at the same time, the Philharmonia doesn't particularly understand what he's doing - they're just playing another job and Mackerras does not refine them to reflect his conception the way Monteux or Dorati would. B

John Eliot Gardiner/Royal Stockholm Philharmonic: A great maestro of the orchestra this choral master has never been, but Gardiner has learned a lot about how to conduct an orchestra since his 'sowing machine' days of the 1990s. The military precision will never leave him, but now he gives orchestras the space to breathe the phrases and harmonies, and he was always more meticulous about composer's markings than 90-95%. Dvorak 7 speaks naturally to both Gardiner's natural vitality and his explosive personality. Gardiner knows how to rage and dance both, and this choral conductor has finally learned how to make the orchestra sing, phrase, and bend the phrase. Talich and Monteux give us still more cantabile, but this is a performance that does just about everything it should. A-

Jiri Behlolavek/Czech Philharmonic