Another voice

There is this singer, Jonas Kaufmann. I like him. Jonas Kaufmann is a tenor but he almost sounds like a baritone. He has that kind of depth to his voice.

He is from Munich, I think. That is a funky picture of him up above. I heard him the other day in "Die Schoene Muellerin." You want to get my attention, let me hear you in "Die Schoene Muellerin." Every time a new one comes in I drop everything. I collect performances. I have about 25, I think.

Here is a hippie picture of Jonas Kaufmann. It reminds me of Grateful Dead concerts I attended.

Ha, ha! I guess there has been a kind of flap because Jonas Kaufmann complained that he was being presented as eye candy. "Totty" is the quaint word they use. It must be British. You can read about that flap, as I eagerly did, on this fine Web log here.

To accompany your reading here is "Der Zurnende Barde" ("The Angry Singer") by Schubert.  This is a great song and a dandy performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Back to Jonas Kaufmann's voice.


Here is a recording on YouTube of my new friend Jonas singing the first two "Schoene Muellerin" songs. This is kind of like a dream video for me. In the car, or anywhere, listening to this song cycle, I always take forever to get past "Wohin." Even though I love the whole cycle and know it by heart, I will keep listening to those first two songs over and over again, into eternity. I get like some kind of robot. You have to reboot me.

I have special feelings for them because when I went to California to get with Leonard Pennario, I had that moment of panic in the parking lot of work because it struck me I had just met this guy, I had no idea what I was doing. Then I heard those first two songs and everything was better. I wrote about that on this Web log, I remember that now. I wrote about it the first day.

I am fussy about these songs the way you get when you love something. "Das Wandern," I do not want it too fast or too slow. I want the piano strong and hearty. I want the singing strong and hearty too. Tenors do not always do it for me.

But this Jonas Kaufmann ...

I like him.

Out of this world

Today I was listening to the Mozart Clarinet Quintet which came on my clock radio when I was waking up. I am telling you, if you have to wake up, wake up to this. As I wrote on my other Web log, it filled the morning with magic.

Since then I have been thinking about the two great pieces Mozart wrote for clarinet. They are so much like each other, in the same key, with the same mood. I have thought about that before because it jumps right out at you.

They both have these serene first movements and these slow movements that sound as if they come from the next world. The slow movement of the Clarinet Concerto undoes me. I cannot let myself listen to it very often and I am fussy about where and when I hear it. The Quintet gets me too.

Both clarinet pieces also get kind of loopy in the last movement. It is as if Mozart feels this need to lighten up, after the sorrow of those slow movements.

The Clarinet Trio has a bit of that serenity, too. That moment in the first movement when the clarinet comes in, it just soars. That is the Kegelstatt trio, because he supposedly wrote it while he was bowling. Dear Mozart.

I know Mozart was friends with the clarinetist he wrote these pieces for, a man named Anton Stadler. I remember the name from when I was a kid reading books about Mozart. But I do not think that could explain the feelings these pieces have.

Mozart had a special feeling for the clarinet.

The son also rises

Last night I heard Peter Serkin, the pianist, over at the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra playing Brahms' First. It was sort of a thrill to hear Serkin with the orchestra. I heard him a couple of years ago but he was appearing courtesy of our Ramsi P. Tick Memorial Concert Series. That was a solo recital. He played the Diabelli Variations and a bunch of modern stuff.

Serkin has this boyish look with the tousled hair and the glasses. One thing I liked, he wore the old-fashioned white tie and tails. Looking good, Mr. Serkin! Looking good.

He played the daylights out the concerto. It was perhaps the most strenuous performance of a concerto I have ever heard live, and that includes a few people playing the Rach 3. Serkin just threw himself into those gigantic Brahms chords. A few times just from effort he stamped his foot and thanks to the acoustics of Kleinhans Music Hall you could hear it in the balcony, his foot hitting the ground.

Now this is odd. When the concerto was over everyone in the hall, which was close to full, stood and cheered and brought him back about three times. But he played no encore. I thought that was a little odd.

Would a little Brahms intermezzo have been entirely offensive?

Well, maybe he was tuckered out.

Serkin has had a back-and-forth relationship with the piano. I remember reading how he almost quit, he had a wife and a kid, something like that, and he was just going to live in the country. When I read it, I was thinking, being the son of a big-name pianist has to be a double-edged sword. That is a lot to live up to.

Here is Serkin back in his hipster days. He actually does not look that different.

Even with the difficulties involved, I wonder if he had the choice would he choose not to be Rudolf Serkin's son. Would he choose just to start at the bottom like everyone else?

Also, does he ever wish his dad had not given him the middle name Adolf? It was for Adolf Busch but you have to understand why Serkin does not identify himself as Peter A. Serkin. "What does the 'A' stand for, Peter?" "Adolf."

These were the things coursing through my head lastnight as he heard him playing that Brahms.

Playing the daylights out of it.

Remembering Earl Wild

Oh no, once again we are about to turn into the Obituary Web Log (OWL). Because not only did we talk about someone's death the other day but now we have lost Earl Wild. That is Wild pictured above. It is an early picture you do not often see.

Earl Wild is a pianist I love and he has always been so nice to me. I feel privileged to be able to write that sentence. I did get to talk to Wild on the phone on three different occasions, twice for The Buffalo News when he was coming to town to play, and once for my book on Leonard Pennario.

And this is says a lot about how nice Wild is: I did not really have to call him for my book. He was one of the people I called first thing, when I was in California with Leonard, and I did not have the foggiest idea what I was doing and I was calling all kinds of people who, looking back, I see I did not need to call. Wild did not know Pennario all that well. He joined him one year on the jury of the Van Cliburn Competition. After that their paths crossed here and there over the years, as pianists' paths do.

But Pennario liked Wild very much, and Pennario did not like everyone. He loved Wild's sense of humor. And Wild did say a few great things to me, and I am extremely honored to be able to add the voice of this wonderful man to my book. Best of all, I got to get the conversation on tape. That was a secret reason I made that phone call! The previous two times I had talked to Earl Wild, my tape had screwed up. And always it was in the back of my mind that some day I would get one more chance.

Speaking of which, when I was on the phone with Wild for my Pennario book I digressed from the topic of Pennario, which, trust me, I never do. Normally I would rather talk about Pennario than anything! But in Wild's case I entreated him to tell me again a story he had told me before, about how when he wore this really loud and stinky cologne when he was a kid and playing celeste with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. Wow, that story made me laugh. I was dying to have it on tape and now I do.

I hope he put that story in his memoirs, which I was happy to hear are to be published this year. If he does not, though, I will be around to tell it. Anyway, Wild was very nice to me, and so was his companion, Michael Davis, who arranged the interview for me. I felt a kind of kinship with Michael, both of us in the trenches with these old men, speaking for them, negotiating their schedules. Both of us knowing we were on borrowed time.

I thank God for Wild's long and full life. If someone makes it to 94 you do not have a lot to complain about. I am also glad that Earl Wild got some renown late in his life, while he was still alive. There was this story for instance in the New York Times. Wild was able to play until the last couple of years, which kept him in the public consciousness, and that was a blessing all around.

Last spring I was remembering something Wild had told me and I wrote about it.

Here is Tim Smith of the Baltimore Sun writing about Wild. I will also have to write something about him on The Buffalo News' Web log because Wild had a special friendship going with Buffalo in his last years, and made a couple of recordings in our town.

The world will not be the same without Earl Wild in it.

I will miss him!

Opera gentleman

A big voice in classical radio is gone. He was 90. His name was George Jellinek. My friend Steven Carlson at Instant Encore alerted me to this today, to this loss. George Jellinek used to be in charge of WQXR in New York City and he also was known for his erudite interviews with singers. He is pictured above with his wife.

Here is a clip of him interviewing the singer Virginia Zeani.

As I told Steven, to hear their accents together is hilarious!

We are always seeing pictures of George Jellinek old but here is a picture of him younger.

George Jellinek seems like an educated man of the sort we do not often find now. He wrote a book, "The Road to Radio and 'The Vocal Hour.'" And in it he mentions that he took seven years of Latin, "an invaluable asset."

Who in the world takes seven years of Latin now?

I used to hear Jellinek sometimes on the Texaco Opera Quiz they used to run during intermissions in the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

I miss those square old voices on the radio.

A fresh voice

I am not the only one spilling all my secrets out onto the anonymous Internet, blogging my heart away. There is also the Israeli mezzo soprano Rinat Shaham!

It is funny, how the Internet works. You get a Web log going and you forget that you do not know exactly where it goes. Do not ask me how I happened today to find Rinat Shaham's Web log. It is a long story involving that she once gave a recital on Buffalo's Ramsi P. Tick Memorial Concert Series, and also that now she is playing Carmen starting next week at the Canadian Opera Company. Anyway I could not believe some of the stuff she wrote. I mean, talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve.

Here is Rinat Shaham's blog. She is no relation to Gil Shaham by the way. She does not have to be. She is entertaining enough on her own.

I find that my friends divide into two groups: the mystics and the not. I always had a tendency to believe the world of spirits, cards, stars, and magic.

That is what she writes in October 2009. And then:

At any rate, I was traveling to Paris to be with close girlfriends of mine, both I think have strong witchery talents, and we 3 ended up at a fourth one's apartment, where we were all given some "reading" and some advice.

Uh, oh, Miss Shaham. Readings are not good. Witches are not good. Your life is good, you know? Cease and desist.

What else?

This paragraph is touching. It is a very candid account of insecurity and it kills me, coming from someone as beautiful as Rinat Shaham who, from what I have read, she makes a smoldering Carmen.

But when I stepped into my first dress; The one in which I have to make my big entrance, and sing the Habanera , (and in it I immediately transform from Rini to Carmen, feeling fierce and sexy) , looking in the full-length mirror in my dressing room, all I could see was a frumpy , dumpy, short and fat woman staring at me with horror in her eyes.

There was also this account of singing "Carmen" in Israel where they used actual horses.

The horses pooed all over stage, and we had to maneuver ourselves, skipping in between their doodoo, and trying to keep our own drama going.

Oh my gosh my golly. That "pooed" she has links to a video headlined "Opera Horse Poo."

Too funny.

An undersung Web log, so to speak.

To create, or not to create

I love high-minded quotes and here are two from the violinist Henri Temianka. He is the dapper fellow in the picture above which was taken in 1932. I had to look up something relative to my book and I found these two quotes.

Take it, Mr. Temianka:

“You have a choice: to create, or not to create.”

“There are three fool-proof ways to avoid criticism: Say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”

Those are just on Wikipedia! Imagine what else is out there. How funny, this mild-mannered guy and he comes out with these firebrand statements. I will have to get a hold of Mr. Temianka's book, "Facing the Music." It was published in 1973 and my guess is it is out of print.

As you can read on the Wikipedia page, Henri Temianka used to play chamber music with Pennario and Piatigorsky "and other luminaries." I like that word, luminaries. They used to play chamber music professionally and also for fun. The Wikipedia entry has something on that. Mr. Temianka wrote in his book:

“The happiest times have always been when we have chamber music at our house -- veritable orgies of informal music-making, gastronomy, and story-swapping, with everybody in shirtsleeves. The warmth of musical and human empathy is unique. As we play, unrehearsed, a quartet of Beethoven or Mozart, there are extraordinary flashes of insight, thrilling moments of truth when we share the same concept of an exquisite phrase, sculpt the same melodic line, linger and savor the same ritardando or diminuendo. In those moments we spontaneously look up from our music, exchanging ecstatic smiles and glances. It is a level of spiritual communication granted few human beings.”

"In shirtsleeves." That is so quaint! To get the idea now, you would have to say that people were sitting around in T-shirts. Well, everyone sits around in T-shirts anyway. There is no formality now but back then gentlemen always wore jackets and ties, is my understanding.


A different era.

OK, back to work. I have a choice today: to create, or not to create.

You heard the man.