A French homage to Leonard Pennario

RCA's newly issued box set of Leonard Pennario's RCA years has made me really happy. Yesterday I saw that France Musique celebrated the release with a five-day tribute.

It starts out with Pennario's sweetly haunting performance of Fritz Kreisler's "Liebesleid" and goes from there.

In between the selections there are beautiful voices speaking in French which, je ne comprends pas, but I hear the name Leonard Pennario spoken and that is enough for me.

The French have a beautiful way of saying Pennario's name. "Lee-o-NARD Pennario" kind of comes close. That actually makes me laugh because this Italian historian here in Buffalo, Joey Giambra, he has been known to refer to Pennario as "the Nard" or "Nardu."

I have listened to the first installment and moved on to the second, which begins with Beethoven's "Fur Elise" and moves on to the Schumann Piano Concerto. No one in the United States would ever play Pennario playing Schumann.

Zut alors! I wish I could understand French better.

Pennario would have been able to understand it, no problem.

Oh well ... It is the thought that counts. I will be returning to this podcast, or whatever it is, with great pleasure. I will report on it.

To France Musique ...

Merci!

Song sung blue

Besides the wild book on Earl Wild I am also going to be reviewing this book on Edith Piaf in The Buffalo News. It is more work than the Wild book, I will say that. But it is interesting anyway.

I like Piaf's no-good, on-again-off-again friend Momone. Wow, this is a coincidence! I am struggling and struggling here to include a picture of Momone on my Web log. But when I tried to download one it attacked my computer and my security system banned it!

Even in the afterlife Momone is causing trouble!

Therefore alas, no picture of Momone.

However I was able to nail a picture of the boxer Marcel Cerdan with whom Piaf was involved.

Piaf is a textbook case of "Smart Woman, Foolish Choices." Anyone else, if you saw this guy...

... you would run in the other direction, right?

Plus he was married!

The author, Carolyn Burke, writes something about how at last Piaf had found this perfect match. I am sitting there thinking, perfect match? On what planet? Even if he had not been wiped out in that plane crash, there would have been no happy ending to that.

Burke includes a couple of details I love.

One is when Cerdan was about to fight "the redoubtable Jake La Motta." Piaf wrote to him, "I'd like to bite La Motta's a--, that bastard."

Hahahahahaaa!

Another thing, Piaf felt blue because she did not feel that Cerdan felt as bad leaving her as she felt leaving him.

"I thought he suffered when we were apart," Piaf is quoted as saying. "But the day he was to leave, he was singing at the top of his voice in the shower!"

As I wrote the other day:

*** crying ***

That happened to me once in my bad old single days. There was this guy I was seeing and he was out of town and I called him from this pay phone in this jazz club where I was with my friends. Remember pay phones? I am ancient! Anyway, I told this gentleman how much I missed him and how unhappy I was without him.

Then, disaster! The phone did not hang up right and he could hear me laughing and carrying on with my friends, having this wonderful time.

He sat there listening and listening and he got so mad!

Me and Marcel Cerdan, I am telling you. We are trouble!

I am not yet to the end of the Piaf book.

But I can tell you one thing, I can just tell it ends badly.