My square new Christmas record

Today after work on the way home from the gym I stopped at Goodwill and bought the squarest Christmas albums I could find. I am organizing my church's Christmas caroling expedition and I want to be inspired.

I got the Roger Wagner Chorale which, Roger Wagner is no stranger to this Web log! That was fun and to my surprise it played OK on my ancient stereo.

I also got this amazing square album called "Songs of Christmas" by the Norman Luboff Choir.

It was only 50 cents. Plus who could resist that cover art? The album I got was older. It appears to be a 1956 original. But it is the same picture.

The Norman Luboff Choir sounds like the choir you hear singing at the beginning of "Gone With the Wind." They are that ancient- and square-sounding. And this album is a winner. It only skipped a couple of times in "The First Noel" and after that it was fine.

I looked up Norman Luboff. His choir made about 75 albums and toured from 1963 onwards into the '70s or something.

Here is a picture of the man himself.

It is sad but as was typical of that era he died of lung cancer, only 70. You see that again and again, these guys (and gals) holding cigarettes in their pictures, and they look all glamorous, and then they die of lung cancer. I think of Nat "King" Cole, always pictured with his cigarette. And Leonard Bernstein's wife, Felicia. She was always holding that cigarette and looking beautiful and then she died of lung cancer. Josef Krips died of lung cancer, too, I think. He was always smoking his cigars. I do not think a cigar now and then hurts someone but he smoked a lot of them. Anyway it is terrible to think about.

Dear Norman Luboff, he did a good job with his choir. I was just looking around on YouTube for something to share. A lot of recordings seem to have orchestra. My record is all a cappella! This sounds like what I have.



And this was funny, just the other day driving into work I tuned into the Christmas station and they were playing this "Twelve Days of Christmas" I loved. The dopes on the station did not announce who it was but now after listening to my square album I am 90 percent sure it was the Norman Luboff Choir. I was listening to it just now thinking, That is what I heard on the radio!

Bravo, Norman Luboff Choir.

We will carol in your memory!

Great Cesare's ghost

 Normally I am not one for death anniversaries but just now here I was, reading up on Cesare Siepi, and I found he died on this day, just a couple of years ago.

It has been two years since Mr. Siepi left us!

Siepi was said to be one of the great Don Giovannis of his day and if there is something better that can be said about a person I know not what that could be.

Unless you say it, as one commenter did on the video:

"Si, el mejor Don Giovanni!"

He always performed with the greatest conductors and above he is singing the Champagne Aria with Wilhelm Furtwangler, with whom we have been earlier preoccupied.

In 1955 he made a great recording of "Don Giovanni" with Josef Krips that is still regarded as pretty much unsurpassed. The scene at the end where the Commandatore drags him down to hell is supposed to be more terrifying than in any other version EVER. I say "supposed to be" because although I have read all about it I am still waiting for the right time to listen to it. You cannot just listen to it any old day, you know? Someone might interrupt you.

Also I sort of wish I could watch the whole opera. It is cheating to watch that scene by itself.

As I wait for the correct moment, it is fun to watch him seducing poor little Zerlina in "La Ci Darem La Mano." Poor Zerlina, she does not stand a chance, who does?



It is strange to read in the British obituary that for his last 25 years, Cesare Siepi had lived a reclusive life in Atlanta, Ga. Twenty-five years is a long time for an opera singer to live a reclusive life.

It seems he had a long marriage, to Louellen Sibley, a dancer at the Met. My guess is she was the Georgia connection. That name Louellen, it sounds like a Southern belle.

Imagine being a dancer at the Met and picking up with Cesare Siepi. I wonder if it was like the video up above!

Whatever, it must have been fun.

The man for Mozart

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Josef Krips, erstwhile conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, here conducting the pianist Malcolm Frager. I have always liked Frager's playing, since back when I was a teenager.

I am into Krips because I just wrote this story about his years in Buffalo.

It made me kind of emotional to watch him in the video because I had been talking to people about him. His movements are so conservative. He inspires respect just by standing there.

I read in an old copy of The Buffalo Evening News (as The Buffalo News used to be called) that Krips would tell the orchestra before playing Mozart that Mozart would be looking down on them and that they had to play it the way Mozart would want it to sound. For him.

Krips loved to play with Leonard Pennario which is one reason I love him.

Another reason is that Krips loved the Tridentine Mass the way I do.

I will shut up now and just let you watch him conduct.

The master!

The Krips boys

Today my mom had a record sitting on her record player and it was Henry Krips.

I had never heard of Henry Krips!

He is the brother of Josef Krips who was the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1950s. Henry Krips wrote waltzes and that was what was on my mother's record.

"They're nice waltzes," my mom said. As if, they're just OK.

Henry Krips made his fortune in Australia, I have since read.

The picture on the Seraphim album above is kind of flattering but good looks do not appear to have run in that family. In the picture on the back cover Henry Krips does not look nearly as good.

Henry Krips' son Henry leads some band called Wagons. That is he in the middle.

He looks like a genial chap!

I have to say though: I do not know what Henry Krips would have thought of this...



... but being from Buffalo, where Josef Krips is a name still known around town, I know what Josef Krips would have thought of it.

Not very much.