Mary Kunz Goldman was for over 10 years the classical music critic for The Buffalo News, the daily paper of Buffalo, N.Y. She is also the authorized biographer of the great American pianist Leonard Pennario.
I am leaning toward the old 1950s Christmas records. Like my old Carmen Dragon Capitol Records Christmas.
And this one!
This 1956 album is not like Carmen Dragon. Carmen Dragon was pretty adventurous. These arrangements by an outfit called the National Concert Orchestra are pretty straightforward. It is not like Carmen Dragon's "O Tannenbaum" that sounds like something out of the 1939 "Wuthering Heights."
However this album has a nobility about it as great Christmas albums do. There is nothing wrong with not reinventing the wheel. Just play the song.
OK, wait, "The First Noel" kind of goes off the tracks. They are messing with the harmonization. However they got back on track.
It is so soothing!
Speaking of which, a lot of people in the comments love the old Christmas cards on the record jacket cover. They miss those old-fashioned Christmas cards.
I was listening to one record on that channel and way led on to way and I ended up with this one by the Mantovani orchestra.
This is funny, originally the video I listened to was the entire album. Now I can only find this snip, at least on this channel. It does not even sound very Christmas! However you do get that wheezy old Organ and Chimes sound. Although I did not grow up with that I have grown affectionate toward it.
There, that's better. Scratches and skips, but still ... Mantovani, Christmas carols!
People back in the day, I mean the 1940s and 1950s, they would sneer at Mantovani. I know that from my research on Leonard Pennario. I learned a lot about attitudes of that era. Josef Krips, when he was the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, he would sneer at Mantovani. Everyone did.
However now I will tell you this: I adore it!
The "Hark the Herald," the second song on this album, it sounds like out of an old movie. A wonderful burnished nostalgic sound!
Mantovani was classified as Easy Listening. This music is more subdued than the beautiful Carmen Dragon Christmas album I refer to often on this Web log.
However the arrangements are creative and well done. Plus we could use more easy listening these days. At the Hyatt on Friday as Howard is setting up to play happy hour, I am subjected to the kind of "holiday" music on the sound system that, I do not even know how to describe it. I guess it is modern, I mean "artists" who are active this year. I hate to complain however after the fourth or fifth number it gets to me -- I mean, you have no hope at all that the next so-called song will be better, and it just goes on and on.
"Christmas .... Christmas ...." These awful songs. You just want to hit these people!
Everyone talks about the predictions of the book "1984" but nobody ever mentions the tinny horrible music. Orwell specifically mentioned that. That particular prediction has come true, that is for sure.
I think it was actually designed to ruin Christmas, to make us hate it and want it to be over. But anyway.
At least we have these old records! And they are all over the Internet.
It would be fun to go through some of these old Christmas records and listen to them and talk about them. I think I will do that now and then. Even though right now does seem early to me. Because I run Etsy shops and they are busy at this time of year, also because I go to the Latin Mass where we follow a medieval calendar, I think it has finally gotten into my bones that Christmas does not start until Dec. 25. However that horse is out of the barn. Christmas music is all around us. If you cannot beat them join them.
In pursuit of mental health, while I am driving in the car I have gone to a new format.
It is All Mozart, All the Time!
I have a huge collection of Mozart CDs and I just grab one and go. That is the game. I have not turned on the radio for weeks. Not for one second. You get used to the radio, you know, these talk shows and stuff. No more. No more classical station either. No radio.
This rule will not be violated!
The Mozart is proving an adventure. You have to be choosy about what you listen to in the car because you do not want to get into an accident such as could happen if you are listening to something you love too much, or something too intense. I listen to serenades, cassations.
However. The other day I wound up with a Piano Variations disc.
It is funny, here I have been listening to Mozart my whole life and yet here is some music I do not know. This one set of variations especially captured me. Well, I love everything on the whole disc. But the first one, that set amazed me. It sounded like Beethoven. Then it sounded like Schubert. At the end of it I just sat there in the car and I said out loud, "That was the most insane piece."
I had an idea what piece it could be, and I was hoping it wasn't because the title is ungainly. However sure enough, I was right. It was the variations on a Gluck aria called, ahem, "Unser dummer Pobel Meint."
That piece needs rebranding!
Can't we call it "Variations on a Theme By Gluck"?
The disc I was listening to in the car, Daniel Barenboim played it. There is this one variation that, I love how Barenboim plays it. It is ethereal and so beautiful.
No other pianist does it justice that I can find. The Wilhelm Kempff at the top of this post, it's good, but he gallops through it. As does Andras Schiff. I'm not saying anybody is right or wrong, however I go with the Barenboim version hands down. Nice job, Mr. Barenboim, sir!
Mozart, he just never disappoints you, you know? It makes me think of a big house. You think you have seen it all and then you open a door and there is a whole new wing you never knew existed.
I was right about him when I was a kid. Did I recognize quality or what?
One can while away hours watching performances of Mozart's aria "La Ci Darem La Mano," from "Don Giovanni."
The opera of operas! I have seen "Don Giovanni referred to that way and I cannot say I disagree.
What is fun about "La Ci Darem La Mano" is that it is plain and simple a seduction aria. Don Juan is out to seduce this peasant girl who is getting married. And you really don't need a translation of the words, you can tell darn well what is going on. It is the international language of love, as the old joke goes. And you know the exact moment when she makes her decision that yes, she will go with him. This is the kind of aria only Mozart could write because he knew his stuff. Beethoven, for all his genius, could not have written this. And actually he was kind of shocked by it.
There are a million performances I want to feature. They get like salt peanuts, you cannot stop with just one. It is a simple aria however there are so many ways you can go with it. Invariably, at least if you are going to do it right, it involves a certain amount of manhandling. On occasion I have gotten into it with someone in the comments section about that. Some high-minded person objects to what is going on and it falls to me to point out that I am sorry however it has to be that way.
The above performance is an absolute classic. The good old '80s, you cannot beat them, you know? Beautiful Kathleen Battle in her hot pink, and handsome Thomas Hampson who demonstrates many times on YouTube that he knows what to do with this aria.
The acting is wonderful on both sides. Miss Battle, her face says it all, how she's struggling, and when she finally gives in. A tremendous moment -- she leans back against Hampson. He's so much bigger than she is, and he uses his size to his advantage -- just stands there, sure of victory. I mean who could resist him. His hand gestures throughout are amazing, too. I have never seen a complete "Don Giovanni" with him as the Don and now I have to look one up.
Much praise to both of them for the ending! I will not give it away but my guess is you could not get away with it now. The audience goes wild.
I will have to post other performances. I limit myself today to one because otherwise it would become overwhelming and I would never write the post.
I love this old picture. I remember seeing it when I was a kid and today I ran across it on the Internet.
It shows Beethoven playing for Mozart. You have to click on the picture to see it bigger to get the look on Mozart's face. That artist did a good job! Mozart looks alert and interested but not threatened. He looks kind of cocky, the way he was in real life.
Then all the ladies. Artists love to draw ladies with their pretty hair and dresses. Especially if the artist is a woman. Women love to draw women.
It is fun how there is a crowd present.
Underlying it all is the mystery of whether Beethoven did in fact meet Mozart, or if he did not. He was hoping to study with Mozart. However then his mother died and his plans were undone. And when he got around to pursuing those plans again, Mozart was gone.
There is a chance however that Beethoven did meet Mozart. You have to doubt it, however, because you would think Beethoven would have mentioned it to someone at some point if it had happened. Or Mozart might have mentioned it. Especially Beethoven, though, you would think it would come up.
I have written a lot about this I know, but I think about it a lot... Those two.
In a book about Mozart -- I will have to link to it -- the Englishman Paul Johnson goes into great detail about that. I like how I am not the only one thinking about it. Johnson said that Mozart and Beethoven would go into eternity together, both magnifying the other. He said it better than that. I will have to look it up.
You almost have to think of them together, to compare and contrast. And you can say whatever about Beethoven admiring Handel more, or Cherubini more, or whoever more than he admired Mozart. He did not.
There was no way he admired anyone more than he admired Mozart. You can hear it in his music. There would have been no Beethoven without Mozart. Well, he would have written music, but he would have been different.
Today I was looking over my Etsy statistics and saw a notice from Etsy telling me how they are working to find us as many customers as possible. There was a button you could click that said, "See what we've done."
I clicked it. Ask not what you can do for Etsy, ask what Etsy can do for you!
One thing they did was list commercials they ran, along with links so you could watch them. One of them, a commercial that ran in Germany, was titled "Mozart."
How could I resist?
That is the commercial up above. It's kind of fun. There is this kid who is playing the Andante from K. 545, the C major sonata for beginners that all kids play. Let me tell you this, I loved that sonata when I was little and I love it now, just as much, if not more. That Andante -- so beautiful!!
Keep in mind however, this is the, ahem, Music Critic web log. So I must criticize this commercial.
One, they go through all the trouble to let you glimpse the piano score, they should show us the right sonata. Instead they show us another Mozart sonata, in F. I forget the Kochel number but I played that as a kid too. I love that as much as I love K. 545. But show us the sonata the kid is supposed to be playing. Lots of people read music and they can tell.
Another criticism, they can't really give us the music Mozart wrote. You get a few bars over and over and eventually it lapses into this New Age-y thing.
Also in the commercial, maybe there is a language barrier -- it seems I understand German only when Thomas Hampson is speaking it. However I cannot quite grasp what makes this kid in the commercial so addled. He looks through the whole ad as if something is not quite right. You can play the piano, you're playing Mozart, life cannot be that bad.
Whatever, at the end you get the payoff -- he gets a Mozart gift!
Every morning I put myself through Pilates and recently the Pilates routine has become easier.
That is because I watch these singing master classes. It is amazing, the stuff you can find on YouTube. You do not have to be a singer or a pianist to appreciate them, either. It is a wonderful way to learn your way around a Schubert song. Or whatever it is they are discussing.
The video above, all it is is Schubert. It is like being in heaven!
There is this thing called Schubert Week. It takes place in Heidelberg, as far as I can figure out. There is a hall oddly named the Pierre Boulez Hall and that is where this takes place. Thomas Hampson presides over it and he talks, at least in the above video, mostly in German.
I cannot always understand German in movies or when actual Germans are talking it. But I notice that when Thomas Hampson is talking German I can usually understand him. It must be because he is American and talks just a little more slowly and clearly.
There are a lot of things I love about this video. I will get into a lot more detail about this in some future point, but for now I just want to say one thing I appreciate about this Thomas Hampson Schubert Week master class.
It is recent!
This video streamed live on Jan. 28, 2022. I am guessing the Schubert Week is tied to Schubert's birthday which is Jan. 31. So many things were canceled because of Covid however Hampson seems to have observed Schubert Week come hell or high water.
Not virtual. In person!
I love that!
I am so sick of virtual this and virtual that. Not only that but these other master classes I am watching, they are usually eight or 10 years ago. That can preoccupy me. I start wondering what happened to these students who are singing in the master class. I think of them being older now. I think of the singer leading the master class. What is that singer doing now?
In contrast the Schubert Week is in the here and now. That Korean singer -- I think he is Korean -- singing the first of the "Gesange des Harfners," he was singing that only a month ago. That is a song I love, by the way. It takes me back to when I was a teenager. However this is funny, I was thinking today, I know it by heart but I never took it into my head to learn anything about it. The song's poem is from Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister"; I knew that, but I never knew what that story was, or anything about it.
I find all this fascinating. I kept leaving the mat so I could rewind the video a few minutes and pick up something I missed. I would be drawn into a discussion about the difference between "allein" and "Einsamkeit."
"It is remarkable how many people are watching," Hampson says at some point, introducing the class.
