Widor Early Symphonies

Charles-Marie Widor, Symphonies No. 3 and 4
Charles Krigbaum at the Newberry Memorial Organ, Woolsey Hall, Yale University
AKFA Records, SK-522, 1992

This is another issue in this series. I've little to add to my observations about the previous releases here except to confirm my previous impressions. This organ makes such convincing sounds that whatever it lacks in authenticity for this music it more than makes up for with its own very compelling voice. Overall, this instrument is much less reedy than the big Cavaillé-Colls--Aeolian Skinners in general, I think--though not less powerful. Rather, the power is made a different way, seemingly from just moving a whole lot of air through very large scale fluework rather than from a resort to brash reeds. That makes for a different effect, though I dare say it's no less effective.

This is always my impression of the more successful Skinners, that they exhibit a power and intensity all their own, some X-factor which newer "American Classic"-style concert organs (like the Dobson in Kimmel Center or the Meyerson Fisk) don't quite capture. I wonder what the comparative sound pressure levels between the instruments would be. It could be that I've got my teeth into a little subtlety that doesn't quite hold up to thorough rinsing, but every time I listen to this Woolsey Skinner I think "My god what a huge, huge sound."

The playing is excellent, as is the recording.

The Nostalgia Whore Takes to the Sea

(The Queen with Russian submarine Scorpion in the foreground. The ship's painted waterline is so far off the water's surface because engines and boilers--many tons of heavy machinery--have been removed.)

Another long-ass weekend layover in Los Angeles. Well, there are far worse ways of making a living than to be told to sit in a hotel room for a couple days on the clock. But I've had four of these long weekends on my schedule in the past couple months, and this time I decided to rent a car and look around a bit. Luckily for me, I have some good friends who live in the city and who were eager to play tour guide. Suddenly the weekend looks rather appealing.

I regaled both my regular readers a couple months ago with Susan's and my dalliance on The Bounding Main in the form of January's Mexican cruise. With that experience fresh in mind, I thought this weekend might be a good time to go see the Queen Mary which is docked in neighboring Long Beach (where, incidentally, my beloved DC-8 came into being some 40 years ago).




It was well worth the trip. The storied vessel is still afloat, but after--literally--1001 crossings, her days of plying the Atlantic are behind her. She floats permanently moored in Long Beach harbor now performing hotel duty, sitting high in the water with much of her vital machinery removed. These are days to sit in her easy chair and reminisce about the moonlight dances and exotic lovers and varied adventures of her younger days.

Built in 1930-31, she is 1020 feet long and displaced (in her operational days) 81,237 tons. After the Titanic disaster not 20 years before, it's intriguing to compare the stats of the two vessels. I especially can't help but note that the Queen, while only about 15% longer than Titanic, is nearly twice the weight (883 feet, 46,329 tons). This must be due in part to her hull being constructed of 25% thicker plating with over three times the number of rivets as in Titanic (ten million versus three million). (As an aside, I looked thru my materials about our January cruise ship--the Oosterdam--and found that she is 950 feet long, displaces 82,000 tons, and her hull is between 1/2 and 3/4 inch thick--considerably thinner than the QM's. There are no visible rivets, everything being welded instead. I wonder if this explains the difference?) Both had water-tight doors, but the Queen Mary's were considerably improved after the Titanic's proved, well, inadequate.

(A closeup view of one of the overlapping 1.25" thick steel hull planks and some of the ten million rivets.)

As a bona fide nostalgia whore, I found it a fascinating and moving experience to wander the decks. A lot of the ship is not open to the public, and I have to think that much of it was never converted and is unused; but many of the areas one would naturally gravitate towards are, like most of the top decks, the promenade deck, the bridge and all retail spaces. And what you see in these places is like running into your stunning high school sweetheart at your 60th class reunion when you haven't seen her since graduation. Everything is strangely familiar but faded and uncomfortably different, with a faint smell of decay. She ain't what she used to be, but you can see enough to imagine the grandeur that once emanated from her in her heyday.

(Looking aft from the bow toward the bridge, past one of the huge anchor chains. Note the observation wings out either side of the bridge, used for docking maneuvers. Odd to think of one little human being controlling such mass.)

(Looking aft from the port bridge wing. Note the gentle 3-D arc of the line of lifeboats, which follow the the contour line of the hull.)

(The outdoor promenade deck. This one was level all the way around.)

(A posh, two-level restaurant overlooking the aft promenade deck.)

Having spent a few weeks now on modern Holland America ships, the connection between these two ocean liners, old and new, is plain. Mooks like me were not the primary patrons of the QM during her high season (whereas I'm exactly the pasty sun-blocker who populates the contemporary cruise ship), and it's the sense of high style in the older ship that helps contribute the aura of class and breeding (that remains as but a faint aroma) on the modern ships. But the problems to be solved to make the enterprise work are exactly the same now as then, and the entertainments and amenities follow the same basic pattern. Any present-day cruiser would recognize this place, exactly as we can all see that an old woman is still a woman. It's the pull of the Queen Mary that we still get a sense of the old girl's beauty and sex appeal all these decades later.

(An Art-Deco lounge forward, a few decks below the bridge.)

(The shopping arcade was requisite back then, too. This is a fantastic indoor space midships.)

There are several restaurants open to the public on board, plus a variety of retail outlets, most nautically-themed or related to the Queen Mary or the Cunard Line. It sounds from the Wikipedia article that the viability of the ship in this tourist capacity has been marginal, and the attraction has closed a couple times and declared bankruptcy in the 30 years since it steamed its last.

In what seems to me a sad and depressing commentary on the American public generally, or at least on the clientele whom the hotel is trying to attract, some energy is devoted to promoting the ship as a "haunted" venue, with tours and pamphlets centered on supposed "paranormal" activities which have been attested to over the years--sightings and strange noises and things moving on their own, etc. The first-class swimming pool (one of the most spectacular areas of the ship in photographs) is now drained and closed for safety and structural reasons, but the space can be seen on the "ghost tours" and apparently they fill the well with steam and assist people's imaginations--since, of course, the "ghosts" cannot be counted upon to perform on cue. Like gagging through the church sermon in order to hear the organ, I was tempted to take the silly tour just to see the areas of the ship which are otherwise off limits. Maybe next time.

(The bridge from the port observation wing.)

(The bridge. There are telegraphs for all four screws plus a steering telegraph. The wheels are fabulous, brass hydraulic mechanisms.)

(Note the huge compass between the twin wheels, plus the communication funnels just overhead. Presumably, orders could be shouted to several places through these tubes, but I don't know if they supplement or duplicate the telegraphs.)

(One of four engine telegraphs, one for each screw.)

But "haunted" is not a bad metaphor for the palpable sense of the rich history that the ship has lived during its almost 40-year run. Looking at the bridge, for example, it's quite something to remind yourself that it's not a mock-up of what an ocean liner's control center would look like; this one actually functioned, spending decades crossing oceans and steaming in and out of the world's great ports. And, like the cockpit of an airplane, this is where and how they controlled things. (The parallels between what the ship's crew and what the flight crew do in the prosecution of their job duties kind of stops me in my tracks to ponder; and it's worth noting that an airplane like my DC-8 played a starring role in the death of the ocean liner as transportation.) The ship spent time both as a luxury liner and as a troop transport, so there must have been a staggering array of occurrences on board, from births and deaths to robberies and wild lovemaking and murders and fallings-in-love and breakups and weddings and so many other things. The mind whirls as you walk around, noting the wear and tear on handles and stairways and railings. She was actively hunted by German Uboats; she hit and sank another ship during a crossing. So many, many things she has seen.

We were not able to see any of the rooms (many of the ship's cabins have not been converted for hotel use; what has become of those rooms and corridors and facilities?), but the public areas we did see look pretty good. Still, there is a sense that entropy is inevitably going to win this battle, especially the entropy of a steel vessel floating in salt water--I think of the constant work the Holland America crews were doing to maintain the ships we've been on, including a brand new one that still needed daily scraping and painting and so on; we saw no such work being done on the Queen Mary. With so much of the ship not in use (and presumably not being vigorously maintained), I have a distinct feeling that the operating entity is trying to get everything out of the facility before it passes the tipping point where all that remains is to scrap her. That day is coming, but for now it's business as usual in the public areas, anyway.

(One of the main ballrooms being readied for an event.)

(One of the hotel's hallways. Unlike modern cruise ships, this one has a gentle arc from stem to stern, so that long hallways are always curving up and away from you. Odd but charming.)

The heart just fills up at this setting, at this brief dipping of the toe into a stream which stretches back unbroken into history. Maybe you have to be a nostalgia whore to see it.

But I guess I'm that guy.

200 Years' Worth

Preludes, Fugues and Variations
Music of Bach, Beethoven, Franck and Rachmaninov
Frederick Moyer, Piano
JRI Records, J101

• Bach/David Moyer: "Herr Christ, der ein'ge Gottes-Sohn"
• Beethoven: Twelve Variations on a Russian Dance
• Franck/Bauer: Prelude, Fugue et Variation in b minor
• Rachmaninoff: Three Preludes from Op. 23: No. 2 in B-flat Major, No. 4 in D Major, No. 5 in g minor
• Bach/Busoni: Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532

***

Here's a fun recording from concert pianist Frederick Moyer. He has collected a recital of various pieces which conform to the basic forms of Franck's triptych: preludes, fugues or variations. For the preludes, we get three piano preludes from Rachmaninov's Opus 23 set, a transcription of Bach's organ chorale prelude Herr Christ, der ein'ge Gottes-Sohn, BWV 601, and Busoni's transcription of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532; that piece gives us our fugue, along with Franck's Prelude, fugue et variation in b minor, which latter piece gives us a variation planform; this is followed by Beethoven's substantial Twelve Variations On a Russian Dance, WoO 71.

I confess I have too many recordings of both Ferrucio Busoni's transcriptions of Bach's organ works and of Rachmaninov's preludes as well. But there are relatively few transcriptions of Cesar Franck's organ works for piano, and this is the first I'm aware of that transcribes this particular piece. In any case this collection of pieces in a single recital makes an intriguing grouping, and a welcome addition to my collection.

The CD issues from the small, new-to-me label JRI Recordings, whose catalog exists almost entirely of recordings by this pianist. Regardless, the recording is excellent, quiet and fairly closely-miked. Mr. Moyer plays with a deft touch and a very deliberate manner. I did find a few of his phrasings a bit distracting, especially when the organ transcriptions essentially gave him more notes to play than he had fingers; his idiomatic interruption of melodic line to surmount these difficulties is expertly handled (that is, with the same confident deliberateness of the rest of the performances), but nonetheless seems always to catch me a bit off-guard.

Small potatoes. It's a fine performance of an interesting collection of pieces, well-recorded and played.

Even More Nothin'

I've very little to blog about lately (though I suspect there is a book review and a couple movie reviews percolating). So here's something horribly self-absorbed and non-topical.

***

Today as I was out for a walk in L.A. I thought about how small my social circle has become. As I passed thru the lobby of the hotel I saw a number of other pilots (some of whom I knew) chatting socially as a group before heading out to eat together. Seems innocent and normal enough. But though I'm on friendly terms with at least one of them (and he almost surely would have invited me along) I kind of instinctively slunk past without attracting notice and headed off for a walk and lunch on my own.

Part of this is pilots generally. I spend enough time around them to know that I'm almost certainly not going to find myself in agreement with any of them in regards to politics or religion or education or the media or the environment or marriage or movies or books or music or much of anything, really--except maybe some isolated topics of a flying nature (which I get quite enough of at work without spending my lunch talking about it). And I'm virtually guaranteed to take umbrage to the tenor of conversation among a group of them over a meal in a restaurant--in much the same way as I know in advance that I cannot bear to be in a room where Fox "News" is prattling on the TV. So I avoid most pilots actively except in specific circumstances.

(A standard disclaimer for my standard rant: I try not to apply an automatic value judgment to this situation [hey, how am I doing?]; I know that many of the guys I work with are smart, capable people who are living good lives by their own yardsticks. I certainly can't claim to have accomplished anything more than this myself. But I can count on the fingers of one hand or so the number of pilots I've met in 15 years in this industry that I call close friends. From the outset in this career I did not expect to find myself in philosophical agreement with my coworkers, and that has proven largely true. So be it.)

But there's something more than this at work here. It's not only because I don't care for the company that I spend so much time alone. Over time I find that my circle of friends has gradually diminished until I find myself now spending my non-working time about 49% with my wife and 49% alone. I've lived in Appleton now for eight years, but if my wife is working I basically hang out at the house by myself. I wouldn't even know who to call to do something socially. This is certainly odd.

Even in high school I was much more of a few-close-personal-friends kind of guy rather than a million-acquaintances one. And when I got to college I established a different, but similarly small, set of friends. But for whatever reason I find these isolationist tendencies increasing, and I seem to become more and more reclusive as the years go by, even to the point of actively avoiding circumstances where I might meet people I actually like. My schedule contributes something to this, I know, as I am quite unreliable for scheduling much of anything; but it's all fertilizing the same trend. I honestly think that if I worked for Pixar or as a staffer for Mythbusters or as an editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune I would find my coworkers much more stimulating--or at least not so oppressive that I'd want to slash my wrists the way I would now if I payed attention to them. And I might even have a social life, perhaps even a vibrant one.

Is that something I want? I don't even know, really.

I don't mean to complain; life is really, really good and I'm very happy. I don't know that there's any problem here that needs solving.

But I couldn't help thinking that my reclusiveness has become a bit conspicuous.

Two More in a Series

Sylvius Leopold Weiss: Complete Lute Works, Volumes 2 and 3
Robert Barto, Lute
Naxos Records, 8.553988, 8.554350

***

Another couple volumes of this great Naxos series of the complete works of Sylvius Weiss, a composer introduced to me on this site by my friend Shrimplate.

I couldn't pretend this review to be of much value to established fans of lute and guitar music, as I have comparatively little such music in my collection. So my impressions are at least as much--no, mostly--to do with my budding awareness of the lute as an instrument as they are about the compositions. It's relatively new territory for me, but a good fit with my preferences. As an instrument which requires its player to think in harmonic as well as melodic terms--like the piano and the organ--the lute interests me as requiring a more complete musical immersion than, say, a flute.

These releases lead me to think about the lute versus the guitar. If one goes back far enough, the two instruments seem to have diverged from a common ancestor, but the guitar has gone on to a modern ubiquity while the lute seems now much more attached to antiquity. That seems a loss to me, since with its greater number of courses (often doubled) and greater pitch range the lute seems a more ambitious instrument than the guitar.

(It bears saying that the guitar seems to have a more flexible phenotype than many other instruments; seven- and eight- and ten- and of course 12-string guitars are not uncommon. I'm reminded of the great series of Delos recordings of Paul Galbraith playing a custom-made 8-string guitar of his own specification--the "Brahms guitar"--which he holds and plays like a cello, even having a post out the bottom which rests on a resonance box.)

The guitar's ongoing prominence in classical and popular music results in it being played in a much wider variety of manners and musical styles than the lute. This longevity has resulted in traditions and vital schools of musical thought surrounding the guitar in far-flung places stretching from the present day back several centuries. The lute by contrast seems to be reliving a couple hundred years of glory from ages now long past. But I personally find the sound of the lute more pleasing to the ear, lighter and richer.

Certainly the lute shares some of the guitar's virtues: it's a salon instrument, intended to impact a small group of people in close proximity; it works well accompanying the human voice or in combination with other instruments; and the artist has a deeply intimate interface with the instrument, controlling much of its tone production in addition to voicing and phrasing. So the sounds produced are much more individual than, say, several people recording Bach on various Steinway Ds--and this is without addressing the variety of the instruments themselves, which I imagine are highly variable.

So much for my philosophical wanderings. Without knowing more about any of this than I do, it seems immediately apparent that Robert Barto is a virtuoso of the first order. There is a strong sense of musical statement, of a coherent musical mind projecting these works for us. Weiss's compositions, as I mentioned in a previous review, have the modern harmonic sensibility of Bach and Scarlatti and Handel, but they are less contrapuntally rigorous than Bach or imitative than Scarlatti, and these compositions at least sound very idiomatic to the lute. Bach's lute music is frequently heard on guitar, and so much of Bach has been transcribed for other instruments (or other genres altogether); I can't help wondering how some of Weiss's pieces would come off on guitar or a keyboard instrument. As it is, some of the movements seem technically very challenging for the lutenist.

Pleasant and impressive as these recordings are, what I have not gleaned at this stage is whether these compositions will come to have stronger individual identities than is presently the case, either the individual movements themselves or the suites. For all the variety in the lute's tonal capabilities, these pieces sound all of a certain stripe, much like Scarlatti's 550 harpsichord sonatas or Tournemire's L'orgue mystique. I suspect this is something that needs a bit of investment of time; I'm simply not familiar enough with any of it to have determined my favorites. But at this point I would have little hope of determining which movements went with which suite if my iTunes were to scramble the tracks. While that was true for me at one time with Bach's Brandenburgs as well, I wonder if I'll ever find myself passionately attached to these pieces rather than liking and admiring the sound generally.

Whatever the case, I am mesmerized by the sound--the courtly, intimate and very civilized sound.

A Hell of a Speech

I'm so used to dismissing political speeches as meaningless gobbledygook, as carefully-strategized salvos in a sound bite war of electability, that it's refreshing to see someone take on a specific (if gigantic) issue and deal with it so eloquently and comprehensively.

If his carriage here is exemplary of how he would govern, he would make a first-rate President.

Size Matters

This is a post from January of last year from my other blog. It seems it might have a more sensible existence over here.

***

I continue my little musical nostalgia tour from the last post. It's been a musical couple of weeks, which is much better than a couple weeks of politics.



Our hotel in PHL is a block from the old Wanamaker department store, now owned & operated by Macy's. This store contains, in what seems the ultimate non-sequitur, the largest operational pipe organ in the world.




As a devoted fan of the pipe organ, I've known of this instrument for many years. It's not really my kind of organ; this is an ultimate example of what we might call the symphonic organ, that is, the organ as a kind of one-man orchestra. This design philosophy, which really took off after Bach's death and found great flowering in the 19th and 20th Centuries at the hands of France's Aristide Cavaille-Coll and America's Ernest M. Skinner, among many others, stands in philosophical contrast to the organs that Bach knew. Bach's organ was a stand-alone instrument with its own repertoire and its own history having nothing to do with the orchestra or any other instruments. Starting in the late 1950s, by which time these symphonic organs were the established norm, there was a push in the organ world to return to the non-imitative roots of the baroque organ, creating a pretty deep rift--almost a civil war--between the neo-baroque and romantic / symphonic camps. To me this whole fight has been a vital and interesting one (in a sitting- on- the- sidelines- while- buttoned- down- Christians- throw- stones- at- each- other kinda way), one with a few dollops of intrigue thrown in; but that's kind of another post.



The organ at Wanamaker's has the additional distinction of being incongruently located in the eight-story central court of an operating retail department store. As if the pipe organ does not seem anachronistic enough on its own (something about which I'm feeling rather bruised and vulnerable lately), the idea of supporting such a beast with retail shoppers of socks and underwear is positively surreal. Proven so, actually, since nobody I saw shopping during the 45 minute concert paid the least attention to the music. But John Wanamaker had money and a love for the organ and a place to put one, and the rest is history.

Yesterday was the first time I ever heard the Wanamaker instrument. I've walked past the building a few times in the last five years, but the last couple times I've been here the store has been closed for its conversion from a Lord & Taylor to a Macy's. Yesterday everything was up and running as usual. There are regular noontime concerts played every day of the week, and there are afternoon concerts three days a week, plus weekend concerts and occasional special events (including after-hours things where they can let the beast out of its cage properly). So I timed my walk around the city to make the noon concert.

The organ speaks into the large, central shopping court from several levels, and the delivery-van-sized console is visible behind a railing on the third level. Walking around to the console, a flat screen monitor televises the organist at work. I can't entirely fault the shoppers for not paying more attention to the music, as there are no accommodations made for concertgoers--no seats and not many good places to stand and watch & listen--and the repertoire, while pleasant and demonstrative of the huge variety of the lower half of the instrument's dynamic range, was not thought-provoking. Which is as it should be; after all, it is a working retail establishment, and they can hardly do without their phones or normal business transactions for two 45-minute periods every day.



After the concert I talked to the organist and one of the two technical people who look after the instrument full-time, and I got a tour of the massive console. Much of the organ--including this awesome control console--was built by a shop on the 12th floor of the store (space now leased out to other tenants), with the pipes themselves coming from the Kimball Organ Company. The instrument was originally installed in the department store in 1911, at which time its 10,000 pipes (already several times the number found in most church organs today) were deemed "inadequate" for the space and enlargements were undertaken. By about 1930 the organ had tripled in size to its present 28,000 pipes. I talk of the organ exercising the quieter half of its dynamic range, but even then the power of the instrument rather takes one by surprise. Considering that, from where I listened to the concert from the third floor I could not have heard a normal cell phone ringer down on the main shopping floor below me, the fact that even a quiet solo stop is clearly audible throughout the eight-story courtyard gives one an idea of what kind of horsepower is behind it. And naturally, the organ has the resources to make conversation in the courtyard quite impossible. Those who have heard a good-quality pipe organ in their local church or auditorium know that organ bass is often felt as much as it is heard, the product of high energy, low frequency sound waves produced by the large pedal pipes. Well, one can imagine what kind of power is required to shake the air--and the occupants--of so large a space as this one.

It's amazing, really, that Macy's would agree to continue funding something which at this point can only be considered an historical and nostalgic oddity. Surely this instrument no longer generates any real revenue, and yet Macy's pay a staff organist and several assistants, as well as two full-time maintenance people. They also contract out some maintenance services when the jobs get too big for the in-house shop to handle. While there is a non-profit foundation called the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, and the organ has received several substantial endowments and private donations, it is still some burden on Macy's and one cannot help feeling grateful that they have embraced this quirk in the store's past.

It's a little off track, but even as long as I've been a student of this instrument and (some of) its repertoire--nearly 30 years now--I'm still not immune to its magic. I have made treks over the years to a number of individual pipe organs both here and in Europe, instruments which I've come through recordings to love; I've examined and played them in my unskilled way, and gotten a sense of their presence and of the rooms and acoustics where they live; and I've been witness to some awesome demonstrations by people who knew what they were doing at these instruments. And I'm always frankly amazed at the organist's skill.



Yesterday at Wanamaker's I watched the organist at the console during the concert via a little flat screen monitor outside the cordoned-off area where the console sits, and though he appeared to be a thousand years old he still achieved a near-magical feat that virtually none of us could do. The coordination required of an organist--just the aspect of playing coherent musical phrases with one's feet while the hands do their thing simultaneously on two separate keyboards--requires a physical command of one's body that borders on the impossible. (Look sometime at the notation for Bach's Trio Sonatas for organ and you'll have some idea of what this inter-limb / digit coordination entails.)

But there's more. Look at the photos of this console.





In addition to six separate keyboards (basically, one for each division of the organ, each of which will have a distinct function or sonic character) plus a full pedalboard, there is a tablet for activating each of several hundred individual timbres of the organ, controls for coupling divisions together (at various octave intervals), pedals and sliders for controlling the volume of sound allowed to escape from the chambers where the pipes are contained, and a baffling array of buttons and footswitches which can be programmed to singly make large-scale changes of the organ's settings. And a couple dozen other odds and ends to boot. Ignoring the business of simply playing a coherent musical thought in this setting (again, a not inconsiderable task by a long shot), just the management of all these other controls and resources at this console requires a physical dexterity and concentration that I would venture few of us ever have to muster in life. Put the two things together--playing music and managing the machinery--and we have arrived at outright sorcery. This has to rank among the most complicated tasks the human brain and body can tackle. I can think of no better way for a hunched-over old man to inarguably win the pissing contest of masculine achievement than to play something coherent on this instrument. Top THAT, football boy. That the purpose of all this training and skill is to fill an arena-sized room with a kind of bone-marrow-boiling sound makes it all the more interesting. Or, looked at from the opposite angle, that such stirring musical ideas come to fruition by way of such great demands placed on the artist makes the art remarkable.

Love In The Time Before Washing

I'm watching the first season of the Showtime series The Tudors, an exploration of the reign of King Henry VIII and his struggles with the church and the essential concepts of marriage. While presumably chronicling actual events, it seems the series is only tenuously tethered to historical fact. Many of the events depicted in the series have some kernel of verity in recorded history, though the timeline of these events and the connections portrayed between people are fashioned to make for good TV rather than as an educational exercise.

But no matter. (Wasn't it Mark Twain who said "Never let facts stand in the way of a good story"?) It's a really interesting time in history, close enough to present times that we recognize the behaviors and motivations easily enough but far enough back that life must have been very different than today.

Though it's not their primary motivation, I know, it's fascinating to see what life was like in the absence of science (and, by inference, to contemplate what life would be like if religions were allowed free reign again). Medicine especially was a genuinely hazardous endeavor, the doctor very likely killing far more people than he saved. It's morbidly fascinating to listen to the physician authoritatively pontificate about things of which we now know he hasn't the slightest clue, and watch him put people in real peril with bleedings and hogwash potions and elixirs and poultices. (The religious pontificating seems completely modern, of course, since it's exactly the same snake oil then as now.) There was no awareness of sanitation or any of the principles of infectious disease, so people wandered pell-mell into the jaws of self-destruction blinkingly unaware. Thank god procreation was rampant, as death was all around.

Over several episodes in this first season, we see England ravaged by an incendiary case of what was called sweating sickness, a probably viral infection which killed a high proportion of those who showed symptoms, often as quickly as 24 hours from first sign. What a terrifying thing: there was a vague sense that being around someone who had it put yourself at risk, but nobody had any real clue. And it came and went with such rapidity that everyone felt in mortal peril from it. Which, of course, they were. Naturally, the superstitious speculation about what message god was sending--and what sins He was punishing--spread like wildfire through the terrorized population. (If only they had our present means of knowing god's will.) You can see how the guy who managed by luck to call things right might gain a foothold as a "wise man." Such are the things that run through my mind as I watch.

The production values are a bit cheesy--there is a sense of budgetary constraints and all--but they've put the emphasis on the things that matter: the writing and acting are really first-rate, and there are a number of quite compelling characters among the cast. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is excellent as the vain and ambitious monarch with a touch of paranoia, and Maria Doyle Kennedy is really splendid as Queen Catherine of Aragon. Other cast luminaries include Sam Neill as the ambitious Cardinal Wolsey and Jeremy Northam as Thomas More, plus the intriguing Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn, the woman around whom so much of the series' plot developments revolve.

The second season is about to Launch on Showtime; we'll have to wait a bit for the DVD release.

That Gretchaninov Disc Wasn't a Fluke

Rheinberger: Sacred Choral Works
Kansas City Chorale / Phoenix Bach Choir; Charles Bruffy
Chandos Records, CHSA 5055
Four Motets Op. 133; Mass Op. 109; Three Sacred Songs Op. 69; Easter Hymn Op. 134

***

(I didn't really think it was, but here's the proof just the same.)

As a lover of organ music I'm a bit surprised that I've failed to latch onto the works of German (or Liechtensteinian) Josef Rheinberger (1839-1901). Falling between Felix Mendelssohn and Max Reger (he was a contemporary of Brahms)--all of whom I enjoy--one would think I'd eat up his output of some 20 Sonatas. But Rheinberger and me are apparently like Mozart and me: people far smarter and more informed than I have given their stamp of approval, but his music just begets no response whatsoever in me. In both these cases, I reserve the right for the long-planted seeds to suddenly bear fruit, but every time I check back there's just dirt (in the case of Mozart, the seeds have had 30 years to germinate and I'm pretty sure they're dead and they'll stay that way).

Well, that's organ music. But after my thrilling discovery of the Kansas City Chorale and Phoenix Bach Choir singing Gretchaninov, I was eager to give this group's next release a quick audition. And Rheinberger it is. Well--a big relief to his corpse, I'm sure--I like his choral music rather more than his organ music. Indeed, I would have pegged it as either Brahms or Mendelssohn if I hadn't read the label; it has Mendelssohn's lyricism. Gently contrapuntal and resolutely tonal and conservative as church music apparently should be, this is music that will surprise no one. But it's well-crafted and quietly engaging and makes for a disc I'm happy to add to my collection.

The ensemble and conductor Bruffy bring the same wondrous sensibilities and careful precision to this disc as to their previous. His tempi and phrasing and the balance of the ensemble are simply beyond reproach; inspired, even. I was tempted to conclude that Rheinberger's writing is not quite as engaging as Gretchaninov's to my ear, but it's growing on me after several hearings. Still, the Russian works seem more ambitious or momentous somehow -- transcendent, almost otherworldly, familiar yet different. Maybe it's just that Gretchaninov hails from a more isolated corner of human culture. There is something predictable about much of the Rheinberger (not to say mundane); it sounds a bit like a solidly competent composer using the standard tools available to him.

But for all that, this is still a virtuosic display of choral singing with moments of real depth and inspiration. Much of it is soaringly beautiful, and here's to hoping it continues to grow on me as it has. But for now it still gives me a warm glow of satisfaction rather than leaving my mouth open in astonishment. Call it fully five stars for execution and four for material. Well, that's still a pretty great accomplishment at that.

And who knows? Maybe this will be the eye-opener for Rheinberger's organ works for me.

One Good Turn Deserves Another

Widor: Organ Favorites
Robert Delcamp at the Martin Pasi organ of the St. Cecilia Cathedral, Omaha
Naxos Records, 8.570310
Excerpts from Symphonies 1-6 and 9, etc.

***

I've long wondered what role authenticity really plays in musical enjoyment. I found myself very early on drawn to the sound of period instruments in baroque music, but not, I think, because these sounds were supposed to be "correct." No, I just liked the fundamental sounds better; I liked the clarity and intonation and / or lack of affected vibrato in music of my favored period. Even more contrarily, I always wondered whether more contemporary music wouldn't sound better on these older sounds (we do the converse of this all the time, by playing antique music on modern orchestral instruments, harpsichord music on piano, Buxtehude and Pachelbel and Scheidemann on modern organs). I knew that the music of Cesar Franck, say, played on the Flentrop organ at Harvard University--an organ whose sound I so loved and which was so effective in Bach--would go against custom and even the composer's stated desires; and yet I still felt the music would come off really well in that setting. Different, sure; but moving and wonderful and maybe better in some ways--small and focused and intimate.

Well, I never did get to hear Franck on that particular Flentrop (though E. Power Biggs recorded Hindemith to very good effect on it), but I've heard quite a bit of his music on very different instruments than Franck had in mind; and as with Bach's music Franck has a near-universal appeal that transcends period specifics.

This present release is another opportunity to put some of these questions front and center. The instrument, the Op. 14 of 2003 from the shops of Martin Pasi and Associates, resides in the St. Cecilia Cathedral in Omaha, NE, and is familiar to us from two recently-reviewed discs of baroque music performed by George Ritchie and Julia Brown (another issue from which Buxtehude cycle I have since acquired, recorded on the same instrument). We may recall from those reviews that the organ is really two organs in one, sporting a dual temperament. The whole organ of 55 stops on three manuals and pedal is available in well-tempering, and a smaller portion--29 stops on two manuals and pedal--is available in quarter-comma meantone. This is a really valuable tool for exploring the music of Bach and earlier, as those temperaments were a fact of life before the 19th Century, and music sounds different when tempered.

(Drawknobs for well-tempered; sliding levers for meantone.)

But the organs which Cesar Franck played were not tempered, at least not anything like what Buxtehude knew. So the idea of a non-equally-tempered organ being used for more contemporary music--music made familiar to us via equal tempering--seemed to push my old-sounds-with-new-music idea out nearer the uncharted waters. Once again it's our friends at Naxos who deliver the goods for us. The prevalent well-tempering of the organ (all 55 of the organ's stops are available this way) is subtle enough that it might be mistaken for equal temperament if you weren't paying close attention. None of the keys is woefully off color, and the Widor Symphonies spend much of their time in familiar tonalities. But these pieces meander through a much wider range of tonalities than was common in the Baroque, resulting in an occasional piquancy from the tuning and a glow to some of the resolutions that you don't hear with equal tempering. It's a little unexpected, but just as delightful here as with music where it's more commonly found.

And quite apart from the tuning, this instrument is clearly not from Cavaillé-Coll's workshop. It's a nicely powerful instrument with a solid 32' underpinning in a really wonderful, reverberant space, but it doesn't have a characteristic French sound; the reeds especially lack that brassy snarl that so characterizes C-C's organs. Just the same, I think it sounds fantastic in this literature, even if it might have sounded a bit odd to Franck's ears.

More distracting than the temperament to me is the organ's fairly flexible wind, which makes itself known in some of the big, chordy sections of the Symphony Finales. It's not extreme, and I don't mean to protest (though in fact I do think of it as a defect of antiquity that someone resurrected centuries later in an attempt to be "fashionable" and others followed suit), but it's an affectation that one simply isn't used to hearing in instruments after the Baroque. And a couple times I wonder if I didn't hear the instrument struggling to provide enough wind to meet the organist's demands. (In a couple recordings of Biggs' Flentrop, one could hear some parts of the organ flat slightly at the big climaxes, something which organ builder Fritz Noack told me a couple years ago was due to inadequate winding of the instrument's rückpositiv division--which malady he was hired to remedy. Well, this Pasi organ's temperament might be playing a role here: were the meantone stops added to the mix for big climaxes, for example?) Maybe my ears were just playing tricks on me. The effect, if there was one, was very subtle and nothing to prevent a thorough enjoyment of the performances.

Organist Robert Delcamp hails from Sewanee, Tennessee, where he is Professor of Music, University Organist and Choirmaster, and Chair of the Music Department at The University of the South. He has made several recordings for Naxos, mostly involving the music of Marcel Dupré. This marks Dr. Delcamp as a specialist in French repertoire and makes him a natural for Widor's music (Dupré was Widor's assistant at St. Sulpice in Paris for many years before taking over the position when Widor retired), and his performances are really excellent. He takes his time to let the organ speak into the great space, and he lingers over Widor's writing like someone who is trying to tell a story. I've never heard these pieces better, and rarely as good.

The Season Begins

Tomorrow night, Sunday in Australia, is the opening race of the 2008 Formula One race season. It's always tough to sit out the nearly five months of the off season, and that break gives the season opener an extra boost of excitement (like the start of baseball season, I imagine, for the diehard fan).

Making things more interesting yet, there have been a few key rule changes over the winter, the ramifications of which can really only be seen once the cars take the track in anger. Some of these things, like the elimination of the spare car or the tweaking of the qualifying procedures, are just a fine-tuning of what are after all quite arbitrary things. But others are fiddling with the very guts of motor racing. The chief of these more substantial changes is the introduction of a standard engine electronic control unit--ECU. Sounds innocent enough, but in practice it has a big impact on how the cars behave on the track and, in consequence, on the demands placed on the drivers.

And that's the point of the exercise. Over the last 15 years or so F1 cars have increasingly relied on traction control--that is, computer management of power to keep the wheels from breaking traction under acceleration--to prevent spinouts, with the result being a pretty sanitized experience for viewers: sand or moisture on the track pose no real challenge to the drivers (at least under acceleration) as the TC would just cut power when any wheelspin was detected. The resultant awful ratcheting sound as the cars pulled away from corner became one of F1's trademark (very loud) sounds.

But the advent of traction control, though it has its application to road cars (and is even now found on many new cars), meant that a machine and / or software was doing what had previously been the domain of the race driver: to control the car at the ragged edge to get around a race course faster than others doing the same. The driver's instincts and skill in feathering the application of power was simply removed from the mix. There had been a ban on traction control imposed by the sport's governing body (the FIA) six or seven years ago, but it quickly transpired that the ingenuity of the teams' massive engineering departments made policing this policy nigh-unto impossible. And so to level the playing field it was decided to allow TC back into the legal paradigm. But nobody liked this decision. So this year, in pursuit of the same goal as last time, the FIA took the more radical step of mandating a standard engine electronic control unit. This effectively makes electronic traction control impossible.

What makes this all rather more fascinating than it might otherwise be is the dire seriousness with which the sport itself approaches technical matters. The top F1 teams spend in the region of $300-400 million each to put two cars through a 19-race season. Think of that: that's several billion dollars a year, much of it devoted to engineering staffs (I believe it was Ferrari or Mclaren who were said to employ an engineering staff of 600 people). There are massive computer and wind tunnel staffs, engine and chassis people, transmission people, suspension people, materials departments, on and on. The result of all this effort is not merely cutting-edge, but a placement of that edge much further along the line of progress than it would be on its own.

And the long and short of that is this: the FIA regulations and dicta simply become hurdles for the engineering staffs to find ways to circumvent. This is why the first traction control ban failed; the teams found ways to accomplish the task without being detected by the FIA. The governing body continues to come up with restrictions in an effort to limit the staggering costs of the sport, and the teams continue to find ways to get around the restrictions. (Again and again we've heard that the cars have become dangerously fast, and that big restrictions on engine size and aerodynamics and changes in tire regulations are required to slow the cars down. And without fail the restrictions are nullified in the space of the winter off-season. The current cars are running near-record paces in spite of years of additional restrictions.)

And that, in a nutshell, is Formula One. That's why people watch. Because it's the greatest non-military technical show on earth. It helps if you find your heartrate quickening a little to see cars trying to beat each other around a race course. But even if you didn't care much about racing it remains a most fertile field for a machinery geek. I've actually verified this by taking a couple non-race-fan pilot buddies with me to a race; pilot means machine geek, even if they aren't race fans. And sure enough, they were all flabbergasted at the sheer extremity of it all.

I've lamented for years that the biggest advances in aviation have come only when governments put military dollars toward some lethal goal. F1 kneels at a different alter, that of advertising dollars and marketing imperatives. There's plenty in this scenario to find unsavory as well, but to me it's an improvement that this gigantic technical design impetus is purely market-driven. If only we could find a way to turn these teams loose on problems of electric cars or energy technology or space travel (things at least tangentially related to their present tasks), we might make some real progress in these fields.

(There are unraised questions here about the role of technology in racing and about what role a governing body ought to play in a racing series. I lament Nascar's use of restrictor plates--among the other things I lament about Nascar--because it's a blatant attempt to achieve a level playing field by constricting innovation. It makes a sham out of racing itself; why bother having different cars at all? The use of a standard ECU in F1 is exactly the same thing, even if the levels of technology in the two race series are not remotely comparable. But this is another lengthy post.)

Practice in the Mirror: "I Am Not a Crook!"

Interesting to follow the hullaballoo about Eliot Spitzer. Not being from New York, I have no background of knowledge nor conviction about the man or his career, so I come to this out of the blue. Which sounds like how the news came to those in the know: like a thunderbolt.

I can't bring myself to give a shit about the sexual behavior of consenting adults, and I don't get how government even gets involved (that is, provided there is no coercion involved). If a woman is willing to take a guy's money for sex, and the guy is willing to pay for it, I just can't find a foothold to care.

But a person must be held to the standards which they demand of others, especially if those standards bring dire consequences to other people. Like the priest who keeps a tight yoke on his flock's sexual behavior yet regularly dupes the alter boys into changing his oil, a man who makes a good living and garners spectacular press off of breaking up prostitution rings yet clandestinely partakes himself needs to be brought down in the most forceful way. It isn't that his sin should not be forgiven, it's that he himself loudly and publicly defined the act as unforgivable. Spitzer is being pounded with his own hammer. (I can only wonder that his wife doesn't say "Do your own fucking press conference; I'll be at my lawyer's!")

I expect this kind of you-all-have-to-follow-the-rules-but-I-don't behavior from the legions of oily, self-righteous Republican scumbags--guys like Jimmy Swaggart and Larry Craig and Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, hypocrites all--who love to wrap themselves in the flag and carry their Bibles. Hell, the setup and downfall is so commonplace that it's become a cliché. But here's yet another reminder that there are dirtballs of every political stripe (not that I've ever been much more inclined to trust Democrats). Either politics and power attract the ethically-handicapped, or it makes monsters of otherwise solid citizens; but whatever the cause / effect sequence, this is what we've come to expect from those who would lead us.

Thus do they get swept out with their own broom; but, unfortunately, only to make room for the next scumbag off the bus.

Burn, Baby, Burn

With nothing else particularly going on at the moment that I can bring myself to comment on, we'll stick with movies. Specifically, another of this past year's noteworthy entries: actor Ben Affleck's directorial debut Gone, Baby Gone. In addition to directing, Affleck also had a hand, with Aaron Stockard, in adapting the Dennis Lehane book of the same name into the screenplay, and he has brought on board a very strong cast, including his brother Casey and veteran actors Morgan Freeman, Amy Ryan (in an Oscar-nominated role), Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris and John Ashton among others.

I must say that neither Ben Affleck nor his brother Casey have made much of an impression on me in any capacity, though I liked the elder Affleck's work with Matt Damon with their screenplay for 1997's Good Will Hunting. But as actors both Afflecks exude a certain youthful slacker-ness that inclined me to dismiss their work as pop-culture fluff. This movie quickly puts a stop to this line of thinking about both men. Indeed, I may have been wrong here all along: Casey Affleck is said to be a revelation in The Assassination of Jesse James, and this movie now strongly motivates me to check that one out.

The story follows a young, boyfriend / girlfriend team of private investigators (Casey Affleck and Monaghan) who are hired to look into the disappearance of the young daughter of a drug-addicted single mom (Ryan). With the police already on high alert at the girl's disappearance, nobody welcomes the young detectives into the mix, and the two seem to run into a striking hostility at almost every turn. This resistance only further piques the determination of the detectives, and we come to wonder if there's something more than inhospitality at work. The events unfold in such a way that we end up astride a really difficult, fundamental question, the kind of issue where middle ground is hard to find and even harder to defend.

If this brilliant condensation of a core issue is Lehane's primary gift to the film, then kudos to Director Affleck for not losing sight of it, and to the cast for doing so seamless a job of setting us up for the brick wall they so deftly place in our way at the end. Although there is a fair amount of action in the film, it's really this skillful, methodical unfolding of the story's many petals that delivers us so deftly into the dilemma, and it's that dilemma that will have you talking with your friends for hours afterward.

Like with Good Will Hunting, there is a sense of this picture being an exposé of a world the Afflecks know intimately rather than an adventurous foray into new territory. No matter, with so compelling a story, we can forgive them sticking close to home; and the payoff is that Affleck knows what to show in order to bring the place to life for us. Many of the movie's extras (and even some of the smaller speaking roles) are handled by citizens of the neighborhood, and there is an unmistakable authenticity to the look and feel of the movie.

Lastly, I have to put in my plug for Amy Ryan, whose nomination for an Oscar was clearly not a mistake. It takes guts to play someone so profoundly depraved, though Ryan has the satisfaction of knowing that her persona sits at the very heart of the film's big dilemma. She's not the first person, of course, to tackle the Unsavory Character mantle ( Daniel Day-Lewis also comes to mind this year), but she gives a virtuoso turn here for a character that guarantees a strong reaction in spite of relatively little screen time. I can't help thinking it must have been a thrill for her as an actor to take this on. I don't think she topples my pick (and subsequent Oscar winner) Tilda Swinton, but after seeing this movie I think it was a very, very close race.

Grade: A-

The Glories of YouTube

For those not familiar with Bach's Trio Sonatas for organ, they represent yet another milestone of organ composition from the German master. There are six Sonatas in all, each in three movements, and they involve (as the name implies) three musical lines in each movement: one for each of the hands and one for the feet. Registration is generally static, and the whole show is in the mastery of the dense, highly imitative counterpoint.

The feet are especially tasked here. Bach placed greater demands on the organist's feet than any composer to that point, and nowhere so much as in these pieces. The coordination required to play them at all is very impressive, and to play them well is really miraculous.

The organist, Aarnoud de Groen, is someone new to me, but he plays this movement brilliantly. (One small criticism: I do wish he had chosen a more assertive registration for his left hand, as this line gets lost a bit in this recording. But that bottom manual is for the rückpositiv, the "chair organ" which is speaking out into the church from behind his back. If this recording comes from the camera, we're hearing less of this--and more of the organ's mechanical sounds--than someone out in the church proper.)