Bossy Bossy

I think we all know the type: a big guy (usually middle aged) who explains things to everybody in loud, bombastic, tedious detail. Who sternly informs you how you aren’t doing it right. Who is the only person who KNOWS ABOUT EVERYTHING and never lets up. The blowhard, the bully, the obnoxious bossy type.

Which I’ve been thinking about after grimacing through Dimitri Mitropoulos and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra doing just that in their 1941 recording of the Schumann Second Symphony. I haven’t been this sternly lectured to in a good long while. Everybody is pointing everything out, emphasizing everything, making sure we understand that THE PHRASE IS DIRECTED TO THIS POINT AND NO OTHER and that THIS INNER VOICE MUST BE HEARD and that THIS IS A REPEATED PASSAGE AND THEREFORE MUST BE VARIED FROM THE ORIGINAL.

Sweet it ain’t. Gentleness has no place here. This is the Schumann Second shouted out, punched out, not so much played as commanded. It’s not a performance to listen to. It’s a performance to cringe to. Maybe a performance to salute. Yes, sir Mister Mitropoulos sir!

But more likely, a performance to be heard once and then put away with a sigh of relief. Just like getting away from that obnoxious blowhard and all of his stern directives and drill-sargeant pronouncements.

Along with that, I also heard a later Mitropoulos performance of the Tchaikovsky Capriccio italien, this time with the NY Phil and in stereo. Not so punched out, fortunately. But grim. Rigid. Broad-shouldered. Mean-spirited. How can you make the Tchaikovsky Capriccio italien vaguely unpleasant? It takes some doing, but Mitropoulos does it.

One of my litmus tests for any particular conductor: “do I want to hear this person leading a performance of the Brahms Third?”

With Mitropoulos the answer is: Oh, God, no no no. Fortunately I don’t have to even consider the possibility since on the giant Sony complete set of his recordings only a St. Anthony Variations is present for Brahms. None of the symphonies. A few Beethoven overtures, a rushed and impatient Pastoral, and one concerto as accompanist. Not a whiff of Mozart. (Good.) No Schubert. (Also good.) No Wagner. No Bruckner. A bit of Mahler. A harshly-lit, driven Debussy La Mer that lacks even the faintest whiff of nuance, spat out by that grumpest of orchestras, the 1950s New York Philharmonic that even Bruno Walter couldn’t completely tame.

This is a guy who specialized in contemporary music — meaning that he wasn’t much of one for the traditional repertoire. It shows. God, how it shows.

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Morning Trauma

I begin with the assertion that my early mornings are, on the whole, trauma-free. My morning schedule is well established, the usual regimen of bathroom-shower-dress-breakfast. On workdays (MWF) I get up early enough to ensure that I’m not rushed.

Nor is there anything particularly traumatic about my morning commute, although it takes a while. I live in Brentwood, a sparkling suburb on the very eastern edge of the Bay Area. Brentwood is not served directly by a BART line, but nearby Antioch hosts the terminal for the ‘yellow’ line. I drive to that station, a trip of about 10 miles westwards on Highway 4 to the Hillcrest Avenue exit. Traffic is usually light, as one might expect at 5:30 AM in suburbia.

The ride begins on the eBART cars, diesel-electric jobbers that shuttle for about 10 miles between Antioch and a transfer platform just east of the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station. (Tidbit: those eBART cars are the most pleasant vehicles in the entire BART system.) The transfer to the main BART train is typically without incident. Since BART has retired all of the old cars, the new trains are clean and bright, and even better, they’re not stinky inside. Big win.

It’s about an hour on BART from there to Embarcadero station in San Francisco, where I transfer to the MUNI Metro subway. The trip from Embarcadero to Van Ness station is also typically uneventful.

So where’s the trauma? Well, it has just arrived. It arises once I exit Van Ness Station, via an escalator that that lifts me up to street level, at the northwest corner of Van Ness and Market.

The northwest goddamn corner of Van Ness and Market. Apart from the Tenderloin, there may be no grislier or more off-putting corner in all of grimy, gritty, gruesome San Francisco. The first thing you see when riding up the escalator is a half-dead oak tree that resembles one of those twiggy misshapen specters in Caspar David Friedrich’s allegories. Immediately underneath it, these days, is a grubby tent. Drug-addled junkies and festering vagrants litter the filthy, greasy, sticky, grotesquely unpleasant sidewalk and cluster around the filthy, greasy, sticky, grotesquely unpleasant “All Star Café” on the corner. (In any properly-governed city, that thing would have been bulldozed ages ago.) To get to my destination half a block up Oak Street, I have to walk around the front of the All-Star Café while sidestepping drugged-out zombies (yesterday there were three, one of whom was in the U-shaped posture of the hopelessly addicted), and turn left just past the café onto Oak Street.

Oak Street is kinda dead. There are three parking lots along the single block between Van Ness and Franklin — this in a city with some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. How on earth has this block not been developed? One answer can be found in the large condominium mid-block that was completed several years ago but stands empty, apparently done in by legal issues. The city’s horrendous planning process has probably sunk any chance of anything else being built along the block.

Oak Street’s post-apocalyptic aura is intensified by thick encrustations on the sidewalk that render the paving barely visible. It’s not a good idea to walk on those sidewalks unless getting a dose of typhoid is on your bucket list. The Conservatory is on the north side of the street, immediately past a vaguely Italianesque building on the corner. That building features a number of inset niches that provide huddling places for druggies and vagrants and bums. Streams of various liquids run from those niches across the sidewalk to the curb. One shouldn’t step on those. 

So I don’t walk on the sidewalk. I walk on Oak Street instead. Dirty tire rubber on my shoes is preferable to whatever’s on those sidewalks. Fortunately it’s a one-way street and almost a cul-de-sac, so I’m in no danger of being run over provided I stay close to the cars that are parked diagonally nose-in at the curb. Once I’m in front of the Conservatory the sidewalk is, as a rule, clean and vagrant-free.

I should add that the sky is invariably leaden gray. And it’s cold.

All in all, the morning trauma lasts about a minute. But it packs a lot into that minute. It’s depressing. It’s distressing. It’s disgusting. It’s dismaying. It’s disturbing. As soon as I duck into the Conservatory building I stay inside until it’s time to go home.

I return to a lovely and well-governed small city where the sidewalks are clean, where the sun shines and the trees flourish, where druggies are conspicuously absent, where I enjoy going for long walks, where I feel happy and safe and at ease. I don’t expect San Francisco to become a suburban jewel like Brentwood, but I’d sure appreciate it if the damn place didn’t go out of its way to be so damn unpleasant.

PS: I do not allow my San Francisco shoes in the house unless they’ve had a good scrubbing with disinfectant. 

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Desert Island: Mozart 39

Certain pieces make me happier like no others. There’s nothing rational about any of this, nothing logical, nothing I can present to the jury for defense. They’re just my favorite, desert-island, can’t-live-without-them pieces. Here’s one.

Mozart: Symphony No. 39 in E-flat Major, K. 543, II – Andante con moto

The second movement of this luminous late Mozart symphony almost never fails to enchant me, in its blend of fascinating rhythmic contrasts, its wondrously hushed lyrical passages, its adventurous key changes, its magical wind writing.

I say it almost never fails because certain performers can turn this ineffable silk purse into a sow’s ear. They’re almost all the HP types, those agenda-driven, canned-gesture automatons who lack poetry in their souls and have lost whatever sense of mystery they might have ever had about music. Fortunately I don’t have to waste much time on any of them, unless there’s a point to be made. This is music that responds most strongly to intensely personal musicianship, depth of feeling, and a sincere, beating-heart love of music. Thus the best thing to do with the HP recordings: run screaming from the listening room.

Favorite Recordings

Bruno Walter conducts the Columbia Symphony Orchestra (1961)

Walter recorded this symphony three times over his long career—in 1934 with the BBC Symphony, in 1956 with the New York Philharmonic, and 1961 with the ‘Columbia Symphony Orchestra,’ which is actually the Los Angeles Philharmonic with some additions from the best studio orchestras. Walter may not be in sync with today’s rushed and crabbed sensibilities, but that’s not a black mark on Bruno Walter. It’s a black mark on today. Any musician who can’t hear the absolute rightness, the radiance, of Walter’s loving approach to this symphony is, frankly, a musician I’d never want to perform with or listen to. Walter gives the phrases time to breathe, luxuriates in beautiful string and wind tone, and sings this exquisite creation out with every bit of love he has. (And that’s a lot of love.) The orchestra players give it their all in return—and quite an ‘all’ it is. 

Of Walter’s two earlier performances, the early one with the BBC Symphony is truly lovely, and it’s instructive to hear how his conception of the movement was essentially already established in 1934. The 1956 New York Philharmonic performance is also good but suffers from a ham-handed orchestra and some distinctly iffy wind intonation. 

Carlo Maria Giulini conducts the Berlin Philharmonic (1982)

Giulini was a conductor very much in the Bruno Walter mode, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that his performance of the Symphony 39 slow movement would luxuriate in the music’s beauty. Slower than many (at 10:08 it’s slower than Walter at 9:14,) it doesn’t feel slow, and that’s the critical thing. There’s so much happening in this performance: the limpid warm clarity of the strings, the finely fashioned wind sonorities, the long phrases with their natural breathing and contours. If the Walter performances didn’t exist, the Giulini/Berlin could stand in their place. And none of Walter’s performances can boast an orchestra like the Berlin Philharmonic. 

Daniel Barenboim conducts the English Chamber Orchestra (1968)

There’s a pattern emerging here, in that I’m clearly attached to slower and more loving performances. At 8:58 Barenboim is just a smidgen faster than Walter, and more than a smidgen faster than Giulini, but the same attention to tonal luster, warmth, and just plain old love turn this carefully-fashioned and intelligent performance into a thing of rare beauty. The ECO went into this project having recently put down some of the most memorable Mozart symphony performances in recorded history under the peerless baton of Benjamin Britten, so one can say they were primed and ready to roll for Barenboim. 

Rafael Kubelik conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony (1988)

With a name like “Bavarian Radio Symphony” it sure doesn’t sound like a world-class orchestra, but it’s really and truly one of the great ones. That south German adoration of fine music, combined with superb musical training and a series of distinguished conductors, results in an orchestra that more often than not leaves one enchanted, thrilled, and moved.

And in Rafael Kubelik they had one of the unsung giants of the podium, a conductor of absolute musical integrity who eschewed even the slightest hint of showboating. (That may be why he never had the rep of certain more glamorous and musically-inferior conductors.) This 1988 performance is perfection, period. It’s on the fast side compared to my other loves (9:12, but that’s well within the Walter-Giulini-Barenboim range), but the lyrical poise, the tonal balance, the sheer civilization of this performance make it one in a million. 

Some Absolutely NOT Favorite Recordings

Alan Gilbert conducts the New York Philharmonic (2014)

Here we have the sorry spectacle of a conductor with absolutely no affinity for a piece of music plodding through an uninspired, unimaginative, and downright noncommittal performance. Today’s Philharmonic players are a much more affable gang than the dour grumps whom Walter was obliged to lead, but even if they play with professional polish (and then some,) nothing can ameliorate their being whisked through the movement by a conductorial efficiency expert.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts the Concentus Musicus Wien (2014)

To paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, I hated, hated, hated, HATED this performance. This is HP at its most agenda-driven and careless, contemptuous of artistic sensibility and without the slightest hint of good taste. Fully two minutes shorter than Walter—and this is with taking every repeat no matter what, in keeping with that grim HP dogmatism—this renders great music as a silly trifle, a performance in which every phrase is flicked off crisply, every legato is warped by woofy swells, and the overall demeanor of this most heartfelt of slow movements is deliberately devolved into music that could appeal only to the most dance-y dance-y and brain-dead of vapid little twits. Everybody responsible for this calculated insult to a great composer should be ashamed of themselves.

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Silence is Golden

I have a thing for quiet. Probably more than most people. I’m disturbed by all kinds of noises, from light bonks to moderate thrashes to unsettling thwocks. Motorcycles and helicopters are anathema. People talking loudly can render me borderline homicidal. 

There’s more, but you get the general idea. “A quiet-living man who prefers to spend his evenings in the quiet of his room/who likes an atmosphere as peaceful as an undiscovered tomb.” That’s me — of course except when I’m playing my own music via my fine audiophile-grade sound system or watching a movie, etc. Naturally I make noise sometimes myself. I use a cordless leaf blower on a daily basis in the back yard. I use electric hedge trimmers. I vacuum. I can run the dishwasher (Bosch 800 and incredibly quiet) and the laundry (also sonically very well-behaved.) I’m not a monk in his cell. Neither am I a boisterous family with small children and dogs and a mom-wife with a buzz-saw voice (the house immediately behind me) nor an aging hoarder with a squad of yappy small dogs (next door). 

I also spend part of my work days riding on BART trains, which as anyone in the Bay Area knows, are egregious sonic offenders. The fancy new BART trains are, if anything, noisier than the old ones.

The upshot is that I’ve become quite the afficionado of noise-cancelling headphones. As such I’ve seen fit to acquire a small hoard of same. So here are my thoughts about the ones I have. Since I’m a teacher I’m giving them letter grades as well.

Bose Quiet Comfort II Earbuds

On the whole I’m not big on earbuds. My princess-and-the-pea ears become sore easily. I remember a pair of wired Shure earbuds of a decade ago that left my ears aching in short order. I dislike over-ear headphones for the same reason, vastly preferring the circum-ear instead that surround my ears rather than pressing down on my earlobes.

For what they are, the Bose earbuds do a good job. The thing I’ve noticed with earbuds is that they just can’t cancel sound as well as headphones. But the Bose are the best ones I’ve tried. The audio quality is mediocre, however. And even with these I start feeling the discomfort before too long.

C+

Sony WF-1000XM5 Earbuds

I wound up taking these back to the store and getting a refund. The overall sound quality is quite good. But the noise cancellation doesn’t work worth beans, and believe me I tried every Internet group for advice, including Sony’s own suggestions. Maybe I had a defective pair. I don’t know. 

Furthermore, they had an annoying habit of not turning on, or mysteriously playing in mono instead of stereo.

F

Sony WH-1000XM4 Headphones

It’s hard to realize that these are made by the same folks who came up with those troublesome earbuds. Excellent headphones, pure and simple. The audio quality is extremely good, although I find it a bit mushy overall. However, they do a fine job with noise cancellation, enough so that all last year they were my go-to headphones for BART. 

They’re also extremely comfortable and boast superb battery life.

B+

Bose QuietComfort 700 Headphones

When it comes to noise cancellation these are the absolute champions. They cancel everything. Furthermore, they’re light.

They tend to make clunk-clunk noises when you move your head, caused by the way the cups themselves are connected via plastic slider thingies. You can fix it with some silicon lubricant. It makes them look odd since they wind up with goo along the sides, but it’s an effective remedy.

The sound quality is OK. I’ve just never found a Bose product that can really cut the mustard sonically. These produce a distinctly undernourished sound. They’re just fine with simple stuff—such as the nature sounds I like to play—but you really don’t want them for music. At least I don’t.

B+/A-

Apple AirPods Max

Leave it to Apple to nail the whole shebang. The AirPods Max are high-class jobbers that are designed to work their best within an Apple-centric environment. That’s me. I also like the controls, which eschew those pesky surface gesture things where you brush a finger this way or that way and can wind up changing something just because you tried to move them a bit and touched the wrong place. The AirPods Max have an honest-to-God volume knob (a crown like on the AppleWatch) that’s also pushable for play/pause, and a real, flesh-and-blood button that you press to select between ambient sound and noise cancellation. And that’s it. No power button since they deal with all that automatically. No Bluetooth button. No “special” button that does whatever you want it to do, and most of the time just sits there unused. You can touch your AirPods Max with confidence that you aren’t going to inadvertently change tracks or change the volume or mute or or or …

The noise cancellation is on par with the Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones, not quite at the Bose 700s level, but close enough. 

Sound quality is excellent. Full-bodied, crisp response, without the Bose emaciation or the Sony mush. The AirPods Max are my only noise-cancellation headphones that can handle a quality recording of a Baroque trio sonata without making fools out of themselves. Sonically they can’t hold a candle to my Sennheiser HD 800s, but those are audiophile indoor-listening cans, cabled, sans noise cancellation, and requiring audiophile-grade amplification to strut their stuff. The day hasn’t arrived when wireless ANC headphones can compete with Sennheiser HD 800s or their brethren. 

I’ll grant that they’re a little heavy. Not jogging cans, if one is into that sort of thing. (I’m not.) But they’re really comfortable nonetheless. It’s easy to forget you’re wearing them. Yes, they’re the most expensive of the models I’ve listed. But Apple tax notwithstanding, you definitely get what you pay for.

A

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Sitting Pretty

When I bought my house in 2015, I took on a truly sizable debt, not just the usual credit card balances or car payments. This was a great looming thing, a mortgage. Six figures. Intimidating.

The intimidation didn’t last long. After all, monthly payments for housing had been a fixture of my adulthood since age 19 and my first little apartment in the Mount Vernon section of downtown Baltimore. This new monthly payment was at least partly something I was paying to myself (allowing that mortgage interest accrued to the lender and not to me.) So the mortgage never gave me any sleepless nights or anything like that. A fairly low interest rate and substantial initial down payment helped; I had a big blob of equity from the get-go. And I figured the house would increase in value. Which it has, spectacularly, and will likely continue to do so.

Nevertheless, I originally planned to pay off the mortgage debt as soon as possible, and to that end set myself a goal of being mortgage-free within ten years. But rather than pay the money directly into the mortgage account, I choose to put the extra funds into investment accounts—index funds and decent-yield certificates of deposit on the whole—so they could earn while they accrued.

I reached my goal in 2022: seven years rather than ten. This afternoon I could waltz into a Chase bank, or go online, and arrange to pay off the entire mortgage: bada-bing, bada-boom. Thus Sitting Pretty. I know I can render myself mortgage-free. Property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, utilities would remain. But they’re pipsqueaks compared to the mortgage proper.

Goal realized, I realized that I didn’t want to pay off the mortgage yet. Here’s why:

  • Given that I’m still very much employed and working, cash flow simply isn’t a problem. I make way more than I spend, house payment or no house payment. 
  • Why let go of the tax breaks for mortgage interest?
  • The invested funds earn more than the interest on the mortgage. Net gain.
  • Why lock up all that money in a non-liquid asset?

The upside: I’ll keep on making the mortgage payments until I retire. Which, barring the unforeseen, won’t happen any time soon. Then I’ll act. In the meantime my investments will have grown and the mortgage balance will have shrunk: heads you lose, tails I win.

Sitting pretty. 

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Sometimes You Can Go Back

Fascinated by recordings at an early age, but saddled with a kid’s limited budget and even more limited accessibility from my perch in a western Denver suburb, I discovered Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande orchestra by sheer happenstance. In America they were issued on the “London Stereo Treasury” label, this side of the pond’s answer to Decca’s “Ace of Diamonds” budget reprints in Europe. Decca was not apt to offer their highest-ranked artists on Stereo Treasury—no Solti, no Curzon, etc. But the prolific Ansermet and his Geneva orchestra were fair game.

As a result, they showed up at a nearby market, a 7-11 in all but name, stacked up in the tiny set of record racks, most of which held junk of the “101 Strings Play Movie Classics” variety—RCA Camden for the most part. But they also stocked whatever the latest London Stereo Treasury discs were coming from their distributor, and those included a fair sampling of Ansermet. Best of all, I could buy a few of those on a regular basis given their modest prices, something like $1.50 at a time when a fine Deutsche Grammophon would set me back a whopping $5.00 or so—far too much for my skinny pocketbook with its funds acquired mostly via bagging groceries at the local King Soopers. And getting better records meant cajoling my mother to take me to a big shopping center. She detested driving so that took some doing.

So I stocked up on London Stereo Treasury. I still have a few of them to this day, and taking them out for an examination I’m quite taken with the quality of the vinyl pressings, far superior to those horrid RCA Camdens with their cheap recycled vinyl that snapped, crackled, and popped even when new. The jacket art was simple but at least in full color, obviously designed to dispense with graphic designers since each cover looked more or less the same: white, black print, and a rectangular color photo in the bottom two-thirds. But they weren’t unattractive and they didn’t scream ‘cheap’ the way the Camdens did. And they sounded great.

It made for an odd introduction to the orchestral repertory. Ansermet and the Suisse Romande weren’t typically entrusted with Brahms or Schumann or Wagner; they got Debussy, Ravel, Dukas, Honegger, Martin, and the like. They did a gorgeous job with those, to be sure. But that lopsided repertory meant that I knew Paul Dukas’ score to the ballet La Peri before I knew the Beethoven 7th. I also picked up some chamber music thanks to the Borodin Quartet and certain Shostakovich quartets. 

I think my experience might be matched by a lot of folk my age. During a golden age for recordings, Decca gave the Genevans a massive go and provided posterity with a whopping harvest of truly first-rate recordings of a truly second-rate orchestra. But while they couldn’t hope to match the Berlin or Vienna Phils, or American powerhouses like Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York on Columbia, or Boston and Chicago on RCA, Decca and the Genevans offered superior audio and a much wider-ranging repertory than the American labels were producing. 

The Ansermet-Suisse-Romande recordings have had a somewhat spotty history in the digital world but they’ve really never been wholly unavailable. Decca brought them out in decent remasterings in a set of boxes organized by repertoire—European Tradition, French, Modern—which brought a lot of fascinating performances back to light. Now they’re re-doing the lot, both the monophonic and stereo recordings. The stereo set has become available, and me being me, I snapped it up, just as I snapped up those earlier sets. I have too many fond memories of those recordings to let these pass by, especially with their new remasterings that bring out more detail than ever before.

I’m taking my time with the set, and right now I’m going through their Beethoven cycle—something which I knew existed but assumed wouldn’t be worth bothering with in comparison to the magisterial Karajan/Berlin 1963 set or Szell’s diamond-precision Cleveland jobbers on Epic/Columbia. But in fact they’re quite worth going over in detail; many of them seem to channel the future performance practice movement, and allowing for the occasional icky wind intonation and scrappy strings, they’re really quite effective. Without a doubt Ansermet is at his best in the faster movements and at his least in the slow movements; among my test movements for Beethoven symphonies is the second movement of the Second Symphony, and this one’s something of a clunker. But the first movement is terrific. The Fourth is given a dandy rendition. The Eroica isn’t one of the great ones by any means, but it holds up really quite well. 

This business of re-issuing oldies-but-goodies in remastered digital audio is a great one for nostalgic duffers like me. But for younger listeners it can be a terrific way to build a find recorded music library with modest expense—provided that younger listeners have the slightest interest in owning copies, as opposed to depending on streaming for access. But you can stream these remastered jobbers just as well as sell them in box sets (and that’s happening), so as far as I can tell it’s a win-win scenario. 

Shades of sitting on the floor in my bedroom in Applewood, glued to my RCA Victor record player with its separate red-cloth-covered speakers, spinning my just-acquired London Stereo Treasury disc of Debussy’s Printemps in Ansermet’s lively performance, Decca’s superlative audio obvious enough even through the no-doubt limited mush of that record player. You can’t go home again, but at least you can revisit those moments of quiet happiness within the chaotic churn of adolescence.

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Grow, Grow

I’m not any kind of accomplished gardener. I let things grow too much. Sometimes I learn about some plant’s light or heat requirements by messing it up and eventually plopping it into the green can, destined to become mulch or whatnot.

But I love it. I’ve learned significantly since my first baby steps back in the fall of 2015 when I bought this house and all the flora that came with it. In fact, it was something of a trial by fire since said flora wasn’t in all that good of shape. The roses, in particular, weren’t healthy — and even I, in my ignorance, could recognize that they would be needing some attention. At the time, however, just the act of deadheading was about all I could handle. It felt kind of like being Morticia Addams, clipping away at those leftover blobs that had been rose blooms just a few days before.

Eventually I learned, from an experienced hand with roses, that ‘you can’t cut them too much.’ In other words, they really need plenty of pruning. I began picking up on that. I’m still inclined to let them grow long antennae-like canes, partly because I know that they need to reach the best light in my considerably shady back yard, but also because I can’t bear the idea of pruning a rose cane if I can see that there’s a bud forming at the tip. I’ll wait until after it has produced a bloom.

I learned about shade versus sun the hard way, by putting a newly-planted pot of impatiens on the deck railing, where the sunlight is constant and intense during the summer. The impatiens were destroyed within half a day and I had learned my lesson. I read up on them and found that they are, of course, shade flowers for whom direct sunlight is downright toxic. I tried again, this time placing the impatiens underneath the ficus trees that are largely responsible for my back yard being so shady. And they flourished. To this day I fill the area underneath two of the ficus trees with a billowing chorus of impatiens.

I got some books. I watched some videos. Mostly I just practiced and lamented my failures while celebrating my successes. Not long ago I found out that canna lilies — they’re really a kind of iris — really love major sunlight. I put a distinctly retiring canna lily in a larger pot and placed it smack dab out on the patio where it gets direct sunlight most of the day. And it went nuts, quadrupling in height and sending out a veritable thicket of canes with bright golden blooms hither and yon. Aha, I thought. Canna lilies like sunlight. That barely-there canna lily is now the monarch of the back yard. So it goes.

What has made me a good, if not expert, gardener is that I understand the patience involved. I’m a teacher, after all, and teaching is all about patience and waiting for results. Thus I’m not about to jump to hasty conclusions about the health or prospects of a particular plant. I’m also accustomed to doing research so I’m quite willing to look around for solutions to particular problems. (That’s how I learned about the way overly alkaline soil can really screw up a lot of plants since it interferes with their ability to process iron for making chlorophyll. An iron-and-acid liquid compound from my local Ace Hardware sets that right in a jiffy.)

We don’t have extreme seasons here in Brentwood, out on the eastern edge of the SF Bay Area. Fall lingers on through November and the winter is incredibly mild; no snow, hardly ever freezing temperatures. Hopefully plenty of rain. The spring gets started around late February. By late April it’s summer. At no time do I have to protect anything from the winter frosts. I still cut the roses down to short, bare canes every December because they really need it. I have a big plumbago on the deck that I also trim down to practically nothing since it, like the roses, needs it. I chuck most of the impatiens and begonias and start over in late April. So there’s definitely a feeling of renewal and change. And every year I seem to add more.

This year it occurred to me that I was overdoing it. Just too many plants everywhere. I’m mostly a pots guy, rather than planting in the ground. My soil isn’t so good — mostly clay — and the long strip of soil underneath the ficus trees is threaded through with tree roots. So I’ve found that large planters work better on the whole. It also makes for moving things around possible. However, the flip side is that it encourages me to pick up just a few more of those cool looking whatchamacallits and thingamabobs at the garden store and worry later about where I’m going to put them. So I wind up with too much. But I don’t mind. Flowers are pretty, and I can take the extra time to stroll about with hose and sprayer.

Most importantly, though, is that it creates a space with lots of character. It’s definitely my garden; there’s nothing whatsoever of the designer about it. I’ve put things hither and yon and never hesitated to crowd things together. Thus it expresses my happiness in home. And my continued love for experimentation and growth. And my determination not to let myself get old and static before my time.

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Scrappy, Scratchy, Screechy

One of my favorite moments in Cervantes’ Don Quixote occurs when he lets on that he knows perfectly well that he’s living in a fantasy land. On the subject of Aldonza Lorenzo, the country barmaid that he has elevated into the chastely beautiful Dulcinea del Toboso, he has this to say:

“Do you think that the Amaryllises, Phyllises, Sylvias, Dianas, Galateas, Alidas, and all the rest that fill books, ballads, barbershops, and theaters are really ladies of flesh and blood to those who celebrate them? It is enough for me to think and believe that my good Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and virtuous; for her lineage, it matters little, for no one is going to investigate it in order to give her a robe of office, and I can think she is the highest princess in the world. Because you should know, Sancho, if you do not know already, that two things inspire love more than any other; they are great beauty and a good name, and these two things reach their consummation in Dulcinea. I depict her in my imagination as I wish her to be in beauty and distinction.”

I depict her in my imagination as I wish her to be. Yes. That’s what divine madness is all about. Except in the case of Alonso Quixano, a.k.a. Don Quixote, it’s not really madness since, as Cervantes keeps hinting, he’s not mad at all. He’s just got this whole living thing down really well. He can tell his hawks from his handsaws and, all things being equal, he’d much rather have the hawks.

Which brings me to the subject of ‘period’ performance practice as applied to major symphonic works such as Beethoven symphonies. And I’ll say this about that: I don’t give a flying farquar how the Eroica might have sounded in Beethoven’s day. I don’t want to know, except that the performance practice people keep rubbing my nose in what they think was the ‘real’ Beethoven orchestral sound: scrappy, scruffy, brass-y, drum-y. And speedy. And unsentimental. And remorselessly metronomic. Which I think is balderdash. Beethoven was a lot of things, and one of those things was musician. Nobody could be Beethoven without having one of humanity’s most acute senses of beauty, temporal pacing, and musical proportions. If Beethoven was OK with scrappy and scratchy and rushed and inflexible, well then, we’re all wasting our time. 

Now wait there just a moment, I can hear the argument starting. They don’t all play like that, now do they? Well, actually, they kinda do, I reply. I’m tired of hearing those scrape-y strings and borderline-blatty brass and everything zipping by in quickstep. Sorry, but I want the Berlin Philharmonic in all its burnished glory. I want the Vienna Philharmonic with its strings to die for, with its marvelous pungent woodwinds and its centuries of lived experience. I want my Eroica played by a nice big orchestra with all the trimmings, not some stripped-down, dressed-down, toned-down little gaggle of a band that sounds way bigger in a recording than it does in real life.

What I want is Dulcinea. So stop insisting that period performance insists that she’s just some farm girl who waits on tables at the local pub. Give me the virtuous and mysterious and elevated and beautiful Dulcinea. 

Give me Beethoven with sound, dammit. Opulent sound. Big sound. Melt-in-your-mouth dolcissimi and peel-the-paint-off fortissimi. Give me a performance that’s willing to linger perhaps a bit here or there, or that has spent any amount of time getting chord balances just so, or a phrasing in the slow movement of the 2nd symphony perfectly balanced and planned.

Give me Beethoven. Beethoven. BEETHOVEN. He’s the ultimate kahuna, the biggest enchilada, the headiest head guy, in all Western music. That’s for a reason. And that reason has nothing to do with symphonies that sound like a junior high school marching band heard through a cheap transistor radio.

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My Piano Besties, Part 1

It occurs to me that I haven’t written about my own favorite pianists. As a pianist myself I’m bound to have some opinions on the matter; after all, I taught an entire semester course at the Fromm Institute about the history of the great pianists and piano playing in general.

Not long ago I consulted my library’s collection of recordings of the slow movement of the very first Beethoven piano sonata, Op. 2 No. 1 in F Minor. But I almost stopped for good after the first.

That’s because the first one was the grand old Artur Schnabel from the 1930s, in its latest beautifully remastered incarnation from the fine folks at Pristine Classical. As I sat there, captivated by Schnabel’s delicate rubato, elegant phrasing, and almost superhuman tonal control, I realized that there’s everyday good Beethoven playing, and there’s Schnabel playing Beethoven. Whole different ball game. Eventually I listened through the remainder of the recordings in my collection. Each had its own take on the movement, its own strengths and weaknesses. Despite the primitive recording tech of Schnabel’s 1935 outing, none of the other performances floated my boat the way Schnabel’s did.

Which made me think about those pianists who ring my bell particularly loudly, and have for as long as I’ve known those particular pianists. I’ll start at the top. This is the one pianist who has been my bestie for as long as I’ve been aware of him. 

Arthur Rubinstein.

The late Terry Teachout wrote an article in which he bewailed Rubinstein’s posthumous slipping off the pianistic radar. He noted that other pianists of the early- to mid-twentieth century were much more highly regarded nowadays, pianists such as Horowitz or Kempff or Hofmann or Rachmaninoff. But for me he remains the grand seigneur of the piano, an elegant musician with a straightforward and uncomplicated ear. There were bigger technicians. There were folks with more magical shadings of tone and dynamics. There were gutsier pianists. But Rubinstein checked off more boxes than anybody else. He kept at it for three quarters of a century and left us a stunning recorded legacy in addition to a host of memories of his larger-than-life onstage persona.

I experienced that persona a number of times growing up. Rubinstein would come to Denver and play either a solo recital or appear with the Denver Symphony. (That’s what it was called back then; nowadays it’s the Colorado Philharmonic.) I vividly remember one evening when he was playing the Chopin E Minor piano concerto on the first half and the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor on the second. The Denver audience was distinctly lukewarm towards the Chopin; it just wasn’t their kind of piece, I don’t think. That’s because they were a bunch of hicks. They clapped politely. I had been brought to the concert by the mother of one of my high school friends, and she was downright appalled by the Denverites lack of appreciation for Chopin and/or Rubinstein. Well, she groused beside me: we’ll stand up! And we did.

Rubinstein noticed the reserved nature of the audience, and I think it ticked him off. At least that was my impression from his demeanor when he came striding/stomping out onstage for the second half. He attacked the Tchaikovsky like an avenging fury. It may not have been a subtle performance—subtlety would have been wasted on that crowd anyway—but he punched that sucker through the rafters of the old Auditorium Theater. Appropriately titillated, the Denverites erupted into cheers, hoots, and hollers. Of course. Rubinstein clearly enjoyed the adulation pouring over the edge of the stage, but he had a look on his face, something to the effect of: peasants!! You want slam-bang, I’ll give you slam-bang!

Maybe I’m underestimating Denver audiences. (Nah.) I remember a solo recital Rubinstein gave us a Brahms F Minor sonata that I’ll always remember for its sheer commitment and care. He put the thing across magnificently, no easy feat. I don’t remember the audience response. Probably a different crowd than the bovine crew that frequented the Denver Symphony.

But it was via records by which I really absorbed all things Rubinstein. The Beethoven concertos with Leinsdorf/Boston. The Rachmaninoff 2nd with Reiner/Chicago. The Tchaikovsky with Leinsdorf. The solo albums of the Chopin Nocturnes; the Scherzos; the Ballades; the Waltzes. And the Schubert B-flat Posthumous, which ensured that I would indeed become a professional pianist. That recording (1970) was to me the almost unapproachable ideal of great piano playing. I was mesmerized by its poise, beauty, and sustained line. Eventually I determined to play that sonata; it was my most successful performance of my undergraduate years. Later in life I returned to it and gave several performances that were probably the best public piano playing I ever achieved. And it was all because that RCA Red Seal record with its gold-background title and grayscale photo of Rubinstein became a talisman to me of everything piano playing could be. 

So of course I grabbed that huge magenta-and-white box set of his complete RCA recordings as soon as the fine folks at Sony made it available. That big heavy box remains a crown jewel of my record collection. Oh, I can’t say I actually sit down and listen to Rubinstein as often as I once did, but every time I do, I’m always swept back to those teenage days in my Denver bedroom, sitting there on the floor next to my RCA Victor record player with its red-cloth speakers, listening to Rubinstein over and over and over, whether in Beethoven or Schumann or Brahms or Tchaikovsky or whatnot. Pianistically speaking, he’ll always by my first love, a youthful infatuation that has echoed down the years and in one way or another shaped the musician I was eventually to become.

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Happy 250th, Big Boy

As I write these words I’m listening to a collection of Beethoven overtures performed in 1991 by Claudio Abbado and the Vienna Philharmonic, gorgeously recorded and simply glowing with the radiance that the Philharmonic emits with such abundance. In some ways the Vienna Phil is Beethoven’s own orchestra, even if it was founded fifteen years after his death. The Philharmonic came about mostly to satisfy public craving for Beethoven’s orchestral works, symphonies and concertos and overtures alike. And it’s in Beethoven’s adopted home town. To hear the Vienna Philharmonic play Beethoven is to be present at a family gathering.

It’s an interesting collection, given that it omits the ‘big four’ overtures — i.e., the three Leonores and one Fidelio. Instead, we get the lesser-played Creatures of Prometheus and King Stephan and such, including the often maligned Namensfeier, for which I hold quite an affection. It ends in a simply hair-raising rendition of Egmont, those incredible piccolo swoops at the conclusion like whips of lightning. Abbado had a great relationship with the Phil, and they played their hearts out for him. (They aren’t always so free with their affection; saddle them with a conductor they dislike and they’ll sound like a third-rate pickup band.)

More to the present point, those overtures are as good an observation of Beethoven’s 250th birthday—December 16, 1770—as I can imagine. Not as well known as the whoppers, those epochal symphonies (3, 5, 9) that really and actually changed the arc of music history, the late string quartets, the big piano sonatas, they’re pure LvanB nonetheless, imbued with that irresistible spirit, that potent will for being, that makes him so much more than a collection of ink blots on paper.

It’s the sheer vitality of his life force that does it for me. Consider the common music-apprish bromide about his writing the tragic funeral march of the Eroica symphony while coming to grips with his encroaching deafness, pouring out his soul into a confession/suicide node, there in his rented room in Heiligenstadt. And yes, he was working on the Eroica then and there. But he was also putting the finishing touches on the 2nd symphony finale, music of downright volcanic optimism, struck through with shafts of blazing light, a torrent of rhythmic exuberance and melodic grandeur. A still young man (in his early 30s) facing a devastating personal catastrophe—a musician losing his hearing—and yet responding, not with bouts of self-pity intertwined with lugubrious whining, as might be reasonably expected from just about anyone, but with both the innate nobility of the Eroica’s second movement or that starburst of the 2nd symphony’s finale. Now that’s a class act.

You just couldn’t keep the guy down. He wasn’t any kind of nice, to be sure. Clumsy, tactless, temperamental, ill-groomed. Egregiously foolish in matters of the heart, challenged in his friendships, well-nigh incompetent in maintaining a decent home for himself. Drank way too much. But, I mean, come on. I can’t see how anybody could be Beethoven and retain much semblance of ordinary human behavior. Not with that thing happening in his mind all the time. It is reported that during the compositional process he was borderline insane, consumed by the act of creation. Of course he wasn’t that way all the time. He could sit down and scribble something professionally competent, to satisfy a commission or make a quick buck. But even his merely competent stuff has magic, and not just because it’s Beethoven and so confirmation bias assures that we will indeed find said magic. Beethoven at his absolute worst (think Wellington’s Victory, think A Glorious Moment) still has a lot to offer.

He isn’t alone on posthumous Olympus. Bach, Mozart, Haydn surely join him there at the summit. Close acolytes abound—Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Handel, Tchaikovsky. But Beethoven is somehow apart, distinct from the rest. He’s the monarch of the Western musical tradition, no doubt. But as time passes — not only for all of us but for me personally — I am increasingly convinced that his kingship is absolutely and irrevocably earned. Over the years he has become ever more awe-inspiring, ever more heart-filling, and most of all, ever more indispensable.

So happy birthday, big boy. I wish we could do you up more proud this year, but we’re kinda preoccupied with this virus that’s killing a lot of us, impoverishing even more of us, and wreaking havoc on our economies. We can’t flock to our concert halls and give you the kingly festivals you so warrant. Maybe we can make up for it later. But we really don’t have to, do we? After all, you left us this imperishable legacy, this collective birthright. You provide us with undeniable evidence that we just might have potential for being more than a bunch of selfish jerks.

After all, once in a while somebody comes along who really and truly excels. Like Beethoven. He can’t make up for all of our miserable shortcomings as a supposedly intelligent species. But at least he was there. He was one of us. He was human. Dammit, that’s got to count for something.

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