I don’t know what it is about serial articles that I like so much, but there it is. During my year on Examiner, I was series-mad: I began with a series on the state of classical music (better than common knowledge would have it), shortly followed up by series on movie music, SF Symphony recordings, Stravinsky’s recordings, and more.
Thus the present series, remembering the records that made a big difference to me when I was growing up, or when I was a young adult. Along the way I’ve been gabbing on about recordings back in the 1960s—the days of LPs and cassettes, as well as tossing in autobiographical bon-bons hither and yon.
Schubert: Piano Sonata in B-flat, Op. Posth.
Artur Rubinstein on RCA Red Seal
I may have been raised and trained as a pianist, but my relationship with the instrument has been rocky at best. Only during a very limited period of my life did the piano become really central to my career as a musician, but that unnatural attachment led soon enough to an all-stops meltdown. For the past fifteen years I have had the career I want to have, and not the one people told me I was supposed to have. That career includes the piano only peripherally; I play the occasional recital, and that’s about it.
That reluctance about formal piano-playing was there from the beginning. (I didn’t realize that until well until adulthood.) Oh, I took piano lessons and I played recitals from time to time. But as I think about musical joy in my childhood and teenage years, I don’t think about playing the piano: I think about listening to music. Learning pieces, studying the score and practicing, was drudgery as far as I was concerned. There was a world in which music was magical, but that wasn’t the world of my piano lessons. The piano world consisted of ladies’s musical guilds with their stuffily endless boring recitals and the crabby old women piano teachers and all that music I didn’t like but had to play because the crabby old women were forcing it down my throat during the piano lessons to prepare for the stuffy endless boring recitals.
In another world (say, the 18th or 19th centuries) I may well have become a composer (I was a dynamite improviser from age four onwards), but not in the 1950s through the 1970s, which must have been the most disheartening three decades of the last millennium for anyone with an interest in writing music.
No: I took my piano lessons, but from age four onwards the verdict was the same, year after year, teacher after teacher: the kid is extremely talented, he has promise galore, plays with immense flair, but he doesn’t practice enough or properly and he makes a mess when he plays. Too loud, too fast, too much pedal, too many wrong notes.
But there were piano recordings that mattered to me—damn few, to be honest—and this one mattered more than any. It was a Christmas present from the folks; Rubinstein was my favorite pianist (well, he was just about the only one I knew), and it was a brand-new Rubinstein record over at the local record store in suburban Denver. So they got it for me. (The photo is of the original cover; I can’t seem to find a better one.)
The Schubert B-flat entered my life at that point and has never left it since. I spent a significant portion of my sophomore year at Peabody learning it, and I performed it successfully. It was my audition piece for the SF Conservatory. And several years ago I played it again, in my first recital in the new SFCM building on Oak Street.
But it has always been this recording that I hear in my mind’s ear when I think of this sonata.
My Fair Lady
Original Broadway Cast on Columbia Masterworks
My Fair Lady: the once and future king of Broadway cast albums
What an irony it is that as an adult I’ve become downright aversive to musical theater, given that as a kid it was hands-down my favorite. Part of that enthusiasm came from the heady excitement of attending summer stock musical productions at Fort Worth’s Casa Mañana, a theater-in-the-round with a geodesic-dome roof. I was slogging through an ordinary kid’s life in suburbia, but once in a while something thrilling came along in the way of Gypsy or West Side Story or Peter Pan or Camelot. Those musical productions were high points of my entire existence, right up there with Christmas morning.
Fort Worth’s Casa Mañana: except for the extension on the left, it hasn’t changed since the 1960s
As a rule we would stop by the record store on the way home after the show where my Dad would buy me a copy of the broadway cast album. Most of the Casa Mañana productions were of fairly recent Broadway productions and thus the records were also of reasonably recent vintage. Most of them were Columbia Masterworks LPs, that being the label that had nearly locked the market on original cast albums.
I forget precisely when we saw My Fair Lady, but we got back home and I had a nice fresh copy of that glorious white LP. The original cast album of My Fair Lady was one of the last great monophonic records—just the next year Columbia recorded West Side Story in stereo. I had loved the show in the theater, and now I settled down to learn it note-by-note, as had so many folks before me. (The album remains one of the biggest sellers of all time.)
There have been other recordings of My Fair Lady—even a stereo version made during the original London run with mostly the same cast as on Broadway. (That’s the one with the gold background rather than white.) But that original monophonic album, with its white background, will remain forever supreme. I have a gorgeously remastered version of it nowadays in pristine digital, and it remains just as terrific as ever.
The stereo London recording: good, but the white Broadway album rules
I still remember working my way through On the Street Where You Live on the piano, playing by ear as I always did—I don’t think my piano teachers ever quite realized that I was borderline musically illiterate—and consistently coming to grief trying to figure out the harmonic progressions of the bridge. I just couldn’t wrap my head around Frederick Loewe’s sophisticated use of the mediant key; if I started in C Major (as I always did), then the bridge moved to E Major, touched on V of III, then via a bit of chromatic slithering found its way back to a V43 in C Major and hence the repeat of the chorus. Every time I tried it, I always wound up in some other key than C Major for the recap. Eventually I unlocked the thing, but it took a while, and I couldn’t have described what I was actually playing or how I got there to save my life. As I think back to my kiddy self, the odds are I wasn’t playing quite what Frederick Loewe wrote, but some strange hybrid.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was giving myself The Eartraining Course that Ate Cleveland. To this day I can sit down and rattle off harmonizations to melodies at sight, one after another, each one different than the last, in almost any style you care to name. People ask me how I do it. I answer honestly: I don’t know. However, I know how I learned to do it—it was all those hours at the piano, trying to figure out songs from My Fair Lady and Camelot and South Pacific and Flower Drum Song.
I suppose I should have been practicing my Mozart or Beethoven while I was sitting there working out the chord changes in I Enjoy Being a Girl. But I’m deeply grateful to myself for having followed my bliss instead of knuckling under to the demands of those grim-jawed harpies with their goddamn Schirmer editions full of fingerings and pedal markings. I never would have been happy as a full-time pianist, but in my eventual incarnation as an all-purpose musical gadfly, I wouldn’t change places with anybody.