Once more, on DVD

[calimac]

Buffy season 6 arrived today, so I've been busy. Watching "Once More With Feeling", watching it with Joss's commentary (very illuminating on the older musicals that were his influences both musically and visually), watching the "making of" video (which told more of how the episode was actually made than most such do, though it didn't reveal how they handled the shots in "Standing" where Giles is moving at normal speed and Buffy is in slow motion). I wouldn't recommend this episode to anyone who didn't already know the show: it'd be more confusing to a first-time viewer than an average Firefly, and that's saying a lot. But for old fans it's a honey, and as B. likes it you know the music has been approved by a discerning mind.

That's not all I've been listening to. I've had a pile of library CDs out, filling in some gaps in the corners of my classical listening. Piano-and-orchestra arrangements by Henry Cowell of his piano music, really effective; George Rochberg's Second Symphony, the only atonal symphony I've ever actually liked; a few-odd classical-period composers like Paul Wranitzky and the Chevalier de Saint-Georges; Havergal Brian's monumental Gothic Symphony, which has a really striking opening for two bars but then devolves into acres of post-Straussian sludge; and the mock-Schubert symphony I mentioned before. The liner notes insist it's the rediscovered score of a famously lost symphony of his, but it sounds like a fake to me, and all the musicology books I've consulted insist that there is no lost symphony (the references to it are actually to the Great C Major), to the extent of not even mentioning this alternative. So it probably isn't Schubert but it was interesting to hear anyway. The recording's Amazon listing tells you nothing: I'm considering writing an explanatory review.

Latest reading, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal by Thomas A. Bailey, which argues that while there's plenty of blame to go around, the principal finger for the failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles should be pointed straight at Wilson for being such a haughty, uncompromising bastard. That's not the picture I got from the history books of my youth (Lodge and Borah, boo hiss), so it was surprising to note that Bailey's cogent revisionary view dates from 1945, long before my youth.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Gary Busch, who teaches piano at the Crane School at Potsdam and who is an old friend of mine from the UW music school (where he put on lavish Schubertiades), told me it was bunk. He was, and probably still is, a Schubert scholar. And I am sure I've read a music review that trashed it as a fake, but I have nothing to back that up. Now I want to investigate it further and find that elusive review or something similar!