two lectures and a concert

[calimac]

It hardly registered when I was told that Calvin Trillin was giving a free talk at Stanford last Thursday. Free? I got there half an hour before showtime and found the auditorium already half-full. An elderly lady named Sandra Day O'Connor was in the front row.

Trillin looks like Carl Reiner, and sounds a bit like him too. He answered moderator and audience questions with his expected tangents and dry wit. To a serious question on journalists who invent their stories, he reminisced about the things he gets away with as a humorous columnist. An editor once asked him, "Did John Foster Dulles really say, 'You can't fool all the people all of the time, but you can give it your best shot'?"

Saturday afternoon (we're Reform, it's OK), Eric Kujawsky, conductor of a local community orchestra, gave a talk at the synagogue on Jewish composers - classical, Broadway, and film. When he stopped to see if the audience knew which film directors are associated with Bernard Herrmann and Danny Elfman, the wise guy who broke the dead silences by calling out the answers from the back row was me.

It was fun; I didn't learn much (except that Ligeti is Jewish), but Kujawsky brought along recorded excerpts from a number of pieces I hadn't heard. I'm shamed to say that, though I'm certainly aware of Louis Gottschalk (the first significant US-born orchestral/instrumental composer), I've never heard much of his music. From the evidence here, he was writing Gershwin-style jazz-flavored concert music in the 1860s. I'll have to get some of this.

Then, down to San Jose for a Symphony Silicon Valley program, grand finale of George Cleve's three-concert mini Mozart festival. This one was pretty much all vocal or choral, not what I normally go to the concert hall for, but once in a while is all right. Soloists from Opera San Jose sang excerpts from Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute in plummy tones. Then the Requiem with more soloists and the symphony chorale, which lacked bite. It's a much better work than one would guess from this performance. Cleve did one very intelligent thing: he rescued the Requiem from its trailing-off Süssmayr ending by tacking on the utterly beautiful (even in this performance) Ave verum Corpus that Mozart had written a few months earlier.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I'm fond of the Gottschalk pieces that I know. His "Grand Tarantelle" was rescued twice: first by the Cuban composer Espadero, whose arrangements for solo, duet, and two pianos were the only ones anybody had of it; and then by Hershy Kay, who re-orhestrated it rather well. It's a barn-burner.

His solo piano music and duets include a lot of charming pieces. "La Gallina," "Ojos Criollos" and others have a lot of appeal. "Bamboula" and "Souvenir de Porto Rico" are swell also. I will maintain always that "The Dying Poet" is better than the critics will admit, and I love to play it. Harold Schonberg uses it as a metaphor for Gottschalk's failings, but it's the piece that i came to mock and stayed to appreciate. "The Banjo" is his best known, and doesn't fail to satisfy.

His symphony "A Night in the Tropics" (two movements) is also evocative and entertaining.

He also made a piano duet version of Rossini's "William Tell" overture that I prefer to the original, but that might just be me. It sparkles and scintillates, and is as satisfying as a good drink of water (and that's one of the highest accolades I can bestow).

He also wrote pieces that are possibly mere empty virtuosity. Schonberg has the highest admiration for the virtuosity of his fantasy on the Brazilian national anthem, but says it's musically wretched. Perhaps a better virtuoso piece of his is "The Union," which includes "The Star-Spangled Banner" and a simultaneous presentation of "Yankee Doodle" and "Hail Columbia" at the end.

Of course, there's a lot of swell stuff I haven't mentioned. I like the guy. Schonberg says he also wrote very entertaining prose, and quotes a bit of it (in translation -- he wrote in French). He was a sensation on the level of Frank Sinatra, and says the lovely young ladies in the audience caused him to miss a few notes.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I have one piece of Gottschalk's, a "Romance", on an LP of 19th century American piano music, but that's it.

"A Night in the Tropics" was the work we heard an excerpt of.