Spent the afternoon today visiting the Stoogeum in Ambler, PA, an eccentric institution, chock full of Three Stooges collectibles and memorabilia. I must say, there is more in there than you might suspect – yellowed newspapers, candid glossies, and theatrical broadsides share space with state-of-the-art touch screens (activated by poking an image of Curly in the eyes), pinball machines and video games, a “Hall of Shemp” (which endeared the place to me immediately), statues and sculptures of the team, costumes and posters from the films, a Joe Besser ceremonial banner (!), a gallery of autographed photos of Stooges associates and contemporaries (ranging from Mae Clarke, memorable recipient of Cagney’s grapefruit in “Public Enemy,” and Dick Powell, to Jimmy Durante and Hugh Herbert, to Lloyd Bridges and Adam West), salutes to Stooges regulars Christine McIntyre, Emil Sitka, and director Jules White, a sit-down movie theater that continuously runs Stooges shorts, and of course monitors all over the place.
The third floor is crammed with Stooges art, storyboards from the cartoon series and floor-to-ceiling Stooges tributes – somebody actually managed convincing likenesses of Moe, Larry, Curly, and Shemp on four different Etch-a-Sketches, now preserved behind plexiglass (let’s hope there’s not an earthquake!); but perhaps most striking for those with long memories is a stained glass window by Stanley Livingston, who played Chip on “My Three Sons.” Bizarrely, there is no photography allowed in the museum (what are they trying to hide?), but if you Google it, you will find some images.
If you’re interested in visiting – and it is worth the trip if you’re fascinated by the era – plan ahead and make a reservation, as the museum keeps very specific, roaming hours. You’ll be admitted with everyone else approved for the period (two hours) and then set loose to explore. I went with my former newspaper editor (now retired, but he can’t stop writing), Dan Aubrey, and one of his acquaintances. We passed the car trip recalling our favorite Stooges shorts and marveled at just how surreal they could be. For example, we rewatched “Idle Roomers” on one of the museum monitors – that’s the one where the boys get trapped in an elevator with a werewolf – which has one of the great WTF Stooges endings!
Here’s the website. Have fun figuring it out. Nyuk nyuk nyuk…
Last week, while reading Tolstoy’s “The Cossacks,” I was amused to come across this unexpected putdown of J.S. Bach:
“One evening, the Nogai driver pointed with his whip to the mountains shrouded in clouds. Olenin looked eagerly, but it was dull, and the mountains were almost hidden by the clouds. Olenin made out something grey and white and fleecy, but, try as he would, he could find nothing beautiful in the mountains of which he had so often read and heard. The mountains and clouds appeared to him quite alike, and he thought the special beauty of the snow peaks, of which he had so often been told, was as much an invention as Bach’s music and the love for women, which he did not believe in.”
Early the next morning, under clear skies, Olenin changes his tune about the Caucasus. Some time later, he falls under the spell of Maryanka, a haughty Cossack beauty. But Tolstoy never does tell us if his protagonist ever softens in his assessment of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
As something of a preamble to this year’s Bard Music Festival, devoted to the Czech master Bohuslav Martinů (“Martinů and His World,” to be presented at Bard College over two weekends, August 8-10 and 14-17), this year’s Bard SummerFest, now in progress, will offer the U.S. stage debut of Bedřich Smetana’s 1868 opera “Dalibor” in four performances, beginning this weekend at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, July 25 at 6:30 p.m., July 27 at 2 p.m., July 30 at 2 p.m., and August 1 at 4 p.m.
If it sounds enticing, but you can’t make it, the July 30 matinee will be available for livestreaming, in real-time, with an encore broadcast on August 2 at 5 p.m. There’s more information at the “Dalibor” link below.
Smetana is regarded as the father of Czech national music, his immediately identifiable sound an inspiration to Dvořák and those who followed.
His best-known opera, by far, is “The Bartered Bride,” with its rousing overture and rustic dances. Also, I’ll wager you can’t listen to classical radio for a week without encountering “The Moldau,” the second of the collection of symphonic poems that comprise the composer’s epic patriotic tableau “Ma Vlast” (“My Country”).
“Dalibor” is very far from “The Bartered Bride.” It’s a drama, for one thing, full of Teutonic iconography: medieval castles, minnesingers, and resourceful damsels. There’s some “Lohengrin” in it, and some “Fidelio.” (The heroine disguises herself as boy in order spring the man she loves from imprisonment.) Having attended performances of Richard Strauss’ “Guntram” and Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in recent weeks, you’d think I’d have had enough of this sort of thing, but no!
At any rate, Smetana’s music, despite the scenic trappings, is unmistakably Czech to its core. Hey, the Czech lands have their castles too. “Dalibor” was tepidly received at its premiere, but it gained traction following the composer’s death and its significance is now deemed to be considerable among Smetana’s countrymen. Although programmed in Europe, in its early years performed throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by Gustav Mahler, among others, it has yet to make it to these shores.
It was Bard president and festival artistic co-director Leon Botstein who oversaw the presentation of “Guntram” at Carnegie Hall in June, with the American Symphony Orchestra. Conductor and orchestra will also take part in these performances of “Dalibor.” On top of everything else, Botstein has been music director of the ASO since 1992.
The production was to have been headlined by the Czech tenor Ladislav Elgr and Polish soprano Izabela Matula, but due to visa issues, some talented Americans have stepped up to address the challenges of learning what must be for them new roles in an uncommon language. Slavic opera is much less frequently encountered here than Italian, German, and French.
But don’t for a moment think that you’ll be getting shortchanged. I was at the performance of “Guntram” at Carnegie, featuring tenor John Matthew Myers, and I can attest that anyone who attends “Dalibor” will be in for a real treat. This guy has a clarion voice, with a warm, radiant tone, guaranteed to fill the entire house. Soprano Cadie J. Bryan is unfamiliar to me, but she has received praise for her radiance and vocal luster. I’m very much looking forward to hearing her as Mlada. Glancing through the rest of the cast, I also recognize bass-baritone Alfred Walker, another Botstein favorite (among other things, he sang the title role in Bard’s production of Saint-Saens’ “Henri VIII”). He’ll return as King Vladislav.
The stage director is Jean-Romain Vespirini (also the director of “Henri VIII”). There are two endings to the work, both of them tragic. Which one will be used?
Botstein and Bard are all about resurrecting unusual and neglected repertoire. Other rarely-encountered operas revived at Bard include Ernest Chausson’s “Le roi Arthus,” Dvořák’s “Dmitrij,” Korngold’s “Das Wunder der Heliane,” Meyerbeer’s “La prophète,” Anton Rubinstein’s “Demon,” and Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers,” among many others.
For anyone in search of a little respite from Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, Mozart, and the four or five others who dominate the world’s opera houses, Bard’s offerings are like manna in a desert of seemingly endless repetition.
As the interest in period instrument recordings was just beginning to crest in the 1980s, I remember being put off by what I perceived as a kind of “metallic” sound – something of a paradox, since historic instruments flaunted gut strings, made from organic matter (sheep or cattle intestines). Yet the sound impressed me as alien. Clinical. Inhuman. There was just something about many of those CD recordings of Baroque and Classical music of the time that for me lacked warmth. They left me cold.
Roger Norrington was one of the influences that helped expand my consciousness, so that gradually I realized that sometimes the fault, dear Brutus, is not in a performance, but in ourselves. Or to borrow a somewhat folksier insight from George Ives, Charles Ives’ bandmaster father, sometimes our ears can use a good stretching. It’s healthy for music, and healthy for ourselves.
Norrington allowed me to perceive the advantage of regarding the classics from different perspectives, with, of all things, one of his Robert Schumann recordings for EMI. (He later rerecorded the symphonies for Hänssler Classic.) Schumann, a Romantic composer if ever there was one, is quite beyond the jurisdiction of “early music,” or so one would suppose. But that doesn’t mean performance of his works cannot benefit from a contextual lesson from history, or at any rate historical theory. In Schumann, Norrington’s brisk tempi and understatement struck me as novel in music that often benefits from the opposite approach. I hasten to add that this is NOT Schumann for every day, but it is interesting.
Norrington applied his lexicon of “period” practices, compiled through his experiments with Baroque and Classical music, to the works of later masters, viewing their scores not retrospectively, as most conductors were in the habit of doing, but rather chronologically, as extensions of what had come before.
That’s not to say a Norrington performance, regardless of how it was sold, was not, in its way, any less subjective than that of any other conductor. Norrington was frequently pelted with accusations of misguided dogma, but he would have been the first to admit that, at the end of the day, bringing a piece of music to life requires making interpretive choices.
It was Norrington’s Beethoven that really seemed to tickle people’s ears. His performances were characterized by sparse vibrato, fleet tempi, strange sonorities, and shifting seating charts. Controversially, he adhered “strictly” to Beethoven’s metronome markings (though not always). Most conductors have deemed these to be far too fast to properly allow what Beethoven presumably was trying to express in his music.
Norrington was already in his 50s by the time he was propelled to international fame with the launch of his first, ear-catching Beethoven cycle. In retrospect, was it really the lessons of history that made listeners sit up and take notice, or was it the novelty of an interpreter going all in with something new? Does it matter? When packaged as “the one, true way,” I suppose it does. But when viewed as ANOTHER way, well, why not? How is Norrington any different, in his fashion, than Celibidache? Aside from the philosophical underpinnings, I mean?
There’s a lot of guess-work involved in “historically-informed performance.” To a large extent, we don’t know what the music sounded like before the invention of recordings. But the more reputable of its practitioners used sound scholarship to back-up their artistic decisions. Norrington came under fire in some circles for just sort of making things up. It could be especially awkward when ignoring testimonial evidence of conductors who lived from the time of Brahms and Mahler into the stereo era (Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Pierre Monteux), all of whom actually knew how this stuff was performed back in the day.
But hey, if it doesn’t distort the composer’s intentions too badly and allows us to hear the music with fresh ears, why not? Norrington was merely the other side of the coin from the Romantic indulgence we experienced with some conductors earlier in the century.
In the end, he might not have expressed it as such, but he could be as much a sensualist as anyone else. Norrington was not some self-abnegating high priest of classical music. Just the opposite. For him, music was not to be approached as a holy relic, but rather as a vehicle for having fun. He promoted a relaxed atmosphere in his concerts, encouraging applause between movements, if the audience was so moved, citing the fact that concerts in the 18th century would have been far from the staid affairs they later became.
His survey of Beethoven piano concertos for EMI, with Melvyn Tan the soloist, performing on a replica of a period keyboard instrument, was another ear-opener. Again, the tinkly, underpowered nature of the fortepiano triggered plenty of aversion at first, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t present the “Choral Fantasy” in a whole new, convincing way.
His second cycle of Beethoven symphonies (for Hänssler), in some respects improves on the first. By then he had moved on from the London Classical Players, the period instrument ensemble he founded in 1978, which often struggled mightily with its anemic, historically-informed instruments, to the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, a modern band, well-versed in the repertoire. When Norrington formed lasting relationships with “modern” groups, such as Stuttgart, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, or the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the weird sonorities (mercurial, undernourished strings and unruly brass) were exchanged for a more moderate, middle ground.
Gradually, cumulatively, the world’s major orchestras all came around to the idea that maybe not all music from all periods should be played using the same techniques. Thanks to the efforts of Norrington and his peers (Christopher Hogwood, Trevor Pinnock, John Eliot Gardiner), early music revisionism became normalized, so that now it is rare to hear truly “big band” Mozart and Haydn, for instance, and certainly not Bach. Is the medium subservient to the message? There are plenty of recordings of “old school” Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to suggest that there are things to relish in either camp.
Norrington, the most hubristic of the period performance practitioners, perhaps overplayed his hand, as he continued to push into the later Romantic era to tackle symphonies by Bruckner and Mahler. Experimentation admits the possibility of disaster. On the other hand, though I was as skeptical as the next guy when he entered the modern era, he managed a satisfying recording of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” of all things. (His Elgar was not so fortunate.)
He was also a surprisingly effective advocate of contemporary music. He conducted over 50 first performances and won a Grammy in 2001 for his recording of Nicholas Maw’s Violin Concerto, with Joshua Bell the soloist.
Norrington was no slouch. He studied conducting with Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal Academy of Music, but also composition and music history. He was a violinist and a professional singer, and he played percussion in the conservatory orchestra. Based on his success, he also had a genius for self-promotion and showmanship.
Around his 60th birthday, he experienced some major health scares, when he was diagnosed with melanoma and a brain tumor. At a point, he was given only months to live. Miraculously, he beat it. The illness may have taken the edge off his earlier dynamism, but he retained his mental vigor and sense of joy through his retirement in 2021.
Norrington was knighted for his services to music in 1997. He died on Friday at the age of 91.
R.I.P. Sir Roger.
Norrington introduces and conducts Beethoven’s 8th
Beethoven insights, courtesy of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
It’s summer and a Sunday. As I continue to work on my appreciation of conductor Roger Norrington (who died on Friday), which hopefully I will have in satisfactory shape soon, I thought I’d share this interview with musicologist Byron Adams, conducted by Andrew Green of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.
Adams, whose comments on this page are invariably illuminating (and always welcome), has been a passionate and lifelong advocate of Vaughan Williams, Elgar, and other British composers. If you ever attend concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra, pay attention to who wrote the program notes. There’s a possibility it could be Byron!
Adams is also a composer himself, a retired professor of music at the University of California, Riverside. The conversation at the link rightly emphasizes his contribution to the Bard Music Festival, especially in the editing of a tie-in volume of critical essays for the 2023 festival, devoted to “Vaughan Williams and His World,” published by University of Chicago Press. But you may also learn a thing or two about Vaughan Williams’ experiences in America and certainly more about the Bard Music Festival.
Another one of Byron’s enthusiasms and areas of expertise is French music. He’ll be introducing a concert to be performed at Bard on the afternoon August 9 for a program he helped curate, titled “The French Connection,” designed to illuminate the experiences in Paris of – and French influences on – the subject of this year’s festival, the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. The concert will also include music by Alexandre Tansman, Albert Roussel, Maurice Ravel, and Josef Suk.
Adams is a Bard stalwart, having for many years served on the program committee for the festival.
Here’s a link to the complete schedule for “Martinů and His World,” which will take place at Bard College over two weekends, August 8-10 and 14-17.
