I had to be out this morning anyway, so I’m just back from crossing off two more bakeries from the checklist on my annual search for the perfect hamantaschen on Purim. I am sorry to report, neither sample I consumed today lived up to expectations. (Of course, in my optimism, I purchased several from both shops.) In the interest of kindness, I won’t name the bakeries, as I have no animosity toward them, even though their hamantaschen suck.
Hamantaschen, in case you don’t know, are triangular, pocket-filled pastries associated with Haman, the villain of the Purim story as related in the Book of Esther – “tash” meaning “pocket” or “pouch” in Yiddish. In Hebrew, they’re sometimes referred to as “Haman’s ears.” And what an appetizing image that is, especially when biting into the fruity center!
The cookie is often filled with apricot, raspberry, poppy seed, or my personal favorite, prune – which may sound a little geriatric, but trust me, with a good cup of coffee, it infuses one with a ridiculous sense of well-being.
The best hamantaschen I ever had were from Rindelaub’s Bakery, then located right across the street from one of my many Philadelphia apartments, on South 18th Street, just a few doors north of Rittenhouse Square. That was decades ago, when I was in my 20s. A prune-centered hamantasch and a large cup of coffee consumed in the square on a sunny afternoon was a recipe for pure bliss. Alas, once a Philadelphia institution, Rindelaub’s is no more.
In the name of all that’s holy, avoid hamantaschen from the local grocery store. They’re generally pretty terrible – hard jelly in a tasteless cookie that will turn to powder as soon as you bite into it. But if you can find them at an actual bakery, give them a shot – although, I confess, I have not had a lot of luck. In the Trenton-Princeton area, so far the closest I’ve come to recapturing the unalloyed pleasure of Rindelaub’s pastries was from a vendor at Trenton Farmer’s Market, but I haven’t been back there in years and the market is only open Thursday to Sunday.
If someone knows of a great Jewish bakery in the vicinity, please let me know. I’ve already been to Cramer’s in Yardley, a couple of years back. With all respect to Cramer, it wasn’t even close. I also experienced an epic fail at a bakery in Sea Girt last summer.
A few years ago, I put together a post about music inspired by the Purim story. The best-known musical response is still probably George Frideric Handel’s “Esther,” from 1732. Handel’s first English oratorio recounts the events of the Biblical book, by way of an Old Testament drama by Jean Racine. The Hebrew Esther becomes Queen of Persia and thwarts the machinations of the king’s jealous vizier, which would have resulted in the extermination of her people.
Interestingly, although Princeton doesn’t seem to have any good Jewish bakeries, it turns out the town is the final resting place of a composer who, I only just learned this week, wrote an opera based on the same Racine play.
Thomas De Hartmann was born in Ukraine in 1885. He studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov, Anton Arensky, and Sergei Taneyev. He was friendly with the mystic-philosopher George Gurdjieff, who acted as his spiritual adviser and with whom De Hartmann and his wife, Olga, an opera singer, departed Russia following the revolution. Eventually, in 1950, they settled in the United States. De Hartmann and Gurdjieff collaborated on a number of musical works.
De Hartmann would die of a heart attack several weeks after performing his Violin Sonata in Princeton (with Alexander Schneider, violin, and the composer at the keyboard). He is buried next to his wife in Princeton Cemetery, his grave marked by a very distinctive headstone, which bears a quotation from his unfinished Fourth Symphony.
I wrote about him for an article in the Princeton weekly newspaper U.S. 1, as part of a “haunted tour” of local composers’ gravesites I compiled one year for Halloween.
Since then, I’ve purchased two volumes of his orchestral music on the Toccata Classics label, and earlier this season heard Joshua Bell play his Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic. Bell’s recording of the Violin Concerto has been coupled with Matt Haimovitz’s performance of the Cello Concerto, for Pentatone Records. I wonder if we’re poised on the brink of a full-blown Thomas De Hartmann revival?
Also imminent from Pentatone is the premiere recording of De Hartmann’s opera, “Esther,” which the label only just previewed on its YouTube channel yesterday. To learn more about it, read the description under the video at the link.
Comparisons to Poulenc, Debussy, Strauss, and Korngold? I’m there!
Thomas De Hartmann’s “Esther” will be released on April 24. Even if the bakeries let me down, I’m fairly confident De Hartmann will not.
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IMAGE: “Esther Denouncing Haman to King Ahasuerus” (1888) by Ernest Norman, with hamantasch added by me
It wasn’t until 6 p.m. Saturday that it occurred to me I might have a concert in New York City on Sunday. The thought popped into my head as I was adjusting some magnets on the refrigerator in order to lift the page on the calendar and have a glimpse at March.
Huh. No musical events listed until the weekend.
But I knew I had committed to see Emanuel Ax perform John Williams’ new piano concerto at the New York Philharmonic, and I thought it was sometime around the beginning of the month. So I went to the calendar I carry with me in my computer bag, and lo and behold, there it was, scrawled on March 1, at 2 p.m. Somehow I had missed it when copying over my appointments to the other calendar!
How could that possibly happen? If you’re wondering why it didn’t pop up on my Google calendar, then you really don’t know Classic Ross Amico. I still chisel all my commitments onto stone tablets.
Be that as it may, my mind immediately shifted into business mode. Should I drive or take the train? What time should I leave? What do I need to do in the morning? If I drive, where do I park? Where should I grab lunch? What should I eat, and when, in order to satisfy hunger without inducing drowsiness during the performance? How should I time my afternoon coffee? Shouldn’t I be thinking about getting to bed?
In the end, I decided to drive. Meters are free in New York on Sunday, and it turned out to be a lovely day, weather-wise, despite a chance of rain and snow in the morning forecast. So I zipped in, in about 70-75 minutes, Giuseppe Sinopoli conducting the “Enigma Variations” on my CD player, and parked on the street, a stone’s throw from Lincoln Center, at around 12:30. A grab-and-go lunch later, I had strolled as far north as Verdi Square, to have a glimpse at the monument in the March Sunday sunshine, despite a chill in the air, its warm glow promising the imminent arrival of spring. I visited the Strand Bookstore at its satellite at 2020 Broadway to grab a cup of coffee and run my eye over the sidewalk stalls, and then headed back down to Geffen Hall by 1:30.
There, I met my concert companion, H. Paul Moon, who was very kind to make all the ticket arrangements, and we made our way to our seats on the second tier, stage right (the left side of the auditorium). How narrow and perilous the path was, with a single row of seats angled for an easier view of the stage and a low rail beckoning me to just end it all already.
But I resisted.
The conductor of the program was the somewhat elfin Lithuanian Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a Dudamel protégée in Los Angeles, who spread her wings as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Youthful and expressive, at times capricious even, she manages to stay tethered to reality, with interpretive decisions that seem grounded in practicality. It’s afterward, as she acknowledges the musicians, that she extends an open palm to the various sections and players, as if to offer them fey honey cakes.
The concert opened with Ralph Vaughan Williams (yay!): his “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis,” with nine string players sequestered upstage, behind the larger body of musicians, the better to achieve the work’s antiphonal effects.
The work suggests the interplay of sacred voices in a cathedral, evocative of Renaissance church music, yet at the same time manages to convey kind of a transcendent radiance that lends it a certain timelessness. The music sways and swells in its Phrygian modality, alternating between austerity and a certain lushness that parallels the bygone English countryside so often celebrated and idealized by the pastoral school. Hearing it again only confirms its greatness. There’s a reason it’s Vaughan Williams’ most famous piece (alongside “The Lark Ascending”).
Gražinytė-Tyla’s interpretation was gorgeous without teetering into sentiment. Hers was a holistic approach. Unlike some, she didn’t attempt to whip the music into ecstasies. But as with all the great works, the piece stands up to different interpretive philosophies.
Stepping off the podium to acknowledge the musicians, the conductor was again full of smiles and asides to the first chair players. She seems to be a positive force, and though the Philharmonic has been known to be notoriously jaded, they responded well to her.
Here’s an excerpt of Gražinytė-Tyla conducting Vaughan Williams in Birmingham.
Next came John Williams – no relation to Vaughan Williams, though based on some of his film scores, the composer clearly admires English music.
It’s probably safe to say that few from the “Star Wars”/”Harry Potter” crowd that attend performances of Williams’ concert works are going to come out of them feeling wholly satisfied. Not that there aren’t touches in his concert music that could betray the voice of the composer to those exceptionally well-versed in his film scores. But there are no heroic marches or sweeping love themes. More often, the music is impressionistic, rather than cinematic.
In this new work, Williams also risks disappointing the jazz crowd, as each of the three movements is tied to an admired jazz pianist – Art Tatum, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson – all of whom Williams heard live. It might be perceived as another bait-and-switch, as there is very little “jazz” in it. Or when there is, it’s been internalized, processed, and given back as something else. Williams takes as his starting point his memories of the essence of each of these keyboard titans.
He certainly gives the soloist plenty to do, in a cadenza-heavy first movement and another virtuosic cadenza at the end. Of course, there’s more to classical piano than leaping technical hurdles and playing fast and loud, so there are also introspective passages and reflective interludes throughout. Emanuel Ax played the piece with the safety net of sheet music, but he did so with such confidence that it made you wonder why he thought it necessary.
When it comes to Williams’ concert music, which he has been writing since the 1960s, prior to his blockbuster successes as a film composer, one almost feels as if he protests too much, and for as much as I love just about every note this guy ever wrote (with a few exceptions), I sometimes wish he would indulge his natural melodic gift more in his concertos. I would recommend the Tuba Concerto as a good starting point for the uninitiated. His other works have lyrical passages – some more than others – but few will leave you humming.
For me, the work under consideration becomes more appealing as it progresses. In the second movement, the piano supports the principal viola (here Cynthia Phelps), who is given a substantial lyrical passage, before the movement gradually expands into the woodwinds and then the lower strings. Ax ruminates, until eventually the strings begin to swell. The woodwinds return, somewhat ethereally, and then the viola reappears to round off the movement.
I also like how Williams builds up to the end of the piece. For as large as the orchestra is – with no less than six percussionists, another piano within the orchestra, and a celesta – it’s remarkable just how restrained and precise the composer is in conjuring the different timbres. Say what you want about John Williams, he’s a master colorist and the guy really knows his way around the orchestra. More viscerally, he does give us a race to the finish and a satisfying “bang” to let us know when to applaud.
That Williams, who turned 94 on February 8, still has the intellectual rigor to pull off a work on this scale is astonishing. The concerto was introduced by Ax at Tanglewood last summer. Word is that a recording was made for commercial release. If you’re interested in checking it out, the premiere performance is posted on YouTube.
If you want to hear it live, Ax will be bringing it to the Philadelphia Orchestra next season.
The piano has always been Williams’ own instrument. He studied seriously with Juilliard’s Rosina Lhévinne, while also playing jazz piano and serving as a session pianist for innumerable singers. From well before he was a household name, you can hear him playing on the soundtracks to “Peter Gunn,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “West Side Story” (the film), “The Big Country,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and so many others. This is a man who’s had nine creative lives.
One wonders what kind of concerto he would have written for the keyboard had he tackled it 40 years earlier. But what we’ve got is a good one, even if it will never enter the public consciousness the way his film scores have. At least it was written with dignity and craftsmanship, and it never teeters into kitsch.
Even so, I can’t help but wonder what one of his concertos would sound like if he had he been writing a hundred years ago, when a significant number of major composers were still creating vital music in a tonal idiom. I’m all for composing a work that reveals more and more on repeated listening, but the surest way to get repeat performances is to be sure to give listeners something the first go-round that they’ll want to hear again.
For an encore, Ax offered Schubert’s “Ständchen” (“Serenade”), which was beautifully played, an ideal palate-cleanser, even if some nearby idiot thought it necessary to hum along off-key.
The second half of the program was devoted to the Symphony No. 5 by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, yet another composer who walked a perilous line in Soviet Russia. Weinberg fled the Nazi invasion of Poland – his parents and sister were killed – and throughout his life, even in “safety,” there were periods during which he weathered harrowing encounters with anti-Semitism and Stalin’s dangerous whims. Weinberg’s father-in-law was murdered by the secret police and he himself was arrested. His friend and colleague, Dmitri Shostakovich, went above and beyond, putting himself at risk to defend Weinberg to Stalin himself. Who knows what would have happened to Weinberg had Stalin not died unexpectedly.
While clearly laboring under the same tense reality as Shostakovich and many of his peers, Weinberg’s creative voice is very much his own. It is notable in his symphony that he actually supplies some melodic material to the piccolo, as opposed to merely using the instrument expressively, to pierce the listener’s eardrums, as Shostakovich is prone to do. Furthermore, Weinberg doesn’t descend into grotesquerie. Even so, despite having been composed under Krushchev’s “thaw,” it is a gloomy work. Following the somber, unsettled adagio that forms the symphony’s second movement, I noted at least six people heading for the exits on the ground floor. It is certainly worthwhile music, however, and in its way, often quite beautiful.
I probably have more Weinberg recordings in my library than most, but before yesterday I confess I had not heard the Symphony No. 5. There are a number of recordings of it on YouTube.
Gražinytė-Tyla has been a steadfast Weinberg champion. Her first recording for Deutsche Grammophon was of Weinberg’s Symphonies Nos. 2 & 21. A subsequent release documents her performances of his Symphonies Nos. 3 & 7 and his Flute Concerto.
Yesterday’s was quite a significant program – the last of a four-concert series, at that. Hats off to the New York Philharmonic for investing in such serious fare. Gražinytė-Tyla will continue with the orchestra, conducting music by György Kurtág (who just turned 100 last week), his “Brefs messages,” Elgar’s Cello Concerto (with soloist Vilde Frang), and Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 (the “Spring” Symphony), March 5-7.
For those in search of unusual and neglected repertoire, with a welcome appetizer in the form of a delectable modern classic, this was one Sunday matinee that very much satisfied.
Bravi, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and Emanuel Ax, and thank you, New York Philharmonic!
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Photo of Emanuel Ax and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, courtesy of Paul Moon
When Neil Sedaka died on Friday, I think everyone of a certain age, regardless of their musical proclivities, must have felt it. “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” “Laughter in the Rain,” and “Love Will Keep Us Together” have been a part of our lives since it was still okay to feel good about the world – in no small part thanks to Sedaka’s contributions to it.
The man was pure music. I knew something of his classical music background from a piano concerto he composed, called “Manhattan Intermezzo,” a recording of which I’ve played on the air a few times, but I never realized the extent of his training and ambition until reading up on him after his death.
Both Sedaka’s parents – his father a taxi driver of Lebanese Jewish descent and his mother an Ashkenazi Jew of Polish and Russian descent – played piano. When Neil revealed his own musical aptitude at school, his mother took a part-time job to raise money for a second-hand upright. Sedaka took to it like laughter in the rain. He successfully obtained a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music prep division.
However, he took an unexpected turn (secretly, so as not to break his mother’s heart) when he teamed with a neighbor, Howard Greenfield, three years his senior, a poet and an aspiring lyricist. Sedaka claims that the two churned out a song a day for the next three years. They pounded the pavement and knocked on doors until Connie Francis recorded “Stupid Cupid.” That was followed by “Where the Boys Are.” When Sedaka received a five-figure royalty check for “Calendar Girl,” he must have thought, hey, maybe this is the way to go, after all – for now anyway. At least it made his mother feel better.
But after a few years, he was starting to get the itch to get back to the long-hair stuff and began to practice seriously, three and four hours a day, with the intent to compete in the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. You’ll remember Van Cliburn won the inaugural competition in 1958, earning himself a ticker-tape parade on Fifth Avenue.
Sedaka, however, would be rejected by the Soviet authorities for his association with “American popular capitalistic music.”
He retained a lifelong love of the classics. Later in his career, he put out a kitschy album of classical music melodies outfitted with his own lyrics.
For Frédéric Chopin’s birthday, I wondered if there might be any videos or recordings of Sedaka playing Chopin. Lo and behold, here he is talking with Steve Allen and then doing just that on “I’ve Got a Secret.”
It’s crazy that the first time an African American composer would receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music was only in 1996. I remember when it happened. It was a pretty big deal. A special award had been made to Scott Joplin in 1976 – 59 years after Joplin’s death – and there have been some special citations and a number of Black honorees since. In more recent years, it’s not been unusual for composers of all races to be recognized. But it was George Walker who broke the glass ceiling.
This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll celebrate this trailblazing artist with a program of four of his original works, including his Piano Sonata No. 2 (with the composer himself at the keyboard), the award-winning “Lilacs” (after poetry of Walt Whitman), “Address for Orchestra” (his first major orchestral work), and “Lyric for Strings” (his most famous music, in its original version for string quartet).
By his own assessment, Walker was a composer more interested in building “elegant structures” than in “creating beauty.” Depending on one’s sensibility, it could be argued that he achieved both.
In an interview given in 2012, he commented, “I’ve always thought in universal terms, not just what is Black or what is American, but simply what has quality.”
I hope you’ll join me for “Perambulations with Walker” on “The Lost Chord,” now syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
A fascinating interview with Walker by Frank J. Oteri, which, among other things, lends an added dimension to Walker’s most frequently performed music (the “Lyric”) and offers insights into his life and musical philosophy. Also, some great photos!
This week on “Sweetness and Light,” the cat’s out of the bag. It’s an hour of felicitous feline music!
On the 150th anniversary of the birth of American composer John Alden Carpenter, we’ll hear the ballet “Krazy Kat,” inspired by George Herriman’s cult comic strip. Carpenter characterized it as a “jazz pantomime”, but if there’s any jazz in it, it’s “white man” jazz of the 1920s (i.e. less jazz than “Rhapsody in Blue”). Believe it or not, I’ve actually seen this performed – twice! If memory serves, Sergei Prokofiev, in the U.S. for the debut of his opera “The Love for Three Oranges” and to perform his Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was present at the work’s premiere. I can’t find anything on the internet to back it up right now, so it looks like I’ll be sleuthing around my library.
Carpenter’s music will headline a meow mix of melodies by Leroy Anderson, Ernst von Dohnányi, Richard Rodney Bennett, Gioachino Rossini, Nino Rota, Samuel Barber, and Zez Confrey.
It will be programming you can sink your claws into, on “Sweetness and Light.” The music, like your host, will be the cat’s pajamas, this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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