When you’re in the moment, it seems everything stays basically the same, for years. I’d say it’s especially the case when you’re younger. Relatives look the same. Celebrities look the same. In the old movies, when they want to convey the passage of time, they often put a little powder in somebody’s hair. Then all of a sudden time pulls the rug out from under you.
The last couple of decades were not kind to Teri Garr. But since she hasn’t really been in the spotlight so very much since her health struggles intensified, she’s been kind of frozen in time, on celluloid and on YouTube. I will always remember her as she was in her movies and on her appearances on “Late Night with David Letterman,” when the show was still great, still subversive, and still hilarious, on NBC.
She was so vibrant, so beautiful, and so fun. Can it really be 50 years since “Young Frankenstein?”
I was so overtaxed this weekend trying to wrestle an article into submission that I never did get around to acknowledging the passing of the great mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza, who died on Friday at the age of 87.
Now I turn on my computer this morning to learn that she has been joined by the organist Simon Preston. He too died on Friday at the age of 83.
Both were prominent artists, well documented on major record labels at a time when the industry was still going strong.
Distressing reminders of change and the passage of time. Thanks to them both, and may they rest in peace.
The weekend has been a costly one for the world of art music. Two estimable composers – England’s Hugh Wood and Canada’s R. Murray Schafer – have gone silent.
Though Wood earned much of his daily bread as a teacher of composition, at Cambridge and elsewhere, he yet managed to complete something in the ballpark of 65 pieces.
Given that much of his music reflects his interest in the 12-tone school of Arnold Schoenberg, I am astonished – and delighted – to have discovered this, his last completed work, which at times sounds positively Waltonian (as in William Walton). I wonder if he ever before composed such an “English”-sounding piece?
“Epithalamion” is a setting of John Donne’s 1613 “marriage song,” written for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I, and Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine in the Holy Roman Empire (1610 to 1623) and “winter king” of Bohemia (1619 to 1620).
Wood first conceived the work in 1955, but carried it through to completion only in 2014. This recording is from a performance at the BBC Proms in 2015.
Wood’s Cello Concerto, composed between 1965 and 1969, is much more characteristic. He once claimed he was less interested in serial technique than in the philosophy behind it.
An interview with Hugh Wood on the occasion of his 70th birthday:
Sadly, we’ve also lost the grand old man of Canadian music. R. Murray Schafer died on Saturday at the age of 88. Schafer developed some fascinating ideas about, and interesting insights into, the relation of sound and music to the environment. His is not music for the morning rush hour, perhaps, but it is undeniably stimulating.
The composer walks us around his property, plays with our heads a little bit, and directs us to listen:
“Mimiwanka” (1971), employing American Indian texts, is meant to reflect on the various states of water. This video is particularly interesting in that it also displays Schafer’s unique style of graphic notation.
A selection from “Music for Wilderness Lake” (1979)
“Bird calls” infuse his String Quartet No. 8 (2000-01)
This obituary and appreciation, assembled by the CBC, encompasses the man and the artist much more satisfyingly than I ever could.
