Jeff's Music Corner. Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story Suite, Joshua Bell.

I was walking around Gramercy Park the other day when I passed Joshua Bell and my mind went reeling back to this stormy night a decade ago when tens of thousands of us put our fear of lightening on the back burner, transfixed by the lightening-fast hands of Mr. Bell as we were. Leonard Bernstein had approved a violin suite for his score to West Side Story in the same year he died. I'd never heard it until this night, and rearranged as it is, one gets a new appreciation of the complexities of Bernstein's mind in the way motifs play off one another throughout. Mr. Bell wrote the cadenza and it is a dizzying piece of virtuosity. Listen right afterwards as Mr. Bell plays the first few notes of "Somewhere." A rumble of thunder swept over Central Park as though God Himself heard the strains and wanted 'in.' Who wouldn't want to play with the New York Philharmonic? It was a very special night. And here it is for you.

Jeff's Music Corner. Peter Grimes: Now the Great Bear and Pleiades from the opera by Benjamin Britten.

Should you think opera a distant conceit of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, I give you this, Benjamin Britten's dark masterpiece of 1945, PETER GRIMES. Peter is a fisherman whose apprentices have the unfortunate and careless habit of dying while in Peter's care, and this small, small-minded, gossipy town comes to life in Britten's moving and fascinating score with stunning words by librettist Montagu Slater. This particular aria, "Now the Great Bear," is a study in terror, Peter singing for his life on nearly merely one note throughout, an E, while descending harmonics in the orchestra underscore his existential plunge into questions of Fate and Determinism. Tenor Jon Vickers was the quintessential Peter (even though it is rumored Benjamin Britten rather disliked his interpretation!) and his performance almost singlehandedly brought this opera into the standard repertoire. It is difficult to pull off this very modern anti-hero with any kind of honesty while making an audience care for him. I think Vickers straddles this delicate balance brilliantly. And he is a consummate musician. Listen as he creates a veritable auditorium in his mouth, placing the voice up front and directly dead on in the mask while lifting his soft palette into a cavern of resonant sound, most especially at around 1:32. I'm including the lyric below because it is one of the densest poems I have ever encountered in opera. How smart to have the melodic line subordinate to these heartbreaking words.

Now the great Bear and Pleiades
where earth moves
Are drawing up the clouds
of human grief
Breathing solemnity in the deep night.
Who can decipher
In storm or starlight
The written character
of a friendly fate
As the sky turns, the world for us to change?
But if the horoscope's
bewildering
Like a flashing turmoil
of a shoal of herring,
Who can turn skies back and begin again? 

By the way, PBS just recorded the new production by the English National Opera, and it is a smashing version. Stiuart Skelton has one of those once in a lifetime voices of richness, power, and clarity and I love his performance, a man who doesn't need an orchestra to have a thousand overtones ringing through the room.

Jeff's Music Corner. Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3.

Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto is famous, of course, notoriously difficult, a favorite at competitions for the virtuosity that must be displayed. But most importantly, it is achingly beautiful. There are many remarkable recordings, perhaps the best by Horowitz with the New York Philharmonic. You can hear Rachmaninoff himself play it with the Philadelphia Orchestra. But this concert by Martha Argerich has always been a personal favorite. She is powerful and expressive, exacting and judicious on the pedal, and it is fun to watch her succumb to what every pianist does when climbing this Mount Olympus of concerti--she mumbles to herself. She tackles the cadenza at 11:05, the huge ten-fingered chords, in spectacular rapid-fire succession with gusto leaving even her conductor smiling in awe. (It is fun to note that Argerich and Ricardo Chailly were probably dating at the time.) She has precision and grace and fire and, yes, ice.

When you've the time, listen to the entire performance. But for now, at least listen to the First Movement. I always think of it as a battle of two melodies. It begins with the sad little Russian peasant tune that breaks free in a whirlwind of variations. Then Rachmaninoff introduces the second melody in fractures, giving us glimpses of it for the next twelve minutes, turning it inside out and upside down, each time you hear it think he is fully realizing it, but he is not. When he finally gives it its full voice, its due, its moment at 12:40, it feels like redemption, like the glory of the simplest moment in the history of the world. Sometimes, I can't even take it, it's so beautiful.

Jeff's Music Corner. Shostakovich - Piano Concerto No 2 Op. 102, II. Andante

I love me the Russians. Their sweeping lush harmonics are rooted in centuries of folk temperaments, of peasant misery, of lone survival in a mass of humanity. The dotted eighth notes in the first measures take me on a trip to the Urals, and the thirds and fifths in triplets set against eighth notes play at my hidden heartstrings. The progression at bar 77 in transcendent. This is not nearly the most complicated Shostakovich, but if you're just meeting him, this is a sweet sweet spot to jump off. 

Jeff's Music Corner. Arturo Márquez - Danzón No. 2

Laurence Olivier said that we wouldn't get people into the theaters until we made them as exciting as football. And that is what Gustavo Dudamel is up to here; on display, the starry fireworks of his Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra. When this was recorded, the average age of the musicians was 18 years old, yet they'd all been playing together for at least ten years already. Their fun is infectious, and they also get my vote for the sexiest symphony orchestra alive (with the exception of the bands to whom I've had the good fortune to give tours). The Danzón No. 2, inspired by the national dance of both Cuba and Mexico, and popular as well in Puerto Rico, starts off is a simple melody played first by the clarinet, then brought into laser focus with the oboe. The instruments respond to one another throughout the orchestra in all kinds of wonderful variations and dynamics and finally rendered romantically by this particularly large string section at 4:58. At 6:19, all hell breaks loose and I defy you to watch this and keep still. It is crazy joy and I wish I could bottle it. I turn to this whenever I'm feeling moody blue because this is all kinds of yellow sunlight. It is a soccer match. I wish I was smack in the middle of this orchestra. But I'd watch them from the stands in a fluttering heartbeat. Enjoy.

Jeff's Music Corner. Mahler - Symphony No.1, III, Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen

Perhaps never has the battle between life and death been waged more musically and effectively so than in Mahler's Titan Symphony, his first, and particularly here in the third movement. A funereal march begins dirge-like in the drums, and the familiar strains of Frère Jacques are picked up scratchily between the strings, mocked by the bassoons in a round and set in a disconcerting minor key. Like an embattled ray of sunshine, however, a little boy meets the march in a merry martial tune at 1:21, our friend the oboe singing his little sailor song head on against the march. Mahler, like most of the Romantics and post-Romantics, relied heavily on his cultural roots and folk traditions to make his sweeping melodic gestures and here, at 2:47, a Klezmer band meets the march, and then at 3:14, another! A minor skirmish, a happy battle of Jewish folk tunes ensues, lushly in the strings, giddy in the oom-pah-pah drums. But while Death may have taken a holiday, it infects the melodic lines and all turns minor. A lovely lilting Viennese tune breaks out at 6:00; life wants to live of course, and we are swept up in the now, savoring the time signature, living in the moment. Always lurking is Jacques, though, the sad sleeping brother, who brings the movement to a solemn sober conclusion.

This performance is crisp and fine under the precise baton and hawk-like eye of Christoph Eschenbach.

Jeff's Music Corner. Barber - Canzonetta for Oboe & Strings, Op. 48

I think this best illustrates why Samuel Barber touches a part of me that, what, I don't want to know very well. The strings at the top are so sad but the oboe, alone, sweet and silly, forges on above them. Barber composes simple acts of bravery. And it is sublime and frightening. 

The first three minutes are as perfect as any three minutes I've ever encountered.

An ado in Central Park.

I very rarely see productions of plays I have myself once been in because I know them too well to enjoy them, because I am jealous by nature and hate that I haven't been cast in this one, but mostly because I get hit with the longing for what the French poet Villon called "les neiges d'antan" or  "the snows of yesteryear." Luckily, my career has not been so huge that this has much curtailed my theatre-going. But it almost did tonight, that, and a bout of bronchitis I'm just getting over. But because my friend Kate DeWall, who was an intern what seems like just the other day and is now Master Electrician for The Public Theatre's legendary Shakespeare in the Park, invited me to tonight's closing performance of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, I said yes.

Seeing a production in Central Park normally means waiting twelve hours in all kinds of weather on a sometimes festive, sometimes furious line to obtain one of the 1600 free tickets they dispense to each performance. Sometimes, they run out before they get to you and you are rewarded with nothing for your troubles. Sometimes, you wait the twelve hours, get your ticket, and the performance is cancelled by a thunderstorm, as it was twice this week. To walk right up to the Delacorte Theatre without having waited one second and see my friend who handed me my ticket was the first delight of the evening.

When I played Benedick, I was far too young, a freshman in college in my first Shakespeare play. These many years later, and on the most beautiful evening I can recall, the air the same temperature as my skin so it seemed I was one with the night, we all were, not knowing where each of us began and the others of us ended, swimming in each other, my heart ran a slight chill, the snow that capped a realization that I am now too old to play Benedick. But the stars came out up above and down below, seated near Zachary Quinto and Lucy Liu, and the accomplished director of the show, Jack O'Brien as we were, and the most Italian production I have ever seen the few times I have of a play that takes place in Italy began like a wash of warm Tuscany, complete with tinny melodic mandolins on a spectacular set of an Italian villa lit beautifully, to perfection, with the help of my very own friend.

The cast included Broadway powerhouse performers like Brian Stokes Mitchell and John Glover. But also a lot of movie and TV personalities, including Pedro Pascal, Lily Rabe, and, playing Benedick, Hamish Linklater. In NYC it is less likely one becomes famous merely on their looks and all of these actors have the chops or at least the good guts to take on Shakespeare. And as the play unfolded, none disappointed me, many thrilled me. They bit into the text with a particularly American bent, Shakespeare, of course, transcending dialect. It wasn't until I developed a cramp that I realized my left hand was in a knot. 

I didn't want to like Hamish Linklater, and at first, I'm not sure I did, a few of his flourishes ringing false to me, his bravado, unearned, I thought.  It took the spasm in my arm to a let me to the fact that I was at odds with myself, that he was utterly charming me, and that it was time to let go. Of the snows.

Here we all were, nearly two thousand of my fellow New Yorkers and my friends Kate and Kayliane and Cort in a sweet spot of a clearing in the park on a perfect night, everyone pumped and psyched to see Shakespeare, all of us laughing, guffawing, groaning, rooting, cheering, even weeping for a moment or two, the sadness of a funeral, the exquisite music written for this production ringing through the trees and off Belvedere Castle in the distance, William Shakespeare, dead for centuries, had turned us all into his Groundlings at The Globe once again, his poetry dripping off the tongues of some of America's most accomplished actors and thawing in my mind the memories of my youth, hey, Hamish, I got a laugh there decades ago, my friend, ha ha, but you are wonderful, dear boy, just delightful, all of you simply delightful and near the end, during the death scene, as the little ensemble broke into a bit of my favorite verse in the entire canon, accompanied by a lushly sad tune and the words, "Pardon, Goddess, of the night, those that slew thy virgin bride," I kid you not, a shooting star burst through the sky above and my heart nearly burst out of my chest.

This is one of the reasons I live in NYC. And I regret none of it.