“Labels are for the things men make, not for men.”
Rex Stout, The Father Hunt
Archives for February 2009
CD
Constant Lambert Conducts Ballet Music (Somm). In addition to being a brilliant critic, a gifted composer, and a provocative personality, Constant Lambert was the best ballet conductor who ever lived. The proof is on this imported CD, which contains the never-before-reissued suite from Sleeping Beauty that he recorded in 1939 shortly after leading the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in the first complete production of Tchaikovsky’s ballet given outside of Russia. Lambert and the company’s pit orchestra perform this nine-movement suite with a breathtaking blend of poise, elegance, and rhythmic lift–exactly what it takes to bring a stageful of dancers to swirling life. Would that Somm had also included the equally rare excerpts from Sleeping Beauty that Lambert recorded with the Covent Garden pit orchestra after World War II, but this recording, coupled here with other ballet suites by Boyce, Meyerbeer, and Rossini, is more than precious enough in its own right (TT).
CD
Robert Casadesus, George Szell, and the Cleveland Orchestra, Mozart Piano Concertos, K. 467 and 491. French pianism can be superficial, but it can also be irresistibly cool, clear, and limpid. Casadesus filled all three bills, never more fully than on this budget-priced CD. Yes, there are other ways to play Mozart, just as there are those who think that George Szell was a cold fish, but these performances of the C Major and C Minor Piano Concertos seem to me to be as close to definitive as a classical recording can get (TT).
FOLIO
Wolf Kahn’s America: An Artist’s Travels. I love Kahn’s paintings and pastels, in which the utterly distinctive palettes of Bonnard and Mark Rothko are miraculously blended into a no less individual style that wanders fruiltfully from abstraction to representation and back again. I’m embarrassed to admit, though, that I knew nothing of this 2003 volume, which consists of miniature essays by Kahn in which he talks about the real-life settings for a hundred of his canvases and works on paper, until I interviewed the artist last week at his Manhattan studio. It turns out that Kahn is also a marvelously blunt and funny writer with a knack for pungent anecdotage. Rarely has a modern artist written so unpretentiously yet vividly about his art (TT).
BOOK
A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science and Other Writings (Library of America, $40, in stores Mar. 19). This omnibus, edited by Pete Hamill, is very nearly the best single-volume collection of Liebling’s domestic writings that could possibly be put together. (His World War II journalism has already been collected here.) It contains The Sweet Science, The Earl of Louisiana, The Jollity Building, Between Meals, and The Press, which between them cover all the bases. The New Yorker never had a better staff writer: Liebling’s prose was an exuberant, extroverted alloy of uptown and downtown, more or less what H.L. Mencken might have sounded like had he stuck to reporting instead of switching to the editorial page. If you don’t know his work, this is a very, very good place to start (TT).
TT: Thinking very, very small
In this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review two small-scale New York shows, one on Broadway (The Story of My Life) and the second off-off (Itamar Moses’ Love/Stories). The first is a bore, the second a treat. Here’s an excerpt.
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Broadway, like the rest of America, is feeling the financial crunch and looking for ways to weather it. This explains “The Story of My Life,” a new musical performed by a cast of two on a single set and accompanied by a nine-piece orchestra. Aside from being inexpensive to mount, “The Story of My Life” is sincere and sentimental, two commodities that have been known to draw a crowd. It’s also nicely staged and designed and features a charming star turn by Malcolm Gets, a performer of whom much more should be seen on Broadway. I only wish that all this, or any of it, made “The Story of My Life” worth seeing, but it’s an over-earnest dud.
Thomas and Alvin (Will Chase and Mr. Gets), the show’s two characters, are best buddies. Thomas is talented and ambitious, Alvin fey and Peter-Pannish. Thomas goes out into the big bad world and becomes a famous writer, while Alvin stays home to run his father’s bookstore and nurture what is pretty obviously an unrequited crush on his childhood friend. Thomas loses interest in Alvin, who responds by jumping off a bridge one snowy Christmas eve. Did I mention that Alvin and Thomas are both obsessed with “It’s a Wonderful Life”? Alas, no goofy angel shows up to intervene, and Thomas returns home to deliver Alvin’s eulogy. At first he finds it impossible to write, but Alvin’s ghost spends the evening telling him stories about their childhood, and the funeral takes place on schedule, complete with Heartfelt Tribute by Best Friend.
What we have here, in short, is a namby-pamby variation on “Merrily We Roll Along,” and Neil Bartram’s songs, which sound like sugar-sprinkled Sondheim, make the family resemblance clearer still. The trouble with Mr. Bartram’s score is that it has no edge at all–every song is nostalgic to a fault–and the trouble with Brian Hill’s book is that it’s static and surprise-free….
One of the many things that I thought about to keep from nodding off during the second half of “The Story of My Life” was “The Four of Us,” Itamar Moses’ two-man play about a pair of struggling young writers whose friendship goes sour when one of them becomes successful. Mr. Moses is among the few playwrights who can write interestingly about writers and their work, a subject that is usually dramatic poison, and he’s done it again in “Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It),” a program of five related one-act plays that is far better than its coy title.
The two central panels of “Love/Stories,” “Authorial Intent” and “Szinhaz,” are tales of romance gone wrong in which Mr. Moses plays Stoppard-style narrative tricks on the audience. “Authorial Intent” starts with a breakup scene, followed by a replay of the same scene in which the two characters analyze their lines instead of speaking them (“Objective: Change her mind. Tactic: Insist behavior is not a tactic designed to change her mind”). Then the lights go up and the actors, playing themselves, enact a “real-life” scene in which Character B (Michael Micalizzi) tries to pick up Character A (Laurel Holland) after the show. On paper this may sound too clever for its own good, but on stage it is amazingly effective–and very funny.
Even better is “Szinhaz,” in which Istvan Zoltan Andras (Felipe Bonilla), the director of a Russian theater company called “The Slow Death of the Human Soul,” takes questions from the audience, speaking through a translator (Maren Langdon) whose English is a bubble or two off plumb: “This company is now of course very much knowed about by peoples, but for very much time it was not knowed, or if it was, it was unliked, and not liked, which is what people were saying in the audiences, and in the critics, and also shouting in the streets at Istvan.” At first Mr. Moses plays the scene for laughs, but then he takes an unexpected swerve toward seriousness, and all at once you’re holding your breath….
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Read the whole thing here.
TT: Almanac
“Any person who is truly observed is interesting, if only because he is unique. What makes Hollywood’s characters dull is that they are conventional types who are conventionally observed.”
Dwight Macdonald, “Kazanistan, Ingeland and Williams, Tenn.” (in On Movies)
CAAF: You’re ugly, too
This anecdote’s been rattling around my head for a while. It’s related in Jane Smiley’s splendid Penguin Lives study of Charles Dickens. At the time it occurred Dickens was in the planning stages of Little Dorrit–a successful author but feeling increasingly restless in his marriage. He receives a letter from his first love, Maria Beadnell, whom he loved ardently as a young man and who refused him. She is now Mrs. Winter and aged forty-four. His reply is warm and charming. Correspondence flies. She confesses that in the decades since he last saw her she’s grown “toothless, fat, old and ugly.” He responds that he doesn’t believe it.
A meeting is arranged, and as Smiley describes it, “[it] was not a success. Mrs. Winter was as she described herself and, in addition, extremely talkative.”
It’s the letter that Dickens sends after this meeting that I find so horrifying and amusing. Horrifying on Mrs. Winter’s behalf–for obvious reasons.* Amusing because it’s such a perfect specimen of a writer who’s having trouble writing and is in bad temper, on a rampage and behaving badly. Dickens sends it to explain why he must miss a planned engagement:
You have never seen it before you, or lived with it, or had occasion to care about, and you cannot have the necessary consideration for it. “It is only half an hour”–“It is only an afternoon”–“It is only an evening”–people say to me over and over again–but they don’t know that it is impossible to command oneself to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes, or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a day away. These are the penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to an Art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it.
I like to think that after firing this off, Dickens burst into tears, then got on the computer and played Web Sudoku for an hour.
* In one last burst of writerly bad behavior, Dickens went on to write Mrs. Winter into Little Dorrit as the character Flora, who is portrayed as “fat,” “foolish” and “flirtatious” albeit ultimately “kindhearted.” Poor Mrs. Winter! To her great credit, she seems to have acquitted herself with grace and good humor throughout the entire episode.