The Busch Quartet, Beethoven: The Late String Quartets (EMI Classics, three CDs). If you read my recent Wall Street Journal column about Adolf Busch and the Nazis and want to hear how this courageous artist made music, the place to start is EMI’s collection of the Busch Quartet’s legendary 78-era recordings of Beethoven’s last six string quartets, which is available on CD or as a digital download. The playing may strike contemporary listeners as less than ideally polished, but the interpretations are uniquely penetrating, and Busch’s violin playing combines forthrightness and Innigkeit in a way that no one has rivaled, before or since. Warning: don’t expect state-of-the-art sound (TT).
Archives for December 2010
CD
Robert Shaw Chamber Singers, Songs of Angels: Christmas Hymns and Carols (Telarc). Had it up to here with super-slick holiday musical fare? Then allow me to direct your attention to this 1994 CD, in which America’s most celebrated choral conductor remade the much-loved a cappella arrangements of traditional carols that he first recorded on 78 in 1946. The singing is lovely, the arrangements tasteful. Guaranteed to cleanse your ears of Christmastide commercialism (TT).
NOVEL
Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede. (Simon & Schuster, $25). In this quietly absorbing 1969 novel, the author of the book on which Jean Renoir’s The River was based tells the story of a well-heeled British civil servant of a certain age who renounces the world, gives away her earthly possessions, and enters an abbey to become a cloistered nun. Whatever your religious views, if any, my guess is that you’ll be impressed, not least because Godden portrays the social life (so to speak) of a tightly-knit religious community with absolute candor (TT).
BOOK
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner, $30). An extraordinarily compelling history of a disease that once was unmentionable and is now a national obsession. Mukherjee’s theme is the way in which the preternaturally stubborn resolve of generation after generation of cancer researchers has led them to make great scientific discoveries–then prevented them from seeing the flaws in their theories that are discovered by their successors. Sobering and splendidly well written (TT).
PLAY
Play Dead (Players, 115 MacDougal). An off-Broadway spook show concocted by Teller (Penn Jillette’s silent partner) in collaboration with Todd Robbins, who tells the more-or-less true stories of a serial killer, two phony mediums, a geek (look it up) and a murder victim whom Robbins knew in real life. During and in between these narratives, things…happen. The nature of these grisly occurrences can best be summarized by saying that the white suit worn by Robbins grows steadily redder throughout the evening. Great fun for anyone who likes magic and stage blood, and ideal for kids who are not–repeat, not–highly impressionable (TT).
MP3
Coleman Hawkins, To Be or Not to Bop (Wnts). The first great jazz saxophonist was also one of a handful of swing-era giants who successfully embraced bebop, both on and off record. This new mp3-only downloadable collection contains twenty-two of the bop-and-bop-flavored 78 sides that Hawkins recorded in the mid-to-late-Forties with such then-youngsters as Dizzy Gillespie, J.J. Johnson, Hank Jones, Howard McGhee, Fats Navarro, Oscar Pettiford, and Max Roach, including the premiere recordings of “I Mean You,” “Salt Peanuts” and “Woody’n You.” It’s the first time that Hawkins’ key bop recordings have been released in a single-source anthology. Listen and marvel at his ability to ride the wave of a radically innovative new jazz style (TT).
GALLERY
Sargent and Impressionism (Adelson Galleries, 19 E. 82, closes Saturday). Two dozen-plus paintings and watercolors in which John Singer Sargent, who befriended Monet and looked closely at his work, dabbled in the then-revolutionary language of French impressionism, almost always to striking (if not quite idiomatic) effect. Guaranteed to open the eyes of those who think of Sargent purely as as a high-society portraitist (TT).
TT: The girl in the kitchen sink
I went to Madison, New Jersey, last Saturday to see the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey perform I Capture the Castle. It was a knockout. Here’s an excerpt from my review in today’s Wall Street Journal.
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Doctors have a saying: “The dose makes the poison.” If you’re a playwright, charm works the same way. It’s an indispensable part of the dramatic pharmacopoeia, but put in a pinch too much and a show can cloy. That doesn’t happen in Dodie Smith’s “I Capture the Castle,” which is being performed for the first time on the East Coast by the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Not only does Smith’s stage version of her fizzy 1948 novel about a clever young woman teetering on the brink of adulthood get the dosage right, but it has been impeccably directed by Cameron Watson and is being performed on a handsome set by an ideal cast. The word “irresistible” is rarely true, but I don’t see how anyone not descended from Scrooge McDuck could fail to fall for “I Capture the Castle.”
Smith, who died in 1990, was a British novelist and playwright who is best known for having written the book on which Walt Disney’s “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” was based. While none of her plays went over big on Broadway, the original version of “I Capture the Castle” has become something of a cult favorite, winning fans as varied as J.K. Rowling and Donald E. Westlake. The 1954 stage adaptation, however, is all but unknown, and until now had only received a single American production four years ago in Los Angeles.
Mr. Watson, who directed the show there, has restaged it in New Jersey, bringing with him one cast member, Rebecca Mozo, who plays Cassandra Mortmain, the budding novelist who is the play’s narrator. Cassandra, who sometimes likes to write while sitting in the kitchen sink, is a fey girl-woman who knows much of poverty–her impecunious family lives in a tumbledown castle–but nothing about men. “I know all about the facts of life,” she says firmly. “And I don’t think much of them.” Then her life is turned inside out when two rich young Americans declare themselves to be the owners of the castle in which the Mortmains live….
Each member of the cast catches the exact tone of his or her character, above all Ms. Mozo, who brings off with sweet grace the tricky task of showing us Cassandra’s discovery of the hurt of romantic love….
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Read the whole thing here.
The theatrical trailer from the 2003 BBC film version of I Capture the Castle: