TT: Stocking stuffers for the hopelessly arty

On Friday The Wall Street Journal will be publishing my best-theater-of-the-year list for 2011. Hence I thought that this would be a good time for me to take a quick look back at my ten favorite Top Five picks of the year just past:
• Debra Bricker Balken, John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury (Yale, $40). The catalogue of the Portland Museum’s superlative exhibition of Marin’s late paintings and watercolors is itself a first-class effort, a penetrating study of a great painter whose work is no longer widely known save to students of American modernism.
• Car 54 Where Are You?: Complete First Season (Shanachie, four DVDs). All thirty episodes of the 1961-62 season of one of the most clever and well-made situation comedies ever to appear on American television. Nat Hiken, who made Phil Silvers a TV star, did the same for Fred Gwynne and Joe E. Ross in this zany portrait of a squad-car team who troll the Bronx in search of trouble–all of which happens to them. An absolute must for golden-age TV buffs.
• The Essential Rosanne Cash (Sony Legacy, two CDs). Thirty-six tracks from one of America’s most creative singer-songwriters, chosen by Cash herself. An ideal one-stop introduction to her work, especially when heard in tandem with Composed, Cash’s 2010 memoir.
• John Gielgud, Ages of Man (Entertainment One). Courtesy of the Archive of American Television, the 1966 broadcast version of the great actor’s one-man Shakespeare show, which aired on CBS on two consecutive Sunday afternoons (the network suits didn’t think anybody would sit still long enough to watch the whole show in one go) and has been in limbo ever since. Contemporary Shakespeare style has changed beyond recognition since Gielgud’s day, but his elegant delivery and exquisitely modulated voice remain as seductive–and intelligent–as ever.
• Percy Grainger, The Complete 78-RPM Solo Recordings 1908-1945 (Appian, five CDs). The composer of “Country Gardens” and “Molly on the Shore” was also one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, a marvelously idiosyncratic virtuoso whose style ranged from tender lyricism to explosive extroversion. Most of his 78s have been unavailable in any format since their original release. This much-needed box set solves that problem–and does it right. Ward Marston’s digital transfers of such classic Grainger recordings as Chopin’s B Minor Sonata, Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes, and Grieg’s “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” are crystal-clear and scratch-free.
• Justified: The Complete First Season (Sony, three DVDs). In this cable-TV series, Graham Yost takes U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, one of Elmore Leonard’s most attractive recurring characters, and returns him to Kentucky’s Harlan County for a series of freshly written adventures that have the true Leonard touch. Timothy Olyphant, who plays Givens, is exactly, exquisitely right.
• Pat Metheny, What’s It All About (Nonesuch). A lovely sequel to One Quiet Night, Metheny’s 2009 album of acoustic-guitar solos. This time around the fare consists of pop standards, some likely (“Alfie”), others joltingly unexpected (“Betcha by Golly, Wow”), and all played with luminescent sensitivity. Ideal for wee-small-hours listening.
• A Minister’s Wife (PS Classics). The original-cast recording of the Lincoln Center Theatre production of this musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida is a major event. I called it “the most important new musical since The Light in the Piazza” when I reviewed the show in The Wall Street Journal, and now you can revel at leisure in Joshua Schmidt’s astringent yet tuneful score. If you didn’t see A Minister’s Wife on stage, make haste to hear it on record.
• Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (Pantheon, $28.95). I can’t do any better than to repeat my dust-jacket blurb: “The later years of Louis Armstrong are one of the most fascinating untold tales in the history of jazz. What a Wonderful World is indispensable to anyone with a serious interest in the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century.” If you liked Pops, you need to read this book.
• Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer (Picador, $15 paper). A bewitchingly clever historical thriller in which the lives and work of Peter Warlock, Constant Lambert, and Carlo Gesualdo are blended into the hair-raising tale of an unworldly music critic who writes an opera libretto for a flint-hearted composer who returns the favor in the most malevolent way imaginable. The author (better known in pop-music circles as John Wesley Harding) has done a virtuosic job of fusing fact with fiction, and the result is one of the few novels with a musical setting in which the background is rendered accurately. Absolutely not for musicians only, though those who already know the dramatis personae will be dazzled by the sure-footed skill with which Stace has put their real-life stories to novelistic use.