The Golden Apples of the Sun

The rain has arrived, welcome enough, though it was difficult not to be mesmerized during our recent string of stunningly bright and balmy days. I wasn’t thinking much about apples during that stretch, but the golden leaves of the Norway maples seemed to be squealing with indwelling delight. Or maybe that was just me.

The yellow branches, scattered amid the surrounding green and red, veritably glowed as they caught the afternoon sun from behind, softening and redirecting it out from the shadows of the woods behind.

Hilary and I had our dinners on the deck all week, and we also took to the tennis court on three successive days. It was fun, but it might have been a mistake in light of the aches and pains it produced, thighs and hips creaking and groaning. But once again, maybe that was just me.

Then again, I suppose such things are connected: the sun, the leaves, the body, and me.  When we’re out on the court, the yellow ball, the blue sky, the movement, the stroke also have a part to play, as does the opponent. But Hilary is less an opponent than a fellow-conspirator. We spent most of our time simply warming up, and we seldom last more than half an hour on the court.  It’s my great delight to report that almost invariably it’s Hilary who finally says, “Shall we play a few games?”

On our way home we sometimes stop at the public library. It’s on the way. On a recent visit the annual Friends of the Library Sale was in progress. I left the room with a meagre haul: Keith Jarrett playing The Well-Tempered Clavier on the harpsicord, two CDs of renaissance liturgical music (Palestrina and Victoria), and an unopened CD of folk music by the Klezmatics. 

I also scored a slim paperback of Kierkegaard’s Journals (the slimmer the better, I say), an anthology of Robert Bly’s more obscure poems called Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life, and a history of British landscape painting called Spirit of Place that weighed a ton.

These nuts will soon be squirreled away on the selves amid many others to nourish us through the long winter months.  

On the day the clouds arrived, we decided to drive north to Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge. A few ducks and shorebirds had been reported, and you never know. To our surprise, the sheet of stratus clouds that was blanketing the city hadn't gotten quite that far, and the sun was perking up the landscape bigtime.

Meanwhile, small groups of sandhill cranes--three or seven or ten--were passing in the distance or directly overhead, their grotesque but appealing croaks as evocative as their lanky bent-in-the-middle flight motion. 

Hundreds of red-winged blackbirds (or were they Brewer's blackbirds?) were rustling in the cattails. But it was the leaves, and the sky, and the shape of the land, that stole the show.

    

Morning Meditations: Election Day

Hilary is off to her post as an election judge, and I’m facing a blank grayish day. It starts with a mug of French roast coffee and a CostCo croissant from the freezer.

Are they any good? At fifty cents apiece they’re quite good. The ones at Patisserie 46, at $6 apiece, are only slightly better. And they’re a half-hour drive away.

I can remember a time when the only place in town you could get good croissants was the New French Café. This was followed by the era that produced two important works: The Preppie Handbook and Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. From there, it was but a few short steps to the January 6th riots and the first major attempt to overthrow a freely elected U.S. government.

Before rosy-fingered dawn had shown her smiling pink face, I’d already done the Wordle and Connections, and read Paul Krugman’s latest column, in which he restates the (to some of us) obvious fact that the American health care system has been largely government subsidized for decades. He goes on to describe the private insurance industry as “parasitic.”

Everyone should read this column, but few will read it. I would go farther and suggest that all government activity is by nature socialistic. Good governments handle their responsibilities sensibly; bad ones don’t.

Krugman follows up the reasoning and the statistics with a popular song, as usual. Today it was “Closer to Fine.” I didn’t recognize the Indigo Girls. (They were after my time.)

I'm trying to tell you something 'bout my life

Maybe give me insight between black and white

And the best thing you ever done for me

Is to help me take my life less seriously… 

By now, so many popular musical groups are “after my time” that I can hardly make it through the daily crossword puzzle. “Lead singer of REM, Michael _____.” If they didn’t do a half-time show at the Superbowl, I’ve never heard of them. I just watched Help for the first time the other day—on DVD. (I liked it.)

Right now my main concern is to determine which translation of The Odyssey is best. The Emily Wilson version that I requested arrived at the library the other day. I’m finding that the iambic pentameter doesn’t really flow. She might just as well have straightened it out into prose paragraphs.

Of course, any translation will be radically different from the film, a medium that even in the surest hands lacks the tools to bring the lyricism of the original to life.

Down by the stony trail they made their way

As far as Clearwater, not far from town—

A spring house where the people filled their jars …

And round it on the humid ground a grove,

A circular wood of poplars grew. Ice cold

In runnels from high rock ran the spring,

And over it there stood an altar stone

To the cool nymphs, where all men going by

Laid offerings.

Yesterday was a marvel of serendipitous conversation. We chatted at length out in the street with our neighbors Brendan and Sara. They were hard at work digging up a rectangle of bare ground the local energy company had disturbed while installing a new gas line. We discussed the neighborhood owls, Brenden’s success at selling odd pieces of junk on Facebook Marketplace, and the deterioration of their mini-camper, which hasn’t left the driveway all summer.

Our next-door neighbor Rocky was also out in her yard—a rare occurrence. Brendan told me she bought a robot lawn-mower, and it seemed she was trying to program it with her phone. 

We might have stopped over to say hi, but we were heading down to Edina to pick up a book-club book from some friends. They were expecting us. We sat in their imaginatively landscaped front yard sipping drinks that Michel concocted in a big wooden bowl with fresh limes, Brazilian rum, and salt. Conversation roamed from the nature of “borderline personalities” to office politics at Metro State to the rising stars on the women’s tennis tour. Michel later brought out a succession of choice morsels from the kitchen. I might call them cheeseballs or bruschetta; he would call them acılı ezme or bolinho de aipim.

Late in the afternoon I took some newspapers out to the recycling bin and ran into our neighbor Brian, out for a walk with his daughter, Vivian. He’s seldom around; we chat maybe once a year.

“How’s the sound-track industry treating you,” I asked him.

“It tanked. My sponsor lost his funding. Now I’m installing audio systems.”

“Well, at least it gets you out of the house,” I said.

Vivian has grown in the course of a year. “Gee. Are you in college now?” I asked.

“I’ll be a high school junior next fall.”

Favorite subject? “English, I think.”

Good answer. All young people should read Middlemarch, All the King’s Men, Notes from Underground, and A Farewell to Arms, don’t you think? But who knows? Maybe she’s been reading Gravity’s Rainbow, Bel Canto, Olive Kittridge, and Bright Lights, Big City?

Now the sun is out. Rising. Along with the heat. It's the same thing every day, but with variations. The hummingbirds are starting to get belligerent around their red plastic feeder. 

"Take it easy, fellas. There's plenty for everyone."

And the catbird is devouring the berries on the dogwood. Cats and dogs.   

Any time now, I'm going to go vote down at the fire station. While I'm at it, I might as well check the water clarity at the bridge above Bassett Creek. It's getting better, year by year. 

Chalk it up to the efforts of the Bassett Creek Watershed Management Commission.  I wonder who's paying for that ...

Winona Beethoven Overnight

Winona has been holding a midsummer Beethoven Festival annually for almost two decades now, with world-class performers and a wide array of classical ensembles, styles, and programs. After reading about the event for years—often after the fact—we finally committed ourselves this year to an evening of Beethoven quartets performed by the Ariel String Quartet.

It wasn’t the most auspicious moment to embark on an overnight getaway to Winona. Temperatures were in the 90s and forest fires in the BWCA had sent the air quality index to dangerous heights. The smell of stale smoke was everywhere, and the Minneapolis skyline had been reduced to a vague dystopian silhouette.

We went anyway. We’d already booked the tickets and the motel. And there was reason for hope. The forecast mentioned the possibility of rain, which would wash some of the smoke away, and the NW wind might just shush the nasty stuff east into Wisconsin.

We left town at 1:30. There was water on the roads in Red Wing. The air had improved. Patches of blue sky appeared. Clouds took shape.

It rained heavily while we were checking into our motel on the outskirts of Winona. (Good timing.) We dressed for the concert (summer casual) and headed down into the city a few minutes later, looking for a place to grab a bite to eat. Hilary was scrolling the possibilities on Trip Advisor and happened on Sapori di Sicilia, which described itself as a “panificio : pasticceria.” A bakery and pastry shop?

It was only three blocks away. We parked right in front of the steps leading up to the place. Downtown Winona is full of half-decrepit storefronts, but this place seemed to be housed in a repurposed bank. Modern. Large tiles on the floor. Bakery cases half-full of tasty-looking morsels.

A closer look at the menu on the wall behind the cash register suggested that we’d come to the right place: truffle fries, falafel fritters, capicola panini. aglio e olio, gnocchi. And six or seven house wines at $ 6-8/glass.

Everything tastes better in an oversized bowl.

We ordered a Greek salad and pasta carbonara, took a table by the window, and settled in to watch the passing scene. The chairs were remarkably comfortable. Hilary had a great view of a group of seven elderly women engaged in animated conversation. A book club? University professors discussing some upcoming candidate for tenure? Or were they all headed to the Beethoven festival later that evening?

We nursed our orders, passing them back and forth across the table, happy to be inside watching the weather improve through the window. At one point I went up to the counter to get two glasses of water and said to the young woman behind the register, apropos of nothing, “This image on your menu looks like it came from Crete.”

“Well, it happens to be in the center of the Sicilian flag,” she replied, cracking a hint of a smile.

The concert took place at a theater on the campus of St. Mary’s University, tucked into the wooded bluffs a five-minute drive up the hill from our motel. The night wasn’t cool, but it was no longer unpleasantly hot, and the air had improved so greatly that Hilary spotted the crescent moon peeking through a rift in the clouds. People were milling around on the terrace in front of the concert hall, and it seemed the only thing missing was the sharp report of a passing nighthawk.

The concert itself was deeply expressive and thoroughly engaging: Beethoven—early, middle, and late. Works like these don’t carry you along like a breeze, they draw you in like a compelling argument, and the Ariel Quartet offered a flawless exercise in emotional logic and probing intensity. The first half of the program ran 90 minutes. The single piece after intermission was a mere twenty-two. The balance seemed perfect.

I was impressed. I had never heard of the Ariel Quartet prior to coming upon them in the festival schedule, though they’ve been playing together for almost thirty years. But I’m sure these musicians are less concerned with impressing people than with fully exposing the challenge, the anguish, and the beauty of Beethoven’s imagery.

The next morning, after a "light breakfast" at the motel, we returned to our new favorite Sicilian cafe stop to sample the bakery goods. The same young woman was behind the country, and when she brought us our coffee we learned a bit about the owner's background.

From there it was across the river to Trempealeau NWR, where we drove the nine-mile gravel circuit, stopping hear and there to take a walk or get a better view of a bird. The sky was clear and the humidity had dropped, though not by much. 

We spotted four or five indigo buntings along the way--they like to sit in the open at the tops of trees, displaying their iridescent feathers--but most of the birds were sheltering in the shadows of the vegetation. We heard warbling vireos, common yellow-throats, great-crested flycatchers, Eastern towhees, robins, pewees, yellow-bellied woodpeckers, catbirds--the usual suspects. Hilary spotted a few pelicans drifting out in the river. A beaver swam by. Perhaps our best sighting was of a red-headed woodpecker disappearing into the underbrush. 

   

The Heavenly Regions

Bright sun, a moderate breeze, and temperatures in the low sixties. These are the conditions that prevail in the heavenly regions, I suspect, and last weekend we were blessed with the same regime here in town. After rejecting three or four more exotic cycling options, Hilary and I decided to pump up the tires and make the time-honored, but often overlooked, trip around the Lakes.

What lakes? Bde Maka Ska, Harriet, and Isles, of course, a few minutes’ drive down the parkway from our house.

We got an early start. The air was sharp, and traffic on the bike paths was moderate. We were soaring.

It’s become fashionable to describe such episodes as “being in the present.” More than a few books have been written celebrating that level of innocent awareness, and offering advice about how to reach and sustain it.

I have no advice to give. I’m tempted to argue that such a concept is inappropriate to the occasion. At the least, it seems to suggest that our recollections of the past are filled with remorse, our anticipation of the future fraught with anxiety. That’s not necessarily true.

We used to live much closer to these lakes, and throughout our leisurely tour I was pleasantly reminded of people and events from the past. The recollections added an emotional depth to the visually spectacular scene. I was reminded of the years when our friends Greg and Betty lived in a condo across Bryant Park from us. As we locked our bikes and took a stroll through Harriet Gardens, I was reminded that the bedding plants near the fountains were once set off by a trim row of buckthorn hedges!

The tennis courts at Beard’s Pleasance reminded me of matches with an old friend interrupted again and again by snippets of conversation about food, films, and travel. We passed my cousin’s house, where we all used to sit on the shady porch as the morning heated up. And at one point, on the west side of Lake Harriet, I was reminded of a party I went to in the mid-1970s in an upstairs apartment before Hilary and I had even met.

On our way back to the car, we sat on a bench overlooking Bde MaKa Ska, trying to pick out a good place for lunch. Yum? No. Niviya Thai Kitchen? It’s gone downhill. Hazelwood? Too suburban. Convention Grill? Might work.

In the end, as we often do, we went home and cooked up something new, in this case a pasta salad with corn and cherry tomatoes from a recent recipe in the Times. Not bad. (But might not be a “keeper.”)

*   *   *

The next morning was equally brilliant but far more blustery. We drove down to the farmers’ market to pick up some parsley and a few discounted zinnias. Did some planting back home.

But the real highlight of the day came later, when we once again drove into town to attend a concert by Lux String Quartet being given at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in association with a traveling exhibit called Violins of Hope. The display consisted of six or seven Plexiglas cases holding a selection of violins that had been owned by Jews who died in concentration camps during WW II.  

This is serious stuff, and it might almost have seemed a bit morbid, except for the subtlety and zeal with which the members of Lux worked through their program, and also the verve with which each of the four performers announced a piece and also described what it was like to play an instrument from the venerable collection.

As an added twist, the performance consisted of isolated movements from several compositions—Grieg, Shostakovich, Kodaly, and, best of all, the first movement of Ravel’s String Quartet, one of my favorites. Taking them out of their broader musical environment seemed to refresh them.

And as chance would have it, we ran into five of our friends at the concert. But is that really chance? They all live near the Lakes, and three of the five are musicians.

After the concert I ran into composer David Evan Thomas in the hall where the instruments were on exhibit. I told him the tale of the LP of Ravel’s Quartet that I had in college, a Nonesuch recording with a pink hot-air balloon on the cover. He agreed that Nonesuch album covers could be outrageous.

“You should write something for the Lux,” I said.

He cleared his throat and replied, modestly, “Well, they premiered my second string quartet.”

Oh. I didn’t know.

 

   

Sonny Rollins and Me

Sonny Rollins died the other day at 95. I grew up listening to his sometimes tender but more often churlish and irascible sound. I liked him, but I struggled to find an album of his that I really liked.

He came to town in the early seventies to play the Whole Coffeehouse in the basement of the U of Minnesota’s Coffman Union. There might have been thirty tables spread out in front of the stage. That’s the thing about jazz: world-class talent, yet very few people actually “dig” the music. As if Placido Domingo were doing a recital at your local Punch Pizza.

It was a memorable show, especially Rollins’ highly rhythmic rendering of a calypso number called “St. Thomas.” He stretched out for close to ten minutes and would have gone farther, I think, if some idiot in the back row hadn’t shouted out “HoHoHo.”

I heard him again, years later, at the State Theater in downtown Minneapolis as part of a “supergroup” tour with McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter. Sure, it was good. But it’s better when the ceiling’s low, you’re twenty feet from the bandstand, and everyone in the group isn’t trying to be a star.

Throughout his career, Rollins struggled to remain creative, choosing to go out on a limb, or muddy the waters, or rough up the texture, time and again, rather than return to the familiar riffs and changes of the post-bop world—the riffs and changes that most jazz aficionados love. In this he differed from his near contemporary Sonny Stitt, who seemed to come out with a new album every three months. Rollins quit playing for years at a time, famously practicing late at night on the Williamsburg Bridge, near his apartment on the Lower East Side.  

The legend I grew up with was that Rollins was freaked out by the appearance of “free jazz,” and especially by the exploratory sound of John Coltrane, who seemed to be usurping his position as “best tenor sax” in the minds of many listeners. The first album of his that I owned, East Broadway Run Down, contained a twenty-minute track with quite a bit of upper-range squealing—Rollins’s attempt to join in the movement toward “freedom” and noise. I found it embarrassing.

The album’s B-side had a twelve-minute Rollins original, “Blessing in Disguise,” full of repeated angular rhythms, and a ballad, “We Kiss in the Shadows.” Good stuff. But I'm not sure dropping the piano was such a good idea.

It’s true that Rollins’ star seemed to fade as Coltrane’s grew brighter. It’s a classic trope, though the details don’t quite fit. In his recent book, Three Shades of Blue, jazz historian James Kaplan takes a closer look at the critical juncture when trumpeter Miles Davis replaced Rollins with Coltrane in his ever-evolving ensemble.

At the time, Miles had just returned to the States from Paris, and he wanted to form a new band. Coltrane was just finishing up a gig at the Five Spot with Thelonious Monk, and Miles wanted Coltrane back. Kaplan quotes trumpeter Wallace Roney:

One night [Miles] comes to Trane and says, 'Trane, come on back in the band, man.' Trane said, 'No, Miles—I like it here. I’m havin’ fun.' Miles said, 'You don’t want to play this shit—we playing some different shitl' Coltrane said, 'No, Miles, I’m enjoying this.'

Miles said, 'Come on. Come on back home.' He said, 'Philly’s back. Red’s back. And we got a little boy, Cannonball.' He said, “Just come on and play some with us.' 

In Roney's version, Miles hires Sonny Rollins on tenor and books a gig at Cafe Bohemia. Then one night Coltrane shows up, carrying his horn. Cutting a solo short, Miles goes off the bandstand to talk to him. Sonny takes the next solo, and then, (as Miles later told the story to Roney) “Trane got up there and played so much shit, took the championship belt away from Sonny. Made Sonny go to the bridge!”

It's a fine tale, the kind of insider scuttlebutt that those who love the music relish, Kaplan among them. But he prudently adds:

If the account is taken literally, it has a couple of chronological issues. For one thing, Sonny Rollins had left Miles’s band in September, while the Monk-Coltrane stand at the Five Spot was still in full bloom. For an­other, Rollins’s famous sabbatical from jazz, during which he practiced every day on the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, didn’t happen until the summer of 1959, and by his own account, a cutting contest with Coltrane had nothing to do with it. And Red Garland didn’t rejoin Miles until late December, at which point Rollins was long gone. 

So much for the details. The fact remains that Coltrane’s play­ing had developed exponentially during his time with Monk: “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order," he told Down Beat editor Don DeMicheal in August 1960. “I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically....”

Rollins also played with Monk. Did his music develop? I don’t know. I don’t think that playing with the Rolling Stones helped him much. I could be wrong.

When I feel a yen to listen to Rollins, I’m likely to return to his albums from the 1950s: Tenor Madness, Sonny Rollins Plus 4, The Sound of Sonny, and a great Dizzy Gillespie album called Sonny Side Up featuring Rollins and Sonny Stitt as sidemen.

Are these his best albums? I couldn’t say. They just happen to be the ones I have.

One of my favorites among his tracks is a rendition of “My Reverie,” a boppish version of a big band number based on a famous tune by Claude Debussy. I find the restraint with which Rollins nurses the development moving, and appropriate to this solemn occasion.

You can listen to it here.

    

 

 

Excited by What?

Depending on your situation, or your temperament, to be “excited by nothing” might be taken to mean either that a) life has lost its sparkle, or b) you’re excited to greet the day, though you can’t put your finger on any specific reason.

These days I often find myself in the latter state. I might attribute such irrepressible glee to the clear morning light, the bright green vegetation, crabapples coming into bloom, the songs of the kinglets and white-throated sparrows that fill the air as I step out onto the deck—or all four. But the feeling runs deeper than that. Everything seems grand on such mornings, and the question becomes, “What are you going to do about it?”

Do we have to do anything about it? Going for walks, getting together with friends, listening to music, staring off into the underbrush …    

Yesterday morning I trimmed a low-hanging branch from a tree near the fence. I’ve been wanting to do that since last year. While out in the yard I spotted a “pheasant-back” mushroom that had sprung up on a tree stump amid the seas of Virginia waterleaf. A few minutes later I was back inside, googling the species to make sure of the identification. I looked high and low, and found no comment on the order of “not to be confused with the similar and highly poisonous ….”

In the afternoon Hilary and I took a stroll through Eloise Butler wildflower garden. Back home, I noticed we had quite a few red bell peppers in the fridge, and I concocted a plan. I put some early Italian music on the stereo—Landini and friends. It might just as well have been modern Italian folk music, though the harmonic progressions tended toward the pleasantly odd and strange, as if an episode of Father Cadfael were running on the TV in the next room.

I sliced up the peppers, blackened them in the broiler, then proceeded to assemble the dish we call Sicilian Peppers—black olives, anchovies, capers, oregano, onion, garlic, and balsamic vinegar.

Then I harvested the mushroom, brushed it off, and sliced it up. I took a bite, which immediately confirmed the identification: it tasted like watermelon rind. I sauteed the slices in butter, and we enjoyed a light dinner sitting in front of the doors that open out to the deck.

Homage to Mercury

There’s moisture in the air again. I'm sure you've noticed. It's raining. It’s still dark at 6:45, but on a clear day, Jupiter is bright and high in the western sky, and the sun is brilliant on the ungainly heaps of snow. On a clear day, it also streams in above the piano on a lower plane than at any other time of the year, shoots across the room, and comes to rest on the light switch in the hall. 

Mercury is the god of quick changes, I think. They say you can see it just before sunrise in the southeast these days. I haven't made the effort, but I can see its influence everywhere.

It all began with a dreadful cold snap. During that bitter spell, we sat in the den by the warmth of the Jøtul stove, though we might just as well have been up on the North Shore. As usual in such situations, I had a stack of books by my side on the couch, including Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, a biography of Erik Satie, a slim book about aesthetics by Bence Nanay (part of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series), and a collection of essays by John MacQuarrie called Studies in Christian Existentialism.

Also near at hand was my journal, into which I occasionally jotted a few notes. For example:

“Nanay rejects both beauty and pleasure as foundations or standards for aesthetic judgment. In fact, he rejects judgment itself, preferring the term “analysis.” He quotes Susan Sontag, who characterizes aesthetic experiences as ‘detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation or approval.’ Evidently Sontag didn’t go to the movies much.”

The weather turned that night, and the next morning we went on a spectacular ski, following Tornado Alley south in bright sun through the woods, under Highway 55, across Bassett Creek, and around a loop through the white pines just north of Glenwood Avenue. We've walked these grounds many times, but had never skied them before. The freshness in the air was genuinely intoxicating. 

In order to make the most of it, I shoveled two feet of snow off the deck and oiled the track on the garage door, which was squeaking something terrible. (Alas! It still is.) Then I split a few pieces of the firewood stacked in the garage  into narrow strips for kindling, which will come in handy sooner or later. It won’t stay this warm for long.

The next morning the air was just the same, but the snow had crystalized during the thaw, and we left the skis at home during our morning ramble down alongside the creek.

Last night the rain arrived, slightly weird, but still atmospheric. 

This morning I was cleaning up some emails from Earth/Sky News and was cheered to learn that the universe, like me, is slowing down. The theory had been that it was not only expanding, but accelerating. New research offers a more reasonable view. In findings published November 6 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers argued that “the universe is in a phase of decelerated expansion.” 

Here's the gist: Early arguments for accelerated expansion were based on measurements of distance to faraway galaxies using Type 1a supernovas. These supernovas were regarded as the universe’s “standard candles,” but new research suggests that their brightness is related not only to distance, but also to the age of the stars that created them. Once you factor that information in, the data suggests that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion, rather than expanding and thinning out with relentless and ever-increasing speed.

I like that idea, and Empedocles would have liked it, too, I think.  

The Fall Music Season

When the days get dark, we head inside for entertainment, though when I look back at the events we’ve attended recently, most of them took place in the afternoon!

We attended an afternoon concert of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra recently. We were struck, a few years ago, by the magic that Eunice Kim summoned  to a performance of Mendelsohn’s Violin Concerto, and she worked her magic again on Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto No. 3. She retains the knack for bringing out the heavily romantic aspects of the music fully, yet selflessly. 

The orchestra’s woodwind “dectet” (is that a word?) had primed us by opening the “set” with a crisp, frothy appetizer by Jean Françaix, “Seven Dances after the Ballet Les malheurs de Sophie,” in the vein of Poulenc or Stravinsky in his pesky neo-classical phase.  

We left at intermission, fearing that even the most charming of Beethoven’s symphonies—his first—would have sounded lead-footed in comparison to Saint-Saëns’s richer offering. But we picked up a bit of a heavier Central European vibe while having lunch at Moscow on the Hill.

A few days later, we spent the better part of an afternoon in the Ordway’s bigger theater listening to the Minnesota Opera perform Mozart’s delightful Cosi Fan Tutti. I first heard this opera performed by the same company back in 1976 when it was in its infancy. It was a snowy night; my mom had driven into town to see the opera with us, and she spent the night on the couch in our tiny apartment.

I liked the opera then, and I liked it even more a half-century later, the second time around.

Cosi Fan Tutti once had a spotty or questionable reputation, on the order of: “not quite up to Mozart’s best, somewhat trashy, but after all, it is Mozart.” Some found the plot to be “immoral,” though it strikes me that Don Giovanni is hardly a model citizen. In any case, I loved the entire performance, and I was pleased to read later than some experts share that view.  “The most perfect ensemble opera ever written,” Matthew Boyden writes glowingly in The Rough Guide to Opera. And scholar Arthur Hutchen’s confesses, in his biography of Mozart, “For reasons I cannot explain and do not think worth discovering, despite the glories of other Mozart operas, I personally derive the greatest pleasure from Cosi fan Tutti…”

The big issue, when attending a classic opera these days, is whether the “updated” production will add something to the experience, or simply muck up the thing. In this case, the opera took place in a modern office setting, seemingly furnished by IKEA. In the first scene the two male protagonists—or perhaps I should call them “bros”—are drinking beer and playing video games. You get the idea.

The producers added a final twist to the show, giving viewers the opportunity to vote for a given outcome: do the two pairs of lovers remain together, or switch partners, or break up? The tally would determine how the cast wrapped up the “drama.”

It sounds dumb, but I was interested to read in an essay by Florence Badol-Bertrand that Mozart seemed “barely interested” in how the opera turned out. “At the end of the opera,’ she writes, “contrary to the conventions of the period, we are not exactly sure about how the couples are ‘redistributed.’”

We were sitting in the last row of the balcony, under the overhang of the second balcony, and from that distance I couldn’t tell for sure what happened at the end, either. Nor was it easy to discern, during the love scenes, the extent to which the two couples were playing a “part” in the grand ruse and the degree to which they were getting carried away by genuine emotion in an amorous situation. The ambiguity, or complexity, of the narrative made it possible to sit back, relax, enjoy the hijinks, and more especially, enjoy the music.

A few days later we met some friends down at the Dakota for tenor giant Joshua Redman’s eight o’clock show. The club’s habit of cramming the tables into long tight rows doesn’t sit well with me, but we’d reserve one that’s nestled up against the wall in front of the bar. It had the added virtue of obscuring our view of the huge TV sets on the wall behind the bandstand.

It was a pleasant scene, and the performance was decently long. But the band focused its attention on high-energy tunes from Redman’s most recent album, Words Fall Short. With all due respect, the music fell a little short, too. The tunes themselves weren’t that distinctive, and their somewhat arbitrary modal progressions seemed to thwart Redman’s attempts to stretch out lyrically. Pianist Paul Cornish went wild on several numbers, bashing away in a post-Don Pullen mode, and Redman gave it his fiery best, but the most engaging solos were provided by bassist Paul Norris. Hmmm. (The last time we heard Redman live he was exploring standards with Brad Mehldau. It was a musical feast.)

The following week we paid a visit one afternoon to an obscure (to us, not to God) church in St. Paul to hear a recently resurrected Mass by baroque composer Domenico Belli. What? You’ve never heard of him? Neither had we. But Consortium Carissimi always puts on a good show, and in this case they were featuring two quartets of vocalists, one of which included local star Clara Osowski. It was a lovely forty-minute Mass, although the experience was marred somewhat for Hilary by the fact that she was following the text in the program.

The fear of death doth trouble me, sinning daily, and not repenting: for that in hell there is no redemption, have mercy upon me O God, and save me.

And so on. Relentlessly. Heavy stuff. Then again, the piece was a funeral elegy. Officium DEFUNCTORUM. We’d been warned.

When it was over, the musicians headed to the basement while Garrick Comeaux, the group’s founder and artistic director, came forward to apologize for the brevity of the performance. He’d discovered the manuscript in an archive in Brescia, not far from Milan.

“I never know how long a piece is going to be until I have it worked up,” he told us. “Do you want us to do part of it again?”

A man in the front row suggested the final aria. Comeaux sent someone down to summon the musicians from the basement, and we were treated to a reprise of the concert’s last twenty minutes, during which all eight of the vocalists have a part to play.  

Blue Moon – the Film

The last days of lyricist Lorenz Hart weren’t pretty ones. He’d penned the lyrics for numerous Broadway hits including “Blue Moon,” Ship Without a Sail," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "Dancing on the Ceiling," "Falling in Love with Love," "Glad to Be Unhappy," "He Was Too Good to Me," "I Could Write a Book," "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," "Isn't It Romantic?" "It Never Entered My Mind," "Manhattan," "My Funny Valentine," "My Romance," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Thou Swell" and "With a Song in My Heart." He was overflowing with ingenious phrases, tending toward the humorous, the satirical, and the self-depreciatory, making him the perfect collaborator for the often shmaltzy tunesmith Richard Rodgers, six years his junior. 

But Larry was unreliable, difficult to work with. He drank, he slept in, he missed appointments. When Rodgers proposed a new musical called “Oklahoma!,” Hart rejected it, considering it utter cornball. So Rodgers moved ahead with a new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, who hadn't written a hit since Showboat, a decade earlier.

In Blue Moon, director Richard Linklater focuses on one particular evening: the opening night of Oklahoma! Hart attends the show with his mother, then hurries down to the bar nearby where the reception is set to take place. In the course of the evening he chats with the worldly-wise bartender, the young soldier at the piano, and E. B. White (who happens to be sitting at a table nearby.) He tells the bartender about his “girlfriend,” a attractive coed twenty years his junior, and the language gets crude. She’ll be arriving soon. Hart has promised to introduce her to Rodgers.

Guests start to trickle in from the theater, including Hammerstein and Rodgers himself. By this time Hart has had a few drinks, and he’s getting slightly manic. He congratulates Hammerstein, then Rodgers, things remain cordial, and Rodgers even goes so far as to suggest a new collaboration with Hart, an update of the duo’s first show, now fifteen years in the past.

OK, Hart replies, but why not do a new show? A satire about Marco Polo. Four hours long. “We’ll skewer everything and everybody …. “

It’s painful to watch the evening unfold. Ethan Hawke inhabits the role of Hart with all the exuberance and pathos he can muster, but it’s never fun to watch an alcoholic head down that slippery slope to inebriation. Andrew Scott, in the role of Rodgers, nails the complex blend of gratitude, affection, courtesy, and distaste that the songwriter feels for his one-time mentor, collaborator, and friend. And Margaret Qualley is perfect as the worldly-wise yet strangely innocent ingénue who’s truly fond of her much older and much more famous friend, though she doesn’t care for him “in that way.”

It isn’t difficult to guess who’s going to get the girl.

But that's not the point of the film. Linklater wanted to bring to life a fascinating and dreadful moment in the history of American popular culture, and in that he's succeeded. 

It almost makes you want to stream Oklahoma! again. 

___________________

For deeper insights into the art and milieu of the Great American Songbook, I would highly recommend Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built. For an almost academic look at the lyricists of the era, including forty-odd pages on Hart himself, it might be worthwhile checking out The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, by Philip Furia.   

 

10th Wave Redux

We’ve never been disappointed at a performance by 10th Wave Ensemble. We’ve heard them twice now, and they’re holding strong.

The qualities that make their performances engaging are:

a. We know nothing about who they are or what they’re trying to do, beyond presenting refreshing, engaging, and sometimes challenging music that we’ve never heard of and know nothing about.

b. Their instrumental arsenal is unusual and impressive: clarinet, cello, piano, marimba, violin, tabla, bass, vocals, flute, and whatever else might be required for a piece they’re dying to do.

c. Their performances are casual, relatively brief, and relatively cheap—pay what you can, or what you choose.

d. The group is multi-ethnic: Asian, white, African American.

d. Their musicianship is top-flight.

e. The program notes are accessible only on-line. (Listen now with an open mind and heart; read about it later. OK?)

e. They're making their “home” this fall at University Lutheran Church of Hope, which is located on a back street in Dinkytown.

This last item might seem inconsequential, but it’s fun to return to the neighborhood where Hilary and I lived back in our college days, half a century ago. They’ve closed off some streets since then and built a few apartment high-rises, but as we zigzagged here and there we might have reminisced about the Eighth Street Market, the ice cream truck that once passed us by (long gone), listening to the West Bank Trackers at Bootlegger Sam’s (long gone), the great LP sale at Bank’s liquidation center (now gone), or buying Steward Sandwiches at Positively 4^th Street (now gone.) 

I used to walk two miles before sunrise, three days a week, from East Hennepin across Dinkytown to the university police station (to pick up my moneybag), then on to my post at a large parking lot on the River Flats (now gone).

But more than any of that, Dinkytown once epitomized the curiosity, creativity, and freedom of university life that was opening up to young adults like me who had just arrived from the suburbs, and at a concert like this one, that same spirit was brought to life again.

(If you're interested in any of that history, you might want to read the recent article "How Alive or Dead is Dinkytown?"

We had no idea what the program would be. It wouldn’t have mattered. The music was fresh, varied, quirky, moving, humorous, and haunting, with more than a few touches of the sublime.

The piece de resistance was Robert Aldridge’s “Three Dance.” In which violin, marimba, and tabla set off at a furious pace, though the mood was occasionally haunting, reminding me, in snatches, of Stravinsky’s “Duo Concertant.”

In James Rolfe's “The Connection,” the performer, Eri Isomura, was required to recite an absurdist narrative while playing the marimba. The tale deals in chance meetings ala Andre Breton’s Nadja, but it wouldn’t have held my interest without the resonant plung-plung-plung on the rosewood keys. The marimba looked unusually long to me, and Isomura is not tall, which added an element of gymnastics to her performance as she stretched from one end of the beast to the other.

The “Billy Collins Suite” for clarinet, cello, piano, and narrator was more complex but didn’t quite work for me. Narrator Elwyn A. Fraser, Jr. has a beautiful and expressive voice, with the power to be heard even at a whisper, but the sound system was erratic and failed to deliver. I had trouble following the text, but unfortunately picked up just enough to keep trying, rather than leaving it behind and following the music. (Words are themselves a form of music, powerful and suggestive. My preference is for art songs in languages I have no knowledge with.)

The composer of “Power and Beauty,” Victoria Malaway, was present, and she informed us before the piece that it dealt with interactions of whites and Native Americans with the nearby Falls of St. Anthony, and each other, over a long span of history. The piece was frothy and engaging … but far too short for the subject at hand.

But random notes like these do little to convey the general flow of the evening, which was relaxed, gracious, lively, and full of lyricism and surprise. And I have failed to mention the intricacy and "touch" of Ben Yats' tabla playing. It gives us reason enough to look forward to the group’s upcoming concert, "East Meets West: India America," on September 20th. 

 

A Wild Week for Music

It wasn’t really that wild. I’m just trying to get your attention. But music arrives in many forms, and last week Hilary and I had the pleasure of listening to good deal of it.

It all started on Friday night. The moon was out, tinted by smoke from the forest fires raging in Manitoba. We were out, too, listening to rock-and-roll on the rooftop terrace of Brookview Community Center in Golden Valley. The event was a repeat of the Hopkins Class Reunion we attended last year, but for a different class. Hilary’s brother, David, was playing in the band again, and he’d gotten us complimentary tickets. 

Lively and distinguished?

The venue was classier, the food was slightly better, and the attendees seemed less frenzied, perhaps because of the larger venue and the more ample tables.

Most of the guests stayed inside, where the air was cleaner and it was easier to talk, but we sat out under the stars (only one of which was visible) listening to the music and chatting with spouses and friends of the band members. The band seemed slightly mellower, but also inspired by two new female vocalists. It was a memorable evening all around.

A few nights later Hilary’s other two brothers stopped over for “jazz night.” We’ve been doing this on a roughly monthly basis for at least twenty years. Everyone brings a few cuts, we take turns playing them, listening politely, commenting occasionally. It’s a great way to socialize and also to learn about new artists and forms of music.

Every month we wrap up the evening with pie. Hilary makes them, following in the footsteps of her mother, who made the pies and attended faithfully to the end, though she didn’t much like jazz. “I like the commentary,” she told us. She died a year ago at 97.

We keep track of the pieces we’re playing, and I type up a list later and send it around, sometimes manufacturing a “theme” after the fact. As you can see from our most recent gathering, our devotion to jazz is sincere but not exclusive:

July 2025: Jazz beyond borders

 Jeff / “Tin Roof Blues” / Herb Ellis (guitar) Roy Eldridge (trumpet), Getz (tenor) in straight-ahead 1957 performance

 John /  “Remember”  / Hank Mobley (tenor)  in1959 update of often recorded 1925 Irving Berlin tune, corny and sweet. To wit:

"Remember we found a lonely spot

And after I learned to care a lot;

You promised that you’d forget me not

 

But you forgot to remember"

 Hilary / “Fly with the Wind” (1964) mellow Lucky Thompson (tenor) with nice Hank Jones piano solo

 Paul / “Fuzzy” / Laura Jurd (Scotish composer / trumpet) in an upbeat, party-like New Orleans work w accordion & guitar             

 Jeff  /  “Seattle” Avishnu Cohen / young Jewish pianist in trio piece from album “Gently Disturbed”

 John / “Ka Ju Mot” / Albanian “folk” vocalist Elina Duli in slow, haunting piece with Colin Vollan (Swiss pianist) on ECM

 Hilary / “Reminiscence”/ a quieter side of Lucky Thompson from album “Lucky Strikes”

 Paul / “Little Opener” /Laura Jurd,  fun explosive arrangement with guitar and button accordion                       

 Jeff / “Ashé” /  Aaron Parks (piano)   Lyric and emotive jazz

 John / “After You’re Gone”/ rich modern harmonies and cookin’ solos on Nicolas Payton ensemble remake of 1915 tune

 Hilary / ”Siboney” / Cuban crooner/ballad from Los Super Seven album “Canto”

 Paul  / “Bonito Y Sabroso” / Cuban pianist Harold Lopez Nossa in live performance

A few days later we drove down to the West End theaters to see a matinee “encore” screening of the Met’s controversial production of Donizetti’s “Lucia de Lammermoor,” set in a nameless American Rust Belt slum rather than a 17^th century Scottish court. Donizetti’s music is very fine, but it didn’t jibe very well with the garish, seedy milieu, and several important elements in the plot were all but obliterated in the process of modernizing the story.

I didn’t like it … until I started to like it. The performance was lively, and slightly “cool,” all the ugly tattoos notwithstanding, and the singers were outstanding. Soprano Nadine Serra was spectacular in the title role, even with a bucket of blood splashed across her wedding dress. (She’d just murdered her newly wed husband with a fire extinguisher in a motel room.)

The next morning we headed downtown to see an exhibit of graphic art by Many Sully, a Sioux artist whose work dates mostly from the 30s and 40s. I’m including it in the lineup here because all art is in some sense musical, and because Sully’s work in particular draws upon repeated colors, patterns, and rhythms to achieve it effects. 

It’s a small exhibit, tucked into a room at the far end of MIA, but I’m glad we saw it. Most of the pieces consist of three-tiered panels with which Sully “depicted” famous personalities of her era and transformed them into native symbols.

Sully was raised in an aristocratic Sioux family, and she spent much of her adult life in New York City. I was interested to learn that she was related to the scholar Vine deLoria, Jr. When we got home I downloaded deLoria’s book, Spirit and Reason, in which he ridicules the Western philosophical establishment, pokes fun at his publisher, and tries to draw parallels between the Messiah and the Trickster figure who plays such a prominent role in Native American folklore. I can’t say that I fully caught the drift, but it’s definitely a subject worth investigating.

The next afternoon we returned downtown to attend a recital given by the vocal students at the annual Source Song Festival. The young performers had drawn their pieces from the standard romantic repertoire—Schubert, Wolf, Rachmaninov, Debussy, etc.­—and I shouldn’t have been surprised to see how many of the lyrics were of the “twittering birds,” “forest glen,” “lost love” variety.

No doubt, the pianists were as skilled as the singers. And if the lyrics sometimes teetering on the edge of schmaltz, one of the baritones redressed the balance by shaking the hall with a boisterous rendition of Charles Ives' "General William Booth Enters into Heaven."  

I'll spare you a blow-by-blow of the documentary we watched the next night, devoted to the career of eighteenth-century French composer Jean-Phillippe Rameau. Suffice it to say that music is often in the air-- 

or on the wall-- 

Or on the dining room table!