Author: John

Five Great Concerts on YouTube

If you find yourself with some free time this holiday weekend and would like to enjoy some great music, you could do worse than watch some of the concert-length performances now available on YouTube. (I’m assuming that these have all been legally posted, since I know YouTube/Google polices content from organizations like Viacom.)

Here are a few performances I’ve particularly enjoyed.

Classical: Monteverdi’s Orfeo – Jordi Savall, Le Concert des Nations, La Capella Reial y solistas

I’ve posted a clip of Savall’s entrance to this performance earlier. The full performance is wonderful.

Classical: Vivaldi Cello Concertos performed by Christophe Coin, cello, and Il Giardino Armonico

The French record label naive is working on a multi-decade labor-of-love recording the complete works of Vivaldi. Here’s a spirited performance of cello concerti played in a beautiful Renaissance setting.

Jazz: Archie Shepp and Chucho Valdes

Tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp is 75 years old and still going strong. Here is his with the virtuoso pianist Chucho Valdes and a very strong Afro-cuban band. The band and the audience both clearly revere Shepp, and he delivers.

Jazz: Paquito D’Rivera & Chano Dominguez

Alto saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera always looks like he’s having the time of his life onstage. Here he teams up with pianist Chano Dominguez and his band for a concert in Madrid. I hadn’t heard of Dominguez before coming across this video, but he and his band put in a fine performance.

Jazz: Miles Davis Live at Montreux at 1973

You might want to save this one for late at night. It’s spare, a matter of whispers and hints rather than full statements and lush arrangements. But it works.

Happy New Year.

Kenneth Rexroth on San Francisco

We were running errands the other day and listening to NPR, when Garrison Keillor came on for “The Writer’s Almanac” and read this droll description of San Francisco by Kenneth Rexroth:

It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward-spreading puritan tradition, or by the Walter Scott, fake-cavalier tradition of the South. It had been settled, mostly, in spite of all the romances of the overland migration, by gamblers, prostitutes, rascals and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn. They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather.

That’s just perfect.

Remembering Charles Rosen

There aren’t many great classical pianists who can also write great essays on topics as various as the form of classical music, the paintings of David Caspar Friedrich, the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, and the cookbooks of Elizabeth David.

Correction: there’s just one, Charles Rosen, and we lost him yesterday. He died of cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He was 85. (New York Times obituary here.)

I still haven’t read his National Book Award-winning book on classical style, but I’ve read his book on Schoenberg, which was insightful about so much more than Schoenberg, and I was awed his book of essays (and here’s a great title) Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen.

Twice I’ve found myself needing to teach writing to teenagers who had been overexposed to the five-paragraph essay, that odd literary form found only in the laboratory and never in the wild. In both cases, I reached for Rosen’s essay on the cookbooks of Elizabeth David. It’s unlike anything most teenagers have encountered (he quotes her instructions for pulling the skin off an octopus), while demonstrating clearly how to hook the reader, introduce a startling thesis (that her cookbooks are pastorals), and defend that thesis with evidence.

And he was a marvelous pianist, as well. About twenty years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing him perform Beethoven’s Diabelli variations. I’ve cherished his recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Elliott Carter’s piano music.

Here he is performing Schumann, whom he also writes about with great insight.

Wine Labels We Never Finished Reading

Crafted by winemaker Jeff Carell, this Cinsault Rose was sourced from old vines in the Languedoc region of Southern France. A light-bodied wine, intensely crisp and vividly fresh, it offers complex aromas of strawberries and red currants, with a hint of quince. As an apertif it is the perfect warm weather gulper

—Villa des Anges

Perhaps the polyglot name Villa (Italian word that appeals to tourists) des Anges (French and heavenly) should have tipped us off—no self-respecting French estate would have reached across the border for that noun. For the record, the wine tastes like lightly flavored water. But if you’re looking for a gulper . . .

The Origins of St. Valentine’s Day

A parliament of fowlsWe can thank Chaucer, apparently, for the convention of the feast day of St. Valentine being a day for lovers.

The name Valentine belongs to several early Christian martyrs, including one who was apprehended for performing marriages.

But the first reference to the feast day of one of these saints being a day for match-making comes from Chaucer, who wrote the following in his poem The Parlement of Foules (The Parliament of Fowls):

For this was on seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make,
Of every kynde that men thynke may,
And that so huge a noyse gan they make
That erthe, and eyr, and tre, and every lake
So ful was, that unethe there was space
For me to stonde, so was ful al the place.

Amid the huge “noyse” that Hallmark and others will make on St. Valentine’s Day, with restaurants so “ful” that you might need to “stonde” a while at the bar, may the day be felicitous one for you, and may you “chese a make” (and perhaps eek maken meloyde) with “ful devout corage.”

Venerable

I’m finally reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (the Gregory Hays translation). I was struck by this passage:

Not to be sidetracked by my interest in rhetoric. Not to write treatises on abstract questions, or deliver moralizing little sermons, or compose imaginary descriptions of The Simple Life or The Man Who Lives Only for Others. (p. 6)

Some themes were cliches two thousand years ago, and a wise man knew not to indulge in them.