Brushes with greatness

The image annotation feature at Flickr is one of thoes things that might make me recant my previous position on it. For one thing, it shows me when I’ve missed making a connection with someone interesting.

I was at a networking event the other week, and Sooz, the organizer, has posted some of her photos from the event. Check out this one and move your cursor over the photo—for maximum effect, going from right, where I’m sitting, to left. Where do you end up?

Why, Aaron Swartz, of course. And I didn’t know he was there. The kicker is I saw his Mac OS X 10.0 T-shirt—geek cred that says “I was there before Jaguar”—and thought I should go over to chat. Next time I won’t ignore that voice.

All finales are anticlimactic

chorus on stage

Boston Globe: Levine, Mahler triumph at Tanglewood. On the positive side, I can be assured that, unlike other groups in which I have sung, our concerts will almost always be reviewed. On the other hand, all our preparation, hard work, and ultimately ecstatic performance was summed up by the reviewer as:

The music is so tightly wound that it explodes — it lasts 25 minutes or so, but it passes like a flash of lightning, a noisy one. Levine and his orchestra, the soloists, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the American Boychoir fired it like a cannon — it was noisy and exciting, it was hectic, and the temptation to scream offered by the vocal writing was not avoided.

Ah well. I can only hope they were talking about the soloists, not us.

Funniest moment of the night: One of the sopranos, who had the most sublime vocal line of the night, delivered it from high above the shell for dramatic effect. When the applause came, due to some misunderstanding—or worse, some mishap—she never came down, and there were three bows taken for the rest of the soloists before Levine realized she was still up there and waved up to acknowledge her contributions.

Least funny moment of the night: I had hoped that, since it had rained the whole week, it would stop for the performance. And it did, but only about half an hour before curtain, and it rained more or less continuously on us all the way home.

Marian McPartland: Piano Jazz with Elvis Costello

This recording of Elvis Costello on Marian McPartland’s long running jazz interview show will surprise only those of his fans who haven’t been paying attention. For the last 20 years, Elvis has made a career of confounding expectations and sneaking popular music and standards into the unlikeliest of places. This latest recording, featuring EC singing a mix of standards, ballads, and a few of his own tunes and discussing his career with the indefatigable McPartland, is the purest fruit of his long labor in the vineyards of the American songbook.

If you’re unfamiliar with the format of McPartland’s show, which is typically interview material alternated with a joint performance between host and guest, the chatty bits between the songs may throw you. For those who prefer not to hear the chatter, the songs are thoughtfully on separate tracks. It would be a mistake to skip the interview, though, as Elvis discusses his early influences (his dad the jazz musician, his mom’s record collection, British R&B singers), his approach to performing, his early 80s collaborations with Chet Baker, and other bits of interesting ephemera.

How about the songs? The performances are clean: I don’t think Elvis has ever turned in a purer rendition of “My Funny Valentine” than on this disc, his Little Jimmy Scott-esque vibrato on the final phrase notwithstanding. “At Last,” which Elvis dedicates to his dad who performed it many years ago, is understated and touching, as is “The Very Thought of You.” He takes a turn to the darkness with “Gloomy Sunday” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is” (and notes in an aside to McPartland, “I can make ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ sound dark—I’ve had this face for 48 years now, there’s nothing I can do about it!”).

Of the EC originals on this disc, the closer (“I’m in the Mood Again,” from his underrated North) is the better performance. With Elvis playing “composer’s piano,” the melody is effortlessly spun into a gentle reverie that, to my ears, betters the album performance. Alas, no such luck with “Almost Blue.” McPartland hangs back a little too far and the flow of the piece is lost; I also miss the coda of the piece.

To my ears, the highlight of this disc is “They Didn’t Believe Me,” a forgotten Jerome Kern jewel from 1914 that sings in this version. It narrowly bests Elvis’s other recording of the song with the Brodsky Quartet, available only on a promotional sampler from the Juliet Letters tour.

Based on the chronology of this session (Elvis mentions he’s in the process of recording North), this recording was made around the time that his relationship with Diana Krall began. The performances show it. This is a man in love, and the performances of these ballads benefit from it: gentle, sensitive, and optimistic in a way that is unusual in EC’s massive catalog. Highly recommended.

(Also on Blogcritics.)

Partial blogoutage

Apologies for the somewhat denuded appearance of the site this morning. The server that hosts my images (and my CSS stylesheet!) is currently down.

I’m going to keep posting, however, mostly because I’ve found an excellent coffeehouse, complete with free wifi, here in Pittsfield. (It helps that the baristas here at Digital Blend really know what they’re doing. I almost expect to see Coffee of Doom-style menu listings on the chalkboard; fortunately, no wedgies here today.)

With such a congenial atmosphere, I might as well blog—er, and work, too—because it doesn’t look like the rain is letting up any time soon.

Pack up your bombs….

Brilliant, brilliant letter from the London News Review to the perpetrators of yesterday’s attack. Best bit excerpted below:

…we’re better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we’re going to go about our lives. We’re going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we’re going to work. And we’re going down the pub.

Check out the original for the punchline, which completes the title of this post. (Via Tin Man.)

Four explosions rock London transit

Oh hell. CNN: London rocked by explosions. CNN says that it now appears that three explosions went off in the Tube, and another ripped through a double-decker bus as it was approaching Russell Square.

Lisa and I stayed in Russell Square during our first stay in London in 1999. We felt it was one of the most peaceful places in that busy city. Sadly, not anymore.

Update: Jeff Jarvis has a growing list of links and first hand reports from London bloggers.

Beerhunting along Route 7

I have now figured out the secret of surviving a Tanglewood residency. It involves a car, a map, and an Internet connection.

To back up: I had a hazy, mystical picture of life at Tanglewood prior to arriving here, including random music clinics with the famous and artistic; brushes with genius at every turn; and the sort of breezy camaraderie that goes with all good choirs. I am in the process of recalibrating my expectations.

For one thing, most of my fellow 178 choristers seem to have made plans well in advance for every meal and don’t linger about after rehearsals, leaving us newbies to shift for ourselves. (In fact, another Tanglewood first timer to whom I gave a lift today decided that he was going to hike around, and hike back the five miles to his hotel, after we tried unsuccessfully for half an hour to find a group to join for lunch.) For another, we are early in the season, and the masters classes appear not to have started (or to not be advertised to the hoi polloi, at any rate). What to do?

Well, for me, the solution was to do a solid afternoon of work for the office, and then to strike out on my own. And if you know me, you know that means beer. In particular, thanks to a BeerAdvocate recommendation, I found my way 10 miles north up Route 7, which runs from the Mass Pike past Lenox and through Pittsfield, all the way up to Lanesboro, where I found Ye Olde Forge, which claims it has the “county’s largest selection of imported and domestic beer.”

And it just might. The draft list was about fifteen beers—numerically nothing spectacular, but when those fifteen include Belhaven Scottish Ale and Delerium Nocturnum, your writer tends to sit up and pay attention. Add to that a long (if incompletely stocked) list of bottled offerings and a pub menu that stretches from mussels to chicken fingers to etoufée, and you have a minor mecca on your hands.

(Chicken fingers? Well, Ye Olde Forge is family friendly, as evidenced by the two young kids at the table across the way from me. The younger child got off the best line I heard today when, looking at the bar TV which was showing the Tour De France, he solemnly told his mom that he didn’t ever want to go to France. “Why not?” “Because I don’t want to be run over by bicycles.”)

Anyway, I recommend Ye Olde Forge—and I recommend arriving early, particularly on a rainy summer evening when the patio isn’t open.

Room transformation

teaser for completed work in office

We were so busy over the weekend, and I was so busy the last couple of days, that I never got a chance to record our progress on the latest project—closing the walls after the first round of AC install.

As recorded previously, I opportunistically ran phone, Cat 5, and coax through the open walls where our contractor ran his electrical wires, the cooling lines from the compressor, and the drip line from the attic. I was originally planning to run speaker wires as well, but Lisa talked me out of it. We will leave audio out of the second floor for now.

We wanted to get the walls closed off, so rather than completing the coax run from the outside drop to the structured wiring box, I moved ahead to installing insulation. After reviewing the options, I reluctantly went with fiberglass — reluctantly because our house’s 2×4 exterior framing only allowed using R-13 batts, and even those were somewhat compressed by the pipes in the wall. But, as Lisa keeps pointing out, it’s better than the horsehair that was there to begin with.

After the insulation, I cut blueboard to size and installed that with drywall screws. Upstairs, I was able to drive the screws directly into studs on both sides. Downstairs the studs were hidden behind the window frame on one side of the opening, but there were still the ends of some laths visible in half the hole. I cut some 3/4″ by 3″ standoffs, nailed those into the studs whereever I had gaps, and then ran the screws through those into the studs (in a few cases, at an angle!) to support the top of the board. It was an ugly process, but it worked well enough, and after the seams and screw holes were taped and the entire thing skim-coated with two layers of veneer plaster, it was OK. (Lisa did the actual plastering, and has concluded that it is the skill most lacking by us for this whole project.)

After the plastering was done, I installed the wall plates for the media wiring outlets, which involved terminating each of the cables and snapping the plugs into the modular wall plate. Final steps were priming the plaster and then (finally!) painting the first floor office/bedroom. I took a few photos throughout the process; the one on this entry is a teaser that (with the exception of the uncovered electrical outlet) shows the final product of all the work I just described. The original wall opening ran between the two outlet plates on the wall to within a few inches of the ceiling.

So that was the work on the office this weekend. Plus of course assembling the desk we bought at Ikea. But that’s another story. So is repainting our bedroom, but that story will have to wait until we start it.

Different ball game

My first Tanglewood rehearsal is over. Yes, already. We had a brief piano rehearsal with James Levine, who went over a few potential trouble spots in the Mahler, complimented our tone, and wished us a good evening. Completely unlike what I had anticipated based on my past experiences with famous conductors. Where Robert Shaw always gave an impression (amplified, to be sure, by his various ailments) of desperately contained passion and fury, and Sir David Willcocks was acerbic, dramatic, and understatedly witty, Levine strikes me as brisk, unassuming, and subtle.

I came away from the first rehearsal better understanding what I had started to gather from the first few rehearsals of this piece: nearly everything that I have done for concert preparation before has been work. This is making music.

TangleBlog

Blogging will be intermittent this week (I know myself too well to say it will be light). I am currently in Pittsfield, MA, getting ready to head over to Tanglewood for my first rehearsal there with James Levine.

More notes to come. (Ba-da-bum.)

Lest there be any confusion

Just updated the tagline. Courtesy Mike Doughty, nee M. Doughty of Soul Coughing, in his fine “Move On.”

I think we get confused, even on a day like today, about where we all stand. Me? I couldn’t be happier to be in a country that was born of a bunch of people standing around and talking about what was wrong with their current form of government, and then doing something about it.

Woody Guthrie sez

Half the Sins of Mankind points to the statement of copyright that Woody Guthrie wrote for his “This Land is Your Land”:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Right on, Woody.

Jefferson sez

“Error has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper and sufficent antagonist to error.”—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion, 1776.

“The judges should always be men of learning and experience in the laws, of exemplary morals, great patience, calmness and attention; their minds should not be distracted with jarring interests.”—Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Wythe, 1776

Two faces of the Pops

Watching the televised Boston Pops concert tonight, it’s tempting to compare and contrast Keith Lockhart’s face and words as he winds up for the concert and conducts the first few numbers with his interview in the Sunday edition of the Boston Globef. In the paper, he sounded like a petulant boy trying to decide whether to fish or cut bait. On stage and in pre-concert interviews, he looks charming, refreshed and assured. Which is the real Pops director?

As I haven’t had the opportunity to sing under Mr. Lockhart, I can’t offer a first hand observation. I do find the difference in presentation curious, though. Why on earth would someone as apparently media-savvy as Keith Lockhart drop the shield for an interview that made him out to be such a whiner? You’d think he’d, I don’t know, go start a LiveJournal or something.

The Fourth

For the last few years I’ve been posting patriotica on this holiday, when we commemorate the passings of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as well as the signing of our Declaration of Independence. I may yet post some tonight. Right now, though, I’m too darn tired.

The weekend has been a blur—lots of home improvement stuff. Tonight it took its toll, as we conked out on the brink of heading downtown to watch the fireworks from a friend’s Back Bay rooftop. Instead we’re cocooning; watching the Pops on TV and catching our breath before I head out tomorrow to Tanglewood for my residency with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.