Opera without Words

When I was in my twenties and just beginning to know classical music one of my favorite albums was the Opera without Words version of Carmen. The Bizet favorite has some of the genre’s most beloved tunes and this album was an easy way to hear those tunes without those pesky singers mixing up the mix. (My love of real opera was more than a decade away at the time). It’s likely I'd still play the Carmen album if I had it, partly because I like Carmen, the full opera, but it’s really long and quite boring in parts.

Saturday night I heard an opera without words concert. The Lincoln Center Festival presented Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Michaels Reise um die Erde (Michael’s Journey around the Earth). It was one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever heard and certainly THE most fascinating. (Having said that, let me add that twenty years ago I likely would not have gone; ten years ago I might have gone but not liked it; this is NOT the most accessible music out there).

Michael's Journey is the second act of Stockhausen’s opera Donnerstag (Thursday) which is itself only one of a seven opera cycle Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche (Light: The Seven Days of the Week). The entire cycle is twenty-nine (29!) hours long; luckily, Journey is only an hour in length and, as I said, it features instrumentalists only: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, 2 horns, 5 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, 3 percussion, harp, piano, organ, 3 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos and double-bass. I bother to list them only to show you that the orchestration is unlike any opera you're likely to hear on your local stage.

And that’s just the ensemble; there are also four soloists: two clarinets and a basset horn as well as a lead soloist, the excellent Michael Marco Blaauw on trumpet. (You could actually call this piece a trumpet concerto and get no argument from me).

I’m not sure I'm ready for the entire 29 hours of Licht, but, as I say, last night was breathtaking. At least twice I noticed my jaw had dropped and I was staring and listening with my mouth wide open.

In truth, it was the staging as much as the music that made this piece so compelling. The hall (Avery Fisher) was very dark -- unusual for a classical music venue -- and the musicians were set up in three groups, stage right and left, and upstage. The conductor was mostly in the middle where you’d expect him, but he picked up his music stand and moved several times.

The trumpet soloist moved constantly, spending most of the hour strapped onto a platform mounted on a hand-operated crane. He soared 15 feet or so above the stage, twisting, turning and looping – all the time continuing to play. It was dizzying and dazzling.

I know as I write these words that I am not conveying half of what the experience was like – I haven’t even mentioned the video images projected on a huge scrim that fronted the stage, or the satellite dish. I invite you to watch this YouTube video and read the New York Times review. You might then get a small sense of what the weirdness and wonderfulness was all about.

A wonderful "only dog"

I learned today that Jake, a beautiful rescue dog who graced our lives for two years, died this month. He had spent the last thirteen years living a very happy life with Ransom’s friend Theo on an island off the Washington coast.

We found Jake at the West Haven (CT) Animal Shelter in 1997 or 1998. He was an alert, excitable, beautiful, black German-shepherd-looking mutt. We both loved him at first sight and he seemed satisfied that we’d be good owners. We took him home to meet Toby and Misha and that went pretty well, at least at first.

But Jake wasn’t happy. We didn’t yet know it, but he needed to be the alpha dog; he in fact needed to be the ONLY dog in the family. We tried for nearly two years to help him fit in, but it was eventually clear that it wasn’t going to work.

Toby was eleven at the time and Jake was challenging him virtually every day. While there were no serious injuries, Jake was terrorizing poor Toby and was drawing blood. Jake was also eating our house. Literally. When left alone he would chew on anything and everything in sight. He even ate a hole in the deck. Not the railing, but the floor of the deck itself.

We had to act. We sent an email to everyone in our address books, trying to find Jake a new home. No one locally stepped up. No one regionally stepped up. But then Theo, on the West Coast, wrote to say he was interested. In December of 1999 we bought an airline-worthy dog crate and booked Ransom and Jake on a flight to Seattle. I said my goodbyes, sad, but relieved.

It turned out to be a match made in heaven. Jake had what he needed and Theo had a wonderful, loyal and loving companion. For over thirteen years Theo and Jake were bound together, living happily on their island. Ransom visited several times and Jake was always happy to see him.

I’m sorry it didn’t work out for Jake here in CT but am so glad that we persisted and found Jake the home he needed. I am moved by Ransom’s dedication to Jake and Theo and I am truly sorry for their loss. Even though I said goodbye all those years ago, I feel the loss too. He was a great dog.

Jake (1997-2013)

And here's a painting Theo did of his beloved friend

What I love about summer

What’s your favorite roller coaster?

I used to be asked that question a lot. I was a member of ACE, the American Coaster Enthusiasts, and I loved riding roller coasters. I loved reading about them, I loved planning trips to ride them – I even liked just watching them run. In 1994 I decided I would ride 94 roller coasters and write about the experience for my local newspaper. It was a great summer and my total actually surpassed 100.

For years there were two answers to the question. The first answer was, “The Texas Giant, at Six Flags Over Texas.” She was a magnificent, huge, fast, heart-thumping, ass-lifting pleasure machine that I rode often on three separate trips to the Dallas/Fort Worth area. She was renovated in 2010 and reopened the next year as the New Texas Giant, with a steel track structure, replacing the original wood. I haven’t ridden this iteration, and my love of coasters is for wooden roller coasters; steel and steel hybrids are fun, but they’re not the real deal.

I was thinking about roller coasters last night on my way home from the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts as I traversed a beautiful and winding country road. I had just heard Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell in concert and was high on the incredible energy they and their band put out. It’s probably a good thing the road was curvy like a roller coaster, but not as steep.

I first knew of Emmylou Harris in perhaps 1980, hearing her two 1975 albums Pieces of the Sky and Elite Hotel and falling in love especially with 1976’s Luxury Liner. Since then I’ve heard some but not all her music. She’s put out a lot of it and earned twelve Grammys over the years.

Rodney Crowell, who actually wrote songs for Harris in the 70’s, didn’t come to my attention as a singer til much later, with 1988’s Diamond and Dirt LP and Keys to the Highway from 2000. His song Many a Long and Lonesome Highway is one of my very favorites of any genre.

And to what genre do Emmylou and Rodney belong? Well, country maybe, or bluegrass. “Roots music” works. Certainly “Americana.” And, with last night’s concert ringing in my ear, I’d add ROCK AND ROLL for sure. In the 70s Harris toured as Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band. I gotta tell you, the guys backing her up last night were o-n-e  h-o-t  b-a-n-d:

- Steve Fishell  on petal steel guitar, filling the same role he did in the 70s
- Australia’s Jedd Hughes on a red Stratocaster lead guitar
- Bryon House, bass, both electric and stand-up
- Gerry Roe, drums
- Chris Tuttle, keyboard, accordion

It was a terrific concert in Caramoor’s wonderful Venetian Theatre -- a tent actually -- with open-air sides. They sang songs from their new album, Old Yellow Moon, but also reached back to my all-time favorite Emmylou song, the Townes Van Zandt classic, Pancho and Lefty, as well as a scorching version of Luxury Liner, with Jedd Hughes playing a blistering coda that earned him a standing ovation. Their voices melded beautifully all night, but never as sweetly as on a song first sung by the Everly Brothers, Love Hurts.

Back to the question at the top of the page: the other answer is “My favorite roller coaster is the one I just rode.” Just as my favorite concert is the one I just heard.

Meet me in the middle of the night / Let me hear you say everything's all right / Let me smell the moon in your perfume*

I was talking with a financial advisor the other day and he told me he had been to hear the rock group Phish dozens of times – I think he said over fifty actually. I told him I doubted I had ever seen a rock act more than three times, and that that would be the Stones.

But then I thought about it some more and realized that I had seen Steve Forbert four times. Last night I heard him for the fifth time.

He was at The Kate, or, formally, the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center in Old Saybrook, CT. It was a great show in a small and intimate, beautifully appointed space. I wish I could show you pictures but my g-d, not-an-iPhone, won’t-hold-a-charge-for-even-one-day LG cell phone did not have enough power for me to use the camera. So I couldn’t take a shot of the Emmy Hepburn won for 1975’s Love Among the Ruins with Laurence Olivier, or of the full size movie poster for The Philadelphia Story, or any of the other Hepburn memorabilia on display. Nor, of course, could I take a picture of the performance space or of Forbert.

But the concert images will live in my mind, and the sound still reverberates. When his first album, Alive on Arrival, was released in 1978 Forbert was the critics’ darling. “The next Dylan,” he was called, long before that became an all-too-trite sobriquet for all-too-many folk rockers. His follow-up album, Jackrabbit Slim, led off with Romeo’s Tune, Forbert’s number two smash that is, alas, the only song of his most people know.

Not me. My iTunes library holds 450 Steve Forbert recordings. It would take more than 24 hours to listen to them all. I've never understood why he didn't become the star he deserves to be. He writes about it in I Blinked Once, a song from his 1988 album Streets of this Town, wherein he sings of the long years of struggle to find an audience and the one soaring hit that wasn't repeated:

     The nineteen seventies was ten long years

     Was ten long years to sing a song

     It kicked off madly with a New Year's cheer

     I blinked once and it was gone

Right time, right place, luck – the stars have to align, and, unfortunately, they don't always. It’s your loss, America. Thirty-five years after the release of his first album, Steve Forbert is still releasing great music and certainly putting on great shows.

Note to Malette: September 14, 2013, Wilmington, NC, The Soapbox

*Lyrics from Romeo’s Tune

Steve Forbert CDs, 1978-2012

Happy Birthday, America

Here's my Independence Day playlist; click on a title to hear a version, if not the one I'm listening to. Have a merry and musical Fourth.

Fanfare for the Common Man; London Sym Orch; A Copland, cond

El Capitan; Great American Main St Band; Timothy Foley, cond

Rhapsody in Blue; Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band

Only in America; Brooks and Dunn

Rhapsody in Blue; George Gershwin (1925 piano roll); Columbia Jazz band

American Pie; Don McLean

Ancient and Honorable Artillery Co.; Great Amer Main St Band; Timothy Foley, cond

Some Gave All; Billy Ray Cyrus

America; Betty Wand (for Rita Moreno) and George Chakiris

King Cotton; Great Amer Main St Band; Timothy Foley, cond

Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning); Alan Jackson

The Stars And Stripes Forever!; Great Amer Main St Band; Timothy Foley, cond

The Bluest Eyes in Texas; Restless Heart

Ellington: Black, Brown and Beige; Buffalo Phil Orch; JoAnn Falletta, cond

The Washington Post; Great Amer Main St Band; Timothy Foley, cond

An American in Paris; NY Phil; Michael Tilson Thomas, cond

Rhapsody in Blue; Deodato

God Bless the USA; Lee Greenwood

Hoedown from Rodeo; London Sym Orch; A Copland, cond

Rhapsody in Blue; Los Angeles Phil Orch; Michael Tilson Thomas, cond

Barber: Symphony #1, Op. 9; St. Louis Sym Orch; Leonard Slatkin, cond

The Stars and Stripes Forever; Cincinnati Pops; Erich Kunzel, cond

Only in America; Jay and the Americans

The more things change . . .

I am still basking in the glory of last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down parts of the hateful Defense of Marriage Act and reinstating same sex marriage in California. (Have you ever thought about how weird it is that California, of all places, should have struggled with this issue for so long? I mean, gay marriage was legal in Iowa but not in California – say what?)

I keep thinking back to 1974 when a group of students had to sue Virginia Commonwealth University just for the right to meet in a room as the Gay Alliance of Students. We won that right, but only on appeal in 1976. And now thirty-seven years later the Supreme Court of the United States has said, “yes, Walter, yes, Ransom, you are married in the eyes of your family and friends and also in the eyes of your government.

Perhaps it finally is becoming a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

But then today I'm reminded how some things have NOT changed: “Cardinal Dolan Transferred $57 Million To a Cemetery Fund to Shield It From Sexual Abuse Victims.” (slate.com)

Slate is following the New York Times which broke the story yesterday, writing:

Files released by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee on Monday reveal that in 2007, Cardinal Timothy F. Dolan (below), then the archbishop there, requested permission from the Vatican to move nearly $57 million into a cemetery trust fund to protect the assets from victims of clergy sexual abuse who were demanding compensation.

Cardinal Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, has emphatically denied seeking to shield church funds as the archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009. He reiterated in a statement Monday that these were “old and discredited attacks.

However, the files contain a 2007 letter to the Vatican in which he explains that by transferring the assets, “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.” The Vatican approved the request in five weeks, the files show.

The Catholic church -- long an enemy of civil rights, long a home to child rapists, long a denier of responsibility -- is once again shown to be the home of bold-face liars.

The hypocrites! SHAME ON YOU, DOLAN! You’re a homophobic, self-serving liar. How DARE you preach on morality when you, like so many of your colleagues, know so little about it?

When the Supreme Court struck down DOMA, Dolan said it was a  "tragic day for marriage and our nation" that went against "the common good of all, especially our children." That a representative of the Catholic church knows anything about what’s good for children is laughable.

It makes me sick to my stomach that people still give credence to this hateful organization. It’s time the courts strip such hate-mongering political organizations of their tax-exempt status.