Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words,

Conductors, given their highly visible roles in symphony and opera come in two basic and opposing flavors: the humanists/persuaders (Koussevitsky, Bernstein, Mitropoulos) and the autocrats/high priests/maestros (Szell, Toscanini, Reiner). Riccardo Muti belongs in the first category. Reading Muti’s autobiography, it seems likely that two factors contributed to forming his temperate approach to music making. First, there is his southern Italian birth in the affable town of Molfetta, near Naples and below the Gargano Peninsula on the Adriatic. Second, as primarily an opera conductor, Muti has had to acquire (or, if the proclivity is natural, to tap into) those people skills that are necessary for effective collaboration with volatile opera singers. The result is a conductor of wide interests – a leader with a philosophical, positive outlook capable of inspiring his musicians to attain transformational levels of performance.

Muti has held important guest posts in Europe and in America. The Maggio Musicale in Florence, Italy’s oldest music festival, focusing on opera; the London’s Philharmonia Orchestra; the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; the New York Philharmonic, and the Salzburg Festival. Currently, Muti is the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony.

At age 70, Muti has had little in the way of high drama or conflict in his life, and his career path over 40 years shows a steady, upward trajectory to the highest conductorial perches. So is the book, then, simply a placid memoir, reflecting on the glories of an untroubled life and career? No. There’s much here to attract and hold the reader’s attention: reflections that impart the spirit of the man, with his ethical values, love for people and, surprisingly, his typically Italian brand of humor. While reading Muti’s book, I thought of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which reflect a stoic, self-effacing way of life. Here’s a prime example: according to Muti, “a maestro shouldn’t seek out the limelight, especially in the later part of his life. Once he’s had his career, he should withdraw from the media and try, as much as possible, to bring music to others so that he, ephemeral himself, doesn’t fall victim to the ephemeral nature of conducting.” Demonstrating his point, Muti has led concerts for prison inmates and at juvenile detention centers, conducted at Ground Zero for the families of 9/11 victims, and in Sarajevo at the conclusion of the Bosnian war.

A notable aspect of the book is its large selection of photos. Highlights include informal double portraits with England’s Queen Elizabeth II and with Pope John Paul II; Muti as child prodigy violinist; and Muti’s in triumphant performances at La Scala and in Vienna, Japan, Philadelphia and Chicago.

The afterword by Marco Grondona, a 43-page analysis of Muti’s conducting style, compares it to those of Schubert, Bellini and Verdi, among others, and makes for a rather extended postscript. Muti acolytes will love it, no doubt, as it pays tribute to the maestro, saying great things about Muti that the conductor, out of self-effacing humility, has not written. But because of this abrupt change in tone it makes for a strange and awkward stylistic volte-face.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words is recommended primarily for opera lovers, and will make a worthy addition to libraries with collections on conductors and opera.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words, by Riccardo Muti; afterward by Marco Grondona. Rizzoli, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8478-3724-3. 244 pages. Hardcover.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra

Jazz music and black-and-white art photography are quintessentially 20^th century art forms; both matured at the same time. By the early 1940s, the development of camera technology made hand-held field cameras like the press favorite Speed Graphic 4×5, along with relatively fast film, available for the first time to innovative photographers who loved jazz and were inspired to document the modern jazz scenes–mostly in midtown Manhattan’s jazz bistros, which featured legendary black musicians. The lasting legacy of these visual artists is a treasury of iconic musical imagery. The works of master photographers such as Herman Leonard, Gjon Mili, Allan Grant, William P. Gottlieb, William Claxton, Art Kane and others evokes glorious music from the 1930s through the 1960s that in many ways defines American culture in our mind’s eye and ear.

Benjamin Cawthra’s outstanding book Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz provides a window into the history of jazz and a perfect merging of jazz music and black-and-white art photography. It also illustrates both the gradual merging and eventual divergence of black and white cultures during the middle of the 20th century. As the author writes, “Over the thirty years from 1936-1965, the photography of jazz created a visual rhetoric that argued for racial inclusiveness in the 1930s, racial equality in the 1940s and 1950s, and black cultural nationalism in the 1960s… In making jazz visible, photographers visually equated blackness with jazz at important moments in the music’s stylistic development.”

Jazz lovers will appreciate and learn the backstory of the music as well, for Cawthra’s Blue Notes in Black and White is as much about the musicians themselves–Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and many other seminal artists–as it is about the iconic photographs of them.

My only complaint is that the book should have contained a high quality portfolio section in the form of plates to represent the legendary photographs in their full glory. Instead, we get relatively few of the photographs and most only in half-page sizes and low resolution. Blue Notes in Black and White should really have been a coffee table book, to do justice to the photographic art. It’s for this reason that I cannot recommend it to photographers and students of black-and-white photography, which is a shame. I do highly recommend the book to libraries with extensive jazz collections and to lovers of jazz.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra. University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-03875-3. 343 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

Lux Perpetua: Requiem

The polyphonic Requiem mass emerged as a liturgical form in the late 15^th century, and in its earliest examples it can provide both a deeply moving and a hair-raisingly eerie listening experience. I have found no performance of an early Requiem more unsettling or weirdly beautiful than the one on this recording by the Ensemble Organum. The Lux Perpetua burial Mass dates from the late 1400s, and its authorship is unclear; many scholars attribute it to Antoine de Févin (of Louis XII’s court), while some believe it to be the work of Antoine Divitis (a Flemish contemporary of Pierre de la Rue and Alexander Agricola). It’s an unusual work—the ordinary contains no Credo or Gloria, and settings of New Testament texts are scattered throughout along with plainchant sections. But the singing style is what you’ll really notice: basses introduce sections with dark, reedy declamations that sound like Tibetan throat singing; a reading from the Gospel of John is sung by a solo voice in a melismatic style that sounds more Arabic than European; melody lines are ornamented in ways that bring to mind Balkan music. In between all of these moments of musical oddity is a constant sonic tapestry of rich polyphonic part-writing that conveys all of the solemnity, sadness, and devotion that one would expect from a 15th-century burial mass. This is an extraordinary recording, and a tremendously moving one. Grade: A+

The Leiden Choirbooks, Vol. 1 & 2
Various Composers
Egidius Kwartet & College
Etcetera KTC 1410/1411

Moving forward a few decades into the early- to mid-16^th century, we encounter sounds that are more familiar and certainly more refined. In 1566 there was major upheaval in the Dutch city of Leiden, during which several churches were sacked; one of them, the Pieterskerk, lost all of its valuables except for a set of choirbooks containing masses, motets, Magnificat settings, and other liturgical works by such eminent composers as Nicolas Gombert, Clemens Non Papa, Jean Richafort, and Thomas Crecquillon. The excellent Egidius Kwartet and College is now two volumes into what will eventually be a six-volume series of recordings documenting the music in these remarkable books. Each volume consists of two discs; the first set includes a disc of ten motets and a second disc containing two masses, one by Gombert and the other by an anonymous composer. The program on the second volume consists of motets, hymns, and Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis settings. The Egidius ensemble includes only men (as any 16^th-century choir would have), and their sound is clean but not too stark. The music itself is consistently excellent—this was the high-water mark of polyphonic writing in northern Europe, and anyone who loves the music of this period will want to get ahold of these discs and put some money aside for the forthcoming volumes in the series as well. Grade: A

3 String Quartets
Mihály Mosonyi
Festetic Quartet
Hungaroton HCD 32692

The liner notes to this recording inform us that Mihály Mosonyi “was one of the most influential figures on the nineteenth century Hungarian Romantic musical scene,” which leaves me feeling a bit embarrassed at never having heard of him. But I’m very glad to have made his acquaintance; this world-premiere recording of three of his six string quartets, all written during the late 1830s, is both interesting and thoroughly enjoyable. Although Mosonyi was something of a protonationalist composer (anticipating the folk-based work of Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók), the two early quartets presented here tend to stick to the Viennese-School verities; there is plenty of charming melodic invention, but not much innovation. The fifth quartet, also presented on this disc, is more forward-looking but no less accessible. The Festetics Quartet plays on period instruments, which must have been something of a challenge with these sometimes passionate pieces, but they acquit themselves beautifully. The recorded sound is rich and clear. Grade: A-

Tribute
Carsten Lindholm
(self-released)

I came across this disc when an ad popped up on my Facebook page — if memory serves, it said something like “If you like Jon Hassell, you’ll like this.” I’ve loved Jon Hassell since I was a teenager, so I clicked and was immediately entranced. Drummer Carsten Lindholm characterizes his music as “Filmic Ambient Jazz,” but don’t be fooled–while its textures are generally pleasant, this music is far from easy listening and it is “jazz” only in the broadest sense of the term. Tracks like “Elefantastic” and “Bazzland” give guest musicians like trumpeter Rene Damsbak and guitarist Eiven Aarset space for improvisational soloing (including some very Hassell-ish electro excursions), but the overall flavor of Lindholm’s album is that of a long and winding journey into a deep, dark cave filled with a wide variety of electronic beats, textures and melodies. Some of the beats are jazzier, some are more funky and jungly, but at all times the focus is on the big picture: Lindholm is less interested in exploring melodic and harmonic variations than in building layer upon layer of sound design until he has created a dense but accessible construct of multiple moving parts, any of which rewards close attention. The album is titled Tribute because several of the tracks were composed in specific homage to musicians who have inspired him, including Mike Mainieri, Nils Petter Molvaer, Jens Melgaard. This is an intriguing and lovely album. Grade: A-

– Rick Anderson

The Mikado

Welcome to Titipu! Arguably the most celebrated of the Savoy Operas, The Mikado’s witty text and memorable tunes are done justice with this revival production of a 1980s staging by Christopher Renshaw. The brazenly colorful characters weave and leap around (and often jump in and out of) oversized oriental pottery. Actor and guest artist Mitchell Butel was drafted for this production to play Ko-Ko the Lord High Executioner, and he will have you under his spell before you can say Yum-Yum. In his customized enhancements to Ko-Ko’s Little List, he seamlessly inserts quips and jabs at current events in Australia and beyond. This show is a good time, and I guarantee you’ll experience a LOL or two.

The Rake’s Progress. Conducted by Vladimir Jurowski; directed by John Cox; set design by David Hockney. Opus Arte (1062D), 2010. 140 minutes. $29.99.

This is an absolutely enchanting and gorgeous revival production of The Rake’s Progress, which had its Glyndebourne premiere in 1975. Designer David Hockney based the set on an 18^th-century series of paintings by William Hogarth that, when viewed by Stravinsky, struck the composer with the idea for the show. Hockney re-imagines Hogarth’s paintings as modern cartoon characters, and his use of cross-hatching saturates the costumes and all the set and the stage. In this sixth revival of the collaboration between Hockney and director John Cox, the assembled cast is strong in their stage presence as well as their singing. Finn Topi Lehtipuu sings beautifully the unreasonably difficult lines of Tom Rakewell, and Miah Persson performs the role of Anne Trulove with tenacity and grace. Highly recommended.

Nina.  Conducted by Adam Fischer. Arthaus (100367), 2002. 120 minutes. $29.99.

Composer Giovanni Paisiello was Rossini’s senior, and though he enjoyed some popularity during his lifetime, his operas have been staged far less frequently since the mid-19^th century. The 1790 revision of Nina that we see on this disc is billed as an opera buffa in two acts, and it is at the very least an 18^th-century sentimental comedy with simple yet beautiful melodies. Recorded live at the Zurich Opera in 2002, this revival of Nina reflects a production by Cesare Lievi that was staged just a few years earlier. The beloved mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli gives an effective and committed performance as a madwoman, with expertly-done fioritura and just a smidgen of over-acting. Jonas Kaufmann’s acting and singing are both splendid. The disc also includes a 45-minute bonus documentary that explores Paisiello as “A Forgotten Genius,” in which director Cesare Lievi, conductor Adam Fischer, and Neapolitan musicologist, composer, and director Roberto de Simone are all interviewed.

– Anne Shelley

King Crimson’s ongoing legacy is documented at the DGM Website (DGM, which stands for “Discipline Global Mobile,” is King Crimson’s self-run record label). The site features recordings from King Crimson, Robert Fripp, and other Crimson spinoff projects. There are over 330 recordings available for purchase, most with sound samples of individual tracks, and most documenting live performances by Robert Fripp as well as the various incarnations of King Crimson. A random romp through the offerings reveals a 1969 concert from London, plus an entire package of live recordings from the 2001 King Crimson tour (the version of KC with Fripp, Adrian Belew, Pat Mastelotto, and Trey Gunn).   A quick search for “Eno” produced two live shows by Fripp and Brian Eno, one from 1975 and the other from 2006. Downloads are available as lossless FLAC files or MP3 files. In addition to audio files, there are also a number of diary entries, photos, set lists, reviews, and a wealth of of other Crimsononia material.

Guitarist Robert Fripp’s long and storied career covers a lot of territory, including lots of side projects in addition to his ongoing Crimson commitments. Fripp is sometimes considered outside the musical mainstream, and at times critics have had difficulty dealing with his sometimes eccentric output (one opined that “Robert Fripp … makes music for would-be Mensa members”). Fripp’s projects include the League Of Crafty Guitarists, which Fripp founded in 1986. Oddly, Fripp also does the talk circuit with his sister, Patricia. Together they have recorded a series of interview CDs under the Robert Fripp Unplugged moniker. Teasers for the content of these sessions include “the private Robert Fripp,” including such strange quips as “how his bunny runs his household,” “who earned royalties for silence,” and “Robert’s real life work.” Kind of makes you curious, eh?

For all you could possibly want to know about King Crimson, check out the Elephant Talk wiki. It includes discographies of Fripp and Crimson recordings, and links to dozens of interviews with KC members Fripp, Tony Levin, Peter Sinfield, Adrian Belew, Greg Lake, Bill Bruford, Adrian Belew, and others. It also includes tabs and transcriptions for most of Crimson’s material.

One of the most intense and exciting versions of King Crimson included Fripp, guitarist Adrian Belew, drummer Bill Bruford, and bassist/Chapman Stickman Tony Levin. They recorded several albums together, beginning with 1981’s brilliant, engaging album Discipline. You can keep track of Levin, Bruford, and Belew’s current and past career projects through their fine websites:  http://www.papabear.com/ (Tony Levin), http://www.adrianbelew.net, and http://www.billbruford.com.  To get a sense of what the Discipline-era version of King Crimson was like live, check out the video of the version of “Elephant Talk,” the opening track from Discipline, on Bill Bruford’s website. Enjoy!

– Gene Hyde

George Szell – A Life of Music,

Biographies of major 20^th century conductors appear to be proliferating these days. Within the past year I’ve reviewed three books on Leonard Bernstein, and one each on Arturo Toscanini and Dimitri Mitropoulos. This month, George Szell is in the dock, to be followed next month with a review of an autobiography by Riccardo Muti. It goes without saying that all these men were (are, in Muti’s case) venerable maestros who upheld the highest traditions of symphonic performance and brought the canonical classical masterworks to millions, as much by the sheer force of their podium personas and star power as by their uniquely legendary interpretations.

Former assistants or disciples wrote all but one of these books about “their” maestro, and so there is often an aura of veneration that the reader has to peel away to reveal an objective assessment of the conductor as man and artist. Not an easy thing to do in the case of these biographies, which becomes even more problematic for the reader, who, unlike the acolyte, was not the “fly on the wall,” able to see the real man concealed within the public legend.

In the case of George Szell (1897-1970), his accomplishment in molding the Cleveland Orchestra into perhaps America’s greatest orchestra, and certainly one of the world’s supreme ensembles will undoubtedly remain his utmost triumph, followed by his conquests as conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, his engagements with the New York Philharmonic, the NBC and Chicago Symphonies, the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Szell’s many recordings document his genius and will ensure that his great musical legacy survives.

That being said, those who have followed Szell’s illustrious career know that, due to his unfortunate personal qualities of willfulness, arrogance and vindictiveness, he created much ill will and disdain towards him personally: abusing his players, peremptorily firing them, stealing first chair players from other orchestras, and, in a notorious incident at the Metropolitan Opera, walking out on a performance of Tannhaüser in a fit of pique, angered by a mechanical breakdown in the change of scenery. Some years later, Szell, in an uncharacteristically introspective moment, averred, “I’m my own worst enemy.” Rudolf Bing, then the Met’s General Manager, who endured Szell’s insubordination, had the last word: “Not while I’m alive.”

Similar Szell anecdotes are legion among musicians. You won’t find more than a handful, though, in Michael Charry’s book. In assessing the podium tyrants Szell and Toscanini, one concludes that there is but one possible defense of their behavior: that their music making was of such a high order that it justified their dictatorial excesses (in other words, you had to take the [very] bad with the [very] good).

For the rest, which is a mostly dry chronicle of Szell’s triumphs and brilliance throughout his long career, Charry does an adequate job. What is missing is in-depth insight into the mind and persona of a great, but conflicted and possibly troubled mind. We never get to know who George Szell is – the person. The tone instead is respectful and objective. Perhaps a fearsome personality could only engender respect. Still, Szell, the anti-Mitropoulos, love him or hate him, did change the musical world, especially in the United States, by setting the highest possible standards of orchestral performance. For this, if little else, we should be grateful.

George Szell – A Life of Music, by Michael Charry. University of Illinois Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-252-03616-3. 412 pages. Hardcover.

Carnegie Hall Treasures, by Tim Page and Carnegie Hall.

This is a fun, fact-filled, coffee-table-sized tome for lovers of classical music lore and memorabilia. It’s a sort of “Antiques Roadshow” featuring facsimiles of autographed photographs of virtuoso musicians, concert programs, reminiscences, poster art, architectural sketches and much else to pore over. Readers interested in how this, the most illustrious concert hall in America (and perhaps the world), came to be built will learn the story of the coming to maturity of America’s corporate arts culture in fin de siècle New York. The chronicle begins with two chapters that define the importance of Carnegie Hall as a cultural icon: “A Concert Hall for the Ages” and “The People’s House,” its innovative construction (by an architect who had never built a concert hall,) and the landmark inaugural concerts conducted by Tchaikovsky in 1891.

The next chapter, “Celebrating the Composers,” documents the premiere of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila in 1892 and Antonín Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony the following year, along with premieres of major works of John Philip Sousa, Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss, and others, through the 20^th century to works of Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, and many others. This chapter, even more than the others, is filled with photographs, autographed musical manuscripts and other documentation, alongside fascinating musical commentary. As a composer, this was my favorite part. It’s through this particular panorama—as living history—that the book really comes alive.

There’s much more: chapters on the exceptional orchestras and maestros who have performed at Carnegie, and an album of great singers. Chapters on “All That Jazz,” “Pop and World Music,” “Rock and Folk Royalty” and “A Space for More Than Concerts” brings to conclusion this grand circumnavigation of Carnegie Hall’s unique and remarkable history.

“If you believe in ghosts, this would be the place to find them,” writes author/music critic Tim Page. Carnegie Hall Treasures is a wonderful book to leaf through, either in sequence or in random order, and I most highly recommended it to anyone and everyone. It’s a book worthy of its subject: a ‘treasure’ indeed. Carnegie Hall, which was saved by a group of concerned New Yorkers led by the great violinist and humanitarian Isaac Stern in 1960, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a New York City Landmark in 1967.

Carnegie Hall Treasures, by Tim Page and Carnegie Hall, 2011. HarperCollins ISBN 978-0-06-170367-6. 221 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

Erik Wøllo’s Silent Currents consists of two discs, each a 50-minute performance recorded live on the radio, one in 2002 and the other in 2007. Each contains of a blend of prerecorded and improvised material. This is beatless, floating ambient music—the kind on which it is nearly impossible to focus one’s attention for very long. Texturally it resembles Robert Fripp’s “Frippertronics” tape-loop experiments of the 1970s, but is, if anything, even more formless and harmonically static, though quite lovely in the way that a particular color of wallpaper might be lovely. Compared to this, Brian Eno’s ambient music was punk rock. Suggested uses: Putting babies to sleep; meditation; lowering (to the point of somnolence) the energy level at the end of a party. Grade: B

Where Erik Wøllo’s music floats, the music of Stormloop (a.k.a. Kevin Spence) alternately throbs and shimmers. But the overall mood of Snowbound is perfectly encapsulated by the album title: this is not so much music as sound sculpture, and what the sculpture looks like is an enormous and nearly featureless snow field, punctuated only by mile-deep, echoing chasms. Here questions of “beauty” and indeed even of “music” seem rather beside the point—this is programmatic music intended to evoke a physical environment of equally balanced beauty and terror. Suggested uses: Put this on when you feel the need to be reminded how grateful you are to a) live in a civilization b) with central heating and c) other human beings. Grade: B

On Dokument .02, the latest release from the Dadavistic Orchestra, there’s not much in the way of harmonic movement, but lots of color and many pitch variations; listening to this album is kind of like watching a bunch of slow-moving clouds change into a series of interesting shapes. Among the fogbanks and drone layers will emerge sudden glistening features: a long series of arpeggios, a series of echo-laden water drips, tiny Buddhist chimes, an occasional swell of iron-bar clangor. There is a pervasive analog warmth to the Dadavistic Orchestra’s sound which should not be confused with emotional accessibility: this is music of warm, soft surfaces laid over a core of cold metal. While much of this music is attractive, it’s ultimately rather forbidding. Suggested uses: Making unwanted guests feel vaguely uncomfortable; accompanying silent horror films. Grade: B+

Flumina consists of 24 brief pieces, each of them a partially- or fully-improvised piano composition by legendary film composer and electronica artist Ryuichi Sakamoto. On each of the two discs are twelve pieces, each of them written in one of the 12 key centers available in the Western chromatic scale. Sakamoto played one of these pieces at the beginning of each of his shows on a Japanese tour; when all 24 had been recorded, he sent them to Christian Fennesz for overdubs and other manipulation using electronics, guitars, and synthesizers. The result is strange and deeply lovely. Sakamoto’s piano pieces are aimless in the best sense: there are lots of chords, but little sense of harmonic momentum; despite this, he manages to convey a mood of deep melancholy. Fennesz, for his part, counterbalances that mood with the eerie and detached electronic sounds he brings to bear on Sakamoto’s pieces. The result is a bit like listening to Debussy and Alva Noto simultaneously. Suggested uses: To accompany reading on a rainy day with a cat on your lap; looking through old high school yearbooks. Grade: A

With Ishq’s And Awake, we start getting into slightly (very slightly) more rhythmic territory, and also, interestingly, something that starts edging closer to the easy ambience and pseudo-mysticism of New Age music. The pictures of dervishes whirling on this album’s cover and inside artwork might lead you to expect music with a Middle Eastern flavor and of an explicitly mystical cast, but neither turns out to be the case; while there are touches of exotic percussion, much more prevalent are luscious washes of synthesizer chords, water sounds, and gently rocking chord changes (note in particular “Mizu,” which explicitly evokes Brian Eno’s early experiments in ambient music). Given that Ishq is a duo consisting of guitarist Matt Hillier and vocalist Jacqueline Kersley, it’s interesting that this album contains very little sonic material that comes recognizably from either a guitar or a voice. All of it, however, is sumptuously beautiful and should be welcomed both by fans of New Age music and by those for whom the New Age is anathema, but who have a taste for ambience. Suggested uses: Snuggling with a loved one; reading Persian love poetry; taking a nap. Grade: A

– Rick Anderson

A Concert for New York

This memorial concert given by the New York Philharmonic and the New York Choral Artists marked the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Organizers described the concert as a gift to the city, and had originally planned to use Central Park as the venue. Politics and logistics interfered, however, and the event was moved to the Philharmonic’s home, Avery Fisher Hall. Planning for the concert was so intense that then-executive director Zarin Mehta had decided to cancel the orchestra’s popular concerts in the parks over the summer. That move also saved the cash-strapped organization enough money to guarantee a continuation of the parks series into 2013.

This is a captivating and emotional performance of Mahler’s mammoth “Resurrection” Symphony, but not only for the invited first responders, survivors, and other dignitaries in the seats of Avery Fisher. A large screen and speakers set up on Lincoln Center Plaza broadcast the concert to a standing-room only crowd that filled the plaza and spilled onto adjacent walkways. The concert was also broadcast live on the radio. The 90-minute piece gives us the opportunity to watch director Alan Gilbert’s five o’clock shadow grow before our very eyes. Whether stately, furious, delicate, mysterious, or mad, Gilbert plays whatever character is required of him with confidence and grace. The ensembles, too, have lots of bite and lots of tenderness. The group manages to make the performance intensely personal, and by the end, I felt like a bonafide New Yorker. Recommended.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado. Bel Air Classiques (BAC067), 2011. 138 minutes. $29.99.

This opera is one of several collaborations between Kurt Weill and German librettist Bertolt Brecht, and it never quite got the traction that their most highly-regarded work, Weill’s Threepenny Opera, has enjoyed around the globe. Weill based this political satire on greed, industrialization, and overindulgence in the late 1920s, and some of his points fit right in with today’s New Normal, Wall Street documentaries, and Occupy movements. The Teatro Real Madrid produced the show in English, and while the original translation is forty years old and is often performed, I found myself longing to hear Mahagonny in German. Catalan theater company La Fura dels Baus represents Mahagonny—a city where the only offense is to have no money—as a literal trash heap. Except for a couple of lengthy and haunting a cappella chorales, the orchestra plows through their discordant score almost mechanically, matching the vivid horror of the soulless actions and desolate surroundings on the stage. There are several other video recordings of Mahagonny available with more impressive casts, but the visual pull of this production is stunning, disturbing, and strong.

George London: Between Gods and Demons. A film by Marita Stocker. Arthaus Musik (101473), 2011. 155 minutes. $24.99.

American bass-baritone George London, a post-war giant of the stage, sang alongside Renata Tebaldi, Birgit Nilsson, and Maria Callas. He was the first non-Russian to sing Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi Theater, and the first American to sing the Dutchman in Bayreuth. In the video, testimonies to London’s innate talent and his work ethic are as numerous as comments about his strong vocal presence, musicianship, and his linguistic abilities. He also had his share of idiosyncrasies as a performer, as he insisted on doing his own makeup and finding the perfect wig when the one provided to him would just not do. Paralysis of the vocal cords ended London’s singing career tragically early, so in the second half of his career he focused on administration and teaching. “Every singer who has had an important career is duty-bound to pass on the artistry he has amassed,” London says in the video, in translation. The documentary shows a wealth of archival clips from productions of Otello, The Flying Dutchman, Faust, and Tosca, and there is extensive bonus footage of various opera scenes in costume, spirituals, musicals, lied, and a 1962 TV performance from the Festival of Performing Arts.

– Anne Shelley

Now that the holidays are over and winter’s settling in, I often find myself seeking seasonal solace in swing music, particularly the music of William Allen “Count” Basie (1904-1984).  One of jazz’s greatest bandleaders, who led one of the finest rhythm sections in the business, Basie started his career in 1935 and played for nearly half a century.  This month’s column explores websites dedicated to Basie and his legacy.

For a comprehensive overview of Basie’s lengthy career, spend some time with the website ‘One More Once’: A Centennial Celebration of the Life and Music of Count Basie, compiled by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.  A multi-faceted, award-winning website created in 2004 to celebrate the centennial of Basie’s birth, the Rutgers site contains biographical information, an appreciation by Albert Murray, a number of audio clips, a selected discography, and videos of live performances. The Rutgers site also contains a number of impressive photo essays from such notable jazz photographers as bassist/photographer Milt Hinton, as well as photos from the extensive collection of Frank Driggs.

Jazz critic Francis Davis wrote an excellent elegiac assessment of Count Basie’s musical impact after the Count’s death in 1984. Reprinted in The Atlantic Magazine’s online archives, Davis’s “The Loss of Count Basie” describes what made Basie’s band and sound so unique, especially in comparison to Duke Ellington’s band:

Ellington and Basie represented contrasting approaches to the jazz orchestra. For Ellington, the big band was a blank page, upon which he wrote the most enduring body of orchestral literature in jazz history. Basie functioned more as an editor, although his signature was just as plain. Even in the 1930s, when the Basie Orchestra was enjoying its first national triumph with its largely unnotated arrangements (the bulk of them credited to Basie), the leader’s piano was less pad and pencil than general-assignment desk, according to the testimony of his sidemen. “Basie would start out and vamp a little, set a tempo, and say ‘that’s it!’” the trombonist Dicky Wells remarked in his 1971 autobiography, Night People.

Wondering what albums to listen to first in Basie’s catalog?  All About Jazz provides a succinct entry point to Basie’s extensive recording career .  You can also wander over to the Internet Archive, which has a handful of Basie’s early 78rpm recordings available as streaming content or as downloadable audio files.

Basie’s band was typically known for its rock-steady rhythm section and its great soloists.  Two websites highlight stars from each. Perhaps the best known of Basie’s sidemen was saxophonist Lester Young. NPR did a nice article on Young in 2009, and the audio file and transcript are available on the NPR website.  Basie’s guitarist Freddie Green is memorialized on the website Freddie Green: Master of Rhythm Guitar. This expansive site includes a wealth of information about the guitarist, including biographical information, an extensive discography, photographs, a number of audio files, interviews, and links to the Freddie Green Papers at the University of South Carolina’s archives. For guitarists, there are dozens of transcriptions of Basie songs, lots of essays and lessons on his playing style, and tips on how to play and sound like Green. Very impressive.

– Gene Hyde