Canter Bridge

These accessibly priced wireless earbuds are so far beyond earlier solutions I’ve tried that it’s difficulty to consider them members of the same category.

Let’s start with the comfort factor. Both the soft-plastic grip that goes around the outer ear and the soft earbuds that deliver the music to the ear are almost cushy. They just feel really, really good when in place.

As for the sound, the snug fit helps right off the bad. Add to that a sound quality that is itself far beyond adequate, and I have myself rejoicing over the quality of both music and narrated books.

Then, the controls are simple to learn and the bluetooth connection occurs almost instantaneously after a push on the right earbud’s main button turns the unit on. As a first-time user of *wireless* earbuds, I’d have no difficulty with learning the how.

But the real killer here is the price. These are simply great value at just south of thirty-six clams.

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Phyllis White Rodriguez-Peralta’s lovingly told survey of three legendary conductors of one of the great American orchestras is lovingly told. Her joy at having been ‘part of’ the story is palpable, even if her writing is a bit wooden and the volume occasionally flirts with hagiography.

The author describes ‘the Philadelphia sound’ in this way:

Everyone has heard about the ‘Philadelphia sound’, a phrase that usually refers to the lushness of the strings and is associated particularly with Ormandy. This ‘sound’, however, really varies according to the conductor, the composer, and the venue. The seeds were sown by Stokowski, flowered with Ormandy, were strictly cultivated by Muti, and flowered again, but with more definition, under Sawallisch. Eschenbach’s influence (White Rodriguez-Peralta published this work in 2006) is just beginning.

This paragraph is pregnant of the author’s telling, particularly the hint that Muti represents something of a hiatus in the orchestra’s tradition.

It is astonishing that the Orchestra was led by only six principal conductors for the duration of the twentieth century. This idiosyncratic longevity on the podium creates a context for partisans of this or another version of ‘the sound’ who hold and express their views with a certain ferocity.

For this quite amateur appreciator of classical music, I find the principal value of Philadelphia Maestros to lie in the peek it affords us behind the curtain and into the complex constellation of musical gifts and personalities that constitute the source of a great orchestra’s music across the longue durée of its tradition.

Tradition, it seems to me, is the right word, and a venerable one at that. A conductor comes to a place like Philadelphia as a custodian or a steward of this tradition. His (or her) license to reshape what has been given by the preceding decades is finite. The author helps us to understand how a conductor’s individuality vis-à-vis ‘the Philadelphia’s’ tradition played out during the reigns of Ormandy, Muti, and Sawallisch.

Some glimpses are riveting:

Always very strict, Muti was particularly adamant about sticking to the composer’s text, and sometimes a singer reacted against his removal of an expected high note or expected trills and ornamentation because they were not in the original score. He once told Pavarotti, ‘Either sing what Bellini wrote or find yourself a new conductor’.

Or this:

The enmity between Abaddo and Muti was well known, although its origin has never been disclosed by either one. Perhaps it has something to do with the subtle prejudices between northern and southern Italy.

Or again:

In the following September, at the official welcoming ceremony for Sawallisch and his wife, Mechthild, he said to the festive crowd, ‘We are Philadelphians.’ Obviously recalling President Kennedy’s words in Berlin, he seemed, also, to be offering assurance that he would devote his primary efforts and attention to the Philadelphia Orchestra.

White Rodriguez-Peralta’s most effusive admiration is indeed directed towards Wolfgang Sawallisch, who died in 2013, seven years after this book’s publication. This book of light reading on the Orchestra’s directors shines a light on how iconic such a role becomes. Musical mastery is only a precursor to the effective work of the great conductor.

The author’s service lies in helping us to appreciate that fact as we listen to and, just occasionally, gasp at the beauty of that sound.

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Is it just me, or do Blues and Jazz festivals go best with big water? The wind and the waves improvise in a way that naturally frames the indefatigable improvisation at the core of these most American of musical genres.

Think the Chicago, on the edge of Lake Michigan. The Newport, on the Harbor. Now mix in Duluth, on the Lake Superior Bay that it shares with its Wisconsonian neighbor, Superior. (more…)

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Idiosyncratic as Glenn Gould was as a human being, his performance of Bach’s music comes as close to ‘authoritative’ as the term—with all its needed caveats—allows. I say this as a music lover and a music consumer, not as a music critic or even much of a musician. And I do so because amateurs like this one often wonder ‘which version (of a certain musical piece) to buy or stream’.

You will never go wrong purchasing a Glenn Gould performance of J.S. Bach.

This transference of Bach’s French Suites to the piano’s keyboard is performed with the lightest touch, the warmest panache. The lines of Bach’s complex polyphony—whether quick as a dragonfly or stately as a swan—come across almost as the texture and pace of a living being. Nothing is forced, nothing gets in the way. Gould’s notorious nonverbal at the keyboard, bane of his recording engineers, are undetectable. The music simply flows.

Slow down and listen to Gould’s left hand interacting, intertwining, conversing with his right. This is Bach performed, well, authoritatively. If you want Bach’s French Suites or at a more superficial level (like the one at which this music consumer listens), just his exquisite Baroque polyphony performed on the piano, you can do no better than imaging, scrawled in Johann Sebastian’s own hand across the front of this recording: ‘Start here.’

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