by Peter Cates
Mahler
Mahler’s extraordinarily beautiful and powerful Symphony is one I heard live twice: in November 1977, with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony on tour at Portland’s Merrill Auditorium; and in April 1994, via the also touring Pittsburgh Symphony directed by Lorin Maazel at Houston’s Jesse Jones Hall.
The above recording I found quite good steering a good middle ground between Ozawa’s understated elegance and Maazel’s hyper volcanic excitement, a symphony with enough emotional range to take a variety of interpretive approaches. The First, along with the Fourth, are good starter pieces for those rock fans who might be musically adventurous.
One problem with the above record: Maestro Joseph Kreutzer is non-existent and no information is thus far available on identity of the real performers.
Louis Prima
Louis Prima – It Takes a Long Tall Brown-Skin Gal; St. Louis Blues. Majestic 1037, ten-inch 78, recorded 1945-46.
Louis Prima, before he developed his comedy act in the 1950s with his wife Keely Smith, had a thoroughly rehearsed swing band, of which these two sides, especially St. Louis Blues, are spitfire examples.
Stephen King
In Stephen King’s 2001 novel Dreamcatcher, Jonesy and three other childhood chums in the perpetually creepy Derry Maine are reckoning with very creepy creatures from another planet.
Jonesy already having dealt with a Mr. Gray who isn’t exactly playing Nice Guy, he is, as so often happens in Stephen King stories, home alone at a much too perfectly wrong time. One quality of Bangor’s most famous writer is ability to combine both humor and terror. The following is a telling example of this gift:
“There was a hard and ill-tempered thump at the door. Jonesy was once more reminded of the story about The Three Little Pigs. Huff and puff, Mr. Gray; enjoy the dubious pleasures of rage.
“But Mr. Gray had apparently left the door.
” ‘Mr. Gray?’ Jonesy called. ‘Hey, don’t go ‘way mad, okay?’ “
Another Derry novel, It, kept me up most of nights nights with its Pennywise the Clown, coincidentally known also as Robert Gray.
Still the scariest King story for me is Children of the Corn, depicting an agricultural community in the remote regions of Nebraska.
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Two very highly recommended action movies from 2023 are Ruthless, starring Dermot Mulroney as a high school coach who rescues a teenage girl in his gym class who’s been kidnapped by sex traffickers out of Vegas; and Fast Charlie, featuring Pierce Brosnan as a “repairman” for the Biloxi Mississippi’s Dixie Mafia, James Caan in his last role as the Boss and some alligators who help dispose of human evidence.
Several LPs:
Mercury MG 10040 – Janacek: Lach Dances. Czechoslovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Karel Jirak; Martinu: Sinfonietta Giocosa for Piano and Chamber Orchestra. Pianist Germaine Leroux with Jaroslav Krombholc leading the Czech Philharmonic. Late ‘40s radio broadcasts.
In 1947, David Hall, who retired to Castine in the 1980s, and John Hammond, who brought Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan into the recording studio, traveled to Prague to pick up a treasure trove of classical music radio tapes and acetates of Czech musicians for release in the U.S. on Mercury. And both of them got out less than 24 hours before the Communists seized power.
The music of two of the Czech Republic’s most important 20th century composers on this disc is highly colorful and exotic and the performances are very good. One of my special interests as a collector are these Mercury classical LPs from between 1948 and 1951 derived from these broadcast tapes of European and Soviet countries. The sound is antiquated but the music and performances are quite intriguing.
Steve Lawrence
Steve Lawrence Sings. Spinorama S-166, early ‘60s release.
This 87-cent record has side one featuring five songs in which Steve Lawrence sounds as though he was recorded in somebody’s basement when he was still a teenager instead of, along with his wife Eydie Gorme, two of the greatest singers of both the Great American Songbook and some really good pop novelty songs, in his case the 1962 megahit Go Away Little Girl.
Side Two contains Neapolitan pop classics, O Sole Mio, Come Back to Sorrento, Mattinata, etc., along with the most awful 1950s wedding song Because. The singer is listed as Charlie Francis but the same identical recordings were used for side two of another el cheapo LP featuring outtakes of Tony Bennett on side one and a different bogus name from the non-existent Mister Francis.
The voice was a pale copy cat of Perry Como.
One good point: the art work on the record jacket was exquisitely crafted.
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