Re: Glenn Gould's Valentine's Day with Barbra...or Dell?

[Elmer Elevator <bobmer@javanet.com>]

Bradley, thanks for the fascinating GG review. GG was tremendously brave and
original to suggest that classical expertise could inform and inject thought
into pop.

She has a magnificent instrument, a magnificent emotional sensibility ... and
her choice of repertoire over the years has been relentlessly ghastly and
moronic. I couldn't watch the show because I'm a diabetic.*

The low points of her career are undoubtedly the love duets with the likes of
the hopelessly talentless and uninspired Neil Diamond. I think she pioneered
such duets recorded in different studios -- an anti-intimacy of performance, a
way of saying, "Our combined popularity will sell these records, but we both
haven't the slightest interest in meeting or pleasure in performing together.
Sing your part in this key and this tempo, and ship it to the mixers by
Tuesday."

Billie Holiday would have hanged herself before singing drek like Streisand's
choices. And though GG takes a kick at Peggy Lee, Lee's choice of repertoire --
Rosemary Cloony's too, for that matter -- are light years more thoughtful and
interesting than Streisand's. Streisand's choices are like the sign outside a
cheap motel in a Mel Brooks movie: "Catering to the Tastes of the
Unsophisticated."

Dawn Upshaw, on the other hand, drives me crazy because she has an entirely
synthetic, mechanical or absent emotional sensibility, but a WONDERFUL choice of
repertoire! I'm so grateful to her for the music she's rescued from the past or
been among the first to record. I've never spent so much money on the recordings
of a singer I like so little. (But I think she's getting a little better with
age -- maybe she had a couple of bad love affairs and understands a few things
for the first time.)

Bob

* This joke was found carved on a Mesopotamian ziggurat from 5200 BC. Oscar
Levant said he was a diabetic and his doctor wouldn't let him watch the Dinah
Shore show.

Bradley Lehman wrote:

> At 03:52 AM 2/15/01 +0000, Kate Clunies-Ross wrote:
> >Bradley wrote:-
> >
> > > If Glenn Gould were alive today, this is one of those evenings where we
> > > *know* what he would be doing.  He'd be sitting with a box of Arrowroots
> > > and a Poland water, watching the televised Barbra Streisand farewell
> > concert.
> > >
> > > Yes?
> > >
> >   Oh Bradley, no! I know Glenn was a  solitary chap; but do we have to
> >imagine such a lonely Valentines Day for him? Can't he finally contact that
> >"certain beaut. girl" and invite her round to his apartment where she
> >could.... well, scramble some eggs for him, at least?
>
> Fair enough.  During the commercials he could explain to his guest the
> organ registrations that Streisand used in her voice, and make salient
> points about the expressive freedom of her interpretations.  Streisand with
> play-by-play and colour commentary.  Then the Schwarzkopf records would be
> pulled out and played for comparison, and GG would again bemoan the fact
> that Barbra still hasn't done a Dowland album 25 years after he suggested
> it.  Finally, late into the night, parallels would be drawn between
> Streisand's career, the milieu (not to mention the Zeitgeist) of Strauss'
> "Metamorphosen," and the poignant use of Janacek's string quartet in "The
> Unbearable Lightness of Being."
>
> But even with that elaborate evening, wouldn't the guest more likely be
> there by phone rather than in person?
>
> As GG said in the preamble of his review of _Classical Barbra_, "Hers is
> indeed a manner of much greater intimacy, but an intimacy that
> (astonishingly, for this repertoire) is never overtly in search of sexual
> contact.  Streisand is consumed by nostalgia; she can make of the torchiest
> lyric an intimate memoir, and it would never occur to her to employ the
> 'I'll meet you precisely 51% of the way' piquancy of, say, Helen Reddy,
> much less the 'I won't bother to speak up 'cause you're already spellbound,
> aren't you?' routine of Peggy Lee."