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

At 02:57 AM 2/15/01 -0500, Elmer Elevator wrote: 
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.

Another great quote from his review:

"Like Schwarzkopf, Streisand is one of the great italicizers; no phrase is
left solely to its own devices, and the range and diversity of her
expressive gift is such that one is simply unable to chart an a priori
stylistic course on her behalf.  Much of the Affekt of intimacy--indeed,
the sensation of eavesdropping on a private moment not yet wholly committed
to its eventual public profile--is a direct result of our inability to
anticipate her intentions."

And, judging from GG's own contemporary recordings (1976) this was his
credo for himself as well.

Of course, CPE Bach knew this in 1750.  He advised keyboard players to
learn the art of expression by listening to good singers.


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.*


Yup.  If the stuff would be real sugar, that would be one thing.  But it's
saccharine and aspartame.  Worse.

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."


Introducing the clip in last night's show she pointed out that she and Neil
went to the same high school.

She did a live duet with a tape of Frank from the 1950's, standing in front
of the screen they were digitally putting her into.

She also did a duet with herself from a scene from "Yentl."

Better, I thought, was the live duet with the young gal who was her Mini-Me.

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."

"It's good to be da king."

And yet that's the type of stuff that Charlotte Church's career machine
cranks out, because people buy it.  Cross that line from nostalgia into
sentimentality, and cha-CHING!

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.)


About five years ago I heard her sing a concert with Richard Goode, and
noticed the same thing: good music, no emotion.  A pity.

Treat yourself to another dose of Sylvia McNair.  (Anything but "Silver
Linings" with Daniel Kobialka.  That one's so synthesized that it's hardly
McNair's performance anymore.  Unless you *like* Unchained Melody from the
Hearts of Space enough to have it last six minutes, and Pachelbel's canon
to last 15, and Strawberry Fields Forever and Ever and
Ever.  http://www.wco.com/~cymekob/802.html .  Arrestingly pretty sounds,
but where's the forward motion?  It's so disembodied it's like they're
trying to outdo GG's rapturous way with the Siegfried Idyll, or something.)


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.

Good one.



Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
clavichord CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl
trumpet and organ: http://www.mp3.com/hlduo

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot