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Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Greensleeves” Conducted by Sir John Barbirolli and Some Natter Between My Beloved John Wilson and Edward Seckerson; Plus Monty Python, Round the Horne and Polari

Sorry for my shaky handwriting but while listening to this I had a fantasy that gave me the giggles: John being interviewed by my favorite ohne palones—prime purveyors of the gay-gypsy-theatrical patois called polari—Julian and Sandy. Played of course by the inimitable Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams on Round the Horne. (This more-than-usual musical episode of Kenneth Horne’s 1967 radio show also includes Rambling Syd Rumpo, the Fraser Hayes 4 singing off-key not on purpose, and the screamingly funny takeoff skit, “Young Horne with a Man”.)

Now John, John, Glorious John, I know that you know, and I know that you know that I know, that my long-distance lovemaking to you is being observed by a few; not many, just a few. So this rundown is for them, love:

In this very-recently posted pod chat with London-based culture maven Edward Seckerson, John talks about his idol, conductor Sir John Barbirolli; von Karajan; Leonard Bernstein; French romantic music of the early 20th century; conducting Massenet at Glyndebourne; reviving the Sinfonia of London; winning that BBC thingie for his Korngold Symphony (and confirming what I surmised in my review re his “austere” sound vs “chocolate sauce”); his other Korngold recording, the violin concerto, also with son vieil ami Andrew Haveron; Richard Rodney Bennett‘s compositional journey of self-discovery; and what we’re all waiting for, what’s up with The John Wilson Orchestra (seems like that psychic flash I had in April 2020 has proven true).

Here are the main points I took away from this podcast: “What I do try to do as a conductor is carry my sound around with me… It’s almost—I don’t really feel comfortable talking about because you know music is basically a doing thing and not a talking thing… My deepest musical creed is wrapped up with how an orchestra sounds…” Which pretty much confirms what I’ve suspected these two years about him.

John, light of my life, fire of my loins, I respect your process.

Cantara's Beloved Conductor John WilsonAbove: John’s 44-minute podcast interview. Below, “Greensleeves” as we’ve all heard it on Monty Python.

Fantasia on “Greensleeves”
Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer
Barbirolli Conducts English String Music
RCA, 1963 first issue
The Sinfonia of London
John Barbirolli, conductor

23 JUNE 2020 UPDATE: Here’s Barbirolli again from that same album conducting Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia from a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which my beloved John Wilson will be conducting The Phiharmonia Orchestra in, in an online concert on 17 July.

EXTRA! Here are 2 interviews with John from BBC 2 Radio: one (8 min long) from 24 April 2016 with Michael Ball, and one (4 min long) from 4 November 2013 with Steve Wright.

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My Bonny John Wilson Conducts the Orchestre de Lyon for the 2023/24 New Year

Well, well, this sounds exciting. Thanks, @JulietRozsa !

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John Wilson and His Sinfonia of London Tour UK with Hollywood’s Greatest Hits, 04 – 15 November 2023

John’s pop fans in Britain have nothing to worry about—all the goodness of The John Wilson Orchestra (1994-2019) is now squeezed into his new/old/new group, the Sinfonia of London in their brand-new “Hollywood’s Greatest Hits” tour. Thank Kennedy Street Productions, who brought Barry Manilow and Gladys Knight to UK’s shores, for this shrewd spectacular run aimed at the 2023 Holiday Season. Now we’ll hear the rest of the movie music John’s been transcribing all these years.

More info to come as I find it. I understand since 2 December 2022 tickets have been flying off the box office shelves.

The SageAbove: John’s own overture, “Hooray for Hollywood” for his 2011 appearance at the Royal Albert.

Glad you asked. Here’s the Sinfonia’s jam-packed “Hollywood’s Greatest Hits” tour schedule:

Sat 4 November 2023 19:00

The Anvil Theatre
Basingstoke UK
Get Tickets Here

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Sun 5 November 2023 19:00

Brighton Dome
Brighton and Hove UK
Get Tickets Here

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Mon 6 November 2023 19:30

Royal Albert Hall
London UK
Get Tickets Here

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Tue 7 November 2023 19:00

St David’s Hall
Cardiff UK
Get Tickets Here

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Thu 9 November 2023 19:30

Symphony Hall
Birmingham UK
Get Tickets Here

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Sat 11 November 2023 19:30

Sage Gateshead
Gateshead UK
Get Tickets Here

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Sun 12 November 2023 19:30

Philharmonic Hall
Liverpool UK
Get Tickets Here

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Mon 13 November 2023 19:30

Royal Concert Hall
Glasgow UK
Get Tickets Here

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Tue 14 November 2023 19:30

Theatre Royal & Royal Concert Hall
Nottingham UK
Get Tickets Here

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Wed 15 November 2023 19:30

The Bridgewater Hall
Manchester UK
Get Tickets Here

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My Beloved Conductor John Wilson’s Lockdown Listening List: Keely Smith, Teddy Wilson, Walton, Elgar, Brahms, Ireland, Debussy, Peter Ackroyd; Plus Yusef Lateef

From the London-based Philharmonia’s website, July 2020: my beloved John Wilson’s public musical choices. Audio downloads in red.

PETER ACKROYD London, A Biography read by Simon Callow “Can I include an audiobook? I’m getting into them because I can study/write scores with them on in the background…” / Oh, John, oh no no no. I’ve heard of putting music on while reading prose, and that’s bad enough, but this other way around plays much more havoc on one’s powers of focus. But if you’re listening because you’re really groovin to the sound of Callow’s measured, reassuring, perfectly accented voice, that’s another thing…

*I am astonished that John actually, correctly, described Teddy Wilson as a Swing musician rather than put him into the catchall Jazz bag, which I’d have expected him to do, considering who was his teacher. His teacher was Richard Rodney Bennett. My teacher (at CUNY) was YUSEF LATEEF (download his 1957 album Jazz Mood here in full).

**John, are you conflating song with melody, or what? Only asking as a humble member of your audience.

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My Bonny John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London at the BBC Proms, 6 August 2023

Numerous films—such as William Dieterle‘s September Affair (1950), Charles Vidor‘s Rhapsody (1954), and Billy Wilder‘s The Seven Year Itch (1955)—have borrowed themes from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. Frank Borzage‘s I’ve Always Loved You (1946) features it heavily. David Lean’s romantic drama Brief Encounter (1945) utilizes the music widely in its soundtrack. Royal College of Music alumnus Benjamin Grosvenor is the soloist.

Screening Room, SF 1979Above: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no 2 in C minor, op 18 played by Eileen Joyce with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting, from the soundtrack of the 1945 film Brief Encounter. John you cad, you’re playing with my heart again.

The entire film Brief Encounter is available on my YT channel here

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“The Trees So High” by Patrick Hadley, IV Adagio Just for My Bonny Lad, Conductor John Wilson

Today, Easter, I found this work by an esteemed composition teacher of your alma mater, the Royal College of Music, the same day I also spotted the perfect illo to go with this Scotch-English ballad. I am dedicating it to you, John, because the lyrics make me shiver.

Reign of Guilds, 2023Reign of Guilds is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) now in its trial run as of February 2023. Above: The heartbreaking choral Adagio from “The Trees So High” by early 20th century English composer Patrick Hadley (1899-1973). Swiss-born Matthias Bamert conducts the Philharmonia. 
The trees they grow high,
the leaves they do grow green
Many is the time my true love I've seen
Many an hour I have watched him all alone
He's young,
but he's daily growing.

Father, dear father,
you've done me great wrong
You have married me to a boy who is too young
I'm twice twelve and he is but fourteen
He's young,
but he's daily growing.

Daughter, dear daughter,
I've done you no wrong
I have married you to a great lord's son
He'll be a man for you when I am dead and gone
He's young,
but he's daily growing.

Father, dear father, if you see fit
We'll send him to college for another year yet
I'll tie blue ribbons all around his head
To let the maidens know that he's married.

One day I was looking o'er my father's castle wall
I spied all the boys a-playing at the ball
My own true love was the flower of them all
He's young, but he's daily growing.

And so early in the morning
at the dawning of the day
They went out into the hayfield
to have some sport and play;
And what they did there,
she never would declare
But she never more complained of his growing.

At the age of fourteen, he was a married man
At the age of fifteen, the father of a son
At the age of sixteen, his grave it was green
Have gone, to be wasted in battle.
And death had put an end to his growing.

I'll buy my love some flannel
and I will make a shroud
With every stitch I put in it,
the tears they will pour down
With every stitch I put in it,
how the tears will flow
Cruel fate has put an end to his growing.

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Aaron Copland and His Influence on Games Composer Michael Giacchino, Among Others

Encouraged by Maestro Mauceri, I now look for the musical influences on games composers, hence my “Coplandesque” remark on FB about Michael Giacchino’s Medal of Honor theme below. Listen to my beloved and desired English conductor John Wilson helm the BBC Philharmonic in Copland works every freakin’ American knows: “Fanfare for the Common Man” (commission, 1942) and the “Simple Gifts” part of the ballet Appalachian Spring. And just for good measure! “Hoedown” from the ballet Billy the Kid ’cause I enjoy a good steak.

Somewhere in my blog (“My First Music: The Pure Joy of St Trinian’s and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness by Malcolm Arnold“) I wrote about particular chords and intervals that, to me, give music a particularly “English” sound—well, I’m coming around to understand that Copland, far from being a cheap minimalist, was actually one of the founders of the “American” sound (along with Joplin, Dvorak, Gershwin, Schoenberg and, of course, Copland’s pupil Bernstein). I’m so glad my bonny John “gets” it. His Copland almost makes up for his 2017 butchery of Oklahoma! at the Royal Albert. As for Copland’s influence, listen for it in certain tunes of Jerry Goldsmith and, as I said above, games composer Michael Giacchino.

John Mauceri’s THE WAR ON MUSIC: RECLAIMING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (Yale, 2022) can be read free on Scribd here

Medal of Honor

Again, Giacchino’s Coplandesque theme for the game Medal of Honor: https://bit.ly/giacchino1

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Valentine’s Day, 2023

To my beloved BBC conductor John Wilson on Valentine’s Day, 2023—the full force of our mighty spirit Buddy Holly through his emissary Stevie Nicks and company:

Valentine's Day, 2023Above: Buddy Holly’s classic “Not Fade Away” with Stevie Nicks, Waddy Wachtel et al in attendance.

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Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah and Filipinos Will Save Western Music, Part 1

Everyone is getting the 2022 movie Tár wrong, everyone. Except me and Martin Scorsese.

Which is okay, because if Scorsese, Todd Field and Lydia Tár inhabit the same artistic ecosphere as I do, I don’t feel so alone. In a world 99% made up of Maxes and Tony Tarrs, I don’t feel so much alone.

So John, lamplighter of my heart, in my ongoing quest to give you nice things, I’m going to list some elements—in sequence—in the movie you might find useful next time you cocktail chat with people…

In Part 1:

  • Playing to the New York Crowd
  • Kavanah and Teshuvah in the Kabala
  • That Fantastic Red Handbag
  • We All Know That Conductors Hate Sopranos
  • Lunch With Elliot

PLAYING TO THE NEW YORK CROWD

  • It’s Francesca texting Krista on the private flight from Berlin to NYC. It’s Krista who posits to F, you still love her then…
  • Francesca is a Yale School of Music grad, probably post-grad. No matter the impression she gives of powerless and invisibility, she is actually connected and quite probably brilliant—but these days ground down. I know the feeling. Hope you never, my love.
  • The song at the beginning is in Lydian mode. (But you got that, John.) When I was 11, I was captured by the Lydian mode in this popular jukebox tune, side B of NYC-based Left Banke’s hit single.
  • In the (mostly tech/assistance) credits, there are at least 2 real people who lent their names to characters in the story, Francesca Lentini and Sebastian Brix.
  • The New Yorker Festival in which Lydia is interviewed was held 7-9 October 2022. Been to a couple of these. They’re like Glyndebourne, only without the food.
  • Lydia’s hands are beautiful my love, but no more beautiful than yours.
  • The benefit concert for Zaatari would’ve been the 10th anniversary—ten freakin years!—of that crummy refugee camp.
  • Antonia Brico was a big deal in my Women’s Liberation group in the mid 70s. You know, women of achievement. Here’s a 2018 romantic biopic of Brico, entitled The Conductor. And here’s the 1974 documentary.

KAVANAH AND TESHUVAH IN THE KABALA

  • I first got interested in Jewish mystical thought when it kept popping up in Leonard Bernstein‘s writing. The more advanced ideas, I got into at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv. I had a crush on Neil Horowitz so I followed him to Israel, after having won a CUNY scholarship to go. We learned about Maimonides, the Kabala and how to read Hebrew. Then on the way home we did it in the washroom of the El Al.
  • Kavanah means intent, just like Lydia says. She expands on this, simply and forcefully, in the master class scene.
  • Teshuvah is another matter. Teshuvah is the more important, more complex idea and it arrives close to the end of the movie so I’ll explain it more fully at the right time. Teshuvah has to do with the inevitability of creation. So you want to stick around for that.
  • You know John, this stuff is taught at the yeshiva up in Bensham, a couple miles from your childhood neighborhood of Low Fell. I know about Gateshead Talmudical College because a stateless Jewish refugee (from Cuba, he escaped, they took away his citizenship) we knew in Quito, a brilliant scholar downstairs, applied to this school so I got to read all the brochures they sent him.

THAT FANTASTIC RED HANDBAG

  • This scene was so spot on I can’t believe a man wrote it. This is the first scene in the movie that made Scorsese start to sit up in his seat and believe again.
  • Field pulled out all his AFI grad stuff for this scene. Check out Whitney’s enormous rock as she flirts with Lydia. I’m engaged, but that’s no problem. They talk about Stravinsky. Lydia throws in a really, really esoteric Kabalistic reference that goes right past this pretty Smith alum.
  • Lydia points at Whitney’s handbag, which is luscious, and with a price tag of around US800-1200 I’d say. Now, this is where most women (and certain men) in the audience call out with awed recognition, You bitch! We know you’re angling for that bag! And you know that you’re gonna get it! Because you know that rich tramp is gonna call Bergdorf’s and have one sent to you “in token of our meeting” or other bullshit… But in the end, it’s just another cheap trophy you toss to Sharon…
  • And all the while Francesca is the background, texting.

WE ALL KNOW THAT CONDUCTORS HATE SOPRANOS

  • I grew up with the story in music school, probably false, that the legendary Otto Klemperer made Kirsten Flagstad cry in rehearsals, which I suppose was the beginning of my conviction that there exists a natural antipathy between vocal artists and orchestra conductors.
  • So when Francesca texts Krista a shot of Lydia’s digs at the Carlyle, dubbed the “Placido Domingo Suite” and K quips, she thinks she is being ironic, you wonder in passing what the deal is between conductor Lydia and tenor Domingo.
  • But that remark is actually meant to alert us to the recentness of Francesca’s and Krista’s relationship with Lydia. Later in the movie Lydia makes a disparaging remark about the excellent mezzo Samantha Hankey—who rode to prominence quickly in 2018 after winning prizes at Gyndebourne and Placido Domingo’s own star-making Operalia (which he also conducts, by the way)—that clarifies this.

LUNCH WITH ELLIOT, OR TOSKER, MAN!

  • Tosker, man!
  • Mostly Norman Lebrecht-type stuff but we get a few necessary pieces of information, for example the Accordion Fellowship doesn’t simply place fellows in residencies, it fosters (funds?) entrepreneurship. This will figure in the Krista part of the story.
  • Elliot is a banker/lawyer/amateur conductor with biiiig pretensions. Lydia doesn’t notice his predatory tendencies because he’s gotten her fat and complacent.
  • Lydia brings up Max Bruch to affirm her place in Elliot’s society.
  • That bit about Turing Machine (a math rock group) doing Chopin’s Piano Concerto #1 in Japan, conducted by (who we later see is a dodderer) Sebastian Brix rubato has to have gotten a laugh from somebody in the audience.
  • One last one! This is the first time in the movie an Asian is clearly and lengthily shown in the background. Well dressed, middle-aged Chinese lady. You think I don’t notice these things, do you? Gwilo mooks.

Next: The Master Class

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Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah and Filipinos Will Save Western Music, Part 2

I’ve been saying for years that I long to get into your head, John. Now here’s a movie that shows me the inner workings of a fellow creator so consider the pressure off. I still want to sleep with you though.

Reminder: These crib notes are all meant for you and you alone, my love. Fold them up and put them in your wallet till you need them!

Part 1: Playing to the New York Crowd; Kavanah and Teshuvah in the Kabala; That Fantastic Red Handbag; We All Know That Conductors Hate Sopranos; Lunch With Elliot, or Tosker, Man!

In Part 2:

  • The Master Class
  • Rules of the Game
  • Vita’s Novel

THE MASTER CLASS

  • 11-minute continuous single sweeping shot. Field just outdid Renoir.
  • This is the scene that made Scorsese murmur to himself with satisfaction, That’s my girl.
  • Sarah Chang the prodigy—yes, she would now be an elder to these younglings.
  • René Redzepi! That quip is sooo Frasier.
  • I think she’s referencing Stockhausen in the Punkt Kontrapunkt remark. But who am I to know? They were barely getting over post-“Verklärte Nacht” Schoenberg, the boys in composition class.
  • Olive is a composition student as well as conducting. Max is not.
  • Max is doomed from the start. He chose as his jury piece a composition by the last master class teacher. Because he was inspired? wanted to play it safe/go with the trend? didn’t know any better/has a limited scope? Have these limitations on his scope been imposed by a racist society? These questions except the last go through Lydia’s brain like Mr Spock processing info bytes.
  • Lydia hates the modern atonals, John Cage et al. Pleads for the younglings to invest emotionally in the classics.
  • Man, I can’t wait to get to Olive Kerr. In fact, it’s either her girlfriend in the top row up there who’s shooting this or someone in Max’s support/political group, whatever the fuck that is.
  • Okay, here’s the Olive Kerr thing: one, consider the audience arrangement, John. And I’m really asking because I don’t know if you’ve ever given a master class. Because Lydia really, really pays attention to who’s sitting in front. Mostly it’s girls, and girls of a particular type she finds attractive. Fresh, bright, round faced. And she’s got aural instincts! And she’s a composition student!
  • Without breaking her stride, she subtly shifts her talk toward connecting, in subtle but undeniable ways, with Olive. Some people find this creepy. Some people are gwilo morons. I talk about this subtlety in the “The God Drug Tribe” so stay tuned.
  • When Lydia decides she’s given up on Max, which is early but not too, it’s then she goes all out lesbo commando. I mean, superhot in a Waldorf teacher kind of way!? Manages to bait Max and enchant Olive in the same breath! I know, I know the kid was humiliated but he sooo had it coming.
  • One more! This is the second time Asians are shown in a clear and lengthy shot. And in a strangely apt position. Field uses Asians like David Mamet uses Asians in The Spanish Prisoner, and that’s okay.

RULES OF THE GAME

  • All that talk about composer-muse Alma Mahler leaving Gustav Mahler for architect-and-founder-of-the-Bauhaus-movement Gropius and there goes Lydia back to her Bauhaus apartment in Berlin.
  • Oh, and remember the character who’s at the center of Renoir’s 1939 movie, The Rules of the Game? Octave the failed conductor. Played by the director himself.
  • Metoprolol! breathes the woman who was hospitalized twice for congestive heart failure, the first time at Hospital Eugenio Espejo, Quito.
  • Who Killed Cock Robin? sings Petra loudly. It was the sparrow with his bow and arrow, don’t you know? Klezmer. Sheesh.

VITA’S NOVEL

  • The book is Vita Sackville-West’s novel, Challenge. It was Lydia’s gift to Krista, who has returned it.
  • The love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita is the kind of story that helps define you, if you’re a high-minded yet passionate lesbian who needs to have those two facets of your personality merge in a single narrative. Challenge is Vita’s love letter to Virginia, and a challenge. It’s about a dynamic artist-hero named Julian who claims a beautiful artist-heroine named Eve to be by his side as together they scale the Parnassus of Art. It’s filled with prose like this:
[T]he poet, the creator, the woman, the mystic, the man skirting the fringes of death—were they kin with one another and free of some realm unknown, towards which all, consciously or unconsciously, were journeying? Where the extremes of passion (he did not mean only the passion of love), of exaltation, of danger, of courage and vision—where all these extremes met—was it there, the great crossways where the moral ended, and the divine began? Was it for Eve supremely, and to a certain extent for all women and artists—the visionaries, the lovely, the graceful, the irresponsible, the useless!—was it reserved for them to show the beginning of the road?
  • Vita cast herself as Julian and Virginia as Eve. Lydia went through some cost and effort to find this 1923 first edition to give to Krista. Lydia cast herself as Julian. Remember that when you see that dream sequence late in the movie, that’s a memory of when things went waaay the wrong way and the deepest part of Lydia’s wasn’t just challenged, it was threatened. Drawing the curtain here.

Next: The God Drug Tribe

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Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah and Filipinos Will Save Western Music, Part 3

Ever forward, hope to finish by the end of the week.

Part 1: Playing to the New York Crowd; Kavanah and Teshuvah in the Kabala; That Fantastic Red Handbag; We All Know That Conductors Hate Sopranos; Lunch With Elliot, or Tosker, Man!

Part 2: The Master Class; The Rules of the Game; Vita’s Novel

In Part 3:

  • The God Drug Tribe
  • Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) and Olga Metkina (2002?-????)
  • John Mauceri and the You-Don’t-Belong-Here Blues

THE GOD DRUG TRIBE

  • Shipibo-Conibo, of course. But first I want to tell you about my first musicology professor, Dr Johannes Riedel (1913-1993). What do he, I, and the tribe all have common? Ecuador.
  • When Dr Reidel was about 25 or so and in school in Berlin, he found out he was about to be deported back to his native Poland, which would’ve been bad for him of course, but for his young wife Judith as well, who surely would’ve ended up in Auschwitz. So to save his wife from being murdered in the ovens, he took a job in a faraway Catholic high school on the coast of Ecuador, teaching choir while studying the region’s Hispanic-based music in preparation for his longed-for-in-the-distance postgraduate work, hopefully in a free country.
  • When I met Dr Reidel I was 14, in a citywide high-school student arts program run by the city of Minneapolis, they were that rich in those days. The Minnesota Opera. The Minnesota Orchestra. Skrowaczewski, man! In college, my dorm (F only) was right across the common from Northrop Auditorium, so I ushered every week to get into the concerts free. Skrowaczewski brought us Karol Szymanowski’s Song of the Night.
  • I wish you and I had been in the Urban Arts Program together John, conductor of my heart. We would’ve had such fun together.
  • But back to the Shipibo-Conibo. More than once while Mister Grumble and I were hanging out in the Mariscal we’d run into hippie backpackers who’d ask us if we knew where the tribe with the god-drug—ayahuasca—could be found. When we told them they’d have go down south, way south, most of them balked and opted just to score crappy weed from the local dealers, which ironically all came down from Mexico anyway.
  • So—ayahuasca+the Shipobo-Conibo is a known thing among the heads among us, one of whom is, at it turns out, Lydia Tár herself.
  • LYDIA IS A HEAD—AND A HEALER. Pay close attention to how she treats Sharon’s dickey heart. I know all about this.
  • Pay attention too to her particular awareness of the energies of those people surrounding her, especially the ones she’s attracted to.
  • This is not a topic fit for the gwilo robots in our “civilized” places and Lydia is smart enough to know she’d be derided and condemned if she talked about it. So let me talk about it because I’m nobody so this won’t get back to me.
  • Ayahuasca is a psilocybin that comes in liquid form. Under close supervision by a shaman (that guy in the photo and in her dreams), you drink it from a bowl and it makes you throw up all the bad stuff in your body/spirit. Then when you’re nice and clean the channels are open and you are confronted with not only your true self, but the Divine.
  • This confrontation can break lesser minds but Lydia has a great, strong mind. I can understand her desire to share her experience with those she considered her equals, going up the Ucayali with Francesca and Krista. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for her. Some rivers you have to travel alone.

more soon…

Next: The Bernstein Tapes

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Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah and Filipinos Will Save Western Music, Part 4

Copy to come…

Part 1: Playing to the New York Crowd; Kavanah and Teshuvah in the Kabala; That Fantastic Red Handbag; We All Know That Conductors Hate Sopranos; Lunch With Elliot, or Tosker, Man!

Part 2: The Master Class; Rules of the Game; Vita’s Novel

Part 3: The God Drug Tribe; Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) and Olga Metkina (2002?-????); John Mauceri and the You-Don’t-Belong-Here Blues

In Part 4:

coming…

copy to come…

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Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, Sung by Anna Moffo (1964) and Played by the Sinfonia of London (2022), Conducted by John Wilson

One of these is a true vocalise, sung by soprano Anna Moffo and conducted by the legendary Leopold Stokowski.

The other is a strictly instrumental vocalise (which is perfectly all right, Rachmaninoff wrote it for instruments, too) played by the Sinfonia of London, conducted by my bonny John Wilson.

By the way John, if it were in your power to enter the mind and body of any orchestra conductor who ever lived—while they were conducting a particular piece at a particular time and place—who would be that conductor? and what would be the piece, and where and when?

(This is mine. Bernstein—Berlin—Beethoven—Reunification)

Save your answer for when we actually meet.

And Happy New Year to you over in Berlin at Circus Roncalli, my love.

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“Bird Songs at Eventide” by Eric Coates, Sung by Kathryn Rudge, Just for My Bonny 2022 Gramophone Award Winner, John Wilson

John mi vida, white-hot flame of my heart: In celebration of your latest award, I’m serenading you tonight with a song I know you know, because you’ve played it and I’ve sung it, and somewhere in that magical Music Room out there, you and I are playing and singing it together.

My John Wins Another AwardAbove John, his award, and a Chandos exec: Eric Coates’s enduring 1926 sheet music hit, “Bird Songs at Eventide” sung by Liverpool-born mezzo Kathryn Rudge, played by RAM professor James Baillieu.

Here also are the lyrics, which were written by the father of your old housemate: 

Over the quiet hills 
Slowly the shadows fall; 
Far down the echoing vale 
Birds softly call; 
Slowly the golden sun 
Sinks in the dreaming west; 
Bird songs at eventide 
Call me to rest.

Love, though the hours of day 
Sadness of heart may bring, 
When twilight comes again 
Sorrows take wing; 
For when the dusk of dreams 
Comes with the falling dew, 
Bird songs at eventide 
Call me to you.

~Harry Rodney Bennett (1890-1948), writing as Royden Barrie

Listen to John’s new orchestra the SINFONIA OF LONDON here

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