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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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My First Music: “My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair” by Joseph Haydn, Sung by Joan Sutherland with Richard Bonynge at the Piano, 1970

Smile as you will at this mincing little ditty but it got me a medal at the Tri-State Vocal Competition of 1969 when I was fourteen. Go Minnesota!

Joan Sutherland Richard Bonynge.jpgAustralian-born conductor Richard Bonynge and soprano Joan Sutherland; they married in 1962.

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John Wilson Conducts the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra in Barber, Delius and Ravel, July 2021

Recorded at the Duke’s Hall, Royal Academy of Music, 2 July 2021. Found the donation window, incidentally. Back in January, 2020 after we heard John conducting them in Tchaikowsky I said to Mister Grumble, ‘That was as good as any small-city orchestra in the US. I’d’ve paid cash money for this,’ and darned if the RAM didn’t just make my life a little easier. Here it is.

Chocolate kisses for my John and a promise to teach him how to make s’mores when the time is right. Above: 2 July 2021 concert at the RAM, in full.

To continue from my earlier posting, “My Beloved John Wilson Appointed to the Henry Wood Chair of Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music and Conducts the RAMSO in Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Verklärte Nacht’ (1899) at Snape Maltings, 6 June 2021”: We talked over beers, Mister Grumble and I, about John’s energy, among other things, a couple of weeks ago. After we toasted Bloomsday, he gave me his take on John and John’s music. Mister G isn’t as enamored of John Wilson’s enormous and varied repertoire—from Broadway tunes to Rachmaninoff to Turnage—as I am, but he has many good things to say about my beloved conductor’s basic character. I described to him (my angel baby is blind) how differently John looks and acts when he’s with the RAM, or the Sinfonia of London or the Royal Northern Sinfonia. Less tense, more in control, more in his element—happier. Plus he doesn’t sweat as much as on the stage of the Royal Albert. ‘Then this is where he belongs,’ said Mister Grumble.

EXTRA! Download PDF of Feb 2020 issue of Gramophone with John’s interview that mentions the Sinfonia of London here.

Program:

Cassandra Wright, soprano

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Four (and More) by Richard Rodgers: “Slaughter On Tenth Avenue”; “Can’t You Do a Friend a Favor?”; “Falling In Love With Love”; and “I Have Dreamed” All For My Beloved English Conductor, John Wilson

Another weekend doddle before we celebrate the Fourth (Yanks 1-Brits 0). (Updated October 2021)

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Maria Ewing (1950-2022) Gives Richard Strauss’s Salome the Full Monty and Sings “Bali Ha’i” Exotically with The JWO, Just for My Beloved English Conductor, John Wilson

There are 3 naked ladies in this blog. This is one of them.

“I’m not given to displays of emotion, but when Maria and I met up again [to record the R+H album] we had tears in our eyes. She’s so exotic!” enthused my bonny conductor about this Detroit-born soprano. “I love her—as a person!” Yes, John. I’d love to hear more.

Maria Ewing in SalomeAbove proudly nude Salome in the 1991 Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera directed by Ewing’s husband at the time, Sir Peter Hall: “Bali Ha’i” sung by soprano Maria Ewing in the compilation Rodgers & Hammerstein At the Movies, with The John Wilson Orchestra, conducted by John Wilson (Warners, 2011).

About the DVD recording of Salome, says Toronto blogger John Gilks in Opera Ramblings: “The production is really pretty conventional… Almost all the visual interest revolves around Ewing’s Salome though Michael Devlin’s scantily clad and palely made up Jochanaan is quite arresting too. Narraboth (Robin Legate) is an unremarkable actor and Herod (Kenneth Riegel) and Herodias (Gillian Knight) look uncomfortably like a couple of drag queens… The recording, directed by Derek Bailey, is about what one would expect from a 1992 BBC TV broadcast… This is probably worth having a look at as a record of an iconic performance by Ewing but I can’t imagine anyone would choose it as the definitive Salome.”

Here’s another exotic nude, just for my beloved John Wilson.

And the third and best, which you can find in the posting, “Cantara Christopher in Sadie (Bob Chinn director, Mitam Productions, 1980) as Indexed in the Database of the British Film Institute; and ‘Pictures of Lily’ by Pete Townshend”.

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Conductor John Wilson Among the Women of Glyndebourne’s Cendrillon by Jules Massenet, 2019

At the intermission talk with Cendrillon‘s director Fiona Dunn, my beloved John Wilson, mezzo Kate Lindsey, and soprano Danielle de Niese, the topic of debate was, What should Prince Charming look like in the 21st century?

AVAILABLE NOW: The Glyndebourne production of CENDRILLON streamcast at Marquee.tv

John Wilson Glyndebourne 1Above John at Glyndebourne, 2019: “Vous êtes mon prince charmant” from Act III of Massenet’s comic opera.

Says John to the lovelies (here pictured): “I think having Prince Charming as Massenet stipulated, it fits beautifully within the whole kind of sonic picture of the whole thing. It’s not a piece that you could say fits on one musical plane, it’s got lots of colors. It’s one of the most colorful pieces he ever wrote… When I said I was doing this piece to people, they would say, Oh yeah, that’s a nice light sort of sweet little piece. It’s not a sweet little piece, it’s a big piece, there’s always another layer to get to and there’s always more detail to explore, always more depth every time. It’s not lightweight…”

EXTRA! The most John Wilsonish piece in Cendrillon.

“Marche des princesses”
from Cendrillon, Act IV
Jules Massenet, composer
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Neville Marriner, conductor
Capriccio, 1997

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Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella Starring Julie Andrews, CBS-TV 1957

We all need a visit from the Empress of Delight every so often. So—here she is in all her youthful splendor, about to be kissed by handsome Jon Cypher.

Julie Andrews, Jon Cypher in Cinderella 1957Above Dame Julie and her Prince Charming: The entire audio of R+H’s 1957 original TV musical, Cinderella.

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Clare Teal, Sarah Fox, Caroline O’Connor and Charles Castronovo at the 2011 BBC Proms with My Beloved John Wilson and The John Wilson Orchestra

There were some particularly strong singers in the BBC Proms concert at the Royal Albert back in 2011 I take pleasure in remembering, on this gray Monday two days before The Inauguration. “Serenade” from The Student Prince was one of my mother’s favorite numbers, she just thrilled to it, especially when Mario Lanza was singing. “Can’t Help Singing” was in my Deanna Durbin Songbook when I was a teenager. “The Man That Got Away” was sung at my friend’s funeral—the friend who left me all his Andre Previn records—by his grieving lover. And then there’s “Secret Love”.

John Wilson Orchestra, 2011John you cad, we all witnessed this nifty bit of scene-building. But I already knew anyway, that’s where your true love lies now and forever.

COMPLETE downloadable audio of the BBC Proms 2011 concert John Wilson and The John Wilson Orchestra “Hooray for Hollywood” here / complete video on YT here

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Venera Gimadieva Sings Salammbo’s Aria by Bernard Herrmann, Backed by The John Wilson Orchestra (BBC Proms, 2013)

Gimadieva made her UK debut at the Proms with John and the John Wilson Orchestra in their program Hollywood Rhapsody, which included pieces by my favorite screen composer Bernard Herrmann. I’ve been a fairly knowledgeable fan of Herrmann since my teen years, but somehow I never got around to hearing the entire aria until—yes! yes! are you getting bored hearing this again?—I fell in love totally and completely with English conductor John Wilson and craved to hear all the music that he is part of. To my delight, he backed this brilliant singer well.

I'd be jealous except she's such a wonderful singerAbove my bonny John making nicey-nice with a soprano for once: “O cruel!” (Salammbo’s aria) from the film Citizen Kane. Herrmann planned to write an entire opera based on this scandalous Flaubert novel but, daunted by the task, as Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff before him, never got around to it.

And for good measure, here’s Gimadieva doing Donizetti’s “O luce di quest anima” with The Hallé the way I’d like to have sounded in my last trimester jury at music school.

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John Wilson and The John Wilson Orchestra at the BBC Proms, the Royal Albert Hall, 26 August 2013: The Complete Concert of Hollywood Rhapsody Including “Casablanca”

Disappointing to hear that John won’t be doing Britten’s The Turn of the Screw at Wilton’s Music Hall in London this month. So, to cheer everybody up, here’s the full 2-hour program of my John and The John Wilson Orchestra at the Proms, 2013. That’s Jane Monheit, John, and Matt Ford below.

Catch the entire Hollywood Rhapsody at the BBC 2013 Proms here

And what the hell, here are ALL the other, complete JOHN WILSON AT THE BBC PROMS available on my blog:

John Wilson Orchestra BBC Proms 2011 (Monheit, Ford)

The full program of 2013 (with remarks as they come to me):

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