My following book reviews first appeared over the past few years in an alternative tabloid publication in Hamilton. Perhaps reading the following paragraphs will tempt you to visit your local independent bookstore and to check them out there. Here’s Part VI:
1.)Like a sacred text of any religion, the religion here being classical music, The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2008 invites anyone, from devout believer to potential convert, to come forth and experience anew the nuanced profundity of spirit. Fortunately, the tone herein, although imbued with the writers’ erudite and fanatical dedication, is one of objective consideration that acknowledges variety in individual preferences. One may be a believer in classical music, it is further implied, but one has a responsibility to explore composers and styles as yet unheard, to compare interpretations, and above all to go forth with informed ears and hearts, thanks to the Penguin Guide, and listen and hear and listen again. I’ve been referring to the Penguin Guide since times B. C. (before compact disc) and can’t imagine doing without.
The current edition begins with Adam, of the Giselle ballet, and ends on page 1588 with one recording of Symphony 2 by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich -and there’s an issue. With the editors’ goal to provide sufficient evaluation of each named recording, you won’t, of course, find every worthy classical recording included here. Thus, even acknowledged cornerstones like Schnabel’s complete Beethoven Sonatas on EMI or Toscanini’s take on Verdi’s Falstaff, must be found in previous editions. On the other hand, this guide does include many lower-priced discs that allow one to create a substantial library without going into debt, most often thanks to the Naxos label. The writing speaks to both professional and novice –and delights as it informs Try this summation of the Takacs Quartet recording of the Bartok String Quartets: “ (They) bring to these masterpieces the requisite virtuosity, tonal sophistication and command of idiom. These are full-blooded accounts of enormous conviction, with that open-air quality which suggests the fragrance of the forests and lakes of Hungary.” Such writing not only inspires one to listen, but also to develop one’s musical knowledge -and oneself- for more sensitive and acute understanding.
2.)The Eighth Edition of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings also, at 1534 pages, weighs heavy; this makes sense since it contains reviews of 14, 000 CDs. Many entries include a sometimes too succinct but helpful biography and all follow the Penguin approach of designating one to four stars with half stars allowing for finer points. One plus is that 2,000 new discs are reviewed in this edition with more than 400 new artist listings, so a noble effort is made to be up to date. As well, the writing is informed as to each recording’s stature in an artist’s career, plus the artist’s historical impact, stylistic achievements, and aesthetic clout, and many a time I read passages again for pleasure. Try this piece on June Christy: “(Her) wholesome but peculiarly sensuous voice is both creative and emotive. Her long, controlled lines and the shading of a fine vibrato suggest both a professional’s attention to detail and a tender, solicitous feel for the heart of a song, something that makes the often dark material of her later years the more affecting. Her greatest moments are as close to creating definitive interpretations as any singer can come.”
Concise, evocative, apt –that’s nice. But I am playing The Complete Lester Young Studio Sessions on Verve as I write this and, of course, feel the critical entry on the same recording is missing some, though not all, Zen possibility. And I remember Oscar Peterson explaining to me how most critics presume to know the inside track but in truth miss the boat, remember Oscar’s friend and bassist Ray Brown answering my question as to the purpose of critics with a quickly-retorted, “Critics, we’re just happy if they get the tunes right.” But, for all that, this volume is essential and I will be consulting its pages many times. (By the way, Lester Young is now singing, on a rare recorded occasion, and Margaret, walking by says, “Lester sounds like Jackie (Washington).”)
3.)Last of three Penguins, if you check out The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings, you will have one of the true mysteries of music, Robert Johnson, on the cover staring out at you –and look at those stilt-long fingers that helped make a sound so untouchably itself. Like jazz, blues music inspires passion and invites writers to pass off personal enthusiasm for universal truths, but the ensuing dialogue –or is it conflict?- is good for the soul. And the critics in the Penguin Guides do impart much knowledge and much insightful argument to reflect upon as they blend their reasonings into judgment of compelling worth; these are real people feeling the music of which they write.
So automatically I go looking for the entry on Tommy McClennan and realize that, yes, he did “force his vocals in the manner of Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson” and discover that “contemporaries were impressed that such a loud voice could emanate from his diminutive frame.” In the entry of Lucille Bogan, whose sexually-explicit Shave ‘Em Dry sits proud in the raunchy hall of fame, one discovers that “She made her debut recording during Okeh’s session in Atlanta in June 1923, the first time blues was recorded on location in the South…” Yep, this volume will sit beside my CD collection.
So here’s why the Penguin Guides are so popular, chez moi and everywhere. One wants to come away with a fresh perspective on musicians one knows and informed with new information into reconsideration of their work. One wants to be seduced into checking out artists one doesn’t know or, better, challenged in one’s biases, for or against, concerning already known artists, so one won’t become aesthetically lazy. One wants to agree to disagree with writers whose integrity is, as far as possible to tell, beyond reproach and then read someone sharing their passion for music –be it classical, jazz, or blues- with addiction-inspiring enthusiasm. One wants to know more about good music, music of substance and not the clichéd mediocrities that the music industry too often imposes upon us, because we ourselves are as substantial as the depth of the sounds we allow into our ears and minds and emotions.
4.&5)The barbaric destruction of a city’s accumulated character, through indifference or wanton demolition of its buildings, dehumanizes us. We are robbed of a past we once lived in our stores and offices and theatres; we are left to despair over an ugly wasteland of parking lots, especially in our city’s core. Take a look at Gary Evans’ dozen books celebrating, in photographs, Hamilton’s years gone by and realize how people once walked our streets in intimate relation to the buildings around them. Who is it who profits that our civic spirit should die in the ruin of our city?
Christopher Rauschenberg’s Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugene Atget’s Paris (Princeton Architectural Press) shows, of course, how much of that city’s overwhelming charm ensues very often from its remaining unchanged. The 76 pairings of elegantly-reproduced photographs, taken a century apart, illustrate time almost standing still and the impact is haunting. More focused on people actually living their day-to-day lives within their architectural past are Federica D’Orazio’s Rome Then and Now and Peter & Oriel Caine’s Paris Then and Now, both from Thunder Bay Press. Once again vintage photographs are paired with a current viewing of specific locations and I’m reminded over and over why I love to visit each city. Each one is sculpted from its past.
6&7)Two new volumes from The Boston Mills Press, both by Ron Brown, are endlessly fascinating with their exclusive focus (hundreds of photographs) on our own province . Top 100 Unusual Things to See in Ontario includes the eerie Cheltenham Badlands, the fascinating Cryptic Gavestone of Rushes Cemetery, and our “last covered bridge,” located in West Montrose, all within driving distance of Hamilton. Meanwhile, Ontario’s Ghost Town Heritage features over 80 locations, including 10 near Hamilton, Crook’s Hollow near Dundas and Guelph Junction being two. I find the photographs here –now a collapsed roof, now a solitary building remaining from an entire village, now an unpainted wooden wall blackened with time- seductive, unsettling, and oozing with history.
8.)The reason for Michael Dirda’s Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism speaks on every page of his Classics for Pleasure in which he considers ninety authors/titles from world literature. These include Lao-tse, Pope, Chekhov, Gorey, Spinoza, Doyle, Beowulf, Stoker, Plutarch, Frazer, Pound, Kierkegaard, Hammett –how’s that for range? Dirda writes with an evocative clarity, an informed but unpretentious delight, and an insightful knack for revealing biographical and cultural detail, all as he admirably structures each four page chapter into something of a new world for his reader. Writing like this invigorates because it blends human smarts, literary passion, and a love for getting each sentence right. I’m delighted, each time, at how much I enjoy a dip into these pages.
9.)Some favourite recent books, that involve the deeper human dimension of creativity, include Parallels and Paradoxes, published by Vintage, a series of conversations between conductor-pianist Daniel Barenboim, a Jew, and Edward Said, a Palestinian academic. It’s subtitled Explorations in Music and Society and it certainly illuminates on many topics. We learn from Barenboim, for example, that in the operas of Wagner, a notorious anti-Semite, “there is not one Jewish character. There is not one anti-Semitic remark.” And, “By knowing your Boulez and your Carter, you see aspects of Beethoven in a different way.” One leaves these pages challenged and invigorated by the authors’ passionate voices that speak their lives, their arts, and their deep concerns for truth.
10.)Testaments Betrayed by novelist-essayist Milan Kundera, from Harper Collins, is an eloquent defense of creative individuals like Kafka, Stravinsky, Hemingway, and Rushdie, who were subjected to misguided interpretation by others and, as a result, had their artistic rights and creative integrity abused or compromised. Critical opinion is too often a case of presumption without qualifications and Kundera here convinces that the artist, not the critic or any outsider, knows best. A culture must respect its artists’ sincere intentions.
11.)Some years ago, the custodian of the Franz Schubert apartment museum in Vienna shook with emotion as she told me, “Schubert was very, very poor when he was alive.” I remembered her passionate sorrow while reading Michael Steen’s The Lives & Times of the Great Composers, published by Oxford or Icon, which shows in genuinely distressing detail the horrid conditions, both social and personal, in which many of our culture’s musical masterpieces were created. We sometimes forget in our concert hall chatter that in this music real lives are speaking.
12.)Although critical consensus deems some of the Shakespearan productions at Stratford this season misguided, check out Frank Kermode’s essential Shakepeare’s Language, published by Penguin, which provides an incisive and enlightening account of the Bard as writer. Kermode, whom I’ve found elsewhere to be unnecessarily obscure, here clearly charts Shakespeare’s dramatic development from a classically influenced style to a versatile one that poetically reflected individual psychology in memorable lines. Thus he helps us to find the human within the Bard. Kermode’s consideration of passages in Shakespeare that make no apparent sense, then and now, is especially fun.
13.)My favourite books this month include Canadian Paintings, Prints and Drawings (Firefly Books), a visually impressive, oversized volume by Anne Newlands of the National Gallery of Canada. Each of 164 artists, native included, from the 17th century up to today, gets one vivid reproduction and a text of one page in which Newlands concisely blends involved aesthetic evaluation, helpful historical and geographical context, and insightful biographical gems all to demonstrate each individual life process. I especially enjoy Newlands’ literary smarts at blending information to make each painting and its artist into an event, but I did smile at the inclusion of Harold Town’s quotation, “I paint to defy death.” Every time I visited Harold, with whom I collaborated on several books, he’d be working on several projects at one time, not defying death, I suspect, but just because his creative imagination allowed him no rest.
14&15.)In 1935, the population of Ethiopia, which I haven’t visited, was 15 million; today it is 75 million. I learned this astounding fact in The Africa Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the Continent, published by Lonely Planet. When the government of Kenya, which I have visited, recently legislated free primary education for all, one 84 year old donned school uniform shorts and, hard of hearing, sat in the front row so that he might first learn to read, then read the Bible, and then prove his preacher wasn’t following it. In other words, this oversized book, and its companion volume The Asia Book, which includes the Middle East, combine essential information about Landscape, People, History, the economy and much else in six richly illustrated pages per country and always with a human touch that brings each country to flavourful life. We are outsiders to most of the world and these two volumes help to break down many shut doors of our own ignorance –unless, of course, one is president of the USA and flaunts that ignorance.