Larry Kart

That would be Teachout's would-be rebuttal IMO.

I haven't seen the play, but trusting Riccardi's research/account as I do, I'll add that, accepting Teachout's fiction-is-fiction point of view for the sake of argument, the fairly complex reality of the Armstrong-Glaser relationship as Riccardi describes it strikes me as potentially far more interesting dramatically than the resolution, as described, of Teachout's play. Also, in the fiction-is-fiction vein -- yes, but when fiction that has a semi-documentary, rooted in historical reality, real people with real names framework is used to make a tendentious point about those people?

It seems to me that almost from the first here Lee's time and swing are very Pres-like (which is hardly news), and that Alan Dawson picks up on that right off, both in his own playing and his "aw yes" facial expression/body language.

Barbara Pym's "Some Tame Gazelle" Robert Bernard Martin's "Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart"

Geez -- You should have taken him to hear Larry Gray.

Just got the Suk-Neumann recording of the two Violin Concerti, plus the Rhapsody for Viola and Orchestra, and have listened to Concerto No. 1. Wow! -- the performance and the music. http://www.amazon.com/NEW-Czech-Neumann-Suk-Martinu-violin/dp/B00000359V/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1433383243&sr=1-1&keywords=martinu+suk+violin Have now listened to the rest. The second movement of Concerto No. 2 is very intense, the orchestral writing especially.

This recording is anathama, at least to me, b/c it features two dear friends, Clarence C. Sharpe and wife China Lynne Perault. They're given the tune of I Got it Bad, but unfortunately Shepp plays an obnoxious obligatto over both the vocal and C's alto solo and ruins the track. Judge for yourselves, Organissmo-ites: I'd say Fasstrack has a point.

Moms -- "let the music speak for itself" is a lazy-ass phrase, but IMO F-D, like Lizzie Blackhead, did often err on the side of fussiness and/or a mannered "lecture/demonstration" mode of interpretation. In Lizzie's case, Walter Legge might have been significantly responsible; supposedly the happy couple thoroughly scoped out most everything she sang beforehand. Again, as I'm sure you know, such cavils about the work of both F-D and Lizzie, right or wrong, have been made quite commonly for many years. BTW, much early F-D, like his St. Matthew Passion with Fritz Lehman and some Bach cantatas from the '50s on EMI, is quite something IMO. Another F-D gem is his Schoeck Notturno with the Juilliard Quartet. The Mozart Flute Concerti are not going to be exciting works in anyone's hands, but this recording is quite stylish IIRC: http://www.amazon.com/Mozart-Flute-Concertos-Nos-Concerto/dp/B0000CDJKB About Kubelik and Martinon, it was mostly the Tribune's Claudia Cassidy who took out Kubelik (she'd earlier done the same with Desire Defauw), and it was board politics plus Martinon's own managerial gaffes, and his basic unsuitability, for all his conductorial gifts, to handle a more or less Germanic orchestra, that did him in.

Moms -- I think we both loathe Alex Ross but even a stopped clock etc. "A Little Late-Night Music" by Alex Ross The New Yorker, August 29, 2005. "A decade ago, the Mostly Mozart Festival, Lincoln Center’s venerable summertime series, was offering some of the dullest concerts in the Western Hemisphere. I remember a performance of Mozart’s Flute Concerto in D, with Jean-Pierre Rampal as the soloist and Gerard Schwarz conducting the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which was positively bureaucratic in its self-satisfied mediocrity, as if it were being piped in from a department of motor vehicles in Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia. I briefly considered abandoning music criticism for cat-sitting." P.S. To support my broader point about Schwarz's work at Mostly Mozart generally not being well regarded, if I know my boy Alex, he wouldn't have been that bitchy about Schwarz if he didn't think that a lot of people agreed with him.

Moms -- If you think that Sandow, crank though he may be, was the only one who had it up there with Schwarz at Mostly Mozart, think again.

FWIW, Greg Sandow on a 1998 Schwarz Mostly Mozart performance of Richard Strauss's version of Mozart's "Idomeneo": And now a word about the performance. Maybe I wish the tenor in the title role had sounded less boyish -- Idomeneo, after all, is a king -- and that he had more strength in his lower range, where much of his music lies. But he sang well, and in any case he and the other singers (Angelika Kirchschlager, Olga Makarina, and Christine Brewer, nicely chosen for the other leading roles) weren’t the problem. What almost killed the evening was the conductor, Gerard Schwarz, who’s been music director of Mostly Mozart for 16 years. In his favor, I can say that he kept the soloists, chorus and orchestra together and moved everything along at the proper speed. But in his hands the music had no line, no motion from place to place. It had no color, only the most routine kind of clarity, and no sense of Mozart’s style. Mr. Schwarz didn’t even breathe or phrase with the singers, giving them no support at all, as if to him they were just some minor element in an otherwise orchestral texture. Sometimes he’d demonstrate his control by emphasizing details -- accented notes, or momentary counter-melodies, all of which seemed pointless in a performance with no tone or shape, no strong contrast between loud music and soft, and sometimes in fast passages (like the final chorus) not much rhythm. Why, I might ask, should someone with so little to offer be entrusted with a major musical event, let alone one that so clearly demands a point of view? But there’s a larger issue. For years, Mostly Mozart hasn’t mattered very much. People bought tickets, and that, it seemed, was all its planners cared about. The performances mostly were routine. Lately, though, Lincoln Center’s programmers, Jane Moss and Hanako Yamaguchi, have revived the artistic spark that created the series in the first place. Within a week, I’ve heard not just "Idomeneo," but heartwarming and deeply original performances by Emmanuel Ax (playing Chopin’s second concerto on a period piano, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) and by the deeply original Latvian-born violinist Gidon Kremer, with an irrepressible ensemble of 20-something string players from the Baltic states, which he calls KREMERata BALTICA. In a festival of this emerging quality, Schwarz -- once known for running chamber orchestras in New York, but now not much respected outside Seattle, where he leads the Seattle Symphony -- wouldn’t be invited to conduct. That he should be music director is, quite simply, astonishing. Wall Street Journal, August 11, 1998

Remember Ralph J. Gleason's idea-proposal (in 1964, I think it was) to have Dizzy run for president? Dizzy's cabinet proposals included IIRC posts for both Mingus (Secretary of Defense) and Miles (CIA director), and Peggy Lee was his choice for Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare "because she always treats her musicians great."

Moms -- Leaving aside the human relations-managerial aspects of Schwarz's time in Seattle, my impression is that as a conductor he was/is a routiner -- and I do own a fair number of his recordings, the William Schuman symphonies set in particular. Terrific trumpeter, though.

Not so much: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/arts/music/16waki.html?_r=0

Thought I should edit the thread title to forestall confusion. Julie Harris the actress died in 2013.

BTW, I see that the Allen Chase who was at Madison when Taylor was there was at the U of W.-Beloit before that time, and is not at Beloit now. Only further mention of him I can find is some pieces he wrote for trombone ensemble.

Just to be clear, the "one Allen Chase" who was in charge of the U. of Wisconsin jazz band at that time and between whom and Taylor, according to John's piece, there "was an undertone of disagreement," was not saxophonist-educator Allan Chase (formerly at NEC, now at Berklee) but trombonist-educator Allen Chase, now at the U. of W.-Beloit. A onetime close musical associate of the late Rashied Ali, Allan Chase, had he been at Madison back then, undoubtedly would have been in Taylor's corner. Further, the Allan Chase who is now at Berklee was age 14 in 1971.

Some explanation of three of the ones I mentioned: Robert Di Domenica's music might be described as a highly personal offshoot of Alban Berg's. There's a profoundly mediative tone to it. Jon Leif's music is, by and large, that of an elemental wildman. Like it or not, you've probably never heard anything like it. I picked Michael Finnissy's piano concerto in part because the soloist is my friend, the brilliant Nicolas Hodges.

Yeah -- that was grim and ugly.

Leave us not forget Sam's brother Abe, who certainly had something going for him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft5Hq92Cesw

Here's one of Most's better than nice (to say the least) Xanadu bands:

Most is a swinger, and all of his Xanadu dates have nice or better bands, but there is something unusual and -- for me in certain moods kind of off-putting -- about the way he actually produces and articulates notes. It's almost as though he's humming or whistling or (to coin a word) "throating" his lines rather than producing them by blowing air through the instrument and working the keys. Sometimes that sounds sort of unfair, if that makes any sense.

Jon Leifs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AQ24wuylqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgn-OlLuldU Alexander Goehr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke008JBWmEE Michael Finnissy:

Robert Di Domenica: http://www.gmrecordings.com/gm2061.htm

Serious answer: Because a good many people in the NYC area, having grown up listening to his show, regard him, to coin a phrase, as a legend in his own time? As a Chicagoan, I used to venerate Daddy-O Daylie, Dick Buckley, and Sid McCoy because they were part of the furniture of my life, but to quote Whitney Balliett (or was it John S. Wilson?) "nostalgia is cheap witchcraft."