Word: albums
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Cloar realized: "For the first time in my life, I was homesick." Cloar began a long voyage home, a year later was back in Arkansas. "I tried to imagine how things seemed to me when I was a child," he says. He found his mother's old picture album a rich lode to mine. Setting up his studio in nearby Memphis, Cloar painted My father was big as a tree, recording his boyhood image of his looming (200 Ibs., 6 ft. 1 in.) father, Charlie Cloar. Arrival of the Germans in Crittenden County, if they won the war they...
Vintage Rotgut. For those who want to hear the original version, there is a new Threepenny Opera album in German (Vanguard), fascinating largely because it shows how difficult it is for vintage rotgut to travel. The "chamber orchestra" of the august Vienna State Opera bravely buckles down to the hurdy-gurdy score with its plinky-plink banjos, but it is played with excruciating slowness. The star is a charming Viennese nightclub chanteuse named Liane, who sounds less like Polly Peachum than an operetta shopgirl mooning over an archduke. The record does have its high spots, notably the duet between...
...other Weill musicals that are virtually unknown in the U.S., most of them close echoes of Threepenny Opera tunes. Composer Weill (who died in the U.S. in 1950) grew lyrical, sentimental and popular in such musicals as Lady in the Dark and Lost in the Stars. But in this album he is still the unreconstructed composer of gutter nihilisms. In one ditty. Singer Lenya is a bitter, jilted girl who snarls at her indifferent lover: "Take that pipe out of your kisser, you dog!" In the chilling Berlin Requiem she sings the horrifying vision of a drowned girl whose body...
...Masters (Bing Crosby; Decca, 3 LPs). The sequel to Crooner Crosby's last Decca album, consisting of original recordings made between 1934 and 1949. The title is a bit pretentious for even such a yellowed parchment as Crosby, but it does contain some rare items, e.g., Dear Old Girl, Someday, Sweetheart, It's the Dreamer...
...case there is any doubt just what a conductor is good for, Columbia has released a fascinating and informative album called The Birth of a Performance. The music is Mozart's "Linz" Symphony (No. 36) and the star is Conductor Bruno Walter, 79. Three of the four sides are devoted to rehearsal (the fourth is the finished performance), with Walter's kindly voice correcting, explaining, singing (off key), completely unaware that he is being recorded...