I would subtitle this "Another LP From the Closet," except that since we moved in 2022 my LPs are no longer stuffed inconveniently into a closet, but are now out on shelves in full view and easily accessible. Metaphorically the subtitle is still applicable, as I thought of it as referring to pop/rock/whatever LPs that I have owned for many years--since the '60s, some of them--but haven't listened to in this century, perhaps not since the 1970s.   

This is one that I can't recall having heard since the early '70s. It was released in 1969, and I once spent several weeks of isolation and idleness with only a few books and records, of which this was one, and so heard it a lot. Of those few records, there were at least a couple that I didn't like at all, further limiting my choice. That was when I first heard Grand Funk Railroad, and couldn't understand why they were so popular. The music resembled superficially some of the hard rock bands of the late '60s--they were a trio like Cream, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience--but to my ears they just sounded thin and colorless. They became a sort of sign for me that the '60s were ending.

But I liked Your Saving Grace very much. One look at the cover tells you that the '60s were certainly not over for the Steve Miller Band. Well, they weren't over for anybody in 1969, obviously. But you know what I mean.

It's an eclectic album, if you want to be generous, or a jumble, if you don't. I think the band's personnel were somewhat in flux at the time. There are several pretty straightforward bluesy rock songs, more blues than rock--this was definitely not an entry in the "hard rock" contest that was currently being won by Led Zeppelin--and Grand Funk Railroad. The instrumentation is light and supple, almost jazzy, with a strong acoustic element. But it was two songs that were not rock at all that I most liked. One was a slow dreamy treatment of the folk hymn "Motherless Children," a bit "psychedelic" in that it included some electronic effects.

The other was "Baby's House," which prompts some non-musical reflection. Today's cultural-political left owes a great deal to the twin forces of rebellion in the '60s, the hippie counter-culture and the Marxist left. There was a lot of overlap between them, in the end a fusion, but they weren't always identical. There was always in the hippie culture an emphasis on the natural, seen as a healthy alternative to industrial civilization. And for at least some hippies that included a very healthy regard for having children as a good and natural thing. That's often forgotten now that the left has coalesced into something that is grimly and loudly committed to  abortion as the essential right guaranteeing the unlimited personal freedom which was also a hippie ideal. 

As testimony that it wasn't all always and altogether that way, "Baby's House" is an open and to my mind beautiful celebration of love and fertility. The house of the title is both the place where the woman lives and the womb in which the life of her child begins. The piece is long for a pop song--right around eight minutes--and the arrangement is certainly unusual. It's mostly twelve-string guitar, piano, and organ. Drums come in at a couple of points for drama, but are silent through most of the track. I think I hear bass guitar in that long fade-out. Much of the credit for the arrangement sure goes to keyboardist Nicky Hopkins, famous for his session work with many artists. He's also given songwriting credit along with Miller.

I can't think of anything comparable in the pop music of the time. I suppose it must have been occasioned by events in Steve Miller's own life, but have no idea whether that's actually the case or not. And as for our time--well, let me know if you know of anything as naively romantic and life-affirming. 

What do I think of the album now? Well, I still like it, but, as I said of R.E.M.'s Murmur a few weeks ago, it doesn't move me as it once did. I'll repeat what I said about Murmur: hearing it again "was a bit like running into someone who had been at one time a good friend but whom you haven't seen for a long time, and realizing that you don't really have a lot to say to each other anymore. Nothing especially negative, no hostility, just a certain distance."

But "Baby's House" and "Motherless Children" are worth coming back to now and again, as is the final and title track.

Quite a few years ago, though within this century, I heard this concerto performed live. As I recall, I didn't have a strong reaction to it, which was disappointing, because I had expected, being a great lover of some of Sibelius's symphonies, to like it very much. And though I don't remember it well at all and I don't recall having listened to it since then, I assumed it would reasonably have a place in this tour of great Romantic violin concertos that I began a while back. First it was just the Germans: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, and Brahms, in response to a remark by the famous 19th century violinist Joseph Joachim in which he compared them, calling the Mendelssohn "the heart's jewel." Those done, I included other Romantic concertos: Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and now Sibelius.

Or what I thought to be Romantic concertos: the Sibelius, I discovered immediately, really doesn't belong with the others. "Post-Romantic" or even "early Modern" would be more accurate. This is a somewhat strange work. I listened to it once and, as with that long-ago concert performance, felt that I had heard quite a bit of music, most of which, apart from a few lovely melodies, had swept by leaving little impression.

Then I listened to it again, and it began to open up somewhat. Then once more, and I really enjoyed it. On a fourth hearing (all these over a period of two or three weeks) I was totally carried away, getting up out of my comfortable listening chair, walking around the room excitedly and muttering about how great it was. (I would have said "jumping up" out of my chair, but I'm not really capable of that anymore. In my mind I jumped.)

Compared to the others, this concerto is darker--brooding, uneasy, restless, often stormy. The first movement is intense, with shifts of tone, tempo, and mood that may be part of the reason why it seems different structurally, from the others--less conventionally ordered, though certainly not chaotic. The violin itself is often electrifying, especially in a sort of cadenza that occurs well before its usual place toward the end of a concerto. 

I listened, as I sometimes do, with a pad and pen handy for jotting down impressions for a future blog post, and among those jottings is the phrase "cry or scream." Some pop music fans may recognize that from the Dire Straits song "Sultans of Swing," which says of a chord-oriented jazz guitarist that "he doesn't care to make it cry or scream." Well, Sibelius, in the hands of David Oistrakh, very definitely makes it cry and scream (more about the recording in a moment).

The orchestra is prominent, often featuring very powerful brass. I was reminded of Mahler at several points. The movement ends in a way that I can only describe as "punchy." Instead of the drawn-out finale so typical of 19th century orchestral works, this one comes quickly: it's full-on until the very end, which comes abruptly in two loud chords. 

Mahler came to mind again in the second movement. Yes, it's an adagio, as usual, but most of it's not pretty and serene. I wrote "hesitant" and "questioning." And again the word "uneasy" comes to mind. But it does end peacefully.

During the third movement, I wrote only "totentanz" and "scary harmonics." If the concerto as a whole should be described as a bit strange, this movement is the decidedly strange part. "Totentanz," as you probably know, means "death-dance" in German, which I only know because it turns up in other 19th century contexts, though offhand I can't tell you where. (Liszt, maybe?) It certainly seems to be a sort of dance, and it struck me as a dark one. It's followed by sunnier passages. The ending is exhilarating, similar to that of the first movement, brief, pointed, and somehow joyful. 

As for the scary harmonics--I'm referring to what I think of as high notes with a sort of whistling sound, which I think are not natural tones but, if they're like harmonics on the guitar, made by touching a string but not pressing it down. At any rate, in the context of this movement, they sounded wild, almost deranged, breaking out in the midst of the death-dance as if trying to jack up the somewhat frenzied atmosphere.

I generally try not to read anything about an unfamiliar work before getting acquainted with it directly, without too many prejudices or expectations. So I avoided reading the liner notes on the LP until after that fourth hearing. I had wondered if I was making too much of, or even making up entirely, the dark quality of that third-movement dance. No, it's not just me:

It is undoubtedly an exciting dance, far showier than the other movements, but there is a curious unease beneath the wild prancing.... Sibelius himself referred to the movement as a danse macabre. 

The notes are credited to Bill Parker, whose name I don't recognize. 

Like much of Mahler's work, this concerto seems caught between the 19th and 20th centuries, as if looking over a wall separating them, with a view of the other side which is indistinct but which makes him uneasy. I was surprised to learn that it was written soon after the Second Symphony, which is very much in the Romantic tradition and, as far as I recall (haven't heard it for a while) pretty conventional.

This is the recording I have, and the only one I listened to:

This is not, however, the cover of my edition, which is ugly, featuring a very grim bust of Sibelius, with closed eyes, looking like a death mask. Back in the '60s Angel Records had some kind of distribution deal with Melodiya, the official Soviet recording company (if "company" is the right word). There were a lot of these joint-venture LPs around then. As best I can tell from Discogs, this performance was originally issued by Melodiya in 1965, with the Angel/Melodiya edition coming out in 1967. Somehow it made its way onto the budget label Quintessence in 1982, and that's the edition I have. In spite of the unattractive cover, it's a gem. The sound is fantastic and to my ears so are the orchestra and soloist. I don't recall having heard the conductor's name before. Even the liner notes are very good, which is unusual with budget labels. As with the Dvorak and Tchaikovsky concertos, I felt, and feel, no need to seek out another performance. 

The back cover, by the way, quotes a 1968 reviewer in High Fidelity as saying that Oistrakh's playing "risks, but always misses, technical disaster," and is a "virtuoso flirtation with danger." Doesn't sound that way to me.

I haven't listened to the two Humoresques that fill out the second side of the LP. When that third movement ends, I don't want to hear any more music for a while. 

I hardly know what to say about this novel. I can say that I did not know what to expect of it, but must immediately contradict that remark by saying that it was not what I expected. Whatever else those very vague expectations may have been, they did not include the combination of realist and visionary qualities that the book actually possesses.

In 1964, just outside of Rome, late in the afternoon of August 9th, a 74-year-old man and a 19-year-old boy find themselves thrown together by a need and desire to walk 70 kilometers (over 40 miles). The old man, Alessandro, is the title character, the soldier. Alessandro is a professor "of aesthetics." I'm not sure exactly what that means in practice--a sort of generalist of the arts, a critic without boundaries, and a theorizer, I suppose. The boy, Nicolo, works in a factory making airplane propellers and is vastly ignorant. He doesn't even know that the Great War, the First World War, happened, and is curious about it. The old man doesn't really want to talk about it, except in general historical terms. 

Alessandro alternately encourages the boy, berates him for his ignorance and naivete, or provokes him with cryptic remarks. When Nicolo, piqued at Alessandro's refusal to answer a question about the war, points out that he wasn't "the only one ever to be in a war," Alessandro replies:

"I know, but I survived. That puts me on a lower plane."

"A lower plane?"

"Lower than those who perished. It was their war, not mine."

And he goes on to expand on that remark in a way which only confuses Nicolo.

I found Alessandro a bit annoying, a bit sententious, and for the first hundred pages or so thought I wasn't going to like the book very much: am I going to have 700-plus pages of this old man philosophizing and reminiscing? The conversation takes place amid vivid descriptions of the landscape and the changing light, but no amount of beauty in the setting would keep it from getting tiresome after a few hundred pages.

I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but the phrase "the joy of being alive" has always bothered me a bit.  I'm not sure why this is so, because I am very familiar with the sensation and grateful for it. Perhaps the reason is only that it's something of a cliché, and so no longer really communicates what it says. Or--now that I think about it--maybe it's because I think of it as the voice of someone who has no reason not to be very happy with his circumstances, and if he did have such a reason would probably sing a different tune. At any rate I receive it somewhat cynically. And I thought this book was going to be all about The Joy of Being Alive and The Wisdom of Experience, and that I wasn't going to care much for it. And in fact those descriptors are justified, or at least justifiable, but, being clichés and rather vapid, they would do more harm than good as a commentary.

At a pause in their journey Alessandro's memory makes an excursion into his childhood, to a curious incident involving an Austrian princess at a ski lodge in the Alps. Then, as day breaks after the long night's trek:

The sun rose on the left and turned the glossy leaves of the poplars into a blinding haze of light too bright to behold until the wind coursed through the trees and they began to bend and sway, softening the glare.

Alessandro felt the world take fire. His heart repaired to the past and he barely touched the ground as he walked between trees that now were shimmering in the dawn. No matter that distant thunder is muted and slow, it comes through the air more clearly. After half a century and more, he was going to take one last look. He no longer cared what it might do to him. He just wanted to go back. And he did. 

(I cannot help inserting here that I either don't understand or don't believe that remark about distant thunder, but never mind.)

That's the end of the first of ten fairly lengthy chapters. The next one, "Race to the Sea," won me over, and had me reading the rest of the book eagerly and with great enjoyment. Alessandro's initial return is to his youth, probably around 1908 or so. He is the son of a fairly affluent Roman family, well off but not aristocratic. He is an expert rider with a very fine horse. He learns mountaineering. He's in love with a neighbor girl, and one summer day encounters her as she is about to ride to the seashore. He wants to go with her, but he isn't ready, and she leaves without him. Starting out a half-hour later, he races to get there before her; that's the race of the chapter's title. 

I have been on horseback maybe half a dozen times in my life, for no more than an hour each time, and never at any pace faster than a slow trot (or is canter the right term?). So although (or because?) I have absolutely no experience of wild horseback rides, I found the account of this one exhilarating. At that point I was fully drawn into the narrative, and continued so until it was over. The middle eight of the ten chapters tell the story of Alessandro's youth, his years in the war, and some of the aftermath. The last chapter returns to Alessandro and Nicolo, nearing the end of their long walk.

When I say "the story" I mean to include all the resonances of that term. This is a story in the grand mode, almost the epic mode, except that it is also very naturalistic. It's difficult to believe that the novel was written by someone in his mid-30s who had not (as far as I know*) experienced war, or indeed many of the physical situations described. Both Alessandro's horsemanship and his mountaineering skills prove to be important in his survival of the war. 

Alessandro is a hero, and his heroism--which consists not only of courage, but also of skill and resourcefulness--sometimes strains credulity. But this does not come at the cost of any downplaying of the ugly madness of war, still less any glorification of it. The heroics, and certain other features, such as a number of highly improbable coincidences (one involving that childhood encounter with the Austrian princess), near-miraculous escapes, and moments of implausible good luck, make the book one which can fairly be categorized as a romance: a tale of great adventures with a more or less happy ending for the hero.

I said the story is naturalistic, and it is in its details. At the same time, the coincidences and the supreme good luck sometimes give the story a little of the flavor of magic realism. It could be called whimsy, but that suggests lightness. The whimsy is that of the pagan gods, "who kill us for their sport." (That's from Lear, I think.) There is at the center of many plot turns a mad dwarf who exercises an extraordinary influence on events. He is real, but his actions and his ravings suggest that there is something other than the natural at work. At times it seems that madness is the only plausible explanation of the war, in which some are carried through great danger by courage and luck, only to be undone by something outside their control, perhaps accident or mere coincidence, or, in one case, a soldier's misunderstanding of an order. 

There is a semi-mystical sense of time, fate, and order operating in a meaningful pattern. There is a definite religiosity without any very specific content beyond an enormous sense of wonder and a confidence that beauty means something, and is not just an accident. Countering the madness and influence of the dwarf is a painting by Giorgione, La Tempesta, The Tempest (click here for what I hope is a pretty good reproduction). It is an enigmatic picture, and Alessandro is mildly obsessed with it, seeing some mysteriously ordering principle embodied in it. The principle is mysterious, and the order it produces is mysterious, very often seeming to be no order at all, perhaps more promised than realized. The story is not a tragedy, but it includes a great deal of sorrow. 

I suggest that you read it. I don't think you'll be sorry. 

---

* The few biographical notes that I've read say that Helprin served in the Israeli Defense Forces, but do not mention any combat experience.

By the way, the author is not to be confused with Mark Halperin, the journalist.

Nobody could keep up with all the declared National or International Such-And-Such Days, or Weeks, or Months. But I happened to notice this one, and I took "book" quite literally: as referring not to the content of a book, the words and the ideas or stories or pictures and whatever else may be the abstract thing that is "the book" as distinct from any physical thing that incarnates the book, but an actual material object. 

(Pedantically, I don't say "physical or electronic," because the workings of the latter are just as physical as paper, though they are invisible. This gets in my way sometimes when I want to differentiate with a word or maybe two a paper from an electronic book, or a CD or LP from an MP3.)

Love of the physical book is the reason I'm currently reading this one:

I haven't had it for very long and have already forgotten where I got it. Perhaps at an open-air used-book stall in D.C. the last time I was there; at any rate it was either cheap or free. And I did not need it. I've had a copy of Frost's complete poetry, published after his death and so including In the Clearing, which was his last book, published when he was eighty-eight, for many years and could have read these poems at any time. In fact I have never done much more than scratch the surface of his work, knowing a dozen or two of his best poems very well and hundreds of others not at all. 

But I started reading this one a week or so ago because I wanted to handle the book itself. I think I can say with some confidence that this would be a very bad place to begin one's reading of Frost. It is not, so far, a very good book. It's an odd one, or at least it contains a lot of poems that strike me as very odd, and not so very good. There is, for instance, a poem called "Kitty Hawk" which is fifteen pages of irregularly rhymed three-beat lines, which I have to say was a bit of a trial, and which left me a bit puzzled. The puzzlement may have more to do with the fact that I was reading it in bed and started falling asleep partway through my first reading than with the poem itself (which I did finish the next night), but I'm not much inclined to put more effort into it.

I've read most of it now, and there are a few gems, including one you may remember (I do) from the classroom, "In A Glass of Cider." But on the whole there's just not much here of what makes Frost so highly and rightly regarded. (See this entry at Poems Ancient and Modern for an instance of just how technically skilled he could be while maintaining a very American conversational voice.)

Some great part of my enjoyment of the book is the sort of physical book it is, I mean even apart from its physicality. It's not that I'm any sort of collector or connoisseur--a slightly embarrassing number of my books are library discards, and look it. But I have a particular weakness for books that were published between, say, 1920 and 1960 (1962 in this case): books that constituted adult reading when I was a child and adolescent. And the physical condition of the book doesn't really matter that much. The attraction is a form of nostalgia, containing, I suppose, the memory of something which at the time represented to me maturity and intelligence, a world of which I wanted to be a part. I'm fairly sure I didn't think any such thing at the age of fifteen or so, but it was present as a vague sense of wanting to be a substantial sort of person. To be a grown-up. There's an ideal which seems pretty close to vanishing from our culture. And maybe that knowledge, too, figures into the nostalgia.

And then there are the closing lines of the poem Frost wrote for John F. Kennedy's inauguration, greeting

A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.

Frost did not live to see the savage response of history to that hope, though he did live a few months past Kennedy's assassination, which was a pretty good first serving of what was to come. 

"The piece was written in Clarens, a Swiss resort on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Tchaikovsky had gone to recover from the depression brought on by his disastrous marriage to Antonina Miliukova. "

So says Wikipedia. The poor man. And poor Antonina, too. It seems to be a generally accepted view that Tchaikovsky was homosexual. Whether the marriage was ventured upon as a way of covering up that fact, or he really thought it could work, or she knew and accepted the situation for reasons of her own, I will leave to those who are more interested in the biography than I am. I mention it because one would suppose that the concerto would be deeply melancholy, at least. But it isn't. It isn't exactly sunny, either, but it doesn't come near the heartbreak and gloom of, for instance, the Sixth Symphony. But then, whatever Tchaikovsky felt about the ending of the marriage, it probably wasn't heartbreak. 

In one very broad aspect it resembles the Beethoven and Brahms concertos: its first movement is much longer than the other two, roughly as long as the second and third combined. Maybe there was some sense of what a concerto is supposed to be that plays a part in this, but if it was not unusual it wasn't exactly a convention, either, as Mendelssohn and Bruch and Dvorak didn't follow it. 

The first movement includes two "big tunes," as I think of them: grand, beautiful, memorable, often famous melodies. These are, to put it flippantly, played around with in various ways until there is a climax which brings them together in what the Wikipedia article describes as an "arrival," a good term, and one of those heart-grabbing, possibly tear-jerking, moments which any music lover loves. Not the tears of pathos, but the good tears similar to those produced by eucatastrophe, the term invented (it seems) by Tolkien to describe a sudden unexpected turn for the good in a story. I'm partial to cadenzas, and this one is wonderful, including a passage of those high-pitched whistling tones which I think are harmonics and which must be extremely difficult to play. 

The second movement is a deeply mournful theme, turning into a sort of slow gentle waltz which seems to me to convey resignation. Here, perhaps, is something connected to the marriage. There is no break between the second movement's Andante and the third's Allegro vivacissimo, and I will venture to complain about that. It's too sudden and startling, downright unpleasant in my opinion. I'll get used to it. Or perhaps implement my own pause as I listen to it on CD or MP3. At any rate, if there is any connection between the concerto and the marriage, this movement suggests that the composer got over his distress about the latter. As with the Beethoven, this movement seems a bit of a letdown to me, which seems a possibility built into the dominance of the first movement. 

The recording I listened to is, in fact, on MP3. It's an older one: Isaac Stern, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. As with the Dvorak, I felt no need to investigate other recordings, though I probably will eventually. As best I can tell from Discogs it was originally recorded in 1959, which makes its outstanding sound even more impressive. It's part of the MP3 version of a boxed CD set, a set of boxed sets, called The Original Jacket Collection, this being the Ormandy and Philadelphia box, a 10-CD set, presumably someone's idea of the best work of that conductor and orchestra. Some number of years ago, greater than five and less than twenty, an MP3 version was offered for some ridiculously low price, probably on Amazon, and I grabbed it. It's 104 separate files of absolutely wonderful music. I haven't heard all of it, but I'm sure it's wonderful.