Ponte Vecchio

In search of Beethoven

Genius explored. Some interesting scenes with Gianandrea Noseda, Emanuel Ax, Hélène Grimaud. Lots of talk, some rapture. In one set of scenes Maestro Noseda conducts Filarmonica della Scala in Beethoven's Opus 55, Symphony no.3 in E flat major "Eroica" with vim and vigor; when the work ends he kisses the score with Mediterranean passion. In fact, I noted that Mediterraneans showed more passion than others: Hélène Grimaud, playing Opus 73, Piano Concerto no.5 in E flat major "Emperor" shows amazing emotion, near rapture, as she interprets the work.


 Satisfying. Of course, it has a website.

"Can you believe I had to play Bach with a gun?"

Ben Lando for The Wall Street Journal - Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner rehearses with his Iraqi hosts on the Rasheed Hotel's baby grand.

BAGHDAD—Karim Wasfi, director and conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony, was waiting in the lounge of the Rasheed Hotel one recent afternoon for two things: the arrival of a 13-year-old American pianist scheduled to headline a rare concert here; and the Steinway grand he was supposed to play.
The prodigy, Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner, was coming from New York. The piano was coming from the symphony's rehearsal space, just five miles away from the hotel. Mr. Wasfi was more worried about the piano.

 Mr. Wasfi's orchestra has faced many such obstacles. Its predecessor, the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra, started in 1944 and was shut down again and again over the decades by the strains of war, economics or politics. After Saddam Hussein was deposed, in the postinvasion chaos, Mr. Wasfi recalls, instruments were broken, music sheets ripped, a concert hall burned. "It was a grotesque scene," he says.

In the following years, the orchestra often waited until the last minute to reveal concert times to avoid an attack on such a large, high-profile gathering. Mr. Wasfi says he once took to carrying a sidearm for protection. "Can you believe I had to play Bach with a gun?"

Mr. Sanchez-Werner, the young pianist, is also a musician with a mission: "to fulfill my passion of doing things for the world…at a humanitarian level." A Juilliard student, he plans to play in Rwanda this summer, for the second time, and says he will perform at the Kennedy Center next year for the 50th anniversary celebration of the United Farm Workers. He performed at the White House in December.

 Thirteen years old? Quite impressive.

Mr. Wasfi wore coattails for the concert. After closing with Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade," he and Mr. Sanchez-Werner embraced on stage.

Iraq is "a nation that is so wonderful," the pianist says, "but struggled so much it needs to have something like that in which they can participate."

Lamenting The Future Of the Blues

In early May, I traveled to Memphis to attend the Blues Foundation's 31st annual two-day gala, which included its Hall of Fame induction ceremony and awards banquet. Buddy Guy received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Pinetop Perkins, now 96 years old, turned up, as did 80-year-old Bobby "Blue" Bland and 78-year-old Hubert Sumlin. I heard folk blues, country blues, jump blues, Chicago blues, Delta blues, Texas blues, fast blues, slow blues, good blues and bad blues. What I didn't hear was new blues, and I flew back home no less relieved of my own blues over the genre's troubling future.

Got the blues flying bqack from the blues 'cause of the state of the blues.

Today's blues music isn't only steeped in the past; it's anchored to it. During the performances before and during the banquet, I could trace to almost every song, instrumental solo or vocal style I heard its originator or its most celebrated proponent—and I'm far from an expert on the history of the blues. These tales of heartache, oppression and fleeting joy sounded all too familar.
According to Jay Sieleman, the Blues Foundation's executive director, most blues fans aren't looking for something new. "We all don't want the blues to be the same ol', same ol'," he said, "but it'd better be close."

Laying down the law.

The blues establishment seems to have little interest in reaching out to other musical communities. No rock, hip-hop or jazz artists with a musical debt to the blues were part of the activities in Memphis. Perhaps in turn, blues musicians aren't invited to participate in most major rock festivals...

Keep it pure, ensuring it atrophies; well done.

"We're all worrisome about getting a young audience," XM Satellite Radio's Bill Wax said over sweet tea in Memphis. At the same time, though, he said: "I don't believe the blues world looks for the next big thing. We love people who play around with the form, but we don't want people to mess with the tradition."

Nonsense: keep it pure, resist change, and the music will wither away.

For the blues to have a future in which daring artists bring in new listeners, the establishment needs to share the blues with people who have a different idea of what it is. The future can be built on new modes of expression if musicians and fans remember the blues isn't merely a form. It's a feeling. Capture it, as so many artists did in decades past in so many ways, and you're playing the blues, whether it's with a bottleneck, a big band or a studio full of digital effects.

Jason Moran, the gifted jazz pianist who eagerly explores the blues, explains how he connects with a feeling necessary to make authentic music: "I remember saying to an older musician that I wanted to play bebop, and he said, 'You can't. You didn't live in that time.' That really fired me up to think about what was going on in that time to make those musicians play that way."

That's nonsense, that one can't play it if one didn't live in a particular time; that would make all music die.

"The blues is getting to be like an endangered species," Mr. Guy said by phone. "It's like somebody put a spell on it."

Traditionalists closed to change.

As for Mr. Guy, he profited from some outreach when his daughter Shawnna asked him to appear on "Block Music," her 2006 platinum album. "It's a new thing, a different way," Mr. Guy said of the rap-blues marriage. "Like when Muddy put electricity to the harmonica."

Exactly.

Endless Highway

In reviewing the book You don't look like a Librarian, for The Indexer, I came across the group My Morning Jacket. One of the songs in their 2008 CD, Evil Urges, is Librarian. Eager to hear them, I took the one CD that Peninsula Library owns with them, Endless Highway, a tribute to the music of The Band. One other group on the CD that does a nice job with the song Chest Fever is Widespread Panic.

His Writers' Workshop? A Prison Cell

The life of William Sydney Porter came with a twist at the end. The man who achieved fame under the pen name "O. Henry" had spent more than three years in federal prison on embezzlement charges—a secret that he carried to his grave when he died on June 5, 1910. Not even his daughter knew. It took the investigations of a professor, C. Alphonso Smith of the University of Virginia, to unearth the startling truth. Shrewd observers might have guessed that Porter was hiding something. During his decade-long run as one of America's best-loved writers, which included authorship of "The Gift of the Magi," he avoided conversations about his past. He turned down requests for interviews. He dodged cameras. Yet when Smith announced his discovery in 1916, the effect was the opposite of what Porter had feared. Rather than shunning him as a criminal, the public became fascinated by a personal history that might have been lifted from one of his own tales.

I know the name, but not his work. And I seem to remember there is a bar near Union Square, below Gramercy Park, that is named O'Henry. I've been there, maybe when I worked at MetLife. So I went searching on the Web, and found it via Google maps.

Pete's Tavern, on 18th Street and Irving Place, that's the place. Here is the banner from its website. Also, a picture from Panoramio.

That's what I remember.

Pete's Tavern first opened its doors in 1864. From that date to today it has remained open. This achievement makes Pete's Tavern both an official historical landmark and the longest continuously operating bar and restaurant in New York City. It even stayed open during Prohibition: disguised as a flower shop. Pete's Tavern is proud of its history and steadfastly maintains its traditions. It still looks as exactly as it did when its most celebrated regular O. Henry wrote the classic Gift of The Magi here at his favorite booth by the front doors, in 1902.

From its website, some of its history.

One hundred years after his death, Porter's legacy as a master of the short story appears secure. In his hometown of Greensboro, N.C., the local historical museum plans to reopen next month after extensive renovations. It will include a new section on O. Henry. In Texas, where Porter spent his early adulthood, there are museums devoted to him in Austin and San Antonio. In New York, his final home, the book industry selects a set of O. Henry Prize Stories each year and publishes them in a special volume.

Which is curious, based on this next paragraph: Lots of high-school students still receive a taste of O. Henry, but college professors rarely put his work on their syllabi. To be sure, the bulk of Porter's output was middling. He specialized in pleasant diversions whose main purpose was to entertain. The tales can feel contrived. Even the best bear the marks of hasty composition. Several legends surround the writing of "The Gift of the Magi," but all agree that Porter cranked it out under deadline pressure in just two or three hours. Despite the story's popular appeal, it's easy to believe that "The Gift of the Magi" would have benefited from a second draft.


If so, if his work is middling, why did O.Henry become so well regarded?

Imprisoned by Clichés, Laments and Exposition

Jorge Martín's opera "Before Night Falls" given its premiere recently by the Fort Worth Opera, is based on the memoir by the dissident Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. Tortured and imprisoned by the Castro regime, Arenas was forced to repudiate his writings and his identity as a gay man; a few years after escaping to New York in the Mariel boatlift, he was stricken with AIDS and committed suicide. It's a subject with great possibilities, but Mr. Martín, who wrote his own libretto in collaboration with the memoir's translator, Dolores M. Koch, outlines the story without really making the audience live it. The Arenas character, Rey, is onstage for every scene of its 2½ hours of music, singing about his suffering, but it's never clear what it was that he wrote that was so threatening to the regime. And as lament follows lament, Rey never seems to change.

More than Communists, Cubans in power and with influence are machos, and homosexuality is not accepted.

Most of the opera is exposition and lamentation without dramatic tension, so it's a relief when an actual antagonist—Victor, the Castro hardliner—finally starts torturing Rey by burning his manuscript and knocking him around in prison. The most dramatic moment comes when Victor forces Rey to watch a television broadcast of Ovidio, Rey's mentor, denouncing his own writing and that of his friends, including Rey. And although one of Rey's greatest crimes in Cuba was to be homosexual, that fact, though much talked about, gets little expression, except in two gauzily homoerotic group ballets (cue those harp glissandos). Perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of Fort Worth, we never see Rey in a love relationship with a man.

Forth Worth sensibilities?