A Little Mozart 4 U

It was something of a revelation to me, six months after moving from an inner-city DC neighborhood to quiet little Medford, that I could listen to music while walking the dogs at night. That might not seem like much of a revelation, but as a music lover and audiophile with an eight-year-old running around the house, there isn't a whole lot of time for extended listening in a quiet place. The problem in the city, of course, is that you sort of want to stay alert to what's going on around you. Our old neighborhood, while very pleasant and convenient, wasn't immune to the occasional mugging or car-jacking. Walking around at night with earbuds inserted, oblivious to one's surroundings, wasn't exactly advisable. It took me a while to realize that in Medford I don't need to be looking over my shoulder all the time. This has freed me to get some quality listening done while strolling through our peaceful suburban enclave, gazing at the stars.

While I often listen to new acquisitions, I also poke through my CD library to revisit old favorites I haven't heard in a long time. Thus it was the other night that I heard again one of the most thrilling classical recordings in my collection, and I thought I'd share it with you. Lots of people enjoy Mozart, especially the piano concertos, but many are not familiar with some of the great historical recordings in this genre.

Walter Gieseking was one of the most extraordinary pianists of the previous century. German by birth, he made a name for himself as one of the foremost proponents of French piano music--notably the works of Debussy and Ravel. What distinguished Gieseking's recordings was his refusal to indulge in excessive pedaling, relying instead on an extremely subtle sense of touch and fingering to convey the delicate, impressionistic sounds wrought by these composers. The effects he achieved were magical--instead of drowning in a wash of sound, the music emerges with crystalline clarity and precision.

Though noted mainly for his recordings of the great impressionists, he also excelled at Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and others. His recordings of Grieg, Mendelssohn and Schumann are still considered by many to be without peer.

Gieseking was a fascinating character. His staggering technical prowess came so naturally to him that he disliked practicing and preferred to devote his energies to reading, composing and collecting butterflies (he was a noted lepidopterist and discovered several species which were named after him). He had a photographic memory and could memorize an entire concerto during the train ride to a concert and play it flawlessly that same night. This casual approach sometimes betrayed him and, depending on his mood or health, resulted in the occasional sloppy or indifferent performance. It was sometimes suggested (supposedly by jealous colleagues) that he sight-read during his recordings, an accusation that friends and students hotly denied. His refusal to leave Germany during World War II damned him in the eyes of the international music community, and for many years after the war he was persona non grata in much of Europe and America. By the early 1950's however, enough time had passed that he was able to resume playing outside of Germany.

One would be hard-pressed to find a more contrasting personality than that of Guido Cantelli. This highly-strung, fiery-tempered conductor emerged from post-war Italy to become a protege of Arturo Toscanini and a frequent guest conductor of both the NBC Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. Strikingly handsome and charismatic, he was also a notorious perfectionist, and rehearsals were often exhausting affairs that left tempers frayed on both sides of the podium. But the results were well worth the trouble. Under his baton the most complex works took on a rich, glowing transparency and beauty. His phrasing was impeccable, his tempos were perfectly judged and faithful to the composer's intentions, and the sound he drew from the orchestra was both precise and jocosely robust. He maintained a constant rhythmic drive and urgency that kept listeners on the edges of their seats.

In March of 1955, these two geniuses were thrust together for what must have been an unforgettable evening at Carnegie Hall. With Cantelli leading the New York Philharmonic, Gieseking was the featured soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, the famous "Elvira Madigan" concerto. The performance was recorded by radio engineers and has come down to us in pretty decent shape, along with dozens of other wonderful concerts from that era. I was introduced to it, oh, probably 20 years ago by a fellow collector and it has become one of my favorite recordings. I'm not alone in considering it one of the greatest Mozart recordings in existence. If you love Mozart but have never heard this famous performance, you owe it yourself to give it a listen.

It's apparent from the the opening bars that something special is going on. If you prefer your Mozart in dainty little nibbles, you'd better stop here. The orchestral introduction rumbles and chortles, then explodes with ferocious glee. After wringing every ounce out of the main theme, Cantelli subsides for a moment and Gieseking makes his entrance with a coy little improvised run that teases the listener into momentary complacence. He states the main theme without fuss, then gradually builds the intensity and force of his playing. The orchestra comes back into play and now commences the best example of an "argument" between soloist and accompaniment that you are ever likely to hear. Each side eggs on the other, echoing themes and introducing new ones in a contest of wit and will. Gieseking's tone dances and sparkles, while the orchestra growls and shouts. It's a fascinating collaboration. The cadenza is Gieseking's own and introduces some shocking harmonics--his personal tastes in composition ran toward twelve-tone techniques--but it's also tender and childlike in its treatment of the thematic material.

Cantelli begins the second movement with a brisk, singing rendition of the tune made famous by it's prominent use in the 1967 movie Elvira Madigan. It's beautifully judged, but Gieseking isn't content to let it go at that, for immediately upon entering he pushes the tempo ahead, forcing the orchestra to scramble to catch up. He seems to find even Cantelli's unsentimental take on the music too "drippy" and opts for a more driven approach. The result is a taut, sustained tension that emphasizes the eternally aching, yearning quality of Mozart's gorgeous theme.

The third movement is taken at a death-defying pace, and after "shaking things out" in the opening passages, Gieseking and Cantelli dash breathlessly to the finish in a virtuosic whirl. The audience responds with a shattering roar of approval.

The performance is available on a number of CD issues, most of them currently out of print. It's easiest to obtain on iTunes by searching for "gieseking cantelli." In addition you get a contemporaneous performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with Cantelli and the great Jascha Heifetz. It's an excellent companion to the Mozart.

Sadly, neither Gieseking nor Cantelli were to live long after this momentous event. They died within a month of each other in late 1956--Gieseking at age 61 from medical complications following a car accident, Cantelli at only 36 in a plane crash. While Gieseking was nearing the end of a long and distinguished career, there's little doubt that Cantelli would have developed into one of the most famous conductors of the modern era.

Sunday in Southern Oregon

We took a short day trip today to Briggs Creek, which is in the Siskiyou Mountains west of Grants Pass and feeds into the Rogue River. Exiting I-5 north of Grants Pass, you pass through Merlin and then Galice. The road takes you along the Rogue Gorge...



...and past the Hellgate portion of the Rogue River, famous for its thrilling raft rides. It's also the setting for numerous movies and television shows, including Gunsmoke, Rooster Cogburn and The River Wild.



Eventually you turn off onto a single-lane road that snakes its way up a mountain and deep into the Rogue Forest. Many miles of winding road later, you come upon several popular recreation areas. Big Pine is home to the tallest known Ponderosa pine tree. There's a wonderful interpretive trail with a series of hiking loops, each one longer than the next but all of them suitable for kids and tired parents.



Someone put a lot of effort into the layout, evidenced by the beautiful wooden bridge, the well-kept paths and the interpretive signs. It was once a highly "accessible" area, with talking exhibits for the blind and other features. Much of that has deteriorated, but it's still a charming place for little ones.



Big Pine itself is truly awesome...



...and over 300 hundred years old.



Driving a bit further you come to the Sam Brown Horse Trails and Campground, named for a miner who had a habit of fooling around with other miners' wives and paid a hefty price for it. Apparently there's a grave site nearby but we didn't look for it. Briggs Creek trail is more rustic but still well-defined and maintained. I can't begin to describe how good it smelled here.



The trail is about 4 miles long, makes several fords across Briggs and Turkey Creeks and passes some abandoned mining camps and cabins. The swimming holes along the way are well-known and popular in the summer. Here's one surrounded by lush umbrella plants:



After a couple of fords we grew less adventurous and veered off onto a logging road that loops back to the campground. We spotted a garter snake sunning himself in the middle of the road. He was very sleepy and only slithered off when we tried to touch him.



It was a beautiful fall day, 70 degrees, with bright sun, clear blue sky and a light breeze. The air was filled with hints of pine, rotting leaves, campfire smoke and other autumn scents. Just heavenly.

Just a Spoonful of Sugar...

Tonight my daughter had to take an antibiotic. Medicine has always been a huge struggle with her, from the time we had to administer a little liquid children's Tylenol when she was two, up to the present day. Last time we had to do an antibiotic, it was in the form of an evil-looking pink liquid with "cherry" flavoring. Getting it inside her was a daily struggle--tears, wailing, threats, shouting, you name it.

This time the doctor prescribed pills and suggested we crush them and mix them in sorbet or applesauce. Great! So I'm blissfully out on the porch doing some emails this evening, when I hear all hell break loose inside. Apparently tempers had reached the breaking point after an hour of trying to do the medicine thing again. My daughter was near hysterics and my wife was at wit's end. "I'll handle this, " I manfully announced.

I crushed another pill (two had already been sacrificed to the cause) and mixed it in some raspberry sorbet. My daughter eyed me tearfully.

"We tried that. I can taste it!"

"Well," I replied, "I'm sure you can, a little bit. But how bad can it be? Mommy probably didn't mix it up enough. Yummy sorbet, it'll be great, you won't even notice."

"No, I will, " she wailed.

"No, you won't," I said calmly, "just relax! It'll be fine. It's yummy! Look, I'll take bite myself."

I took a tiny nibble of the sorbet with the crushed pill mixed in.

"See, it's fi...UFF! ACK! GAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHH. URK! BLLLLEEEEEECCCCCKKKKKHHH. PTOOEY! PTOOEY!"

She was right! It was just incredibly horrible tasting, like eating frozen battery acid, just unbelievable awful. How could a little bit of antibiotic powder completely overwhelm a half a bowl of sweet, delicious, gourmet sorbet?

We're going back to the liquid. At least it's over in five seconds, as opposed to five minutes of choking down a bowl of atomic waste.

Blasts from the Past, Day 30

For my last post I want to discuss some issues, not about the past, but about the future. My featured title is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, which I recorded for Blackstone last year.

Now here's a great audio program. It has everything going for it: a evergreen non-fiction title, an epic journey for narrator and listener, and subject matter that never gets stale. It's doing extremely well on Audible and I'm sure it will make a lot of money.

Do I wish I had a little back-end participation? Yeah, that would be nice. Would Blackstone have offered it to me? That's debatable. On a sure money-maker like this, they're probably better off getting me out of the picture as soon as possible, rather than risk paying me three or four times my usual fee over the course of seven years.

Am I sorry? Well, no, because for every book like this, I've done eight or nine that probably won't come even close to making that kind of money. They're good books but they don't have the broad appeal of a book like The Rise and Fall.

Royalty sharing has become an issue lately, and it's worth looking at for a moment. It's not that it can't work. It can if you're very canny, or get lucky and hit the jackpot. But if you don't, the returns may not be what you expected. One problem is that most audiobook rights are limited to 7 years, at which point they revert to the rights holder. They might be renewed, but there's also a chance that they won't or they'll be transferred to someone else. Bear in mind that, of the over 750 titles I've recorded in my career, only about 300 are currently in circulation. Over half my output has disappeared.

Before jumping into anything like this, a narrator would be wise to have some knowledge of trends in the industry, as well as access to research tools like BookScan (though even that won't help with first-time or self-pubbed authors). It's no secret that book acquisition, for anyone except the major publishers with best-selling authors in their stables, is a gamble. Obviously it's worth the gamble, or companies like Blackstone wouldn't be able to stay in business. And with a catalogue of 4000 books, you're likely to pull in a decent profit over the long run.

My point is not to bash the idea of royalty sharing. It's to make it clear that, as more and more narrators are forced into entrepreneurial positions, you have to find out as much as you can about how the business works and how it's changing. And it's definitely changing, with breath-taking rapidity.

I was relieved not to be on a panel at APAC this year because my answer to just about any question about the future of audiobooks would have been,"I have no frickin' clue." Having spent a week in New York at BEA, however, I've got a little better idea. The most encouraging thing about the business right now is that those on the receiving end (talent, producers, directors, and so forth) are very willing to exchange information and insights with each other. This sharing of information is very beneficial, particularly to talent, because until various union efforts and rate scales are settled (if they ever are) the only way to support a stable rate structure is for people on the talent end to know what's going on. This works the other way, too. As a producer, it helps to have some sense of the range of what's acceptable to the majority of narrators. There's always the danger of collusion, but we're a long way from that right now: The market is too fragmented, and there are so many variables to take into account--timing, schedules, location, experience levels, book length and complexity, special language or character skills, and so on. Price is just one consideration in the production process. In fact, I think it would be very healthy to see more freedom of negotiation in the rate structure depending on all these factors.

About 90 percent of audiobook production is based on relationships. This is perfectly logical--you don't trust someone to do a 15 hour book in two weeks if you have no idea who they are. It also behooves me from a casting point of view to know who my narrators are, what they like and how they work. When these relationships are not fully engaged in and realized, the production process falters, sometimes disastrously. Maintaining these relationships is about 50% of my job as a producer who relies on a consistent stable of available readers.

As JIAM draws to a close today, my hat is off to all the new people coming into the business who have negotiated a path through what is still an incredibly loosely-structured, Wild West sort of industry. It's about to get wilder. Stay informed, ask questions, learn as much about the business as you can. Don't be afraid to pump people for information. The more you know, the better you'll be able to benefit from the changes going on as we speak.

Blasts from the Past, Day 29

Napolean Hill.

What is it about this guy? He's the self-help guru to end all self-help gurus. Eighty years later he's still going strong. You can get his books for free from various web sites. You can buy deluxe editions of them. You can download numerous audio versions. It doesn't seem to matter, the guy has a huge following and people will pay whatever to read him.

He puts forth some pretty wacky ideas, from "mind-meld" to "atmospheric vibrations," some of which make a little sense if you believe in "karma" or things like that. His behavioral insights are generally sound, though. Always do more work than is required of you. Be pleasant, positive and cooperative. Work as a team and draw on the intelligence and experience of others to help you get ahead. Take care of your health and mind your hygiene.

This is useful stuff, and though it's presented as an astonishing set of revelations, it's nothing common sense wouldn't dictate. But back in the day, before there was a real middle-class, this advice to people seeking advancement was no doubt highly pertinent.

He's very entertaining to narrate, I'll give him that.

Blasts from the Past, Day 28

The Wall by Jeff Long was the first book I recorded for Tantor Media in 2006. It was nominated for an Audie Award in 2007. This was kind of startling to me because, as much as I enjoyed it, I hadn't been quite sure what to make of it when I was narrating it. Part action novel and part mystical ghost story, it doesn't fit snugly in either category. It's not that I want to pigeonhole books when I narrate them, or resort to a "stereotyped" read, but it helps to be able to determine what sort of audience the book will appeal to. This one was hard to pin down. The writing was excellent and the images were vivid enough to stay with me all these years.

Today I got curious and looked up Jeff Long on Amazon, and I understand a bit more about him now. The Wall is in fact typical of his writing, which blends mystery, adventure and the supernatural in a way that defies easy categorization. Surprisingly, none of his other books are currently available in audio, which seems odd because the descriptions are appealing, the reader comments are strong and at least a couple of them have decent sales rankings. In fact, they look downright interesting. I may purchase a few for vacation reading.

Blasts from the Past, Day 27

I mentioned Gore Vidal's series of historical novels in my first post. The recordings I did are long out of print, but if you enjoy historical fiction, delivered with a gimlet eye and healthy dose of (mostly cheerful) cynicism, you should pick up this series for summer reading. Burr is excellent, and the later novels spin out the family saga sub-plot in a clever way, but Lincoln is the jewel in this richly figured crown--probably one of the best historical novels of the last century. The author's fondness for his subject is obvious on every page. His portrait of Lincoln is deeply affectionate and fully fleshed out. You feel you get to know Lincoln in a way few other novelists or biographers have managed. Whenever I read a book about Lincoln these days, I can't help picturing Gore Vidal's Lincoln, a complex, humorous and immensely loveable figure.

What I never knew until I scouted around on Amazon looking for a copy of my old recording, is that Vidal himself recorded an abridged version for Random House. You can pick one up for as little as $4. I imagine the entertainment value would be well worth the price--plus the trouble of digging out an old cassette player to hear it.