Horton Foote and David Mamet in Conversation

When I moved to New York in 1980 I went a little bit wild. Yes, I did, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. After years of relative deprivation in Denver, I subscribed to concert series like they were going out of style, joined Manhattan Theater Club and the Public Theatre, and even became a member of the 92nd Street’s Poetry Center. Those were the days, my friend! I heard Eudora Welty, Eugene Ionesco, Bill Murray perform in a Yeats play, Robert Merrill, Salman Rushdie, and so on.
And there, on October 6, 1986, introduced by Lindsay Crouse, Horton Foote met David Mamet for a conversation on writing for the theater and the movies. I took notes, either to share with a friend who couldn’t be there or for my own amusement. When Horton Foote died earlier this year, I looked for the notes but couldn’t find them. It would have made a nice commemorative post, I thought. Since then, one page of the notes turned up and even though there’s more Mamet that Foote in my notes, I’m going to share them in Foote’s memory.
Mamet: Their idea of the craft of screenwriting jingles when you put it in your pocket.
Foote: Nobody is writing plays, stories, or poems much — they’re all writing screenplays. I quickly try to discourage them from that.
Foote: I was an actor and I started from the most terrible reason: I wrote myself a part.
Mamet: Why should one go back to that other hell-on-earth unless one’s wife needs a new kitchen?
Mamet: Tolstoy, I kind of think, was a Russian Dreiser.
Mamet: I just kind of write down what people say to each other. That’s where I think the theater differs from the movies.
Mamet: Dodsworth was one of the greatest American movies ever made.
Mamet: Sandy Meisner told me I’d starve in the gutter if I became an actor. And well I would have, if any gutter would have had me.

The Star-Pupil Syndrome

One of the things I’ve done this summer is catch up on my reading, specifically the books that have been sitting around, waiting for time to read them. Some have been in boxes, packed away more years ago than I care to say. A few were sitting on the bookshelf and now that I have to make room I have finally taken them down and worked my way through them. I finished The Art Lover by Carole Masi, which was quite a slog, and Larry McMurtry’s Film-Flam: Essays on Hollywood, which was also a slog, to my surprise. There was entirely too much of McMurtry decrying the state of Hollywood and drawing conclusions on the state of America’s youth from the behavior of characters in movies. There wasn’t a whole lot of oomph in the writing, as if he decided too late that he wasn’t all that interested in writing the columns for American Film but a promise is a promise. I realized, when I was almost done with it, that it would have gone down more easily if I’d read it with a Texas accent.

Still, I’m a persistent cuss and I finished it, and so I came to the paragraphs I’ve excerpted here. There was a shock of recognition as I read about the Star-Pupil Syndrome and saw myself in it. I wanted to defend myself to McMurtry, even as I saw that he was absolutely right. I wanted to add that rather than conferring respectability, in some circles **cough** Parterre Box **cough** status depends on having seen, heard, and read everything. More and more I realize that is impossible, an insight that now seems obvious but that I appear to have ignored for most of my life, as I made lists of records to buy and books to read. And so for your delectation and edification, here’s Larry McMurtry.

My problem with great founts, apparently, is that the water which flows from them is sometimes so satisfying that having drunk deeply once, I feel no urge to drink again. I knew fourteen years ago, walking out of The Naked Night, that it would be a long time before I really needed to see another Ingmar Bergman film. I was simply filled by that film, where its author is concerned. I went on and checked out Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal and several others, and I admired a few lyric moments and few great austere images, but I had stopped being hungry for Bergman and they meant little to me. I felt the same way about Truffaut, after seeing Jules et Jim.

This is not, I should say, an attempt to propose a one-man, one-masterpiece theory. Artists are welcome to as many masterpieces as they can pull off, and a great artist might manage to pull off several. My point is that one’s need for masterpieces is not simple or uniform—one is not obliged to confront them every time one has the opportunity. For most of us, the opportunity comes too often; so much magisterial art is not easy to incorporate into one’s life.

The belief that one is obliged to read all the books of every author, hear all the music of every great composer, and see all the films of every great director is surely a kind of neurosis, and a neurosis whose origin can usually be traced to one’s university career. A compulsion toward over-informedness is most apt to occur in individuals who have been arrested at a graduate school level of development; it is an intellectual infirmity, rather than a sign of health, and is so common now that it perhaps deserves to be elevated to the status of a syndrome: the Star-Pupil Syndrome. If the desire to shine as a pupil is sustained too long it can cause even the most committed worker to work badly.

[I omit a digression on Joyce Carol Oates. Addison]

The weight of the academic experience is such, for most of us, that it sometimes takes about ten years to realize that we have, after all, graduated. There comes a time when one no longer has teachers to please; thus it is not really necessary to read everything, see everything, and hear everything in order to remain respectable. One eventually begins to notice that the cellars of all the arts are filled with the over-informed, and finally one is forced to admit that there is just too much art—far more, at least, than I can use, either as a writer or as a person. With that recognition the nature of the search changes, and instead of trying, perhaps unconsciously, to please one’s teachers one begins to seek out sources of response for oneself—people and books and films that one can hearken to, and perhaps be heartened by.

One of the reasons, I imagine, why I continue to go to silly films rather than serious films is that the vast majority of serious films, like the vast majority of serious books, are mediocre, and nothing can be more disheartening than mediocre, realistic art.

Movie-Tripping: My Own Rotten Film Festival (originally published in New York magazine)
from Film-Flam: Essays on Hollywood (1986) by Larry McMurtry.

Everyday I Have the Blues #13

CompuServe remains a source of surprising copy. I call this one “It’s A Hell of a Wine.”

Zin vs. Primitivo

What happens when American Zinfidels

go head-to-head with Italian Primitivos?

Everyday I Have the Blues #12

Sara Elder had a good story in The Times last month called “Learning How to Walk (Chewing Gum Not Included),” about retraining adults to walk in a non-stressful way. It was quite interesting but I’d say it illustrates the danger of cutting and pasting from your notes. I scanned the relevant part of the article and tried to highlight the passages that escaped the copy editor’s eye, but if the highlighting is hard to read here they are:

“Each part of the body has it’s own job, and everything is connected.”

“You can’t make your bones go in different direction than than they want to go in,” he said.

said Ms Goldman, the editor of a marketing trade magazine.

And darned if they aren’t all in the version of the story posted on the Web.

NOTE: I checked the story on August 27, 2009, and “than than” had been corrected in the online version. The other mistakes were still there.

Everyday I Have the Blues #11

AOL’s CompuServe features several stories on its home page each day. Here’s the headline and teaser for one from Thursday, October 2:

The Secret of How to Barter
Why pay $100 for something if you can get it for $75? Learn how to barter in 4 steps.

Why indeed? And why barter when you can bargain?

Everyday I Have the Blues #10
Monday, September 29, must have been an extraordinary day at The Times, what with the bailout package collapsing and stock markets swooning. Just look at the lead story on the first page of Tuesday’s Business Day, “The Banking Crisis Trickles Up,” and let your eye travel down until it stops just above the fold. There you will see HEAD W. SANDWICHKICKER TAG, underneath which are two lines of what we call in the business Greeked type. Oops. Of all the things they hate in the newsroom, a big goof in a headline or caption is right up there at the top of the list. Maybe it was corrected in a later edition. I hope so.

But that’s not what gave me the blues. It was a story in SportsTuesday about Charles “Chongo” Tucker, a rock climber who lived in Yosemite Park: “His Roof Is the Sky” by Michael Brick. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I rarely read a sports story. It’s not a very Addison thing to do. This story piqued my interest, though, and I read it from beginning to end, stopping only to puzzle over two sentences.

The first was this one, on the first page: “Rumors of his whereabouts began to trade around the big rocks and rope-walking fixtures of the Western states.” Huh? Rumors traded? “Hold on a doggone minute, Mr. Brick,” I said to myself. “Rumors are not independent actors, no matter how much you may want them to be, and they’re not traveling around the West on their own.” The sentence reads as if he wanted to construct it without any people, who would be the ones trading rumors as they climbed the rocks. Why he’d want to do that I haven’t a clue but it didn’t work for me.

On the next page, Mr. Brick tries to strike another literary note in describing Chongo: “Leathery skin, knowing eyes and a dilettante’s smile gave him the cabalistic twinkle of a movie pirate.” Leaving aside the dilettante’s smile, which I still have trouble imagining, I was baffled by the cabalistic twinkle. If the second meaning of “cabala,” according to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is “a traditional, esoteric, occult, or secret matter,” then is a cabalistic twinkle “a way of looking at someone that implies possession of esoteric or occult knowledge,” a la Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean? It could be but just what was twinkling? His whole face? Just his eyes? If they’re already knowing how are they radiating cabalistic knowledge at the same time?

It’s a pity no one had the time to wrestle his meaning out of Mr. Brick when the story was being edited. Except for those two clunkers it’s a good story.

Everyday I Have the Blues #9

Last week, The Times published an obituary of Norman Whitfield, the Motown Records songwriter and producer. As a dedicated follower of obits and a fan of Motown’s golden era, I read it with great interest until the last sentence in this paragraph stopped me cold.

For all his renown as a composer, Mr. Whitfield was even more prominent as a producer and arranger. He was known especially for his work with the Temptations; he produced many of their recordings for Motown, including the album “Cloud Nine,” whose title track earned the group a Grammy in 1969. He also helped usher in the era of psychedelic soul, producing the work of artists like Edwin Starr and the Undisputed Truth.

Look at the name of the second artist. If the group’s name is Undisputed Truth, then that is what it should be called. If the group called itself The Undisputed Truth, then “the” should be capitalized, the same way The New York Times styles its own name. Sheesh.

NOTE: And the same thing goes for The Temptations.

Everyday I Have the Blues #8

David Pogue had me awfully confused today. In his State of the Art column, “Nontechies, This One's For You,” he threw what looks like a comma splice into his review of the Peek.

The power cord ends in a micro U.S.B. connector, alas, you can’t recharge the Peek from a computer, as you can with a BlackBerry or an iPod.

I had to read that pesky sentence two or three times and I still don’t know why he didn’t either put a semicolon after “connector” or just split the darn thing into two sentences. If anyone can explain what he was doing there I’d love to hear it.
“Nontechies, This One's For You,” by David Pogue. Page C1, The New York Times, September 11, 2008.

NOTE: Read the comment for David Pogue’s response.

Everyday I Have the Blues #7

That little gem is from the NewEgg.com e-mail newsletter “Back to School All-Category Savings Spectacular! Up to 60% Off!” from August 19.

Everyday I Have the Blues #6

Sometimes Spellcheck is your friend.

Add creative inspiration and a love for trends and brand indentity, and you’re on your way to forging breakthrough ads.

“Copywriting: Mastering Ad Writing. Break into advertising,” e-mail from MediaBistro.com

This was the pullquote they used:

Before taking this course I knew nothing about copywriting now I know how to take an idea and turn it into a great ad.
--Latrice Harris

Everyday I Have the Blues #5

Typos don’t really count as wince-inducing but this one is too amusing not to pass along.

It is also the most ambitious classical music offering to date at Le Poisson Rouge, a new Greenwich Village club started by a pair of still-practicing classical sting players intent on presenting music of every description.

Can’t you just see Robert Redford on violin and Paul Newman on viola, playing the Maple Leaf Rag?

The Listings: Classical: Opera: “The Coronation of Poppea,” by Allan Kozin. The New York Times, p. E21, Friday, August 15, 2008.

Everyday I Have the Blues #4

When I read today’s sentence my first reaction was “Didn’t anyone read this?” And it’s possible that there wasn’t time to read the story, just run it through the grammar and spelling checker. Spellcheck is a great thing, but it won’t save you if you don’t know the difference between “there” and “their,” “your” and “you’re,” or “a device that fits inside or around a garment for hanging from a hook or rod” and “a covered and usually enclosed area for housing and repairing aircraft.”

A vibrant 55-year-old, Ms. Olsen is coming to terms with the unceremonious end of her fashion career — as the windows of the last remaining stores were papered over last month and the stock sold at discounts of 70 percent, including the hangars — at the same time she is starting over as an artist and entrepreneur.

“Her Forced Retirement” by Eric Wilson. The New York Times, G1, August 14, 2008

Everyday I Have the Blues #3

I tell people not to use “comprise” unless they have the proper training and permit, but do they listen to me? No, they don’t. They just go right on and embarrass themselves in print anyway. This is from sign-on instructions I received the other day from the human resources department of one of the biggest banks in the world.

Step 1 Begin the Sign-on Process.
* Enter your standard ID on the single sign-on screen.
* Enter your default password, which is comprised of:
* The first three characters of your Standard ID
* The last four digits of your Social Security number or national ID number.
et cetera

Everyday I Have the Blues #2a and 2b

I know, I know, it’s not really fair to spotlight goofs in The New York Times. They work under a daily deadline and there aren’t enough copy editors to give the copy a good going over. However, my criterion is the wince factor and these two examples supplied a good wince apiece.

Mr. Medoff said he hoped that people would read the comic and agree. “There’s a certain amount of ongoing pressure, but it’s been so far not efficient to make the authorities bow.”

“Comic-Book Idols Rally to Aid a Holocaust Artist” by George Gene Gustines, p. B7, Saturday, August 9, 2008

Did Mr. Gustines transcribe the interview poorly, did he misread his notes, or can we blame the editor for transforming “sufficient” into “efficient”? I can’t say but the quote doesn't make sense as it was printed.

(Mr. Kraus said he was germophobe when it came to the subway.)

Jamie Bishop/Christian Kraus wedding announcement, Sunday Styles p. 16, Sunday, August 10, 2008

Just what did Mr. Kraus say? That he was a germophobe or that he was germophobic? Maybe the editor couldn’t make up her mind, or maybe she doesn’t know the difference.

Everyday I Have the Blues #1

This is the first in an occasional, though possibly daily, series of posts featuring English usage that makes me wince. Spotlighting these won’t make the world a better place, I know, but they deserve to be shared.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Membership News, the lead sentence in a story about the horticulturalist at The Cloisters:

Even in a city of more than 8 million residents, Deirdre Larkin easily has one of the most unique jobs.

Another Blogpost for Burma

Top 300 Favorite Songs of All Time III
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (Saint Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes) (comp. 1893)

David Ocker, a college classmate and fellow ex-member of the Carleton Orchestra, wrote in his blog Mixed Meters a while ago that when someone asked him why he lost interest in Mahler, he said “instantly, without thinking and completely accurately, ‘I grew up.’” I’m not sure what he meant and I’m curious to find out, because I still find Mahler’s music, especially his songs, as enjoyable as when I first heard it more than 40 years ago.

One of my favorites among Mahler’s works is the song Saint Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes. In his notes to the Virgin Classics recording of Songs from The Youth’s Magic Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn), Terry Barfoot quotes Mahler as saying, “Not one of the fish is the wiser for the sermon, even though the saint has performed for them! But only a few people will understand my satire on mankind.” I have to wonder if an urban audience, especially a Viennese audience which was likely as sophisticated as any in the world, would not have gotten the message of the song.

Still, though the message is obvious, it is no less true today. And it isn’t unique to the song. Think of “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” A great variation on that is the saying collected by Ken Weaver, a member of New York proto-punk group The Fugs, in Texas Crude: “You can buy ’em books and buy ’em books, and they just chew on the covers.”

As I probably made clear in the first two installments of this series, the words are as important to me as the music, and Saint Anthony’s Sermon has a wonderful lyric. From the opening, where St. Anthony (1195–1231) finds his Paduan parishioners have all stayed away from the church and decides he will give his sermon to the fish in the river, on to the ending, where the fish swim away unchanged by what they’ve heard, it paints a great picture.

The text is full of exclamation points which give an elbow-in-the-ribs quality to the printed lyric but don’t carry over to the music. The first comes in the opening verse:

Antonius zur Predigt
die Kirche find’t ledig!
Er geht zu den Flüssen
und predigt den Fischen.
or
Anthony, at sermon time,
Finds the church empty!
He goes to the river and
Preaches to the fishes.

Can you imagine, the lyric says (probably heavily edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano), that the people would have passed up the chance to hear St. Anthony preach? Unbelievable! Maybe it was a nice day or they were all out of town. The song may have been inspired by the story that St. Anthony was such an eloquent preacher that even the fish in Padua’s Brenta River enjoyed his sermons, and created a cynical elaboration on it. Another version of the story, cited by gonomad.com, sets the sermon in Rimini.

While in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, he encountered some difficulty in getting the local population to listen to him. Somewhat dejected, he went down to the shore, where the river Ariminus runs into the sea, and began to speak to the fishes.

No sooner had he spoken a few words when suddenly so great a multitude of fishes, both small and great, approached the bank on which he stood. All the fishes kept their heads out of the water, and seemed to be looking attentively on St Anthony's face; all were ranged in perfect order and most peacefully, the smaller ones in front near the bank, after them came those a little bigger, and last of all, where the water was deeper, the largest.

As he continued speaking, the fish began to open their mouths and bow their heads, endeavoring as much as was in their power to express their reverence. The people of the city, hearing of the miracle, made haste to go and witness it.

Right from the beginning of the Lied, Mahler sets up a regularly accented three-quarter meter, possibly evoking the river and the movement of the schools of fish, before the singer sets the song up with the astonishing event of the empty church. With a repeated rising fourth in the lower timpani, a portentous sound that turns out to introduce a less-than-terrifying message, bassoons, clarinets, and string basses provide only about 10 seconds of vamping until the singer comes in and the rest of the orchestra joins (usually) her. Notice the triangle chiming along as the singer describes the sun reflecting off the river and the fishes’ scales. Mahler brings the triangle back periodically as a bit of orchestral color, and perhaps as a reminder of the sun on the river.

The strings are in constant motion, sometimes harmonizing the melody, sometimes stating a countermelody. When they drop out, the winds, especially the clarinets or brasses, by turns take over. In this song, at least, Mahler doesn’t throw the whole orchestra at the audience. Rather, as B.H. Haggin pointed out, he uses all of the resources of a large orchestra judiciously, never just for the sake of making a big sound, contrary to the obtuse views of some critics, perhaps most notably, Olin Downes of The New York Times.

Much of the fun of the song comes from listing of the fish species and their attributes — pike: belligerent, stockfish: always on a diet, crabs: slow moving, sturgeon: delicacies for the wealthy — and the refrain, “Kein Predigt niemalen/Den Fischen so g’fallen!” (No sermon ever/pleased [insert fish species here] as much!), coupled with the subtly ironic melody and orchestral accompaniment.

With a steady, rhythmic drive, the voice and accompaniment work through nine verses of catchy, folk-inspired melody, as potent a collection of hooks as you would want to hear. Finally, St. Anthony reaches the end of his sermon and the singer reports on its effect on his listeners:

Die Predigt geendet,
Ein jeder sich wendet,
Die Hechte bleiben Diebe,
Die Aale viel lieben.

The sermon having ended,
each [fish] turns himself around;
the pikes remain thieves,
the eels, great lovers.

Die Predigt hat g'fallen.
Sie bleiben wie allen!

The sermon has pleased them,
they remain the same as before!

Die Krebs gehn zurücke,
Die Stockfisch bleiben dicke,
Die Karpfen viel fressen,
die Predigt vergessen, vergessen!

The crabs still walk backwards,
the stockfish stay fat,
the carp still stuff themselves,
the sermon is forgotten!

Not surprisingly, the fish, like most preachers’ human parishioners, go away as they arrived. The accompaniment doesn’t even pause to comment, but sinks lower and lower and ends with an extended bass note: as it began, at the bottom of the river. The complete text, by the way, is available at The Lied and Art Songs Text Page and the translation from German to English is copyright © by Emily Ezust.

There are about 15 versions of Des Knaben Wunderhorn listed at arkivmusic.com. Since I have only heard a few of them I hesitate to make a recommendation, though if I had to choose one from that page I’d probably go with Claudio Abbado’s version with Anne-Sofie von Otter and Thomas Quasthoff. I have the Vanguard stereo recording with Maureen Forrester and Heinz Rehfuss, the Thomas Allen/Ann Murray/Sir Charles Mackerras recording, and Thomas Hampson’s survey of the original piano accompaniments. The last two CDs are out of print but might be found in a used CD store or on Amazon.com and are worth picking up. To give a sense of the Lied to anyone who is unfamiliar with it, the opening and closing of Ann Murray’s recording in mp3 format is available here.

A Mensch, He’s Not

Howard Katz, a play by Patrick Marber, who also wrote Closer and Notes on a Scandal, among other pieces, was presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Pels Theatre. This is what The Times said about it:

The subject of Patrick Marber’s comedy of unhappiness about a rabid talent agent, starring a baleful Alfred Molina and directed by Doug Hughes, is nothing more nor less than your standard-issue midlife crisis. This familiar topic gets the better of all the talented people here trying to make it seem fresh. (Brantley)

Yes, it was. It was like The Book of Job without the happy ending, starring Woody Allen’s Danny Rose in a particularly foul mood. Where Rose tried to create a career for his entertainment industry dead-enders, Katz tells them that they have no talent or have had too much surgery. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t go over too well with the owners of the agency where he works. But before he gets the sack, his marriage ends, he tells off his father, and hits his son. Then he doesn’t have sex with a prostitute, quarrels with his brother, fails to buy a gun with which to commit suicide, gives his watch and wallet to a mugger, and either loses or dreams that he loses his last £2,000. There’s also a returning-to-the-faith-of-his-fathers subplot that surfaces now and then, though it isn’t clear what purpose it serves except to provide a little bit of ethnic spice.

The exact order of events is confused by the play’s dreamlike chronology but in the last scene, Katz — sans money, sans home, sans everything — seems to pull himself together to strew his father’s ashes, which he has been carrying around for what must have been weeks, off Tower Bridge.

Maybe Katz would follow the ashes into the Thames since he doesn’t seem to have anything to live for or any idea of what to do, but it isn’t clear. The play doesn’t come to a conclusion or dramatically satisfying resolution. It just ends, and what a relief that is.

Howard Katz was yet another play in which the greatest pleasure was found in the work being done, rather than the work being performed, on the stage. Among the talented actors in the company, nearly all playing multiple parts, were Euan Morton (Boy George in Taboo in London and New York), Alvin Epstein, Elizabeth Franz, and Jessica Hecht (The House in Town). It was a particular pleasure to see Jessica Hecht again, especially in the scenes where she played the co-owner of the talent agency.

Marber seemed to working out something deeply personal with Howard Katz, though exactly what wasn’t clear. Now that it’s out of his system, here’s hoping he moves on to work that says more than “if you’re not a nice person, bad things happen to you and no one likes you.”

Image from Roundabout Theatre

Slightly French is Slightly Good

I saw Slightly French over the weekend and submitted this review to Internet Movie Database today.

Slightly French is a rather a leaden trifle, which today is chiefly of interest to students of Douglas Sirk’s films or Dorothy Lamour or Don Ameche fans. I thought the implausible plot would have worked better in the late 1920s or early ’30s, and found at IMDB that it was a remake of Let’s Fall in Love, a 1933 vehicle for Ann Sothern. By 1949, passing off a New York Irish carnival dancer as the Parisian cousin of a vocal coach, and tying her starring in a movie to bringing back a fired director, was too great a suspension of nearly anyone’s disbelief. (And note that Lamour was 35 in 1949 while Sothern was 25 when she made Let’s Fall in Love. Lamour was far from old but the plot would have been more convincing if she were younger.) The breezy style needed to carry it off was just a memory, at least on the Universal studio lot.

Nevertheless, everyone involved in the production was enough of a professional to keep a not-too-demanding viewer entertained with the plot twists, snappy dialogue, and musical numbers. Lamour gets to sing — in French-accented English — a short version of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's “Let’s Fall in Love,” the only song in the picture that sticks in the memory, to excuse her calling a playwright at a press party a “plagiarist.” She dances a little, too, though in the big dance number set in the streets of Paris the soloist looks younger and thinner. Ameche is a stereotypical egomaniacal director, single and living with his sister in an oceanfront Hollywood-moderne mansion. The explanation for his bachelorhood is excessive self-love, but his best-friend producer is similarly single. Inquiring minds inevitably will speculate on the coincidence, though both end up symmetrically in love by the picture’s end.

Meant for the bottom half of a double-bill, Slightly French never quite gets out of its B-picture category, but for a low-budget black-and-white musical it isn’t half bad.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a recital by Magdalena Kozena, a soprano with an international career and several well-received recordings. I wrote about it and tried to summon up some enthusiasm for what I thought should have been a good concert — tried and failed. I just wasn’t moved, and I thought something must have been wrong with me: I wasn’t in the mood, or I was preoccupied by some crisis or other in my life. I told a friend that it was a perfectly nice recital but I couldn’t get excited by it. Yesterday, I heard Angelika Kirchschlager sing Schumann and Schubert, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau, who was also Kozena’s accompanist. After the first measure of Schumann’s Freisinn it was clear that the problem at Kozena’s concert wasn't my mood. It was that Kozena wasn’t as moving or as involving a singer.

Kirchschlager, whom I didn’t like the first time I heard her, carried me away, to my considerable surprise. Her voice is smooth and rich, and her legato is exemplary. The voice is not without minor flaws — there were times when an increase in volume came with too much vibrato, though that seemed to abate as she warmed up, and not every note was perfect — but that didn't matter when so her singing was so beautiful. Most of the songs in both parts of the program were unfamiliar to me, which increased the pleasure of hearing her sing them. (The program, complete with the opus numbers Playbill saw fit to leave out, can be found at the la Verdi.org Web site: http://www.laverdi.org/english/quartetto.php. Apparently, Kirchschlager has been touring with this same program, though she was accompanied by Helmut Deutsch in Milan. Note also that the concert there was part of a 10-concert season for 100 euros, or $130. Tickets at Tully Hall were $48 for nonsubscribers.)

Also in contrast to Kozena, Kirchschlager’s dress was much more conservative, that is to say, not cut down to there, and displayed only a bit of lace on the sleeves. If I was in the diva advisory business, I would advise Angelika to “rethink the jewelry,” since a choker and a necklace are a touch over the top, especially when the necklace is evening length and sets up a contrasting movement to the rhythm of the music. Her encores (there were only two) were Widmung by Schumann (Op. 25, No. 1, from Myrthen), which was stunning, and Hôtel by Poulenc (No. 2 from Banalités, FP 107, text by Apollinaire), which was delivered in a wonderfully idiomatic style. It was a pleasurable shock after 24 Lieder to hear so ingratiating a mélodie.

Kozena deserves another chance. Perhaps she was nervous or having an off day. Kirchschlager, after Sunday’s recital and despite the minor shortcomings, takes her place as one of my Top Ten Recitalists.