Terry Teachout's Blog, page 35

TT: Lift up your hearts

Once I thought that Christmas was, like the song says, the most wonderful time of the year. Then, eighteen years ago today, my closest friend died, painfully and pointlessly, and for a long time afterward I found it impossible to rejoice at Christmas. I went through the motions, but there was a hole in my heart.

Ten years later, almost to the day, I was hospitalized with congestive heart failure. By a coincidence at which I would surely have turned up my nose had I encountered it on stage, I fell in love with Mrs. T at the very same moment. We've been together ever since.

I suppose the holiday season can never mean the same thing to a middle-aged man that it does to an innocent, unknowing child. For a decade it meant death to me. Now it means life, hope, and gratitude--which is, needless to say, what it's supposed to mean. The hole in my heart has healed, and I now know myself to be the luckiest person imaginable, blessed beyond measure with a loving companion, true friends, and a fulfilling career.

Would that my old friend had lived to see and share my good fortune. May all of you be so fortunate, today and always.

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Nancy LaMott sings "I'll Be Home for Christmas" in 1994, accompanied by Christopher Marlowe:

TT: Almanac

"Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time."

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Threatened"

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Annie (musical, G, closing Jan. 5, reviewed here)

• A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Macbeth (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Jan. 12, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)

• No Man's Land/Waiting for Godot (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, playing in rotating repertory through Mar. 2, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, extended through Feb. 16, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Commons of Pensacola (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 26, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Fun Home (musical, PG-13, unsuitable for children, newly extended through Jan. 12, reviewed here)

• Hamlet/Saint Joan (drama, G/PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, performed in rotating repertory, closes Feb. 2, original production reviewed here)

• Juno and the Paycock (drama, G/PG-13, far too dark for children, extended through Jan. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• Show Boat (musical, G, remounting of Goodspeed Musicals production, suitable for bright children, closes Dec. 29, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Family Furniture (drama, PG-13, closes Dec. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN BOSTON:

• The Cocktail Hour (comedy, PG-13, closes Dec. 15, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"Giving lessons makes you rich, but it is exhausting, much more so than practicing. It takes a lot of strength to make these frail and sensitive young souls play a proper forte; but in so doing one has done something for eternity."

Rudolf Serkin (quoted in Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber, Rudolf Serkin: A Life)

TT: Eleven things I don't understand getting excited about

• Cars

• Seeing the sun rise (I'm a sunset man myself)

• New Year's Eve

• Chess

• Fancy restaurants (I like good food, but it never excites me prospectively)

• The release of a new movie

• The outcome of any sports event

• Jukebox musicals

• Buying new underwear (but go here for a persuasive contrary opinion)

• Zombies

• Snow

TT: Snapshot

Rudolf Serkin, Herbert Blomstedt, and the San Francisco Symphony play Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto in 1986:



(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

"Serkin told me a story once about a monk. He was playing in Japan, I believe, and after a couple of hours of practicing somewhere in a monastery that happened to have a piano, he suddenly became aware that somebody was there. It was a monk, who told him that he had been observing for two hours and said, 'I think I recognize what you do; it seems to be very much like what we do.'"

Richard Goode (quoted in Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber, Rudolf Serkin: A Life)

TT: Jim Hall, R.I.P.

The guitarist Jim Hall, a truly great artist and my favorite living jazz musician, has passed away unexpectedly in his sleep. I wrote about him many times, most extensively in this 2003 Wall Street Journal profile occasioned by his having been named an NEA Jazz Master:

Like all great jazz musicians, Mr. Hall has a sound as recognizable as the voice of a friend. His floating, fine-grained tone is smooth and edgeless, his wide-spaced harmonies subtly oblique. A charged hush settles over the noisiest of nightclubs when he plays standard ballads like "All the Things You Are," sneaking up on their familiar melodies as if to capture them unawares. Yet he is no less happy to jump head first into the deep end of an unpremeditated group improvisation, and the nine superbly varied CDs he has recorded since 1994 for Telarc (he especially likes "Dedications and Inspirations" and "Textures") suggest that advancing age has made him more daring than ever.

"My playing used to be a little bit conservative, but I think I've gained courage," Mr. Hall explains. "It's not that I'm playing better. I certainly don't have more chops. I guess it's just lack of fear! I just basically don't give a damn now. I feel I'm OK. Miles Davis was a hero of mine in a lot of ways, and I always figured Miles was kind of like Picasso--he just sort of kept letting himself grow. That's what I'm trying to do, let myself grow. Sort of like a painter, or a writer. I don't want to live in the past."...

This was my favorite of his many unforgettable albums.

My heartfelt condolences to Jane and Devra, his wife and daughter. I cannot imagine a world without him.

UPDATE: Peter Keepnews' New York Times obituary is here .

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Jim Hall and Scott Colley play a set in 2012 at North Sea Jazz:

TT: See you on the radio (cont'd)

I'm not done with Duke by a long shot! Today I'll be talking about Duke Ellington and his music at one p.m. ET on WYPR, Baltimore's NPR news station. The program is "Midday," the host is Dan Rodricks, and I'll be speaking halfway across the country from a studio in Chicago, where the weather outside is frightful.

If you live in the Baltimore area, tune to 88.1 on your FM dial, or listen on line in streaming audio by going here .

TT: Lookback

From 2003:

The "untheatricality" of rock music is a complicated subject about which I've never gotten around to writing. It's far too complicated to go into in a short posting, but I can say that to blame the decline of the Broadway musical on rock is to mistake a symptom for the disease. What happened in the Sixties was that the old-fashioned standard-style ballad ceased to be the lingua franca of American popular music--and that nothing replaced it. Instead, our musical tastes shattered into a million pieces. After the Sixties, there was never again one kind of music to which "everyone" listened. In the absence of that kind of broad-based consensus of taste, popular music began to take a back seat in the mass media to other forms of pop culture....

Read the whole thing here .