Hello there! I'm Peter Schickele, and this is Schickele Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good. And the same goes for money. If it smells good, it is good. Especially if it's used for noble purposes like this program. Our bills as it happens are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, And by this noble radio station, where even I, who was voted by my high school graduating class least likely to succeed in learning how to operate anything more complicated than an alarm clock, and, at our last reunion, least likely ever to be able to program his VCR for delayed recording without calling his son, even I can turn out a show that can be distributed by PRI, Public Radio International.
I was born in 1935 in the midst of the Great Depression. Now I'm not going to go into one of those we were so poor we lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road routines. The family did fine. My dad always had a good job. But consumer goods were not purchased as casually in those days, to put it mildly, as they came to be after World War II. In the late 1930s, my folks, being big Mozart fans, decided to invest in a recording of Così fan tutte. Now this was not only before CDs but before LPs and an opera like that came in three volumes each containing what six to ten 78s and they saved up for one volume at a time. One of the strongest memories of my childhood lasting into my teens is of waking up on Sunday mornings to the smell of bacon and the strains of Così fan tutte. But you know even though Così has remained one of my absolute fave raves among all the pieces ever composed, I've always felt that the last third of it doesn't quite live up to the first two thirds.
Now is that because Mozart's inspiration actually flagged a bit as the deadline pressed in on him? Or is it because I'm not as familiar with the last third due to the fact that my folks never got around to buying the last volume?
Later, of course, they bought the same Glyndebourne performance on LP. But even in the thirties, a violin concerto could be bought in one fell swoop. And my mother says her favorite recording around the time I was born was of the Mozart violin concerto known as the Adelaide Concerto, played by Yehudi Menuhin. The reason it meant so much to her then was that everything about it spoke of youth.
A piece written by a child prodigy composer at the age of 10, played by a child prodigy violinist who, by the time he made this recording, was just turning a ripe old 18. Here's the last mov- There goes the very old recording alert. Let me turn that off. This particular recording was made in 1934, which means it's a year older than your humble host.
[music: Mozart (attributed to), Violin Concerto in D (K Anh 294a), 3rd Mvt.; Yehudi Menuhin/Orchestre Symphonique de Paris/Monteux]
The last movement of Mozart's Violin Concerto in D, the Adelaide Concerto, played by Yehudi Menuhin, with Pierre Monteux conducting the Orchestre Symphonique. For those of you who don't know French, that means Symphony Orchestra. Orchestre Symphonique de, de, that's of, Orchestre Symphonique de Paris. Well, what my mother didn't know didn't hurt her. It turns out that the Adelaide Concerto was youthful all right, but not because it was written by the ten-year-old Mozart. It was youthful because it was only a few years old when my parents purchased the recording It was a hoax perpetrated by a violinist who didn't fess up until 1977 when he got involved in a lawsuit over the copyright of what he had claimed was merely his arrangement of incomplete sketches by Mozart, sic transit gloria forgery.
Please don't ask me, by the way, to judge that piece, which I hadn't heard for decades before finding this reissue. It would be like showing someone the rubber ducky he had as a child and asking him to evaluate it as a piece of sculpture. But Menuhin was no fake. When he was 11 years old, he met his idol, the great Romanian violinist Georges Enescu, and asked to be taken on as a pupil.
Enescu said, You've got to be kidding, or European words to that effect. I have no time. I don't take pupils. Besides, I'm leaving on tour tomorrow morning at 6.30. But the 11-year-old boy insisted and ended up playing for the master at 5.30 the next morning, whereupon Enescu immediately agreed to take him on as a student. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
Well, so are the musically very gifted. In the first place, they have an inborn talent that seems otherworldly to the rest of us. And in the second place, leaving aside the complicated question of where the motivation comes from, they display as children an aptitude for extended concentration that most of us don't develop until we start playing poker for money.
Extraordinary musical talent usually manifests itself at an early age, and if it's not developed early, the brass ring will not come around again. I don't mean that all good musicians were playing tunes on their pacifiers, but classical instrumentalists who aren't extremely accomplished by the time they leave their teenage years behind, have little chance of scaling the heights or of heightening the scales But then the issue that envious ordinary mortals bring up is, okay, so these prepubescent tykes and callow teenagers were born with more natural ability than any one person in a democracy deserves, and so they threw away their childhood to develop it?
Still, do they have the maturity, the life experience necessary to plumb the depths of the great works? Here, of course, we tread on highly subjective ground. And I'd love to take one of those great works and play several recordings with you listening blindfolded, as it were, so that you could decide for yourself. But the trouble is that great works are all quite long. That's one of the things that makes them great works.
And to judge something as unquantifiable as maturity, you really have to hear the whole thing, the artist's whole conception, before you hold up your cards.
[sound: recorded applause]
The judge from the Canary Islands gives him an 8 for technique, a 3 for maturity, and a 10 for the way he combs his hair. Still, that's not bad for a performer who is obviously wearing diapers under his tux pants.
Now, it's really not fair to judge an artist on the basis of a few phrases. But that doesn't mean we're not going to do it. Here are three recordings of the beginning of the slow movement of the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor. One of these recordings features Yehudi Menuhin at the age of 15. The other two feature mature artists. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to see if you can guess which version is being played by the high school sophomore.
[music excerpt: Bruch, Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Opus 26, 2nd Mvt.; Yehudi Menuhin/Philharmonia Orchestra/Susskind]
[music excerpt: Bruch, Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Opus 26, 2nd Mvt.; Isaac Stern/Philadelphia Orchestra/Ormandy]
[music excerpt: Bruch, Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Opus 26, 2nd Mvt.; Yehudi Menuhin/London Symphony Orchestra/Ronald]
The opening of the Adagio of Bruch's first violin concerto in three different performances. The last one was Menuhin at 15. The middle one was Isaac Stern, and the first was Menuhin again, this time at the age of 40. Well, different bow strokes for different folks. You know which one you liked best. But it's certainly true that the 15-year-old was the least patient of the three.
His performance of that very brief excerpt was a quarter of a minute shorter than Stern's and a half a minute shorter than his own performance 25 years later. Okay, now I hear you. The more technical-minded of you are saying, so why didn't the very old recording alert go off? There are two reasons. Reason one, I disarmed that puppy so it couldn't give anything away.
Reason two, I figured that some of you were going to cheat by listening more to the sound quality than to the music, so I actually doctored the more recent recordings to make them sound older. I'm bad, I'm bad. I just slay myself.
Now, musical prodigies, like child actors, are apt to have problems in their teenage years. I mean, don't we all, but special problems.
They're no longer cute and they face the danger of burnout. I know a pianist who, now I may not have these numbers exactly right, but pretty close, he was playing piano by the time he was four, he was playing in public by the time he was six, he played his first concerto with an orchestra when he was eight, and when I got to know him when he was twenty, he was bored, even though he still loved music.
The extremely competitive aspect of the concert pianist world bothered him, and he found at that point his greatest pleasure in chamber music. Now, a couple of decades later, he still plays professionally, but not full time. He seems to need to balance his playing with non-musical activity. Me, I'm Peter Schickele, and I seem to need to balance my poker playing with things like Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called prodigious talents. Now with singers it's quite different than it is with instrumentalists. In the first place you don't really know what you've got vocally wise speaking until your past puberty. And then no matter how talented you are if you haven't been given a beautiful singing voice you can forget about becoming a classical singer. Or at least you should forget about it. In classical music you can't do an end run and make it work anyway, like Bob Dylan or Rex Harrison. Singers are often kidded about having more temperament than brains. That is, of course, a gross exaggeration at the very least, but if it sometimes seems to have the shadow of a kernel of truth in it, it's because there are more than a few singers around who really hadn't thought much about music one way or the other until they discovered or were told that they had beautiful voices. With instrumentalists, the person chooses music.
With singers, music chooses the person. Still, and especially if you broaden the field, there are some vocal artists who get off to a pretty self-assured start.
[music: Parton, "Puppy Love" (Dolly Parton & Friends at Goldband); Dolly Parton]
That, ladies and gentlemen, was Aretha Franklin at the age of 14 singing Never Grow Old. Does she tear your heart out or what?
That middle recording of a setting by Gunnar Wennerberg of the Fourth Psalm was made in about 1920 and all three of the boys are Bjorlings, Olle, Jussi, and Gosta. And Dolly Parton sang and wrote Puppy Love.
Hey, I'm glad I disabled that very old recording alert. Because this next one is, are you ready for this? A 45 RPM, yup, with one of those big holes in the middle. Fortunately, I still have one, and only one, but one's all it takes, of those plastic thingamajigs to put in the center.
This song is called Rock Around Mother Goose, and the singer, I would guess from the fact that the song on the flip side is called Seven, is approximately seven years old.
[music: Tepper/Bennett, "Rock Around Mother Goose"; Barry Gordon]
Barry Gordon, giving it his all. Rock around Mother Goose. I don't know. Is it the white, midwestern, protestant part of me, and I don't ask this rhetorically, that is made a bit uncomfortable by kids who try to act or sing too much like adults?
Maybe it is. I saw a film clip from an old all-black movie once in which a four-year-old Sammy Davis Jr. just tore up a staid courtroom with his flashy dancing. It was pretty great. But I don't know, this one... Well, let me put it this way. Again, a sincere question. Is there a difference between a kid imitating adults because he wants to be like the adults, and a kid imitating adults because he knows they'll tell him how cute he is?
I'm not sure. But I do know, actually, that I wish kids in my culture were brought up to be much less inhibited about singing and dancing. Listen to the beginning of this beautifully sexy, slinky rendition of It Ain't Necessarily So.
Sarah Chang, at the age of nine, playing Gershwin's It Ain't Necessarily So on a quarter-sized violin. The arrangement was by Jascha Heifetz and Sandra Rivers was the pianist. That's some fiddle playing. And life goes on. Georges Enescu was bowled over by the 11-year-old Yehudi Menuhin. And decades later, Yehudi Menuhin said, I thought Sarah Chang was the most wonderful, perfect, ideal violinist I had ever heard. And he's heard a lot more violinists than I have.
My name's Peter Schickele. And by the way, in case there are any Cincinnati kids out there, don't come looking for me. I just play dime ante, you know, pretty panty-waist poker. Wild cards, anaconda. We do draw the line at Indian, where you hold your hole card up to your forehead so that everyone can see it except you, but still, we quit about 10:15, you know, Monday's a weeknight, and I just don't want to attract any gunslingers here.
Peter Schickele is the name, Schickele Mix is the game, From PRI, Public Radio International.
Prodigious Talents. We're talking about musical youngsters here, but now I'd like to shift the emphasis from young soloists to family members. There is something about the ties that bind. I have on occasion made appearances with my son and daughter, who are both in their twenties now, singing songs by the Everly Brothers and the Coasters. And even at our first rehearsal, it feels as if we've been working for days. We're way ahead of the game in matters of inflection and nuance.
Just because we lived together for so long. Here are three different constellations of kin. A pianist playing a concerto written by his grandfather and conducted by his father, a great big family gathering of relatives by blood and marriage, and a father and his daughter singing a song whose words are well worth paying close attention to. I call this suite All in the Family, and it lasts less than 11 minutes.
[music: Shostakovich, Concerto for Piano, Trumpet, and Strings in C minor, Opus 35, 1st Mvt.; Dmitri Shostakovich Jr., piano/James Thompson, trumpet/I Musici de Montreal/Maxim Shostakovich]
[music: Trad., "When I Die"; The Watson Family]
[music: Belew, "Oh Daddy" (Mr. Music Head); Adrian Belew with Audie Belew]
All in the family. We began with the first movement from Shostakovich's first string quartet [sic] for piano, trumpet, and strings in C minor. And that was Dmitri Shostakovich Jr., that is, the composer's grandson, playing the piano with Maxim Shostakovich conducting. And that was I Musici de Montreal with James Thompson on trumpet.
A sad note there is that Dmitri, young Dmitri, was born in 1961 on the day his grandfather died. Then we heard from Doc Watson's family, When I Die, and there are about 12 of them here on the cover. It's a real family get-together.
And then finally we had Adrian Belew in one of my favorite songs, Oh Daddy, and that was his daughter Audie Belew singing in the refrains there. Now we've been dealing today with kids who were very much encouraged to go into music. Either they came from a musical family or they came from a family that set a lot of store in their kids doing well in music.
But a lot of what you might call regular musicians, non-soloists, try to discourage their kids from going into music because it's a high burnout profession. And although some musicians do very well, there are a lot of them out there that are barely making a living. I mean, they're really scrounging to get by. I was standing with a bunch of symphony orchestra musicians once at the break in a rehearsal. And this one guy was saying, you know, my son has said he wants to be a musician. I'm trying to talk him out of it.
And I talked to him last weekend. He's at college. And he said, Hey, Dad, I've decided not to be a musician after all. And I said, Great. And he said, I'm going to be a poet.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
And that's Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this radio station and its members. Thank you, members. And not only that, our program has a habit of being distributed by PRI, Public Radio International. We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist of all the music on today's program with album numbers and everything.
Just refer to the program number. This is program number 95. And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You're looking good. See you next week.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Schickele Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Schickele Mix. Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.