Crossing the line

The Broadway Album; Barbra Streisand

My piano teacher, Dr. P., didn’t like the Hungarian Rhapsodies by Franz Liszt. As a matter of fact, he got particularly short with me when I brought a book of them into one of my lessons. Over the years, I’ve come around to seeing them in the same light that he did: Flash and Trash. Nominal music return for the effort invested. You might be able to pick up some chicks with them, though; as a matter of fact, that’s probably why they were composed.

Dr. P. didn’t like Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, either. Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-Flat Major, Op. 106, takes forty-five minutes to perform. Four movements of uber-originality, with the last movement containing two more movements – and a Baroque style fugue. Why don’t you like it, Dr. P? I loved his answer: “It’s too Beethoveney.” You know, he was right on the money with that one. If only in this piece, Mr. Beethoven gives his Beethoven-ness priority over musicianship. Instead of putting us, as pianists, in the driver’s seat of a vintage Lincoln Cadillac, like he did with the other thirty-one piano sonatas, here he leaps up and down around our ankles like a dog, as if to say, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”

I don’t question the greatness Mr. Beethoven achieved with this composition. But he doesn’t give us an awful lot of time for ourselves. It’s all him, all the time. It’s Beethoven concentrate – in a can.

It reminds of me of a scene from the great Billy Wilder movie “Sunset Boulevard”. Gloria Swanson, as Norma Desmond, confronts her script editor William Holden, as Joe Gillis, about a portion of her screenplay, “Salome”, that he filed away into the trash.

GS: What’s that?

JG: Just a scene I threw out.

GS: Which scene?

JG: The one where you go to the slave market. It’s better to cut directly to John the Baptist.

GS: Cut away from me?

JG: Well, honestly, it’s a little too much of you…

OOoooooooooooooooooo.

I applaud Barbra Streisand for all the things that make her great: her singing, her acting and her directing. I especially enjoy her singing. Her approach to a song exemplifies original and glorious interpretation.

Regrettably, an encounter with Miss Babs, even in concert settings, comes drenched in politics, opinions and, all too often, an alienating worldview. Ms. Streisand is entitled to all of these things, certainly. I admire the fortitude of her convictions. But, how can fans, who see the world through glasses of a different hue, enjoy – the music – when they have to confront antithetical barbs (HA!) throughout the evening. Sorry, Ms. Streisand, but there’s a little too much of you.

Thankfully, when she recorded “The Broadway Album” in 1985, she was focused on the task at hand. The selections, the arrangements and the talent all come together to intimate Broadway’s finest fare in original and glorious light. I came to this album as one who had never heard most of the repertoire. Sometimes it’s hard to listen to these songs outside the treatment that they receive by Barbra Streisand and her musical friends on this album.

Maybe I was a little hard on old Hammy Bammy Beethoven. When you’re deaf as a post, can you really sound like anyone but yourself?

A joke: So if a deaf kid swears, does his mother make him wash his hands out with soap?

Credits: To Gloria Swanson, for playing herself on the big, silver screen. You were very brave and very brilliant. And a sight to see. Bravo.