Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Maria Callas and me.
For some unknown and unplanned reason, I have been watching concert films and big-screen musical presentations this past week. There was the high-octane IMAX presentation of Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light. Although not a Stones nut, to say the least, I was swayed and excited by this movie. Only Scorsese and Mick Jagger could have given it the intensity that it has. Shot at the Beacon Theatre in New York in late 2006 (the same place I saw Gloria Swanson in person introducing her silent Queen Kelly back in the 1960s), it is a virtuoso cinematic piece captured via eighteen motion picture cameras on speed. I wish I had the same energy as Mick and Keith and Charlie. After all we are around the same age! But my gyrations pale in comparison with Sir Michael's. I've compared them. They pale.
I also saw two Newport Folk Festival documentaries, Murray Lerner's Festival from 1967 and his 2007 The Other Side of the Mirror, an anthology of Bob Dylan's appearances at that festival from 1963-1965, from his country-boy persona of 1963 with "North Country Blues" to the 1964 "Chimes of Freedom" when the audience wouldn't let him go, to the electric-guitar-betrayal in 1965 with "Maggie's Farm." I was a participant in this history because I actually attended the 1963 concert with a group of friends. Dylan was pretty much an unknown then when introduced on the stage of Freebody Park by Joan Baez on July 26, 1963. Lerner's compilation of long-unseen footage from those three Newport Festivals is a must for all Dylan enthusiasts and cinema buffs in general.
Light-years away from all this and representing my truer tastes was the HD presentation at Newport's Jane Pickens Theatre last Monday of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino production of Verdi's La forza del destino. The opera's libretto is a mishmash of meandering melodrama, but, ah the music! That work was the first opera recording I ever bought. I was seventeen, and it was an LP of highlights featuring Maria Callas and Giuseppe Di Stefano. I had heard her singing the aria "Pace, pace, mio Dio" on the radio when my parents were driving me home from the seminary for a break, and I fell in love with the music and with Callas' voice.
Ah, music!
I also saw two Newport Folk Festival documentaries, Murray Lerner's Festival from 1967 and his 2007 The Other Side of the Mirror, an anthology of Bob Dylan's appearances at that festival from 1963-1965, from his country-boy persona of 1963 with "North Country Blues" to the 1964 "Chimes of Freedom" when the audience wouldn't let him go, to the electric-guitar-betrayal in 1965 with "Maggie's Farm." I was a participant in this history because I actually attended the 1963 concert with a group of friends. Dylan was pretty much an unknown then when introduced on the stage of Freebody Park by Joan Baez on July 26, 1963. Lerner's compilation of long-unseen footage from those three Newport Festivals is a must for all Dylan enthusiasts and cinema buffs in general.
Light-years away from all this and representing my truer tastes was the HD presentation at Newport's Jane Pickens Theatre last Monday of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino production of Verdi's La forza del destino. The opera's libretto is a mishmash of meandering melodrama, but, ah the music! That work was the first opera recording I ever bought. I was seventeen, and it was an LP of highlights featuring Maria Callas and Giuseppe Di Stefano. I had heard her singing the aria "Pace, pace, mio Dio" on the radio when my parents were driving me home from the seminary for a break, and I fell in love with the music and with Callas' voice.
Ah, music!