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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 18, 2019

The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (4)

October 18, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the order in which I first heard them.

4. Judy Collins, In My Life (Elektra)

Bob Nelson, my eighth-grade social-studies teacher, dropped a bomb on my sedate musical world when he introduced me to Bob Dylan in 1968. He then proceeded to up the ante by loaning me In My Life, the 1966 album in which Judy Collins, a singer-guitarist whose first four records had established her as a key figure in the folk-music revival of the Sixties, pulled a switch on her fans. No, Collins didn’t go electric. Instead, she put out a record on which her flute-like mezzo-soprano was accompanied by a studio orchestra—and not just any studio orchestra, either, but a chamber ensemble conducted by and featuring the colorful arrangements of Joshua Rifkin, the pianist-musicologist best remembered today for recording an album of piano rags by Scott Joplin released in 1970 that spearheaded the ragtime revival.

Not only does In My Life sound different from anything that Collins and her fellow folksingers had previously recorded, but it contains an unusually wide-ranging and imaginatively chosen assortment of material. In addition to the title track, a Lennon-McCartney ballad that first appeared on Rubber Soul, it includes, among other things, Leonard Cohen’s “Dress Rehearsal Rag” and “Suzanne,” Donovan’s “Sunny Goodge Street,” Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” Richard Fariña’s “Hard Lovin’ Loser,” Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” and Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny” (from The Threepenny Opera, performed by Collins in Marc Blitzstein’s English-language version of Bertolt Brecht’s German lyric). Pop songs didn’t get much better than that in 1966, and Collins sang them all with her usual grace and delicacy.

Nowadays I (mostly) prefer the harder-edged original versions of the songs on In My Life, but Collins’ gentle lyricism was perfectly in tune with the inchoate longings of a painfully shy thirteen-year-old boy who had only just started to notice and be excited by the mysterious differences between men and women. Not surprisingly, I fell hopelessly in love with singer and songs alike, “Suzanne” in particular, and I would listen to In My Life countless times before moving away from Smalltown, U.S.A., and moving on to grittier musical fare.

(To be continued)

*  *  *

Judy Collins, introduced by Tommy Smothers, performs “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967. She is lip-synching to the orchestral accompaniment from In My Life:

*  *  *

To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

Replay: José Iturbi plays Liszt

October 18, 2019 by Terry Teachout

José Iturbi plays Liszt’s Eleventh Hungarian Rhapsody in a 1940 film:

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

Almanac: Arturo Toscanini on the tragedy of the great performer

October 18, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“No true musician can be satisfied with his performance, even through an audience is driven to a frenzy.”

Arturo Toscanini (quoted by Halina Rodzinski in Our Two Lives)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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