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 every weekday in the order in which I first heard them.

5. Bach Organ Favorites, performed by E. Power Biggs (Columbia)

This handsomely played E. Power Biggs anthology of Bach organ music came out in 1961, eight years before I bought a copy. It contains the “big three” large-scale organ solos, the C Minor Passacaglia and Fugue, the C Major Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, and the D Minor Toccata and Fugue, together with two shorter but equally familiar works, the “Little” Fugue in G Minor and the G Major Fugue “à la Gigue.”

In those days, Biggs was probably the world’s most famous classical organist, but I didn’t know who he was, nor had I seen Walt Disney’s Fantasia, in which Leopold Stokowski’s Technicolor orchestral version of the D Minor Toccata and Fugue figures prominently. What first got me interested in Bach was “Bach Transmogrified,” one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, which aired in April of 1969. Switched-On Bach, the album on which Wendy Carlos (then known as Walter) performed an assortment of pieces by Bach on the then-new Moog Synthesizer, had just been released, and Bernstein took advantage of its popularity to present a TV concert in which he showed how Bach’s music could be played in a variety of ways. The program opened with the G Minor Fugue played by Michael Korn on Avery Fisher Hall’s pipe organ. Then Stokowski himself led the New York Philharmonic in his own resplendent orchestral transcription of the same piece, followed by an all-electronic synthesizer “performance.”

I was naturally fascinated by what Bernstein had to say, but it was the music, the G Minor Fugue in particular, that seized and held my attention. I went to Keith Collins Piano Company, Smalltown’s local music store, the very next day, hoping against hope to find a recording of that miraculous piece. Sure enough, they had Biggs’ Bach Organ Favorites in stock, and I brought the album home with delight and listened to it in ecstasy. I’ve been listening to it ever since.

(To be continued)

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“Bach Transmogrified,” a Young People’s Concert by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, originally telecast by CBS on April 27, 1969:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

“Jazz on Stage,” an episode from a 1970 syndicated TV series. This episode was directed by Jack Lewerke and filmed during a performance at Shelly’s Manne-Hole, a Los Angeles night club owned and run by Shelly Manne. The band consists of Bob Cooper on tenor saxophone, Hampton Hawes on piano, Ray Brown on bass, and Manne on drums:

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

“I have no use for principles which demand human sacrifice.”

Eugenie Schwarzwald (quoted in Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander)

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)

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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:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

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)

“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)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo. Here’s an excerpt.

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Were a visitor from another planet to spend a few seasons visiting Broadway, he could be forgiven for assuming that Tennessee Williams wrote only three plays, “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Not since 1996 have any of Williams’ other major plays been staged there. Of course there’s a good reason for this, which is that many of his other plays are flawed beyond repair. But even some of the successful ones are rarely seen. The original 1951 production of “The Rose Tattoo,” for example, had a solid Broadway run—306 performances—and was also filmed four years later. Nevertheless, it has only been revived there twice, in 1966 and 1995.

Why has “The Rose Tattoo” dropped out of sight? One obvious reason is that it requires a huge cast. The 1951 production fielded 23 actors, and even though Trip Cullman’s new Roundabout Theatre Company revival, which stars Marisa Tomei, has trimmed that budget-busting figure down to 18, it’s still ruinously costly to mount. That said, my guess is that the real reason why we no longer see much of “The Rose Tattoo” has to do with the play itself, which is tricky to bring off and which Mr. Cullman has not managed to make fully palatable for contemporary audiences.

One aspect of “The Rose Tattoo” that makes it so awkward to revive is that it’s part comedy and part drama, an attempt by Williams to translate his favorite theme, the need for everyone to have more and better sex, into farce-flavored terms….

It’s easy to see how such a situation could be played for laughs. Where Mr. Cullman’s revival goes astray is that it does so too broadly….

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The version of this review that appears in today’s print edition is somewhat shorter than the original, which appeared on line on Wednesday. Read the whole thing here.

Marisa Tomei talks about The Rose Tattoo:

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 every weekday in the order in which I first heard them:

3. Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Columbia)

This album, which came out in 1964, was the first one on which Bob Dylan sang nothing but his own material, accompanied only by his harmonic and acoustic guitar. I was introduced to it four years later by Bob Nelson, my eighth-grade social-studies teacher, who decided for reasons of his own to introduce me to the music of my own time.

It was, as the saying goes, a good day’s work: I’ve spent much of the rest of my life listening to, and thinking about, the records that Mr. Nelson (as I invariably called him, having been raised by my parents to be polite to my elders) loaned me that year. I wonder whether he had any idea back then what an impression they would make.

As I wrote in this space four years ago:

I’d listened to music of sundry kinds throughout my childhood, but I discovered it—all of it—in 1968, the year I turned twelve. Prior to that time, my knowledge of what it sounded like was mostly limited to my father’s record collection, which consisted in the main of swing and jazz albums and pop singles from the Fifties, augmented by what I saw and heard on TV. Smalltown, U.S.A., had only two AM radio stations, neither of which was hip by any conceivable standard. They played the Top 40, and the best-selling singles of 1967, according to Billboard, were, in descending order, Lulu’s “To Sir With Love,” the Box Tops’ “The Letter,” Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” the Association’s “Windy,” and the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer.”

Yes, there were more galvanizing sounds to be found on the airwaves. Billboard’s Hot 100 for 1967 also included, among other things, the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” the Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man,” and the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin.’” But I don’t remember hearing any of them that year, at least not on the radio. The hits of 1967 that I recall most clearly, if not nostalgically, are (I blush to admit it) “Incense and Peppermints” and “Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron.” What can I say? I was eleven and still in a state of unkissed innocence.

All that began to change when I took up the violin in the fall of 1967 and, a year later, fell into the clutches of Bob Nelson, a bearded social-studies teacher who took it upon himself to force my ears open by loaning me a stack of albums from his personal collection….

The first of Mr. Nelson’s albums to which I remember listening was The Times They Are A-Changin’. It was Dylan’s political balladry that hit me hardest at first, though it was “One Too Many Mornings” that stayed with me longest. Mostly, though, what I remember best is the raspy, lonely sound of Dylan’s entwined voice and harmonica. It had nothing in common with the smooth, jazzy balladry of the Fifties that my father loved. It was something new and different, and I responded to it immediately and wholeheartedly. I can’t remember the last time I listened to The Times They Are A-Changin’, but I have no trouble calling it up in my mind’s ear a half-century after I first heard it. You never forget the sound of the future calling out to you.

(To be continued)

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Bob Dylan sings “Blowin’ in the Wind” on TV in 1963:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.