David Carbonara interview
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Category Archives: CD Reviews
Mad Men CD, David Carbonara
My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast with musical excerpts. You can read all my CD reviews here.
Matthew Weiner, the creator of the hugely popular TV series Mad Men—now in its fifth season—works very hard at going beneath the surface to capture the look of the 1960s, from company logo typefaces to office equipment tints to the shine in a pair of trousers. Mad Men composer David Carbonara labors just as much on the show’s music to express that era; he’s a composer of acutely original pieces.
Mad Men, Original Soundtrack from the TV Series, Vol. 1 is filled mostly with standards from artists such as Gordon Jenkins (“Caravan”), Vic Damone (“On the Street Where You Live”), and Ella Fitzgerald, who makes an appearance with “Manhattan.” “Fly Me to the Moon” is Julie London’s luscious pizzicato-tinged string version, not Frank Sinatra’s better-known big-band hit.
But for lovers of music in the cracks—not pop, not concert, but what, exactly—the reason to look for this CD may be David Carbonara himself.
Weiner chooses most of the period songs, but “Lipstick” by Carbonara is a distillation (if you will, given all the imbibing in the series) of music in the twilight: slightly lounge, slightly jazz, and as rebellious as one may appear while keeping one’s hair in place. It’s the sound of muted trumpets, punchy trombones, low flutes, snapping fingers, walking bass lines, one-handed laconic piano playing (necessary while stubbing out a cigarette), and that child of the time, the Hammond organ. His “Mad Men Suite” is likewise all delicately drawn atmosphere.
A big surprise is the inclusion of the traditional round “Babylon,” known by many (anachronistically for the show) from Don McLean’s 1971 album American Pie. In one episode it was worked into a Village mandolin-strummed folk happening (with Carbonara briefly on camera, playing autoharp!). Its text comes right out of Psalm 137, “By the waters of Babylon, we laid down and wept, when we remembered Zion.”
What that has to do with the advertising world, legions of die-hard Mad Men fans will know. There’s a lot going on here beneath the surface.
Mark Hagerty, Soliloquy
My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.
Soliloquy: Music of Mark Hagerty
Mark Hagerty’s music is smart and sneaky. Let’s start with sneaky. He doesn’t show off: his music is so nicely grounded that you don’t appreciate the intelligence and difficulty needed to bring it off until later. Whether it’s the hipness grooved into High Octane (written for the new-music ensemble Relâche) or the Clavier Books 1 through 3 and Cello Suite 2 in his new CD Soliloquy, his music keeps surprising you.
In the 2-disc Soliloquy, the surprise is the strength carried by lightness. These suites float like a dragonfly and zing like peppermint tea. The Cello Suite 2, performed soulfully by Douglas McNames, is profound but never moribund, and it may occur to you later how seldom you hear that nowadays. I’d call it optimistic, but that’s not quite it. It’s full of life, the parts that are good and the parts that are, perhaps, just real.
Hagerty’s three books for harpsichord, played with precision and vigor by his wife Tracy Richardson, lay out a wonderful trajectory through Baroque dance forms of Capriccios, Arias, Toccatas, and Saltarellos. The bite of the harpsichord can make deviations from tonality appear tendentious. Hagerty knows this as well as anyone, and composes suites that are a refreshing—even remarkable—series of harmonic acrobatics that push to the edge of imbalance, but never topple. Ooh and ah if you like.
So it’s sneaky and it’s smart. Hagerty writes on his website, “the 20th Century is over. Pastiche, irony, alienation, avant-garde posturing, minimalism, and shock are played out. We need music that fights back and evinces the positive that still does, or could, exist.” A fine soliloquy, that.
Musik Ekklesia: The Vanishing Nordic Chorale
My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.
Musik Ekklesia: The Vanishing Nordic Chorale
It’s well past time to listen to historical instruments because they’re, well, historical. Or “informed,” or “accurate,” or whatever word we might use to feel scholastically correct. It’s time to listen because they sound beautiful.
Musik Ekklesia, “music for the church,” is an Indiana-based Baroque ensemble led by bassist and violonist Philip Spray. He’s rounded up some of the top period-instrument players—including Stanley Ritchie, violin, Wendy Gillespie, viol, and Kathryn Montoya, oboe—for this sparkling CD of surprising chorale arrangements.
It’s immediately surprising because in addition to the expected chorale setters Praetorius, Scheidt, Crüger, and the later J.S. Bach, who should show up but 20th-century Carl Nielsen? There’s also Grieg, and Mendelssohn’s deeply felt Verleih uns Frieden (Now grant us peace, Lord, in these troubled times), sung in Danish (Forlen os freden, Herre, nu). The light sweep and brilliance of the older instruments bring out new colors, which ought to make Mendelssohn, that lover of old music, smile.
The Lutheran chorale began in Germany but quickly spread to Scandinavian and other countries. They added their own tunes to the repertoire, and emigre enclaves in the U.S. continued those traditions. Musik Ekklesia brings the music all the way to today. There’s some Christmas music here, and even a brand-new work, an improvisation by the Budapest-born Bálint Karosi, Music Director of the First Lutheran Church of Boston, performing on its new 27-stop North German Baroque-style organ.
The times and instruments and composers spin, making any putative correctness happily unnecessary. It just sounds beautiful.
Jay Ungar, Molly Mason, Harvest Home
My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.
Harvest Home: Jay Ungar, Molly Mason, Nashville Chamber Orchestra
“Classical music” is not a single style, but an ever-widening variety. Because of this, classical audiences have the broadest tastes, and will happily listen to music on the borders of what others might consider “classical.” Take this CD by fiddler Jay Ungar and guitarist Molly Mason, which will also match the Thanksgiving spirit of any gathering you may be planning. The music blooms with the excellent Nashville Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Paul Gambill.
It’s a fusion of mostly-new music in a mostly-folk style, with salutes to Yanks, Cajuns, and Copland. It also includes one tune you may already know from the Ken Burns film The Civil War, “The Ashokan Farewell.”
Ungar wrote that tune as the closing song for the fiddle camp he runs in the Catskills. Its genius is that it sounds like it’s an Appalachian or Scottish lament, hundreds of years old. It’s a timeless melody, given a ravishing reading here with orchestra.
The Harvest Home Suite includes “Autumn,” with a re-imagining of “We Gather Together to Ask Our Lord’s Blessing,” a Dutch hymn-text translated to Latin by Austrian Eduard Kremser (who composed the tune), then to English by the New Yorker Theodore Baker, the originator of one of the standard music reference resources, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary. New Yorker Jay Ungar now folds this classic Thanksgiving hymn into this lovingly-played suite. Everything on the CD is performed with beauty and sheen. That’s something all classical audiences love.
John Williams
My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.
John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999
A lone violin plays a simple, haunting melody, and you think of the people: the many taken away, the few saved, and the one who saved the few. His name is Schindler, and the violin plays. This forlorn, soft, heart-rending music—performed here by Itzhak Perlman—is by John Williams, the king of Hollywood composers. It transforms the movie, because as sad as Schindler’s List is, it is the sweetness of the music that drives the sadness deeper. John Williams makes magic happen in front of our eyes. In more than 75 films and counting, that’s what he does…. read more…
Where flames a word, CD review
Quebec’s François Couture’s Listening Diary, in French and English, ”IS NOT a collection of thought-out reviews. It’s a set of on-the-spot reactions.” He listens to tons, and likes The Crossing’s latest CD It is Time:
The Crossing is a strong choir devoted to classical and contemporary music. Navona Records just devoted a record to it. Conducted by Donald Nally, the choir performed works by David Shapiro, Kile Smith, Paul Fowler, Frank Havrøy, Erhard karkowschka, and Kirsten Broberg,. Shapiro’s two pieces explore deeply mastered dissonant harmonies. The other composers are less bold, but “Where flames a word” by Smith and Broberg’s ‘Breathturn” develop original ideas. And all in all, It Is Time is a pretty nice offering.
