Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

The legendary jazzman Coleman Hawkins would have been 100 years old Sunday. Music historians say masterpieces such as "Body and Soul" and Hawkins' dexterity on the tenor saxophone helped change the genre. His love of classical music also informed his music.

Not long after I learned about “Frozen,” I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked his way through a mountain of CDs. He played “Angel,” by the reggae singer Shaggy, and then “The Joker,” by the Steve Miller Band, and told me to listen very carefully to the similarity in bass lines. He played Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and then Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love,” to show the extent to which Led Zeppelin had mined the blues for inspiration. He played “Twice My Age,” by Shabba Ranks and Krystal, and then the saccharine seventies pop standard “Seasons in the Sun,” until I could hear the echoes of the second song in the first. . . .

My friend had hundreds of these examples. We could have sat in his living room playing at musical genealogy for hours. Did the examples upset him? Of course not, because he knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence—cribbing, tweaking, transforming—were at the very heart of the creative process.

All his students learned to do good imitations of Shure's Socratic methods as he grilled us about details in the score. "Tony, what does the B do?," he would ask sternly, pointing to a note. Panic-stricken, I'd answer: "It leads to the C?" Huffing with displeasure, Shure would respond: "Not in my score!" Then he would play the passage in question with such authority, majesty, expressive power and refinement that you felt privileged to be in his presence.

From the master he acquired and passed on a heritage of treating piano music and piano playing itself as a serious artistic undertaking. Both composers and performers, Czerny believed, must learn from the structural integrity of Beethoven's works. Every note must matter. Display for the sake of display should be shunned.

Few people have been as ill-equipped, yet as eager to be an opera performer as Peter Gaspar. It was 1944 in the Terezin concentration camp, and the seven-year-old Czech Jew knew it was "a big deal".

"It meant better food - fresh fruit, a glass of milk a day, soup that wasn't just dishwater - plus a relief from boredom," he says.

Jewish Czech actress Vlaska Schoenova, who befriended Gaspar and his mother, got him an audition for the performance, which revealed one slight handicap: he could not sing.

A man who started the evening sitting in the audience for a production of the opera Carmen, ended the night onstage receiving kudos after he replaced a stricken opera singer.

Baritone Ian Vayne had been watching a Monday performance of the Bizet opera at the Landestheater in the city of Linz, Austria, when one of the leads suffered a heart attack in the second act.

"[Vayne] jumped onstage without makeup or costume and, without having warmed up his voice, finished the opera in place of Lauri Vasar," Elisabeth Egger-Mann, a spokesperson for the Landestheater, said on Tuesday.