Elmer Gantry was drunk.
Who’s going to see Elmer Gantry at Montclair later this week? Want to write a review for us? No money but an incredible amount of love, peace and understanding (and what’s so funny about that?) and the next 10 Mozart CDs companies send me by mistake.
Marvin is doing the world premiere of the Alan Hovhaness concerto Shambala, for violin, sitar and orchestra, originally composed for Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, on his Classical Discoveries radio program on January 30 during the 9 am EST hour. As usual, you can listen to it on the web at WPRB in Princeton.
The broadcast marks the February 14th release of the OgreOgress DualDisc comprising three Hovhaness works, each featuring violinist/violist Christina Fong. Both Shambala and Janabar (1950) appear in world-premiere recordings, while the concerto Talin was last recorded in its original viola & strings format in 1957.
I had a real thing about Sinclair Lewis when I was 10 or 11 years old. Read Arrowsmith, Dodsworth, Elmer Gantry, Babbitt, Main Street back to back. Lewis created characters that were not so much flesh and blood as archetypes of American mendacity. I soon moved on to Hemingway and Faulkner but Lewis–who was hardly in that league as a writer–was my first real exposure to concepts like satire and irony and skepticism and, for better or worse, far more influential in shaping my views of the world.
Actually, I was teasing. I’ll be 65 in May and Richard is a couple of years older than me. I remember a great August afternoon picnic about 30 years ago in his parents backyard in Westport. About 30 of Richard’s ex-girlfriends were there, one of them a physician and incredible physical presence who could throw a football about 40 yards in a perfect spiral. Ah, to be young again. (Or maybe not)
Richard Kostelanetz is only, according to Wikipedia, 67. That doesn’t quite pass for “very old” these days, does it?
Are you thinking of his uncle, Andre, the conductor? He died way back in 1980.
Is Kostelanetz’s still alive? We used to be pretty good friends. He must be very old.
Ah, glad for the heads-up on Marvin’s program – Hovhaness just arrived on my musical radar thanks to Richard Kostelanetz’s On Innovative Music(ian)s and a Naxos podcast that I finally got around to listening to.
I love Sinclair Lewis & read him regularly. I’ve even got the ones no one remembers. I’m just now finishing Ann Vickers.
Reading ‘Main Street’ again just before we moved to Minnesota 17 years back turned out to be the single best thing I could have done. Lewis describes the Midwest take on how to accept the cultural ‘new’ / different and absolutely nails it.
For this New Yorker-bref it was quite a change. ( Oh Min-ne-soh!-ta !)