What to get a little girl for Christmas?
First, thank goodness for the pink ad on the left. But we're sticking with the editorial Christmas suggestions until New Year's Day.
Buy her a slip, a nightie and some bath things and call it a day. Can't it be that simple? No. The little drawing of the slip pushes the fabric (Dacron), the brand (Style Undies), the owner of the brand (Burlington - we've seen their ad already) and two department stores (Julius Garfinckel and Altman's. It's just a little slip and it has the weight of industrial America behind it. You could step through this page and come out in Fortune magazine. Somehow more brutally evident here. Or my shoes are pinching and need a break from shopping.
How about Tub o' Fun? Just a dollar! O.K. - Restored! On to the record store.
What to get the classical music fiend on your list?
Bach: St. Matthew Passion; Ernst Haefliger, Keith Engen, Max Proebstl, Irmgaard Seefried, Munich Boys Choir, Bach Orchestra, conducted by Karl Richter.
One of the important recordings, I read on a Bach site, and still available. I am just as ignorant of classical music as I am of jazz. Appallingly, I never realized how huge and varied are the gaps in my glossy, expensive, 100-per-cent-liberal arts education!
Although, if I haven't heard the St. Matthew passion, I have heard something similar on an organ with a choir around Easter in Flensburg, in Germany. I think it was this organ, at the St. Nikolaikirche.
I went with "Tante" Hannchen, the village woman who saved my mother-in-law, an orphan, from typhus and the Russians at the end of the war. She lived in an ancient house with no indoor plumbing in a village near the Polish border and came West twice a year to stay with the family. She stocked up on good tweeds and woolens from the most expensive place in town. Liked to watch Columbo -- "Ach, kluge!" (Clever). When I knew her, she was in her nineties and kicked a soccer ball around the yard with my son, more than 90 years younger. Had worked in a beauty salon in Berlin in the 1920s, never saw a bit of decadence.
Never know what you'll get here.
Never know what you'll get here.
Here is Karl Richter and the Passion of St. Matthew from 1971:
Beethoven: Concertos No. 1 and 2, Emil Gilels and the Orchestre de la de Societe des Concerts du Conservetoire.
This particular set of concertos appears not to have survived. After the Bach, which I have been listening to off and on for the past few days, these seem thin and showy. Piano Concerto No. 3 seems to have been the big hit; can't find a video of 1 or 2.
So we will pass on to:
Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies, Bruno Walter, conducting, and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. This didn't survive either in its original form. How could it? The unsigned Vogue writer, who seems to be a different person that picked the jazz records: "A four-sheet drawing of Bruno Walter, suitable for mounting on a billboard, is the first of the tidbits that jump out of this handsome box. The second is "A Beethoven Reader," a 48 page booklet full of steel engravings, epigrams and themes of the symphonies, by all sorts of people -- Debussy, Schumann, Berlioz, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Finally there come the recordings, solid, authoritative, a series of brilliant meditations. They justify all the fuss." Goes on to say not all of them are the best or most interesting examples, but a stunning effort. "No false elegance."
What a present! Seven records, a booklet, a poster, all of the record sleeves, the sturdy box, that smell of vinyl and the kind of electric aura it gave off, when fresh. A new record was a beautiful thing.
No video. And no movie!
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