BECAUSE THE BASSOON was my instrument through high school, and my best friend Merton played oboe, a fascination for the double-reed instruments pursued me, or I it, for a number of years afterward. One of the first LPs I bought — second-hand, needless to say, there was never a lot of money around in those days — was a ten-inch Mercury disc featuring Mitch Miller playing the Vaughan Williams Oboe Concerto and a Pavane and Gigue arranged from vihuela music, I suppose, by Luis Milan. Miller was A&R man for Mercury and this must have been one of their first LPs; the serial number is 10003.
Miller died three days ago, not quite a month after his 99th birthday. He must have been a marvelous conversationalist, and he knew his way around all sorts of music — the "Sing Along with Mitch" tv series eclipsed what were, to me, finer aspects of his musicianship. My copy of the Vaughan Williams is scratchy and hazy; I played it a lot in the 1950s and '60s. I think the Oboe Concerto is one of VW's best scores, neoclassical, not the romantic-English-pastoral vein too often mined by this curious composer. Miller's playing is clear, in tune, beautifully expressive. How I wish he'd recorded the Strauss concerto!
You can download a copy of the VW concerto, how legally I do not know, here; there must be a slew of obituaries online by now, and of course there's always Wikipedia. I wish I'd known Mitch Miller; I bet he was a much more interesting and rewarding acquaintance than any of these references suggest.
3 comments:
I'm not sure whether to be sad or what. I've never thought of Mitch Miller as someone whom I might have known, or cared much about. The Mitch Miller Sing-along found its way into our livingroom, probably in the late 50's or early 60's, along with Palladin and Gunsmoke and Jack Paar. I still flinch to recall the horrible renditions they gave of the pop poop of that day.
But I just finished Pete Hamill's little biography of Sinatra, where he mentions the anecdote about Miller trying to make a novelty-singer out of The Voice--just at about the lowest point in Frank's career. Apparently, this was common practice for Miller while he worked at Columbia. Record producers can be pretty crass. Miller made a lot of dough, and pleased a lot of (common) people. My stepfather, who had less than no taste in music (is that possible?), liked the sing-alongs. I found them putrid.
Hmmm. Well, maybe I'm more than a little common. I remember in the 1950s liking Miller's use of French horns in backup orchestrations for some of that "pop poop," and I remember my father's interest in them, too; they took his "taste" further than it might otherwise have gone…
Listening to Mitch Miller's performances, which I've downloaded, gives me a totally different picture from the biographical details. I've been writing in my own website about "channels of energy" in which traditions seem to pass through certain artists is if they were carriers rather than creators. A third of a century ago I felt it, first in an extraordinary 19-year-old violinist and then in my own experience of putting together a complex prerecorded tape for Henri Pousseur in an impossibly short period of time, and with no direct personal communication. The details are in http://www.thankyouoneandall.co.uk,in the letters to Sophie and to Henri.
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