Two Words, One Answer.
middle organs
 A Man of Flowers $24.99 "Man of Flowers" shows a few months from the life of a man who as the result of childhood traumas has become devoid of the need for human relationships, and consequently, never developed social skills necessary to build and sustain them. Being thus freed from the hang-up on relationships, he has become rarefied, and has escaped instead into the safety of another hang-up - beauty in its various forms: flowers, music, human body in painting and sculpture. He's not unhappy, but he is considered to be so, and to cure this perceived suffering he is in psychotherapy. As part of it, he's told to build relationships, and he tries to, clumsily and hilariously, with quite unlikely characters: his therapist, postman, long-deceased mother, construction contractor. None of those are real and normal relationships, and as he fails to see that, and lacks the sense of danger, he is easy prey to manipulators. He also has an on-going acquaintance with a young and pretty girl - an artists' model. At first glance it looks like this one might be a normal relationship, but on his side it's nothing more than an acquaintance - he doesn't see the girl as a person, but merely as an object of beauty (his "flower"). He doesn't do it out of ill will, he simply doesn't have a need, or an idea, for anything more. The girl, on the other hand, becomes fond of him, increasingly more so as her relationship with her junkie boyfriend deteriorates. He turns down her offer of living together, and proves to be more protective than fond of her by solving her boyfriend problem in a truly ingenious way. A charming movie, portraying a man who's not "from Mars" but perhaps from Jupiter.  Pachelbel Greatest Hits $7.99 The title of this CD, Pachelbel - Greatest Hits, is a misnomer. First, less than a third of the selections are by Johann Pachelbel, the German organist and composer of about a generation-and-a-half before J.S. Bach, whose Canon for strings and continuo was a mega runaway hit when it was reintroduced to the world in the early 1970s in the recording made by the Paillard Chamber Orchestra (still the reference performance in my opinion). The album might be better called Pachelbel and His Successors, as it contains works by Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, among others. Most of the works are baroque chestnuts that are familiar to anyone previously exposed to classical music. Many are excerpts from larger works, which begs the question: Why this compilation? Frankly, I cannot give you an answer. This collection, while including selections from such well-known works as Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Vivaldi's The Four Seasons and the Fireworks Music, Water Music and Messiah of Handel, also contains a lot of music that is as obscure as the composers who wrote it. What's more, the versions presented here aren't orthodox: Pachelbel's now famous Canon is performed not by a string ensemble but the Canadian Brass; the Hallelujah Chorus is sung in German, rather than in the English of the original Messiah. These quirks render this assemblage of interest only to those who are already familiar with these pieces and won't mind listening to them again but in different clothing. For the uninitiated, there are better collections of baroque hits. For those interested in the masterworks from which excerpts are packaged here, they would be best advised to seek recordings of the complete Brandenburgs or Goldberg Variations or Four Seasons. As for poor Pachelbel, his greatest hits really boil down to just one work: that Canon. Not that his music isn't worth investigating, but he is, in the final analysis, a minor figure, known to us today (aside from professional organists) only because of the accident of the Paillard recording and the music's use in the film Ordinary People. I bought this CD in a rush because I needed it for a podcast [...] in which I wanted to include Bach's Sinfonia to Cantata No. 29. For my own interest, if I had not been in such a panic, I would have preferred to have bought a recording of the entire cantata. With those caveats, Pachelbel - Greatest Hits is pleasant if unusual listening. The performances, all taken from the Columbia/Sony Classical archives, are good and the recorded sound decent. I would recommend this CD only to those who are already very familiar with the more famous among these works and wouldn't mind listening to different versions during, say, Sunday brunch. |
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