Book notes: 'David Park: A Painter's Life' by Nancy Boas

David Park: A Painter's Life by Nancy Boas

UC Press, $49.95

David Park (1911-1960) was a first-rate painter who found himself in a tough spot in fall 1946. Clyfford Still, the imperious and voluble artist who would pioneer Abstract Expressionism, wanted to take over the advanced painting class that Park taught at San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts. The administration turned him down, and Still harbored a grudge for years.

Park went on to paint his way out of the dilemma, finding the means for a distinctive type of figuration that could be convincingly infused within muscular abstraction. In "David Park: A Painter's Life," Nancy Boas (Society of Six) draws on 20 years of interviews and research to tell the story of how Park came to spearhead Bay Area Figurative art, spawning Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown and others. This welcome volume is the first full biography of a Northern California artist.

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-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Book review: 'The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography'

Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982
Daniell Cornell, ed.; Prestel pp.256; $60

A splashy picture book makes sense for a large-format volume on post-World War II photographs that include swimming pools.

With more than 200 images by nearly 50 artists, starting in the 1940s with Ruth Bernhard and ending with David Hockney's early 1980s multi-Polaroids, this handsomely printed catalog to a large Pacific Standard Time show at the Palm Springs Art Museum accomplishes that.

It fudges a bit by including a few seashore pictures; but together with the photographs' pleasurable indulgences, the five essays also have larger, smarter points to make.

Along with the artificial Eden represented by the swimming pool construction-boom and the emerging gay sub-theme in the arc from Bernhard's babes to Hockney's boys, camera-work underwent a simultaneous shift.

Sharp-focused Modernist purity gave way to postmodern multiplicity, and America's narrow domestic environment changed along with it.

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-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Album review: Kronos Quartet: Music of Vladimir Martynov

Kronos Quartet: Music of Vladimir Martynov
Nonesuch

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s addictive three-week Mahler Project is over. Now what? There is always cold turkey. But there is also, courtesy of the Kronos Quartet, Mahler methadone.

In the string quartet "Das Abschied," by a 65-year-old spiritual Russian composer too little known in the West, Vladimir Martynov extends the final passages of the last measures of Mahler’s symphonic song cycle “Das Lied von der Erde” to a heavenly length of 40 minutes.

This is Mahler for those who never want one of his most movingly ethereal passages to stop.

Also on the recording is another magnificent example of how Martinov’s mystical obsession with time and history music has led him to step outside of reasonable temporality and human concerns. He is, in his own description, a "posthumous" composer of “post-opus” music.

In this spirit he wrote his "Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished)," a stirring meditation on Schubert’s magnificent Quintet in C, three years ago for Kronos and its former cellist, Joan Jeanrenaud. It is not so much a post-opus as a Postmodern, Minimalist masterpiece. The performance, exquisitely recorded, is radiant.
 

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Photo: The Kronos Quartet with Jean Jeanrenaud in the world premiere of Martynov's "Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished)" in Berkeley in 2009. Credit: Los Angeles Times.

 

Album review: Michael Slattery's 'Dowland in Dublin'

Michael Slattery: "Dowland in Dublin"

ATMA Classique

The supposedly dour John Dowland is thought to need all the help he can get. His early 17th century songs have been sometimes jazzed up and sung by Sting, even. Still, Michael Slattery, the American tenor of Irish descent (who, as the sailor, was the first singer heard in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Tristan Project” seven years ago) has some cheek. He and the Canadian early music ensemble La Nef have given a selection of Dowland's very British songs an Irish lilt. And an Indian drone too, with a shruti box that is meant to be used for chanting.

It works. Dowland’s tunes are sturdy, able to thrive on a lively lilt or bring a sentimental tear to the eye when offered with sweet Irish melancholy. Slattery sings with a feel for period style and the pub, and La Nef crosses genre divides with similar ease.

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-- Mark Swed

Photo: Michael Slattery. Credit: Ned Schenck.

Book review: 'Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973-1977'

"Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973-1977"
Mike Kelley, Dan Nadel, eds.
Prism / Picturebox $34.95

Destroy All Monsters, the infamous '70s performance art group based in Ann Arbor, Mich., has been the subject of several publications that manage to maintain its anarchic edge of post-adolescent energy, throw-away humor and dead-serious insanity. "Return of the Repressed" is the latest. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at West Hollywood's Prism Gallery, it focuses on the drawings, collages and prints of now-celebrated L.A. artists Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, plus the off-kilter photographs of Cary Loren and fractured fairy tale images by Niagara (she took her name from the 1953 movie, a noir masterpiece that made Marilyn Monroe a star).

As befits a proto-punk group that erupted from the American Rust Belt's collapsed economy, this paperback edition is a bottomless pit: Most of the hundreds of works reproduced in it haven't been published before. Equally pertinent is the smart introductory essay by Nicole Rudick, former managing editor of Bookforum. Rudick sources what she rightly terms the "sui generis" work's inspirations in everything from composers Sun Ra, Harry Partch and John Cage to artists Jean Dubuffet, Asger Jorn and Joseph Beuys.

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Book review: 'The Young Leonardo' by Larry J. Feinberg

'The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence'
Larry J. Feinberg
Cambridge University Press, $95

Leonardo da Vinci's triumphant years in the tough, dangerous environment of Ludovico Sforza's court in Milan is getting lots of attention right now, thanks to an unprecedented exhibition currently at London's National Gallery. If you're wondering what the Renaissance artist's life was like before he moved north, this tightly written, deeply informed recent book chronicles Leonardo's rural Tuscan birth (under less-than-ideal circumstances) through his 20s, when he worked in Verocchio's competitive workshop in Florence.

To limn a portrait of the artist as a young man, Larry J. Feinberg -- director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and a former curator of European painting at the Art Institute of Chicago -- nicely interweaves biography, the implacable social milieu in 15th-century Italy and analysis of Leonardo's rapidly evolving paintings and drawings. Among the book's best features is its keen avoidance of idealizing puffery, which makes Leonardo's accomplishments under often difficult daily circumstances all that much more impressive.

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These classical CD box sets make great gifts

When investing in a CD set for a gift, it’s not a bad idea to go for a sure thing. These are, or will become, classics. They’re for keeps.

The Decca Sound

(Decca)

The Decca label became favored for its high fidelity in the early LP era, to say nothing for its vast, if often British-centric, artist roster. The 50 choice releases from the past half-century, each disc in a cute original album sleeve, are a feast. Famous recordings include excerpts from George Solti’s “Ring,” Benjamin Britten conducting his “War Requiem,” and Zubin Mehta’s  great “Turandot” with Sutherland and Pavarotti. But that’s only the beginning.

Beethoven: The Symphonies. Riccardo Chailly conducts the Gewandhaus Orchestra.

(Decca)

Decca is still at it. Although Beethoven symphony sets are common enough, Chailly’s rhythmic exhilaration and ear for orchestral color provide a spectacular freshening act. The recorded sound is terrific and the symphonies seem to leap out with magical immediacy from whatever digital or analog  device you favor.

Rossini: “William Tell”

(EMI Classics)

It’s been a while since Rossini’s epic and too-little-produced (especially in America) last opera has had a new recording. This one which comes from Rome’s Santa Cecilia Orchestra, is highlighted by Antonio Pappano’s compelling conducting and boasts a capable cast headed by Gerald Finley’s Tell. But the main accomplishment is to remind us of what wonderfully characterful music this opera contains.

CD review: 'Follies' New Broadway Cast Recording

"Follies" New Broadway Cast Recording

(PS Classics)

The score Stephen Sondheim wrote for “Follies” is mind-bogglingly lush — rivaled only perhaps by “Sweeney Todd.” Most cast recordings focus on those songs that have been interpreted again and again — “Broadway Baby,” “In Buddy’s Eyes,” “I’m Still Here” and, of course, everyone’s favorite romantic nervous breakdown number, “Losing My Mind.”

PS Classics' "Follies" New Broadway Cast Recording provides a fuller experience of the entire show, including incidental music and setup dialogue. Nearly 110 minutes long, this two-disc set isn’t for those who just want to sing along in the car. But it’s the most convenient way to experience the current revival -- starring Bernadette Peters and Jan Maxwell as former Follies girls haunted by their life choices -- before it arrives at the Ahmanson Theatre (with a cast to be announced) in May.
 
The 28-piece orchestra, conducted by music director James Moore, creates a sound so sumptuous you won’t have any trouble imagining yourself at the Marquis Theatre. Jayne Houdyshell delivers a vintage trooper rendition of “Broadway Baby” (the upside of casting the role with an ace character actor) and Elaine Paige, doyenne of the British musical theater, knocks out a vocally spectacular “I’m Still Here” that ought to become a classic alongside Elaine Stritch’s sublimely gravelly version. And although Peters and Maxwell portray unhappily married wives, they mesh perfectly well with their onstage spouses played by Danny Burstein and Ron Raines.

The character exchanges need more context than a recording can provide. The acting, as a result, can seem stilted, which wasn’t the case when I saw the show earlier this fall. But when the music is in full flow, as it is during the fantasy Follies number “Loveland,” the feeling is that of a cascading dream.

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 — Charles McNulty

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charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

Album review: Ernest Bloch, Landscapes

Ernest Bloch: Landscapes
(Sony Classical)

It's about time that someone went to bat for Bloch.

The Swiss-born composer who was born in 1880 and immigrated to the U.S. during World War I, is mainly remembered for his Hebrew rhapsody, “Schlomo.” But there is far more to a composer who straddled the Romantic and the Modern, and who had a big influence on many American composers, teaching in Cleveland, San Francisco and Portland, Ore.

He wrote five really good mature string quartets, all neglected. But it is the idea of the young Galatea Quartet, which champions new Swiss and German music and plays Pink Floyd on the side, instead, to introduce Bloch through small chamber pieces that show the gamut of his styles and flair for evoking nature. The playing is imaginative and the music haunts. Included is also the first recording of a teenage string quartet that gives near Mendelssohnian promise of a major composer to come.

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-- Mark Swed

Photo: the Galatea Quartet. Credit: Raphaël Fleury

Album review: Christian McBride's 'Conversations With Christian'

Christian McBride, "Conversations With Christian"

(Mack Avenue)

Bassist/bandleader Christian McBride isn't a guy who likes sitting still. The L.A. Phil's Creative Chair for Jazz from 2006 to 2010, the 39-year-old McBride has recently toured with the jazz-fusion super-group Five Peace Band as well as his throwback acoustic ensemble Kind of Brown, which released a sharp debut in 2009. This year marks another active one for McBride with September's rambunctious big-band album "The Good Feeling" and this month's "Conversations With Christian," a collection of duets that rose out of a 2009 podcast series of the same name.

Full of loosely intimate interplay, the results sometimes recall the try-anything spirit of McBride's guest-heavy 2006 live album "Live at Tonic." A duet with Dee Dee Bridgewater on "It's Your Thing" swells with such a sassily off-the-cuff spirit that Bridgewater briefly breaks into laughter, while jazz violinist Regina Carter forms an intricate lattice-work with McBride for a bluesy play on Bach's Double Violin Concerto. A sparkling improvisation with Chick Corea churns through a sea of unexpected twists, and "McDukey's Blues" is a raucous piano-bass sprint with George Duke, who sounds worlds away from his breezier plugged-in fare.