THE TAOS TATLER.

MUSIC REVIEW.

Way back in the ’70s I was presented with a box set of Bach Cantatas played on so-called original, or period, instruments. I hated it. The fiddles were scratchy and the players’s lousy intonation was painful to behold for this nerd with perfect pitch. Similarly with the winds: they sounded anemic, wimpy and dull. Worse, the interpretations were overly academic and boring, the shared notion among players and conductor alike: emotions and excitement were romantic practices, thus taboo for authentic performances of baroque music. My reaction at the time was, if this is the way performances of music by Bach and his contemporaries sounded back then, give me modern instruments, crescendi and diminuendi, vibrato, and all the other sinful musical practices of our age.

Over the years however I’ve changed my mind about historically-informed performances, the reasons being better instruments and players, plus more recent research. Now days one can find original-instument recordings of baroque, classical and even early romantic works that not only compete with their modern counterparts, but often outshine them.

The recordings featured here, Vivaldi / Bach: “12 Concertos, Op. 3, “L’Estro armonico / Bach: Keyboards Arrangements,” exemplify superior historically-informed performances and recordings  All the negatives I describe above are absent, replaced by exquisite musicianship and fresh, lively interpretations. Moreover, there’s a wonderful concept to this album.

Vivaldi’s L’Estro armonico is a collection of a dozen concerti grossi, of which there are dozens of recordings. They could almost be considered baroque potboilers, but what makes these recordings stand out from the rest, in addition to the fabulous playing of the ensemble, Concerto Italiano and its leader and founder, Rinaldo Allesandrini, is the works are paired with transcriptions made of them by a young J. S. Bach for harpsichord and organ, after their publication in 1711. Bach was deeply impressed by the concertos comprising L’Estro armonico and his later compositions, after becoming aware of them, show a marked influence on him.

Also worth mentioning is the audio on these recordings, which is superb, among the finest I’ve ever heard. A Hi-Res surround-sound system will bring out the best in these beautifully recorded performances, but they should sound terrific on any decent rig.

Highly recommended.

From here.

A commenter writes: “Punching testicles is how New Yorkers say “welcome.” That’s close, but not quite on the mark. As an ex-New Yorker whose family has been in the City even before the mists of time, I can state with authority, punching testicles is how New Yorkers say: “Have a nice day, a**hole.”

Église Saint-Bernard in Digby County, NS: attendance had dwindled to “30 to 40 people.” The church needed repairs the congregation couldn’t afford, so it’s up for sale, asking price is 250,000 CAD.

During its heyday, LeBlanc said there were two masses on weekends with over a thousand people in attendance for each. By the time COVID-19 arrived, she said around 35 people were attending the one weekend mass.

A thousand worshipers, down to 35. True, the county population has declined, but surely not ca. 97%. What happened to the rest of those worshippers? Can’t say for sure but it’s easy to guess.

From Jihad Watch.

The Archbishop needn’t expect an invitation likewise from the Muslims.

Thanks to William Tighe.

NOTE: Your Tatler, after taking a well-unearned break, is resuming blogging. To ease the way back into my craft, as it were, this return post will feature an essayist more able than I and who will do the heavy lifting.

* * *

News item:

Biden’s Approval Rating Tanks Near All-Time Lows As Country Continues Downward Spiral

With the present occupant of the White House increasingly becoming an embarrassment to our nation, both here and abroad, liberals, especially well-off white ones with book larnin’, i. e., the majority of them, are quietly pining nostalgically for President Obama, whom they regard as a mental colossus. That is forgivable when comparing him with President Biden, but a closer look at that alleged savant suggests there is much less to him than meets the eye.

An email received a few days ago from The Rev’d George Rutler confirms suspicions of the intellectual prowess, or lack thereof, of our former president. It takes the shape of an essay titled “The Shores of Tripoli: The Libyan Tragedy and Our Historically Challenged President,” written over a decade ago, which can be found in a collection of Father Rutler’s essays titled “Calm in Chaos: Catholic Wisdom for Anxious Times.” A few excerpts from that essay follow, with the author’s permission.

We begin with a quote not by Fr Rutler, but Barack Obama himself, from a speech he gave at a little institution of his: the annual “Iftar” dinner,”a feast at the end of day of Ramadan fasting, for assembled Muslims in the White House . . . “

As I’ve noted before, Thomas Jefferson once held a sunset dinner here with an envoy from Tunisia—perhaps the first Iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago. And some of you, as you arrived tonight, may have seen our special display, courtesy of our friends at the Library of Congress—the Koran that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. And that’s a reminder, along with the generations of patriotic Muslims in America, that Islam—like so many faiths—is part of our national story.

Fr Rutler’s response:

If I felt confident that President Obama could name some of the Hasmonean kings, I could point out that while they were “a part of the story” of Christianity, they were not so in a positive light. This might put into a better perspective any notion that the Treaty of Tripoli was anything like a free trade agreement, or that the Tunisian envoy’s dinner with Jefferson was a pleasant interlude, or that Jefferson’s purchase of “Holy Koran” was part of his quest for oriental wisdom. For one thing, Jefferson’s copy was an English translation published in 1734 by George Sale. As it was not in Arabic, it was not any more authentic in the opinion of Muslims than is Farrakhan’s “Nation of Islam” which the first Muslim congressman to whom Obama alluded, Keith Ellison,  assisted in some of its activities before he abjured it during his election campaign.

And further:

In the eighteenth century, Tripoli, along with the other Barbary Coast lands of Tunis and Algiers (being North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire) and Morocco, had been centers of piracy, preying with a special lust on the ships of the fledgling United States. In March of 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met in London with the representative of the Dey of Algiers to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. They posed the simple question: Why were the Muslims so hostile to a new country that had done them no injury? Adams joined Jefferson in reporting to Congress through a letter to John Jay who was then Secretary of Foreign Affairs, that “Islam was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.”

And the essay concludes:

How former presidents should occupy their time in retirement is not indicated by the Constitution, and they are free agents in that regard. They could spend some of their days boning up on history, but it would be better if they had known some history before being elected to become part of it.

The few quotes above should dispel notions of Barack Obama as intellectual Superman and there is much more debunking of him in Fr. Rutler’s essay not quoted here. Nevertheless, as Joe Biden sinks lower and lower, Barack Obama’s adoring claque, six years after their hero left office, continues to idolize him. What’s sad is, regardless of his limitations, Obama is likely brighter than any of the current leading lights, e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the Democratic Party today.

The unending vitriol from Rome directed at Usus Antiquior enthusiasts, celebrants, and worshipers alike, has reached the point where this writer is coming to believe politics has more to do with it than liturgy.

The gradual takeover by the left of our major institutions, here and abroad: government, education, professions, and even corporate, is all but accomplished. To that must also be added religion. Virtually all the protestant sects in the west long ago fell into the hands of progressives. Now we must sadly face up to the fact even the Holy Catholic Church has embraced the progressive agenda, with the Pope on down regularly spouting leftist rhetoric that not many years ago would have been unthinkable.

With the left pretty much dominating Church hierarchy, the concern over a relatively small segment of the faithful celebrating or praying the Mass in a manner the majority of progressives consider out of date seems outsized. To this writer, there are far greater matters with which Pope and Vatican ought be concerned, beginning with the shocking decline in church attendance these past decades, as well the precipitous drop in vocations, down to zero in some locales. The relatively small number of seeming oddballs that prefer the Mass celebrated in the manner it was for half a millennium before being crudely “modernized” in the dismal 1970s, should hardly be seen as great a threat as the concerns above.

One of the bedrock principles of socialism is the establishment of a one-party state. Those who veer from that party, history has shown, are dealt with severely. It is no secret TLM enthusiasts are generally more, often far more, conservative than the Pope and the majority of prelates. Steeped as the latter are in contemporary leftist ideology, I wonder if they are more offended by TLM enthusiasts’s extra-party politics than they are by their manner of worship. After all, most TLM-ers ought to be considered ideal Catholics, pious, generous, enthusiastic, and observant. Additionally, though their manner of worship is not that of mainstream Catholics, according to Francis’s predecessor, it is entirely legitimate.

Rather than conducting an inquisition against traditional Catholic worshippers, who are otherwise, by all accounts, good Catholics, wouldn’t it be wiser for the Pope to accommodate them, however distasteful their politics, and keep them within Holy Church?