The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Notably: I very much disliked classical music as a young child. I especially reviled anything with a voice, any violin music, and anything molasses-like, as are most adagios, though I was and remain a great fan of carob molasses as long as it’s mixed with a generous portion of tahini (I can still hear my late late father’s voice asking if I wanted a bowl of debs bet-hini, which you can see this lovely Emirati describe in a video from her balcony over memory. I loved the mixing of it, a culinary metaphor of pluralism, and the banana was always the perfect touch). I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear Barber’s famous adagio until I saw “Platoon” in Chapel Hill the winter of 1986 or else I’d have joined the militias in Lebanon just to get away from the music box. Unless they come to it naturally, unless they chuck the nursery rhymes (which, truth be told, I find to be an echo, or a preparation, for the hell of adulthood to come, a sort of inauculatory, auditory waterboarding) it is unhealthy for children not to dislike classical music at least a little: who needs to invite progeria syndrome? Not to mention all those play-Mozart-to-your-child fads. Bullshit for the soul. First off, your child isn’t growing up to be Einstein no matter what you play for them/her/him. Not to be Nietzchean about it, but with a few exceptions we should be glad to abjure for ourselves (do you really want to be a Musk? A Van Gogh? A syphilitically maddened Schubert?), we all end up in that happy middle station of life Robinson Crusoe’s daddy told him about to keep him from going on his catastrophic voyages. (It didn’t work, thankfully for us readers: let the other guy be the genius for our entertainment). Second, nothing in recorded science (or mythology for that matter) suggests that playing an 18th century serenade to your little monster is any better than playing, say, Lyle Lovett, Elvis, Taylor Swift or Fairuz (whom I couldn’t stand either even after my father landed a contract to photograph her). Not my point, all this. My point is this: my mother used to have a variety show–or something–on Radio Liban before the war, before its Arabization, and would often take me to the studio with her. For whatever reason, the theme to her show was Bach’s Badinerie from the Second Orchestral Suite. The B Minor one. So right there it should have been a dullfest for me, as I knew instinctively that anything in a minor key was snoozville. But I liked the damn Badinerie. I liked its impish flute, I liked the way it made my brain chase after its undiscovered self, the way it twirled and zwirled and fluted up and down ramparts of the impossible and made insistent insolence–which defined my early years–sound so gorgeous. It wasn’t easy to play music back then, it was a whole thing with 33s and stereos and permissions from parents, and I still wouldn’t be caught dead wanting to listen to classical. So I waited for mom’s theme and loved it every time. The very week we were exiled from Lebanon in 1978 and spent a couple of weeks in France, I bought my first classical music cassette: Bach’s first and second orchestral suites, just for the Badinerie. It was the Jean-Francois Paillard version, on the Erato label. I started playing that cassette every day, several times a day that summer as we went from Paris to Kingsport to England. It became a connection–not to Bach or Germany, but to Lebanon and to my mother’s radio studio back when all was well, when war was a television show and exile an incomprehensible word I might hear here and there in connection with other incomprehensible names like Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn and 700,000 Palestinians trying to take our land, but not in connection with me. So it was that I started listening to Bach, then to more Bach, then to other classical bores, and then it was an infatuation, a love affair, and like so much else in my aesthetically distorted life, an addiction. I wore out the cassette, though I still have it. That’s the one pictured above. One day it was left in the sun, so it buckled a little. I haven’t been able to play it in years, but thanks to Naxos’s life-saving online library, I found the Paillard recording–and the third and fourth suites, which I had never heard in Paillard’s version. These memories, these little magical convenient ways of tapping back into them, is what at times makes me grateful for this ungrateful life, and it can seem just then, for a little while, just enough.

—P.T.

The second suite is the most lightly scored of the four.  Written for a single flute, strings and harpsichord continuo, some people have considered it a solo flute piece, much like a concerto, and, in order to balance the solo flute, have performed the work with only solo strings in the orchestra.  However, the writing, particularly in the overture, is just as full and the character just as weighty as in the other suites, and it does not suggest an exceptionally light sonority.  Using multiple violins need not bury the sound of the flute, but the two can be blended into a richer sonority, especially with the sound of the wooden flute and the gut strings of Baroque instruments.  On this recording, where the flute simply doubles the violins in much of the overture, we use the larger string ensemble, but where there is a solo passage for flute, we reduce the accompaniment to solo strings.  Thus there is a lively alternation of solos and tutti in the orchestra for the overture, as well as in certain other movements of the suite. Of the other movements, the Sarabande is highly unusual in that the bass line imitates the violins and flute in a canon at the fifth throughout the movement.  It is the kind of intellectual play that Bach enjoyed, but it is worked out so gracefully and is so unexpected in a dance movement of this kind that it is easy to miss.  Here the inner voices of the second violins and violas need to be light enough that the canon in the outer voices is heard, while at the same time providing their own interesting counterpoint.  Through all this contrapuntal play we must feel the slow, underlying pulse of the dance, the Sarabande. In the Polonaise, the flute first plays the tune as part of the orchestra.   Then in a variation, it plays soloistic figuration, while the bass line repeats the original tune. The suite ends not with a dance but with a character piece, the Badinerie.  The title is related to the Badinage (“banter” or “playfulness”), which one finds occasionally in suites by other composers.  In recent times, this movement has become popular as a lightning-fast virtuoso show-piece for flutists.   But while it is a quick piece, it still can suggest some of the character of a dance, beginning phrases in the middle of the bar, almost like a fast gavotte.

–From Martin Pearlman’s Boston Baroque’s Program Notes for a Dec. 31, 2022 and Jan. 1, 2023 concert.

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