Moscow Mitch Referred To Himself As The Grim Reaper-- And Now The Whole GOP Is A Party Of Death

Trump Tsunami by Nancy Ohanian

David Feldman tapes a radio show/podcast with me every Monday. The new one-- with special guest eastern Washington state congressional candidate Chris Armitage-- will be posted online late tonight. David and I are pals and it feels like we've known each other for decades. Last week, though, he pissed me off no end by weaving some kind of cockamamie scenario and asking me to respond to it. I almost blew a gasket. He came up with something absolutely nonsensical-- "what if the the death rate goes down; will Trump win in November?" What kind of a crazy question is that? What if Trump gives everyone in the country-- or in the swing states-- a check for $100,000; will he win in November? What if Martians invade? What if Ivanka turns into a talking marlin?

The second spike of the first wave is upon us-- and, thanks to Trump and incompetent governors, it is a doozy. Yesterday, as you've no doubt read, Florida reported its worst one-day numbers ever-- 15,300-- which is not just Florida's worst daily report, but the worst daily report of any state anywhere... ever. Yes, worst than New York's or New Jersey's worst days. That brought Florida's cases to 269,811-- 12,562 cases per million Floridians. Those numbers, reported yesterday, were for Saturday, a day the whole country reported 61,719 new cases. Yesterday the national increase was 58,349 bringing the total number of Americans who Trump has infected to 3,413,995--  and rapidly rising.

And it isn't just Florida where new cases are out of control. Yesterday, judging by nothing but their one day reports these 10 states-- not even counting Florida-- were all pandemic disaster zones:

• California +7,702
• Texas +6,091
• Arizona- 2,537
• Georgia +2,525
• South Carolina +1,949
• North Carolina +1,910
• Alabama +1,640
• Ohio +1,398
• Louisiana +1,319
• Tennessee +954

Why are those statistics important? Because in several weeks they will represent hospitals overrun with patients-- as they already are in Texas, Florida and Arizona-- and patients starting to die in larger numbers. In a statement to New Yorkers yesterday, Andrew Cuomo said "What's happening elsewhere in the United States is very concerning to us here at home, and our ability to avoid the same fate rests on New Yorkers' willingness to wear masks, socially distance and wash their hands, and local governments' willingness to enforce state guidelines. Today's numbers remain low and stable, but it is up to us to keep it that way. Being New York Tough isn't easy, but New Yorkers have shown the nation that we can effectively fight the virus when we all come together, and I urge them not to give up any ground now."

New York State is closely monitoring an uptick in COVID-19 cases in Rensselaer County, a number of which are being investigated as being linked to several individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 after traveling back to New York from Georgia. They are in isolation and the New York State Department of Health and Rensselaer County Health Department are conducting contact tracing.

On Friday, Cuomo predicted that the northeast will be hot again because of the surge in cases across the country. " Speaking on WAMC radio, he said the state government is "doing everything we can. The quarantine, we have an enforcement mechanism. But, you know, how do you catch somebody driving in, right? I mean, it’s very very difficult, it’s trying to catch water in a screen... You’re going to see our numbers and the Northeast numbers probably start to increase because the virus that you see now in the south and the west, California has real trouble, it’s going to come back here... The other states don’t take the same precautions. It rises up in the other states and then is going to come back here from the other states. That’s what’s going to happen. The only question is how far up our rate goes. But you can’t have it all across the country and not come back. You think nobody’s coming here from California and these states?"

Yesterday the Associated Press reporter "A long-expected upturn in U.S. coronavirus deaths has begun, driven by fatalities in states in the South and West, according to data on the pandemic. The number of deaths per day from the virus had been falling for months, and even remained down as states like Florida and Texas saw explosions in cases and hospitalizations-- and reported daily U.S. infections broke records several times in recent days. Scientists warned it wouldn’t last. A coronavirus death, when it occurs, typically comes several weeks after a person is first infected. And experts predicted states that saw increases in cases and hospitalizations would, at some point, see deaths rise too. Now that’s happening."

“It’s consistently picking up. And it’s picking up at the time you’d expect it to,” said William Hanage, a Harvard University infectious diseases researcher.

According to an Associated Press analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, the seven-day rolling average for daily reported deaths in the U.S. has increased from 578 two weeks ago to 664 on July 10-- still well below the heights hit in April. Daily reported deaths increased in 27 states over that time period, but the majority of those states are averaging under 15 new deaths per day. A smaller group of states has been driving the nationwide increase in deaths.

...Deaths first began mounting in the U.S. in March. About two dozen deaths were being reported daily in the middle of that month. By late in the month, hundreds were being reported each day, and in April thousands. Most happened in New York, New Jersey and elsewhere in the Northeast.

Deaths were so high there because it was a new virus tearing through a densely populated area, and it quickly swept through vulnerable groups of people in nursing homes and other places, said Perry Halkitis, the dean of the Rutgers University School of Public Health in New Jersey.

Many of the infections occurred before government officials imposed stay-at-home orders and other social-distancing measures. The daily death toll started falling in mid-April-- and continued to fall until about a week ago.

Researchers now expect deaths to rise for at least some weeks, but some think the count probably will not go up as dramatically as it did in the spring-- for several reasons.

First, testing was extremely limited early in the pandemic, and it’s become clear that unrecognized infections were spreading on subways, in nursing homes and in other public places before anyone knew exactly what was going on. Now testing is more widespread, and the magnitude of outbreaks is becoming better understood.

Second, many people’s health behaviors have changed, with mask-wearing becoming more common in some places. Although there is no vaccine yet, hospitals are also getting better at treating patients.

Another factor, tragically, is that deadly new viruses often tear through vulnerable populations first, such as the elderly and people already weakened by other health conditions. That means that, in the Northeast at least, “many of the vulnerable people have already died,” Halkitis said.

Now, the U.S. is likely in for “a much longer, slower burn,” Hanage, the Harvard researcher, said. “We’re not going to see as many deaths (as in the spring). But we’re going to see a total number of deaths, which is going to be large.”

But Disney is opening its properties... pandemic be damned.





Generally, Americans are aghast at Trump's incompetent-- even sociopathic-- handling of the pandemic and are ready to let him know what they think of him and his enablers in November. The new Ipsos poll for Reuters released Friday show that an increasing a majority of registered voters disapprove of how Trump has handled the pandemic (57%), and only 37% approve, which is the lowest number since Ipsos began tracking in early March. When asked who they would vote for if the election were held today, voters prefer Biden over Trump 43% to 37%.

Disney To Recommence Firing American Workers Because They Are Americans

Disney Admits To Forcing Highly Skilled Americans To Train Their Replacements-- Imported Un-Skilled Foreign Workers-- Then Fired The Americans Because They Are Americans.

Disney executives told the condemned employees who protested that they would be replaced by imported foreign workers: "Get used to it. You need to learn to wear a sari [Indian dress] because that is the only place you will ever get a job."

by James Otto

There is fact and then, there is fantasy.

There is the truth and then, there are lies.

When does "fantasy" become a "lie?"

Disney Corporation is the undisputed champion of fantasy. So great and convincing is Disney’s power to "spin a yarn" that parents routinely teach their children to recognize the difference between Disney’s fantasy versus real life reality.

"Look at actions not words" is a staple of parental advise.

Here is the best lesson for parents to use to teach their children to recognize thatDisney’s actions versus Disney’s lies are malicious and unpatriotic.

Disney admits three (3) truths:

First: Disney admits it imported foreign workers to replace highly skilled American workers.

Second: Disney admits that it requires the condemned highly skilled American workers to educate the un-skilled imported foreign workers BEFORE the American is fired.

Third: Disney admits that if the highly skilled American workers wanted to be paid, then, the Americans had to educate the un-skilled imported foreign workers. The fired highly skilled employees stated that the "replacement" foreign workers were younger technicians who had to be instructed in the basics of the work.

Now separating the TRUTH from Disney’s lies.

FACT 1: Disney fired 850 out of the planned 1,000 highly skilled American workers in the last 12 months in order to import over 1,000 foreign workers to take jobs away from the American workers.

According to Disney managers and various news sources, including news media from India, citing Disney executives, Disney in October 2014 fired approximately 350 Americans; in 2015, Disney fired 250 or more in Orlando Florida and 250 or more in Anaheim California. Those 850 American workers were replaced by un-skilled imported foreign workers-- but ONLY after receiving training from the highly skilled American workers.

Disney admits that it planned on firing an additional 150 or more highly skilled Americans on October 1, 2015 but changed plans after either they received notice of intent to sue from an employee who did not want to "lay down and be stepped on" or by the publicity in the New York Times article in June 2015.

Disney imported so many foreign workers that it was rare to hear English spoken at Disney’s workplace. "I really felt like a foreigner in that building," the American worker said, referring to the widespread use of Hindi.

Disney executives told the condemned employees who protested that they would be replaced by imported foreign workers with this statement: “Get used to it. You need to learn to wear a sari [Indian dress] because that is the only place you will ever get a job.”

DISNEY’S LIE 1: Disney claims that it "employs" only 10 foreign workers.

TRUTH 1: Disney’s deception is that it "employs" only 10 foreign workers. YET, Disney admits that it fired ONLY American workers; then "leased," NOT hired, the 1,000 foreign workers imported by a company that specializes in importing ONLY foreign workers.

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the deception, such as utilized by Disney, is how corporations skirt the Immigration Law.

Please remember that Disney fired ONLY American workers and replaced them with ONLY imported foreign workers from India who were not skilled enough to do the jobs unless and without the highly skilled American workers educating them.

Thus, Disney intentionally excludes Americans out of the work force.

FACT 2: Disney Intends To Fire More Highly Skilled Workers In 2016. The exact number has not yet been detemined but the best information from various Disney executives and supervisors is that the several hundred American workers who survived the "first round" of layoffs are now targeted to be replaced by foreign workers.

DISNEY’S LIE 2: Disney told Congressman Alan Grayson from Orlando, Flordia and several news mediums that there would be no more importation of foreign workers to replace highly skilled American workers.

TRUTH 2: Disney has retained Cognizant Technology Solutions, Inc. a corportation that specializes in importing ONLY young male Indians to REPLACE American workers. Cognizant has made public statements that its business NEEDS TO IMPORT foreign workers to replace American workers.

FACT 3: Disney fired highly skilled American workers whose job performance reviews admitted that the American’s "superior skills and 'outstanding' work," "had saved the company thousands of dollars."

In exchange, Disney imported un-skilled, young technicians to replace the highly skilled American workers.

DISNEY’S TWO LIES: Disney exeutives are quoted in the news media, including the news media in India, explaing the reason for firing the highly skilled Americans as follows:

"We have restructured our global technology organization to significantly increase our [staff] focus on future innovation and new capabilities, and are continuing to work with leading technical firms to maintain our existing systems as needed."

First Lie: Disney claims that the only way to "to significantly increase. . . future innovation and new capabilities" REQUIRED elimination of the 250 highly skilled Americans workers of "superior skills and 'outstanding' work," who "had saved the company thousands of dollars." In the past 12 months, Disney eliminated 850 highly skilled American workers only to replace them with young, inexperienced foreign workers.

Disney deceitfulness is obvious. To determine whether Disney or I am smarter than a 5th grader, I asked a 5th grader to read Disney’s claim. He laughed and said "Disney’s crazy! You do not 'increase' anything by getting rid of your best!"

In truth, Disney illegally excluded American workers from the labor market.

Second Lie, Disney, who employs over 66,000, wants us to believe that the "global technology [re]organization" involved a mere 250 highly skilled American workers. Firing 4 one-thousands (that’s 0.0038) of your work force is not a reorganization, much more a "global" [anything] reorganization.

TRUTH 3: Disney lied to the American people about its true reason for firing highly skilled Americans and replacing them with un-skilled imported foreign workers.

In truth, Disney illegally excluded American workers from the labor market.

FACT 4: The chairman of the Walt Disney Co., Robert A. Iger, is a co-chairman with Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, and Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp., along with various other executives of corporations, in the Partnership for a New American Economy, which pushes for increasing importation of more foreign labor to replace American workers.

The Partnership for a New American Economy claims in its website that its purpose is to increase immigration of foreign workers to replace American workers. The "partnership" claims that increasing the importation of both foreign workers and foreign students will help the U.S. to "attract and keep the best, the brightest and the hardest-working."

Yet, this self proclaimed "Partnership" refused to explain why for every imported foreign worker a highly skilled American workers is fired. Many of the corporations in the "Partnership" participate in firing highly skilled American workers then replacing them with un-skilled foreign labor.

DISNEY’S LIE 4: The "Partnership" made the false claim that importation of foreign workers to replace American workers (1) does not hurt the unemployed American (obviously nonsense) and (2) America will face a projected shortfall of more than 200,000 advanced-degree STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) holders.

TRUTH 4: The reality is that imported foreign workers are of “average quality” at best, and certainity NOT THE BEST. According to Norman Matloff, professor, U.C. Davis, a leading authority on the issue of how the imported foreign workers, and specifically the H1B worker, impacts American workers recently stated:

The vast majority of H-1Bs, including those hired from U.S. universities, are ordinary people doing ordinary work, not the best and the brightest. On the contrary, the average quality of the H-1Bs is LOWER than that of the Americans.

Furthermore, vast majority of H-1Bs, again including those hired from U.S. universities, are not doing work for which qualified Americans are unavailable.

Second, The U.S. Census Bureau reported that 74 percent of those who have a bachelor's degree in science, technology, engineering and math-- commonly referred to as STEM-- are not employed in STEM occupations. Since 2012, more than 2,715, 000 have graduated EACH YEAR supplying 100% of U.S. business needs.

Thus, there are TOO MANY STEM graduates for the U.S. economy to for the U.S. economy to employ.

"Do NOT Open Until 2056"

James Otto is a prominent civil rights attorney based in Northridge, CA. He served as an officer in the Marine Corps from 1976 to 1980 and later worked for the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, prosecuting violators of California's civil rights laws in both employment and housing. Presently, he is developing new legal theories to protect American workers and green-card holders from national-origin discrimination. Recently he filed a law suit against Disney, whose preference for foreign workers over U.S. workers resulted in over 700 competent U.S. workers in Florida, California and New York being forced to train incompetent foreign workers as their own replacements! Somehow I persuaded him to do a guest post for DWT today.


What Does Congress Do to Harm Americans?
By James Otto

Where have all the good jobs gone? The government is using your tax dollars to put you out of work. Our government is giving away jobs to foreign workers. Can I prove those very tough statements? You be the judge and consider the following. 

Please watch the following video showing your government giving a Chinese corporation your tax dollars for infrastructure repair:






So, why are American jobs given to foreigners when America now has an overabundance of experienced professionals?  

The government’s policy is founded on Alan Greenspan’s plan, which was, as he states in his book Age of Turbulence, that as economic adviser to every President from Nixon to George W. Bush he always advised and believed that all immigration laws should be waived to allow foreign workers free access to U.S.-based jobs, to force the American middle class to compete with foreign wage scales. The intended effect is to drive down wages for all Americans.





Of course, we would be driving those wages down to Mexican or another Third World wage level. 

WHY DID Elaine Chao, wife of Senator Mitch McConnell and President Bush's Secretary of Labor from 2001 to 2008, state the government's policy in her Strategic Report 2006-2011, which is that "a qualified U.S. worker can be displaced from a job in favor of the foreign worker."

WHY DID Senator McConnell FAIL to correct his wife or to protect American workers?

WHY DO both Congress and the President accept the government's actions of allowing harm to Americans and believe that, "additionally, the importation of the foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers"?  

WHY DID in 2010 the USAID, a U.S. federal agency that received overall foreign policy guidance from Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, authorize the investment of between $10 and $36 million to train several thousand Sri Lankans in advanced computer software principals in order to replace U.S. workers in the U.S.?

Similarly, the U.S. government invested an undisclosed sum in Armenia to train workers to compete with U.S. workers.


WHY DID Hillary Clinton invest over 60 million taxpayers' dollars to train foreigners to replace U.S. workers?

WHY HAS President Obama frequently stated that he favors preferences given to foreign workers?

Congress Gets Paid


Witnesses in the Jack Abramoff trial for bribing Congress estimated that the total for Microsoft’s and other corporations' direct and indirect political expenditures between 1995 and 2000 were in the vicinity of $100 to 120 million range to strip the immigration code of any protection for Amercians and all U.S. workers.



Ranking Minority Member Thomas Davis III (R-VA) was quoted in 2000 as supporting elements of the Abramoff Microsoft conspiracy. In spring 2000, Davis was a major supporter of pending legislation that would increase the H-1B quota and amend any protection for U.S. workers. Davis commented, "This is not a popular bill with the public. It's popular with the CEOs...This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money." (National Journal, May 5, 2000, and New York Daily News, May 3, 2000

)

Free-market advocate and Nobel economist Milton Friedman identified the guest-worker visa program as a "government subsidy" in a 2002 Computerworld article by Paul Donnelly. It is a government subsidy because it permits employers to have access to low-skilled imported labor at below-market rates. Researchers believe that the guest-worker visa programs guarantee workforce gluts as they directly lead to the firing of U.S. workers.



History of Jack Abramoff

The lobby firm of Preston Gates traces its Seattle roots back to 1883. The Seattle office, where many of the firm's more than 420 attorneys are based, housed William Gates Sr., father of Bill Gates of Microsoft.



Jack Abramoff and his team worked for Gates and delivered big-dollar accounts, which resulted in soaring revenues for Preston Gates. During the three-year period that ended in 2000, Abramoff's lobbying clients accounted for roughly 30 percent of the firm's total lobbying revenue of more than $32 million, according to federal disclosure records.

 Abramoff sought to influence a congressman through campaign contributions, golf, regular meals, fund-raising events and other things of value.



Abramoff’s influence continues to this day as a review of campaign finance filings shows that Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, has accepted more than $100,000 in donations from employees of Greenberg Traurig, the very firm where Abramoff once reigned.

These donations started when McCain used his position in Congress to start a Congressional investigation cover-up of the Abramoff scandal by placing under seal and prohibititng any disclosure of the trial testimony until 2056.



A trial witness has stated the McCain cover-up hides the most damning details of the Abramoff scandal:



• Abramoff’s role as a 25-year bagman for the GOP;


• Abramoff’s close working relationship with the Bush White House;


• Abramoff’s close relationship with the Republican Congressional leadership;
• Abramoff’s role in off-the-books money for the GOP.

John McCain has used his position as senator to hide evidence before, when he sided with a very rich busnessman to hide his fraud, which stole money from widows and orphans.



Over 750,000 pages of Abramoff scandal documents were collected by John McCain. Far less than 5,000 pages were released to the public. The rest have been sent to the National Archives and stamped: "Do NOT Open Until 2056."

In time for the holidays (um, which holiday again, Bill-O?): Buy John Lanchbery's splendid recordings of all three Tchaikovsky ballets for a mere $20!

Leopold Stokowski conducts the "Dance of the Sugar-Plum
Fairy" in Walt Disney's Fantasia

by Ken

I've spent a lot of time listening to recordings and trying to puzzle out musical and technical enigmas that arise. I don't know that my "explanations" are much good, but what really throws me is when I can't come up with a reasonable explanation. I encountered such a case recently when I first became aware of a 2004 EMI France CD reissue of John Lanchbery's 1981 recordings of all three complete ballets by Tchaikovsky.

It seemed like an eminently logical idea: having Lanchbery (1823-2003), an internationally renowned ballet composer, arranger, and conductor, record this music in London in state-of-the-art digital sound with the excellent Philharmonia Orchestra. Lanchbery, after all, had impeccable credentials as a dance conductor, and therefore wouldn't commit the gross improprieties the Ballet Bullies always attribute to non-dance conductors who perform music composed for the dance.

The only thing was that when the recordings were released on LP, they didn't seem terribly special. Alongside the numerous outstanding recordings that had been made of all three ballets, they seemed rather pallid.

Over the years I returned to those LPs periodically, to see if I might get some message I'd previously missed, without success. But the other day I noticed the aforementioned French EMI CD issue, which squeezed the pieces onto five budget-priced discs. The set I saw was priced at $20 (and you can find it for that price online) -- for all three full-length ballets. My curiosity was reignited., even though I had previously bought EMI's CD compilation of Andre Previn's beautiful recordings of the three Tchaikovsky ballets with the London Symphony and found the sound quality distinctly disappointing -- and these are recordings I know to be musically and sonically top-notch.

I won't bore you with the paltry theories I've come up with to explain the discrepancy. Instead, let me just report, with delight, that as I hear them now the Lanchbery performances are a consistent joy -- full-bodied, rhythmically driving, passionate, songful, and gorgeously played and recorded. The scrunching onto five very well-filled isn't painless. A mere 8 1/2 minutes of The Nutcracker spills onto the second CD (though on the plus side, that puts "The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" [ye gods in heaven, is there really such a thing as Sugar-Plum Fairy Barbie?] at the start of the disc), and less than 5 minutes of the start of Act II of Sleeping Beauty is tacked onto a previous disc.

I should also say that I haven't sat down with scores to verify that, say, no repeats have been trimmed to squeeze the music on. Ironically, given the quality of the performances and recording, and the low per-disc cost (you can find the set online for $20), it would have been just as fine a bargain spread out over the more usual six CDs, but that may be just too persnickety. While we're being persnickety, English-speaking buyers need to know that the contents listing and liner note are all in French.

Does Tchaikovsky need defending?

As to the music itself, I hope at this date it doesn't need selling. There used to be Tchaikovsky snobs who sneered at those of us who adore his music, but my impression is that they've mostly gone on to other hobbies.

Poor Tchaikovsky's reputation among some "serious" critics has always suffered because of the sheer irresistibleness of so much of his music. It seems to pump directly into the bloodstream.

The composer himself may have had a touch of this same feeling. He had a low opinion of The Nutcracker, at least as compared with the short opera, Yolanta, which he composed to share a double bill with the littlest of his three ballets. (He was positively withering on the subject of the little Nutcracker Suite he extracted from the full ballet, which is probably still his most-performed work. The difference is that now there are a large number of other, more substantial Tchaikovsky works that are performed an awful lot.)

Yolanta is indeed a lovely work, of remarkably delicate sensibilities. It tells the story of a king who tries to protect (as he sees it) his daughter, the princess Yolanta, from suffering the pain of being blind by using all his royal powers to prevent her from ever knowing that she's blind. Of course it's a wonderful metaphor for parents' regrettable impulse to "protect" their children from realities it's ultimately dangerous and destructive to shield them from. But it's also a remarkable attempt to imagine a world where there is nothing to see and nothing seen -- and obviously music, placing such a premium on sound and hearing, is an ideal medium through which to try to imagine such a world. Yolanta might be deeply moving if the damned thing could be really well performed, but that's something I don't expect ever to see. (Records aren't a bad way to experience it, but even from a musical standpoint it's an excruciatingly difficult piece to bring to life.)

Whereas The Nutcracker is, for goodness' sake, one of the most astonishing creations to spring from the mind of humankind. Not even its involuntary servitude as a ritual Christmas torture for the kiddies can dim the brilliance of its imagined world of toy drama. In a competent performance, the inexorable build to the soaring climax of Act I is one of the supreme spans of musical construction -- and Lanchbery brings it off as well as anybody I've heard (with the optional choral part, if you're keeping score).

Oh, that's the "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy"?

At the top of this piece we have a clip of the chunk of Walt Disney's Fantasia in which Leopold Stokowski conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in the oh-so-familiar "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" from The Nutcracker -- the kind of all-sense-stimulating music that set Stoky's imagination roaring. (From this excerpt in particular it's hard to believe that the original Fantasia recordings will be 70 years old in April!) We know that the piece was inspired by Tchaikovsky's curiosity as to what use could be made of the intriguing celesta, a keyboard instrument that produces this distinctive chimelike sound. We know too that nobody has ever found a more arresting, not to mention tingling, application.

I'm sorry I can't offer you Lanchbery's performance, which holds its own against Stoky's. For that matter I would have liked to offer you, at minimum, say, the Sleeping Beauty Act I finale, which Lanchbery builds wonderfully. Alas, I'm still working on my (basically nonexistent) computer audio and video technical skills. One of these days perhaps . . .

It was Howie who pointed out to me the seasonal coincidence that I happened to decide to write about the Tchaikovsky ballets during the holiday season, the very time when kiddies the world over are being force-marched into renderings of The Nutcracker, with the apparent intent of engender a life-long hatred of serious music. You have only my word that the timing is a coincidence; I listen to the Tchaikovsky ballets year-round.

But if this is a good time of year for you to think about this music, that works for me.

Why listen to the ballets complete?

Sometimes I listen to the Tchaikovsky ballets in suite form, but more often I prefer to hear them in full -- or at least a full act at a time. It's partly a matter of the sustained musical invention, which goes far beyond what you might guess from listening to collections of musical "highlights." But there's more to it. The complete scores aren't conceived in terms of highlights and lowlights. This composer's imagination had a specifically dramatic cast that comes to the fore in his theater works, the operas and ballets, animating the best of them in a way that you can't imagine from just excerpts, memorable as they are.

It occurs to me that we tend to think the Tchaikovsky ballets represent a genre, that of the "full-length ballet." However, the reality is that, except for Tchaikovsky's later countryman Sergei Prokofiev with his Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, nobody else has pulled off the feat of sustaining musical interest through the length of a full-evening ballet score. I guess you could make a case of sorts for Leo Delibes, but really now, how often would anybody really wish to sit through the whole of Coppelia or Sylvia?

Tchaikovsky, as noted, made his own little Nutcracker Suite, and Prokofiev extracted no fewer than three orchestral suites from his Romeo and Juliet. In addition, countless other hands have assembled suites from all of these great ballets -- and any conductor can make his/her own, by stringing together as much or as little music as he/she sees fit. Certainly, there have been many performances of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev ballet suites I've treasured, notably from conductors we have no opportunity to hear perform the complete scores, people like Yevgeny Mravinsky, Pierre Monteux, even Herbert von Karajan (a better Tchaikovsky conductor than a lot of people seem to remember).

Then there's the curious case of Eugene Ormandy, Stoky's successor in Philadelphia, who during his long tenure as music director gave glorious performances of (usually) his own suites from the Tchaikovsky ballets. The single LP's worth of each that he recorded for Columbia Masterworks ranks with the great Tchaikovsky on records. Surely, if he had wished, when it came to redoing their recorded repertory for RCA Red Seal, Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra could have done the ballets complete; it's my understanding that RCA would have been only too happy to have more repertory Ormandy and the Philadelphians hadn't already recorded. I have to assume the conductor just wasn't interested in doing so. For RCA he once again did a single LP's worth of selections from each of the ballets.

No knock on Tchaikovsky's little Nutcracker Suite -- it gathers 20 or so minutes' worth of ever-delightful music. But as an experiment, try listening to the Suite and then to just Act I of the complete Nutcracker, which lasts about 45 minutes. First off, I think you'll be astonished at how much wonderful music you lose in the Suite. And then, even if you don't know the story, especially as you get to know the music well, I think you'll find yourself overwhelmed by the dramatic build-up of the complete Act I.

You don't have to be a "dance person" -- I'm sure not!

I should stress that I'm not speaking here of the music's appeal for ballet fans. I'm not much of a dance person myself. On those rare occasions when I'm dragged to the ballet, generally on the promise of hearing some music I love played by musicians who supposedly understand its dance qualities, I usually come away (a) fuming at the miserable quality of the musical presentation, and (b) churlishly ungrateful for the tedious visual "spectacle," which, rather than adding anything to the music, merely distracts or actually detracts from it. In the same way that I rarely enjoy actual stagings of Stravinsky's trio of ballet masterpieces The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring (I much prefer to let them take shape in the theater of my imagination), I listen to Tchaikovsky's ballets for their all but unimaginable sustained inspiration.

Composer-arranger-conductor John Lanchbery

Now, I'm not about to chuck a shelfful of other recordings of these timeless masterpieces -- or rather shelves full, allowing for various recorded media. But I can say that I would be unable to direct you to a better version of any of them. I find this almost as remarkable as the quality of the music itself.

#

Annals of technology: 22 CDs' worth of Stravinsky by Stravinsky for under $2 a disk if you shop right; plus a hybrid (1961+1967+2005) "Soldier's Tale"

"It is all changed," Stravinsky was told, and "indeed it was."

It's the story I always think of when I think of Igor Stravinsky. As the composer told it, it displayed not just his prickly "don't mess with me" side, but also his waspish sense of humor.

He was recalling, 20 years after the fact, his "participation" in Walt Disney's Fantasia, a segment of which was bult around his revolutionary score for Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). It's well-known that the 1913 Paris premiere of Le Sacre, by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, precipitated a full-fledged riot. It's also well-established that Stravinsky's shockingly brutal yet rivetingly beautiful score changed the course of 20th-century Western music.

Most observers thought it was pretty radical of Disney and his musical advisers to fix on Stravinsky's score (even today it remains startling, or should), which after all dramatized the sacrifice of a virgin to pagan gods. Disney and his people somehow got the idea that the music provided a fitting sonic image for the birth of the universe, and the formation of the earth, and eventually the dawn of tyrannosaurus rex. (Here you can see some of the dinosaurs romping.)

Now, Fantasia had some legitimate classical bona fides, starting with the enthusiastic participation of conductor Leopold Stokowski, who recorded the musical selections with his Philadelphia Orchestra in a revolutionary new (for 1939!) multichannel format.

Stravinsky told the story of his involvement with Fantasia in the course of his recorded "Apropos of Le Sacre," included as a single-sided bonus LP in Columbia Masterworks' lavish Stravinsky Conducts 1960 box, which contained brand-new recordings of Le Sacre and the ballet he wrote just before it, Petrushka (1911).

[No, I didn't transcribe Stravinsky's talk myself. I just typed it from the printed version that was included among the tiny-type but nevertheless extensive liner notes that accompanied one of the great record releases of all time: Columbia Masterworks' reissue, in a bargain-priced box (three LPs for the price of two), of the 1960 Petrushka and Sacre along with Stravinsky's 1961 recording of the complete Firebird (1910)--the three great ballets written in collaboration with Diaghilev which defined and propelled Stravinsky's international career. (Generous Columbia followed this up with another indispensable box, also three LPs for the price of two, containing the ballets Apollo and Orpheus and the complete Fairy's Kiss and Pulcinella.)

[Here is Stravinsky at 82 conducting London's New Philharmonia Orchestra in the "Lullaby"--with the famous bassoon solo--and rousing "Final Hymn" that conclude the Firebird Suite.]

Anyway, here is Stravinsky telling the story:

In 1937 or 1938 I received a request from the Disney office in America for permission to use Le Sacre in a cartoon film. The request was accompanied by a gentle warning that if permission were withheld the music would be used anyway. (Le Sacre, being "Russian," was not copyrighted in the United States), but as the owners of the film wished to show it abroad (i.e., in Berne Copyright countries) they offered me $5,000, a sum I was obliged to accept (though, in fact, the "percentages" of a dozen crapulous intermediaries reduced it to $1,200).

I saw the film with George Balanchine in a Hollywood studio at Christmastime 1939. I remember someone offering me a score, and, when I said I had my own, the someone saying "But it is all changed."

It was indeed. The order of the pieces had been shuffled and the most difficult of them eliminated--though this didn't help the musical performance, which was execrable. I will say nothing about the visual complement (for I do not wish to criticize an unresisting imbecility), but the musical point of view of the film involved a dangerous misunderstanding.

So tell us, Igor, and don't pull any punches, how'd you like Fantasia?

I really want to talk about Stravinsky one of these days, and I plan to get to it really soon. Awhile back I startled Howie by saying that we've already had the last three great composers we're ever going to have--Stravinsky (1882-1971), Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), all now long since safely dead and buried. This seems so obvious to me now that I forget how stark it may sound to others. But these are the last composers who seem to me, through the sheer force of their imagination, to have transcended the exhaustion of the musical language they inherited, or could scrounge up or invent.

I didn't really mean to get into this just now, but in this connection I can't resist throwing in the concluding paragraph of Stravinsky's "Apropos of Le Sacre" talk:

I was guided by no system whatever in Le Sacre du printemps. When I think of the music of the other composers of that time who interest me--Berg's music, which is synthetic (in the best sense), and Webern's, which is analytic--how much more theoretical it seems than Le Sacre. And these composers belonged to and were supported by a great tradition. Very little immediate tradition lies behind Le Sacre du printemps, and no theory. I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.

At the time of this "Apropos," Le Sacre was nearly 50 years old. Stravinsky was still composing actively, and continued to do so more or less up to his death. Over those six decades of composing, he wound up working in an astonishing range of styles and musical languages, but mostly he used the sheer force of his imagination to squeeze every drop he could out of those musical languages available to him.

One of the remarkable aspects of Stravinsky's career is the extensive recorded documentation we have of it. The composer was from fairly early times an active performer of his own music, and began making recordings early on. But the intensive, near-encyclopedic recorded documentation of his works eventually undertaken by Columbia Masterworks was without precedent. It was almost entirely the initiative of the remarkably urbane, deeply cultured man who once upon a time actually ran Columbia Records, Goddard Lieberson [pictured above]. Lieberson also committed the company to extensive recorded documentation of the fine American composer Aaron Copland. (How times have changed!)

In the notes for the Stravinsky Conducts 1960 box, Lieberson himself explained the gap that Stravinsky's recorded "Apropos of Le Sacre" was designed to plug. He paid tribute to the published conversations the composer was then producing with his "valued associate," Robert Craft, which "give us a glimpse of his brilliant, urbane, cultured mind." "Unfortunately," he added,

they do not provide our ears with the wonderful Stravinsky-geneticized language which he has put together out of French, German, English, and Russian-with-immediate-translations. (With French and German, Stravinsky hurtles forward and is imperturbably and aloofly unconcerned with his auditors' linguistic accomplishments, while for a Russian phrase he will provide an English translation as quickly as a U.N. translator.) That, too, we have tried to remedy with the enclosed record of Stravinsky speaking about Le Sacre du printemps.

Columbia/CBS Masterworks and its corporate heir, Sony Classical, have done commendable work gathering the Stravinsky recorded legacy, first on LP and then on CD. Not much incentive was offered to the nonspecialist music lover, though. Now, the current heir to the whole of the catalogs of both Columbia/CBS Masterworks and RCA Victor Red Seal, Sony BMG Masterworks, is importing a 22-CD set produced by German Sony, at a staggeringly low price--the list is $45.98! (I paid $37 for mine, including shipping, but I've noticed the price inching upward.)

At this price, of course, it's unreasonable to expect much in the way of liner notes, a real limitation in the case of the many vocal works included, hard to appreciate fully without printed texts--and also for the many less-known works that become easy to explore in this incredibly handy collection. Well, I would think that anyone who's found his/her way to DWT has the "search" skills to dig up the necessary material online.

Even in the most famous Stravinsky works, which naturally have received vast numbers of recordings, including a fair number of extremely good ones, the composer's own recordings remain, in almost all cases, not only fully competitive, but in some ways the best place for the newcomer to the music to start. Even though I already had a lot of this stuff on LP, I made a point of buying CD editions of the ageless 1960 Stravinsky Petrushka and Le Sacre (conveniently coupled on a CD, which I endorse without reservation to anyone who isn't thinking of buying the set) and Stravinsky's 1964 stereo remake of his only full-length opera, the satirically biting yet also heart-hurting Rake's Progress.

If I could point to one thing about Stravinsky's own performances, it would be rhythm, his unmatched from-the-inside feel for the way the music moves. And if I could offer you a sound clip [maybe someone out there can suggest how I might do that?--K.], I might start with the orchestral fanfare that doesn't so much open as launch The Rake, which has a propulsive, infectious vitality I've never heard anyone else duplicate.

Or I might offer the opening "Soldier's March" from one of my very favorite Stravinsky recordings, the Suite from L'Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale). L'Histoire, written in Switzerland during World War I (1918), is a work of no definable genre. It's a play-with-music in which, as Robert Craft once put it, the music "is the play." It's the shaggiest of shaggy-dog tales, which begins with a violin-playing soldier, en route home to his village on leave, unknowingly selling his soul to the Devil. The amazingly pungent and biting yet often haunting music is scored for the odd, what-he-had-on-hand septet of violin, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, double bass, and percussion.

In February 1961 Columbia assembled seven top-notch players drawn from the unique assortment of musical backgrounds you find in the Los Angeles area, to be the "Columbia Chamber Ensemble" for a composer-conducted recording of the Suite from L'Histoire. With most of the finished product apparently drawn from the final day of recording (it was, it seems, an amazing session), they produced magic. The vivid instrumental textures are so gloriously reproduced that for a long time I made this 1961 L'Histoire Suite a part of my standard "test kit" when I wanted to get an impression of unfamiliar audio equipment.

What hardly anybody seems to have known until a couple of years ago was that in 1967 a new "Columbia Chamber Ensemble," featuring four of the 1961 players including the outstanding violinist Israel Baker, was assembled to record the tiny bits of connective music, adding up to a mere four minutes, needed to produce a complete recording of L'Histoire. (A certain amount of the spoken portion of the play takes place over the musical movements familiar from the suite.)

Nothing more was done with this material, though. It's suggested that the composer himself didn't have any burning desire to produce a complete recording of L'Histoire, perhaps because of a falling out at some point with the librettist, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz.

But, as we learn from William Wernick--executive producer of Sony's "new" complete L'Histoire conducted by the composer [pictured above], 36 years after his death!--once he discovered that the 1967 session took place, since he had a job number to apply to a search, the session tapes were soon found, intact! "All the takes were there," he writes, "and not only that, they were superb both in quality and performance."

The 1961 and 1967 tapes were edited and assembled, leaving just the question of the spoken portion of the play.

By coincidence, we discovered that Academy Award-winnning actor Jeremy Irons had performed The Soldier's Tale at the Old Vic in 2004 in a new English adaptation by the noted writer Jeremy Sams.

Irons agreed to undertake this improbable "collaboration" with the long-departed composer (the now-veteran actor was 22 when Stravinsky died) and the two-headed Columbia Chamber Ensemble. His part, recorded in London in 2005, was duly edited into the hybrid 1961/1967 music tape. You might think the result would be a hopeless hodge-podge. In fact, it sounds to me like the recording of L'Histoire we've been waiting for all these years.

There's no question that Irons is a splendid actor, but a lot of brilliant actors have fallen into the trap of turning L'Histoire into cloying sing-song silliness, and Irons himself is prone to a number of actorish mannerisms that might have been fatal here. Nothing of the sort happened, I'm delighted to report. Performing the entire play as narration--rather than sharing the action with separate actors for the Soldier and the Devil, as is more commonly done--Irons does a simply glorious job, thanks in no small part to the wonder of Sams's English version, which plays better than I've ever heard even the original French text, let alone any other English version.

So, a humble "well done" to everyone involved in this unusual production, which includes exemplary background notes, not least regarding the 1961 recording sessions that are still the heart of this project. A "not so well done" to whoever thought that tacking on the 1966 Robert Craft-conducted Symphonies of Wind Instruments added something to the disk. It's worth having, no doubt, and the piece was written within several years of L'Histoire, but surely some more meaningful filler could have been found?

And a "pathetically badly done" to the Sony BMG Masterworks people who are the embarrassing current guardians of the immense Masterworks and Red Seal legacies. When I went looking online for a photo of the new L'Histoire package, I easily enough found a Sony BMG Masterworks home page with a row of "FEATURE RELEASES" including this one, with a thumbnail photo that gave every evidence of being a link. So I clicked on it, expecting to be taken to a page where the recording was presented/promoted with justified pride.

Instead I landed on a "Sony Music Store" page proclaiming, "Search (no products found)," with the additional information: "Sorry no match available. This is not a Sony Music product. Please select another product."

I can think of several things to say, but for once I'm not going to say any of them.