Röslein auf der Heide...

~ so there are temptations which exist for us who love music and wine and good food more than most monkeyshines, where at some point the one takes precedence over the other. Bob Millman got a culinary invite he couldn’t turn down, and went off to Chicago for the weekend, leaving me with two tickets to hear René Pape sing Lieder at Carnegie Hall, his NYC recital début, accompanied by pianist Brian Zeger, in a programme of Schubert, Wolf and Schumann, whose song-cycle Dichterliebe constituted the second half of the programme.

I had heard Pape a year ago at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, playing Second Bass to James Morris in a wonderful and slightly twisty production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger with Barenboim at bat, a splendid evening by any and all accounts. What a voice! Dramatic presence, focus—and even a bit of stagecraft—

so was very happy for the chance to see the man wearing tails standing in the bentside of a glittering Steinway on the stage of Carnegie Hall.

the programme opened with a group of Schubert songs: Aufenthalt, Ständchen and poor sad Atlas—then took a slight leap forward in time to Hugo Wolf’s setting of poems by Michaelangelo Buonarotti—yes, that Michaelangelo—before settling back in to a larger group of Schubert Lieder to round out the first half.

And what a wonderful warm and lovely voice! This big and that deep, one didn’t always demand that it be agile, that it got allowed time to let sound and sentiment develop... Pitch flawless, phrasing exemplary, diction impeccable. An intelligent interpreter, without any of the pieces being overladen by the artist.

During the first batch of Schubert I wondered about the accompaniment—thought it perhaps a bit rough and over-pedaled, but then I looked down and Mr Zeger’s foot was not resting on the aforementioned accelerator—thought about it and thought about it, and realised that since Pape is a basso, the songs would’ve been transposed down a fourth or so—which meant that the octave-doublings in the Schubert accompaniments were positively growling out of the piano. The Wolf songs were written for the bass voice, and so found themselves at home in a more measured patch of ivory and ebony.

Schubert’s accompaniments are like a phantom orchestra being expressed through the piano. If he had been a rock keyboard player, he would’ve been Garth Hudson. Both Wolf and Schumann are thinking of the piano more in terms of it being a piano, and it seemed that Zeger’s style favoured this sort of writing, which meant that the Schumann profited most of all from excellent ensemble work—

a digression... my favourite Schubert song, Heidenröslein, to a poem by Goethe, was not my favourite performance, and it had to do with the piano playing, which I didn’t find sufficiently crisp and animated. So I dug into Youtube this morning, and listened through Bostridge and Schwarzkopf and a couple more—and found Fritz Wunderlich to be totally sublime, so far as the singing went, but the combination of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore remains the best, and it’s because of Moore. Please, do not underestimate the importance of the accompanist in these pieces. They are ensemble works, and the guy sitting down is much more than half as important as the guy standing up.

...highlights of the recital were the Schumann cycle, and Schubert’s Lachen und Weinen.

Excellent evening, two encores including one pop-hit and numerous bows before we found our way to a late snack and a bottle of Wieninger Gemischter Satz 07 at Seasonal...

I was very well pleased with René Pape in tails—am tempted to go to Die Walküre at the Met tomorrow night and see how he does wearing a bear-skin...

~ a fun footnote to former foolishness...

...so spent a couple weeks in Europe last month, most of it in Austria traveling around the wine counties, seeing people I work with as well as friends from previous incarnations.

one very pleasant meeting from among the latter was a carefully timed luncheon with Paul Achs—who had a small window between flying in from London and flying out to Düsseldorf to collect me at the Hauptbahnhof in his hometown of Gols and drive ten minutes through the vineyards to Podersdorf, where we spent and hour and a half together having lunch at restaurant zur Dankbarkeit, talking about nearly everything but business before I got dropped off again at ÖBB.

In addition to being a winegrower himself, proprietor Josef Lentsch has quite a cellarful of the Burgenland’s best bottles belowdecks: ‘a wide range, from Achs to Velich,’ as he puts it. And what did the sommelier haul out of the Schatzkammer for us on this occasion? It was a 1994 Pannobile white from Paul Achs, which was then made from a cuvée of Weißburgunder and Chardonnay—with I think I correctly remember 20% Welschriesling—

this to wash down a delicious Neusiedlerseezander—a local walleye that had himself just gotten hauled out of the neighbouring lake. Paul opted for the Wels, a catfish summoned from the same depth (that’s a joke—the Neusiedlersee is very very shallow) and put before the chef. I’d had the Wels on my previous visit to Dankbarkeit—a delicious fish indeed, with a slightly firmer flesh than the flaky fellow on my platter.

another joke is that since I come from Virginia, I can just translate my West Virginia jokes into German, and they automatically become Burgenland jokes...

the 94er Pannobile white showed nice and nutty aromas, something like those pinot blancs one sometimes finds in Burgundy, which age quite durably and show a sort of creamy flavour and pleasing texture, delicious and satisfying without ever quite aspiring to greatness...

and the punchline of this here excercise? I mentioned to Paul that I’d just had lunch at Chanterelle in New York with Bob Millman. I had first heard of Paul Achs when Chanterelle sommelier Roger Dagorn warbled his name into my ear some six years ago, and lost no time in getting his wines into the market and onto the winelist. I was able to connect once when Paul visited NYC and together go to Chanterelle for lunch, along with Bob, plus on that occasion Jodi Stern.

but no sooner had I uttered the name ‘Chanterelle’ than Achs responded, ‘aah... seafood sausage...’

* see below posted 17 March

Paris Match

~ last month three days in Paris, first time in a couple years, including first day of spring and sunshine, entirely agreeable.

hiked up the hill and climbed the steps to la Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, looking up and looking down.

tried something new at the dinner-table,

 first time for this fool: red wine with oysters.

’twas in Huîtrière Wepler, Place de Clichy in Montmartre— the oysters were large Fines de Claire from Marrennes-Oléron, and the red was a half-bottle of 2006 Léon Beyer Pinot Noir, from the town of Eguisheim in Alsace.

and the result?

well, the Beyer tasted entirely innocent of any oak-treatment, was light and bright, leapt sprightly out of the glass, not much in the way of tannins to speak of, succulent fruit...

and the six fresh specimens of Crassostrea gigas showed themselves as generous of flavour and texture as one could ever hope.

and the combination?

not hard to imagine, once you work your mind around the idea: Splendid, just splendid. And why? Monsieur pinot noir loves minerality—even when it’s not his own. The Beyer displayed no prominent mineral highlights, and so greedily amalgamated any inorganic nuance brought into its proximity by the bivalve into the bigger picture.

~ on dirait, peut-être, quelque chose d’huître  ~

~

chewing on chanters with mugsy and the millman

~ how we celebrated Friday the Thirstteenth ~

about as lovely as a lazy lunch can be...

me and Bob Millman at Chanterelle—two wines times three hours equals six courses—

while time hung suspended outside the elegantly understated room in Harrison Street.

creative and engaging cookery—

'twas the perfect place to showcase a couple special bottles whose number was up:

2001 Randersackerer Marsberg Riesling Spätlese Trocken, Schmitts Kinder

1993 Musigny Vieilles Vignes, Comte Georges de Vogüé

devilled quail eggs
poached Blue Island oysters with spinach in curry cream
seafood sausage
sweetbreads with carmelised leek and orange, framed in bok choy, with a little potato gratin as an afterthink
cheese
kumquat mascarpone torte with mandarin sorbet

the quail eggs were pretty and dainty...

the oysters were ideally prepared, perfectly poached, and the only problem was that there were five of them and two of us...
Bob being the instigator of this particular foolishness—as well as age-before-beauty—earned him title to the odd bivalve.

the elegant choice of two butters—du maison, with- and without sea-salt—was welcome, and the service was attentive and unobtrusive.

*  I don't think I've ever dined or lunched at Chanterelle without ordering the seafood sausage *
...the importance of detail in unfussy fine cooking—the impact of the pignole tucked away among the various textures within the skin...
...the soft depth and slight tang of the sauce—

Bob had the forethought to phone ahead and order sweetbreads off the dinner menu—an excellent anticipation.
...thoughts about the remarkable versatility of bok choy—
sweetbreads with just the right relationship of crunch to chew within the various morsels...

the cheeses were all American but spoke French well enough to be described as bien-affinés... Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Wisconsin was particularly satisfying

the mascarpone was nicely balanced in sweetness and texture, while the coffee was delicious and scalding hot.

wines?

... the Bocksbeutel looked great, sitting pertly perched on the tablecloth in this swish French joint. Franconia is not known for great riesling. It's not even known much for riesling at all, except for schwarzriesling, and that is pinot meunier... I visited at Schimitt's Kinder for the first time several years ago as a stopoff between my plane landing in Munich and my destination in the Pfalz. And I was immediately taken with the quality of the riesling, particularly from the Marsberg, a limestony site on the Main river. On this occasion the Randersackerer sacked every Rander in its path, all the way from the first thirst to the last swipe of the sausage sauce on sourdough. It had grown a nice medium gold colour, bright acid into a tart finish, nice pearsy apple aromas and flavours that grew increasingly citric as the afternoon went on. The texture showed itself only a touch sharp at the first pass, but then grew increasingly rich and creamy—and in company of the brown sauce around the seafood sausage, the fruit took on an enhanced sweetness, even as some of the 13.5% alcohol showed as well.

This is very fine riesling. Is it as great as a Spätlese from a top address in the Rheingau or Mosel? Not really, no. But it had a nice heft and a rustic charm to it that was quite pleasing.

and our other bottle was a Côte de Nuits red Burgundy that's pretty hard to beat. Big wine. “Enough tannin for nebbiolo,” Bob said early-on. If I wished to be a great compiler of tasting notes, I could follow Bob around and write down everything he says like a modern-day Boswell.

Great producer in a big vintage. Yes, the 1955 was better. So was the 1962. Did it matter? No. This was one of two bottles I bought across the street at Tribeca Wine Merchants, some five years ago. I drank one as soon as possible with Peter Ross and his wife and my friend Laila—which was mostly protesting we were drinking it, only showing its true colours toward the very end.

Five years later, we have achieved the point where both of us were happy enough with the aroma for nearly ten minutes before we took the next step the first sip—big wine. Lovely texture, more satin than velvet, with just a bit of grit, loads of grip, beginning to show flattering secondaries, and having a long life ahead of it. Very deep in the nose, penetrating and inviting serious fruit, griottes and plums and dried blackberries, without much in the way yet of sauvage or du gibier... length and persistance a-plenty. What it did with the orange in the sweetbreads was remarkable, although perhaps something from Gevrey-Chambertin does that better...

and an email from Bob adds the following:

“...I can say that you did a fine job of describing the food and the wine. The remarkable aspect of Chanterelle is its undemonstrative committment to excellence. No ego-centric displays of attention grabbing virtuosity. In this sense Chanterelle reminds me of Lutece. Fine ingredients, perfect executions, flavors and textures that make sense, a calm, relaxing, spirit lifting environment, a peacefulness that is difficult to find in this city. A restaurant for adults who have some serious experience with food and wine going back to the 1980s. I liked the Musigny more than I expected to. It is a wine which needs 15-20 years in the bottle to shed its haughty demeanor. I would like to revisit the 1999 in 5 years”

and what do we talk about on such an elegantly misspent afternoon? what is on our minds and moves ‘round the brains of two such hardened aesthetes?

wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib und Gesang

der bleibt ein Narr, sein Leben lang ~

~ a little ittybitty silly hint for all you culture-vultures about Slumdog Millionaire...

I noticed while watching Slumdog Millionaire something that I liked very much, which I have yet to see reported:

during one of the scenes where the children were stealing anything not nailed-down, the two are boosting purses from a grandstand where people are watching the performance of an opera.

this opera the folks are watching is none other than Christoph Willibald Glück’s delightful little diversion written during an otherwise mostly dead-zone between Händel and Mozart, Orfeo ed Euridyce.

the theme of this opera concerns itself with a fellow journeying into the infernal regions to rescue his beloved from hell—fitting rather intentionally I suspect with the theme of the movie...

~ owed to the internet ~

facebook is the perfect ploy
to turn a tool into a toy