High Definition Tape Transfers

11/20/2025

Vanity project, or spoiler?...

Commentary from Chris Tomlinson, writing in the Houston Chronicle:

Third-place politicians have a duty to explain themselves: are they spoilers, posers or merely dreamy long shots? Because how they lose can change the world.

Two 2026 candidates could dramatically affect Texas’ future. U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt, who is running against incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton, could throw the Republican primary into a low-turnout runoff, where the party base makes the call.

Mike Collier, an erstwhile Democrat running for lieutenant governor as an independent, could take votes from his former party’s nominee next year and guarantee Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s reelection.

Prevailing political wisdom and their minimal campaign funds suggest neither candidate stands much of a chance. So, do they really think they can win? Or are they burning through millions of dollars in campaign donations just to promote themselves?

Hunt is running against two well-funded Republicans with far greater name recognition. I spoke with Hunt’s campaign team, but they did not make Hunt available or declined to answer questions on the record.

However, Hunt did speak with my colleague Jeremy Wallace last month on the Texas Take podcast. The two-term representative of Congressional District 38 in northwest Houston argued Texans need a younger generation representing them in the U.S. Senate.

“You have a 24-year incumbent (Cornyn) that is polling in the low-30s after spending $30 million in the last 2½ months,” Hunt told Wallace. “People are looking for an alternative.”

Paxton, who leads in the polls, says he is the true Make America Great Again alternative for Trump supporters. But Hunt calls Paxton “embattled,” due to past corruption allegations, and is running as Trump’s number one fan.

The problem, though, is that most Texans have never heard of Hunt unless they are on a MAGA email list. Luckily, Hunt seems to enjoy the campaign trail more than going to his office in Washington, his voting record shows.

Hunt has missed 18% of House votes since taking office in 2023. The congressman says in 2023 he was caring for his wife and son, who was born six weeks premature. But that only explains one out of his three years in office.

Hunt missed 16.4% of roll call votes in 2024, according to nonpartisan data site GovTrack.com. He was busy campaigning for Trump, he says.

This year, Hunt has missed 27% of record votes. Instead of going to Capitol Hill, he was making dozens of public appearances and videos trying to build up his name ID with voters.

“It’s not about the votes you miss; it’s about the votes you make,” Hunt argued to Wallace. “The most serious and most important votes I have taken make me probably among the top three most conservative congressmen.”

Despite skipping his day job for side-hustles, Hunt will struggle to pull ahead of both Cornyn and Paxton. But he can draw enough votes away from them to force a runoff.

Former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert’s long-shot campaign threw the 2012 Senate race into a runoff between Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz. While Dewhurst got the most votes in the primary, Cruz won the low-turnout runoff.

Hunt is trying to follow in Cruz’s footsteps, but he’s more likely to give Paxton the edge in a runoff. This is why Senate Majority Leader John Thune and South Carolina Sen. Rick Scott have called Hunt’s candidacy “a vanity project,” and President Donald Trump has not made an endorsement.

In a general election, candidates can win without a majority, which is why Collier’s bid for lieutenant governor could help Dan Patrick. As a former Democratic candidate for state comptroller and lieutenant governor, Collier is most likely to pull voters away from the winner of the Democratic primary than to win himself.

Yet Collier told me he’s running because voters are sick and tired of the two-party system and want something different.

“Texans are tired of the partisanship; they want someone who’s going to solve the problems they care about,” Collier said in an interview. “Someone needs to offer an alternative to the two parties, and I feel compelled to do that.”

I pressed Collier on whether he was ruining the Democrats’ best chance to win statewide office since 2018. He said he was concentrating on raising money and winning, but it's hard to understand why he's trying again after two previous races for statewide office ended badly.

Politicians, much like entrepreneurs, require an absurd amount of overconfidence to succeed. They must believe they can beat the odds. But don’t underestimate the role of their campaign consultants, who make huge sums whether their candidate wins or not.

Voters should ask themselves, Is this candidate running to make my world better? Or do they love the thrill of the chase or have some other motive? These are tough questions for tough times.

11/20/2025

02/02/2025

Here is a prime example of the MAGA/GOP commitment to christian / family values.

The debate over Trump’s federal freezes exposes the GOP’s hostility toward the poor.

02/04/2024

WHEN YOU PURCHASE THE HIGHEST-PRICED DOWNLOAD OF THIS PRODUCT, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ACCESS ALL THE OTHER AVAILABLE FORMATS THIS FEATURE IS INCLUDED WITH YOUR PURCHASE. FIRST HIGH-RESOLUTION RELEASE OF STOKOWSKI’S DESMAR RECORDING OF RACHMANINOFF’S SYMPHONY NO. 3 AND VOCALISE HDTT customers have e...

01/20/2024

Artist(s): Piano - Vladimir Horowitz Recording Info: Released by Columbia 1963 Producer - Thomas Frost

03/29/2017

Another excellent, and thorough, review of my Howard Hanson album, newly remastered from the original tapes for HDTT. Steven Schwartz does a detailed analysis:

"I find simplicity harder to understand than complexity, oddly enough. Bach makes things easier for me than Mozart does, Arnold Schoenberg easier than Francis Poulenc. Perhaps musical technique counts for so much, and technical understanding comes down to a matter of books and exercises. To me, melody, among other things, lies outside technique, and so it's usually harder to write about, say, Puccini than about Wagner. In the case of Wagner, you can talk about other things, but there's little point discussing Puccini if you're not prepared to speak about his melodies.

Howard Hanson falls into that folder for me. I've blown hot and cold over his music for years, precisely because the technique, while masterful, is so beside the point of the music's appeal....Finally, despite lovely music of great individuality (one recognizes the Hanson sound-world after a few measures), Hanson seems a bit outside of everything, and that disturbs me. Like Alan Hovhaness, he has built his own mansion, but out in the middle of practically nowhere. By way of contrast, Aaron Copland – with a style just as individual – seems in the thick of modernism, as does even a neo-Romantic like Samuel Barber. You can imagine these two eating dinner with Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith, and Schoenberg. Hanson and Hovhaness pretty much dine alone. Still, the individual work matters most, and the disc presents several of great beauty, from many periods of Hanson's career....

As he did with much of his output, Hanson cast the Organ Concerto in a single movement but, as usual with such things, clearly marked in four large subsections, corresponding to first movement, scherzo, slow movement, and finale. Hanson uses cyclical procedures, rather than sonata form, as well as ingenious constant thematic variation. The entire concerto grows out of an upward fifth and a modal run up the scale, both heard at the very beginning. It's a small field, of course, but this is one of the finest organ concerti ever – big ideas, long sweeping phrases, and canny treatment of the organ as a solo concertante instrument, rather than as an extra orchestral color with occasional solos. Hanson writes an heroic part, including a fiendish cadenza for the pedals. David Craighead not only hits the notes but conveys the architecture of the piece and carries up the listener in the emotional surge – a marvel of a performance. The Rochester Chamber Orchestra and conductor Fetler support him superbly well. This is a performance where ensemble and soloist feed off one another. I wouldn't be surprised if the ensemble had a few ringers from the Eastman School. The string sound is so Eastman, it recalls the old Mercury LPs with Hanson conducting.

The lush opening measures of Nymphs and Satyrs require a suspension of disbelief: Hanson first intended the music for solo clarinet. The piece yet again is flat-out gorgeous, but its very lyricism militates against anyone dancing to it. As a composer, Hanson sings rather than dances. To me, it's a tone poem in three short movements, the most delightful being the scherzo second movement. Hanson invented the main theme as something to serenade his dog Mollie with while he fed her dog biscuits. It's just one of those tunes that aren't constructed so much as they are found, and, by the way, it resembles both the dance of the Seven Dwarves in the Disney cartoon as well as the "Jodelling Song" from Walton's Facade. Fetler and his players give the work a very loving performance indeed.

The earliest work on the disc, the Concerto da Camera, sounds it. Hanson became more concise as he got older, and by the 1920s had cleaned up his scoring quite a bit. Here, he confuses power with the number of lines, a mistake he got over quickly. Still, the piece has its share of great themes (Hanson recycled one of them for his Fantasy Variations on a Theme of Youth at least thirty years later), but the composer can't seem to get the most mileage out of them. He even resorts to fugato (Stefan Wolpe described fugato, only half-jokingly, as what to do when you run out of ideas). The quartet plays heavily, and Brian Preston, on the piano, seems divorced from the proceedings.

As a pianist, Preston comes off better in the Two Yuletide Pieces. These have no specific program, much less one to do with Christmas. Still, Preston's difficulties arise from the character of the works themselves. They suffer from "fish-and-fowl." On the one hand, they are short salon morceaux, of the secondary kind tossed off by John Ireland and Arnold Bax when they weren't writing something important. On the other hand, the ideas seem to demand larger treatment. The piano writing is capable, but not sufficiently interesting in itself. I know, lighten up.

The choral music, on the other hand, is pure joy. A Prayer of the Middle Ages, for 8 parts a ca****la, is an unusual combination for Hanson. In fact, it's the only example in his catalogue. For a composer of major works for chorus and orchestra (my favorite: the Lament for Beowulf), Hanson avoided the a ca****la choir. In fact, the remaining works are for choir and organ. The Prayer brims with declamatory vigor and very rich chords. The choir's intonation teeters a bit (some of those chords sound a bit too rich due to pitch spread), particularly in the opening, where a written perfect fifth sounds like something other.

I first heard Hanson's Psalm 8 in the 60s sung by, believe it or not, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who actually managed to get through it on their New York World's Fair album. Thank God for the accompanying organ. On the other hand, the organ part is necessary only for choirs that can't keep pitch. It adds very little to the musical texture. I wish someone would experiment with leaving it out. This is a major Hanson work, too seldom heard, one that managed to linger in my musical memory for thirty years. Hanson has left most of his compositional fingerprints all over the work: the quiet opening, the upward modal runs, building to a great climax on "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him," and ending in a radiant chorale-like passage (Hanson later appropriated this theme for his 4 Psalms for baritone and strings). By me, it's a major 20th-century choral work. The choir's pitch problems have largely cleared up, and their diction is admirable. It's a good performance, but once in my life I'd like to hear a professional group tackle it with the subtlety of shading and dynamic the work cries out for.

Psalm 121 is an extended baritone solo with organ accompaniment and choral interjections. Hanson's cantabile belongs to him alone. If you know anything of his opera Merry Mount, you've heard it. For that matter, you hear it in the Organ Concerto as well. It depends quite a bit on sequence, particularly on cadential figures, to build to climaxes. Again, the college kids do fine, but it would be nice to hear the darker, more ringing sound of grownups, particularly in the solo.

Again, I first heard Hanson's Psalm 150 from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, this time from a mid-70s LP of mostly forgettable stuff. The poor surroundings only enhanced its quality. The College Chorale does better than the MTC, reaching a brave climax indeed on the alleluias.

John Proffitt, the recording engineer, not only has produced a fine set of field recordings, but also provided the very informative album notes. A superior job all around.

Steven Schwartz, writing in Classical.net

Purchase at https://www.highdeftapetransfers.com/products/howard-hanson-an-american-romantic