NEWISH BOSTON SYMPHONY SACDS
From the desk of James Reel on Monday, February 8th 2010 at 7:53
Here are two reviews I contributed to Fanfare last year of items from a new series of high-resolution recordings from James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra...
Read MoreTHE GADABOUT'S NIGHTMARE
From the desk of James Reel on Friday, February 5th 2010 at 9:07
Last night I had one of those performance-anxiety dreams. For students and ex-students, it’s the one in which you’ve gotten several weeks into the semester without bothering to attend a particular class, and now you’re hopelessly behind with an exam coming up, and you can’t even find the classroom. For radio announcers, it involves dead air. I have both dreams from time to time. Last night, though, was something that sneaks through my subconscious far less frequency: a dream about actual performance ...
Read MoreHOW NOT TO READ A BOOK
From the desk of James Reel on Monday, February 1st 2010 at 7:35
If I were a good blogger, I would link to a couple of interesting little comments on the classical Grammys, but the Grammys are even less relevant to anything than the Golden Globes. So instead I will offer the second monthly installment of reruns from a column I wrote for a literary e-zine back in the late 1990s...
Read MoreBLU-RAY OPERA REVIEWS
From the desk of James Reel on Friday, January 29th 2010 at 8:59
My days as a critic for Fanfare are probably numbered, because I don't have time to do that and perform my new duties as the magazine's music editor (glorified proofreader), a position I inherited when the previous music editor dropped dead over New Year's weekend. So I'll start catching you up on some reviews I've written during the past few months...
Read MoreDA CAPO AL FINE
From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, January 27th 2010 at 9:31
While cleaning out my music database, I've discovered that St. Paul Sunday has been running the same programs the same week of every year for something like four years. Have you noticed? Do you care?
Read MoreTSO CUTS--IN CASE YOU MISSED THE MEMO
From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, January 19th 2010 at 10:10
Here's the announcement of cutbacks at the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, although I don't think this press release mentions that the musicians reportedly took a 30-percent cut in pay...
Read MoreMAJOR/MINOR
From the desk of James Reel on Friday, January 15th 2010 at 8:19
Have you ever wondered exactly WHY we perceive much major-mode music to be happy and most minor-mode music to be sad? Well, here is a possible scientific explanation. (If the link takes you to a registration page, just click past it.)
Read MoreSACD REVIEW: DMITRY BORTNYANSKY/"THE ITALIAN ALBUM." PRATUM INTEGRUM ORCHESTRA. CARO MITIS 0042003.
From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, January 14th 2010 at 10:35
Dmitry Bortnyansky (1751–1825), a longer-lived Russian contemporary of Mozart, is remembered today chiefly for his important contributions to Russian Orthodox church music. But a splendid SACD by the Russian period-instrument orchestra Pratum Integrum demonstrates that there was far more to Bortnansky than solemn, bass-rich hymns ...
Read MorePBS: THE NEW ARTS CHANNEL (AGAIN)?
From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, January 13th 2010 at 8:09
What passes for cultural programming on PBS has been rare and largely low-brow in the past decade-plus, but the network's head promises to do better.
Read MoreFLUTIST FLURRY
From the desk of James Reel on Monday, January 11th 2010 at 7:04
Mathieu Dufour, who this season has been serving as principal flutist of both the Chicago Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic, will be giving a mostly French chamber-music recital here in Tucson this Sunday, courtesy of the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (at the link, scroll down a bit for specifics). It's an interesting time for him to show up here. Dufour got a lot of publicity last week for giving up his L.A. job; an article in a Chicago newspaper reported that Dufour said that musicians in L.A. "have no tradition there -- no tradition of sound and no tradition of working together as a dedicated ensemble." But now he's claiming to the Los Angeles press that he was misquoted, a standard claim when somebody's loose talk gets him in trouble. You can find the latest in the affair here.
Read MoreNEW THIS MONTH: UA FACULTY RECORDINGS
From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, January 6th 2010 at 8:51
A few weeks ago, someone from the UA School of Music dropped off a bag full of CDs featuring members of the music faculty, and they're beginning to pop up on this month's schedule. Keep your ears open for recordings involving bassoonist William Dietz, flutist Brian Luce, pianists Rex Woods and Paula Fan and organist Pamela Decker, among others.
Read MoreTHE FUTURE (PAST) OF READING
From the desk of James Reel on Monday, January 4th 2010 at 8:52
I really do promise to blog more this year, and I intend to make things a little easier on myself by making the first post of each month a rerun of columns I wrote in the late 1990s for the e-zine The Whole Wired World, or TW3. Some of them have popped up in my blog in the past, but not systematically, and it’s been so long that you have surely forgotten having seen them before. This one is especially pertinent now that Amazon.com is claiming that on Christmas Day it distributed more e-books for Kindle than regular paper books.
Read MoreQUALITY, NOT QUANTITY
From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, December 31st 2009 at 8:02
Writes blogger Pliable of "On and Overgrown Path," "It is my hope that in 2010 we will again start to measure classical music by its ability to sway, to inspire, to change and to comfort, as well as by its audience size." Indeed. See his full post here.
Read MoreKNOW-IT-ALMOST
From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, December 30th 2009 at 6:45
This Sunday, I'll be giving the pre-performance talk for Chamber Music Plus' presentation "A Stopped Clock: From Brahms To Bloomsbury." The subject will be English composer, conductor and women's rights activist Ethel Smyth, about whom I know about two minutes of material that will have to be spun out to fill a 20-minute chat. I'd better start hitting the books.
Read MoreHOLIDAY ENTERTAINMENT
From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, December 23rd 2009 at 9:38
No blog posts in about two weeks ... sorry for that. It's been busy around here, getting a big batch of new releases cataloged before generating the January schedules, and putting together several special programs for Christmas Day in addition to the usual Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concerts each week. Whew!
Read MoreSICK SIGNAL
From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, December 10th 2009 at 8:12
For the past couple of days, sometimes it’s sounded like a lot of CDs have been mistracking—“skipping”—as have, strangely, our spoken announcements. The problem, as it turns out, has nothing to do with bad CDs, stuttering announcers or anything else originating in the control room. It’s about a malfunction along the path the signal takes from the studio to the transmitter. ...
Read MoreCHOPIN FOR NON-DUMMIES
From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, December 1st 2009 at 8:48
Pianist Jeremy Denk has been an even more negligent blogger than I have recently, but he’s back now with a very nice appreciation of Chopin as a composer of much more than pretty background music for people uninterested in close listening. Read it here.
Read MoreTHE PETER PRINCIPLE IN ACTION
From the desk of James Reel on Monday, November 16th 2009 at 7:34
As of today, I am officially Arizona Public Media’s Classical Music Director. That means I’m basically getting a title, an office and a raise for doing just a little more than the work I’ve been doing for the past several months ...
Read MoreWHATEVER HAPPENED TO LIONA BOYD?
From the desk of James Reel on Monday, November 9th 2009 at 7:41
The Canadian guitarist Liona Boyd was hot stuff, in more ways than one, back in the 1980s, but perhaps she suffered from over-exposure (quite literally, in the case of the translucent toga she wore on one album cover). Gradually she drifted out of the public consciousness, and stopped performing altogether in 2003 ...
Read MoreSACD REVIEW: PRATUM INTEGRUM ORCHESTRA PLAYS TELEMANN
From the desk of James Reel on Monday, November 2nd 2009 at 9:11
I’ve been hanging on to a small batch of SACDs on the Caro Mitis label for something like two years, intending but never getting around to writing reviews for this blog. Let me begin to rectify that, starting with two very attractive Telemann discs ...
Read MoreIS IT LIVE OR IS IT MEMOREX?
From the desk of James Reel on Friday, October 30th 2009 at 8:12
The main reason I’ve hardly been blogging during the past few months is that I’m just too busy with other duties around here. At the beginning of summer, Arizona Public Media—suffering from the same budget crunch as the rest of the University of Arizona—had to lay off a few employees, including KUAT-FM’s afternoon announcer and its music director. Since the goal was to save money, those people’s work had to be taken on by employees who were already salaried, meaning, primarily, Bill Luckhardt and me ...
Read MoreINTERVIEW WITH THE VIOL MASTER
From the desk of James Reel on Monday, October 26th 2009 at 7:19
In case you missed my announcement in August, I’ve withdrawn from the Tucson Weekly. As I wrote in that column, “I’ve been contributing to the Weekly for 10 years, during much of which I’ve reviewed one to three plays in almost every issue, and after all this time, I want my weekends back.” It turns out that plenty of other diversions have filled my anticipated weekend vacuum, so I have yet to enjoy all the cocoon time I’d anticipated. Besides which, I’m still writing for a couple of magazines ...
Read MoreFTC BACKPEDALS
From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, October 20th 2009 at 8:37
In other news, the Federal Trade Commission is now telling book bloggers (and presumably CD reviewers) not to worry about its new rules on freebies and disclosure. It would be nice if the agency could get its story straight.
Read MoreSECRETS FROM MEMBERSHIP CENTRAL
From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, October 20th 2009 at 8:36
As you surely know by now, we’ve thrown ourselves into our autumn membership campaign. Coincidentally, last week Slate repeated an article in which June Thomas, after listening to campaigns on her New York City station, explained public radio's 10 most effective fundraising strategies. Read the article, listen to what we do, compare and contrast. And don’t forget to pledge.
Read MoreBEYOND PREACHING TO THE CHOIR
From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, October 14th 2009 at 9:13
We had a staff meeting yesterday at which senior staffers outlined Arizona Public Media’s growing use of social networking media. It’s great that we’re going to make a bigger push with Twitter and blogging and Facebook and such, but I’m not sure that some of us completely understand its potential ...
Read More
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