SPRING
From the desk of James Reel on Friday, March 19th 2010 at 11:35
With the vernal equinox upon us, we're going all out with spring music Saturday morning (and right after the Metropolitan Opera, too). You'll hear the pieces you expect--between 7 and 8, it'll be an excerpt from Copland's Appalachian Spring, Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata for violin and piano, and Schumann's "Spring" Symphony--but we'll also have some comparative rarities, including Respighi's virtually unknown big cantata Spring. For various reasons, however, we will not be playing that hit from Mel Brooks' The Producers, "Springtime for Hitler."
Read MorePLAGIARISTS OF EXPERIENCE
From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, March 2nd 2010 at 8:53
Considering, first, the swarms of American and European journalists across earthquake-ruined Haiti and Chile, and the current controversy over what constitutes a literary “mash-up” and what remains out-and-out plagiarism, this seems like a good time to revive an essay I wrote a decade ago about a more benign form of “borrowing.”
Read MoreTUCSON SYMPHONY CHANGES?
From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, February 25th 2010 at 10:28
Unconfirmed report: The Tucson Symphony Orchestra's executive director and development director are poised to depart. The organization is undergoing some potentially devastating cuts, so this would be a good time to move people with fresh ideas into those positions. On the other hand, a period of instability is not the best time for regime change. We'll see what happens.
Read MoreONE RING TO RULE THEM ALL
From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, February 18th 2010 at 6:44
For years, I was under the impression that the multiple rings in the Olympics logo represented the many continents from which competitors originate, but I must have been wrong. Judging from NPR's top-of-the-hour newscasts, only Americans are competing now. What happened to the rest of the world?
Read MoreHAYDN SEEK
From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, February 11th 2010 at 8:01
I have managed, Sgt. Bilko-like, to work out a scheme that will enable me to target specific CDs for addition to the KUAT-FM library, despite the statewide Legislature-induced budgetary disaster. We have 6248 active items in the classical library already, so you’d think all the standard repertory would be well represented by now, but not so. Recently, I’ve been filling a lot of Haydn gaps ...
Read MoreNEWISH 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 More
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