OLD NEWS IS ... STILL NEWS

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, October 31st 2005 at 7:43

    One of the play openings I attended over the weekend was decidedly unsuccessful. The quality of the acting varied wildly, from quite good to frankly amateurish, and the tone of the production was similarly uneven; the director sometimes mocked his material, but not consistently enough to turn the whole thing into a focused parody. I’ve committed to reviewing this production, but because I have too much else to cram into the forthcoming Tucson Weekly, I’ll have to hold this review for a week. By that time, I suppose most of the actors will have settled more comfortably into their roles, so when my review appears it will no longer reflect what’s actually happening on the stage.

DA CAPO AL FINE

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, October 28th 2005 at 9:30

    Terry Teachout makes a case for abandoning books:

I wholeheartedly endorse pulling the plug on books you don’t like. … I expect a lot out of the books I read, and when they fail to deliver the goods, I toss them aside with a clear conscience and no second thoughts. Life is so very short—and so often shorter than we expect—that it seems a fearful mistake to waste even the tiniest part of it submitting voluntarily to unnecessary boredom.

ALEICHEM? I LIKE HIM

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, October 27th 2005 at 7:49

    Next week I’ll have a flood of theater-related material in the Tucson Weekly—why does everything open at once?—but for today, it’s just a single preview of An Evening of Sholom Aleichem at Invisible Theatre:

Murray Horwitz misspent his youth in Dayton, Ohio, in the library. Not ...

NO NEWS IS ... NO NEWS

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, October 27th 2005 at 7:47

    This is Day 2 of NPR telling us that there’s been no indictment yet in the the purported White House leak of C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame’s identity; it was such a slow news day Wednesday that the item led every morning newscast. I was just about ...

YOU SAY TOMAHTO

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, October 26th 2005 at 7:38

    The latest announcer mini-challenge at KUAT-FM: how to differentiate, through careful pronunciation, the Aradia Ensemble from the Oradea Philharmonic. The first group is pronounced “ah-RAH-dee-ah.” The second is “oh-RAH-deh-ah” (not “day-ah”; there shouldn’t be a diphthong in that penultimate syllable). When spoken at a natural clip, the last two ...

OLD ARTS, NEW MEDIA

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, October 25th 2005 at 6:38

    Writes John Lambert, “I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere in your area, but these online things are starting to make a difference as more & more commercial platforms fall by the wayside.” Lambert operates one of those “online things,” Classical Voice of North Carolina, a Web site dedicated to reviews of classical music performances in the Raleigh/Winston-Salem area. Lambert decided to launch his site when he saw the regional print outlets dropping their serious coverage of classical music. Lambert’s wasn’t the first site to take up the slack left by newspapers and magazines abandoning their commitment to arts coverage, and indeed the number of sites like CVNC is growing, if slowly. Here’s a perfect example of how New Media can step in to correct the errors and omissions of Old Media platforms.

REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ EDGAR MEYER

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, October 21st 2005 at 10:11

    The first rule of concert criticism is to discuss what happened, not what should have happened. But the absence of a particular major work from the current Tucson Symphony concert cycle reveals that the orchestra is stumbling unsurely through its current financial crisis.

SOB STORY

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, October 21st 2005 at 7:58

    A note from my KUAT colleague Mike Serres, who takes exception to the way he was characterized in my post about radio fundraising:

    I hasten to correct a misrepresentation regarding my "pretending" to sob on the air during a pledge shift. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I wear ...

'FUDDY' NO DUDDY

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, October 20th 2005 at 7:45

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I review Live Theatre Workshop’s night-owl show, Fuddy Meers:

If Eugène Ionesco had been hired as the script doctor for Memento, and the whole project had then been handed to director Preston Sturges, you'd have something much like Fuddy Meers, the not-easy-to-classify ...

BEST, BESTER, BESTEST NOVELS

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, October 20th 2005 at 6:43

    Two Time magazine critics have issued their list of the 100 best novels published from 1923 to the present. I’ll withhold comment, because the blogosphere will no doubt be teeming this week with close analysis and random yelping on the subject. Instead, I’ll point you to a column I wrote in 1998 for a now-defunct e-zine archived at an undisclosed location; the subject was a similar list released by the Modern Library.

MORE ON FURTWÄNGLER

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, October 20th 2005 at 6:36

    If you’re disinclined to wade through the Peter Gutmann article on Wilhelm Furtwängler to which I linked yesterday, here’s an essay I wrote about the controversial conductor-composer a few years ago for the All Music Guide. Settle in; it’s 3,400 words long.

ILL REPUTE

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, October 19th 2005 at 8:39

   In an interesting post about conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and new music, the blogger known as Pliable includes in passing an unfortunate line: “Today Wilhelm Furtwängler’s name is irrevocably linked to the Nazis.” Well, that’s just not true. Furtwängler, though he did get himself into some compromising positions, had nothing to do with the Nazis except insofar as they imposed themselves on him; plenty of people know that now, despite smear efforts in America right after World War II.

SCRAMBLED SCHEDULE

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, October 18th 2005 at 9:31

    I woke up in the middle of the night with a blog post in mind inspired by my half day back at the helm of the Tucson Weekly; it was a rant about losing the useful distinctions of language that make English so rich and versatile, but now all I can remember is a complaint about how people misuse “backyard” and “backseat” as nouns (even in a beautifully written Pulitzer-winning novel like The Known World by Edward P. Jones), whereas their one-word forms should be employed only adjectivally. No doubt you would have found it thrilling.
    Instead, I’ll focus my attention on a couple of interviews I need to chase down in preparation for magazine articles.

NO REST FOR THE WICKED

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, October 17th 2005 at 8:36

    The last word in the title of this post should be pronounced “wick’d.” As in someone affected by Wick Communications, the owner of, among other things, the Tucson Weekly. As in someone like me.

THE TRUTH ABOUT RADIO FUNDRAISING

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, October 14th 2005 at 8:27

    As I write, we’re in the second day of our blessedly abbreviated autumn membership campaign. We’re supposed to sound happy and excited about it on the air, and we actually are … part of the time. But, in truth, our enthusiasm rises and falls through a predictable cycle.

ROGUES AND SPIRITS

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, October 13th 2005 at 15:47

    Oops—almost forgot to post links to my theater reviews in the current Tucson Weekly.

FAN MAIL

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, October 12th 2005 at 8:13

    Some time ago I found in my mailbox an envelope holding a letter I’d written to a listener in response to a question she’d posed about a piece of music; at the bottom of the letter, she’d jotted an appreciative little note. What’s striking about this letter—aside from the shameless and excessive way I misused “which” in restrictive clauses back then—is that I wrote it in 1984, and the listener still had it!

BREVITY

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, October 11th 2005 at 7:04

    To see my advice on how to fake a classical concert review put to use in the real world, look at this coverage of last weekend’s Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra performance. In a 447-word review, only 132 words—two paragraphs near the end—discuss the musical aspects of the ...

MASS MARKETING

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, October 10th 2005 at 7:43

    KUAZ’s David Close and I were snickering this morning about the new underwriting announcement for Carondelet Health Network, which invites one and all to “a White Mass with the purpose of offering inspiration and guidance for those in the healthcare field.” Is a White Mass something that shows up on an MRI? Or, if we were closer to Halloween, would they be celebrating a Black Mass?
    It turns out that this White Mass is the latest trend among Catholic-sponsored health facilities.

REVIEW: FRANÇOIS RABBATH/ARIZONA BASS PLAYERS FESTIVAL

From the desk of James Reel on Saturday, October 8th 2005 at 12:43

    The American String Teachers Association urges its members to teach not only the usual classical approach, but also “alternative styles,” meaning everything that isn’t classical music. The word “alternative” suggests that classical music is still the foundation of everything (as well it should be, from the standpoint of technique), and that jazz and bluegrass and Latin and gypsy genres are extra options to be selected from an educational menu. Well, it’s difficult to think of any kinds of music being “alternative” or “optional” when they are all melded so expertly in the work of François Rabbath, a superb Lebanese-born French bassist and composer. Rabbath performed last night (Oct. 7) at the University of Arizona’s Crowder Hall as part of the Arizona Bass Players Festival.

REVIEW: PATRICK NEHER AND COMPANY/ARIZONA BASS PLAYERS FESTIVAL

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, October 7th 2005 at 9:09

    UA professor Patrick Neher opened his Arizona Bass Players Festival with the impish sort of concert that often ends festivals and summer music camps. It was so full of little musical pranks that you couldn’t help wondering if the one ostensibly and seemingly serious work on the program was just an example of Neher taking advantage of our credulity.

PAYBACK

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, October 6th 2005 at 8:25

    Norman Lebrecht has a delighfully vicious column suggesting that the lavishly compensated violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter be banned from London concert halls. Seems she was recently paid the equivalent of $53,000 per night for a three-concert series of Mozart sonatas, and filled less than two-thirds of the house.

LINE ART

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, October 6th 2005 at 8:22

    If you read the Tucson Weekly only online, rather than picking up the print version so you can peruse the fine smut section in the back, you might overlook my preview of the Tucson Poetry Festival, which this time explores affinities between poetry and painting. The story is tucked away ...

QUALITY ON THE CHEAP

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, October 5th 2005 at 8:03

    Yesterday afternoon, six Naxos discs arrived in my mailbox. They contained the Schubert quartet cycle recorded over the past few years by the Kodály Quartet, something I need to listen to in preparation for a magazine feature I’ll be writing on that ensemble. A couple of decades ago, I would have anticipated seven hours of string-quartet playing on a budget label with dismay. Remember all those Vox Boxes? Interesting music you couldn’t find anywhere else, played by groups with wiry tone, sometimes ragged ensemble and the dull efficiency of sight-readers. The performances by the likes of the Kohon Quartet, the Copenhagen Quartet and the Macalester Trio weren’t fundamentally bad, just unpretty. Today, in contrast, it’s difficult to find scrappy chamber-music playing on even the bargain-basement labels.

ATOMIC FALLOUT

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, October 4th 2005 at 7:27

    If you’re interested in how critics are responding to the premiere of the John Adams/Peter Sellars opera Doctor Atomic, about the genesis of the atomic bomb, Lisa Hirsch provides a great many links at Iron Tongue of Midnight (that's an allusion to Shakespeare, not an S&M ...

SIREN SONG

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, October 3rd 2005 at 7:29

    Ever wonder how a performer copes with distractions—exactly what goes through the performer’s mind when unrelated noises intrude on the proceedings? Pianist-blogger Jeremy Denk reveals what was running through his mind as he played Bach recently for BargeMusic, a long-running concert series given on a barge docked near ...