HIGH-PRESSURE FRONT?

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, November 30th 2005 at 8:09

    The New Yorker’s usually astute Alex Ross, bemoaning newspaper cuts in classical-music coverage, mistakenly attributes the decline to the malignant influence of advertisers. This takes off from a question he posed about newspapers possibly losing revenue by giving away their content online.

DEEP SCHMIDT

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, November 30th 2005 at 8:06

    Tonight’s Minnesota Orchestra broadcast features Yakov Kreizberg conducting one of my favorite symphonies, Franz Schmidt’s Fourth. A year or two ago I reviewed Kreizberg’s recording of that symphony with a different orchestra.

ALL ABOARD

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, November 29th 2005 at 9:28

    At the beginning of November, I started dumping out of Music Through the Night before John Zeck had a chance to back-announce the last selection before 5 a.m. It makes the transition from the satellite service out of Minnesota to me in the studio smoother, but the real reason I did it was to eliminate an opportunity for Zeck to do something that drives me nuts.

ALBERT SOTO

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, November 28th 2005 at 7:08

    Every year, a highlight of Borderlands Theater’s A Tucson Pastorella has been the leering, sneering Lucifer played by Albert Soto. Albert seemed perfect for the part, holding everything in contempt, and all too willing to share a slice of malevolence with whoever crossed his path. But the real Albert ...

STRINGS ATTACHED

From the desk of James Reel on Saturday, November 26th 2005 at 12:56

    Strings magazine, to which I contribute (probably excessively), is sometimes a little slow to get its content online, and by the time a new issue is up I forget to post links to my latest. But I’ve noticed that highlights from the December issue are now at the Web ...

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, November 24th 2005 at 8:08

    Two thoughts about Thanksgiving: It’s a holiday that flirts with unconstitutionality, and there’s no good music for it.

PASSAGE TO INDIA

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, November 24th 2005 at 8:03

    Live Theatre Workshop is offering an imperfect but ultimately effective production of a play more serious than its usual offerings:

Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh counts to some degree as a comedy, but it is at times an almost unbearably sad one. Knowing that, some theatergoers have already decided ...

REUNION

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, November 23rd 2005 at 8:05

    My cello has come home! It’s been in the shop for what seems like three but is probably only two weeks. Zoran, the cellist/luthier from whom I bought the instrument, had promised to fix up the many scratches on the old thing when I wrote him the check last spring, but only recently did his schedule and mine allow time for my cello to go to the spa.

THE TIPPLING POINT

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, November 22nd 2005 at 7:24

    Via ArtsJournal.com, here’s a short article in The Guardian about a report declaring that “London’s museums and art galleries should open until 10 p.m. at weekends so people have an alternative to binge drinking in pubs and clubs.” This is something we should keep in mind ...

IN LIEU OF REVIEW

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, November 18th 2005 at 7:38

    I’d planned to write a review of the Joyce Yang/Tucson Symphony concert this morning, but that would be unwise because I wound up not attending the concert. (Not that attendance necessarily affects the content of some reviews elsewhere.)

THEATER BIG AND SMALL

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, November 17th 2005 at 7:46

    Two—well, technically, three—theatrical productions opened here last week, and they’re both worth your while. They could hardly be more dissimilar, though. One, a Shakespeare classic, employs a huge cast and sprawls through nearly six hours spread across two nights; the other, a recent work, is concentrated into the figure of one unprepossessing man holding forth for less than an hour and a half.

WHY ARE WE NOT SURPRISED?

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, November 16th 2005 at 6:17

    From the New York Times:

Investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting concluded today that its former chairman repeatedly broke federal law and its own regulations in a campaign to combat what he saw as liberal bias. A scathing report by the corporation's inspector general described a dysfunctional organization ...

STRANGLEHOLD

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, November 11th 2005 at 8:41

    Ah, don’t you love the American “free market”? That’s  a euphemism for our obsessive anti-regulatory philosophy, whereby the failure to set national standards actually inhibits technological development, and the failure to get serious about antitrust laws allows a few dominant corporations to dig in and resist change at the expense of the American public.

LAFAVE LIVES!

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, November 10th 2005 at 13:39

    Ever wonder what happened to former Arizona Daily Star music critic Ken LaFave? Well, he's had all sorts of professional adventures hither and yon, but right now he's out on his own, trying to make a living mainly as a composer. (He still writes words, too; he's ...

IN MEMORIAM

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, November 10th 2005 at 7:58

    The latest Tucson Weekly includes my rather harsh review of Top Hat Theatre Club’s DOA production of Murder at the Vicarage. I’d also like to draw your attention to something more serious, a series of little tributes to my friend and colleague Chris Limberis, who died of leukemia last Saturday.

PREP

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, November 9th 2005 at 7:36

     For this week's new content in San Francisco Classical Voice, Lisa Hirsch has written an article examining how critics prepare to do their work. She seems to cover all the bases, reporting that preparation ranges from delving into the scores beforehand to ... doing absolutely nothing. I must admit that I fall into the latter camp these days.

MARGARET MEAD AT THE SYMPHONY

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, November 8th 2005 at 9:44

    British journalist Jessica Duchen has posted at her blog an interesting article about the real lives of orchestra musicians. Their lot can be tough, but they’re hardly toiling in a Dickensian poor house. Of course, Duchen’s article draws upon interviews with members of leading British orchestras, but much ...

RADIO DIVERSITY

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, November 7th 2005 at 8:20

    Larry Harnisch, the Arizona Daily Star’s classical-music critic back in the early 1980s (who now works for a certain more serious paper covering Los Angeles), has this riff on my post about radio consultants who promulgate a generic sound across the country:

    Bravo ... I think Internet radio is a ...

HOW TO KILL AN AMERICAN ORCHESTRA

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, November 7th 2005 at 7:52

    David Stabler in the Portland Oregonian promotes the utterly wrong-headed notion that the way to lure audiences back to spottily attended orchestra concerts is to stop being innovative, which is supposedly what caused the reactionaries to flee, and bring back the overpriced big-name soloists and paint-by-numbers 3B programming from which people were already drifing away. Worse, Stabler proposes that the Oregon Symphony and conductor Carlos Kalmar should run the audience-development effort like a political campaign.

RECORDINGS, STYLE, AND ALBAN BERG

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, November 4th 2005 at 8:53

   Via ArtsJournal, here’s a link to a very interesting item in the New York Review of Books (which is stingy with online content). It’s a review by that most intellectual of American pianists, Charles Rosen, of Robert Philip’s Performing Music in the Age of Recording. One of Rosen’s remarks leads to something I’ve been meaning to say about Wednesday’s concert at the Leo Rich Theatre by the Cypress String Quartet, the most fully satisfying performance I’ve ever heard of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite.

TWINS AND SINGLES

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, November 3rd 2005 at 7:37

    It’s a busy theater week in Tucson, with three plays having opened last week and more soon to come.

THE SINS OF THE CONSULTANTS

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, November 2nd 2005 at 7:41

    No doubt public radio station managers across the country are all a-quiver to learn from the Radio Research Consortium that public-radio listenership has lost 400,000 listeners (down from 27.2 million) since … well, who knows since when, because the RRC is vague about exactly what period it’s talking about. Which is typical, because the RRC, like just about anyone wielding statistics—the most weasly of pseudo-sciences—manipulates the interpretation of numbers to suit its agenda. And that agenda, dictated by RRC founder Tom Church, is basically to pull the plug on all this hoity-toity music and replace it with news and talk, so public radio stations will sound like the other jabbering stations on the dial. (From the beginning, in 1981, Church’s mission has been to make public radio sound more like commercial radio in every way possible.)

VIVALDI AND THE ORPHAN VIOLINIST

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, November 1st 2005 at 7:28

    For some reason I haven’t bothered to link to my reviews for Fanfare magazine that happen to show up online (only a small portion of the print edition is available via the Web site). In the last issue, I wrote about a collection of Vivaldi violin concertos described as “for Anna Maria."