DEFENDERS OF SLUDGE

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, January 31st 2006 at 8:19

    Newsday music critic Justin Davidson, guest blogging at The Rest Is Noise, has belched one of the most asinine comments about music I’ve seen in some time.

THE BURDEN OF CELEBRITY

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, January 30th 2006 at 8:06

    Last night my wife and I attended a benefit dinner involving Stephanie Zimbalist and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., following their appearance in Chamber Music Plus Southwest’s Mesmeric Mozart. We’d met Stephanie last year at a much more intimate dinner and got to know her as well as you can know anyone after two or three hours. Both she and her father are remarkably unpretentious, patient, “normal” people in every positive sense of that word. I’ve met several actors and interviewed a great many musicians, and I must say that most of them have been much like the Zimbalists: gracious, easygoing people who happen to have parleyed their talent into solid careers. In fact, I’ve taken an instant dislike to only three world-famous musicians.

GENIUS OR GENUS?

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, January 27th 2006 at 8:29

   This is the big Mozart Day, the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, which we are officially marking during my six-hour shift here at KUAT-FM with exactly one work lasting six minutes and 50 seconds. Don’t tell the music director, but I have taken the liberty of jettisoning from the schedule two or three not-especially-distinctive yet overplayed pieces by other composers that you’ll never miss (trust me) and replacing them with more substantial Mozart works (so far, the bassoon concerto and one of the late piano sonatas). I didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten.

THREE STAGES

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, January 26th 2006 at 7:14

  This being Thursday, I’m off the hook in terms of original blogging while I point you to my contributions in the latest Tucson Weekly.

PITTSBURGH BLOG

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, January 25th 2006 at 6:35

    Today I’ve added to the blogroll on the right the Pittsburgh Symphony’s site, which is a sort of gang blog with contributions from orchestra players, audience members, guest artists (including Jennifer Higdon, who during the past couple of years has become the “hot” American composer) and innocent bystanders ...

THE INNER LIFE OF MUSICIANS

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, January 24th 2006 at 7:15

    At her blog Twang Twang Twang, British harpist Helen Radice tells the cold truth about the supposedly glamorous life of a professional musician, and explains why musicians are such grumblers:

Many people, not just musicians, don't like work. That's why it's called 'work', as opposed to 'play ...

PACIFICA OVERTURES

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, January 19th 2006 at 7:50

    At the beginning of last night’s Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concert, I did an onstage interview with Dmitri Tymoczko, whose brand new Eggman Variations for piano and strings would be premiered a few minutes later. Then I jogged back to the green room to alert the Pacifica Quartet that it was showtime. Before they’d go out, though, first violinist Simin Ganatra asked if I could follow them on and close the piano lid; she didn’t want it reflecting the group’s sound in strange ways while they played the concert’s opening work, a Mendelssohn quartet.
    That’s the first time in years a woman has had to ask me to put the lid down.

IN PRINT, OUT OF MIND

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, January 19th 2006 at 7:46

    At last night’s concert, people buttonholed me and wanted to chat about an article I have in the current issue of Fanfare about a microtonal composer, and a review I wrote for the Tucson Weekly last November of the UA’s production of Henry IV. It’s hard enough for me to remember what I wrote last week, let alone last quarter, so all I could do was smile and nod and pretend I knew what they were talking about.
    On the subject of what I wrote last week, today’s Tucson Weekly carries my review of a well-performed, disturbing play at Invisible Theatre.

MORE ON TOP HAT

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, January 17th 2006 at 13:40

    James Mitchell Gooden, who runs Top Hat Theatre Club, believes that bad reviews can harm his company more than good reviews can help it, so, as I wrote last week, he is not inviting critics to his latest production (I understand the Star’s Kathleen Allen is also not invited to review the show). But I have spies everywhere, and a friend who attended Top Hat’s production of Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor—an adaptation of Chekhov stories—has reported back.

BAIT

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, January 13th 2006 at 9:07

    Back in 1976, when I started working at KUAT-FM the first time around, exactly twice a day the announcers would be given two full minutes, just before the news, to talk about everything that would be happening on the station for the rest of the day. A couple of problems ...

CAN'T TAKE THE PRESSURE

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, January 12th 2006 at 7:56

    I’m not ready to give up on Top Hat yet, but it turns out the matter is beyond my control.

FEVER

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, January 12th 2006 at 7:03

    If you peruse the latest Tucson Weekly, you’ll see that I’m quite impressed by the Rogue Theatre’s production of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, featuring J. Andrew McGrath:

    He veers from one subject to another; at the time, the transition makes sense, but a moment later, you ...

UNTITLED

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, January 11th 2006 at 8:24

    Over at the NewMusicbox, the American Music Center’s Web zine (to which I have contributed on a couple of occasions), editor Frank Oteri wonders “why do so many composers still insist on numbering their works rather than naming them? … Sure, we're no longer living in the era of Haydn, Beethoven, and the gang where everything was either Piano Sonata No. 28 or Symphony No. 6, but this strangest of naming games has yet to completely disappear from our collective reflexes. … Why must [compositions] be named as if they were volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica?”
    Well, classical compositions can be about something beyond music, but often they aren’t.

POP THE CLUTCH

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, January 10th 2006 at 7:05

    My right thumb is still a little numb this morning from yesterday’s cello practice. Obviously, I’m not following the advice I reported in a recent issue of Strings magazine, where the subject was playing with a tension-free bow hand. Here’s the beginning:

    THE FIRST TIME A TEACHER ...

SPACE MUSIC

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, January 9th 2006 at 8:32

    The aptly named blog On an Overgrown Path has a post that begins with a note on the wonderful Renaissance-music performer David Munrow, then wanders on to a list of the music carried on the two Voyager spacecraft launched some months after Munrow’s suicide in 1976 (Munrow is on the spacefaring music discs). The selection is an aptly eclectic array of what we now call world music, plus a little bit of American rock (Chuck Berry) and several classical items.

REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/KYOKO TAKEZAWA

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, January 6th 2006 at 7:52

    It’s been about a century since an all-Brahms concert was an interesting concept. Yet for the current cycle, Tucson Symphony music director George Hanson followed the gutless “Mostly Mozart” formula and plopped two fat Brahms warhorses into a single program, prefacing them with a tiny new piece by Jeffery Cotton. However stuffy and unimaginative the overall program may be, Hanson, the orchestra and violin soloist Kyoko Takezawa are delivering performances that make attendance worthwhile.

RETURN AND DEPARTURE

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, January 5th 2006 at 6:27

    I’m back, but my time off the air wasn’t exactly vacation. Wrangling the in-laws swarming all over the house was a job in itself, and I managed to fit in some work-for-pay during the past week and a half, too. Here’s one example, my review in the latest Tucson Weekly of Dearly Departed at Live Theatre Workshop.