HORN CALL REVISITED

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, March 31st 2006 at 6:23

    Regarding my post on the imminent departure of Tucson Symphony principal hornist Jacquelyn Sellers, my colleague Michael Dauphinais writes:

    I was struck by your blog entry on Ms. Sellers. This past weekend, I had the privilege of substituting for principal keyboardist Paula Fan for the TSO's "Picnic in the ...

DEAD AND LOVING IT

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, March 30th 2006 at 6:54

    By coincidence, death threads its way through all three of my contributions to the latest Tucson Weekly. We go from the ridiculous to the sublime, and end with a situation that is sui generis. First, a review of an Agatha Christie production:

    Agatha Christie's Black Coffee so relishes its ...

HORN CALL

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, March 29th 2006 at 7:11

    A little under the weather, I took yesterday off from the airwaves. Even so, I managed to do two phone interviews and crank out a couple of short articles for a future issue of the Tucson Weekly. One of those interviews was with Jacquelyn Sellers, who is leaving her position ...

LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, March 27th 2006 at 7:15

    My intemperate remarks on Elgar and British music criticism have caused a very small stir, although I doubt I will ever have the honor of being excoriated in the Sun. Poor Helen Radice, in cardiac arrest, has summarized my position as “The British are shit,” so perhaps I should offer ...

REDUCED HISTORY OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, March 24th 2006 at 13:55

    Here's something that I keep forgetting to post, but should provide you with some amusement. Phoenix (formerly Tucson) composer Kenneth LaFave and his wife, Susan, recently wrote a play called A Reduced History of Classical Music, which was workshopped in January at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. To ...

COLD AND FUZZY

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, March 23rd 2006 at 6:59

    Would you rather leave the theater feeling challenged or comforted? Have it your way, depending on whether you line up at Beowulf Alley or Invisible Theatre:

    The Birthday Party, one of Harold Pinter's first and best plays, is the latest fare at Beowulf Alley Theatre Company, and it's ...

RECORDING GLUT

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, March 22nd 2006 at 6:47

    Terry Teachout has posted an intelligently jaded essay about avoiding new recordings of standard repertory. It’s difficult to excerpt, so I’ll just repeat his summary here and hope it inspires you to go read the whole thing from the beginning:

I do solemnly swear that I will never ...

BOOSTER CLUB

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, March 21st 2006 at 7:59

    Only a British critic could assert, as does the otherwise perceptive Jessica Duchen, that Elgar’s Violin Concerto “is indisputably one of the greatest violin concertos in the repertoire.” Well, I dispute that.

HELP WANTED

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, March 20th 2006 at 7:17

    Rumor has it that now that Ann Brown has moved permanently to the head of the Arizona Daily Star’s opinion pages, theater critic Kathleen Allen will take over Ann’s old job as editor of the paper’s weekly entertainment tab, Caliente. (I edited Caliente’s precursor section for a while in the late 1990s.) This means that the theater-critic slot will be open. A newsroom informant tells me that management will probably slide the world-music critic into that position.

UNAPPETIZING

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, March 17th 2006 at 6:47

    I just pulled for use later today a Johann Strauss CD called Wiener Bonbons. Yes, I know how it's supposed to be pronounced, but the title always makes me think of chocolate-covered Vienna sausages. Ick. Which reminds me that my theme-dinner group once collaborated on an "upscale white trash ...

WELCOME TO THE BLOGOSPHERE

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, March 17th 2006 at 6:35

    KUAT/KUAZ newsman Robert Rappaport has started his own personal blog, which I suggest you encourage him to develop.

OMNIPRESENT

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, March 17th 2006 at 5:55

    Yesterday afternoon I did a telephone interview with 18-year-old violinist Caitlin Tulley, of whom I'd frankly never heard until the editor of Strings magazine asked me to write about her a few days ago. (Her Celtic first name is prounounced "KAT-lin," by the way.) She's very smart and ...

THE GAME'S AFOOT

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, March 16th 2006 at 6:41

    Arizona Theatre Company continues its lightest-ever season with a Sherlock Holmes adaptation:

After a criminally bungled attempt to purloin the works of PG Wodehouse and pass them off as theater (Over the Moon), playwright Steven Dietz and director David Ira Goldstein have masterminded a far more successful act of literary ...

CRANK CALLS

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, March 15th 2006 at 7:34

   John Massaro spent seven years as chorus master and assistant conductor at Arizona Opera, mostly working for general director David Speers, but he quit indignantly after one year under the company’s new head, Joel Revzen. To say the least, Massaro is a bitter man. Last week, Massaro announced the formation of a new company in Phoenix, which he’s calling AZ Opera.

TIMELY RETIREMENT

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, March 13th 2006 at 7:20

    Upon the announcement Friday that soprano Anna Moffo had died at age 73, affectionate tributes began to appear in print and cyberspace, but most had to mention that Moffo went into serious vocal decline by her 40s. I’ve enjoyed many of Moffo’s recordings from the 1950s and ’60s, but unfortunately my only experience of her “live” was a negative one. Around 1980 or so, during the George Trautwein years, the Tucson Symphony engaged her to sing … I can’t remember exactly what. Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer? Some of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne? All I recall is that her voice was in poor shape, with a big wobble and a tendency to scoop into notes. It’s a pity that despite all the fine work she’d done earlier, that’s my strongest memory of her.

REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA & CHORUS/GEORGE HANSON

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, March 10th 2006 at 8:17

    If a concert is a musical feast, then conductor George Hanson has fallen in with the slow food movement. Last night he served up a very well-prepared Tucson Symphony concert remarkable not only for its care of presentation but also for its preponderantly broad tempos.

INFANTILE JOURNALISM

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, March 10th 2006 at 6:48

    So the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, of which I’m a board member, puts on a week-long festival with top-notch musicians including the Tokyo Quartet and presents a lot of out-of-the-ordinary music, including a brand-new work by a leading composer, to packed houses. What aspect of this does the ...

DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, March 9th 2006 at 8:45

    I could’ve sworn I got into the car and drove four miles to see a play at the University of Arizona, but I seem to have stayed home and watched the Turner Classic Movies channel, colorized.

SPIFFY

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, March 9th 2006 at 8:43

    Last week I grumbled mildly that it was hard to find certain local content on the KUAZ/KUAT-FM Web pages. Well, coincidentally, a newer, cleaner, easier-to-navigate design went up this week, and this morning Robert Rappaport also began posting news items on the KUAZ page. There are some other nice ...

A GOOD TALKER

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, March 8th 2006 at 7:43

    Sometimes interviewing composers, especially in front of an audience, is about as happy an experience as do-it-yourself dentistry. There are shy composers, who respond to questions with the briefest of unenlightening phrases. There are theory-smitten composers, who respond with the longest, most bombastically unenlightening phrases. There are composers who can ...

SLOPPY

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, March 7th 2006 at 7:13

    I'm making dumb beginner's mistakes this week. Because I didn't program one of the CD players the way I  usually do just now, the disc kept playing after it should have been history, letting my golden voice have the airwaves to itself. Yesterday, when changing my mind ...

SOCK IT TO ME

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, March 6th 2006 at 9:03

    One of the most striking aspects of violinist Benny Kim is his socks. Although he eschews the traditional musician's formal tails, he does stick to sober black and white wear in concert. But he also seems to have taken the advice of men's fashion maven Alan Flusser: If ...

CHAMBER FEST

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, March 3rd 2006 at 6:46

    In case you haven’t heard the underwriting spots that air every two or three hours, the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival gets rolling again this Sunday. I have a vested interest in its success, because I’m the vice-president of the organization that presents it. Lots of interesting elements ...

SACD REVIEWS

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, March 2nd 2006 at 7:36

    Failing to have contributed anything to the latest Tucson Weekly, I point you instead to some Super Audio Compact Disc reviews of mine in the current issue of Fanfare. Poke around in the online archive now, before access becomes restricted to subscribers around the end of the month. ...

POD PEOPLE

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, March 1st 2006 at 6:59

    According to a little blurb in the Boston Globe (which I found via ArtsJournal.com), National Public Radio’s central directory of podcast versions of its programs has station managers quaking in their tasseled loafers: “Local [public radio] stations worry that contributions from listeners will dry up if their programming is distributed through NPR's uber-guide, NPR Podcast Directory.”
    The managers fret that if NPR or individual producers put their programs online for you to download, free, whenever you want, you won't have any reason to tune in to the radio stations. And they’re right, if their stations are merely conduits for network and syndicated shows.