BALAZS BLAST-OFF

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, September 30th 2008 at 8:42

The Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, which I help direct, is running an underwriting spot on KUAT-FM promoting this season’s first concert, tomorrow night (October 1). The spot promotes Trio Solisti playing music by three composers: Franz Schubert, Paul Schoenfield and Modest Mussorgsky. One composer was left off that list, whether to keep the spot within its 15-second limit or because whoever wrote it thought he didn’t have a recognizable name: Frederick Balazs. But that name should be immediately recognizable to classical music lovers who have lived in Tucson since the early 1960s ...

TWO BIG SYMPHONIES

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, September 29th 2008 at 10:35

Here are reviews I wrote for Fanfare a few months ago of recordings of two oversized symphonies. The more famous of the two fares poorly in the hands of its conductor, but the obscurity is a real winner in every way.

WHAT'S COOKIN'?

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, September 26th 2008 at 9:37

After many failed efforts, I have given up trying to get dinner or lunch reservations at The French Laundry. I became interested in that fabled California restaurant after reading about it and its owner-chef, Thomas Keller, in Michael Ruhlman’s book The Soul of a Chef ...

THREE REVIEWS IN SEARCH OF A READER

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, September 25th 2008 at 8:11

No wonder I had a theater-critic dream a couple of nights ago—I’ve been spending a lot of time watching plays. In today’s Tucson Weekly, I cover three productions ...

THE DREAMS OF THEATER CRITICS

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, September 24th 2008 at 7:56

Last night I dreamed that I met with an actress I know to interview her about her next production, but she was still despondent about how her last show had turned out and wanted to put our interview off a few hours so she could prepare to do it in character. I agreed, which may not have been a good idea, because she was going to play a serial killer …

STARS STRUCK

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, September 24th 2008 at 7:54

Norman Lebrecht makes the case against appending stars to reviews. My sentiments exactly.

THE SOUND OF NO HANDS CLAPPING

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, September 23rd 2008 at 8:26

Many of the people who discuss ways to attract new audiences to classical concerts advocate ending the “snooty” practice of prohibiting applause between movements. But the fact that a movement has ended doesn’t mean that the whole thing is over...

SPECIALISTS

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, September 19th 2008 at 8:33

English writer on music Norman Lebrecht can’t be trusted when he makes pronouncements on the state of the classical recording industry (for him, the decline of the major labels means the end of the world, ignoring the fact that small labels are taking up the task with greater competence and elegance than the majors). But he does opine intelligently on other matters ...

HAND-MADE

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, September 18th 2008 at 7:53

It’s Thursday, which means I have new spew in the Tucson Weekly. This time, a review of two plays and a restaurant ...

MENDELSSOHN, EARLY AND OFTEN

From the desk of James Reel on Wednesday, September 17th 2008 at 7:42

This morning I played something from Itzhak Perlman’s Concertos from My Childhood CD, a collection of pieces that many violin students learn and present in recital, then abandon as they turn professional. The first “real” violin concerto that advanced students take up is usually Mendelssohn’s. I just turned in an article for Strings magazine about that work, in which Daniel Hope and Nicola Benedetti talk about their love of it, despite learning it young, recording it and performing it everywhere. Here’s an excerpt ...

MEMORY LAPSE

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, September 15th 2008 at 6:32

Over the weekend, the Arizona Daily Star carried a pathetically short blurb noting the suicide of David Foster Wallace, an important and very well-known novelist. Nobody at that uncultured and anti-intellectual newspaper seems to realize that Wallace obtained his MFA from the University of Arizona in the early 1980s ...

A PASSIONATO

From the desk of James Reel on Friday, September 12th 2008 at 8:11

If you’ve been frustrated by the utter failure of the iTunes music store and other download purveyors to handle classical music in a logical way that is rational to classical-music lovers—in other words, not littering the catalog with crossover junk, making it easier to search by composer than by artist—a new download service has just opened in Britain ...

GAY OLD TIME

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, September 11th 2008 at 7:47

In the latest Tucson Weekly, I preview an arts sampler at an unusual performance location, and review two plays that happen to feature gay characters...

LAST WORDS

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, September 9th 2008 at 6:59

Here are reviews I wrote for Fanfare of recordings of the last, incomplete works of two prominent Austrian composers ...

WHY PHOENIX SUCKS, CHAPTER 134

From the desk of James Reel on Monday, September 8th 2008 at 8:02

An Arizona Republic columnist rightly complains about low architectural standards in the Valley of the Sun. Very true, but I wonder how smug we can be here in Tucson? The public buildings aren’t uniformly horrible, but the real travesty is the expanse of indistinguishable, cheaply built, overpriced stucco hutches metastasizing through the suburbs. It wasn’t always thus; Tucson once boasted at least one distinctive domestic and commercial architect.

CONCERTO REVIEWS

From the desk of James Reel on Thursday, September 4th 2008 at 7:06

Here are a couple of reviews I wrote a few months ago for Fanfare, covering very recommendable recordings of concertos by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Glazunov ...

LOOKING THE PART

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, September 2nd 2008 at 8:10

Terry Teachout has posted an old thought piece expressing ambivalence over whether or not opera singers should be attractive ...

I WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

From the desk of James Reel on Tuesday, September 2nd 2008 at 8:08

A nasty cold kept me off the air and out of the blogosphere for most of last week, and even caused me to hand my weekend reviewing duties over to somebody else. At least I got lots of rest, worked on my 18-month backlog of the New Yorker, got well into Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica and made excellent headway in Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, which I borrowed a couple of years ago from my friend the former head of the UA German studies department, but neglected to finish before I actually went to Vienna; over the weekend I started over, and will now make my way to the end, I swear.

Meanwhile, I appeared in the Tucson Weekly without warning you. Here’s what I contributed to the Aug. 28 issue ...