FACEBOOK? NO WAY

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

I recently created a Facebook page to allow for better interaction beyond this blog, but I deleted it before I mentioned it in this space. Here’s why...

First, some background. When this blog was first created last June, I was told by our web developers that a “comments” section would be enabled soon to allow listeners to chime in and start lively discussions. Well, that never happened and I’m getting busy answering emails that people send me via the link I added below. Since it would be so much easier for people to just add a comment and start talking to each other, I figured I’d go another route, an off-site social networking page. I don’t have one personally, but I figured I’d set one up for work and see what happened. That’s where it all went downhill.

After wasting a big chunk of my time just figuring out how the website worked, I made some progress in setting up the page. After refusing to answer many of the default questions for a profile, such as age, political views, religious views etc., I wasn’t left with much. As an unbiased newsman, I didn’t feel right answering any of those questions and it’s really nobody’s business anyway. Hence, my frustrations began.

I’m pretty much a private person and not much of a talker with people I don’t know, so I soon realized this wasn’t the thing for me. With virtually no information in my profile, I essentially was left with only what Facebook calls “status.” I’ve seen people fill this out and comment on what their doing every minute. I’ve seen things like “Mary is warming up the electric blanket,” and “Bob is waiting for pizza.” That immediately brought two words to mind...WHO CARES?

Why would I think anyone would care what I'm doing at the moment and why would I really care what anyone else is doing, especially people who become my “friends,” even though I don’t really know them?

Having the page would invite “friends” to join our group, but quite frankly, we’re not really friends. While I do get paid to deliver you news each morning, would you really want me hanging around your house all the time? I wouldn’t want you hanging around mine and that’s how I feel about these social networking sites. If you use them and they work for you, fine. However, I think they’re a huge waste of time and an invasion of privacy, so I won’t participate. This blog is good enough for me.

For those of you really interested in my status...."Robert is working."

CANCEL THE RESURRECTION

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

Here’s an interesting development: Tonight’s New York Philharmonic broadcast will feature the orchestra’s New Year’s Eve pops program, rather than the scheduled performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony under the baton of Mahler fanatic Gilbert Kaplan, the well-heeled musical amateur obsessed with Mahler’s second symphony, and a man who has bought his way onto the podiums of most of the world’s leading orchestras. Kaplan has even recorded the work twice, once for Deutsche Grammophon. Kaplan’s recent NYP performance got the customary respectful reviews, but some musicians in the orchestra thought the performance was a tragedy, and the griping, including a blog by a trombonist, got significant coverage last month. I wonder if the negative publicity led the Philharmonic’s management to pull the concert off the broadcast schedule?

BOOK 'EM

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

As Robert Rappaport has already blogged, the Arizona Public Media site has a new book and author feature up, and you can find it here. Look down on the bottom left of the page, and you’ll find an audio feature that I did last October, an interview with Jennifer Lee Carrell about her Shakespeare-saturated mystery novel Interred with Their Bones. By the way, I also reviewed the book for the Tucson Weekly.

MORE ON BOOKS

posted to Rappaport's Notebook by Robert Rappaport

Earlier this week, I blogged about a new feature on our website and now it's growing.

We recently launched our Books and Authors page, in the lesser-used "Community" section of our website. I'm sure we'll have better placement soon, but 'bookmark" or "favorite" the link I just gave you for quick access.

Anyway, we've started adding audio content to our already-exisitng video content, but there's a problem now where only one audio piece at a time will show up on the site. I hope we have that fixed today. If you want to skip the linking and waiting for more stuff, I provide the links below to our first four postings of some older interviews.

This space gives me lots of flexibility that still needs to be worked into some of our newer pages, so check out this blog often. Now, on to the books....

Jennifer Lee Carrell - "Interred With Their Bones"
Jim Malusa - "Into Thick Air"
Pete Early - "Crazy: One Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness"
Richard Grant - "God's Middle Finger"

DASHED HOPES AND DISILLUSION

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

Bad economy means less newspaper advertising means lower page count means I have to cram reviews of two theater productions into a single story in the latest Tucson Weekly. “To say that the main characters in Tell Me on a Sunday and Hedwig and the Angry Inch—both shows that opened here last weekend—are unlucky in love hardly begins to describe their stories. These are two intimate shows of dashed hopes and disillusion.” That’s how the review begins, and you can read the whole thing here.

HUGO DISTLER CD REVIEW

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

Written for Fanfare magazine:

DISTLER Harpsichord Concerto; Music for Knight Bluebeard * Huguette Dreyfus (hc); Martin Stephani, cond; German Bach Soloists; Stefan Malzew, cond; New Brandenburg Phil; Katharina Wingen (sop); Stefan Livland (ten) * MUSICAPHON 56860 (hybrid multichannel SACD)

Hugo Distler was a very accessible and important composer of German choral music and organ music from the early 1930s to the early 1940s; war-related despair led him to suicide in 1942, at age 34. His professional positions involved choral conducting and the teaching of that practice, so he had little motivation or opportunity to write purely instrumental music, other than organ works for church use. The Harpsichord Concerto that occupies the first half of this disc suggests that he might have become a compelling though not original voice in midcentury German orchestral music.

Its first movement is a typical example of the period’s Neoclassicism, more motororic and percussive than, say, Frank Martin’s spidery Harpsichord Concerto. The slow movement is particularly redolent of Hindemith in its harmonic structure and melodic intervals. The third, variations on a theme by Samuel Scheidt, begins in a gently piquant style that would later be associated with Rodrigo’s Fantasia para un gentilhombre, but soon reverts to the engaging sewing-machine manner of the first movement.

The string orchestra, as recorded, is large enough to swamp the soloist occasionally, and its tone is unnecessarily harsh at times, especially at the beginning of the second movement. The reason is something found only in the small print: This is a DSD surround-sound remastering of a recording made in 1964, and while there’s no obvious gimmickry going on in the rear channels, the basic sonics remain hampered by the limitations of the original production (not exactly state-of-the-art in its time). That said, this remains a performance of commitment and vitality, though not perfect instrumental balance.

The incidental music for the play Knight Bluebeard comes from a 2002 concert performance, and includes scattered applause at the ends of a couple of internal tracks, plus a small amount of ambient audience noise between numbers. Distler wrote the score for an ill-fated 1940 production of Ludwig Tieck’s happily nonsensical 1797 treatment of Perrault’s Bluebeard tale, and gave the harpsichord a constant role in the proceedings. Partly, that’s because Distler recycled a few bits and pieces of the concerto into the new score, which involves winds as well as strings, plus vocalists in a couple of brief numbers. The movements are of variable interest, but the slow music again shows the greatest debt to Hindemith. The performance is certainly able, but not enough to persuade anyone that this is a neglected masterpiece. Here, the ensemble is recorded in an over-resonant space that slightly dulls the impact of the wide frequency range (at least we get all the overtones of the harpsichord and triangle).

This disc is strongly recommended for the concerto. James Reel