Something I intended to do when I started this blog, but never got around to, was posting some of the CD reviews I write for print magazines. This might be a good time to start, especially with people looking for gift ideas for the holidays. Be warned, though: Not all the reviews will be positive.
I recently interviewed pianist Wu Han, co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and asked her why the society has launched its own CD label, even though it already has a download agreement with Deutsche Grammophon. She said, "I can’t imagine, after a concert, signing somebody’s iPod."
We’ve been running a lot of underwriting credits for performances this weekend of Handel’s Messiah. Here’s some background on the concerts:
Almost every year, Enrique Lasansky conducts performances of Handel's Messiah. Perhaps he's making up for lost time.You can read the rest of my preview here, in the Tucson Weekly.
"I had no exposure to it whatsoever as I grew up as a musician," he says. Lasansky started out as a clarinetist, and there's no clarinet part in this most beloved of oratorios. If you're not a singer, a string player or maybe a trumpeter or oboist, you're not likely to perform it.
"I never sang it," Lasansky says. "I don't think I even heard Messiah beyond the Hallelujah Chorus until I was in my 20s.
"After that, I realized it was one of those pieces that are performed all the time, and as a conductor, I figured I needed to know it. It was a wonderful discovery for me, but it wasn't in my roots."
As if to compensate for all those years of neglect, Lasansky has conducted Messiah most Christmases since he founded the Catalina Chamber Orchestra in 1991. (This season, the orchestra changed its name to Tucson Chamber Orchestra, to avoid confusion with the little town of Catalina, and it has completely professionalized. "There are a lot of new players," Lasansky says. "The old orchestra has gone away, in a way.")
This year, he has gone all out. Not only is he conducting the work with his chamber orchestra this weekend; he hand-picked and personally rehearsed the chorus (instead of employing an existing community choir, as in the past), and this month, he's been immersing students at St. Gregory College Preparatory School in Messiah lore. He gave guest lectures in music, English and European history classes, and presided over an all-school assembly, performing bits of the work with his chorus and a string quartet.
Tonight's Leo Rich Theater concert by the St. Lawrence String Quartet and pianist Stephen Prutsman, presented by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (of which I'm an officer), has some unfortunate changes. One of the quartet members won't be coming to town, because his father has just died; they've temporarily replaced the musician, but they haven't had time to work up the promised Hindemith string quartet; that will be replaced by something else, but at the moment I can't remember what--nothing so rare as the Hindemith, alas. The rest of the program (a Haydn quartet and the Shostakovich piano quintet) remains unchanged.
Last week, upon Amozon.com’s release of Kindle, its new e-book reader, I sent you to an old essay of mine about e-books, as well as Farhad Manjoo’s previews of the new device. Now Manjoo has a full-fledged review of it; here’s the gist:
If you're on the fence about the utility of an e-book reader—if you doubt that reading e-books can match the experience of reading "real" books—a few hours with the Kindle will do much to change your mind.And here’s his full report.
Still, there's a great deal Amazon could improve on. Its $400 price tag, its zany user interface, and some of its sillier restrictions make the Kindle a non-starter for all but the travelingest, readingest early adopters.
OK, here’s one for a very small audience: my piece in the current issue of Strings about bowing technique:
The ancient Greeks knew of four elements: earth, air, fire, water. The periodic table of elements is a lot more crowded these days, but many dancers still reduce everything to four elements of their own: weight, space, time, flow. That’s what 20th-century dance theorist Rudolf Laban emphasized in his study of movement.If you have obscure interests, you can read the rest here.
These elements could apply to string playing, too. What is bowing but a dance on a wire by wood and horsehair partnered by your arm? Janine Riveire, an associate professor of music at Cal Poly Pomona, has adapted Laban’s theories to help you bow like a dancer.
