REVIEW: STEVEN MOECKEL/DAVID LOCKINGTON/TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    The Tucson Symphony’s season-closing program consists of one masterpiece, one mantelpiece and a curio. It was an all-English program, so that’s par for the course.
    First, the curiosity: the concert overture The Gale of Life, written last year by Philip Sawyers, and given only its second performance last night by the TSO under guest conductor David Lockington. It’s a symphonic scherzo inspired by lines drawn from A.E. Houseman’s On Wenlock Edge. It begins and ends with brash, syncopated storm music; the eye of the storm is a long period of respite in the middle. This may be new English music, but it sounds precisely like something that might have been written 40 years ago by Robert Ward, a determined American tonalist. Lockington remarked before the piece that Sawyers is a composer inspired by the Second Vienna School, an influence absolutely undectible in this piece, unless you count a spot of oozing chromaticism in the middle section; still, this is something that more likely dripped off John Foulds’ conservative Dynamic Triptich rather than some Second Vienna score. The piece concludes with a paraphrase, not quite a direct quotation, of the end of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Will all these influences in play, it’s difficult to tell who Philip Sawyers really is from this single work.
    Though played well in terms of technique, The Gale of Life would have benefited from a performance with a bit more snarl, and that was also the trouble at the beginning of the masterly Symphony No. 4 of Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the tumultuous opening, Lockington emphasized precision over momentum, and as a result the music’s phrases broke apart into fragments. Things improved tremendously from the midpoint of the first movement; Lockington’s patient control of the well-prepared orchestra paid off in the movement’s restrained second half, and then the Andante was full of stark beauty. Too bad Alexander Lipay’s lovely flute solo at the end was ruined by some idiot’s cell phone. Why do you people even bring those things into the hall? You’re not that important.
    As if to prove that he could handle fast music after all, Lockington led the TSO through a more incisive reading of the two (connected) final movements. Perhaps this performance wasn’t quite all it could have been, but it readily demonstrated why the Vaughan Williams Fourth merits repeated hearings.
    Alas, there was nothing to be done on behalf of Edward Elgar’s bloated, gaseous Violin Concerto, despite the best efforts of Lockington, the TSO and soloist Steven Moeckel, the orchestra’s concertmaster. Moeckel was impressive not just for his stamina through this 50-minute excrescence, but for his dark, woody tone on his lower strings, and for the silvery sound of his upper range. Just as Lockington did the utmost to animate the first movement’s introduction, Moeckel did everything he could to impose some shape on Elgar’s amorphous themes, but in the end you just can’t mold half-cooked porridge. Elgar was a marvelous miniaturist but he was lost in large-scale works (aside from his cello concerto); had he condensed each movement of this concerto to its five-minute essence he might have had something, but instead he spun everything out well beyond the point at which it lost its limited interest. And for a composer of so many decades of experience, it’s shocking how incompetent Elgar proved at balancing the violin against the orchestra in the tedious final movement, full of gouty pomp and pointless passagework. What a pity that Moeckel and the orchestra wasted their considerable talent on this unexportable English muddle.
    English composers of a Romantic nature have been accused of writing too many vapid, pretty pastoralisms, musical depictions of cows gazing over a country fence. In the case of the Elgar Violin Concerto, we approach the cow from behind; after numbing us with a heavy methane fog, the cow lumbers away, leaving us with nothing but a steaming pile of crap.

STRESSED OUT

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Last week, as co-master-of-ceremonies of the student chamber music showcase at the UA school of music, I spent some time backstage double-checking the pronunciations of performers’ names. One instrumentalist brightened and said, “I’m flattered someone would ask!” I imagine she’s gone through 16 years of schooling, her teachers always mispronouncing her last name because they’d never bothered to ask her how it should sound. It’s not a difficult name; the challenge is figuring out whether to accent it on the first or last syllable. Americans tend to shift accents to the beginnings of words, but that’s not where the stress should fall in that student’s name.
    I’d guess that stress is second only to vowel quality among things that tone-deaf speakers get wrong. Think about comedians affecting a French accent: Perhaps confused by all those accent marks over concluding Es, they tend to stress the last syllable of every word. In reality, French is pretty much a flat-stress language, except that a spoken French sentence builds momentum as it goes, and tends to end with a little punch. A rule of French stylistics is to conclude every sentence with a strong or important word, rather than letting it trail off; no doubt this ties in with the tendency to inflect the ends of spoken French sentences with extra weight.
    This brings me to something frustrating in my work as an editor and proofreader. One publisher I work with decreed several years ago that “back yard,” the noun, should be replaced by the more colloquial “backyard,” properly reserved for adjectival use. I’ve even seen this atrocity in the morning paper.
    Why is this such a bad thing? Let me count the ways. First, there’s the stress problem. Look at the word “backyard,” and your first inclination is to stress the first syllable. Which makes perfect sense if you’re saying “I have a backyard barbecue.” It makes no sense if you say “I have a barbecue in the backyard.” Preserving the noun form as two separate words keeps the stress in its proper place, and maintains a helpful visual distinction between the noun and adjective. Maybe those points count as “first” and “second.” So third, it’s inconsistent. We haven’t turned “frontyard” into a noun, and I’ve seen no indication that such a change is imminent. If we still use “front yard,” we need the parallel structure of “back yard.” (Same goes for backseat/back seat.)
    English vocabulary is rich in nuance and useful distinctions. Unnecessary streamlining, like nouning “backyard,” robs our language of that richness.

NICE 'MICE'

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Today’s Tucson Weekly holds two reviews by yours truly, one enthusiastic, the other ambivalent. First, the good news: Of Mice and Men at Beowulf Alley:

The entire production has been assembled with quiet care. The acting tends to be subtle and anti-melodramatic, yet heartfelt; the pacing is deliberate, yet never feels pokey. All in all, Beowulf Alley does a fine job of rescuing Of Mice and Men from its low status as required reading in high school English and an inspiration for lots of cartoon parodies.

We're dealing with a script that's spent the past 50 years as the high school senior play, and somehow, when it's brought out to mingle with the grown-ups, it just doesn't seem very racy or metaphoric anymore. It still has funny bits, though, as long as you don't mind English Van Druten making his Manhattanites all sound like London sophisticates. It's sort of like they're in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, but a bit less blithe.

UNCOMPETITIVE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Sunday, most newspapers in Arizona bragged about their achievements in this year’s Associated Press Managing Editors News Writing and Photo Contest. The Arizona Daily Star announced that it won eight first-place awards, among other honors.
    It ought to be ashamed.
    Why? Because only one of those first-place awards was for news writing: Becky Pallack’s “Dad slain after he confronts intruders.” All the others were for photos, page design and “online presentation.” In 1998, about a year before I quit, the Star began to focus on presentation over reporting, and as a result the paper has won very few first-place awards for writing in the past several years. Instead of being so proud of its photogs and designers, the management should be worried about the quality of its writing and reporting.
    I dislike journalism contests for reasons I’ll explain a few paragraphs hence, but I must defend this APME competition from some typically boneheaded remarks posted by readers at the Star’s Web site. Blurts one respondent:

These um cough cough "awards" are a HUGE conflict of interest and I would add, entirely unethical. As the Star is a customer of the AP, a very valuable one considering the paper is more than half made up of wire stories from the AP. So this is like giving an award to one of your favorite, and most financially lucrative customers, what a joke.

I've been watching this contest over the years, and clearly, the Az Associated Press voting body is made up mostly of Az Repugnant staffers...

    Last week, the Star, Citizen and even the Tucson Weekly trumpeted the awards they won in the Arizona Press Club competition, as if anybody outside a newsroom really cares about such things. People inside newsrooms shouldn't put so much stock in contests, either.
    The biggest problem is that there's usually only one judge per category, and the winners reflect that single judge's agenda, or lack of imagination.
    Judges are recruited from out of state, which reduces conflicts of interest, but it's hard for someone at such a distance to know if the reporter has missed certain nuances of the story, failed to ask a key question or had an institutional memory lapse.
    Then there's the question of how many stories are submitted. If there are only three entries in some category, that isn't much of a contest. Meanwhile, some publications flood the competition with entries, presumably to increase their chances of getting an award.
    One reform might be to forget the judges; post all entries to a Web site and have members of the press association vote for the best. Groupthink is a danger, but the results would reflect the opinions of a large group of professionals (including reporters, not just editors with trendy agendas or, on the other hand, antediluvian notions).
    Of course, papers with big staffs could concentrate their votes on their own submissions, which wouldn't be fair. Maybe we should just ditch contests altogether. Does anyone outside the journalism profession think they're important?

'STRINGS' ATTACHED

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Saving me the effort of writing anything new as I recover from the two-week pledge drive, parts of the latest issue of Strings magazine are online, including two parts by me. No doubt you will be fascinated by my primer on sight reading (says my source, “Great sight-readers overlook the mistakes they make”). I also have an article about the Section Quartet, a string foursome established to play rock music on its own and with others. The quartet insists on calling itself a band. Call it whatever you want, after you’ve read the article.

VICTORY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    The pledge drive is finally over! The end comes a week late, but no dollars short: $51,429 is the initial tally, on a goal of $50,000. After two weeks of this, I feel like I've just been through fundraising boot camp, plus a tour of combat duty at the same time.