LOWERING THE COMMON DENOMINATOR

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    When the Tucson Symphony announced its 2007-08 season a couple of weeks ago, I was appalled. Now that I’ve looked at the schedule a few more times and given it further thought, it doesn’t seem to pander to the lowest-common denominator audience as much as I initially thought, but the goosebumps of excitement have yet to rise. OK, I like Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat suites and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But why do they occupy an entire program together, aside from the fact that they exist and they’re popular?
    The really bad news is that the core classical series has given up on contemporary music, aside from one item by local boy Dan Coleman (I don’t know the piece, but since it’s sharing a program with Rachmaninov’s big Symphony No. 2 and excepts from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, I can’t imagine that it’s very long), and a very short item by the UA’s Dan Asia. (Why is Asia’s Why (?) Jacob on a program called “Musique de la France”? There’s absolutely no French connection, not even a stylistic one. What a dopey programming decision.) Now, I have complained many times that starting every concert with a five-minute new piece hardly shows much commitment to contemporary music, but even that was better than nothing, which is pretty much what we’re getting next season.
    People might sneer at the November concert with its movie tie-ins—classical pieces used in films, with only one example of original film music—but that’s actually something I wish the TSO and other orchestras would do more of … and I especially wish this would become the pattern again for pops concerts, an evening of well-prepared light classics instead of half an hour of under-rehearsed potboilers followed by an appearance by some has-been pop singer or nostalgia act.
    And in the context of TSO programming history, several of the promised items have hardly worn out their welcome, particularly Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Saint-Saens’ Second Piano Concerto and Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande Suite. (French music has been rather neglected during George Hanson’s tenure.)
    One—count ’em, one—of the programs is very well thought-out: “Old Vienna,” which includes Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier Suite and Berg’s Violin Concerto, which the TSO hasn’t done since John Ferrell was concertmaster (he was the soloist last time) and, I think, George Trautwein was the music director, which was more than 20 years ago.
    Still, I’m not looking forward to another shlocky Mathieu piano concerto, and what, exactly, is Ravel’s “Suite from Mother Goose Suite”? Does that mean they’re playing only two or three of the pieces from the standard five-movement suite excerpted from Ravel’s full score?
    So, there are some lapses, but some interesting material does lurk among all the other things I can stay home and listen to in fabulous CD performances without having to submit to the poor acoustics of the TCC Music Hall. But is it worth the rising price of season tickets? The financially troubled orchestra is starting to look a little desperate, moving toward less sophisticated programming and higher ticket prices when other orchestras are actually playing more daring pieces and lowering their prices to attract younger or more casual audiences. I haven’t gotten out my credit card just yet.

TRIALS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    I had a couple of good nights at the theater last weekend, and you can read about them in the latest Tucson Weekly. First, something special for Easter:

    I am happy to report that my expectations had been dashed by the time I staggered out of Stark Naked Productions' three-hour mounting of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. This is only Stark Naked's second show, I hadn't seen the first, and although I knew producer-director Eugenia Woods to be experienced and sincere, I figured this would be a worthy but not entirely successful effort with a large and therefore necessarily uneven cast. And the play? A trial in Purgatory to decide if Judas really deserves to rot in hell for betraying Jesus and then hanging himself, with witnesses including Satan, Freud and Mother Teresa, plus a cameo by Saint Monica, a jive-talkin' momma whose favorite word is "motherfucker"? Obviously, we were in for an irreligious farce.
    I was wrong, wrong, all wrong. Not about Eugenia Woods being experienced and sincere; that's what enabled her to assemble a strong, well-directed cast and put on a show of very good production values. This is not some well-meaning, amateurish Easter pageant; it's a skilled presentation of a serious play.
    Oh, yes, the script ... I was wrong about that, too. Sure, it has plenty of jokes and funny anachronisms and exaggerated characters--Pontius Pilate is like a gangsta rapper, and Satan, expertly played by Paul Clinco, comes off like an oily Mob nightclub owner. But in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis asks serious questions about free will and God's forgiveness, and he doesn't foist any easy answers upon us.

    Those rogues at the Rogue Theatre have taken a mildly cynical play by Bertold Brecht and, by stripping away Brecht's contrived happy ending, have solidly affirmed the work's dark view of human nature. And that's all to the good, theatrically speaking, in a play that asks how one can be good in a society that abuses those who try.

RAPID PROGRESS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Well, here’s a fine howdy-do. After arguing for a very long time about whether or not Tucson really needs a big new arena, and then becoming sympathetic to the Tucson Convention Center’s complaint that it can’t accommodate big conferences—sympathy that intensified about a month ago, when the biggest annual conference here bolted for Phoenix—the city council has all of a sudden approved a big new arena and TCC expansion. The trigger was pulled when, less than a week ago, downtown property owner Allan Norville (a longtime thorn in the city government’s side) unveiled his own arena proposal. That got the bureaucrats moving fast, rushing their own proposal before the public perhaps months ahead of schedule. A couple of weeks ago, when I was researching an article on TCC expansion for the Downtown Tucsonan, I asked my various sources if it were true that they were going to put a proposal before the council around the middle of this month (which is the rumor I’d heard). All they’d say is that they’d be going public “by the end of the summer.” Well, they even managed to get it done before the end of spring! Very interesting, what will motivate a bureaucracy.
    Now, of course, that Downtown Tucsonan article of mine is good for background, but it has no worth as a news story.
    Next question: Does earmarking all that money for the arena constitute a slap in the face of those at the University of Arizona who proposed gobbling up almost all the available Tax Increment Financing for a science center on the west side? (For more on that, go here and persevere.)

TASTY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Apropos of nothing, I have just read television writer Jane Espenson's description of what she ate for lunch on July 26, 2006: "tongue sandwich from Art's Deli. It's exciting because it tastes you back!"

PS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Regarding the silliness of the “death of the classical CD” stories, Alex Ross offers a reality check: He finds that the number of new classical releases listed in Gramophone magazine has nearly doubled since 1988.
    And regarding my complaint about the journalistic laziness of parroting the numbers from campaign finance reports, there is one good story to tease out of those filings: Who is giving money to whom? That’s the real story. But it takes work, and the reporter has to be able to figure out which names are tied to which special interests. In Tucson, the late Chris Limberis was an expert at this. How many other reporters are so determined today?

KILL THESE STORIES

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    The Guardian has published yet another hand-wringing article on the death of the classical CD industry. Please, let’s stop this foolishness. Yes, the major labels—Sony, BMG, EMI, DG, Decca and a couple of others—went lemming on us and followed each other over the cliff of corporate stupidity. But that’s only a small part of the story. Hundreds of small labels, with good American distribution, are still issuing dozens of classical CDs every month, most of which are much more interesting and necessary than the slop the majors have been dumping onto the market for the past 10 to 15 years. Evidence? For starters, go here, here, here, here and here.
    And while I’m on the subject of non-stories, could the news outlets please stop devoting so much coverage to how much money various political candidates are raising? NPR tried to justify the obsession on a newscast this morning by explaining that fundraising is a barometer of a candidate’s relative political health. Well, in the first place, it isn’t. It’s a barometer of how much money a candidate can raise from fat-cat contributors, which is rather different from political health. Or it would be, if the news media didn’t take the lazy way out and parrot the numbers from the latest campaign finance statements instead of reporting on candidates' positions on actual issues of interest to the electorate. If news organizations insist on reporting on political fundraising, at least move that effort into the financial section, and stop pretending it’s real political coverage.