ROMANTIC VIBRATO

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    David Hurwitz, of Classics Today, has posted a 115-page essay denouncing the claims of certain period-performance-practice specialists—mainly Roger Norrington—that continuous vibrato was rare in orchestral string playing before World War II. Hurwitz has had enough of Norrington’s terminally dull forays into Romantic music (I’ve always thought of the man as Roger Borington, myself), but it’s only well into the essay that Hurwitz fully vents his frustration with this over-hyped (that is, British) hack: “In my view, Norrington is simply cynically exploiting a phenomenon all too common in the world of classical music: people would rather talk about it than listen to it. When a supposed ‘authority’ makes an oracular pronouncement seeking to justify his interpretive biases, it’s much easier to just accept the result at face value, even if the music sounds awful.”
    Hurwitz’s position is that “continuous vibrato arises naturally out of the demand for continuous expression.” He’s writing mainly about music from the early 19th century forward, but he also finds some precedents for this idea in earlier treatises, notably that of Leopold Mozart, which is often used as a justification for eschewing vibrato almost entirely in pre-Romantic music. But, as Hurwitz points out, Leopold Mozart doesn’t banish vibrato at all, which is clear if you bother to read him carefully (which I have). Leopold rails against excessive vibrato, applied indiscriminately. You also have to keep in mind that Leopold’s treatise reflects the taste of one man living north of the Alps; you can’t really generalize about pan-European performance practice circa 1756 from his writings—indeed, if you’re paying attention, you’ll see that Leopold was going against the grain to some degree, because he implies that vibrato was rampant among Italian violinists of his time, much to his distaste.
    Writes Hurwitz: “Interestingly, many of the historical naysayers present their arguments as a protest against a pernicious trend already rampant, indeed out of control. This fact alone tends to favor the pro-vibrato faction as evidence that, irrespective of what various musical eminences may have said, the free use of vibrato has always been the rule rather than the exception when it comes to what players actually did.”
    Hurwitz makes a useful distinction between vibrato in orchestral playing and its employment in solo playing, and he sifts through dozens of 19th- and 20th-century scores looking for evidence that some degree of baseline vibrato was in common orchestral use. Now, much of this depends on accepting Hurwitz’s contention that certain expressive markings themselves implied the presence of vibrato, and his long argument is not entirely free of unsupported generalization. In the end, though, he makes a good contextual case for vibrato as standard orchestral practice during the past 200 years. Curiously, though, for somebody who runs a Web site devoted to classical CD reviews, he refers to very few recordings made before World War II in support of his thesis. Now, any orchestral recording made before about 1928 is going to be too primitive and involve too many compromises of instrumentation and performance to be of any value in the vibrato debate, but anything professionally recorded since the invention of the electric microphone will have sufficient fidelity to be used as evidence, pro or con. So why did Hurwitz sidestep all this potential evidence?

A BORE ONLY A BRIT COULD LOVE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    English music critic Jessica Duchen adds to the archive of puff pieces that have helped the Brits persuade themselves that Edward Elgar was a great composer, despite abundant evidence to the contrary in the man’s own music. Let’s get this straight: Elgar was a gifted miniaturist, but the only large-scale work of his that shows technical competence as well as melodic interest is his cello concerto. Duchen alludes to Elgar’s “gift for flowing, inspired melody,” but what you get in the two symphonies and the violin concerto, not to mention Falstaff, are aimless, vaporous themes that refuse to linger in the mind. This is gouty, second-rate music by an unregenerate dullard, and the English continue to embarrass themselves by promoting Elgar as a major composer. Among English-speaking composers active in Elgar’s time and place, Charles Stanford is far more solid, but, as an Irishman, he’s not eligible for Brit boosterism.

ART OF DARKNESS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Thursday is upon us, and thus a fresh Tucson Weekly, with me in it. First, a preview of a brand-new play:

    One day, Invisible Theatre's Susan Claassen took a break from bidding on eBay auctions of Edith Head costumes, and googled "Jewish plays." The query returned a link to a New York Public Library exhibit and reading of letters a young woman had received while she was interned at Nazi labor camps during World War II.
    "It was bashert!" Claassen says, using the Yiddish word meaning "destined." Claassen knew immediately that she wanted to develop the reading into a full production at Invisible Theatre. "The source material is riveting," she says. "It's the epic story of a pretty extraordinary person."
    The resulting play, Letters to Sala, opens March 20 and runs through April 8.
    The girl in question, Sala Garncarz, was a Polish teen who volunteered to take her older sister's place in what was supposedly a six-week assignment to a labor camp. It turned into a five-year imprisonment, but Sala was not entirely isolated. She had many correspondents: her sister Raizel, who kept her informed of events in the outside world; a persistent suitor named Harry Haubenstock; a friend named Ala Gertner, who would take part in the only armed uprising at Auschwitz, and be hanged for her trouble. There were other pen pals, too, sending Sala hundreds of letters by the end of the war.

    Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy borrows its conceit from a 600-year-old Chinese play: Darkness and light are reversed, so when the characters stumble about during a power outage, the audience can clearly see everything the characters can't.
    Unfortunately, somebody installed a dimmer switch on Beowulf Alley's production of the play, which never quite achieves full farcical intensity.

REVIEW: MALCOLM MCNAB/EXQUISITE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    If you’re not a trumpeter, you’ve never heard the name Malcolm McNab. But you’ve heard him play; since 1970, this Hollywood studio musician has contributed to some 1,500 movie soundtracks, including prominent solo work in Dances with Wolves and L.A. Confidential. When John Williams guest-conducted the Tucson Symphony once in the 1990s, with no disrespect to the local trumpet section he wanted to be sure he had a trumpeter who could handle the Hollywood style, so he brought McNab with him. In Los Angeles, this fellow commands the respect of a Wynton Marsalis.
    Hollywood is no refuge for musicians who can’t cut it in the classical world. Studio musicians must be able to sight-read anything, from simple melodies to wild excursions, and they have to put it all across with style and confidence, knowing that their work will be heard again and again, if sometimes only subliminally, by millions of people over the course of decades. (The next time you slip Jaws or E.T. into your DVD player, you’re hearing Malcolm McNab—for the umpteenth time—in the trumpet section.)
    Now McNab comes to the forefront with a classical CD, Exquisite, revolving around, of all things, Billy May’s trumpet transcription of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. The music is challenging enough for the instrument for which it was written, and the trumpet version is even tougher. But McNab has worked on the score for more than 25 years, and in this recording he plays it as if it were the most idiomatic trumpet concerto in the world.
    Well, almost. Tchaikovsky’s double and triple stops are impossible on the trumpet, and the brass instrument can’t match the violin’s variety of tone colors. (Part of the problem here is that McNab’s microphone is too close to allow his instrument’s sound to bloom.) Aside from the double stops, though, McNab plays the music pretty much as written, violinistic as it is. Something as straightforward on the violin as playing little ornamental notes while crossing the bow quickly from one string to the next translates into a wide and awkward leap on the trumpet, but even here McNab manages to sound more like a musician than a Hollywood stunt man.
    Most of his runs are pristine, with an even tone across the wide range. His flashy first-movement cadenza ventures into upper and lower extremes I didn’t know were possible on the trumpet (in truth, the bottom note sounds more like gastric distress than music). The second movement showcases McNab’s lyrical abilities, and throughout the three-movement work the soloist seems to have mastered the technique of circular breathing; you never hear him pause for a gulp of breath.
    Through overdubbing, McNab also plays both solo parts in a transcription of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. There’s a long tradition of reworking Baroque concertos for trumpet, although the source material was usually for oboe rather than violin. Even so, this concerto lends itself more naturally to the trumpet than does the flashy Tchaikovsky. McNab’s playing is crisp in spirit, although in practice it’s more legato than Baroque specialists might wish.
    The disc continues with a little suite called Saloon Music by the accomplished film composer Bruce Broughton (Silverado, Tombstone). Scored for cornet and pit orchestra, the suite has much in common with Jacques Ibert’s Divertissement, although Broughton’s music is more syncopated and American-sounding.
    The disc concludes with Frank Zappa’s brash and tricky Be-Bop Tango. McNab toured with Zappa during the latter’s Grand Wazoo days, and it’s amazing that McNab ever managed to play this difficult piece live. He certainly pulls it off in this studio recording.
    Throughout, McNab receives excellent support from a small pickup orchestra, no conductor credited as far as I can tell. If the idea of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto played on the trumpet is not just too freakish for you to wrap your mind around, this disc is well worth your attention. It’s apparently available only through McNab’s own Web site.

REVIEW: FABIO BIDINI/TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Fabio Bidini, as a finalist (but not a medalist) in the 1993 Van Cliburn competition, is expected to play a certain kind of repertory: big, beefy, Romantic Russian piano concertos. And so he does, among other things. Yet last night with the Tucson Symphony, Bidini didn’t play Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in the manner of so many other competition laureates—big, beefy, swooning, exhibitionist, rich enough to clog an artery. No, Bidini was a Rachmaninov classicist, with remarkable clarity of articulation, precise dynamic control and passagework that breathed gently. His playing was not tremendously emotive, though it was by no means uninflected, and Bidini developed a hard, brittle tone in chordal passages, which had more to do with his instrument than his own choice. So it wasn’t everyone’s ideal of Rachmaninov, but it was highly effective nonetheless, and the soloist was capable of summoning all the requisite power when necessary.
    It was the Chopin encore, though, that showed Bidini at his most effective. His playing here was elegant, poised, subtly expressive and delicately colored. A solo concert by Bidini of Chopin and Debussy would be something to hear.
    Conductor George Hanson and the orchestra lent Bidini excellent support, with Jeremy Reynolds offering an especially lovely clarinet solo at the beginning of the second movement. The orchestra didn’t produce a burnished, truly Russian sound, but it was sufficiently full-bodied to put the music across, and thankfully Hanson and company weren’t too polite to submerge Bidini in the orchestral texture when Rachmaninov threw the main material to the orchestra.
    Excessive politeness had been a problem in the concert opener, a little suite of dances from Anton Rubinstein’s opera The Demon. Like Edward Elgar, Rubinstein was a bloated bore in long-form works, but he was a fine miniaturist, and the Demon dances should have been a modest delight. Unfortunately, the playing was fatally underpowered; all the notes were in place, but they weren’t projected with any confidence or life.
    The second half was something else entirely: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, performed with all the crackling intensity one could wish. Well, almost. The slow first half of the first movement always needs a little extra edge imposed on it, but Hanson was content to take the score at face value. To his credit, he didn’t let the movement’s second half run away from him, yet he did allow the score its full measure of storm and stress. The second movement was a bit too stiff to be truly sardonic, but concertmaster Steven Moeckel had the right idea in his solo. The third movement was exceptionally well shaped, structurally as well as emotionally, and Hanson and the orchestra got the final movement just right: full of properly shrill controlled hysteria, not the fashionably lugubrious self-pity slathered over it by musicians trying too hard to present this as an anti-Soviet protest symphony.

TRAIN WRECKS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Prowling the nether reaches of the Leo Rich Theater, I came across a Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival musician doing some head-shaking, admitting to me that some colleagues didn’t know their music very well and worrying over some upcoming concerts.
    Well, if some of the musicians have been slacking off, they’re managing to pull everything together brilliantly by concert time. I’m not saying that as somebody determined to be a festival booster no matter what; as one of the people running the festival, I have an interest in its success, which means maintaining quality control. So far, aside from the inevitable odd squawk you’ll get at least once in any live performance, all the performances have been outstanding. If some of our musicians aren’t that committed to practicing before they get to town, at least they’re committed to the performances, and manage to whip themselves into shape by curtain time.
    Of course, we still have two concerts and a dinner performance to go. I suppose there could be a musical train wreck in our immediate future. And oh, people do love to gawk at train wrecks.
    (One of the worse actual train wrecks hereabouts happened in 1903. More than 20 passengers and crew members died when two trains slammed into each other at what is now the intersection of Houghton and Rita roads. A century ago, that was out in the middle of nowhere, but remote as it was, people quickly got out there to rubberneck, even before the victims had been carried off. Here’s a page that tells you all about it.)