NEWS OF THE DAY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    NPR can be as bad as any cable TV channel about hammering non-stories to death all through the day, but this morning the news division did a nice job of mixing items from hour to hour, getting new details on the stories being followed in every newscast, passing along the latest dismal developments in Iraq without obsessing on the usual trivia, and so on. It’s nice that with all the money it’s inherited from the Widow Kroc, NPR news can still sometimes put a little effort into its broadcasts.
    Locally, morning newsman Robert Rappaport pulled some ligaments in his shoulder a couple of nights ago, and Bill Mortimer is filling in, grumbling about the early hour as he arrives with the dawn. Robert is the only KUAT/KUAZ newscaster who always does his stints live; the others, including Bill, record their newscasts just a few minutes before air time. That way, they can start over if they make any big mistakes, and work on getting the timing exactly right (the KUAT-FM newscasts simultaneously fit into a tight slot on KUAZ). Sometimes I worry about using recorded newscasts. What if something newsworthy happens before air time? But hey, this is Tucson, where (despite the false urgency of live TV remotes) newsy events tend not to “break” like Derby horses. They just amble out, and there’s plenty of time for reporters to catch up.

CHARACTER FLAWS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    1. At vending machines, I reach for the change before I reach for the food.
    2. I love my friends, but I’m most comfortable when I’m alone (not counting the presence of wife and dog).
    3. Family heirlooms are best sent to yard sales; if I cherish anything, it’s a grudge.
    4. I dislike talking to strangers, which is a serious weakness in a journalist chasing a story.
    5. I think babies are ugly.

ENGLISH ONLY?

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Um, can this message deposited at the KUAT Web site after we played the Mozart Requiem be serious?

You know that it is becoming more difficult by the day to find anyone who speaks English. Sometimes I wonder if I'm still in the United States. There is a major difference between broadcasting Shubert's Mass in G and broadcasting an entire mass in some language that I have no clue of. Please try to encourage the use of English for those of us in the minority who still use it.

REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/GUILLERMO FIGUEROA

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    What happened to the tam-tam? At the end of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, the full orchestra punches out a series of loud, crackling chords; the last one includes a tam-tam stroke that should reverberate for half a bar after the rest of the orchestra has gone silent. Rachmaninov wants the work to end not with a bang, but a shimmer. But last night’s Tucson Symphony performance under guest conductor Guillermo Figueroa ended merely with the pounding full-orchestra chords, no tam-tam to be heard. Was Figueroa wrongheadedly trying to make Rachmaninov’s music more tasteful? Or did the designated percussionist simply forget to step over to the tam-tam for the last couple of measures?
    It’s unfortunate that these were the thoughts knocking around in my head as I left the concert hall, because nearly everything that had happened up to that last note was splendid. In fact, this was one of the finest TSO performances I’ve heard in a long time.
    The orchestra usually responds very well to guest conductors, and Figueroa drew playing of rhythmic precision and tonal refinement from the musicians. The Puerto Rico-born Figueroa is a distinguished violinist with a taste for contemporary music, a former concertmaster of the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and current music director of the Puerto Rico and New Mexico symphony orchestras. For his first appearance with the TSO, he chose music of color, muscle and agility.
    Things got off to an impressive start with the Corsaire Overture of Hector Berlioz. The playing was full of vitality; at the same time, the strings negotiated their scurrying opening lines cleanly—no easy feat—and the contrasting slow theme was played quite broadly, with great warmth. The sonorous brass chords boasted perfect intonation; the section gleamed, without overpowering the strings and winds (a chronic problem with this orchestra in the TCC Music Hall).
    These assets carried over into the performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1, a work that forecasts many of the characteristics of Shostakovich’s later symphonies, with its disintegrating march-waltz first movement laying the foundation for the knotty Fourth Symphony, the vicious and brawny second movement setting the pattern for later scherzos, and the slightly overextended third and fourth movements revealing a poor sense of architectural balance that would afflict Shostakovich’s otherwise admirable Sixth through Tenth symphonies.
    Figueroa highlighted the symphony’s many contrasts of character; in the first movement, for example, he got the woodwind principals to play their solos with pretty delicacy, leaving the acerbic mockery to the strings. Indeed, through the course of the work almost every principal had at least a brief, exposed solo, and each one came off with accuracy and personality. Consider cellist Nelzimar Neves, playing with her customary open-hearted warmth in the last movement, or concertmaster Steven Moeckel, properly snotty in the first movement and almot but not quite syrupy in the last. Figueroa conducted the slow movement with special breadth and patience, but he pulled out all the stops in the big moments of the second and fourth movements, getting the orchestra to play with great power yet never blaring.
    Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances did not receive quite so sure a reading; the woodwinds were sometimes hard to hear, as they often are under music director George Hanson, and saxophonist Michael Hester’s gorgeous solo in the first of the three dances was accompanied by several reed squeaks elsewhere in the wind section, a rare occurrence in this orchestra. Yet overall the performance abounded in both firm rhythms and free lyricism. The second dance was suitably languid and decadent, and the last dance balanced dreamy restlessness with forceful impulse.
    The musicians seemed to love Figheroa, and he is clearly adept at conveying his good ideas about sound quality and musical intepretation to the players. If George Hanson, who has led the TSO since 1996, decides to move on when his contract expires in 2008, I wouldn’t be at all disappointed if the orchestra romanced Figueroa for the job. First, though, he’d have to come back and show what he can do in a greater diversity of repertory—perhaps some Mozart, Debussy and Brahms. And maybe when he returned he could find that missing tam-tam.

DEADLY, FARCE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I give measured approval to Beowulf Alley’s Chekhov compilation …

    Anton Chekhov's characters can be so annoying. The whining, the self-pity, the vanity, the depression ... for all their psychological acuity, Chekhov's serious plays are nearly done in by one or two dreary figures who render their households a slough of despond simply because nobody has the temerity to give them a swift kick in the butt.
    Chekhov's farces, on the other hand, thrive on annoying characters. You can't have a good farce unless the characters are so self-absorbed that they utterly fail to communicate. The whining, the self-pity, the vanity, the depression ... it's so ridiculously funny.
    Well, it is half the time, judging from Beowulf Alley Theatre Company's current production of four Chekhov farces. Two of the half-hour pieces hit every mark; the other two, despite the company's best efforts, founder, because as a playwright, Chekhov couldn't give himself a swift kick in the butt.

Ira Levin's Deathtrap is splendid mystery entertainment the first time around, abounding in surprises and reversals and refusing to take itself at all seriously, though never devolving into silliness. On second viewing and beyond, however, its central conceit does become tiresome: playwrights working on a murder mystery that anticipates the events in their lives, which constitute the play we're seeing. If you've never seen Deathtrap, it's tremendous fun; if you've seen it before, repeat performances wear like a joke that's been told a bit too often. Tucson Theatre Ensemble opened its production of Deathtrap last weekend, and despite some unevenness, it's a good introduction to the play.

... AND THEIRS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    A couple of external addenda to my post “Yours, Mine and Ours”:
    Compulsively readable oboist-blogger Patricia Mitchell goes off on her own typically gentle ramble on the subject of differing musical tastes, while compulsively readable firebrand A.C. Douglas offers his own typically scorching reply to the Greg Sandow post that started it all. (A.C.D. is not for the faint-hearted; his objection to Sandow begins, “A more wrongheaded, even imbecile, statement is difficult to imagine.”)