ALL ABOARD

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    At the beginning of November, I started dumping out of Music Through the Night before John Zeck had a chance to back-announce the last selection before 5 a.m. It makes the transition from the satellite service out of Minnesota to me in the studio smoother, but the real reason I did it was to eliminate an opportunity for Zeck to do something that drives me nuts.
    Zeck and his fellow golden-throats at C24, the source of Music Through the Night, often neglect to tell us who’s conducting the music. I once heard one of the announcers stumble all over herself in an effort to ignore the conductor; it was as if she wanted to say his name, but some consultant was standing beside her, threatening her with a gag. I have, indeed, heard one radio guru informing the program directors panting at his feet that the conductor is not an important element to include in a break. Wrong, wrong, wrong. (This particular guru studied voice in college, and singers are notorious for ignoring the conductor.)
    Announcing that a piece has been played by such-and-such an orchestra, conductor omitted, tells us nothing. First of all, orchestras have no personalities of their own anymore. You used to be able to identify a Russian orchestra by its throbbing, blaring brass; a French orchestra by the quality of its woodwinds; a German orchestra by the heft of its strings; an Italian orchestra by its utter incompetence. No more. You may still find the distinctive nasal, woody timbre of central European oboes in Czech and Slovak ensembles, but otherwise orchestras have adopted an all-purpose international sound that can be adapted to the scores at hand—if the conductor so insists.
    The members of the orchestra play the notes, but it’s the conductor who shapes the interpretation (or presides over a blank interpretation). Consider the recordings of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 made over the past 80 years by the Berlin Philharmonic: No two are alike. Even those directed by the same conductor are quite different. Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1926 version is fast and efficient; his 1943 version, like most of his wartime performances, is incredibly intense; his 1947 version is more varied, and actually more similar to his 1950 and 1952 performances with the Vienna Philharmonic than to any of his earlier Berlin Philharmonic traversals. These are all quite different from Herbert von Karajan’s recordings of the Beethoven Fifth from 1963 (his best), the mid ’70s and the early ’80s. And these would never be confused with Berlin Philharmonic performances under Hans Knappertsbusch, Zubin Mehta or Claudio Abbado. If you have to choose between mentioning the conductor or the orchestra, go with the conductor every time.
    But don’t overstate the conductor’s authority, either. One of my other pet broadcasting peeves is announcers who suggest that the soloist in a concerto, like the orchestra, is “conducted” by the guy on the podium. Except in a few rare cases, like Karajan having his way with a malleable youngster or Alexis Weissenberg, the approach to a concerto is set by the soloist, and the conductor follows along. Remember the famous little curtain speech Leonard Bernstein gave in the early 1960s, humorously disavowing any responsibility for the interpretation of the Brahms concerto he was about to perform with Glenn Gould? When even a willful conductor like Bernstein makes such a statement, you know without a doubt that the soloist is truly in charge.

ALBERT SOTO

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Every year, a highlight of Borderlands Theater’s A Tucson Pastorella has been the leering, sneering Lucifer played by Albert Soto. Albert seemed perfect for the part, holding everything in contempt, and all too willing to share a slice of malevolence with whoever crossed his path. But the real Albert Soto, at least the one I knew a little, was nothing like that. He smiled easily; his job at the Tucson Pima Arts Council was to help people, not hurt them, and he did it gladly. Not just for a paycheck, either; Albert worked beyond the scope of his official duties to assist artists, and he also volunteered for several important social efforts not related to the arts at all.
    On Friday morning, a friend called to tell me that Albert had suffered a massive stroke on Thanksgiving. The family took him off life support, and Albert died Saturday. He was only 51.
    I didn’t know Albert well, but I liked him, and respected his work at TPAC. Rumor has it that things had not been going well for Albert at TPAC during the past couple of years, but I don’t know any details and will withhold comment. It’s not the sort of detail you’ll find in a newspaper obit such as this, and probably that’s just as well. It’s better to remember Albert for his achievements rather than his frustrations.

STRINGS ATTACHED

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Strings magazine, to which I contribute (probably excessively), is sometimes a little slow to get its content online, and by the time a new issue is up I forget to post links to my latest. But I’ve noticed that highlights from the December issue are now at the Web site; if you’re in the mood for my peerless prose, you can read my profile of classical violist and Scottish fiddler Carol Cook, a technical article for players on the benefits of practicing against drones, and a review of a mostly mellow, mostly Slavic new CD by the latest incarnation of the Borodin Quartet.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Two thoughts about Thanksgiving: It’s a holiday that flirts with unconstitutionality, and there’s no good music for it.
    OK, so “unconstitutional” is way too strong a word for it, but Thanksgiving, while not in the least establishing a state religion, does ignore the separation of church and state that was, if you’ll pardon the expression, an article of faith in American government until the very end of the 20th century. Thanksgiving is a state-created religious holiday, fabricated anew, rather than a recognition of some existing religious observance like Christmas.
    Thanksgiving first became official, though intended as a one-time celebration, in 1863. This was in the depths of the Civil War, during a century when it was assumed that all Americans worshipped the same god. So it was not at all remarkable when, in early October of 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared it was time for the broken nation to thank the Great Overseer who, “while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.” What we forget now is that Lincoln thought it should be a day for us to take account of those sins of ours, too:

I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.

    Strife and national perverseness remain topics of the day, and we are well advised to turn our thoughts to such matters rather than merely preparing our burnt offerings to the god Butterball.
    But what music to accompany these activities? Oddly, there is almost no classical music written especially for the American Thanksgiving holiday. MUSIClassical offers 102 suggested pieces for the day, but about a dozen of them mistakenly hit the list twice and most are “Thanks Be to God” choral pieces for generic occasions of praise, as well as compositions that happen to have certain keywords in their titles. Wagner’s “Pilgrims’ Chorus”? Wrong pilgrims!
    The only authentic Thanksgiving music I know (beyond elementary-school ditties) is the hymn-laced “Thanksgiving” movement that closes Charles Ives’ “Holidays” Symphony. But that’s hardly ever played because, well, it’s Ives. (There are only four recorded performances on the market, and we don’t have any of them in the KUAT library.)
    Why haven’t other leading American composers written significant Thanksgiving music? One problem, perhaps, is that it’s a rather vague holiday, a religious observance with no backstory like Christmas or Easter or the Jewish High Holy Days. Another is that it’s not really much of a religious observance at all anymore; it’s a day of watching parades and football on television, then gorging on an early meal of dishes most of us never touch under normal circumstances (turkey, cranberry sauce, candied yams).
    Who, among living composers, might write a good Thanksgiving piece? A couple of years ago I might have suggested John Adams, but no longer; I, seemingly alone in America, was appalled by his manipulative, not very musical 9/11 Pulitzer bait, so to hell with him. Last night I heard for the first time the exciting new Telarc recording of The Here and Now, an exuberant new setting for chorus and orchstra of poems by Rumi by the youngish Christopher Theofanidis. Perhaps Theofanidis could come up with a Thanksgiving cantata that wouldn’t be overcome by treacly piety. Maybe Ned Rorem could write a good song cycle on the subject, if he could find properly unsentimental texts. But other composers who come to mind just don’t seem right for the project. Poor Thanksgiving: a holiday in search of a composer.

PASSAGE TO INDIA

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Live Theatre Workshop is offering an imperfect but ultimately effective production of a play more serious than its usual offerings:

Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh counts to some degree as a comedy, but it is at times an almost unbearably sad one. Knowing that, some theatergoers have already decided to bypass Live Theatre Workshop's current show, according to patrons I overheard at a performance last weekend. This is a pity, for the company has mounted a moving production that offers relief from the lighter fare that has kept the doors open in these escapist post-Sept. 11 years.

    You can find my full Tucson Weekly review here.

REUNION

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    My cello has come home! It’s been in the shop for what seems like three but is probably only two weeks. Zoran, the cellist/luthier from whom I bought the instrument, had promised to fix up the many scratches on the old thing when I wrote him the check last spring, but only recently did his schedule and mine allow time for my cello to go to the spa. The instrument is nothing really special, a German factory job from the first third of the 20th century, but Zoran and my teacher, Harry, and for that matter I, found it to have a lovely, even tone and not likely to compound my own inadequacies as a beginner.
    Zoran functions in some out-of-joint Croatian time zone, even though he’s lived in Tucson for something like a decade and a half, so his work usually takes a bit longer than one might prefer. But the wait was worth it. I won’t say the instrument looks like new, which I wouldn’t like anyway—the deeper color and darker grain of aged wood give any instrument visual as well as timbral character—but it no longer looks like some frustrated previous owner believed that scraping the bow frog against the cello’s body was a valid performance technique. Zoran noticed that some of the seams were separating, so he tightened those up while he was at it, and the cello now sounds better than ever.
    Or at least I think it does, judging from playing one C-major scale in first position, which is all I had time to do last night. Zoran had quickly tuned the cello when I arrived to pick it up, but then I had to stash the instrument in the back seat of my car (I’d forgotten to bring the case) and let it rest there while I met some friends for a preprandial drink. Yes, I know it’s unwise for many reasons to leave a cello in a car parked near a bar, but the vehicle was quite visible in the lot next to the Rincon Market, so the cello was in no real danger unless some Sam Hughes aging-yuppie passerby decided just then to launch a life of crime.
    Anyway, after I’d gotten home and cooked and eaten dinner, I picked up the cello and found that Zoran had apparently used some bizarre scordatura tuning on it; the tones coming from the open strings had no relation whatsoever to the standard C, G, D and A. The pegs were apparently a bit loose, and by the time I got everything set aright I had time merely to play a scale to recheck the tuning and take delight in my ability to draw a lovely sound from the instrument—an ability that I cannot, to put it mildly, take for granted. The question remains: Will I get anything decent out of it once I start practicing actual music this afternoon? The hiatus has been so long that I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of what little I’ve learned during the past six months. Initially it was a bit of a relief not to have to carve an hour each day out of my insane November schedule to accommodate practice, but soon I began to miss my cello, and now I know I have some hard work ahead if I’m not going to make a complete fool of myself at my next lesson.