IN MEMORIAM

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    The latest Tucson Weekly includes my rather harsh review of Top Hat Theatre Club’s DOA production of Murder at the Vicarage:

James Mitchell Gooden runs the theater; he has directed this production, and plays a major role on stage. Gooden is not directly the problem, except insofar as he may be stretching himself too thin, and unwisely mounting shows too big to be supported by the available talent pool. He's trying to build an ensemble, but he hasn't yet recruited enough seasoned actors to populate a 13-character play, and he shouldn't be charging full admission for us to observe his training program.

    I’d also like to draw your attention to something more serious, a series of little tributes to my friend and colleague Chris Limberis, who died of leukemia last Saturday. Limbo, as we called him, was a tenacious reporter and, despite his modesty, a real character. The finest of the tributes, moving in its heartfelt simplicity and its ability to tell you everything you need to know in just a few words, comes (as expected) from Renée Downing:

    I knew him only by name when I finally got myself introduced to him. Famous Chris Limberis turned out to be lovely company. He was sweet and cheerful and funny, with beautiful, self-effacing manners, an encyclopedic knowledge of everything Tucson and a bottomless, spitting contempt for corruption and stupidity. Chris was proudly Greek, devoutly religious and deeply kind. He was also a fierce, old-school reporter who never let go, even when he felt like hell. That was probably most of the time for the last few years.
    Here's how dear Chris was: He once sent me a thank-you note for a get-well card.
     I will miss him terribly. Tucson will miss him, without ever realizing what it lost.

PREP

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

     For this week's new content in San Francisco Classical Voice, Lisa Hirsch has written an article examining how critics prepare to do their work. She seems to cover all the bases, reporting that preparation ranges from delving into the scores beforehand to ... doing absolutely nothing. I must admit that I fall into the latter camp these days.
     In the music field, I'm already thoroughly familiar with most of the material I'm likely to encounter in concert, except for the newest scores. It's not quite fair to compare the performance at hand to the ideal performance in my head, and it's certainly a bad idea to hold the performers up to the standards and idiosyncracies of whatever CD I may listen to shortly before the concert. For new music, I'll do some background research on the composer, maybe listen to or look at some of the composer's earlier scores, but I usually don't pore over the new score before the concert. I prefer to have an experience as fresh as the audience's, and I'm confident that I can describe what's going on without having my nose in a score, particularly since I'm writing a brief general-interest review, not a detailed analysis.
     The same holds true for my theater criticism; if I do any research, it's after the performance. If my criticism is going to be of much value to a reader, it should first reflect the in-theater experience of the reader, with research and reflection coming afterward.

MARGARET MEAD AT THE SYMPHONY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    British journalist Jessica Duchen has posted at her blog an interesting article about the real lives of orchestra musicians. Their lot can be tough, but they’re hardly toiling in a Dickensian poor house. Of course, Duchen’s article draws upon interviews with members of leading British orchestras, but much of what she reports is true for American players as well (although they rarely get film-score gigs here—unionized American orchestras are too expensive).
    Where Duchen talks about salaries, bear in mind that one British pound is worth about $1.75. Compare the salary figures for the top London orchestras to those in the Tucson Symphony, where, according to a musician I was talking to not long ago, rank-and-file contract players make less than $15,000 a year.

RADIO DIVERSITY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Larry Harnisch, the Arizona Daily Star’s classical-music critic back in the early 1980s (who now works for a certain more serious paper covering Los Angeles), has this riff on my post about radio consultants who promulgate a generic sound across the country:

    Bravo ... I think Internet radio is a wonderful thing because it allows—in fact requires—classical stations around the world to compete on an equal footing and to distinguish themselves from one another. A listener can easily switch from one city's classical station to another with no loss in audio quality. From my point of view, it's a great option.
    [I] hate a certain overnight announcer (not on KUAT) who laughs at all her own jokes and has horrible faux foreign pronounciation. The ditsoid female announcer in question is Nimet Habachy, who works the overnight shift on WQXR. She is almost as annoying as empty-headed gab queen Bonnie Grice (formerly of KUSC and now at WDUQ), if such a thing is humanly possible.

    My own feeling is that people are tuning in to hear the music, not me. Announcers are necessary unless we're just presenting aural wallpaper, but really, who at 7:15 a.m. is really paying attention to anything I have to say? If I can do a sufficiently informative break in only 20 seconds, so much the better.

HOW TO KILL AN AMERICAN ORCHESTRA

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    David Stabler in the Portland Oregonian promotes the utterly wrong-headed notion that the way to lure audiences back to spottily attended orchestra concerts is to stop being innovative, which is supposedly what caused the reactionaries to flee, and bring back the overpriced big-name soloists and paint-by-numbers 3B programming from which people were already drifing away. Worse, Stabler proposes that the Oregon Symphony and conductor Carlos Kalmar should run the audience-development effort like a political campaign:

What Kalmar should do at this point is pretend he's running for political office. Go on the stump. Energize his base. Win back alienated audiences. Convince apathetic citizens that something exciting and provocative might surprise them at the next concert.

    Sounds like a good idea at first (but what’s “exciting and provocative” about the same old celebrity soloists, and sight-reading Beethoven symphonies?). But read his elaboration on this call for action: “What the Oregon Symphony needs is a cutting-edge campaign, led by an ace political strategist. Think James Carville or Karl Rove for the Mozart set.” Stabler is advocating exactly the same lowest-common-denominator audience research that caused the Clinton administration to stall out, and the same practices by which today’s politicians carefully craft their “message” to tell people what they want to hear, whereupon they do something quite different once they’re elected.
    Perhaps the only way to win back the traditional audience is to engage a string of celebrity soloists to play the “Emperor” Concerto in ways that are completely indistinguishable from one another. If so, then it’s time to replace that audience.
    More sensible is this column by William Littler of the Toronto Star:

    Perhaps unfairly, Virgil Thomson used to characterize the standard symphonic repertoire as The Fifty Pieces. Although the active list may be longer now, mainstream musical organizations in general and symphony orchestras in particular still prefer—allegedly for box office reasons—to comfort their listeners with the familiar rather than challenge them with the new. …
    Does constant repetition of the acknowledged masterpieces have to crowd out the works of lesser composers with interesting things to say? Repetition tends to stifle curiosity and it is curiosity that needs to be encouraged in the listening public if our concert halls are to be more than museums to past greatness.

    Read the rest here.

RECORDINGS, STYLE, AND ALBAN BERG

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Via ArtsJournal, here’s a link to a very interesting item in the New York Review of Books (which is stingy with online content). It’s a review by that most intellectual of American pianists, Charles Rosen, of Robert Philip’s Performing Music in the Age of Recording. Says Rosen:

Robert Philip's Performing Music in the Age of Recording is a brilliant analysis of how [the advent and ubiquity of recordings, replacing live music-making] has affected performance style. It is also incidentally, for much of the time, the best account I know of how musical life in general has changed since the introduction of vinyl and long-playing records in the 1950s, which made it possible for records to invade everyone's home. But it starts even further back with the end of the nineteenth century, when recording was invented by Thomas Edison, who recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into his new machine. The book is full of fascinating detail cogently presented on rehearsal practices and standards, recording on piano rolls, the different instruments used in orchestras, the way records are edited, and the contrasting musical ideals of performers. Philip is large-minded, tolerant, and sympathetic to various positions, and consistently judicious.

    Typically, Rosen does far more than summarize the Philip book (which is about all the English contributors to the self-defeatingly Anglophilic NYRB can manage and is the main reason I stopped subscribing to the publication years ago). He offers what he calls “footnotes” to the book, which add up to a thoughtful essay on changing tastes in performance in the past hundred years.
    Rosen is not entirely convincing in his few, mild objections to Philip's thesis that the need for accuracy and repeated listenability in recordings dulled the expressivity of live performance. Toward the end of the review, for example, Rosen writes, “There are, however, enough recordings where precision and a sober lack of mannerism reach a state of grace.” But the examples Rosen then cites were all recorded well before World War II, or shortly thereafter—before the changes that Philip details became widespread. Nevertheless, Rosen’s essay is well worth your time.
    One of Rosen’s remarks leads to something I’ve been meaning to say about Wednesday’s concert at the Leo Rich Theatre by the Cypress String Quartet, the most fully satisfying performance I’ve ever heard of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. Although Berg wrote it 80 years ago, the Lyric Suite has only recently become palatable to the general open-eared music lover. Part of that has to do with the natural expansion of public taste over the decades, but largely it’s because performances have become more and more effective. As Rosen writes,

With radical changes of style, it takes more than a decade for performing musicians to catch up and find an adequate way of rendering the new. We can trace this process in recordings of Stravinsky's music, in which what first sounded awkward and unconvincing was later performed with greater ease and more warmth. The trick, as always, is to find a form of expression in performance that is adequate to the new.

    Berg’s use of the twelve-tone system of composition, as well as his abrupt and frequent shifts of mood (characteristic as well of Leos Janácek’s quartets, which also date from the 1920s), have long made the Lyric Suite seem disjointed and even inscrutable. In the beginning, and for many years, musicians had to work hard just to achieve accurate performances; interpretation and expression seemed hardly possible. Calling the suite “lyric” seemed like a cruel joke.
    But today, groups like the Cypress Quartet are accustomed to essaying challenging scores, and they’re frankly more technically adept than most ensembles of the middle 20th century. I’ve heard performances that were more consistently intense from beginning to end, but on Wednesday night the Cypress Quartet made all the elements of the Lyric Suite cohere; the players found not only the longer line within individual melodies but also the line linking the various brief motifs. Although they did not use the sort of portamento and rubato common among string players when Berg wrote the suite, the Cypress Quartet did present the work in a way that was expressive and communicative.
    Meanwhile, many classical musicians are moving away from the obsession with spit-polish perfection that recordings have nurtured. They’re not getting sloppy, but they are enjoying far more freedom of expression than was considered appropriate during the last half of the 20th century. Just listen to any recent recording by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, or discs from the more daring Italian early-music ensembles like Il Giardino Armonico and Europa Galante. If these practices continue to spread, Philip’s book will soon be a chronicle of the recent past, rather than a description of current trends.