posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
Oops—almost forgot to post links to my theater reviews in the current Tucson Weekly. First, a new company deserves plaudits for its ambition, even if the final product leaves a bit to be desiered:
Rogue Theatre's ambitious first production, The Balcony, announces a company of serious purpose, high artistic aspirations, courage and refreshingly perverse intellectual tastes. If this production falls just short of the ideal, it's first because of playwright Jean Genet's own lack of artistic self-control, and second because the company hesitates to indulge Genet fully in his worst excesses.
You’ll find the full review
here. Meanwhile, Live Theatre Workshop is up to its usual tricks with champagne fizz rendered into a play:
When Arizona Theatre Company produced Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit in 1997, even a psychic would have sensed a vast emptiness on the stage. Coward's little farce evaporated and floated away, the actors dwarfed by the set, the script seeming to be annoyingly insubstantial. Blithe Spirit works far, far better in the tight confines of Live Theatre Workshop, where it opened last weekend and still proves to be insubstantial, but now amusingly so.
Read the rest
here.
tucson-arts,
October 13th 2005 at 15:47 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
Some time ago I found in my mailbox an envelope holding a letter I’d written to a listener in response to a question she’d posed about a piece of music; at the bottom of the letter, she’d jotted an appreciative little note. What’s striking about this letter—aside from the shameless and excessive way I misused “which” in restrictive clauses back then—is that I wrote it in 1984, and the listener still had it!
She’d written to me (I was KUAT’s music director then) for information on obtaining a recording of something she’d recently heard us play, Auber’s hour-long ballet Marco Spada. I regretted to inform her that the disc we’d broadcast was out of print and no other recording was available, but I gave her some tips on where she might find used copies and cutouts. I also mentioned that I’d scheduled the ballet again for a particular afternoon two months later. Turns out she taped that broadcast, and folded up my letter and tucked it into the cassette case.
The lesson here is that our listeners are inquisitive, tenacious, grateful, and have very, very long memories. It’s good to have friends like these … as long as we behave ourselves, because we could just as easily turn tenacious people with long memories into enemies for life.
radio-life,
October 12th 2005 at 8:13 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
To see my advice on how to fake a classical concert review put to use in the real world, look at this coverage of last weekend’s Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra performance. In a 447-word review, only 132 words—two paragraphs near the end—discuss the musical aspects of the concert in a meaningful way. Might as well just run a photo with those 132 words as the caption.
Classical Music,
October 11th 2005 at 7:04 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
KUAZ’s David Close and I were snickering this morning about the new underwriting announcement for Carondelet Health Network, which invites one and all to “a White Mass with the purpose of offering inspiration and guidance for those in the healthcare field.” Is a White Mass something that shows up on an MRI? Or, if we were closer to Halloween, would they be celebrating a Black Mass?
It turns out that this White Mass is the latest trend among Catholic-sponsored health facilities. The Web site of a Tennessee health system informs ignorant little me that “The White Mass is traditionally celebrated close to the feast day of the patron saint of physicians and healthcare workers, St. Luke (October 18). St. Luke, thought to be one of the earliest converts, studied medicine in Antioch and Tarsus. It is speculated that he was traveling as a ship's doctor when he encountered Christianity.”
Furthermore, “Though it is interesting that the term White Mass was selected for celebrating with healthcare workers who often wear white uniforms in their work, the term is actually taken from the color of vestments worn on the Feast of St. Luke.” Apparently there’s also a Red Mass for lawyers, and a Blue Mass for police. I doubt that broadcasters enlist priests as intermediaries to celebrate a Mass on our behalf; we’re in the business of erecting towers of Babel.
radio-life,
October 10th 2005 at 7:43 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
The American String Teachers Association urges its members to teach not only the usual classical approach, but also “alternative styles,” meaning everything that isn’t classical music. The word “alternative” suggests that classical music is still the foundation of everything (as well it should be, from the standpoint of technique), and that jazz and bluegrass and Latin and gypsy genres are extra options to be selected from an educational menu. Well, it’s difficult to think of any kinds of music being “alternative” or “optional” when they are all melded so expertly in the work of François Rabbath, a superb Lebanese-born French bassist and composer. Rabbath performed last night (Oct. 7) at the University of Arizona’s Crowder Hall as part of the Arizona Bass Players Festival.
Rabbath played several of his own compact, evocative pieces, as well as items by Antonio Vivaldi, Frank Proto and George Gershwin. Even jet-lagged and 74 years old, Rabbath is a bassist to reckon with; he gives himself plenty of challenges of technique and expression, but makes them all look and sound like the easiest thing in the world. It appeared that he was caressing and tickling the fingerboard rather than working to get the notes.
The self-taught Rabbath grew up playing jazz in a Beirut restaurant; in his 20s he moved to France, worked as a sideman for such singers as Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel, eventually played in the Paris Opera Orchestra and recorded all sorts of music. His own compositions ignore musical frontiers; they often contain Middle Eastern melodic elements, a jazzy sense of rhythm, and methods of structure and expression that would meet with the approval of any classical partisan.
Just consider his first piece, the item with which he usually opens recitals, Poucha-Dass. It’s a raga inspired by contact with the Indian musician Ravi Shankar, and Rabbath somehow drew from his bass the buzz of a sitar. The extraordinarily beautiful Reitba, inspired by a rose-colored lake near Dakar, began with a rocking rhythmic figure suggesting gentle waves; this was soon overlaid with a keening Middle Eastern melody, all rising to an ecstatic central climax. In a little piece called Chasse à Cours, Rabbath’s bass perfectly imitated the nasal vibrato of French hunting horns. And in a composition whose title Rabbath translated as The E in the Bull’s Eye, not just the low E but every note was right on target in a piece that seemed to blend the muezzin’s call from the minaret with the rumbling drone of a didgeridoo.
Rabbath was equally adept with other people’s music. He showed off his superb intonation in a Vivaldi Adagio, finding passion within nobility, and similarly brought warmth and ardor to a movement from one of Bach’s cello suites. And he showed off all his skills in Frank Proto’s Nine Variants on Paganini, which began like a French cabaret song, turned to jazzier ruminations, and culminated in a cadenza that was essentially Paganini’s devilish 24th caprice for solo violin.
Pianist June Chow-Tyne certainly held her own in the Proto work, but was not seriously challenged in any of the other pieces; she always gave Rabbath the sensitively balanced support he needed.
Rabbath will pop up again in further performances involving John Clayton, Brian Bromberg and Kristin Korb as the Arizona Bass Players Festival continues through Oct. 9.
October 8th 2005 at 12:43 —
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posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel
UA professor Patrick Neher opened his Arizona Bass Players Festival with the impish sort of concert that often ends festivals and summer music camps. It was so full of little musical pranks that you couldn’t help wondering if the one ostensibly and seemingly serious work on the program was just an example of Neher taking advantage of our credulity.
The festival is a series of master classes, workshops and concerts for bass players of all inclinations, but it’s a safe bet that few of these specialists were familiar with the composer Luigi Negri (1837-1891). Neher strode onto stage in a billowing black 19th-century cloak and hat, and even when he tossed those off he was still costumed: He wore a bushy gray wig and mustache, and addressed the audience in a garlicky Italian accent, playing the part of composer-bassist Negri, now long dead. Assuming, that is, that he ever lived. I’ve found no biographical entries for Luigi Negri in the standard sources, no recordings of his music, nothing on him in the University of Arizona or Library of Congress online catalogs. I would strongly suspect that Negri is, in reality, Patrick Neher, if it weren’t for the fact that Neher’s two Negri offerings so precisely adhere to the style of 19th-century Italian performer-composers.
Neher and pianist June Chow-Tyne opened the program with Negri’s Capriccio on Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore and Reminiscence of Rossini’s Stabat Mater. Both works alternate Italianate lyricism with shameless virtuosic display, including several long passages of harmonics, especially in the Donizetti-inspired work. It’s not the sort of thing we can take very seriously anymore, and Neher happily hammed it up with some Gary Karr-style visual shtick and a few schmaltzy little slides. In the beginning of the concert, Neher’s notes were not always dead-center—a problem endemic to the bass, where the notes are distressingly far apart—but he seemed most accurate in the tough passages that sent his left hand hurtling up and down the fingerboard.
Next came a composition that Neher did claim as his own, the engaging Antiphonal Dance for eight double basses. It begins with a pizzicato line that sweeps from one end of the ensemble to the other and back, and proceeds with strong, syncopated rhythms that propel the music back and forth across the stage. This is, above all, a tricky act of timing and coordination, accomoplished with confidence by Neher and students Noel DaSalla, Robbie Matheson, Joe Schumacher, Ethan Sobotta, Jason Roederer, Megan Simpson and Georgia Taylor.
DaSalla and Matheson remained on stage with Neher and were joined by Humberto Colón-Rivera for a parodic work by Daryl Runswick, Suite and Low. The first movement, “Nursery Grind,” manhandles “Pop Goes the Weasel”; the second, “Strauss in the Doghouse,” is a cheeky medley of bits of the “Blue Danube” waltz, the “Radetzky” March, “Die Fledermaus” and other pieces; “American Basses” conjures up Warner Bros. cartoon composer Carl Stalling having his way with the likes of “Dixie” and “Camptown Races.” Runswick tosses in some passages of extended technique for comic effect, but he’s quite serious about maintaining clear lines by, for the most part, keeping each instrument in a particular range, as if he were writing for the voices of a conventional string quartet. Neher and company gave it all a crisp, together performance.
Neher’s particular interest has long been improvisation and theater, which showed up in the hour-long concert’s final item, Juste Melodie et Plus. With the stage lights dimmed, Neher played a broad, American-sounding theme of his own devising, then fragmented it into brief successive utterances, some only tangentially related to the opening material. As he improvised this music, Adrienne Alexander slowly approached the stage and took her place amid an array of electronic equipment. She began to enhance the sonic texture first with what seemed to be heavily manipulated delays of elements of Neher’s playing, and then with fresh input. The sound thickened and grew more dissonant, climaxing with Neher diving into a whole catalog of pizzicato and bowing techniques and slapping the body of his instrument. It all subsided into what sounded vaguely like Bruch’s Kol Nidre, which evolved into a somewhat Middle Eastern melody, perhaps an homage to Neher’s teacher François Rabbath, who is participating in the festival.
This certainly seemed like a serious work, but considering what Neher had been up to earlier in the program, perhaps he was partly mocking our intellectual pretensions. At any rate, ambiguity is not a bad thing, and there are plenty of more straightforward performances to come from bassists Rabbath, John Clayton, Brian Bromberg and Kristin Korb as the Arizona Bass Players Festival continues through Oct. 9.
Classical Music,
October 7th 2005 at 9:09 —
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