MASS MARKETING

posted 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.

REVIEW: FRANÇOIS RABBATH/ARIZONA BASS PLAYERS FESTIVAL

posted 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.

REVIEW: PATRICK NEHER AND COMPANY/ARIZONA BASS PLAYERS FESTIVAL

posted 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.

PAYBACK

posted by James Reel

    Norman Lebrecht has a delighfully vicious column suggesting that the lavishly compensated violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter be banned from London concert halls. Seems she was recently paid the equivalent of $53,000 per night for a three-concert series of Mozart sonatas, and filled less than two-thirds of the house:

Why are orchestral managers tempted to overpay the likes of Mutter? Because they think her smidgeon of fame will attract a lashing of celebrity seekers. A sixty percent turnout proves them wrong. The lady has no more pulling power than a one-armed dentist with a manual drill.

    Coincidentally, Terry Teachout’s latest “Number, please” blurb reminds us that Rudolf Serkin’s fee in 1938 for a piano recital was $1,000, which in today’s dollars would be $12,871.50.
    For comparison, I might note that the most expensive string quartet in the world today charges about $15,000 per appearance, and most quartets and trios are averaging more like $8,000. That sounds like a lot for one night’s work, but remember that it has to be split three or four ways, then managers take a cut, publicists have to be paid, and there are travel and lodging expenses to take into account, as well as taxes, instrument insurance, and somehow compensating for a lack of health insurance.
    Meanwhile, on the subject of delightful viciousness, A.C. Douglas, proprietor of the blog Sounds and Fury, has returned with a vengeance after a two-month hiatus. The object of his fury this time is Greg Sandow, who, in a post on the new opera Doctor Atomic, opined again that classical music needs to be more cognizant of the realities of the wider world and popular culture if it is to survive. I pretty much agree with Greg, but it’s entertaining if nothing else to see Douglas defend the status quo:

Mr. Sandow, I think, as well as others of his ilk, needs to take a sabbatical to do nothing but rethink seriously and deeply his wrongheaded notions on all these matters instead of repeatedly plunging ahead spouting his perverse, simpleminded, pop-culture-infected ideas of the way things ought to go and be.

    Thank you, Mr. Sounds and Fury, for spouting your own … ideas of the way things ought to go and be.

LINE ART

posted by James Reel

    If you read the Tucson Weekly only online, rather than picking up the print version so you can peruse the fine smut section in the back, you might overlook my preview of the Tucson Poetry Festival, which this time explores affinities between poetry and painting. The story is tucked away in an unusual spot this time, not on the Arts page. Here’s a direct link.

QUALITY ON THE CHEAP

posted by James Reel

    Yesterday afternoon, six Naxos discs arrived in my mailbox. They contained the Schubert quartet cycle recorded over the past few years by the Kodály Quartet, something I need to listen to in preparation for a magazine feature I’ll be writing on that ensemble. A couple of decades ago, I would have anticipated seven hours of string-quartet playing on a budget label with dismay. Remember all those Vox Boxes? Interesting music you couldn’t find anywhere else, played by groups with wiry tone, sometimes ragged ensemble and the dull efficiency of sight-readers. The performances by the likes of the Kohon Quartet, the Copenhagen Quartet and the Macalester Trio weren’t fundamentally bad, just unpretty. Today, in contrast, it’s difficult to find scrappy chamber-music playing on even the bargain-basement labels. The worst you’ll find anymore is a group like the recently disbanded Lindsays, whose first violinist, Peter Cropper, would often sacrifice his intonation to the excitement or intensity of the overall performance.
    We owe part of the change to the improvement of music education throughout the northern hemisphere; the situation in American public schools is difficult, of course, but at the college and conservatory level students are better drilled in technique than ever before. Even an out-of-the-way land grant college like our own University of Arizona is now graduating some fine young players. And there are more of these expert players than ever before, so record companies have a greater number of ensembles to choose from.
    Is there work for all of them? Well, not as soloists, and the orchestra employment situation has its ups and downs, although every American and European city big enough to have two McDonald’s franchises seems determined to have an orchestra, too, even if the players would make more money and have greater job security flipping burgers. In terms of chamber music, more and more colleges are funding quartets-in-residence, and there are plenty of presenters like the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music creating a strong touring circuit. But the list of available ensembles is getting as thick as the Nogales phone book, and there aren’t enough concert slots to support them all, so many of these performers are spending more of their time teaching … grooming more expert young players with whom to compete.
    An economist would probably warn us that a boom like this can’t be sustained, and will lead to a crash within a few years, so we music consumers should enjoy it while we can. If we can. I haven’t addressed the issue of interpretation, which is a concern that has fallen by the wayside in pursuit of technical excellence, but that’s a rant for another time. Meanwhile, I’m actually taking pleasure in hearing the Kodály Quartet play six discs worth of Schubert on a budget label.