I am, to be polite about it, most assuredly not a fan of playwright Neil Simon, but even I have to admit that his Brighton Beach Memoirs is a fine piece of theater. The University of Arizona’s Arizona Repertory Theatre is reviving its production of the play starting tonight. Read my review of the show’s opening earlier this summer, order your tickets, and see what Simon is capable of when he’s not content to be merely glib.
This morning the radio alarm went off at 3:55, as usual, and as usual I muted it within five seconds to avoid disturbing my wife, who for some reason wants to sleep in an extra hour. But those five seconds were enough to register what was playing, a chirping woodwind figure in a musical atmosphere of some tension and drive.
“That was exciting,” my wife muttered.
“Enesco,” I said, and shambled off to my morning ablutions.
I’ve always been good at what in the LP days were called “needle-drop” tests, identifying a piece or composer within seconds of hearing some random part of a composition. Of course, there’s no way I’ll figure out a lot of oddball stuff, like a Havergal Brian symphony or Biber violin sonata, but there is a lot of off-the-beaten-path repertory I can get instantly, either through actually knowing the piece or recognizing the composer’s style.
You can be adept at this game without committing a 2,000-disc record collection to memory. Sometimes you’ll recognize the melody right off, but more often it’s something more subtle that triggers recognition of a piece. It may be a little transitional passage that sounds generic on its own but may be just familiar enough to evoke the more individual passages around it; Beethoven and Tchaikovsky wrote especially distinctive transitions, although in Tchaikovsky’s case they can be more like vamps. It may be a particular style of orchestration that gives the composer away; both Shostakovich and Revueltas, for example, were fond of extremes, for example having the tuba and flute (or even piccolo) simultaneously stretch the timbral boundaries of a passage. Perhaps it’s just some “atmosphere” that’s unique to a composer, as with Mahler or Berg.
It does help to have a very good musical memory, and I suppose mine compensates for other memory deficiencies. If I’m introduced to someone at a party or in a theater lobby, for instance, it’s as if some soundproof curtain comes down and I never even register the new person’s name. (I’ve reached the point at which I’m thinking, “I really need to pay attention and remember this name,” and I’m so busy thinking this that the name slips by … again.) Good music, on the other hand, never fails to stick between my ears.
The announcers at C24 out of Minnesota (a service known to you as Music Through the Night) are generally quite fine, but some of their tics and habits annoy me to no end. Case in point: As I was driving in this morning, John Zech introduced “the Overture in the Italian Style by Schubert.” Well, Schubert wrote two overtures in the Italian style, so you can’t describe this one as “the.”
The current philosophy of classical announcing holds that you should keep technical trivia (keys, opus numbers and so forth) to a minimum so you don’t intimidate or confuse listeners, but calling one of several similar pieces “the” is a confusion and a serious disservice to listeners. What if somebody liked this Schubert piece and wanted to buy a recording? The overtures aren’t often recorded together, so the innocent buyer looking for “the” Overture in the Italian Style has a fifty-fifty chance of spending money on the wrong piece.
Related rule of thumb: Never use “the” in conjunction with anything by Vivaldi. Whatever it is, he probably wrote 10 more in the same key.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
