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.

ATOMIC FALLOUT

posted by James Reel

    If you’re interested in how critics are responding to the premiere of the John Adams/Peter Sellars opera Doctor Atomic, about the genesis of the atomic bomb, Lisa Hirsch provides a great many links at Iron Tongue of Midnight (that's an allusion to Shakespeare, not an S&M site; trust me). Doctor Atomic is a very big deal, garnering more coverage than anything else in recent classical-music memory. Critical opinion of the work is somewhat divided, but the score, at least, seems to—if you’ll pardon the expression—blow everyone away.

SIREN SONG

posted by James Reel

    Ever wonder how a performer copes with distractions—exactly what goes through the performer’s mind when unrelated noises intrude on the proceedings? Pianist-blogger Jeremy Denk reveals what was running through his mind as he played Bach recently for BargeMusic, a long-running concert series given on a barge docked near the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems that neither sirens nor choppy water can prevail over a Bach sarabande. But we already knew that, didn't we?