RECORDINGS, STYLE, AND ALBAN BERG

posted 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.

TWINS AND SINGLES

posted by James Reel

    It’s a busy theater week in Tucson, with three plays having opened last week and more soon to come. In today’s Tucson Weekly I have moderately positive things to say about the musical Sideshow at the University of Arizona:

The bearded lady's face isn't the only thing that's a little too warm and fuzzy about Sideshow, the 1997 musical about conjoined twins who graduated from freak-show status to become vaudeville sensations in the 1930s. For a production peopled with physically abnormal characters, a menacing carnival boss and "rescuers" of ambiguous sincerity, Sideshow is awfully soft-hearted.

    The rest of the review lurks here. Meanwhile, Arizona Theatre Company is presenting a one-woman show that by no means delves into the problems of Western civilization, but for many reasons it’s impossible to resist:

    If I were single, I'd be on the phone right now asking Haley Walker to go out with me. Haley has a vibrant spirit; she's smarter than she thinks she is, and she can regale you all night with funny stories. And, yes, I must admit, she does look fetching in her underwear. I don't know how easy she'd be to live with, but I'm certain Haley would be a great date.
    The problem is, what if I were a bad date? Hundreds of people would know it the minute Haley got home. She'd trudge into her bedroom, which is situated on the stage of the Temple of Music and Art, and regale an entire Arizona Theatre Company audience with every sorry detail of the evening. And she'd do it with such spirit and humor and lack of malice that those hundreds of people couldn't help taking her side, even as they were thinking that she ought to know better than to date somebody like me.

    Read the rest here, but note that somebody at the Weekly changed my proper use of the subjunctive in the second paragraph's first sentence to the doltish indicative, the scoundrels. Also in this issue is a preview of a benefit for Arizona Onstage Productions that involves a screening of Jerry Springer: The Opera. In the interest of not raising the blood pressure of readers who are easily offended, I’ll resist posting an excerpt and merely send the curious to the article itself.

THE SINS OF THE CONSULTANTS

posted by James Reel

    No doubt public radio station managers across the country are all a-quiver to learn from the Radio Research Consortium that public-radio listenership has lost 400,000 listeners (down from 27.2 million) since … well, who knows since when, because the RRC is vague about exactly what period it’s talking about. Which is typical, because the RRC, like just about anyone wielding statistics—the most weasly of pseudo-sciences—manipulates the interpretation of numbers to suit its agenda. And that agenda, dictated by RRC founder Tom Church, is basically to pull the plug on all this hoity-toity music and replace it with news and talk, so public radio stations will sound like the other jabbering stations on the dial. (From the beginning, in 1981, Church’s mission has been to make public radio sound more like commercial radio in every way possible.)
    So, allowing for the moment that ratings have any validity at all (and the only people who truly believe that are working at stations that are Number 1 in their target demographic), what could the problem be? Well, more and more public stations have been following the one-size-fits-all programming and presentation guidelines of the RRC, regardless of the needs and tastes of the local audiences. RRC influence has increased, and listenership is down. My, what an odd coincidence.
    I got out of the radio biz in 1988 because station managers were too happy to let Church and his cronies lead them by the nose. I came back last year because KUAT’s current managers seem like independent thinkers who can put the RRC’s infrequent good advice to proper use while ignoring the nonsense. If only other radio managers had a similar strength of will.
    Meanwhile, we should be calling for Tom Church to be burned at the stake, if it didn’t violate local pollution ordinances.

VIVALDI AND THE ORPHAN VIOLINIST

posted by James Reel

    For some reason I haven’t bothered to link to my reviews for Fanfare magazine that happen to show up online (only a small portion of the print edition is available via the Web site). In the last issue, I wrote about a collection of Vivaldi violin concertos described as “for Anna Maria”:

You’ve heard of the "Anna Magdalena Notebook," but how about the “Anna Maria Notebook”? Anna Maria was an orphan without an official last name, educated at Venice’s Ospedale dall' Pietà, where Antonio Vivaldi taught music. Born in 1696, she seems to have entered the music program earlier than usually allowed, owing to her apparent talent. When Anna Maria was 16, Vivaldi saw to it that she received her own violin at institutional expense, and over the years he wrote some 30 violin concertos for her, as well as a couple of works for viola d’amore with her initials worked acrostically into the titles.

    You can read more about Anna Maria and the recording by Federico Guglielmo and L’Arte dell’Arco here. The site also includes my review of the SACD reissue of an underappreciated performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony.

OLD NEWS IS ... STILL NEWS

posted by James Reel

    One of the play openings I attended over the weekend was decidedly unsuccessful. The quality of the acting varied wildly, from quite good to frankly amateurish, and the tone of the production was similarly uneven; the director sometimes mocked his material, but not consistently enough to turn the whole thing into a focused parody. I’ve committed to reviewing this production, but because I have too much else to cram into the forthcoming Tucson Weekly, I’ll have to hold this review for a week. By that time, I suppose most of the actors will have settled more comfortably into their roles, so when my review appears it will no longer reflect what’s actually happening on the stage.
    Theoretically, I should go back for an update this weekend, but I have commitments to something else that conflicts with every performance, and there’s no way I can get out of any of those commitments. (Indeed, I had to give up a gig narrating a piece for saxophone and piano at this Sunday’s Arizona Friends of Chamber Music “Piano and Friends” concert because of pressing duties elsewhere; all the better for you, if you go, because I handed the job to the superb Harold Dixon.) I have no reason to believe that the production will experience a complete improvement over the next few days, but by the time the review hits the street, nearly two weeks after opening night, it won’t be discussing quite the same show that will actually be on the boards. This is the only sort of situation that makes me miss working for a fast-turnaround daily paper.

DA CAPO AL FINE

posted by James Reel

    Terry Teachout makes a case for abandoning books:

I wholeheartedly endorse pulling the plug on books you don’t like. … I expect a lot out of the books I read, and when they fail to deliver the goods, I toss them aside with a clear conscience and no second thoughts. Life is so very short—and so often shorter than we expect—that it seems a fearful mistake to waste even the tiniest part of it submitting voluntarily to unnecessary boredom.

    This is fine advice that I just can’t bring myself to follow. First, I’m pretty good at judging the appeal of a book before I start reading, so I rarely have any reason to give up. But beyond that, I feel a responsibility to the author not to skim; I owe careful consideration to each word the author has put in place. Of course, as a journalist/critic (that is, non-creative writer) myself, I know perfectly well that words frequently get spewed out without much thought, in an effort to meet an impending deadline or merely fulfill an assignment accepted with little enthusiasm. Still, with each book or magazine I pick up, there’s a good chance that each word will be golden. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
    In support of his aversion to commitment, Terry quotes Samuel Johnson’s dismissal of the notion that one must pursue a book through to its end:

This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?

    Well, how are we to know that there’s only one thing worth knowing in it until we read it all through? The payoff may come rather late; this is a weakness of craft, but however late the thing worth knowing comes, perseverence is rewarded. And as for Dr. Johnson’s remark about the silliness of keeping acquaintances for life, this is one of the reasons Johnson was more admired than loved. I’ve allowed a few friends to fall by the wayside over the years, but I choose my friends as carefully as I choose my books, and I try to maintain fidelity to them as long as they remain interested in me. Good books, I think, are worthy of similar consideration.
    Bad operas, on the other hand, I’m only too happy to abandon after one dull or inept act. Opera is, after all, one of the lower forms of musical expression, hobbled as it usually is by inept librettos and amateurish staging and acting. No point suffering through early Verdi when I could be home reading.
    Now, if only I could figure out a way to get through my 10-month backlog of magazines, which I insist on reading cover to cover …