ALEICHEM? I LIKE HIM

posted by James Reel

    Next week I’ll have a flood of theater-related material in the Tucson Weekly—why does everything open at once?—but for today, it’s just a single preview of An Evening of Sholom Aleichem at Invisible Theatre:

Murray Horwitz misspent his youth in Dayton, Ohio, in the library. Not reading books, but listening to records. Some of those records would lead him to co-write the musical Ain't Misbehavin' in the late 1970s. One other LP didn't involve music at all, and it would inspire him years later to create not a big musical, but an intimate, one-man show that he's bringing to the Invisible Theatre next week. The disc presented actor Howard Da Silva reading stories by Sholom Aleichem, the Yiddish writer who lived from 1859 to 1916 and created, among others, the characters who populated Fiddler on the Roof.

NO NEWS IS ... NO NEWS

posted by James Reel

    This is Day 2 of NPR telling us that there’s been no indictment yet in the the purported White House leak of C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame’s identity; it was such a slow news day Wednesday that the item led every morning newscast. I was just about to make a catty comment about this non-news reporting when I saw that Timothy Noah beat me to it. Thank goodness Harriet Miers took pity on reporters this morning and gave them something else to talk about.
    By the way, Gerneralissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

YOU SAY TOMAHTO

posted by James Reel

    The latest announcer mini-challenge at KUAT-FM: how to differentiate, through careful pronunciation, the Aradia Ensemble from the Oradea Philharmonic. The first group is pronounced “ah-RAH-dee-ah.” The second is “oh-RAH-deh-ah” (not “day-ah”; there shouldn’t be a diphthong in that penultimate syllable). When spoken at a natural clip, the last two syllables of each name compress into “dyah.” So that leaves us with only the unstressed first syllable to get the difference across.
    Of course, this fretting ignores the fact that the Aradia group, based in Toronto, calls itself an “ensemble,” while the Oradea group, from Romania, is a “philharmonic.” End of problem.
    Which reminds me of the joke about two neighbors who couldn’t tell their dogs apart. So one of them bobbed his dog’s tail, and said, “OK, mine is the white dog with the short tail, and yours is the black dog with the long tail.” Such is life in public radio.

OLD ARTS, NEW MEDIA

posted by James Reel

    Writes John Lambert, “I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere in your area, but these online things are starting to make a difference as more & more commercial platforms fall by the wayside.” Lambert operates one of those “online things,” Classical Voice of North Carolina, a Web site dedicated to reviews of classical music performances in the Raleigh/Winston-Salem area. Lambert decided to launch his site when he saw the regional print outlets dropping their serious coverage of classical music. Lambert’s wasn’t the first site to take up the slack left by newspapers and magazines abandoning their commitment to arts coverage, and indeed the number of sites like CVNC is growing, if slowly. Here’s a perfect example of how New Media can step in to correct the errors and omissions of Old Media platforms.
    Today, I’m pleased to add to the blogroll on the right a section called “Review Sites.” It’s a way for you to check the state of the arts elsewhere in the country, as covered by feisty independent critics. Here's a quick tour, of the sites, with descriptions in the operators’ own words:
    CLASSICAL VOICE OF NORTH CAROLINA (John Lambert, administrator)
    “CVNC, modeled on a similar site in San Francisco (SFCV) whose founder was of immense value to us as we got off the ground, exists as a direct result of a decision in early 2001 by Spectator Magazine to abandon coverage of classical music, which had been featured in its pages since 1978. Spectator dropped classical a month to the day after the grand opening of Raleigh's BTI Center for the Performing Arts, with three new halls, two of which were intended primarily for music (including opera) and dance. Within several months, Independent, the other major alternative and ‘a&e’ paper in the Triangle, asked its classical critics to abandon reviews in favor of ‘glitzy’ previews. A full discussion of why reviews and a decent calendar are important to artists and the community would consume all our space and more, but we'll take as a given the fact that readers of this document know, understand, and appreciate them. Since Indy 's critics were every bit as serious as Spectator's had been, it didn't take us long to get together, and with a lot of encouragement from our former readers and presenters and a few key arts patrons, we, collectively, decided that we needed to have something in place by the time the Fall 2001 season began, in order to fill the not-inconsiderable voids created by our former (commercial) employers. We started on a hope and a prayer, with no capital, and with no real awareness of what we were getting into. It took about ten minutes to decide that CVNC , which the idea was to become, could NOT succeed in print (due to prohibitive costs of printing and distribution and administration and ad- or subscription sales), and that SFCV would serve as a viable model for us. Indeed, we perceive that serious commentary on the arts—all the arts—will in time be found only in the commercial papers of our largest cities and online.”
    SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE (Mickey Butts and others)
    “SFCV is a not-for-profit enterprise supported by foundation grants and individual contributions. … From September 1, 1998 to September 13, 2005, SFCV has published, in addition to the Music News, feature pieces and weekly editorials, 2182 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 52 symphony orchestras (459 reviews), 89 chamber groups (267), 36 new music ensembles and programs (234), 39 opera companies (306), 29 choral groups (133), 15 music festivals (101), 33 early music ensembles (170), 24 chamber orchestras (88), 6 musical theater groups (14), world music (14), recitals (374), youth music (10), other (12).”
    ARTS SAN FRANCISCO (ARTSSF) (Paul Hertelendy)
    “Live-concert reviews from the San Francisco Bay Area of classical music as well as dance, theater and books, all emphasizing modern creativity (20th and 21st century) in the region.”
    MUSIC IN CINCINNATI (Mary Ellyn Hutton)
    “MusicInCincinnati.com is a kind of ‘keyhole’ on classical music in Cincinnati offering reviews, feature articles and news about events and organizations in Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky and elsewhere. The author, Mary Ellyn Hutton, is a free lance writer with 20 years experience as a music critic and reporter, most of the time as classical music critic for The Cincinnati Post in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ EDGAR MEYER

posted by James Reel

    The first rule of concert criticism is to discuss what happened, not what should have happened. But the absence of a particular major work from the current Tucson Symphony concert cycle reveals that the orchestra is stumbling unsurely through its current financial crisis.
    Last spring, the TSO announced that this week’s concerts would include Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1, a work the orchestra hasn’t played in the 30 years I’ve been attending, and perhaps not ever. Barber’s First is just one weak finale short of being the Great American Symphony, a powerful, concise, melodic work that should appeal to concertgoers of every taste. But it was one of many compositions yanked from the schedule in a cost-cutting move and replaced with something else, in this case Aaron Copland’s all-too-familiar suite from Rodeo. Supposedly the orchestra is saving money by pulling the Copland from its library rather than renting or buying the parts of the Barber symphony. That’s the only possible source of savings. First, the orchestra has to pay royalties for either score.Second, the Barber doesn’t require the participation of any musicians who weren’t already onstage for Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, which in fact is the one piece in the current cycle that requires a lot of extra players, but got through the cuts unscathed. Third, if TSO officials secretly believed that Copland would fill more seats than Barber, let that claim echo through the Music Hall, which was little more than half full last night.
    When an orchestra has money trouble, the last thing it should mess with is its programming; that only disappoints and alienates its core audience, rather than gaining sympathy for the financial plight. Sure, works that include a lot of extra paid musicians, like Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand, can reasonably be set aside, but the rest of an announced schedule should remain sacred, except under the most dire of circumstances. First you eliminate administrative waste. Then you have your development staff and board raise money to cover all reasonable artistic costs—or replace them with people who can. Couldn’t someone have approached potential donors with a “Save Our Season” list, asking for a donation of $X specifically to cover acquisition of the Barber score, $X for a threatened Kodály score, and so forth? Donors like to fund something tangible; a little campaign like this would surely have brought in some much-needed money, and helped the TSO keep its promises to its audience.
    As for what did happen at last night’s concert, it was an all-American program, including the aforementioned Copland and Bernstein works, with bassist Edgar Meyer soloing in his own Bass Concerto No. 1. The composition is as eclectic and self-assured as you’d expect from Meyer, who can play Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet one night (which he’s done here in Tucson) and jam with fiddler Mark O’Connor the next. The first two movements of the 1993 concerto are earthy and bluesy, sometimes a little jazzy, and the last movement is rooted in bluegrass, but Meyer makes all the elements work naturally in a classical setting.
    Despite its size, the bass projects poorly, so Meyer generally kept the dynamics of the smallish orchestra low, except for a few tutti passages during which he didn’t play. His tone was lean, even ghostly in the slow movement, which he played without vibrato. As attractive as the score was and as adeptly as Meyer played it, though, the sound projection and most of the musical gestures were too small for the 2,200-seat hall; it all would have worked better in more intimate confines. Meyer offered a suite of three encores: the fluidly played Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, and two original, jazz-oriented pieces, displaying Meyer’s ease in that idiom, whether the music was bowed or pizz.
    Conductor George Hanson and the TSO supported Meyer sympathetically, even prettily, but the strings’ sometimes spongy if accurate rhythm did not bode well for the Copland and Bernstein in the second half. As it turned out, the strings were able to dig into those more outgoing scores, except for a passage early in the West Side Story dances, when they couldn’t quite manage lyricism and sharp accents at the same time. Rodeo came off well (except for a pedestrian treatment of the “Corral Nocturne”), with the final “Hoe-Down” good and beefy, and Hanson and the orchestra brought power and passion to the Xavier Cugat-nightmare sections of the Bernstein score. This was a relief, after their undercharacterized reading of Bernstein’s Fancy Free a couple of seasons ago, but everyone was fully involved in this performance, and in the sparkling encore, Bernstein’s Candide Overture.
    Much of the evening’s success went to the exuberant but well-balanced work of the brass section. Hanson arrayed those players across the back of the lower balcony for the concert opener, Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, and the result was full-bodied yet mellow-toned playing, absolutely free of the cracks that befall even the best players at certain points in the fanfare.

SOB STORY

posted by James Reel

    A note from my KUAT colleague Mike Serres, who takes exception to the way he was characterized in my post about radio fundraising:

    I hasten to correct a misrepresentation regarding my "pretending" to sob on the air during a pledge shift. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I wear my heart on my sleeve (and that my heart belongs to public broadcasting). (Sorry if I put the period in the wrong place, I've only been writing a few decades.) The long and short of it is ... um ... oh, hell, I forget. Back to my cubbyhole to weep in solitude.
    I am, however, impressed that you recall something I (supposedly) did on the air years ago, when I don't recall it myself!