Last week I grumbled mildly that it was hard to find certain local content on the KUAZ/KUAT-FM Web pages. Well, coincidentally, a newer, cleaner, easier-to-navigate design went up this week, and this morning Robert Rappaport also began posting news items on the KUAZ page. There are some other nice features there, too. Take a look!
Sometimes interviewing composers, especially in front of an audience, is about as happy an experience as do-it-yourself dentistry. There are shy composers, who respond to questions with the briefest of unenlightening phrases. There are theory-smitten composers, who respond with the longest, most bombastically unenlightening phrases. There are composers who can put their points across all right, but they've obviously saved most of their personality for their music.
Interviewing Jennifer Higdon during last night's pre-concert chamber festival talk was, in contrast, a treat. She's in her mid 40s, which means she's come up in a period when composers have been expected to interact with the public. She's fully comfortable in front of an audience, personable, natural, intelligent and articulate. I tried to throw her a few questions she hadn't already answered in a hundred other interviews, and she responded smartly without missing a beat (except for the stall-for-time comment "That's a good question"; she never hesitated or resorted to "umms"). People in the audience later told me how delighted they were by her comments and presentation.
Her brand-new string quartet, An Exaltation of Larks, also went over very well in its premiere by the Tokyo String Quartet. Like its composer, the work has a distinct musical personality. From the very first bars, I thought, "That sounds just like Jennifer Higdon!" She definitely has an identifiable style, beginning with a Copland-via-Bernstein sonority but relying more strongly on her own distinctive set of thematic gestures, harmonies and textural preferences. No wonder she's fully booked up with commissions for the next five years, including requests from the likes of Lang Lang and Hilary Hahn. Jennifer Higdon is a fine composer, and she knows how to handle herself well.
I'm making dumb beginner's mistakes this week. Because I didn't program one of the CD players the way I usually do just now, the disc kept playing after it should have been history, letting my golden voice have the airwaves to itself. Yesterday, when changing my mind about where to slip in a little bit of fill music, I wound up not setting up the discs in my customary sequence, and consequently played a couple of seconds of the wrong piece before switching to the music I'd actually announced.
Lack of focus, I guess, and it's probably going to get worse as the week drags on. Yesterday I had to record an interview with a member of the Tokyo Quartet during my air shift, then zipped out to the Tucson Weekly to take over while the top editor is on vacation. After that, I managed to get home long enough to shave before heading out again to teach an Elderhostel class on chamber music with UA professor Jay Rosenblatt. Today, from KUAT I go again to the Weekly, take time out for a doctor's appointment I scheduled six months ago, go back to the Weekly to put it to bed, then head downtown to give the pre-concert talk for tonight's Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival performance. Tomorrow, after KUAT, it's Part 2 of the Elderhostel class in the afternoon, then another pre-concert talk in the evening. Things may lighten up a little on Thursday, in the period after I MC the festival's kiddie concert in the morning and before the pilgrimage to the Tucson Symphony concert that night.
Right now, I'm thinking about junking the music schedule, putting on an 80-minute Mahler CD, and taking a little nap. Thinking, not planning.
One of the most striking aspects of violinist Benny Kim is his socks. Although he eschews the traditional musician's formal tails, he does stick to sober black and white wear in concert. But he also seems to have taken the advice of men's fashion maven Alan Flusser: If a gentleman wishes to make a personal statement even in the most formal setting, the best place to do it is in that dull little expanse at the ankle.
During yesterday's opening Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival concert, Benny clearly was wearing some riotously colorful socks, but not enough material was showing to make the pattern clear. After the concert, at a dinner for musicians and board members, my wife asked Benny to show her his socks. By then, he wasn't wearing any hosiery at all, but he admitted that for the day's concert he had chosen a Scooby-Doo motif. "Wednesday night," he promised, "it'll be the Tasmanian Devil!"
In case you haven’t heard the underwriting spots that air every two or three hours, the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival gets rolling again this Sunday. I have a vested interest in its success, because I’m the vice-president of the organization that presents it. Lots of interesting elements this year, including the first Tucson appearances in some time of the Tokyo String Quartet, a brand-new work by the suddenly prominent composer Jennifer Higdon, a pipa player, recent music by Philip Glass (if the publisher, G.Schirmer, ever gets around to sending the score, which is six weeks late), and the delightful Mendelssohn Octet as the grand finale. I’ll be giving a talk in the hall 30 minutes before the start of each performance. I hope to see you there!
Failing to have contributed anything to the latest Tucson Weekly, I point you instead to some Super Audio Compact Disc reviews of mine in the current issue of Fanfare. Poke around in the online archive now, before access becomes restricted to subscribers around the end of the month.
In this issue, I find favor with an SACD reissue of Paul Paray’s old Detroit Symphony recording of the Symphonie fantastique. It’s characteristic of the conductor: “Paray’s readings were usually a little breathless but unfailingly exciting, and speed did not come at the expense of phrasing, articulation, or pointed rhythm.” Also superb is Colin Davis’s new LSO Má Vlast, which “flows forward in a well paced, carefully balanced, beautifully played, pointedly phrased, altogether first-rate performance.”
Rather less to my liking are a surround-sound version of one of the big Shostakovich symphonies, and several audiophile organ discs. I say of Mark Wigglesworth’s Shostakovich Eighth, “This is a good performance, if rather English in certain respects not to the score’s best advantage.” Then there’s a Franck organ disc: “Roberta Gary plays Franck like a church organist rather than a concert artist. I don’t intend this to suggest any feebleness or lack of imagination; Franck himself, of course, was a church organist. What I mean is that this veteran organ professor at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music favors rather broad tempos, the better to emphasize the music’s harmonic atmosphere.” It’s perfectly fine, if you like that approach. I’m not so sure about Robert Clark’s two-disc Bach survey: “Robert Clark, organ professor at the University of Michigan 1964–1981 and then director of the organ program at Arizona State University until his retirement in 1998, is certainly no stranger to Bach. ... He is clearly capable of blending scholarship with musicality, yet on these two discs ... he often seems unduly cautious.” And given the competition, I think Christian Schmitt’s selection of Handel organ concertos is beside the point: “I wish Schmitt would cut loose a bit more; although his playing is up-to-date in terms of performance practice, it’s old-fashioned in its hushed respect for the score.”
Follow the links to read the complete reviews.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
