TAKACS QUARTET

posted by James Reel

    The Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, on whose board I sit, is presenting the Takács Quartet in concert tonight. (Coincidentally, I wrote the cover story on the group for the forthcoming November-December issue of Fanfare.) I seriously doubt that the local papers will review tonight's concert, but here's a review of a performance the foursome gave in Orange County last Friday. Note that in Tucson they're playing Debussy and Shostakovich instead of Bartók and Mozart, but the two concerts do have Brahms in common.

BRAHMS THE WISEASS

posted by James Reel

    Jan Swafford, who wrote one of the best biographies of Johannes Brahms and who taught at the University of Arizona one year, and with whom I've had the pleasure of serving on a couple of panels, exposes Brahms as a master of sarcasm and ironic self-deprecation here. Not exactly the image of Brahms we get from the portraits of the serious guy with the long gray beard, but it does somehow evoke the caricature of the portly man trailed by a hedgehog.

NO MORE MR. NICE GUY

posted by James Reel

    Yesterday afternoon I drove to a coffeeshop at Speedway and Tucson Boulevard to meet an actor/playwright/producer who is moving his theater company from Phoenix to Tucson. It turns out I’d reviewed this fellow—favorably—in the first show he acted in upon moving to town a few months ago, so he seemed happy to make my acquaintance. At the beginning of the interview, he said that he’d mentioned the interview to K., the head of another theater company. K. had purportedly said, “Oh, he’s nice, and very supportive of local theater.” I feigned a smile. “Well,” I said, “supportive but honest.”
    “Nice!” I can’t afford to be thought of as “nice.” A critic with a “nice” reputation is one who is too namby-pamby in his reviews, afraid to hurt somebody’s feelings with negative comments. A “nice” arts reporter is regarded as a pushover for previews of a company’s productions, even if that company has gotten ample coverage in the past. A “nice” reviewer is just a cheerleader, not somebody who offers constructive criticism when it’s called for. I’m not nice, am I?
    An hour later, the interview concluded pleasantly, I returned to my car and was about to leave the parking lot when a little old lady in one of those motorized scooter-chairs pulled up alongside me. She needed to cross Speedway, she said, but she was afraid to do it alone. Could I help her? She had a small, high voice, and I could hardly hear her over the traffic, and I briefly considered pretending not to be able to understand her. It was 4 p.m., I’d been up for 12 hours, working straight through—radio announcing, CD review writing, webmastering, interviewing (twice). My cold symptoms were still lingering, and my shoulder was still aching from misuse during vacation. I was exhausted, and just wanted to go home and sit down. I did not want to help the little old lady cross the street. For all I knew she might be some raving street person who would mumble some rambling narrative about her hard life and ask for a handout. I did not want to help her cross the street. I hesitated for a moment. Then I parked the car, got out, walked to the corner with her, and served as the tall moving target for vicious drivers as she followed me across Speedway. I did not do it because I’m a “nice” person. I did it only because I couldn’t come up with a valid reason not to.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

posted by James Reel

    What do Burt Bacharach and Karlheinz Stockhausen have in common? Find out here.

GREEN DAY

posted by James Reel

    I'm still bedeviled by this cold, so not only am I not on the air today, I skipped last night's Tucson Symphony concert, so no review this morning. (My wife, who went with a neighbor, loved it.) If you're terribly disappointed not to be able to read my brilliant opinions about something, take heart: You can go here and find out what I think about three new CDs by former University of Arizona cello prof Nancy Green.

POETRY AND OTHERWISE

posted by James Reel

    Today's Tucson Weekly also carries a nice review by Jarret Keene of a volume of poetry by my friend Pamela Portwood, each poem inspired by a historical figure with epilepsy. While Pamela was doing research for a poem on Edward Lear, master of the limerick, she got into limerick mode and challenged me and her husband to write one using the difficult rhyme "asthma." Here's what I came up with:

A young saxophonist with asthma
Couldn't breathe in a nightclub's miasma.
He said to his mother,
"I feel like I'll smother.
I should never have gone into jazz, ma."