ENGLISH ONLY?

posted by James Reel

    Um, can this message deposited at the KUAT Web site after we played the Mozart Requiem be serious?

You know that it is becoming more difficult by the day to find anyone who speaks English. Sometimes I wonder if I'm still in the United States. There is a major difference between broadcasting Shubert's Mass in G and broadcasting an entire mass in some language that I have no clue of. Please try to encourage the use of English for those of us in the minority who still use it.

    Well, as our music director pointed out to the correspondent, almost every Mass and Requiem is in Latin. That's the way it is. We can't demand that performers and record companies translate the text into English. If the correspondent admits that Latin is "some language that I have no clue of," may I respectfully suggest that it's time to get a clue. Of what benefit is ignorance, even of a dead language?

REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/GUILLERMO FIGUEROA

posted by James Reel

    What happened to the tam-tam? At the end of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, the full orchestra punches out a series of loud, crackling chords; the last one includes a tam-tam stroke that should reverberate for half a bar after the rest of the orchestra has gone silent. Rachmaninov wants the work to end not with a bang, but a shimmer. But last night’s Tucson Symphony performance under guest conductor Guillermo Figueroa ended merely with the pounding full-orchestra chords, no tam-tam to be heard. Was Figueroa wrongheadedly trying to make Rachmaninov’s music more tasteful? Or did the designated percussionist simply forget to step over to the tam-tam for the last couple of measures?
    It’s unfortunate that these were the thoughts knocking around in my head as I left the concert hall, because nearly everything that had happened up to that last note was splendid. In fact, this was one of the finest TSO performances I’ve heard in a long time.
    The orchestra usually responds very well to guest conductors, and Figueroa drew playing of rhythmic precision and tonal refinement from the musicians. The Puerto Rico-born Figueroa is a distinguished violinist with a taste for contemporary music, a former concertmaster of the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and current music director of the Puerto Rico and New Mexico symphony orchestras. For his first appearance with the TSO, he chose music of color, muscle and agility.
    Things got off to an impressive start with the Corsaire Overture of Hector Berlioz. The playing was full of vitality; at the same time, the strings negotiated their scurrying opening lines cleanly—no easy feat—and the contrasting slow theme was played quite broadly, with great warmth. The sonorous brass chords boasted perfect intonation; the section gleamed, without overpowering the strings and winds (a chronic problem with this orchestra in the TCC Music Hall).
    These assets carried over into the performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1, a work that forecasts many of the characteristics of Shostakovich’s later symphonies, with its disintegrating march-waltz first movement laying the foundation for the knotty Fourth Symphony, the vicious and brawny second movement setting the pattern for later scherzos, and the slightly overextended third and fourth movements revealing a poor sense of architectural balance that would afflict Shostakovich’s otherwise admirable Sixth through Tenth symphonies.
    Figueroa highlighted the symphony’s many contrasts of character; in the first movement, for example, he got the woodwind principals to play their solos with pretty delicacy, leaving the acerbic mockery to the strings. Indeed, through the course of the work almost every principal had at least a brief, exposed solo, and each one came off with accuracy and personality. Consider cellist Nelzimar Neves, playing with her customary open-hearted warmth in the last movement, or concertmaster Steven Moeckel, properly snotty in the first movement and almot but not quite syrupy in the last. Figueroa conducted the slow movement with special breadth and patience, but he pulled out all the stops in the big moments of the second and fourth movements, getting the orchestra to play with great power yet never blaring.
    Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances did not receive quite so sure a reading; the woodwinds were sometimes hard to hear, as they often are under music director George Hanson, and saxophonist Michael Hester’s gorgeous solo in the first of the three dances was accompanied by several reed squeaks elsewhere in the wind section, a rare occurrence in this orchestra. Yet overall the performance abounded in both firm rhythms and free lyricism. The second dance was suitably languid and decadent, and the last dance balanced dreamy restlessness with forceful impulse.
    The musicians seemed to love Figheroa, and he is clearly adept at conveying his good ideas about sound quality and musical intepretation to the players. If George Hanson, who has led the TSO since 1996, decides to move on when his contract expires in 2008, I wouldn’t be at all disappointed if the orchestra romanced Figueroa for the job. First, though, he’d have to come back and show what he can do in a greater diversity of repertory—perhaps some Mozart, Debussy and Brahms. And maybe when he returned he could find that missing tam-tam.

DEADLY, FARCE

posted by James Reel

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I give measured approval to Beowulf Alley’s Chekhov compilation …

    Anton Chekhov's characters can be so annoying. The whining, the self-pity, the vanity, the depression ... for all their psychological acuity, Chekhov's serious plays are nearly done in by one or two dreary figures who render their households a slough of despond simply because nobody has the temerity to give them a swift kick in the butt.
    Chekhov's farces, on the other hand, thrive on annoying characters. You can't have a good farce unless the characters are so self-absorbed that they utterly fail to communicate. The whining, the self-pity, the vanity, the depression ... it's so ridiculously funny.
    Well, it is half the time, judging from Beowulf Alley Theatre Company's current production of four Chekhov farces. Two of the half-hour pieces hit every mark; the other two, despite the company's best efforts, founder, because as a playwright, Chekhov couldn't give himself a swift kick in the butt.

    … measured approval to a community-theater murder mystery …

Ira Levin's Deathtrap is splendid mystery entertainment the first time around, abounding in surprises and reversals and refusing to take itself at all seriously, though never devolving into silliness. On second viewing and beyond, however, its central conceit does become tiresome: playwrights working on a murder mystery that anticipates the events in their lives, which constitute the play we're seeing. If you've never seen Deathtrap, it's tremendous fun; if you've seen it before, repeat performances wear like a joke that's been told a bit too often. Tucson Theatre Ensemble opened its production of Deathtrap last weekend, and despite some unevenness, it's a good introduction to the play.

    … and an alert, no judgment passed, to a showcase of Japanese drumming this weekend.

... AND THEIRS

posted by James Reel

    A couple of external addenda to my post “Yours, Mine and Ours”:
    Compulsively readable oboist-blogger Patricia Mitchell goes off on her own typically gentle ramble on the subject of differing musical tastes, while compulsively readable firebrand A.C. Douglas offers his own typically scorching reply to the Greg Sandow post that started it all. (A.C.D. is not for the faint-hearted; his objection to Sandow begins, “A more wrongheaded, even imbecile, statement is difficult to imagine.”)

YOURS, MINE AND OURS

posted by James Reel

    Greg Sandow’s blog is devoted to serious and provocative thinking about the future of classical music. He’s a populist, though, and many of his ideas strike the traditionalists among us as fatal dumbing-down of the music we love. I don’t count myself among Greg’s detractors, but I do think he’s off base in a recent post:

    For a long time, I’ve thought that the classical music world needs to embrace other kinds of music. Why? At first the idea might not make sense to some people. We don’t ask reggae stars to acknowledge country music; we’d be surprised if Wynton Marsalis went on TV with Bjork. So why should classical musicians (and classical music institutions) reach out to any other musical style?
    Well, there are many reasons. … The classical music world is trying to figure out its relationship to the rest of the world. The rest of the world listens to pop (and jazz, and country, and hiphop, and dance music, and world music, and Latin music, and lots more). We live, as far as they’re all concerned, in a closed little box. We need to show them we’re human, too, and that we live in the same world they do. And that many of us listen to their music, which—because we live in the same world—is our music, too.

    Yes, some of us classical types do live in a closed little box. But don’t the people who listen exclusively to Top 40 radio, or the ever-narrowing niches of other terrestrial and satellite services, live in boxes of their own? The only difference is that their boxes are a lot more crowded than ours.
    Different kinds of music serve different purposes, and every kind of music serves an honorable role in society. (Well, I’m not so sure that the gangsta variety of rap is in any way honorable, but that’s the exception.) I’m not being arrogant when I say that Daniel Powter and the Red Hot Chile Peppers do not serve any of my particular purposes, and I’m not ashamed to admit that Mozart and Shostakovich in no way can serve the purposes of certain other people.
    All my friends are intelligent, but our musical tastes do not necessarily intersect. So what? They don’t think I’m a snob because I get more out of classical music than any other variety, and I don’t think they’re uncultured idiots because they prefer something else. We have achieved peaceful coexistence without pretending that we’re alike in our aesthetic needs and choices.
    Yes, over the years I have encouraged one or two of my most musically knowledgable and omnivorous friends to lend me CDs of good music that lies well beyond my usual interest. And yes, I consequently appreciate how much serious, well-crafted music there is in the non-classical sphere. Not much of it engages me, though, aside from the more rhythmically and harmonically intriguing varieties of “world music” and its spinoffs. Even if my friends did convert me into a fan of Radiohead or Björk or Lyle Lovett, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to turn my friends into Bohuslav Martinu groupies. Again, so what?
    If “they” ever come to appreciate some of “our” music, it won’t because we make a show of enjoying theirs. It’s like parents trying to “relate” to their teenagers by using teen slang and dressing in an age-inappropriate manner. The kids don’t relate; they’re just embarrassed.

SNOW JOB

posted by James Reel

    With the blog broken yesterday, I couldn’t post this complaint when it was truly fresh, but it should have a fair shelf life, alas.
    Why did NPR chose to lead each of its hourly newscasts, all day long, with an item about Fox News pundit Tony Snow being named White House press secretary? Why should NPR have led even one newscast with such a thing? The person in that position neither sets nor influences public policy; he’s just a presidential mouthpiece, of variable reliability. The only people he interacts with are reporters, for crying out loud, not the general public.
    Oh, wait a minute—that’s why Snow led the newscasts. It’s all about journalism, and journalists mistakenly believe they have the most fascinating jobs in the world. Newspapers are always touting whatever podunk regional awards they get, as if such things mattered within the newsroom, let alone beyond it. And when a journalist gets kidnapped in the Middle East, even a fairly obscure freelancer, it remains “news” for weeks, while other kidnapping victims receive barely two mentions: maybe one when they’re abducted, and one when they’re recovered dead or alive.
    Even as a journalist myself, I’ve never understood how such a cynical bunch of people can develop such an inflated sense of self-importance. Face it: Nobody cares about journalists as much as journalists care about themselves. Not even the Pulitzer Prize for journalism impresses anybody outside the Fourth Estate.
    Maybe it would, if journalists would stop pimping their profession and instead report more actual news.