REDUCED HISTORY OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

posted by James Reel

    Here's something that I keep forgetting to post, but should provide you with some amusement. Phoenix (formerly Tucson) composer Kenneth LaFave and his wife, Susan, recently wrote a play called A Reduced History of Classical Music, which was workshopped in January at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. To promote the work and lure producers, Ken has posted the entire script online. He invites one and all to read the play, which you can do here, and tell your producer friends how wonderful it is. While you're there, by clicking on "View my complete profile," you may also read a bit of background on the play.

COLD AND FUZZY

posted by James Reel

    Would you rather leave the theater feeling challenged or comforted? Have it your way, depending on whether you line up at Beowulf Alley or Invisible Theatre:

    The Birthday Party, one of Harold Pinter's first and best plays, is the latest fare at Beowulf Alley Theatre Company, and it's not for people who prefer a script with every T neatly crossed, the wet ink carefully blotted, the whole sheaf properly filed away by subject matter. Like certain yeshiva teachers, Pinter is far less interested in giving us answers than in teaching us how to ask questions. …
    Director Howard Allen and his actors give us a brisk, rather lightweight production; it's played as an absurdist comedy, not an existential thriller. Even the set is bright, sunny and a little goofy with its fishnet decor, not at all oppressive. This is by no means a misreading of Pinter, who leaves The Birthday Party open to all sorts of interpretations, but it's not the closest, deepest reading possible.

    You’ll find the rest of my Tucson Weekly review here, and nearby are my comments on what just opened at Invisible Theatre:

From Door to Door, a play about three generations of Jewish women, makes it clear: Saccharine is, indeed, kosher. Yet despite the script's sentimentality and clichés, there's enough honesty and authentic love to lift the story above the level of mundane entertainment.

    Find out more here.

RECORDING GLUT

posted by James Reel

    Terry Teachout has posted an intelligently jaded essay about avoiding new recordings of standard repertory. It’s difficult to excerpt, so I’ll just repeat his summary here and hope it inspires you to go read the whole thing from the beginning:

I do solemnly swear that I will never again review a new recording of the complete Brandenburg Concertos. If you [publicists] want to get my attention, you'll have to think of another way, preferably not involving plastic explosives. Furthermore, I have every intention of regularly adding other warhorses to my do-not-resuscitate list, so if you want to know what I think of your upcoming recording of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, you'd better get on the stick. I'm sure this decision will cause me to miss out on something good—probably even several hundred somethings—but I don't expect to lose any sleep over it. If God had meant me to spend the middle of my journey writing comparison reviews of two dozen different versions of the Eroica, He would have given me more patience, a bigger apartment, and a longer life.

    I agree with most of the points Terry makes in the course of his essay. My agreement would have been more wholehearted a couple of years ago, but I think we’ve entered a period in which many of the performers who are getting recorded actually do have something new, personal and interesting to say about the music. This is true especially in the case of chamber ensembles and early-music groups from the Mediterranean. Just about any Baroque recording on some small label from France, Italy or Spain is worth taking a chance on now, if you have any sympathy for that music. Even performances by full orchestras are becoming more interesting. From the 1960s through most of the 1990s, orchestral performance became faceless, partly out of “fidelity to the score” (not imposing an individual point of view on somebody else’s music), and partly because there wasn’t enough rehearsal time to work on interpretive details. But even that is changing with the arrival of younger conductors who know how to rehearse efficiently and aren’t ashamed to be themselves on the podium.
    Still, like Terry Teachout, I have way too many fine CDs of performances I already like very much, and a new recording has to be very special to inspire me to make room for it on my shelves.

BOOSTER CLUB

posted by James Reel

    Only a British critic could assert, as does the otherwise perceptive Jessica Duchen, that Elgar’s Violin Concerto “is indisputably one of the greatest violin concertos in the repertoire.” Well, I dispute that. If you are not English, you are more likely to perceive the Elgar concerto as a thematically amorphous, bloated corpse of Romanticism. Sorry, Limeys: Elgar was not a great composer. He wrote a lot of lovely, endearing miniatures (and remember that the "Enigma" Variations are a series of miniatures), but only one large-scale work, the Cello Concerto, of truly international stature. Otherwise, Elgar, like Bruckner, is a provincial composer of severely flawed scores that fervent little fan clubs have bullied us into accepting as masterpieces.
    Never, ever trust British critics writing about British music, for they are boosters all. Every blip and squeak of music from their quaint little island is promoted as a work of utmost profundity and heightened expression. This is quite a claim from a nation that has in 350 years produced only three and a half composers equal to any in the world: Henry Purcell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and, when he’s “on,” Peter Maxwell Davies. (Handel, remember, was an import.) Britain has generated many perfectly solid if not particularly exportable composers, but they are not nearly the masters the Brits announce them to be, and exaggerated claims for their ability set me against them (Elgar above all, but also the likes of Parry, Birtwistle and Adès).
    Brit critics are unreliable in other ways. Every British performer, for them, is necessarily a Great Artist no matter how dull, as are those honorary Brits who worked extensively in London (Herbert von Karajan above all). British-born but American-based critic Bernard Jacobson is unusually honest and perceptive among his fellows, but even he remained deaf to the prominent intonation problems of England’s hallowed Lindsay Quartet. (And he loves Elgar.) Brit-crit twits have a horror of any performance that displays the faintest trace of emotion or individuality, unless that performance is by a Brit (Simon Rattle, John Barbirolli). They abhor the fiery modern Mediterranean style of Baroque performance, insisting that early-music musicians remain locked in the cold, dry, metronomic 1970s/’80s English and German manner.
    What I object to is not a simple difference in taste; it’s the monolithic conformity of British critical opinion. With the decline of American magazine and newspaper coverage of classical music, and the infiltration of Brits even into Fanfare, to which I contribute, and the unlikelihood that monolingual Americans are going to delve into Continental publications like Diapason, Brits dominate English-language music criticism.
    So here’s what you can do about it: stop reading, keep listening, and think for yourself.

HELP WANTED

posted by James Reel

    Rumor has it that now that Ann Brown has moved permanently to the head of the Arizona Daily Star’s opinion pages, theater critic Kathleen Allen will take over Ann’s old job as editor of the paper’s weekly entertainment tab, Caliente. (I edited Caliente’s precursor section for a while in the late 1990s.) This means that the theater-critic slot will be open. A newsroom informant tells me that management will probably slide the world-music critic into that position.
    I don’t know whether this is good news or bad, because the fellow has yet to prove himself as a theater critic, and I’m happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. If the rumor is true, though, it’s symptomatic of poor management practices at the Star, where editors believe that arts critics are as interchangeable as newsside reporters. Sure, you can rotate a young reporter from the police beat to courts to schools. As long as the reporter has access to the paper’s archives and people with fair institutional memories, moving from one beat to another is no problem. (Because of that institutional memory requirement, though, taking over a government beat is not so easy.) Arts coverage, in contrast, requires specialized knowledge of an arcane field, and the ability to write about it engagingly yet intelligently. The Star has embarrassed itself in the community by dumping an unsophisticated kid from the sports department into the movie critic’s position, and handing classical music coverage to someone who knows a lot about country music but can’t tell a clarinet from an English horn. (The Star "corrected" the story in that link, but still got the instrumentation wrong.) Let’s hope something similar doesn’t happen with the theater beat.
    If I were king of the Arizona Daily Star, I’d pull copy editor M. Scot Skinner kicking and screaming back into his old theater-criticism job. Scot was despised in some quarters of the theater community, but he knew what he was talking about, and expressed his opinions knowledgably and forcefully. Then I’d lure Ken LaFave down from Phoenix to take over the classical music beat, where he started back in the 1970s, and force executive editor Bobbie Jo Buel to get down on her knees and apologize to Renée Downing and beg her to return to the Star and review movies again. Then I’d send Bobbie Jo and her minions to the sports department, where they would toil as agate clerks while listening to the collected works of rapper Vanilla Ice. Yes, it’s cruel, but torture is now OK in the USA. I'm not talking about Abu Ghraib and Gitmo; every day, newspapers torture their readers with inept arts criticism.

UNAPPETIZING

posted by James Reel

    I just pulled for use later today a Johann Strauss CD called Wiener Bonbons. Yes, I know how it's supposed to be pronounced, but the title always makes me think of chocolate-covered Vienna sausages. Ick. Which reminds me that my theme-dinner group once collaborated on an "upscale white trash" meal. One friend, cultured enough to run a mail-order classical CD service, brought the hors d'oeuvres, which involved Ritz crackers, Velveeta, Vienna sausages and caviar. Needless to say, there were leftovers.