THUMBS SIDEWAYS

posted by James Reel

    A couple of times, people have read my review of some play or concert and asked me, “So, did you like it or not?” If critical response were that simple, all I’d need to do is plop some thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon on the page and be done with it. But I’ve rarely encountered a performance that is either a completely wonderful, stunning, orgasmic experience or complete, abdominal-cramping crap. Even the best presentations usually have one or two elements that don’t quite come off, and when I point that out, readers wanting an all-or-nothing response ask, “Doesn’t he like anything?” Well, of course, but I hardly ever like anything completely. By the same token, I can usually find some glimmer of hope in even the least successful productions.
    So, look at my two reviews in the latest Tucson Weekly; did I like the plays or not? The answer in each case is a strongly qualified yes:

    A man completely out of touch with his own parents becomes obsessed with the skull of what he believes to be a 9,000-year-old ancestor. A woman completely out of touch with her culture and anyone else's defends the skull from the man's reclamation efforts; she's a scientist determined to use the skull to learn about dead people, without having to interact with living people any more than necessary.
    These competing agendas propel the action of Cherylene Lee's Mixed Messages, currently presented by Borderlands Theater. The title is perhaps more apt than Lee intends. Her play dabbles with issues of mixed-race and mixed-heritage populations in contemporary California, personal identity, ownership of culture and the legal rights to the remains of long-dead people. Lee presents the competing arguments even-handedly, but by the end of the play, she abandons those arguments to let the antagonists unite against a common enemy. The big legal issues not only go unresolved; they go missing.

    Please, Shakespeare purists, don't be put off by Live Theatre Workshop's description of its late-night version of Romeo and Juliet.
    The company's Etcetera series promises "a fast-paced interpretation adapted from the original to make it accessible yet still vital ... (an) adaptation that carefully balances a modern approach while remaining faithful to the original style of this classic tragedy." Well, that could mean almost anything, including dumbing down the Bard. Not so in this case. I'm not sure about fidelity to the "original style," but LTW's highly condensed Ro and Ju tells the core story swiftly, flashing some illuminating moments along the way.

DUBIOUS DEFINITIONS

posted by James Reel

    Composer and sometime critic Ken LaFave has passed along some music definitions you won't find in Grove's. You never know the origins of these things that circulate in cyberspace, but this list has the name Al Heller attached to it:

    Obbligato - being forced to practice
    Con Moto - yeah baby, I have a car
    Allegro - a little car
    Metronome - short, city musician who can fit into a Honda Civic
    Lento - the days leading up to Easto
    Largo - beer brewed in Germany for the Florida Keys
    Piu Animato - clean out the cat's litter box
    Con Spirito - drunk again
    Colla Voce - this shirt is so tight I can't sing
    Improvisation - what you do when the music falls down
    Prelude - warm-up before the clever stuff
    Flats - English apartments
    Chords - things organists play with one finger
    Discords - thing that organists play with two fingers
    Suspended Chords - useful for lynching the vocalist
    Time Signatures - things for drummers to ignore
    Melody - an ancient, now almost extinct art in songwriting
    Klavierstuck - A term used by German furniture movers attempting to get a piano through a narrow doorway
    Music Stand - An intricate device used to hold music. Comes in two sizes - too high or too low - always broken.
    Tonic - A medicinal drink consumed in great quantity before a performance, and in greater quantity afterwards.
    Dominant - What parents must be if they expect their children to practice.
    Concert Hall - A place where large audiences gather, for the sole purpose of removing paper wrappings from candy and gum.
     Soto Voce - singing while drunk
     Agogic - playing high enough on an oboe to make the eyes bulge.
     Cadenza - slapping noise on office furniture
     Fandango - grabbing the pull chain on the ceiling fan
     Prima Volta - jump start with a battery
     Refrain - proper technique for playing bagpipes
     Smorzando - with melted chocolate and marshmallow

    This list lacks one of my favorites, which I will append:
    Minor Second - two oboists playing concert A

OPUS 2

posted by James Reel

    KUAT relief announcer and busy pianist Michael Dauphinais sent this response to my screed about opus numbers on the radio:

    Your blog entry about opus numbers is spot on. I recently caught myself almost blurting out a "forbidden" opus number when back announcing a Chopin etude. As you know, you can't just say "Chopin's etude in z-flat minor" since both sets, opus 10 and 25, each contain a full round of 24 keys. I did the same thing that the C-24 announcer did, and awkwardly said something about it being from Chopin's first set of etudes for piano.
    I have had listeners call and ask about opus numbers, even Köchel numbers occasionally. I agree with our management that in many cases the listener simply does not need that much information. I do think that, in certain cases, the catalog reference is useful, at least to the cognoscenti and musicians among our listeners. Beethoven's opus 18 and 53 spring to mind, as do Brahms' opus 116, 117, 118, 119. I'm sure there are others, but I won't belabor the point.

BY THE NUMBERS

posted by James Reel

    Saturday night, driving from one play to another and then home, I had “Music Through the Night” on the car radio, and as usual the Minnesota-based announcer did something annoying. When back-announcing one of Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances, she said, “That was from his Opus—oh, let’s just say his first group of dances.”
    Obviously, somebody at C24, which gives us “Music Through the Night,” has forbidden the use of opus numbers on the air. Judging from how the announcer stumbled over herself to avoid giving the dreaded number, the punishment for noncompliance must be severe, on the order of being forced to listen to Lara St. John’s techno-Bach CD at least twice. A similar guideline, though without that penalty, has been in place at KUAT-FM for several years. The theory is that clogging announcements with a lot of numbers and other technical details will alienate listeners.
    There’s good reason to drop the opus number in many cases. Declaring that we’re listening to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in c-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2 isn’t going to be as communicative to a listener as simply calling it Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. If you hear it on the radio and want to buy a recording or printed music, “Moonlight” Sonata is plenty to point you in the right direction.
    Sometimes, though, the opus number is important. Saying that a dance comes from Dvorák’s “first group” isn’t going to help you track it down. You’ll have to do some sleuthing to learn that the “first group” is Op. 46, which is how every recorded and printed collection of that set is labeled. If you want to buy a recording of that particular dance, knowing right away that it’s from Op. 46 saves you a lot of time and trouble.
    Similarly, the opus number is critical to sorting out Haydn’s string quartets. Unlike his symphonies, the quartets aren’t numbered sequentially, from 1 to 68. For the most part, they were published in groups of six, under widely spaced opus numbers, and recordings are usually released by opus number. Announcing “Haydn’s String Quartet in E-flat” is tremendously uninformative, because Haydn wrote more than one quartet in that key. Saying “Haydn’s String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat” is absolutely misleading, because it may be No. 1 in the Op. 20 set, but it’s by no means the first quartet Haydn ever wrote. Giving the opus number of a Haydn quartet is a real service to any listener who wants to find a recording or score; withholding the opus number because some consultant thinks it will frighten the cowering infophobic ninnies they assume to constitute our audience is a disservice and an insult to our listeners.
    We need rules, but inflexible rules are created by and for people who don’t know what they’re doing.

GOOD PLAYS

posted by James Reel

    Today I'm off the air, but still in print. The latest Tucson Weekly holds my review of Scenes from an Execution, a production I suggest you see forthwith, despite some little problems:

    Don't be misled by the title. Howard Barker's Scenes From an Execution is not a death row play; it's a comic drama about the execution of what we'd now call a public-art commission in late 16th-century Venice. And don't be misled by that description. This is neither an ordinary costume drama nor an old-fashioned comedy of manners. It's a thoroughly contemporary play, mordant and funny, about a painter's integrity, vision and sheer misguided orneriness, and the state's clumsy dance with artists it can't quite trust to glorify its exploits. (Think Amadeus.)
    The University of Arizona's advanced student company, Arizona Repertory Theatre, has mounted a gorgeous production that almost but not quite does Barker's play full justice. The problems: intermittently effective but ultimately monochromatic portrayals of two colorful artists, and one directorial decision that yanks Barker's sharp teeth right out of his head. (Think Rent.)

Go to see Live Theatre Workshop's production of Broadway Bound, and you'll get the wrong idea about Neil Simon. You'll come away thinking that Simon knows how to subordinate gags to character and storytelling, that he can deliver scenes of tenderness without falling too far into sentimentality, that he can write sensitively about a woman who is no longer young and was never fashionable, that he will with the greatest integrity give a director and actors material of substance while remaining first and foremost an able entertainer.

SAME OLD TUNE

posted by James Reel

    Early Monday morning, the KUAT-FM music library database somehow got corrupted, and Steve Hahn, our music director, couldn’t print out any schedules until our computer guru cleansed the database of its impurities. So yesterday Steve scrounged up a printed music schedule from last November and had us use it again. That should explain to the two or three of you who follow our listings online or in the little printed thingy you get in the mail why what you heard didn’t correspond to what you read.
    This morning, as I drove to the studio, I contemplated scrapping whatever recycled schedule I might find today and playing one of the longer Mahler symphonies instead. But the computer guru had come through, Steve was able to generate a fresh schedule, and you were spared the Mahlerian excesses.
    There have been many long, dreary periods in KUAT-FM’s history when the music schedules were recycled as standard operating procedure. Ed Kupperstein initiated that practice when he was the music director in the 1970s. I think Kup produced about two months of completely fresh schedules when he first got the job, and then merely photocopied the old typed sheets, dropping in two or three new recordings each shift by slopping Wite-Out over an old entry and scratching in the new info by hand. Needless to say, after a couple of years the photocopies of photocopies were harder to read than hundred-year-old gravestones, and the programming was similarly hard, dry, featureless and boring.
    When I succeeded Kup as music director, I programmed every day fresh, but my own successor, Richard Hetland, no doubt with the blessings of Kup (who had moved up the management ladder), resumed the recycling practice. When I returned to announcing here a couple of years ago, I noticed with alarm that Richard’s successor, Steve, was also into reruns. He felt a bit helpless, treading water during a very long transition from one computer system to another. The repetition is what finally drove morning announcer Wayne Angerame away screaming, opening the morning slot for me. When the new computer system was finally in place—about a month after Wayne’s escape—Steve began generating a fresh schedule every day.
    Steve maintains that listeners aren’t likely to notice repetition, and boredom is a problem limited to the announcers, not the audience. I disagree. Back when I was driving from home to the Arizona Daily Star at the same time every day—this was during the Richard Hetland era—I knew that about every two months, at exactly the same time, I’d hear exactly the same recording of the same Schubert symphony, or the same Sharon Isbin recording of the same Leo Brower guitar piece. And, at exactly that time, I’d turn off the radio in exasperation. In broadcasting, consistency is good, but predictability is an audience-killer.