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Cue Sheet – February 27th, 2007

HATTOGATE: LOCAL REPERCUSSIONS

    Now that the head of the English label Concert Artist/Fidelio has admitted that he plagiarized up to a hundred recordings and passed them off as the work of his late wife, Joyce Hatto, what are we to make of the Concert Artist recordings featuring Tucson musicians? Will Ozan Marsh’s Liszt turn out to be by Lazar Berman? Nicholas Zumbro’s Granados by Alicia de Larrocha? John Denman’s everything by Reginald Kell? I seriously, seriously doubt it, but I also wonder if Zumbro and the late Marsh would somehow feel slighted if their recordings weren’t deemed worthy to be passed off as Hatto’s. At least then Concert Artist would be using its own master tapes.

Classical Music,

OUT, AND ABOUT

    Of the five days I was recently off the air, four of them were due to illness. At first I thought I had a cold, then it seemed like the flu, and my doctor ultimately diagnosed it as a bacterial infection in my lungs, for which he prescribed antibiotics that gradually got me back in action. (By the way, last Wednesday, when I finally admitted that the nastiness wasn’t going away on its own, I called my doctor’s office, got an appointment for that afternoon, saw the doctor without waiting once I arrived, and was out again 30 minutes after I pulled up in front of the door, even though the doc took time for a little friendly chit-chat. It’s worth the extra money to take the PPO option! Who needs HMOs?)
    Yesterday, although I wasn’t quite 100 percent better as my doctor had promised, I drove up to the far north of Scottsdale to interview Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Anne-Marie McDermott (and the little dog she carries in a bag) for a magazine article. The dog didn’t have much to say, but the musicians, both of whom I’ve interviewed by phone in years past, were open and refreshingly unjaded and not given to tiresome, oft-repeated soundbites.
    McDermott, by the way, is shopping for a label to release her Prokofiev sonata cycle, which she recorded for Arabesque but then bought from the company when it entered a financially troubled period of dormancy. McDermott recorded the sonatas well east of here, but she first performed them as a cycle in Tucson, via a weeklong series of UApresents concerts. I’m sure many people here have fond memories of those performances, and would gladly buy McDermott’s CDs of the works.

Classical Music,

About Cue Sheet

James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.