BOOK AUTHORS: THE DEFENSIVE LINE

posted by James Reel

    A magazine asked me to write a Mstislav Rostropovich retrospective upon the cellist’s death, so I’ve been interviewing a number of cellists who knew him. I’d also hoped to talk to pianist Lambert Orkis, who performed with Rostropovich for 12 years (today, he’s most closely associated with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter). But yesterday I got word through a intermediary that Orkis doesn’t want to give any more interviews now because 1) he’s tired of being misquoted and, no doubt more importantly, 2) he’s thinking about writing a book about his work with Rostropovich, and is saving up anecdotes for that project. It should be an interesting volume if Orkis follows through. And I’m sure that once it’s published, he’ll be much more forthcoming with interviews in the interest of publicity.
    Meanwhile, Norman “Chicken Little” Lebrecht is in a snit because Don Rosenberg at the Cleveland Plain Dealer does not buy Lebrecht’s theory that the classical CD industry is dead. Lebecht tolls the death knell because the major labels have pretty much imploded (due to 15 years of corporate stupidity, I might add, not because of the rise of downloading). Lebrecht ignores the abundant evidence that the death of the classical CD is greatly exaggerated, dismissing the hundreds of new releases by smaller labels as “non-commercial vanity products.” Well, that’s an interesting way to support a dubious assertion: Declare inconvenient facts to be irrelevant. But what really annoys Lebrecht about Rosenberg is this: “The facts of decline are laid out in my book, which has not yet been reviewed in Cleveland, and there can be no excuse for such wilful myopia.” What an arrogant ass.

'SOAR' WINNERS

posted by James Reel

    You know there’s not much going on in local theater when I start previewing heartwarming productions written by children, from whom I usually keep a safe distance:

    Writers sweat over every precious word, but once their work is picked up for production, that original sweat gets wrung out of the adaptation. Have you ever heard of a writer who was completely happy with the way his or her work was adapted to stage or screen?
    "It turned out a lot better than I thought it would," allows Tucsonan Cade Cothrom of a stage version of a story he co-wrote with Edgar Herrera. From a writer, that's an enthusiastic endorsement. And certainly it acknowledges the difficulties of adapting this particular story. Says Edgar, "It's about an evil tomato that wants to rule the world. In the end, someone makes him into ketchup."
    Edgar is a 9-year-old student at Corbett Elementary; Cade is 10. Their tale of pure--or is that puréed?--evil is one of the highlights of the Stories That Soar! show May 18 at the UA's Stevie Eller Dance Theatre. Edgar and Cade are two of the 200 Tucson students whose work has been adapted this year by Stories That Soar!, and Friday's event is a family-oriented showcase of the best recent efforts.

MOZART EFFECT REVISITED

posted by James Reel

    Here's something that was floating around the Internet a couple of years ago; I got it from a colleague, tucked it away into an obscure folder, and just now rediscovered it. For your amusement:

    A new report now says that the Mozart effect is a fraud. For you hip urban professionals: no, playing Mozart for your designer baby will not improve his IQ or help him get into that exclusive preschool. He'll just have to be admitted to Harvard some other way.
    Of course, we're all better off for listening to Mozart purely for the pleasure of it. However, one wonders that if playing Mozart sonatas for little Hillary or Jason could boost their intelligence, what would happen if other composers were played in their developmental time?

LISZT EFFECT: Child speaks rapidly and extravagantly, but never really says anything important.

BRUCKNER EFFECT: Child speaks very slowly and repeats himself frequently. Gains reputation for profundity.

WAGNER EFFECT: Child becomes a megalomaniac. May eventually marry his sister.

MAHLER EFFECT: Child continually screams—at great length and volume—that he's dying.

SCHOENBERG EFFECT: Child never repeats a word until he's used all the other words in his vocabulary. Sometimes talks backwards. Eventually, people stop listening to him. Child blames them for
their inability to understand him.

BABBITT EFFECT: Child gibbers nonsense all the time. Eventually, people stop listening to him. Child doesn't care because all his playmates think he's cool.

IVES EFFECT: the child develops a remarkable ability to carry on several separate conversations at once.

GLASS EFFECT: the child tends to repeat himself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

STRAVINSKY EFFECT: the child is prone to savage, guttural and profane outbursts that often lead to
fighting and pandemonium in the preschool.

BRAHMS EFFECT: the child is able to speak beautifully as long as his sentences contain a multiple of three words (3, 6, 9, 12, etc.). However, his sentences containing 4 or 8 words are strangely uninspired.

THE CAGE EFFECT: Child says nothing for 4 min. 33 sec. Preferred by 9 out of 10 classroom teachers.

REVIEW: STEVEN MOECKEL/DAVID LOCKINGTON/TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

posted by James Reel

    The Tucson Symphony’s season-closing program consists of one masterpiece, one mantelpiece and a curio. It was an all-English program, so that’s par for the course.
    First, the curiosity: the concert overture The Gale of Life, written last year by Philip Sawyers, and given only its second performance last night by the TSO under guest conductor David Lockington. It’s a symphonic scherzo inspired by lines drawn from A.E. Houseman’s On Wenlock Edge. It begins and ends with brash, syncopated storm music; the eye of the storm is a long period of respite in the middle. This may be new English music, but it sounds precisely like something that might have been written 40 years ago by Robert Ward, a determined American tonalist. Lockington remarked before the piece that Sawyers is a composer inspired by the Second Vienna School, an influence absolutely undectible in this piece, unless you count a spot of oozing chromaticism in the middle section; still, this is something that more likely dripped off John Foulds’ conservative Dynamic Triptich rather than some Second Vienna score. The piece concludes with a paraphrase, not quite a direct quotation, of the end of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Will all these influences in play, it’s difficult to tell who Philip Sawyers really is from this single work.
    Though played well in terms of technique, The Gale of Life would have benefited from a performance with a bit more snarl, and that was also the trouble at the beginning of the masterly Symphony No. 4 of Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the tumultuous opening, Lockington emphasized precision over momentum, and as a result the music’s phrases broke apart into fragments. Things improved tremendously from the midpoint of the first movement; Lockington’s patient control of the well-prepared orchestra paid off in the movement’s restrained second half, and then the Andante was full of stark beauty. Too bad Alexander Lipay’s lovely flute solo at the end was ruined by some idiot’s cell phone. Why do you people even bring those things into the hall? You’re not that important.
    As if to prove that he could handle fast music after all, Lockington led the TSO through a more incisive reading of the two (connected) final movements. Perhaps this performance wasn’t quite all it could have been, but it readily demonstrated why the Vaughan Williams Fourth merits repeated hearings.
    Alas, there was nothing to be done on behalf of Edward Elgar’s bloated, gaseous Violin Concerto, despite the best efforts of Lockington, the TSO and soloist Steven Moeckel, the orchestra’s concertmaster. Moeckel was impressive not just for his stamina through this 50-minute excrescence, but for his dark, woody tone on his lower strings, and for the silvery sound of his upper range. Just as Lockington did the utmost to animate the first movement’s introduction, Moeckel did everything he could to impose some shape on Elgar’s amorphous themes, but in the end you just can’t mold half-cooked porridge. Elgar was a marvelous miniaturist but he was lost in large-scale works (aside from his cello concerto); had he condensed each movement of this concerto to its five-minute essence he might have had something, but instead he spun everything out well beyond the point at which it lost its limited interest. And for a composer of so many decades of experience, it’s shocking how incompetent Elgar proved at balancing the violin against the orchestra in the tedious final movement, full of gouty pomp and pointless passagework. What a pity that Moeckel and the orchestra wasted their considerable talent on this unexportable English muddle.
    English composers of a Romantic nature have been accused of writing too many vapid, pretty pastoralisms, musical depictions of cows gazing over a country fence. In the case of the Elgar Violin Concerto, we approach the cow from behind; after numbing us with a heavy methane fog, the cow lumbers away, leaving us with nothing but a steaming pile of crap.

STRESSED OUT

posted by James Reel

    Last week, as co-master-of-ceremonies of the student chamber music showcase at the UA school of music, I spent some time backstage double-checking the pronunciations of performers’ names. One instrumentalist brightened and said, “I’m flattered someone would ask!” I imagine she’s gone through 16 years of schooling, her teachers always mispronouncing her last name because they’d never bothered to ask her how it should sound. It’s not a difficult name; the challenge is figuring out whether to accent it on the first or last syllable. Americans tend to shift accents to the beginnings of words, but that’s not where the stress should fall in that student’s name.
    I’d guess that stress is second only to vowel quality among things that tone-deaf speakers get wrong. Think about comedians affecting a French accent: Perhaps confused by all those accent marks over concluding Es, they tend to stress the last syllable of every word. In reality, French is pretty much a flat-stress language, except that a spoken French sentence builds momentum as it goes, and tends to end with a little punch. A rule of French stylistics is to conclude every sentence with a strong or important word, rather than letting it trail off; no doubt this ties in with the tendency to inflect the ends of spoken French sentences with extra weight.
    This brings me to something frustrating in my work as an editor and proofreader. One publisher I work with decreed several years ago that “back yard,” the noun, should be replaced by the more colloquial “backyard,” properly reserved for adjectival use. I’ve even seen this atrocity in the morning paper.
    Why is this such a bad thing? Let me count the ways. First, there’s the stress problem. Look at the word “backyard,” and your first inclination is to stress the first syllable. Which makes perfect sense if you’re saying “I have a backyard barbecue.” It makes no sense if you say “I have a barbecue in the backyard.” Preserving the noun form as two separate words keeps the stress in its proper place, and maintains a helpful visual distinction between the noun and adjective. Maybe those points count as “first” and “second.” So third, it’s inconsistent. We haven’t turned “frontyard” into a noun, and I’ve seen no indication that such a change is imminent. If we still use “front yard,” we need the parallel structure of “back yard.” (Same goes for backseat/back seat.)
    English vocabulary is rich in nuance and useful distinctions. Unnecessary streamlining, like nouning “backyard,” robs our language of that richness.

NICE 'MICE'

posted by James Reel

    Today’s Tucson Weekly holds two reviews by yours truly, one enthusiastic, the other ambivalent. First, the good news: Of Mice and Men at Beowulf Alley:

The entire production has been assembled with quiet care. The acting tends to be subtle and anti-melodramatic, yet heartfelt; the pacing is deliberate, yet never feels pokey. All in all, Beowulf Alley does a fine job of rescuing Of Mice and Men from its low status as required reading in high school English and an inspiration for lots of cartoon parodies.

We're dealing with a script that's spent the past 50 years as the high school senior play, and somehow, when it's brought out to mingle with the grown-ups, it just doesn't seem very racy or metaphoric anymore. It still has funny bits, though, as long as you don't mind English Van Druten making his Manhattanites all sound like London sophisticates. It's sort of like they're in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, but a bit less blithe.