INVITATION TO A YAMMERING

posted by James Reel

    The 14th Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival begins this Sunday, and continues through the following Sunday. As usual, it keeps me busy; besides a couple of private gatherings for musicians and for board members like me, I’ll be MCing Thursday’s kiddie matinee, co-teaching an Elderhostel class on chamber music, and—of greatest interest (if any) to you—giving the pre-concert talks. I try to make these presentations more than just 20 minutes of potted musicology; I devote most of the time to interviewing festival musicians and composers, getting them to talk about things that aren’t covered in the program notes. If you’re coming to any concerts, please do arrive half an hour early for the free talks. Ushers close the hall doors while the talks are in progress to block noise from the lobby, but if you arrive late, please feel free to come in through one of the side doors and claim the nearest seat. I hope to see you there!

HEEDING THE CALL

posted by James Reel

    Yesterday, a fellow from the Music Critics Association of North America informed me that I’d been nominated to run for the organization’s board. After laughing myself into a coughing spasm, I accepted the challenge, even though I doubt I’ll be elected; probably no more than two people in MCANA know who I am. Most likely, the nominating committee compiled a list of members who paid their dues on time but hadn’t attended the annual conference in several years. It’s a scheme to get slackers like me to show up for the next conference, in late May, just in case we win and are needed at the board meeting.
    I’ve been thinking about what sort of mission I might propose for myself as a board-member-at-large. I think I’d like to address two issues related to the same root problem: American newspapers are phasing out their full-time classical-music critics, and replacing them, if at all, with staff reporters who lack the assignment’s necessary expertise, or with freelancers who have no influence on the direction of coverage. So, first, I’d like to make sure that freelancers continue to see MCANA as an organization that is worth the annual dues that come out of their own pockets, not out of some newspaper’s expense account. Second, I think MCANA needs to conduct some aggressive membership and service outreach to nonspecialist newspaper staffers who get stuck with the classical beat, but don’t realize there’s an organization that can help them develop the credibility they lack.
    Really, it’s up to the critics to set their own standards and police their ranks, because newspaper editors are proving incompetent at quality control. For the past few years, features editors have been chosen for their efficiency rather than their breadth of knowledge, and without that knowledge they can’t possibly judge the work of people on specialized beats. People who are color-blind can’t be trusted as interior decorators, but editors who are culture-blind are allowed to supervise cultural journalism. If anybody’s going to keep newspaper coverage of classical music from becoming a national embarrassment, it’s got to be the critics themselves.

RICHARD WAGNER: PAGE 3 GIRL

posted by James Reel

    Here’s a sensationalist item you’d expect to find in one of the British tabloids, but not in the respectable Guardian: Richard Wagner was a cross-dresser, maybe. This allegation is based on a previously unpublished letter in which Wagner orders a dress, listing its every frill and bow in great detail. Nowhere does he state that the dress is for his use, rather than for his wife, Cosima, and there’s no indication that he ordered it in his size, rather than hers. Wagner was a notorious micromanager, so I see no reason for him not to be intimately familiar with the specifics of female couture, along with so many other things. Maybe he was a cross-dresser, but this letter proves absolutely nothing. Let’s have some actual evidence. Didn’t journalists learn anything from the WMD fiasco?
    And, by the way, if Wagner did enjoy slipping into a skirt now and then, so what? Defenders of his character have bigger things to contend with than supposed transvestism. This is an issue I just can’t care about, and I bring it up only as an example of press laziness. Shall we now have a little chat about cold fusion?
    Maybe this lung infection is just making me intolerant. More than usual, I mean.

POKE AT A 'PIG'

posted by James Reel

    In the current Tucson Weekly, I review a late-night production of Neil LaBute’s rather slim Fat Pig:

    Back in his student days, Neil LaBute must have heard the term "theater of cruelty" and decided to make it his own: not the violent shattering of false reality that Antonin Artaud had in mind, but something more literal, more petty and personal. LaBute has devoted his career to showing us what nasty little assholes we are.
    LaBute is best known for his quietly vicious first two films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, but he's also quite an active playwright. By LaBute's standards, Fat Pig--the current late show at Live Theatre Workshop--is a tender romance, but LaBute isn't really cut out for a play revolving around two nice people. Malignant forces do go to work on our hero and heroine, but the whole thing seems just a bit soft. LaBute doesn't bite into his hero's soul; he just gives it a good, hard gumming.

    The full review is here.

STRING THEORIES

posted by James Reel

    Bits of the latest issue of Strings magazine are online, including my profile of violinist Jennifer Koh:

    You’ve got to love Jennifer Koh for more than just her brain. Oh, sure, at age 17, when she won the top violin prize in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, she nixed the idea of becoming an instant touring virtuoso and high-tailed it back to Oberlin College to finish her degree—in English literature. And, yes, she had the idea of recording a disc of Szymanowski, Martinü, and Bartók concertos after reading the complete works of Czech novelist and essayist Milan Kundera.
    Yet Koh is most certainly not the sort of person to intellectualize all the emotion out of music. Says her mentor, violinist Jaime Laredo, “She’s very outgoing, almost flamboyant, but in a very good way, not in an ostentatious way. And she really touches the heart, because she plays from the heart.”

    The full article rests here. The issue also contains my interview with violinist Vincent Skowronski about the right way (in his opinion) to play the first-movement cadenza in Mendelssohn’s E-minor violin concerto. Now, unless you’re planning to perform the concerto yourself sometime soon, this may not seem like compelling reading, but Skowronski does have some colorful things to say. F’rinstance: “[Mendelssohn] was refined. Even his physiognomy was refined. What he wrote was refined. So why brutalize the concerto? Among violinists, if you like to chop wood and you want to play Mendelssohn, you have to compromise in the middle and not beat the hell out of it.” If you’re interested, you can find the rest here.

HATTOGATE: LOCAL REPERCUSSIONS

posted by James Reel

    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.