BLOODBATH

posted by James Reel

    Yesterday, managers at the Arizona Daily Star fired 11 newsroom employees. Merry friggin’ Christmas.
    Publisher John Humenik, according to an article in today’s business section, blamed the firings on “slumping advertising sales and the real estate downturn.” According to the article, Humenik "declined to identify the employees but said they were offered severance packages.” Whoever wrote the story wasn’t very observant; all that was necessary to discover the victims was to look around the newsroom yesterday morning and see which people were cleaning out their desks, and whose e-mail accounts were immediately terminated, presumably so they couldn’t send out any subversive last-minute messages.
    According to someone I spoke to last night who is still employed at the Star, the victims were a mix of recent hires and long-time employees. I got the names of only about half the sacked personnel, but it seems that the victims were primarily copy editors and clerical workers, not the sort of people readers would develop any loyalty to, but people who are very important to newsroom operation. Nobody from the department head level on up got fired; too bad, because that’s where the fat is.
    According to my source, the operation was conducted very clumsily. The victims got phone calls the night before, saying “You haven’t done anything wrong, but we need to meet with you tomorrow morning.” The meetings were held downstairs in the TNI community room, well isolated from the newsroom. Victims were called forth one at a time, told they were being let go, offered some sort of severance package (rumor: three weeks' pay), then sent upstairs to clear their desks and vacate the premises immediately. Naturally, it didn’t take people in the newsroom long to figure out what was going on, and I can imagine the feelings among those waiting to go to their appointments downstairs.
    Only around 12:30 did publisher Humenik call a staff meeting. Presumably the excuse to hold off was to wait until more employees were present, but if that were true he would have waited until 3 p.m., when staffing peaks. According to my source, Humenik nervously read a four-page statement first blaming the firings on the economic downturn, then rallying the troops with a “we shall overcome” speech. It might have been more convincing if his hands hadn’t been shaking so much.
    No time for Q&A, but according to my informant, the ever-sensible Bonnie Henry did comment that she’d never seen layoffs of this magnitude at the Star. Humenik asked if she was aware of trends in the industry, making this sort of action increasingly common, and Bonnie reportedly replied, “This is the industry I know.”
    I remember that around 1990 or so, 11 reporters left the Star more or less at once, expressing disgust at reductions in the paper triggered by the loss of supermarket and bank advertising, but they left of their own accord, in high dudgeon; they weren’t laid off.
    At his blog, former Star reporter Michael Marizco relays a rumor that Jim Click’s automotive enterprises have cut advertising by 50 percent, sending panic through Star and TNI management; he further points out that stock in the Star’s parent company has plummeted from nearly $36 in March to $14 today. Marizco also relays an internal newsroom memo about other cutbacks at the paper, although it doesn’t mention staff reductions.
    In the Star article, Humenik blames slumping advertising for the firings; my source pointed out last night that ads are decreasing less because of the economy than because the newspaper’s circulation is declining. Here’s an idea: Instead of succumbing to panic and firing people, how about luring more ads by attracting more readers, by putting out a better newspaper?

HIGH FIDELITY

posted by James Reel

    Well, glory be! Somebody in a fairly mainstream publication (Slate) has spoken out against the cruddy sound of mp3 files. As Fred Kaplan makes clear, convenience does not trump quality. Unplug your earbuds, pay attention to the world outside your head for a while, then go home and sit down in front the best audio equipment you can afford and try actually listening to the music. Please.

REVIEW: CMS STUDIO INITIAL RELEASES

posted by James Reel

For a forthcoming issue of Fanfare:

DVORAK Terzetto, Op. 74; Piano Quartet, Op. 87 BEETHOVEN Piano Quartet, Op. 16 * Wu Han (pn); Erin Keefe, Arnaud Sussmann (vn); Beth Guterman (vla); David Finckel (vc) * CMS STUDIO RECORDINGS 82503 (78:42)

ELGAR Piano Quintet WALTON Piano Quartet * Wu Han (pn); Ani Kavafian, Arnaud Sussman (vn); Paul Neubauer (vla); Fred Sherry (vc) * CMS STUDIO RECORDINGS 82505 (78:42)

    Except for the Dvorak Piano Quartet, none of these works have yet been recorded to the saturation point, so these first two releases in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Studio series are attractive for that alone. The playing throughout is typical of the current, very high American chamber-music standard: incisive attacks, rather lean tone (not as lush as Eastern Europeans can be), and impeccable technique. The performance can be suitably sweet when necessary, as in the Dvorak Terzetto, but more often than not, intensity and drama are conveyed more strongly than warmth. This means that the finale of the Dvorak Piano Quartet gets an exciting, edge-of-the-seat performances, but the passages that invite a more affectionate approach seem comparatively underplayed, or at least less emotionally involved.
    The curiosity on the first disc is the Beethoven, the composer’s own piano-and-strings arrangement of his famous quintet for piano and winds. It’s disconcerting to hear strings where the winds should be—for one thing, this early Beethoven work now sounds much more Romantic. The ensemble sound is now mellower, and the piano playing must be more subtle; Wu Han plays with the necessary restraint, without sacrificing character. The Dvorak string trio comes off with good humor (especially the third movement) and a nice variety of tone color. The Piano Quartet gets a big, public performance, yet one that finds the music’s plaintive side when the texture occasionally thins out—but only then. The Lento is tightly controlled, nearly as tense as the first movement, and I’ve already described the overall approach in the previous paragraph.
    My problem with the second disc has nothing to do with the playing and interpretation, and everything to do with Elgar, a composer for whom I have little sympathy in large-scale works. He was a superb miniaturist, but, except in the Cello Concerto, was unable to craft a coherent musical argument in a large-scale format (the Violin Concerto being the prime offender, with the Second Symphony not far behind). The first movement of this quintet is a mess; Sibelius and Mahler, to mention two contemporaries, could cause fragments to cohere into something compelling, but Elgar simply cannot. Here, the players don’t waste their time trying to pull the bits and pieces together; they emphasize the music’s shifting character, moment to moment, from anticipation to bluster to sentimentality; it’s a collage of interesting, sometimes haunting sketches that Elgar never properly integrates and develops. Elgar is much more competent in the slow movement, particularly in the passionate central section, between the more tranquil outer parts. The Lincoln Center players underline the contrasts, even while handling the transitions beautifully. The final movement, though, is again compositionally and thematically diffuse (and not just because material from the first movement reappears here). If English pastoral music is said to evoke a cow gazing over a fence, Elgar’s Piano Quintet evokes a cow pie, yet I must admit that this performance is as committed, and as extroverted, as can be.
    Walton’s Piano Quartet exists on a far higher plane. It was written at about the same time as the Elgar, by an inexperienced 16-year-old, yet—granting that it was revised and no doubt improved later—it’s much more coherent and consistently striking. The Scherzo, for example, is muscular yet fleet, and the last movement is rustic and rambunctious, thanks both to Walton and to the musicians at hand.
    As recorded and produced by Da-Hong Seetoo, an audiophile as well as a fine violinist (he recorded the Tchaikovsky Trio with Finckel and Wu Han on their own ArtistLed label), the musicians seem to exist in a real physical space, heard from a front-row audience perspective rather than a player’s perspective (Seetoo doesn’t seem to cram microphones under the piano lid and into the violins’ f-holes, but lets the sound breathe a bit before capturing it). Despite my dismissal of the Elgar as a composition (but not as a performance), both these discs provide a clear and flattering snapshot of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

CD REVIEWS TO COME

posted by James Reel

    Something I intended to do when I started this blog, but never got around to, was posting some of the CD reviews I write for print magazines. This might be a good time to start, especially with people looking for gift ideas for the holidays. Be warned, though: Not all the reviews will be positive.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

posted by James Reel

    I recently interviewed pianist Wu Han, co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and asked her why the society has launched its own CD label, even though it already has a download agreement with Deutsche Grammophon. She said, "I can’t imagine, after a concert, signing somebody’s iPod."

MESSIAH

posted by James Reel

    We’ve been running a lot of underwriting credits for performances this weekend of Handel’s Messiah. Here’s some background on the concerts:

    Almost every year, Enrique Lasansky conducts performances of Handel's Messiah. Perhaps he's making up for lost time.
    "I had no exposure to it whatsoever as I grew up as a musician," he says. Lasansky started out as a clarinetist, and there's no clarinet part in this most beloved of oratorios. If you're not a singer, a string player or maybe a trumpeter or oboist, you're not likely to perform it.
    "I never sang it," Lasansky says. "I don't think I even heard Messiah beyond the Hallelujah Chorus until I was in my 20s.
    "After that, I realized it was one of those pieces that are performed all the time, and as a conductor, I figured I needed to know it. It was a wonderful discovery for me, but it wasn't in my roots."
    As if to compensate for all those years of neglect, Lasansky has conducted Messiah most Christmases since he founded the Catalina Chamber Orchestra in 1991. (This season, the orchestra changed its name to Tucson Chamber Orchestra, to avoid confusion with the little town of Catalina, and it has completely professionalized. "There are a lot of new players," Lasansky says. "The old orchestra has gone away, in a way.")
    This year, he has gone all out. Not only is he conducting the work with his chamber orchestra this weekend; he hand-picked and personally rehearsed the chorus (instead of employing an existing community choir, as in the past), and this month, he's been immersing students at St. Gregory College Preparatory School in Messiah lore. He gave guest lectures in music, English and European history classes, and presided over an all-school assembly, performing bits of the work with his chorus and a string quartet.