OUT, AND ABOUT

posted by James Reel

    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.

LINK TO 'TIES'

posted by James Reel

    No, I’m not on vacation; I’m one of the dozens of people hereabouts felled by the flu. (I dutifully got a flu shot in November, but it was apparently for the wrong strain.) Before succumbing, I did manage to catch a play for review in today’s Tucson Weekly:

    Whose story is it, anyway? Elizabeth Diggs' Close Ties is billed as a drama about a family coming to grips with how to deal with its increasingly senile matriarch. Eight characters vie for prominence in this 1981 work, presented by Catalina Players; some must inevitably be nudged aside by a few others whose personalities and conflicts command our attention--and the author's.
    So which characters take possession of this story? The answer is a bit surprising, but it's the natural result of Diggs' own interests, and certain strengths of casting in the local production.

HATTO UPDATES

posted by James Reel

    I have no further comment on the Joyce Hatto Affair, but I will direct you to two useful sites. First, David Hurwitz of Classics Today describes how the story broke (it wasn't all sleuthing by Gramophone) here, with the continuation here. And Jessica Duchen is compiling links to articles and discussions at her site.

HATTO'S OFF

posted by James Reel

    During the past year, critics have been all a-twitter over a slew of recordings featuring a reclusive and now dead British pianist named Joyce Hatto. According to legend, health problems caused her to stop concertizing in the 1970s, but she spend the remaining three decades of her life in the studio, recording her entire repertory. The CDs, most of them thrust into the market with great fanfare over the past several months, have been greeted as among the finest performances of this music in recorded history (especially astonishing as they were made by a sickly 70-year-old woman).
    Well, they may be among the finest in recorded history, but it seems they aren't by Joyce Hatto. Looks like her husband, who owns the little recording company that's been issuing the discs, has been pirating recordings by other pianists, some obscure, some not, including Yefim Bronfman and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Here's the New York Times article inspired by the original Gramophone news item, and here's a site, with waveforms and audio clips, that links Hatto's recordings to specific releases by other pianists.
    If Gramophone hadn't launched the investigation, I would take this opportunity to sneer at British boosterism gone bad, because it was mainly the British press that launched the Hatto adulation, with Americans then going along with it. But really, given that almost nobody has turned up who actually heard Hatto play in concert, and that an elderly, cancer-stricken woman was purported to be making top-quality recordings of very difficult piano music, how could everybody have been so credulous?

THREE FOR THE SHOW

posted by James Reel

    It’s review time again in my little space in the Tucson Weekly. This time, I have a trio of plays to cover. Some highlights:

    Of three theater openings last week, one show focused exclusively on women with big hair, while another dwelled on men with big aspirations under their G-strings. The third integrated two men and a woman in a way that shows neither gender to particular advantage, but it did so more fully and honestly than the other two productions, which aspire to be little more than light entertainment. …
    For the most part, the UA's Arizona Repertory Theatre production serves Betrayal well. Director Samantha K. Wyer has made sure her three actors play something more than self-absorbed twits. Well, yes, they're British, so that particular element is inescapable, but there are honest human feelings behind the twittage. What we don't quite get is an authentic Pinter rhythm, those bursts of short, staccato lines separated by uncomfortable pauses. …
    The Full Monty is a commercial show by the standards of Arizona Onstage Productions, which is more closely associated with the deeply felt, nonpandering works of William Finn. Still, if the company finds it necessary to replenish its bank account with a crowd-pleaser, at least it's not compromising its principles. Like most Arizona Onstage shows, The Full Monty deals with issues of sexual identity and the nature of friendship and family without tripping over too many clichés. True, the men here can be macho pricks; the women are tough providers with a keen eye for the male thigh; and the guys are coached by a tough old showbiz veteran who could pass for Martha Raye. But they all have to sort through their strengths and insecurities in ways that seem fairly authentic, by the standards of the Broadway musical. …
    Women get their chance at Live Theatre Workshop, which just opened Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias. It's a formulaic, manipulative and therefore not surprisingly popular account of two years in the lives of women who congregate in a beauty parlor in the fictitious town of Chinquapin, La. A chinquapin is also a kind of chestnut, which is exactly what we get from Harling. I'd love to roast it on an open fire, but director Sabian Trout and her strong cast give us a production that respects the characters, as well as the intelligence of the audience.

ADDENDUM

posted by James Reel

    Former KUAT relief announcer Michael Dauphinais has pointed out to me that, as engaging as the concert announcement in the previous post may be, it neglects to mention that the singer has an accompanist, or who it is. Hmm ... Michael is a pianist who works a great deal with singers. I wonder who the accompanist might be? Not Michael, I've learned; he's busy tickling the ivories in Florida right now, and won't be back in Arizona until next month.