ST. LAWRENCE SWITCHEROO

posted by James Reel

    Tonight's Leo Rich Theater concert by the St. Lawrence String Quartet and pianist Stephen Prutsman, presented by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (of which I'm an officer), has some unfortunate changes. One of the quartet members won't be coming to town, because his father has just died; they've temporarily replaced the musician, but they haven't had time to work up the promised Hindemith string quartet; that will be replaced by something else, but at the moment I can't remember what--nothing so rare as the Hindemith, alas. The rest of the program (a Haydn quartet and the Shostakovich piano quintet) remains unchanged.

SPARKS

posted by James Reel

    Last week, upon Amozon.com’s release of Kindle, its new e-book reader, I sent you to an old essay of mine about e-books, as well as Farhad Manjoo’s previews of the new device. Now Manjoo has a full-fledged review of it; here’s the gist:

    If you're on the fence about the utility of an e-book reader—if you doubt that reading e-books can match the experience of reading "real" books—a few hours with the Kindle will do much to change your mind.
    Still, there's a great deal Amazon could improve on. Its $400 price tag, its zany user interface, and some of its sillier restrictions make the Kindle a non-starter for all but the travelingest, readingest early adopters.

DANCING BOWS

posted by James Reel

    OK, here’s one for a very small audience: my piece in the current issue of Strings about bowing technique:

    The ancient Greeks knew of four elements: earth, air, fire, water. The periodic table of elements is a lot more crowded these days, but many dancers still reduce everything to four elements of their own: weight, space, time, flow. That’s what 20th-century dance theorist Rudolf Laban emphasized in his study of movement.
    These elements could apply to string playing, too. What is bowing but a dance on a wire by wood and horsehair partnered by your arm? Janine Riveire, an associate professor of music at Cal Poly Pomona, has adapted Laban’s theories to help you bow like a dancer.

ALL IN THE FAMILY

posted by James Reel

    Last night I had dinner with actress Talia Shire (and nine other people). Toward the end of the meal, her son, actor Jason Schwartzman, called to find out how she’d done in that afternoon’s Chamber Music Plus Southwest show, in which she’d portrayed Fanny Mendelssohn (she was splendid, by the way). Earlier in the evening, Talia had been talking up her son’s latest film, The Darjeeling Limited, which she assured us wasn’t the usual oddball Wes Anderson sort of movie, but a serious and witty film that all serious and witty people should see, even though audiences have so far been in short supply.
    On the subject of Talia Shire’s family, I took an opportunity to point out that her father, composer Carmine Coppola, was a character in a deleted scene of Godfather II, directed by her brother, Francis Ford Coppola. (Talia played Connie Corleone in the Godfather movies.) In this scene, young Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro) and his associates take a bag of guns to an immigrant identified as Augustino Coppola (the name of Talia’s grandfather; according to family lore, Augustino Coppola did, indeed, once receive a visit from what Talia calls “some very scary guys” like these). While Augustino sorts through the guns, he tells his young son, Carmine, to come out and play his flute for the visitors.
    The real Carmine Coppola started out as a flutist; he played for Radio City Music Hall from 1934 to 1936, the Detroit Symphony from 1936 to 1941 and the NBC Symphony (under Arturo Toscanini) from 1942 to 1948, after which he worked as a music director in New York theaters and wrote film music. According to Talia, her father claimed to hate the flute, but he played it with a beautifully full, round tone. He said that Toscanini hired musicians for the NBC Symphony—bowers and blowers alike—on the basis of their vibrato. I’d never heard of that being used as the main criterion for working in an orchestra, but it does fall in line with Toscanini’s famous insistence on unanimity in all things musical.

THEY'VE GASLIGHTED SCROOGE

posted by James Reel

    Here’s my effort to reduce my carbon footprint in the Tucson Weekly: a recycled review of a recycled show:

    The biggest trend this year has been talking about how we can each reduce our carbon footprint (talking about it, rather than actually doing it). One excellent way to go green is to recycle, and I am pleased to report that the Gaslight Theatre is recycling an entertaining Christmas show, a not entirely serious but certainly heartfelt adaptation of A Christmas Carol called Scrooge, or Older but Miser.
    In the interest of reducing my own noxious emissions, I'll recycle some of my review of Gaslight's 2004 production of the show. Please note that this is not 100 percent recycled material, and some updates occur within and after the quoted material.

KINDLING

posted by James Reel

    Amazon.com has unveiled an e-book reader called Kindle, which may finally be the commercially successful non-book book device that has been promised us by various seers and manufacturers for at least 10 years. You can see what Farhad Manjoo has to say about it here and here, although he hasn’t yet gotten his hands on the thing. Maybe this will be the devicee that changes my mind; I’m a longtime skeptic of e-books, as you can read here.