posted by James Reel
In trying to bust what he calls myths that encourage a rosy view of the health of classical concerts, Greg Sandow finally does what few other participants in this discussion bother to do: look not just at orchestral attendance, but at chamber-music series as well:
If we look at established chamber music series over the past 20 years, we'd almost certainly see a drop in ticket sales. I say "almost certainly" because I don't know if anyone has collected any data, but in many conversations with people who run chamber music series, I hear about the audience declining. One venerable institution that I know about has lost from 10 to 20 subscribers, approximately, each year for the past decade. That doesn't sound like much, until you add up the numbers. This group has around 700 subscribers now, and they used to have 800. That's a 9% drop over 10 years, and there's no sign that it's ending.
You can read Greg’s full post here. I’d just like to point out that my organization, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, isn’t having any attendance or budget trouble at all. For the main series, there’s still a long waiting list for season tickets, and when seats are empty in the main part of the hall, that’s usually because season subscribers haven’t shown up, and haven’t released their seats for resale. True, the few extra seats down by the stage are often empty, but those are set aside for walk-ups and school kids (who generally do not take advantage of our free ticket offers). Again, those are “extra,” temporary seats that don’t even officially exist on the hall’s seating chart, so I shed no tears when they’re not filled—and they usually are for the big-name ensembles, like the Emerson Quartet. The winter festival in March sells very well—the Sunday and Friday concerts generally sell out, and the midweek concerts come close. There’s still room for growth in the Sunday Piano & Friends series, but that series features little-known performers, and the audience has been building steadily over the past few years.
How do we do it? Well, first, unlike a lot of American orchestras, which have gotten over-ambitious in the past 20 years, we know our limitations. We operate in a 550-seat hall (counting those temporary chairs), which is really all you want for an intimate genre like chamber music. Chamber ensembles are fairly inexpensive to engage (top rate is about $18,000, and most are $8,000 to $12,000 these days), so we don’t bust the budget with overpriced superstars. The atmosphere is welcoming and informal, but we don’t treat the audience members like uncultured idiots. We have a strong mix of old favorites and contemporary music, and we’ve commissioned much of the latter ourselves—with money donated by individuals from the audience, not culled from grants.
Yes, it’s almost impossible to get college-age people to show up, but that was true even when we operated on the UA campus, and music students barely can be rounded up for recitals by their own friends and professors. We have a substantial nest egg, but I suspect that’s been seriously cracked by the recent market decline, so we will have to be careful with our money. But all in all, we’re doing fine, and even if students aren’t lining up at the box office, we do have more than a hundred people queued up for season tickets when they become available. We’re in great shape, and I really can’t figure out why other chamber presenters aren’t. I suspect it has less to do with the music’s lack of appeal or demographic/sociological issues than clumsy management.
Classical Music,
October 15th 2008 at 8:11 —
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posted by James Reel
Here are three CD reviews I wrote for Fanfare, in which I give tepidly positive recommendations ... a rather tricky sort of review to write, and unfortunately the sort we have to write most often. Rare is the CD that merits either a rave or an all-out attack. Here we go ...
SHOSTAKOVICH Symphonies: No. 3, “May Day”; No. 15 Roman Kofman, cond; Beethoven O Bonn; Czech Phil Cho Brno MDG 937 1210-6 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 75:21)
“Well,” I thought uncharitably when this next-to-last installment in Roman Kofman’s underwhelming Shostakovich cycle arrived, “at least this means the series is almost over.”Up to this point, Kofman’s performances have been done in by a flatness of affect and a lack of propulsion. This conductor seems unable to bring commitment and involvement to overtly dramatic passages. As it turns out, Shostakovich shaped these two symphonies, especially the Fifteenth, as if to downplay Kofman’s weaknesses as an interpreter, so the disc at hand rises above the rest of the series.
In the early 1970s, Shostakovich claimed that with the Fifteenth he intended to write a “happy little symphony,” something of a musical toyshop. What he actually produced was far more complex than that. There are severally typically mordant episodes, and snippets of Rossini’s William Tell Overture in the first movement allude to Shostakovich’s early work cobbling together live musical accompaniment for silent movies. But the second movement is serious indeed, and perhaps the symphony’s most memorable material is its use of a brass chorale lifted from Wagner’s Ring. It is not a symphony full of driving scherzi and crushing climaxes, so there are few opportunities for Kofman to go wrong. True, in the first movement, a few outbursts, especially at phrase ends, could use a little more snap, but otherwise the music is played with the needed sass. In the slow movement, a few moments plod, but it’s otherwise effective, even if it fails to reach the intensity achieved in several other recordings. The little Allegretto skips by without incident, and the slow final movement is naturally subdued, and therefor does not succumb to Kofman’s typical weaknesses.
The youthful Third Symphony is an experiment that Shostakovich wisely did not repeat, a series of undeveloped, unrelated episodes with a bombastic but mercifully brief choral finale. Kofman encourages the music to natter along, but rarely whips it into a proper frenzy.
The Fifteenth is the work of real interest here, and my current favorite recording, by Järvi on DG, seems to be unavailable at the moment. It has much more snap and snarl than Kofman’s traversal. Of the SACD competition, Caetani’s treatment is even more somber than this one, and Kitayenko’s, which is a bit closer to Järvi’s interpretation, is available only in a big box, as far as I can tell. This latest MDG disc is certainly attractive from the sonic standpoint; the SACD surround layer provides excellent left-to-right definition of the string sections, with the woodwinds and brass positioned quite specifically just a bit behind. Is the praise too faint if I conclude that this is one Roman Kofman disc that you need not avoid? James Reel
BRUCKNER Symphony No. 9 (with finale, revised Samale et al. edition) Marcus Bosch, cond; Aachen SO COVIELLO 30711 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 69:54)
This version of the Bruckner Ninth is remarkable in two respects: first, it’s a fleet performance the likes of which haven’t been heard since Bruno Walter in the 1940s, and second, it ends with what I think is the first recording of the reconstructed finale in the latest (2005) revision of the Samale/Mazzuca/Phillips/Cohrs completion, which has been recorded in earlier incarnations. Of this version’s 665 bars, 569 were pieced together from Bruckner’s own scattered materials (some quite sketchy, but much of it well fleshed out); the coda is wholly fabricated by the editors, based on Bruckner’s intention of concluding with a “hymn of praise to God” and employing motifs from the first and third movements. The booklet includes detailed notes by one of the editors, Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs.
The resulting final movement sounds like Wagner on a particularly uninspired day, but that could be said of much of Bruckner’s own work early in his career as a symphonist. Those more deeply devoted than I to the Bruckner cause will find much fodder for discussion here, and I can imagine that many people will remain partial to the three-movement torso, for even though it ends in the “wrong” key (E major is not where a D-minor symphony is supposed to culminate), it does have a satisfying arch form. At least the curious will not have to pay for an extra disc to hear how the finale works out, as is almost always the case, for Marcus Bosch whips right through the music; the total timing, with the finale, is 69:54, which is not far beyond the duration of many three-movement performances. Bosch brings in the first three movements at 49:31.
As in earlier installments in this series, Bosch keeps things moving smartly, and he does so in the first movement without slighting the initial Misterioso character. Pauses aren’t exactly pregnant, though, and the third movement suggests not spiritual power so much as the mighty engines of the Titanic sweeping the symphonic ship into the frozen unknown. On the positive side, Bosch does much to tighten up Bruckner’s musical argument. Obviously, many partisans will feel that something sacred has been defiled; on the other hand, this performance is strongly recommended to people looking for evidence that Bruckner is not merely a rhetorically clumsy pseudo-mystical windbag.
Sonically, this SACD is less beguiling than earlier releases in the series, with the orchestra placed even more distantly than usual in an enveloping cathedral acoustic. James Reel
LANGGAARD Symphony No. 1, “Mountain Pastorals” Thomas Dausgaard, cond; Danish NSO DACAPO 6.220525 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 60:30)
In 1913, German audiences and critics welcomed the Berlin Philharmonic’s premiere of young Rued Langgaard’s First Symphony with real enthusiasm, but Langgaard’s fellow Danes wanted nothing to do with the thing. And with some good reason; clocking in at about an hour, depending on tempos and cuts, it sprawls out of control in three of the five movements. Langgaard would have been better advised to follow the path of Richard Strauss in his Alpine Symphony (a programmatic cousin to Langgaard’s First, begun in 1911, the year the Dane finished his work), and completely ignore the conventions of symphonic structure rather than cram a riot of effects (as opposed to ideas) into a traditional form. Perhaps Langgaard learned his lesson, for he would prove to be a structural iconoclast in many of his 15 symphonies that followed.
This symphony describes a walk from the ocean-lapped foot of the mountain Kullen to its summit, an ascent of little more than 600 feet—hardly a Straussian Alpine expedition, but from the music you’d think Langgaard were scaling the Matterhorn. Perhaps that’s because the subtext of Langgaard’s program has to do with the strivings of the soul. The first movement, “Surf and Glimpses of Sun,” and the last, “Courage,” are full of Romantic heaving and thrusting, but ultimately, Shakespeare’s line about “sound and fury signifying nothing” seems only slightly too harsh a description. The second movement, “Mountain Flowers,” goes on longer than Langgaard’s material can support, and it’s one of two successive Lento movements, failing to provide sufficient internal contrast.
I’m aware of two previous recordings of the Langgaard First: Ilya Stupel and the Artur Rubinstein Philharmonic as part of their pioneering Langgaard cycle on Danacord (still available if you search hard enough), and Leif Segerstam and the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra on Chandos. Stupel’s orchestra is clearly inferior to the Danish National Symphony Orchestra on this new release (a continuation of Dacapo’s in-progress cycle), and Segerstam drags the thing out seven minutes longer than the performance at hand, so for those reasons alone Thomas Dausgaard has the edge. Beyond that, this is a confident, extroverted performance that makes the best case possible for this problematic symphony. The DSD recording, though, isn’t quite top-notch. The soundstage is fairly broad, but flat from front to back, with everything on the same thin plane. The treble, especially the violin section, has a hard, glassy sound akin to that in early digital recording, not what we expect from a modern SACD. Still, if you absolutely must own a recording of the Langgaard First, this is the one to have. James Reel
Classical Music,
October 14th 2008 at 7:28 —
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posted by James Reel
Is it Thursday already? That means I’m smudging a couple of pages of the latest Tucson Weekly. Only one theater review this time:
I recently heard someone dismiss Ray Cooney's farce _Funny Money_ as _Run for Your Wife 4_.
In other words, Cooney, Britain's leading farceur, has stitched _Funny Money_ together according to exactly the same pattern he has successfully employed in _Run for Your Wife_ and its actual sequel, _Caught in the Net_, not to mention just about every other play he has written: That is, some entirely unremarkable Englishman gets caught up in some extraordinary circumstance of his own devising, traps himself and everyone around him in a cascade of little lies and mistaken identities, and throws around some sexual innuendo that's supposed to be titillating but really wouldn't even offend the Queen Mother.
We've seen all of this before, certainly at Live Theatre Workshop, which has produced _Run for Your Wife_ and _Caught in the Net_ in recent seasons, and is now lavishing its comic resources on _Funny Money_.
Alas, I wasn’t as amused as the theater would have liked, and you can find out why here. Then move along to the Chow section, and see me abuse the liberty of the anecdotal lede:
A few years ago, I'd visit Vietnam every week--when it had a small outpost on Grant Road.
It was the home of a Vietnamese man I had volunteered to tutor in English, helping him out with his Pima Community College assignments (which, by the way, were nearly spotless in grammar, usage and penmanship before I arrived).
He, his wife, their kids and a grandfather were among the Vietnamese refugees who had resettled here around 1990 or so. The father of the household had been a civil engineer in Saigon, and an officer in the South Vietnamese army, which meant trouble once the North took over. In Tucson, he cleaned up other people's yards. His wife had owned a fashionable dress shop or two in Saigon; here, she sewed uniforms for the state-prison system. The kids were apparently doing great in high school and at the UA; the grandfather was less adaptable, but had transformed the front yard of their rented house into a fine vegetable garden.
Every Sunday morning upon my arrival, the exceptionally hospitable family would ply me with a series of little Vietnamese dishes, sometimes involving fish balls, many of them employing a light fish sauce. I didn't charge for my tutoring services, but the food was more than ample compensation. It kept coming, morsel by morsel, until I had the willpower to leave one last bit on the plate, the polite Asian signal that I'd had enough.
The portions are much larger at Saigon Phö, a restaurant that opened last spring in the new part of the Main Gate Square complex on the northwest corner of Park Avenue and University Boulevard. The restaurant doesn't face either of those streets; it's accessible through a passageway leading from University to a back parking lot. Perhaps because it's hidden away, few of the restaurant's 40 seats have been filled on any of my visits over the past few months, including dinner time on a recent Friday night.
Yes, this does eventually become a restaurant review, and you can find the part about the food here.
tucson-arts,
October 9th 2008 at 8:31 —
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posted by James Reel
Have I posted these two reviews I wrote for Fanfare? This site still has no search function (nor a blogroll or provision for a sidebar of links of any kind), so I'm not sure what's here already and what's not. Well, even if you've read these two Bruckner reviews, they probably haven't stuck in your brain, so here you go:
BRUCKNER Symphony No. 3 (1873 version) * Simone Young, cond; Hamburg PO * OEHMS OC 624 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 68:38)
Simone Young is recording the earliest versions of Bruckner’s first four symphonies, plus the Eighth. I was very impressed by her traversal of the Second, although the score itself does not rise to Young’s level of interpretation (see Fanfare 31:3). The Third, the so-called “Wagner” Symphony, is a more satisfactory score, although I must admit that I prefer the later, trimmer editions. The 1873 original, with its Wagner quotations intact, is given to bloat, and the Adagio is simply unmemorable. That said, Young makes a good case for this edition in an increasingly crowded field. This performance is very slow overall, about the same as Nagano’s, but not as expansive as the unusual Tintner (I’m restricting my comparisons to recordings of the 1873 version). The first movement is especially drawn out, and I may eventually decide that it’s too lugubrious for my taste, but at the moment I appreciate Young’s patience, which makes the music ruminative without dragging, and shows proper respect for the rests. The Adagio, despite its inherent defects, is well paced. The scherzo shows off the orchestra’s powerful brass—the section plays with lots of punch here, less elsewhere—contrasted with the grace of the strings and woodwinds in the trio section. The same remarks hold for Young’s traversal of the final movement. The DSD-recorded acoustic is big enough to accommodate the orchestra and its climaxes, but the score does not flounder in cathedral reverberation.
This is a very fine version of the 1873 edition. Robert McColley praised the Douglas Nott recording in 28:6; I haven’t heard it, but I’m cautious, not having found much interest in Nott’s Schubert. McColley also approves of the Nagano performance (28:3), while expressing a preference for Tintner (which, unlike the others mentioned, is not a surround-sound SACD). Peter Rabinowitz warns us away from the Marcus Bosch effort in 31:2. At the moment, I’m quite happy with Simone Young. James Reel
BRUCKNER Mass No. 2. Os justi. Virga Jesse. Locus iste. Afferentur regi. Ave Maria (1861). Christus factus est. Pange lingua * Marcus Creed, cond; SWR Vocal Ens, Stuttgart * HÄNSSLER 93.199 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 65:29)
Bruckner’s Mass No. 2, for chorus accompanied by winds, has received relatively few recordings in recent years, although the smaller motets have fared better. There’s a newish recording of the Mass from Stephen Layton and Polyphony on Hyperion, which I haven’t heard and has not been reviewed in Fanfare at this writing; Robert McColley is very fond of a Carus motet collection conducted by Hans-Christoph Redemann, and had praise for an MDG SACD with Petr Fiala directing Czech forces (see Fanfare 30:4). My own standard for all the Bruckner choral music is the old Jochum set on DG, which seems to be currently available only as a two-pack containing the three Masses, but none of the other choral music that were included in the four-CD version; 10 motets, Psalm 150 and the popular Te Deum are relegated to a separate disc.
On the disc at hand, fleshing out the rather early Mass with some of Bruckner’s early and mature motets, Marcus Creed leads performances that are consistently a bit faster than Jochum’s (except in Pange lingua), but are still slow and devotional. Jochum, overall, is the more dramatic interpreter. Creed, being English, draws a fairly white tone from what sounds to be a mid-sized German choir, but not at the expense of expressive warmth. The choir is well blended, even if some of the writing is skewed to the top voices. The one drawback is that there isn’t much variety among the six motets that begin the disc, which leads to just a little tedium. The surround sound is flattering to the singers, without drawing attention to itself in any way—a hallmark of the SWR engineers. This is a well-performed collection in modern sound, but I’ll stick with the old Jochum when I’m in more of a mood for action than contemplation. James Reel
Classical Music,
October 8th 2008 at 7:47 —
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posted by James Reel
In the hallway outside my radio studio, there’s a big TV screen that displays six—count ’em, six—different KUAT/Arizona Public Media video feeds. One of them is devoted entirely to children’s programming, and the main broadcast channel devotes most of the morning to PBS kiddie shows. There are lots of non-PBS children’s shows on various cable channels, and as far as I know the commercial networks still devote Saturday mornings to cartoons.
Why?
What do children learn from sitting in front of a television that they couldn’t learn more thoroughly from interacting with other human beings? How can Barney or the denizens of Sesame Street or the departed Mr. Rogers teach kids about sharing if they don’t have anybody to share something with? Are commercial-network cartoons even entertaining? I didn’t think so when I was a kid, aside from old Warner Bros. efforts and maybe Roger Ramjet and Rocky & Bullwinkle.
Shows about things like Thomas the Tank Engine are good mainly for selling toys. Why should a child waste time watching the animated infomercial? The kid should just play with the damn toys, either alone (honing the individual imagination) or with other children (learning social interaction). Children also need more time with adults, parents, teachers and strangers who have no compunction about setting them straight when they get out of line. Kids I know spend so much time cavorting in front of the TV (not even watching it, really) that they have no idea how to behave appropriately around actual human beings.
So here’s an idea: End all children’s television programming. Let them read, run around, play with other kids, interact with adults, spend a limited amount of time with video games, help around the house—anything but watch TV. Then PBS and other networks could fill the mornings with programs that grownups could TiVo and use to keep themselves pacified and out of trouble at night.
quodlibet,
October 7th 2008 at 7:42 —
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