KILLING ME SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG

posted by James Reel

First there was Joshua’s horn at the walls of Jericho, then Mozart employed to scare teenage loiterers away from convenience stores and subway stations. Now American interrogators are using a wide array of music to break their prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Of particular interest to PBS viewers is this nugget from an article in the Guardian:

Ultimately, the most overused torture song is “I Love You” by Barney the Purple Dinosaur. On the face of it, the lyrics may seem deeply inappropriate: "I love you, you love me — we're a happy family. / With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you, / Won't you say you love me too?" — but anyone whose child watches the television programme will know how grating it is. In the torture trade, this is called "futility music," designed to convince the prisoner of the futility of maintaining his position.

So Barney is an instrument of torture. Well, parents of preschoolers have known that for years.

DOT DOT DOT

posted by James Reel

It’s been so long since I blogged that I almost forgot I could always get a quick’n’easy Thursday post by linking to my latest drivel in the Tucson Weekly. If you haven’t kept up with my contributions during the past five months, o faithless ones, you can find my archive here. As for this week’s contribution, it’s a preview of Arizona Onstage Productions’ Sunday in the Park With George:

"It's not an easy first listen for a lot of people," says its Tucson director and producer, Kevin Johnson. "You really have to engage your mind. "This is such a hard show," he laments. "It's hard to produce, mount, direct, sing and play." Then, in the next breath, Johnson declares, "It's the most brilliant musical ever written. I've been scared to do it, because I didn't want to mess it up." Johnson has wanted to get his hands on the show since he first saw it as a teenager. He and his pal Rob Russo became so obsessed with Sunday in the Park With George that they wore out two videotapes of its 1986 PBS broadcast. For many years, Johnson dreamed of being cast as the show's title characters--in the first act, Georges Seurat, and in the second act, an imaginary descendant of Seurat's, also named George, an avant-garde artist in 1980s New York City. Johnson never got himself cast in the show, but now--something he wouldn't have imagined 20 years ago--he's directing it in Tucson.

You can read the whole thing here.

LINCOLN CENTER RECORDINGS

posted by James Reel

For a recent issue of Fanfare, I wrote a feature on the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s self-published recordings, and reviewed the label’s first two discs. You may have heard the concert versions of these pieces on the Society’s radio series, but the artists went into the studio after the concerts to make the CDs. Here’s my opinion of the results:

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 hsndling 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.

RUMORS OF MY DEATH HAVE BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED

posted by James Reel

Well, Cue Sheet has finally been revived! Back in January, the KUAT/Arizona Public Media Web site underwent a complete redesign, and launched with a few elements missing, like my blog. There was a notice on the KUAT-FM home page that Cue Sheet would be back soon, but as the months passed it seemed that “soon” was being measured in geologic time. My thanks to those of you who wrote or approached me at plays and concerts to ask when the blog would return to service.

Our tech folks were working on a number of projects during the first part of this year, and they were pretty picky about finding a new blog engine that would suit their demands. They frequently assured me that bringing back the blog was a high priority; they also mentioned several times how proud they were of the Web site’s new back end. It’s not many organizations that will admit that they’re run by the back end.

Anyway, Joey, our Web programmer, got things up and running to his satisfaction a couple of weeks ago, at the same time that I was starting a two-week break to help my wife adjust to home life after her back surgery. Now that I’ve returned, Joey is on vacation. So there are some behind-the-scenes things about this new blog system I haven’t figured out yet, and won’t until Joey gets back. (For one thing, that description on the right needs, shall we say, refinement. “This is a pretty awesome blog about all sorts of stuff” is nice, but not very specific.)

So please be patient as I ease back into the blogging routine. Newsman Robert Rappaport’s blog is running at full tilt, so spend some time with him via the link at the right in the meantime, and thereafter.