DOWNLOAD REVIEWS

posted by James Reel

Deutsche Grammophon has been making a substantial effort to expand into the digital download market. Here are reviews I wrote for Fanfare of two of DG's download-only releases.

TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6, “Pathétique” * Lorin Maazel, cond; New York P * DG CONCERTS 477 7594 (download only, from www.iTunes.com: 47:27)

Lorin Maazel has always been an effective Tchaikovsky conductor, especially in his early-digital recordings for Telarc. This live performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” is good, but not quite up to the conductor’s past standards. It’s available not on CD, but as a download in Deutsche Grammophon’s DG Concerts Series. At this writing, oddly enough, you can’t get it through DG’s Web Shop, but only via iTunes.

Maazel doesn’t dawdle anywhere in the first movement, which is good, but the urgency of this performance derives from tempo rather than attack and articulation; often, the result is more efficient than impassioned. Maazel does put his heart into certain passages, most notably the explosive portion of the first movement’s development, where he maintains not only drama but also an admirable clarity of orchestral voices. The second movement is also on the quick side, but this time with little attendant sense of tension; it’s merely a bit fast. The march is crisp, without the least hint of malice or desperation, but the brass buildup is well played and patiently managed for maximum effect. Everything finally comes together in the final movement, all the more devastating for its lack of weepiness.

The New York Philharmonic is on its best behavior here. The sonics are bright, even slightly top-heavy, but without glare. The recording actually sounds a bit better in mp3 format on my PDA, heard through good-quality earbuds, than as the .wav files I burned to a CD. There was a bit of signal degradation toward the end of the first movement, which I assume is an anomaly of my particular download.

I may be giving this production a less than whole-hearted endorsement, but it has enough attractive qualities to merit space on your iPod, especially since it’s a new major-league performance and recording sold for only $7.99. James Reel

SIBELIUS Symphony No. 2 * Esa-Pekka Salonen, cond; Los Angeles PO * DG CONCERTS 477 7447 (download only, from www2.deutschegrammophon.com/cat: 43:42)

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s concert reading of the Sibelius Second is austere, muting the triumph of the last movement and linking the earlier movements to the darkness to come in Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony. The performance is no funeral dirge, though. Without sudden gear shifts, Salonen emphasizes the contrasts in tempo; the second movement and the trio of the third are quite slow, while the outer movements are brisk, without feeling rushed. It’s one of those interpretations that lies just outside the mainstream, while somehow managing not to sound affected. The Los Angeles Philharmonic plays beautifully for Salonen, as it has for years. The recorded sound, despite a slight emphasis on the higher frequencies, is good, if close and a bit dry—there’s little sense of what Disney Hall sounds like—but it’s not so dry that the music withers. The left-to-right imaging is very precise, presumably thanks to multi-miking. You might prefer a more consensus interpretation as your primary recording of this symphony, but Salonen’s effort is a highly intelligent and valid alternative, especially as a download to carry on your mp3 player. James Reel

MUSICAL POLITICS

posted by James Reel

The Democratic National Convention has a composer in residence, David Amram. No word on whether the Republicans will follow suit. Campaigns on both sides, starting in the primaries, would be vastly improved, I think, if each candidate commissioned an original theme song instead of the existing and not always relevant pop numbers they tend to appropriate—sometimes to the distress of the singers; Jackson Browne has gone so far as to sue McCain.

JENNIFER KOH AND MUSIC@MENLO REVIEWS

posted by James Reel

All I’ve got in the latest issue of Strings is a pair of CD reviews: one of Jennifer Koh’s latest CD, String Poetic, with music by Jennifer Higdon, John Adams, Lou Harrison and Carl Ruggles, and another of Music@Menlo’s 2007 festival concerts.

ARIZONA ONSTAGE UPDATE

posted by James Reel

My latest scribbling for the Tucson Weekly:

Kevin Johnson has been having one of those good-news/bad-news summers. The good news is that his Arizona Onstage production of Stephen Sondheim's _Sunday in the Park With George_ sold out every show in June and got great reviews. The bad news is that even with packed houses, the run left Arizona Onstage Productions more than $10,000 in the hole. Johnson briefly considered shutting down his company. Other good news is that Johnson learned that he may be more or less the inspiration for the main character in a movie being released Aug. 27. The bad news is that the movie is _Hamlet 2_, whose main character is a talentless dork who leads his high school drama students into an ill-advised production that features a song titled "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus." Johnson briefly considered legal action, but, then, he was more than $10,000 in the hole. Ultimately, he decided to forge ahead with another Arizona Onstage season, the first production of which will open next week. And he decided to relax and enjoy the 15 minutes of notoriety he'll get from _Hamlet 2_, even though he's decided not to comment on it publicly for fear of making people wonder just what goes on during his day job at the highly touted BASIS Tucson School.

The full story is here.

MEMORABLE TV MOMENTS?

posted by James Reel

From the Associated Press:

The most memorable moments in television history will be revealed during the 60th Primetime Emmy Awards next month, and it's up to voters to decide which bits should take top honors. Forty “moments”—20 dramatic and 20 comedic—are in the running. Comedy contenders include _M-A-S-H_, _Mork & Mindy_, _Sex and the City_ and _The Cosby Show_, while _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_, _Miami Vice_, _Moonlighting_ and _The Sopranos_ are among the drama candidates. … Fans can watch clips and vote for their favorite moments online until Sept. 15. The top five vote-getters in each category will be presented during the Emmy show on Sept. 21, and the two winning moments will be revealed just before the year's outstanding drama and comedy series are named.

You can vote for the comedy nominees here, and the drama contenders here.

I stopped watching TV on a regular basis in the late 1970s, but it was a constant, nattering presence in my childhood and every couple of years I do catch up with some series on DVD (my current project is Battlestar Galactica. So I was curious about the nominees.

And disappointed. I didn’t watch all the clips, but I’m not sure that even those from shows I have watched really constitute “most memorable moments.”

Let’s look first at the comedy category. First, the clip from M-A-S-H doesn’t belong there. Yes, Radar’s announcement that Henry’s plane had gone down en route home was certainly a memorable scene, but it was a dramatic scene, not a comedic one. (It was one of the big turning points in the tone of the series, as it evolved from a wisecracking comedy to a humorous drama.) It’s what semanticists would call a category error.

So what about the clips that are there? I skipped the shows I never or rarely watched (about half of them) and sampled only those that I knew I had sympathy for. Even so, I wasn’t impressed. The minute-and-a-half from The Honeymooners is just a slow-paced buildup to a very obvious punchline (about “addressing the ball” in a golf lesson). The final scene from Newhart, in which Bob wakes up in the bedroom of his previous series and realizes that the entire series he’s now ending has been a dream, is a fine joke, but it ends with a very weak line about Japanese food. Richard Nixon saying “Sock it to me?” on Laugh-In was a remarkable coup for both the show and Nixon, but I’m not sure that three seconds of comic incongruity equals greatness. Somehow I’d never seen the Mary Tyler Moore episode in which they memorialize a dead clown, supposedly one of the funniest things in TV history, and now judging from the clip I just don’t find it all that funny; the set-up is too obvious, and the lines just aren’t as zany as they need to be. The Carol Burnett Gone with the Wind parody is, on the other hand, a model of TV sketch comedy and includes a priceless joke about the heroine’s dress, but I wonder what makes this more memorable than any other snippet from that series?

There are problems in the drama category, too. I never watched Little House on the Prairie, but clicked its clip out of curiosity. Pa is telling one of his daughters that she is slowly going blind in a scene notable for effective, long pauses in the very simple dialog, but the effect is spoiled by melodramatic music at the end. James Caan’s mumbled hospital scene from Brian’s Song is not, in my opinion, the most memorable moment from that old made-for-TV movie; I’d prefer Billy Dee Williams’ little speech toward the end (although I haven’t seen it in about 35 years, and it might not be as effective as I recall). The moment in Buffy the Vampire Slayer jumps to her death (only for her to be resurrected in the next season) was excellent in the context of the series, but frankly it wasn’t the best example of Joss Whedon’s writing for that show, and the little post-apocalyptic scene of mourning that followed this one was more moving, and, besides, I can think of a lot of “memorable moments” from the series that were better than this. The X-Files snippet, in which Mulder and Scully finally kiss, was cathartic for the characters and fans of the series, but frankly the scene isn’t as well-written as it could have been. Of the clips I watched, the only one I felt was worth voting for was from the famous “City on the Edge of Forever” episode of Star Trek. There are no 23rd-century aliens and spaceships here, just an intense scene in which Kirk and Spock are reunited with a formerly deranged Dr. McCoy in the 1930s, and in order to prevent history from being changed by their presence, Kirk prevents McCoy from saving the life of a woman with whom Kirk has fallen in what for him passes for love. It’s an emotionally complex scene of reunion and death and motivations that the characters themselves don’t fully understand, and it holds up very well on its own.

Surely there are other scenes of this caliber in the 60-year history of television. Why weren’t they submitted for voting?

RHEINBERGER SUITES

posted by James Reel

RHEINBERGER Suite for Violin and Organ, op. 166. Pieces for Cello and Organ, Op. 150. Suite for Violin, Cello, and Organ, op. 149 • Melina Mandozzi (vn); Orfeo Mandozzi (vc); Hannfried Lucke (org) • CARUS 83.411 (Hybrid multichannel SACD: 73:25)

Rheinberger’s Op. 150 pieces for cello and organ are actually arrangements extracted from a suite for violin and organ. The original version, in its entirety, is coupled with the Op. 149 suite for violin, cello, and organ on Helios and Cantate; it’s coupled with the Op. 166 suite for violin and organ on Naxos. Each of those discs received benign notice in previous issues of Fanfare, as did Op. 166 when coupled with Rheinberger’s organ concertos on Capriccio (that review was by me). My colleagues and I tend to respond to this music fairly positively, while noting that it won’t knock you over in originality or panache.

Apparently in the 1880s there was some demand for music for solo strings backed by the Romantic organ as a full partner, even if it had to be reined in so as not to cover the violin or cello. Rheinberger offered rich, luscious music with a limited emotional range, sounding rather like German Fauré (although, in truth, Fauré was capable of greater passion than this). It’s exceptionally pleasant music, its forward-moving melodies looking forward somewhat to the more understated passages in the works of Franz Schmidt.

I’ll compare the playing and ound here only to the Capriccio disc, which is also a hybrid multichannel SACD. Here, the perspective is more distant than in the Capriccio recording, and Melina Mandozzi is more likely than Capriccio’s Ernö Sebestyen to spin out a long line; Sebestyen is more declamatory, and tied to shorter phrases. Cellist Orfeo Mandozzi, apparently Melina’s brother, follows the family lead, and organist Hannfried Lucke is every bit as satisfactory here as is Andreas Juffinger on Capriccio.

This is worth exploring, especially for string fanciers, if you don’t require music that inspires a strong, visceral response from the listener. James Reel