posted by James Reel
This press release just in from Tucson composer Dan Buckley ...
Jonestown opera lecture demonstration scheduled
When: Thursday, Nov. 6, 7 p.m.
Where: Dinnerware Artspace, 264 E. Congress
Admission: $3 at the door, wine bar available (sorry, no Kool Aid)
On November 18, 1978 some 900-plus members of the People¹s Temple of
Jonestown in Guyana took their own lives, hours after some of the Jonestown
commune members murdered visiting congressman Leo Ryan, newsmen and a small
number of Jonestown deserters on a jungle airstrip. The event remains the
largest mass suicide in modern times.
Like Richard Nixon, Rev. Jim Jones frequently kept tape recorders going
to document his "great socialist experiment." The tapes were discovered by
the FBI when the bodies were recovered from Jonestown. The recordings were
later released through the Freedom of Information Act.
Tucson composer Daniel Buckley has been working with the Jonestown
tapes in a variety of musical settings since 1980. He is currently working
in collaboration with set designer Alfred Quiroz on an opera based on the
Jonestown tragedy, to be performed at the University of Arizona School of
Music in November, 2010.
In anticipation of the 30th anniversary of the Jonestown suicide this
year, Buckley will hold a lecture demonstration at the Dinnerware Artspace.
Buckley will talk about the history of the cult and the events that led to
its demise. He will also present various pieces he has written using the
Jonestown tapes, including the string quartet he wrote for the Kronos String
Quartet in the mid 1990s and sketches from the upcoming opera. The
lecture/demonstration will show how working with these materials has
directly impacted his evolution as a composer and performance artist.
Why Jonestown as the subject for an opera? Jones himself said it best
(quoting philosopher George Santayana) in a sign that hung directly behind
his "throne" in Jonestown: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned
to repeat it." The Jonestown tragedy is the best documented example of cult
behavior, but there have been more since (notably the Branch Davidian/Waco
group of David Koresh and the Heaven's Gate cults), while the techniques
Jones used to brainwash his followers were the same employed to get
terrorists to fly into the Pentagon and World Trade Center. As operatic
fodder, it's a tale of megalomania, sexual perversion, intimidation and
death, with whispers of CIA involvement and prevailing mysteries.
From 1987-2005 composer Daniel Buckley was the classical music critic
for the Tucson Citizen. Since 2003 he has created video and audio content
for the Citizen's online operation, www.tucsoncitizen.com. He also writes about contemporary classical music for Stereophile Magazine.
Prior to working for the Citizen Buckley composed music for theatre,
dance, art gallery installations and concerts in Tucson. He was a pioneer of
the Club Congress performance art scene, working under his own name as well
as Blind Lemon Pledge and Lonesome Jack Underpants. He was also a member of
the dreaded Little Dinks, and a five-year president of the now defunct
Central Arts Collective art gallery. He has received grants from the
Southwest Interdisciplinary Arts Fund and the Arizona Commission on the
Arts.
WARNING: Reverend Jones is a foul-mouthed dude. This is not for kids.
Classical Music,
October 20th 2008 at 7:45 —
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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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