ARIZONA OPERA ON ARIZONA SPOTLIGHT

posted by James Reel

On KUAZ's Arizona Spotlight today, I contribute a segment about Arizona Opera's new season, with specific reference to the company's production this weekend of Verdi's Rigoletto. (Coincidentally, today's is Verdi's birthday.) The program airs today (Friday) at 8:30 a.m. (not 9:30, as the home page claims) and 6 p.m., and Saturday at 7 p.m., on KUAZ. Follow that link later if you miss the show; you'll eventually be able to hear it streaming online, but only for about a week as far as I can tell. There used to be an archive of all the past shows, but I can't find it now.

FROM FARCE TO PHO

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.

BRUCKNER THIRD AND A MASS

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

A MODEST PROPOSAL

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.

GRAY AUDIENCE?

posted by James Reel

While I have your attention, here's a good article from the Los Angeles Times debunking the notion that the graying audience for classical music is either a new or tragic thing. Read the article, and you'll be looking at a fairly rosy picture. The only challenge remains how to help younger people make the transition to classical concertgoing once they have the time and money, and I don't think that will be so hard; young people are more musically omnivorous now than they ever have been. What a relief!

IN THE DARK

posted by James Reel

Well, I'm still fending off my case of sinusitis, which returned after a brief hiatus, but yesterday the doc gave me some antibiotics that should rid me of the infection once and for all. I may not be fit for air work, but at least I can point you to my latest Tucson Weekly contribution, a review of the latest Beowulf Alley effort:

In a conventional thriller, darkness means danger. The best twist in Frederick Knott's perhaps too-twisty play Wait Until Dark is that darkness works to the innocent heroine's advantage--she's blind and can easily find her way around while the bad guys flounder. I doubt that I'm giving anything away, because Knott's mid-1960s play was once a Broadway hit, has been repeatedly revived there, can be found in community theaters everywhere, and pops up regularly on cable TV in the form of a nicely edgy little movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin. The appeal of Wait Until Dark isn't what happens at the end--because it's dark, you can't really see much of what's going on, anyway--but how the characters inch their way toward that climax. Beowulf Alley is presenting a not entirely secure production of the play, but its greatest asset is what counts most: a sympathetic but slightly sharp-edged actress in the lead role.

You can read the detailed pluses and minuses here.