posted by James Reel
Here are a couple more reviews I wrote earlier this year for Fanfare: Beethoven chamber music, and Handel organ concertos.
BEETHOVEN String Quartet No. 9 in C, Op. 59/3; String Quintet in C, Op. 29 * Kuijken Ens * CHALLENGE CC72181 (multichannel hybrid SACD: 65:14)
One big happy family—that’s the impression left by these Beethoven performances featuring two generations of Kuijkens. I gave it a corporate title to keep the headnote under control, but group doesn’t really have a name; it consists of violinist Sigiswald Kuijken and his cellist-brother, Wieland; Sigiswald’s violist wife, Marleen Thiers; and their daughters, violinist Veronica and violist Sara. They play well together, in more ways than one.
This is immediately apparent in their joyful treatment of the first movement of the third “Razumovsky” Quartet. (Pedantic note: You can’t just call this the “Razumovsky” Quartet, because the title is applied to all three works of Op. 59, so you must specify whether it’s the first, second, or third. Similarly, you can’t just refer to Schubert’s Ninth Symphony as “the Great,” as if to convey how big or wonderful it is, because the adjective is linked to the key: “Great C-major,” to differentiate it from Schubert’s earlier, “Little C-major” Symphony.) Throughout the disc, there’s abundant evidence of like-minded musicians taking great pleasure in fine music. The often-snubbed Quintet, by the way, is given here in its two-cello version, and comes across as a much stronger work than usual.
The Kuijkens are best known as period-instrument players, but here (as in an earlier Debussy release, apparently not reviewed in Fanfare) they take up modern instruments. Still, they tend to reserve vibrato for held notes and dynamic swells, and they keep their textures clear. The interpretation is not highly emotive, yet the music is by no means underplayed. The playing is clean and incisive, but the overall affect is not high-strung. Compare, for example, the Prazák Quartet’s treatment of Op. 59/3 in its SACD survey of the Beethoven quartets. The Prazáks are recorded at a greater distance, with a narrower aural deployment of the instruments, yet their performance is “bigger.” After the Kuijkens, they seem a bit rushed and frantic, and some of their attacks have greater bite, although there’s nothing soft about the Kuijkens.
There’s nothing unusual about any of the tempo choices; what distinguishes these performances more than anything is the wonderful variety of dynamics, carefully applied, without going to extremes. In the Quintet, despite what might be expected from musicians immersed in the 18th century, the Kuijkens don’t go out of their way to Classicize the score. Indeed, in terms of weight and expression, they link it firmly to Beethoven’s middle quartets. There’s drama here, as in the big episode near the end of the second movement, but the drama isn’t as explosive as it might be at the hands of today’s harder-edged American groups. All in all, this is an exceptionally agreeable and engaging disc, with attractively realistic, fairly close sonics. James Reel
HANDEL Organ Concertos, Op. 4 * Richard Egarr (org); Academy of Ancient Music * HARMONIA MUNDI HMU 807446 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 71:35)
Between us, Andrew Quint and I favorably reviewed PentaTone’s four-disc, multichannel reissue of Daniel Chorzempa’s Handel organ-concerto survey, originally for Philips, in Fanfare 26:5, 27:2, and 28:1. That is a highly desirable series, and has been for more than 30 years, but now Richad Egarr and his Academy of Ancient Music are embarking on a set that should be highly competitive, and interpretively quite different.
The initial disc collects all six of the Op. 4 concertos, and suggests that Egarr and Harmonia Mundi will probably be able to compress the entire series onto three discs. In terms of sonics and performance, Chorzempa is brighter and more in-your-face than Egarr; the latter turns in thoughtful, often darker readings on a sweet-toned little organ that contrasts interestingly with the natural astringency of the period-instrument orchestra (it should be noted that today’s Academy of Ancient Music is far less nasal and honking than it was in the 1970s and ’80s). Making up for the color limitations of the organ (Egarr, like Handel, uses a fairly modest four-stop portative instrument), the musicians employ a mean-tone tuning system that adds some harmonic sparks when certain keys scrape against each other. Egarr’s dense level of ornamentation sounds free, not fussy, and the overall effect is probing and ruminative.
One potentially controversial aspect of this disc is the performance of the sixth concerto, usually played on the harp. What might cause a stir is not the fact that it’s re-assigned to the organ, as is not uncommon, but the nature of the performance itself. On the theory that the organ is essentially a “box of recorders,” Egarr has eliminated the real recorders from the orchestra, and extended throughout the work Handel’s first-movement idea of muting the violins and having the lower strings play pizzicato. The interpretation itself, including Egarr’s playing, is muted and slow, eliminating the work’s customary sparkle. In exchange, we get greater sensuality.
The sonic image is clear and natural, with the organ seeming to be placed a bit closer to us than the orchestra. This promises to be a fine series, and a real interpretive contrast to the more chipper Chorzempa. James Reel
Classical Music,
October 1st 2008 at 10:08 —
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posted by James Reel
The Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, which I help direct, is running an underwriting spot on KUAT-FM promoting this season’s first concert, tomorrow night (October 1). The spot promotes Trio Solisti playing music by three composers: Franz Schubert, Paul Schoenfield and Modest Mussorgsky. One composer was left off that list, whether to keep the spot within its 15-second limit or because whoever wrote it thought he didn’t have a recognizable name: Frederick Balazs. But that name should be immediately recognizable to classical music lovers who have lived in Tucson since the early 1960s.
Fred Balazs was the conductor of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra from 1952 to 1966. He doubled as a composer at the time, and once he left the orchestra and Tucson, that’s mainly how he occupied himself.
After we’d engaged Trio Solisti for the concert, I found out that its violinist, Maria Bachmann, and pianist, Jon Klibonoff, had played a violin sonata by Balazs on the east coast. Since Balazs, now in his late 80s, is living in Tucson again, I asked the AFCM president to try to persuade Bachmann and Klibonoff to play the sonata as part of the Trio Solisti concert. They readily agreed.
At the beginning of the concert, I’ll interview Balazs onstage; meanwhile, you can read all about him in this archived article Dan Buckley wrote for the Tucson Citizen upon Balazs’ last local sighting, some five years ago.
Classical Music,
September 30th 2008 at 8:42 —
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posted by James Reel
Here are reviews I wrote for Fanfare a few months ago of recordings of two oversized symphonies. The more famous of the two fares poorly in the hands of its conductor, but the obscurity is a real winner in every way.
SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 11, “Year 1905” * Roman Kofman, cond; Beethoven O, Bonn * MDG 937 1209-6 (multichannel hybrid SACD: 64:28)
Roman Kofman’s distincly unimpressive Shostakovich cycle continues apace with a thoroughly uninvolving Symphony No. 11, a work that depicts and mourns the failure of the Russian uprising of 1905. Kofman’s reading of the first movement is exceptionally slow, muted, and distant, eventually fading into the background as the listener’s mind wanders. The second movement has turbulence—it’s built into the score—but little bite, and the climax is banal. The third movement, a funereal Adagio, is better, and the final movement shows more spirit, but it’s not enough to make this version competitive. The DSD surround recording places the orchestra in a large space that shows off the brass but swallows the woodwinds. One of my longtime favorite recordings of this is Stokowski’s, and you can’t go wrong with Kondrashin or Mravinsky. In modern surround sound, Pletnev, Rostropovich, Lazarev, and Kitaenko are all far better than this. James Reel
HAUSEGGER Nature Symphony * Ari Rasilainen, cond; WDR SO and Cho * CPO 777 237-2 (multichannel hybrid SACD: 56:37)
This is a wonderful, colorful discovery, although it doesn’t have a sufficiently strong melodic profile to earn a position even in the second rank of late Romantic favorites. Siegmund von Hausegger (1872–1948) was an Austrian conductor noted for his performances of Beethoven and the New German School; in the 1930s he gave back-to-basics performances of Bruckner’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies (Preiser issued his 1938 recording of the Bruckner Ninth on CD some time ago). Hausegger’s most illustrious student was Eugen Jochum, whose interests definitely reflected those of his mentor. Hausegger was also a sometime composer; in his youth, he wrote two operas, one of which was championed by Richard Strauss. But only five big works occupy his mature orchestral catalog, of which the Nature Symphony, from 1911, is the penultimate.
It’s a 56-minute orchestral extravaganza, calling for a large ensemble, with a choral finale setting a pantheistic text by Eckhardt van den Hoogen (the effect calls to mind Liszt’s Faust Symphony rather than Beethoven’s Ninth). It’s splendidly orchestrated, with the orchestra weighted toward the bottom; overall, the music celebrates the sublimity of Austria’s mountains, glaciers and forests, but doesn’t spend much time on twittering birdsong. It’s more a meditative and even primal work, the sort of thing done to such tremendous effect in Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.
There are hints of Mahler here and there: the brass calls in the introduction, the second-movement funeral march, the tumult of the third movement. There are also occasional references to Strauss; the organ pedal-point early on can’t help but remind us of Zarathustra. But more often than not, the composer who came to mind was the darkly Romantic D’Indy (but not his atypical Symphony on a French Mountain Air). Perhaps a more apt parallel would be with Hausegger’s English contemporary Arnold Bax; like Bax, alas, Hausegger was not a distinctive melodist, and this limits the appeal of what is otherwise a highly attractive score.
No small measure of this CD’s success is owed to conductor Ari Rasilainen and his West German Radio Orchestra and Chorus. This is a tight, exciting performance, given all the care and confidence they’d no doubt apply to a similar standard-rep work by Mahler or Strauss. The surround sonics are also impressive: none of the detail ever gets smothered in the voluptuous scoring, and the orchestra has just enough elbow room; it’s not drenched in reverberation.
Don’t let me overstate the case. Hausegger is not some previously undiscovered Mahler. But this release should bring great joy to listeners sympathetic to the late-Romantic Austro-German style. James Reel
Classical Music,
September 29th 2008 at 10:35 —
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posted by James Reel
After many failed efforts, I have given up trying to get dinner or lunch reservations at The French Laundry. I became interested in that fabled California restaurant after reading about it and its owner-chef, Thomas Keller, in Michael Ruhlman’s book The Soul of a Chef. The restaurant is always pretty fully booked. It takes reservations two months in advance, to the day; on September 26, you can try to get a reservation for November 26. To do so, you call a phone number the moment the reservation line opens, and encounter a busy signal. You keep trying for about 50 minutes. When you finally get through, the reservationist sadly informs you that no tables are available on that date—especially for a party of four, rather than two. The only other way in is through Open Table, but the French Laundry makes available only one table at lunch and one at dinner, each at a quarter-hour time not included in Open Table’s drop-down list, and whoever can figure out how to make that system work has already done so the second the reservation becomes available, if then.
Or maybe I’m just not calling from a sufficiently fashionable area code.
And no, I can’t settle for a spot on the restaurant’s standby list. I can’t travel from Tucson, Arizona to Yountville, California on the spur of the moment, especially considering my various professional entanglements, not to mention the schedules of my potential California dining companions, who have jobs and childcare complications. So I’ll just have to go elsewhere to spend the $240 that the French Laundry charges per person.
It all started about eight years ago when Ruhlman himself sent me a copy of Soul of a Chef after stumbling upon an online essay I’d written that, after some meandering, becomes a review of one of his earlier books. For old times’ sake, here’s that essay, which is otherwise no longer available.
FEEL THE BURN
If writers were vessels, journalists would be plastic milk jugs; they carry their product from source to consumer without flavoring it. And like plastic jugs, journalists are regarded as interchangeable, recyclable and ultimately expendable. The latter, particularly, when they begin to take on the tainted smell of what they convey.
Poets and fiction writers, on the other hand, are vessels intended for museum display. Think of a novelist as an ancient vase with an enticing surface texture, an intricate narrative decorative pattern and, of course, a prominent lip. (Also, like the sort of Greek amphora that tapers nearly to a point at the bottom, some novelists have trouble standing up by themselves.)
Poets and fiction writers interest us because they bring us mundane details of life and feeling and thought in an artful way. Journalists interest us only insofar as we may find their topics compelling.
But journalism can be crossbred with creative writing. Some 30 years ago there arose something called “new journalism.” It's a way of telling a non-fiction story using the techniques of a storyteller, not a newspaperman.
A traditional journalist disappears entirely from the report. Journalists write around their presence with awkward locutions:
“Asked how the budget shortfall will affect city services, the Mayor said...” (Who is asking?)
“Redford greeted a visitor with a shyness that could be mistaken for indifference.” (What visitor, eh?)
Traditional journalism is supposed to filter out the writer's bias and keep the reporting objective. How journalistic objectivity is doomed from the beginning is a topic for another day; what interests me now is when the "me" can legitimately enter journalism.
“New journalists” like Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam, and novelists-turned-reporters like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, don't feign objectivity. They have a point of view, an agenda, a passion, and it's right out front. Partisans all, they want to recruit you to their side, and they do it with bold prose and no footnotes. Still, they generally refrain from casting themselves as characters in the story. They report what the legitimate participants have told them, and don't dirty their own hands. Wolfe may hate most modern architecture, but he doesn't try to get a more interesting book out of the topic by dynamiting buildings.
At times, though, the best way to report on a process, a community or a lifestyle is to become a participant. George Plimpton wrote one of the first, great books of participatory journalism in the 1960s: Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback. At age 36, Plimpton—co-founder of the hoity-toity Paris Review—joined the Detroit Lions as a rookie quarterback-wannabe. He survived a month of pre-season training and barely emerged from a public game with his dignity intact.
Plimpton could have stayed off the field, and merely interviewed professional athletes about their work. But, as post-game coverage on TV proves, getting jocks to talk may hold interest as an investigation into Neanderthal linguistics, but it doesn't tell much of a story. Besides, what's most attractive about Paper Lion is Plimpton's own adventure; he is a Walter Mitty whose fantasy has come true—and now he has to measure up. As an outsider stumbling in—as somebody who doesn't have to take the whole thing so damn seriously—Plimpton can see things that the pros ignore. And he sees things the way we might if we amateurs had a chance to go prancing around a field with all those men in tight pants, shoulder pads and smeared mascara.
Now, participatory journalism shouldn't be confused with gonzo journalism, a practice invented by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Sent by a sports magazine to cover a free-for-all bike race in Nevada, Thompson wound up instead writing about himself. Under the pseudonym of Raoul Duke (the inspiration for the Uncle Duke character in Doonesbury), Thompson tools around with his Samoan attorney, one Dr. Gonzo, in a convertible fully equipped with "two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls." Obviously, emerging with his dignity intact is not an option.
No, what Thompson produced is memoir, not journalism. A fine line separates the two, though, and a better example of how to tread it is Michael Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America.
Ruhlman, a writer, talked his way into the nation's haughtiest and most influential cooking school, taking classes and suffering through this expensive culinary boot camp right along with regular students. In the interest of deadlines, he claims, Ruhlman didn't complete the two-year program. But in the CIA's training kitchens he had to hold the same high standards as everyone else—people who, upon graduation, weren't assured of a restaurant job, let alone a book contract.
Now, Ruhlman could have gone in as a straight journalist, audited a few classes, interviewed a lot of students and faculty. And he did this. But interviews and distanced observation could not have given him the insights into what it means to be a CIA student and what it means to be a cook that he gained by actually cutting himself, burning himself, getting himself yelled at by instructors and enduring the high pressures of professional kitchen performance.
The book isn't perfect. Ruhlman slings kitchen slang and culinary French around like pizza dough, mystifying readers who spend their time in the “front of the house,” not back at the stoves. And, as a writer, Ruhlman is very good at describing kitchen action and explicating culinary philosophy, but he fails to write with all five senses at the alert. This is especially disappointing, given his reasons for going to the CIA in the first place:
I was never one to get all goosey about recipes. Recipes were a dime a dozen. You could follow them for a hundred years and never learn to cook. I was after method; I wanted the physical experience of doing it, knowing what the food should look like, sound like, smell like, feel like while it cooked.
Aside from remarking a couple of times that his pocket thermometer read upwards of 120 degrees when he was at his grill station, Ruhlman doesn't give us the sound, smell and feel of working in a kitchen.
But a good human story culminates in a personal transformation, and that's what we do get from Ruhlman's book. He didn't undertake this project lightly, as he makes clear in the beginning:
I rented our home in Cleveland, moved virtually everything we owned into my father's house and transported my wife (a photographer who had paying clients in the city we were leaving), our daughter (not yet ambulatory) and myself 500 miles to a one-bedroom garret above a garage in Tivoli, N.Y., a Hudson River Valley town with a one-to-one human-cow ratio. I had done all of this, I eventually realized, in order to learn how to make a superlative brown veal stock.
Ruhlman understood that cooking can be an art, and he wanted to know if he could be that sort of artist. Gradually he learns that he can hold his own—but as a cook, one who broils and sautées and juliennes, not as a baker of bread.
“The differences between cooking and baking were so deep, so acute—and I was so unprepared for them—that the work of this kitchen confounded me,” he writes of his tenure in the “Bread Baking/Pastry Skills Development” course. “I didn't get it, couldn't get it. It was not in my nature.” He continues:
As in all matters of food, there was an intellectual and spiritual correlative. I'd already discovered that I was (a) cook. I could know what cooking was, fully, in my bones. Cooks, I had learned, came to cooking not to fulfill a desire, but rather, by chance, to fulfill something already in their nature. The same, I believe, was true of bakers. ...
Because I was a cook or, rather, had 'the cook' in my nature (I did not presume to call myself a cook), I could not fully comprehend baking. Baking was a sphere of knowledge and experience—as cooking was such a sphere—that I could not enter, could only observe from without, even though I was, like everyone, baking the bread, stretching the dough in my hands to gauge if it had been mixed enough, had developed the necessary gluten network; I had scraped down my bench, had put boiling hot water into the giant Hobart oblique mixer, and covered it with plastic wrap to steam off the dough, and then cleaned it; I'd pounded the baguettes into tight rolls with the heel of my hand, and lengthened them with strong, gentle palms in hopeful imitation of Chef Coppedge. I'd scored and stippled the loaves with knives and my fingers and brushed them with oil and sprinkled them with salt and shot the loaves into the oven and watched the loaves puff, suddenly—an effect called oven spring, the yeast becoming hyperactive from the heat just before death; and I'd cooled the loaves and eaten the bread and swept the hearthstone with a long mop heavy with vinegar and water. But I was not a baker and I would not then, not ever, understand the true nature of bread or the nature of bakers.
An “objective” journalist monitoring a class could not have written that paragraph. Without the personal experience of stretching, scraping, pounding, stippling, eating and sweeping, Ruhlman could not have achieved his own little epiphany—and we would not be made to understand so well that we each, like Ruhlman, may have a calling, but it's a specific, consuming, jealous calling that accommodates few other endeavors.
Good participatory journalists like Ruhlman are neither plastic jugs nor Grecian urns. They are the oak barrels in which certain wines are aged. The wine—the information—they hold for us begins with its own qualities, its own truths. By the time it reaches us it has been not transformed but enhanced. Participatory journalism at least flavors a good story; at its peak, it can make the ordinary seem unique.
quodlibet,
September 26th 2008 at 9:37 —
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