STARS STRUCK
posted by James Reel
Norman Lebrecht makes the case against appending stars to reviews. My sentiments exactly.
Norman Lebrecht makes the case against appending stars to reviews. My sentiments exactly.
Many of the people who discuss ways to attract new audiences to classical concerts advocate ending the “snooty” practice of prohibiting applause between movements. But the fact that a movement has ended doesn’t mean that the whole thing is over. Premature applause can break a spell created by the music just heard, or at the very least delay getting on with the rest of the piece. I don’t even like internal applause at jazz concerts after solos, because the clapping covers part of the solo that comes next. Public spectacles of all sorts—concerts, movies, plays during which an admirable scenic design first appears—would be greatly improved if audiences spent more time sitting on their hands. As a fellow blogger writes, “I know there is no rule saying no applause between movements. But, by the same token, there is no rule saying wind should not be broken by members of the audience during the performance.” That’s Pliable, a fellow of extraordinarily wide musical and social interests, who presides over On An Overgrown Path.
English writer on music Norman Lebrecht can’t be trusted when he makes pronouncements on the state of the classical recording industry (for him, the decline of the major labels means the end of the world, ignoring the fact that small labels are taking up the task with greater competence and elegance than the majors). But he does opine intelligently on other matters, and his little essay on the death of conductor Vernon Handley is well worth reading. Lebrecht bemoans the demise of specialist conductors who could do a few things magnificently; they’ve been replaced by generalists who do everything at a level of basic competence but nothing with special insight. See what Lebrecht has to say here.
It’s Thursday, which means I have new spew in the Tucson Weekly. This time, a review of two plays and a restaurant. First, the theater story:
Two musicals are running on the eastside right now, and both of them are about people who create things with their hands. All right, that's stretching the point of the Gaslight Theatre show, a spoof of Frankenstein. More straightforward is what just opened by the Da Vinci Players: the mostly blue-collar musical called _Working_. The show is adapted from a 1972 book for which Studs Terkel recorded dozens of people musing about the work they did. Later in the decade, it was turned into a concept musical by Stephen Schwartz, who was then fresh from triumphs as the composer of _Godspell_ and _Pippin_; he is now best-known for _Wicked_. On _Working_, though, Schwartz has had a lot of help from his friends, especially as the show has continued to evolve, updating itself to accommodate the development of computers and barcode scanners. … The characters in _Working_ may have their troubles and disappointments, but all in all, they take pride in what they do. So should the Da Vinci Players. "Pride" is not the first word that comes to mind when the subject is the Gaslight Theatre, a company dedicated to the belief that any prideful character should undergo a pratfall. Gaslight's latest spoof is called _Frankenstein Lives, or the Jolt's on You_. It has less to do with the Mary Shelley novel than the 1930s Boris Karloff movies, and the gravest danger to a show like this is that Mel Brooks created the subject's definitive parody with the film _Young Frankenstein_. To his credit, writer-director Peter Van Slyke has stitched together his own version without seeming at all beholden to Brooks (other than the thunderclaps whenever somebody says "house of Frankenstein," which calls to mind the horses' terror at the mention of Frau Blücher).
You’ll find the full review here, after which you can move along to the Chow section:
A couple of years ago, I heard a rumor that a New York Indian restaurant had sent a headhunter to Tucson in an effort to lure chefs from our city's Indian restaurants. Apparently, it was just too difficult to find good Indian chefs in NYC, but they were easy to come by here. Until this year, all of Tucson's Indian restaurants had been modest family-style places, decorated with depictions of Hindu gods and gurus and sites like the Taj Mahal, and all serving intensely flavorful cuisine from the subcontinent. A few months ago, something different opened in Oro Valley: Saffron Indian Bistro. The food is similar to that already available here, if less spicy, confirming that restaurant heat increasingly dissipates as Tucson diners travel north.
The rest of the review awaits you here.
This morning I played something from Itzhak Perlman’s Concertos from My Childhood CD, a collection of pieces that many violin students learn and present in recital, then abandon as they turn professional. The first “real” violin concerto that advanced students take up is usually Mendelssohn’s. I just turned in an article for Strings magazine about that work, in which Daniel Hope and Nicola Benedetti talk about their love of it, despite learning it young, recording it and performing it everywhere. Here’s an excerpt:
Is it truly so great? The standard version of the work is so overexposed that one can actually come to dread the next performance of the thing. But both Hope and Benedetti agree that the E-minor concerto is worth playing early and often. “It’s a great thing for students to play great music, even if they’re not at a stage to cope with all the music’s demands,” Benedetti declares. Says Hope, “I think the Mendelssohn has absolutely everything that you could possibly want as a technical study and as an audience-winning piece. It has phenomenal melody, virtuosity, lightness and brilliance, and a big ending that’s pure sunshine. His ability to sing makes it so infectious. It’s perfection in every sense. I would encourage people to start learning it as soon as they can, for its combination of technical prowess and real music-making a its finest.” All well and good, but what about performing it again and again, season after season? “Perhaps it’s a shame that it is played through all the different stages of the learning process and the violinist’s career,” Benedetti admits. “People say, ‘There are only so many times you can play this piece, and it’s wonderful but … .’ If it weren’t played so much, it would remain a beautiful and incredible concerto in all aspects. I went through a period of my life when I was performing it all the time, and I’m actually not performing it at the moment, because it’s important to take a break from certain pieces. A fresh ear and fresh understanding encourage you to hear the music as it was heard in the era in which it was written; things that were shocking and genius, and things only that composer could come up with, should never feel predictable. To be playing the Mendelssohn and only focusing on your sound and just delivering a good job is professional and important, but in addition, the creative aspect of being a soloist is what this piece needs. It deserves something fresh with every performance.”
Over the weekend, the Arizona Daily Star carried a pathetically short blurb noting the suicide of David Foster Wallace, an important and very well-known novelist. Nobody at that uncultured and anti-intellectual newspaper seems to realize that Wallace obtained his MFA from the University of Arizona in the early 1980s—exactly the sort of local connection that the paper always plays up, sometimes to the exclusion of more important details. Here’s the news item from the Los Angeles Times, which you can follow with an appreciation of Wallace’s work in this article from Newsweek.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
