AUSTRIAN POLAR OPPOSITES

posted by James Reel

Here are two SACD reviews I contributed to Fanfare some time ago, one disc drawing from Austrian Romanticism, the other from Austrian Classicism:

BRUCKNER Symphony No. 9 * Yannick Nézet-Séguin, cond; O Métropolitain du Grand Montréal * ATMA SACD2-2514 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 67:01)

Here’s a gloriously engineered Bruckner Ninth; alas, it’s not a very well-interpreted one. Montreal’s second orchestra, which has fared very well in earlier recordings, offers patches of drab playing here, perhaps the result of lack of inspiration from the score and the podium. It isn’t that Yannick Nézet-Séguin doesn’t have ideas; it’s just that they tend to sabotage the music. The balances can be odd, with the horns particularly distant, to the detriment of some of the chordal and melodic voicings.

Nézet-Séguin, I’m coming to realize, is an all-purpose slow conductor, like late Giulini and, more grotesquely, late Celibidache, and that has deadly results in this particular work. (But keep in mind that Giulini’s mid-career recordings of this symphony are superb; don’t overlook them.) At these tempos, the repeated figures in the first movement’s second subject immediately turn banal, and everything reaches a point of stasis just before the return of the introductory material after the exposition; this should be a moment of anticipation, not torpor. The second movement comes off all right, although it could benefit from a bit more punch, but the third movement fares no better than the first; within five minutes, the score is sinking into mud when it should be striving toward heaven. In general, Nézet-Séguin flounders when Bruckner fails to provide a strong melodic line, but even his manipulations of the best parts lack coherent motivation. Nézet-Séguin and Bruckner seem to be a poor match. James Reel

MOZART Serenade in D, K. 250, “Haffner”; March in D, K. 249 * Gordan Nikolić, cond; Netherlands Chamber Orchestra * PENTATONE PTC 5186 097 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 57:25)

Mozart wrote his K. 250 serenade in 1776 as entertainment music for a party celebrating the coming nuptials of the daughter of Salzburg’s mayor, Siegmund Haffner. This was about the same time Mozart was writing his five violin concertos, so not too surprisingly there’s, in effect, a violin concerto tucked into this work, constituting its second through fourth movements. There’s also slow “serenade” music, a couple more minuets beyond what’s in the concertante sequence, and two full-fledged sonata-allegro movements. Launch it all with the separate march that probably opened the festivities (or at least was played as the musicians made their entrance), and you have nearly a full hour of attractive Classical pleasure-music with flashes of substance going well beyond the requirements of the occasion.

Gordan Nikolić, former concertmaster of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra of Europe, now serves as concertmaster of the London Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. He leads this performance from the first-violin desk, and plays his solos with a singing yet pulsating line. He presides over a performance (on modern instruments) in which the stately passages carry abundant inner life, while never sounding rushed, and the fast movements sprint by with lots of punch and impact along the way. It’s a taut, vibrant performance, engaging from beginning to end.

PentaTone has made some of the best-sounding orchestral SACDs on the market, with utterly natural reproduction of ensembles given clear spatial definition, but in this project, the upper frequencies are a little harsh. That’s very unusual for PentaTone, and the only drawback to an attractive release. James Reel

AGAIN UPON THE MATTRESS

posted by James Reel

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time this morning perusing the 25th-anniversary issue of the Tucson Weekly. There’s a lot of fascinating material there, looking back at the last quarter century of the publication and of Tucson, and even looking ahead. But the main item of interest, of course, is my contribution, which this week is a review of a little show on the east side:

_Once Upon a Mattress_ is remarkable--a second-string musical that somehow holds up much, much better than some other 50-year-old shows. This fractured fairy-tale version of “The Princess and the Pea” is witty, a little cynical and not the least bit dated. It's getting an enjoyable production on Tucson's far eastside by the Da Vinci Players.

Note that the use of “eastside” in that last sentence was imposed by the editor. I would never use a compound word like that as a noun, no matter what the increasingly idiotic AP Style Manual says. “Eastside” is an adjective; “east side” is the noun. “Backyard” and “backseat” are adjectives; “back yard” and “back seat” are the nouns. There can be no argument over this until people start using “frontyard” and “frontseat” as nouns, too.

Anyway, you can read my review here.

A NON-CLASSICAL MUSICAL OBSESSION

posted by James Reel

At another blog, I stumbled upon a video of Jacques Brel singing his terrific song “Ne me quitte pas.” As you’d expect, Brel superbly brings out many of the song’s dark elements—but there’s a version by someone else I’ve always liked even more. First, get the song from the composer’s mouth (and seeing his face is tremendously important here):

If you can believe it, there’s an even more devastating version by Frida Boccara from 1970; by the end of the song, she sounds like she’s a candidate for the Suicide Hotline. This clip doesn’t show Frida singing; it’s just a montage of stills. But listen to her intense, disturbing performance:

CLASSICIZING ITUNES

posted by James Reel

The people who design the leading databases that organize music files have never understood the special needs of classical music—like, for instance, the composer serves as a far more important organizing field than the performer. In this imperfect world, Randy Salas of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune offers a primer on how a classical fan can best manage iTunes.

THE POWER AND THE PENIS

posted by James Reel

In the latest Tucson Weekly, you can witness my effort to cover four plays in the space of two reviews (damned economy). First, the anatomy lesson:

Everyone knows there are a lot of pricks in the theater world, and they're something of an obsession in two shows that opened locally last week. Live Theatre Workshop's late-night Etcetera series is presenting _The Penis Monologues_, which is exactly what it claims to be, except that the monologues are _about_ penises, not _by_ them. In contrast, coyness rules at Beowulf Alley's _3 Guys in Drag Selling Their Stuff_; the male members are unremarked upon and hidden beneath skirts, tee-hee. In this case, too, the title says it all; indeed, there's nothing more to this play than what the marquee announces.

You can find the full review, including a Latin anatomical pun I’ve been waiting 35 years to use, here. Then, on to something more serious:

Power—how to wield it, how to abuse it. That's the subject of two plays, written nearly 2 1/2 millennia apart, that opened in Tucson last week. A witch-princess exacts revenge in _Medea_ at the UA's Arizona Repertory Theatre, while an American president squares off against an ambitious industrialist in _Camping With Henry and Tom_ at Invisible Theatre. Warren G. Harding is the president in question in Mark St. Germain's _Camping With Henry and Tom_. Remember Harding? Probably not, unless you're an American-history enthusiast, and the Teapot Dome scandal rings a bell. Harding was initially, in the early 1920s, a popular president, but his administration was probably the most corrupt in American history, at least until George Dubya Bush came along. To his credit, Harding was never directly implicated in the scandals, and St. Germain depicts him as merely an amiable front man for a political machine; as Roger Owen plays him at IT, he's tender-hearted and intellectually bland. Not the sort of personality you'd expect to be able to stand up to a combative Henry Ford and cynical Thomas Edison out in the Maryland woods. … Euripides' _Medea_, in a fluid, colloquial translation by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael, is onstage via Arizona Repertory Theatre. It's a student production directed with steadiness and grace by faculty member Brent Gibbs, but overall, it's an uneven effort redeemed by four strong young actors.

Get the details here.

HANSON ON THE MARKET

posted by James Reel

The e-newsletter of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra has landed in my e-mail box, with news that Tucson Symphony Orchestra music director George Hanson is applying for a job there. The Arkansas orchestra's budget is about half a million dollars less than the TSO's, according to the last figures I saw, so Arkansas would probably barely qualify as a lateral move for Hanson; most likely, he's hoping to run both orchestras at the same time (he has held simultaneous appointments in the past). True, Hanson has been in Tucson long enough that it may be time for him to think about moving on, but unless he were desperate to get out he'd be looking to move up in the orchestra world, not over. Here's a condensed version of the news item:

The Search is On! Nearly a year after ASO Music Director David Itkin announced he would be leaving the orchestra, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s Board of Directors is pleased to name the five conductors selected as finalists in the search for the ASO’s next Music Director. The candidates are: Arthur Post * Currently Music Director of San Juan Symphony in Durango, Colorado (serving the four corners region) Philip Mann * American Conducting Fellow and Assistant Conductor of San Diego Symphony George Hanson * Currently Music Director and Conductor of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra Fusao Kajima * Music Director of the Bellevue Philharmonic in Bellevue, Washington André Raphel Smith * Currently Music Director of the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra in Wheeling, West Virginia