"PROCESS OF DISESTABLISHMENT HAS BEGUN"

posted by James Reel

A friend of mine, a professional musician, has been saying that given the legislature-imposed budget crisis in the state university system, the separate music programs at the UA and ASU should be consolidated into a single, world-class program, probably at ASU, which he thinks has better performance facilities and is in a much larger metropolitan center. But now I learn via Patty Mitchell’s blog oboeinsight that ASU is in the process of huge chunks of “disestablishing” its arts programs, particularly at the graduate level. You can learn what’s going to be eliminated here (scroll down to “Herberger College of the Arts"). Meanwhile, the UA, which is usually underfunded compared to ASU, is slower to announce its own cuts. We’ll have to wait and see what happens here.

ON THE BURGERS, NOT THE BOARDS

posted by James Reel

I’m seeing four plays this week (at this writing: one down, three to go), but nothing opened last week, so I have no theater reviews in the latest Tucson Weekly. I do, however, contribute to the Chow section:

Old joke: A hamburger walks into a bar. The bartender says, "We don't serve food here." The Midtown Bar and Grill does serve food, but it is a little discriminatory--it reserves its best service for the burgers.

The full review is here. Yesterday, a reader e-mailed me and wondered why I waste time reviewing mediocre restaurants when what this city really needs is informed reviews of the Tucson Symphony and Arizona Opera. On the subject of restaurant reviews, I just go where the editor sends me, and not every restaurant is going to be a winner. Regarding performance reviews, by the time a review of a short-run offering like a TSO cycle or an opera production would appear in the Weekly, the performances would have ended days before. Space is extremely tight right now, and I can barely squeeze two stories into the arts section because of declining advertising, so I’m going to focus on covering things that people can still choose to see (or avoid). I did review the TSO in this blog for a couple of years, but I wound up saying the same things about the same programming and the same kinds of performance, so if you can predict what I’m going to write, what’s the point of further writing?

I do know, however, that at least one refugee from the soon-to-shut-down Tucson Citizen may be interested in starting an online review site with fellow unemployed critics; if they can figure out a way to make money at it, we may actually end up with more coverage of classical music than we now have, since the Citizen has no real commitment to it.

CD REVIEW: EDUARADO EGÜEZ PLAYS BACH

posted by James Reel

Here's a review of Bach lute recordings I've written especially for this blog, for a change.

BACH: Lute Music, Vol. 1 (BWV 995, 997, 998) and Vol. 2 (BWV 999, 1001, 1006a, 1007). Eduarado Egüez, lute. MA Recordings MO53A and MO54A.

Argentine lutenist Eduarado Egüez, currently based in Switzerland, is not very well known in the United States except through recordings he’s made as a member of various early music ensembles. This is a pity; he’s a marvelous musician, and nowhere is this more evident than in his two-disc survey of Johann Sebastian Bach’s lute music, released in 2000 and 2002 by a terrific little audiophile label called MA Recordings.

Egüez was a student of Hopkinson Smith, which may partly explain his sensitivity as a player. His tempos tend to be moderate (though they never drag), and this allows him to bring particular expressivity to the Bach suites. Just listen to the nice, light, rocking rhythm he brings to the Gigue that concludes BWV 995. He plays with finesse and spontaneity; his intentionally hesitant phrasing in the Loure of BWV 1006a makes the piece seem like a free fantasia, and while he is perfectly capable of crisp articulation (which comes naturally to the lute and leads to mechanical playing in the hands of less gifted performers), Egüez is also a master of legato line, which he can produce without romanticizing the music.

MA makes gorgeous recordings, and the bulk of its select catalog involves very artful world music, but whatever the genre, the sonics are about the best you’ll hear in the standard Redbook CD format. Here, the perspective is close in a resonant acoustic (an old monastery), providing a sonic image that is precise and full of presence, yet airy. The audio quality enhances the character of the scores and playing: meditatative, searching performances perfect for late-night listening.

GUARNERI RECORDINGS RESURRECTED

posted by James Reel

As you may know, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, of which I’m an officer, will present one of the last-ever performances by the Guarneri String Quartet, on April 22 at the Leo Rich Theater. You can find the article on the Guarneri I wrote for Strings magazine here; if the site demands that you log in, use the password “chamber.”

In Tucson, the Guarneri Quartet will play Bartók, Mozart and Dvořák, quartets the ensemble recorded long ago. Many of those recordings from the 1960s and ’70s never made it to CD—until now. Take a look at this press release from its record label:

The Guarneri Quartet, a vibrant, beloved fixture on the chamber music scene for the better part of forty-five years, has launched its farewell tour amid an outpouring of critical and popular affection. Sony Masterworks pays tribute to the standard-setting ensemble with an album of new material, The Hungarian Album, featuring Dohnányi’s String Quartet No. 2 in D-flat Major, Op. 15; Kodály’s String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10; and Dohnányi’s String Quartet No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 33.

The Guarneri Quartet, one of the most distinguished string quartets of our time, will retire at the end of the 2008/2009 concert season. Violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree, and cellist Peter Wiley (the only non-originating member of the group) have made a name for themselves with splendid, unfussy, Old-World musicianship that seems to enliven every piece they play from the inside out.

Having recorded numerous critically acclaimed albums for RCA Red Seal during its illustrious career, it was only appropriate that the Guarneri Quartet cap off this abiding collaboration with a release of new material. Dohnányi’s String Quartet No. 2 in D-flat major is a masterpiece of the repertoire — full of lean, careening, darting lines that call forth the Hungarian folk tradition in rich, Romantic tonalities. The atmosphere of Kodály’s String Quartet No. 2, only one of two that he composed, is quite different, with its silky, slinking, teasing melodies that seem to expire in a single breath. The propulsive energy of Dohányi’s String Quartet No. 3 closes the disc. Sony Masterworks is proud to present the ensemble in a recording that again demonstrates the group’s mastery of style through their understanding of a composer’s intentions.

To commemorate its longstanding recording relationship with the ensemble, Sony Masterworks is also making available for the first time in digital format an incredible sampling of the quartet’s back catalogue. These eight recordings, which were never previously released on CD, are treasures of the group’s discography. They include Bartók: The String Quartets, Brahms: String Quartets & Quintets, Mozart: String Quartets, Dvorák: String Quartets & Terzetto, Italian Album, Schubert: String Quartets, Mendelssohn/Schumann: String Quartets, and Mozart:/Beethoven/Dvorák: String Quintets. They will be available on all digital service providers, including iTunes and Amazon MP3 store on Tuesday, February 3, coinciding with the release of The Hungarian Album. CDs, complete with each album’s original cover art and liner notes, will be available exclusively through ArkivMusic.com.

The extensive farewell tour will take the quartet to almost every major city in the U.S. The earliest concert reviews are already in, celebrating an ensemble that is leaving while “still at the top of its game” (Columbus Dispatch). Mark Swed of The Los Angeles Times calls the ensemble the “Rolls Royce” of string quartets and praises the group’s “ultra-plush, million-dollar tone.” The critical response to the farewell tour is no polite acknowledgement of artists in the autumn of their abilities, but rather a celebration of an ensemble still at the height of its powers. The tour is a must-see event of the 2008/09 season.

The Quartet continues their longstanding series and residency at the University of Maryland, where they are on the faculty. As they told the Columbus Dispatch, “None of us are thinking of this as retirement in any way, because individually, we'll continue playing and we'll continue teaching.”

ARTS BAILOUTS?

posted by James Reel

Greg Sandow has posted two thoughtful, challenging entries regarding arts bailouts/stimuli in the current economic climate—how there are problems with the very idea, and how arguing for the economic importance of the arts isn’t sufficient. Read what Greg has to say, then perhaps take a look at a piece I wrote for the Tucson Weekly in 2004 about the dangers of commodifying culture.

WHOSE LIFE IS IT, ANYWAY?

posted by James Reel

Apropos of nothing except that it would be nice if I blogged more substantially than has been my recent norm, here's an essay I wrote about 10 years ago when I was doing a monthly literary column for an e-zine called The Whole Wired World (TW3). Yes, it's dated, but on the Internet, everything lives forever.

A NOVELIST'S FAVORITE cliché is that "my characters just took on a life of their own." This could be true, because those characters -- and fictionalized versions of novelists themselves -- are increasingly likely to cavort in some other novelist's work.

But once in a rare while, those characters' guardians will find them in suspect precincts and yank them home. On Nov. 6, Farrar, Straus & Giroux agreed to cancel its planned July '99 publication of Lo's Diary, Italian author Pia Pera's retelling of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from the point of view of the title nymphet. Lo's Diary, published in 1995 but not yet having appeared anywhere in English translation, is reportedly a parody. As such, it should be immune to charges of copyright infringement, but that's just the complaint filed in court by Nabokov's son. The American publisher backed off, which is no surprise considering how wussy American publishers have become in the '90s. [UPDATE: The book was eventually published in the United States with a scathing introduction by Nabokov's son.]

I think the battle would have been worth fighting on intellectual grounds. But I can't help feeling that the whole idea of a Lolita parody is a bad mistake, and I'm a little relieved that it will now be impossible for me to read the thing.

Pera's not being especially innovative here. These days, novelists readily appropriate characters from stories no longer under copyright. Browsing through a catalog of remaindered items recently, I spotted Fred Saberhagen's Seance for a Vampire. The plot, according to the blurb: "When two suspicious psychics offer Ambrose Altamont and his wife the opportunity to contact their recently deceased daughter, the wealthy British aristocrat hires Sherlock Holmes to investigate." Why not? Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation has been in the public domain for some time now.

Some characters never belonged to a particular author. The Hardy boys, for example, were a franchise; over the decades, the publisher farmed the adolescent sleuths out to any number of authors, all writing under the same pseudonym.

More recently, authors' estates or relevant publishers have allowed new writers to complete or continue stories from the backlists. Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe found new life, of a sort, in Robert B. Parker's completion of the novel Poodle Springs (pointedly ignored by Colette Bancroft in her Colette's List survey of Chandler, although she does have fine things to say about Parker's own work elsewhere). More recently came Alexandra Ripley's authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind. Janet Maslin, in a New York Times review, deemed this a "fearless act of cultural cannibalism." She didn't mean it as a compliment.

These efforts, however misguided, were sanctioned by relevant authorities. No such permits are required for raiders pillaging the literary tombs of authors dead a century or more.

As far as The Great Unwashed were concerned, Jane Austen's novels were submerged as deep as the Titanic until Hollywood raised them to public consciousness in the 1990s. Now, in print, various completions and sequels cling like barnacles to Austen's authentic works. Further examples would be equally and needlessly depressing.

In 1975, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime launched an odd, somewhat related fad: populating novels with figures from fairly recent history. Ragtime is essentially about fictitious characters from conflicting classes in turn-of-the-century America, but they mingle with the likes of Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman and Emiliano Zapata.

One of the more recent successes in this line is Carol de Chellis Hill's Henry James' Midnight Song, a murder mystery that mixes in Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Edith Wharton and, of course, Henry James. Hill's and Doctorow's works are not traditional historical novels -- loosely accurate dramatizations of actual events. Instead, these fabricate events, pulling in historical figures as if they were stock commedia dell'arte characters to be used and abused at the author's whim. Doctorow and Hill spin their tales with a sense of historical responsibility, but I wonder about some of the other items I see in that remainders catalog ...

The Marble Orchard by William F. Nolan: "Amateur detectives Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardiner join forces to investigate the apparent ritual suicide in a Chinese cemetery of the former husband of Chandler's wife." Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin: "Caspar, an unpromising 1930s painter, falls madly in love with Caroline, a sensible typist, and when she vanishes he embarks on a terrifying comic journey through war-ravaged Europe, encountering Orson Welles, Salvador Dali and Dylan Thomas along the way."

To borrow one of Dave Barry's taglines, I am not making this up.

This is not just a publishing craze; it's hitting the boards, too. Steve Martin's mystifyingly popular play Picasso at the Lapin Agile not only revolves around an imaginary encounter between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in a Paris bistro just before World War I, but, as if it were a throw-away Saturday Night Live sketch, squanders its last scenes on an intrusion by that other defining genius of the 20th century, Elvis Presley. Shakespeare may have played fast and loose with the events in Richard III, but at least he didn't prop up the play with cameos by Julius Caesar and Prince Hal. Shakespeare had enough understanding of the character he half-borrowed, half-created to let him stand without pandering to the cheapest tastes of his restless audience. (Elizabethan theater was, by and large, bawdy, violent, lowest-common-denominator crap, just like today's TV. We can now regard the Elizabethan-Jacobean period as a golden age because the crap eventually got flushed from literary history, with only the likes of Shakespeare and Marlowe remaining as the era's Tidi-Bowl men.)

What worries me about Lo's Diary is, does Pia Pera really understand the Lolita/Lo/Dolly/Dolores Haze created by Vladimir Nabokov? Has she revived this Nabokovian nymphet without pandering to our current sanctimonious horror of child abuse? This is critical, because even though it's a novel in which an adult repeatedly engages in not-entirely-consensual sexual relations with a minor, Lolita is not at all about child abuse. It's a terrifically funny novel about obsession, repression, romantic literature, the vacuity of the American middle class, and, especially, the seriocomic self-delusion of one Humbert Humbert, an arrogant, emotionally traumatized fetishist whose tragedy is not that he's a sex offender but that he winds up deeply loving a girl who cannot love him -- or, apparently, anyone -- back.

Lolita is Humbert's story -- his tale told in his voice. Because Humbert doesn't really understand Lolita as an individual, she comes across as shallow, manipulative and cruel, with just enough flashes of intelligence to keep Humbert (and us) interested. In other words, a typical teenager. Perhaps Pera wants to rehabilitate Lolita, dress her up as a distaff Holden Caufield. This would be a more honorable literary effort than just tarting the story up as an incest novel and trotting out little Dolores Haze as a pathetic victim. Even so, I just don't want to understand Lolita as anything more than a kid broken by her own trampishness (remember that, initially, Lolita and Humbert are each the other's willing victim). I have no interest in learning more about any character in Nabokov's first-person narratives. In great novels like Lolita and Pale Fire, Nabokov's point is to parse the psyches of the delusional narrators. The other characters aren't intended as much more than funhouse mirrors to reflect, attract and bedevil the central figure.

Compare this to the works of, say, Elmore Leonard, wherein you feel that every richly odd walk-on character is another novel waiting to happen. But it's a novel you'd want to be written by Leonard himself -- not, for instance, by Pia Pera.

Literary characters seem to be up for grabs, though. Real people are, too. Individuals who do something especially heroic or heinous can easily sell their tale to the highest bidder: ABC News, The National Enquirer, a Hollywood producer. The woman who murders her children, the celebrity who bottoms out and belatedly dries out -- for a fee, these people gladly relinquish control of their own past experiences. Perhaps Nabokov's son wasn't offered a high enough fee to relinquish control of Lolita to Pia Pera.

Or perhaps he was sincerely trying to protect the integrity of his father's work and characters. But it's a futile effort. A life, real or fictitious, is no longer a grand story. It's merely a commodity.