A video spoof by cellist Stjepan Hauser of the performance styles of many a cellist more famous than he is making the rounds of the Internet, and deservedly so—it’s hilarious. Embedding is forbidden, so you’ll have to go to YouTube and see it there.
This is old news now, but my “live” supposition that the Inaugural music was canned was independently confirmed.
Staying home sick in bed gets boring fast, so I’m actually glad to be back at work. There’s some catch-up blogging to be done, though, starting with links to my contributions to last week’s Tucson Weekly. First, a review of Arizona Theatre Company’s latest production:
Part of Lorraine Hansberry's _A Raisin in the Sun_ hinges on whether a black family in 1950s Chicago will be able to move up into a white neighborhood. Can such a play matter to us in 2009? Consider: My westside Tucson neighborhood neatly reflects the ethnic demographics of the city overall, mostly Anglo and Hispanic, but with proportionate representations of black and Asian families, too; it's happily and naturally integrated. Another point: This week, an African-American family took residence at America's most exclusive address, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. So times have changed, redlining _A Raisin in the Sun_ out of the repertory, right? Not so fast. Setting aside the question of integration and race relations, the play is also about something more fundamental: How does a family set priorities for its own advancement? And can people's dreams and passions blind them to certain realities?
The complete review is here, from which you can move along to my less enthusiastic evaluation of a restaurant:
Once it opened way out on 22nd Street in 1998, Amereno's Little Italy developed a following as loyal as Giuseppe Garibaldi's—and now the restaurant is facing trials not unlike those of the Italian revolutionary leader. Garibaldi's career was a sequence of hard-won victories and strategic retreats, and periods of exile and political disappointment. Today, Garibaldi's name is synonymous with nationalism and unity, and his successes (he was eventually elected to the parliament of a unified Italy) overshadow his tribulations. So it goes with Amereno's. The restaurant temporarily closed a couple of years ago, and founder Victor Amereno moved away. But last autumn, fighting unfavorable economic odds, the restaurant opened in a new, more central location under the management of Jaqueline Piikkila, retaining executive chef Peter Wilkins and an emphasis on traditional Italian fare. Amereno's is making a noble culinary effort--yet the results are uneven. Let me make it clear that nothing my friends and I sampled there is really poor, and several items are quite good. What the menu lacks from dish to dish is a consistent high standard.
The full review, which isn’t really terribly negative, is here.
I’ve been fighting an insidious cold for about a week, and haven’t spent much time in the studio, which means I’ve neglected the blog. Let me try to catch up a little with links to my material in last week’s Tucson Weekly, just before it’s time to replace it all with new stuff. Here’s how the first review starts:
Donald Margulies won a Pulitzer for his play _Dinner With Friends_, but that doesn't mean it's either an epic or a spectacle in the tradition of such winning plays as _August: Osage County, Rent, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches_ or _The Kentucky Cycle_. It's a smaller, tighter work more in the manner of _Doubt, Proof_ and _Wit_. Indeed, at first glance, the subject of _Dinner With Friends_ seems mundane: how four people are affected by divorce. What makes Margulies' comedy/drama Pulitzer-worthy is its slightly unusual angle: This is not so much an account of how relationships fall apart as a consideration of how they might hold together. Beowulf Alley Theatre Company has just opened a strong production of _Dinner With Friends_, deftly directed by Susan Arnold.
And if that boring lede doesn’t dissuade you from pursuing the evaluation, you can do so here. Then, on to a second review:
Gaslight Theatre thrives on musical spoofs of various brands of genre fiction, but right now, it's returning to its late-1970s roots in Western melodrama. The latest bit of horseplay is called The Ballad of Two-Gun McGraw, and it's everything this sort of show should be, if you can figure out what that is.
Find out what my idea of that is here.
I'm watching the inauguration online, and Yo Yo Ma et al. are performing, but all the crowd noise has magically disappeared and the instruments have some reverb. Is what we're hearing an earlier recording?
Tonight, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music will present a concert by the Borromeo Quartet, including the world premiere of a work we at AFCM commissioned from Robert Maggio. The program also includes one of my favorite string quartets, the first in Beethoven’s “Rasumovsky” series. Not long ago in Fanfare, I reviewed a four-channel reissue of a classic recording of that quartet. Here’s that review, and as a bonus my review of the latest installment in Osmo Vänskä’s SACD Beethoven symphony cycle.
BEETHOVEN String Quartets: in F, Op. 59 No. 1, “First Rasumovsky”; in B-flat, Op. 18 No. 6 * Quartetto Italiano * PENTATONE PTC 5186 175 (Hybrid multichannel SACD: 68:00)
It should seem odd to say that PentaTone is rescuing Quartetto Italiano’s Beethoven from oblivion; the ensemble’s highly regarded Beethoven cycle has been a catalog mainstay since its LP release in the 1970s, and its various reissues and repackagings in the CD era. But “rescue” is correct in one sense: Philips has never issued the material in the quadraphonic format in which it was recorded, and now PentaTone begins to rectify that with a single, tantalizing four-channel SACD derived from the original tapes of two of Beethoven’s most attractive and immediately accessible quartets.
The first priority, though, should be the performances, and these are rightly classics. The readings are poised and flowing, sensitive to a variety of articulation, attacks and details of dynamics, but not as hyper-dramatic as many more recent efforts. Without underplaying the scores, Quartetto Italiano provides interpretations that should be very attractive to listeners who find even the finest contemporary efforts (Emerson, Prazak) to be excessively intense and nervous.
The recorded sound as presented here is better than ever: the musicians are close to the microphones but not claustrophobic, and their instruments come through with wonderful transparency and precise placement. We should be urging PentaTone to remaster the entire Quartetto Italiano Beethoven series, but given the current market, perhaps this is the most we can hope for. It may be only a single disc, but it’s very fine indeed. James Reel
BEETHOVEN Symphonies: No. 2; No. 7 * Osmo Vänskä, cond; Minnesota O * BIS SACD 1816 (hybrid multichannel SACD: 75:49)
Here concludes one of the finest available Beethoven symphony cycles. As Osmo Vänskä’s Minnesota series has progressed, the phrasing has gradually lost some of the intricate detail of the early volumes, but all the other virtues remain steady: bracing but not bludgeoning tempi, crisp attacks and releases, and tremendous clarity of texture from the all-important basses to the top. The orchestra performs with a precision and intensity evoking its Dorati days, but now with more refined execution in more flattering acoustics—plush but not overbearing reverberation, and a soundstage that’s wide, deep, and exactly charted. In both the symphonies at hand, this is big-band Beethoven in which the woodwinds make themselves heard assertively and elegantly across the strings, while the brass and timpani create an essential element of the texture without dominating it. The pristine engineering has much to do with this success, but it all begins with the musicians.
Perhaps most essential for these two symphonies, especially the Seventh, is rhythmic clarity, which Vänskä and his Minnesotans provide to the utmost. This is especially rewarding in the Seventh’s first and third movements, where rhythms as well as melodies are articulated exactly, but also with a vivacious litheness. Detailed articulation pays dividends in the slower music as well, particularly the Second Symphony’s first-movement introduction and the Seventh’s Allegretto.
In their heft and muscularity, Vänskä’s Beethoven performances call to mind Karajan’s early-1960s cycle, which is available as a two-channel SACD reissue. But whereas Karajan tends to conduct in big, boldface paragraphs, Vänskä remembers to highlight individual phrases along the way. Paavo Järvi has a very fine chamber-orchestra Beethoven cycle nearing completion, but among large-orchestra versions, Vänskä’s is the preferred SACD traversal, and one of the most desirable in any format. James Reel
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
