WEIRDNESS IN A MINT BOX

posted by James Reel

    Altoids, the curiously strong breath-mint company, held a contest inviting people to devise imaginative re-uses of what the Brits, in their quaint variant of our language, call the “tin.” The top winner, Jon R. Lennon, has pulled in $1,000 for his design of an Altoids theremin, in this case an electronic instrument that produces changing pitches depending on the amount of light it senses.
    The “real” theremin is named for its developer, Lev Sergeyevich Termen, who unveiled the first model in 1920. Termen brought his instrument to America in 1927, and RCA put it into production two years later, eventually cranking out 500 of the things. Oddly, it’s one of the few instruments you play without touching it; you change the pitch by moving your right hand in relation to an antenna, and control the volume by moving your left hand in the vicinity of a metal loop. The spooky-sounding instrument—every movement from one pitch to another is accomanied by a spine-tingling glissando—found its way into more than 100 concert works and several film scores, including Spellbound. Leopold Stokowski even used it briefly around 1930 to reinforce the basses of the Philadelphia Orchestra, but that experiment, like his practice of putting the woodwinds in front and the strings in back, was soon abandoned.
    Within a few decades, the theremin was supplanted by the more sophisticated ondes martenot (another oddball electronic instrument named for its inventor), which makes such a distinctive sound in Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. Indeed, the ondes martenot now almost always replaces the theremin in concert works such as Varese’s Ecuatorial. Surely the theremin can never be replaced, though, in the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.”

FROM THE LOFT

posted by James Reel

    UA organ prof Pamela Decker is performing at Holsclaw Hall tonight. Here’s an interview I did with her for the latest issue of Fanfare, along with reviews of her two latest recordings of her own music.

CANTOR OF THE OPERA

posted by James Reel

    For a change, I’m writing about music in the current Tucson Weekly:

    The first thing you notice about David Montefiore is that he's an operatic tenor. Not that he bursts into Mozart arias while sipping coffee at Starbucks (although he will illustrate a point by singing some stray passage in a voice scaled down to avoid disturbing strangers). But he has that tenor personality--outgoing, self-assured, voluble, full of stories about himself and much else besides.
    The second thing you notice is that he's cosmopolitan. His hard-to-place accent carries the vaguest suggestion of England (where he was born) and a stronger whiff of the more cultured parts of New York City (where he was raised), and, completely without affectation, he manages to pepper his conversation with bits of Italian, French and Argentine Spanish.
    The third thing you notice, something that is apparent from the beginning and soon becomes the dominant aspect of his character, is that Montefiore's greatest passion is neither Mozart nor his own golden throat, but the traditions and performance of Jewish liturgical music. Indeed, he worked in Buenos Aires not as an opera singer but as a cantor in a synagogue.

    Find out more here. And while you’re poking at the nether parts of the Weekly, you may discover that I pop up, unexpectedly, in the music section, which is usually reserved for popular music, not the unpopular kind that you and I listen to. There’s a feature called “Nine Questions,” in which some local music figure is asked a standard set of, um, nine questions. These week’s subject fell through, so the editor called me on Tuesday, a few hours before deadline, and during the one hour I was home that afternoon, and begged me to fill the space. So I did. You can find my Nine Evasions here, slightly nipped and tucked to fit the limited available space. Where else will you see an old Alka-Seltzer jingle and a Mahler symphony mentioned in the same sentence, along with cremation and toilets?

HIGH-PRESSURE FRONT?

posted by James Reel

    The New Yorker’s usually astute Alex Ross, bemoaning newspaper cuts in classical-music coverage, mistakenly attributes the decline to the malignant influence of advertisers. This takes off from a question he posed about newspapers possibly losing revenue by giving away their content online:

Several people wrote in to point out that newspapers make their money not from subscriptions but from advertising—so that putting content on the Internet actually multiplies the opportunities for profit. OK, but should newspapers be so dependent on advertisers for their livelihood? What happens is that they answer to the tastes of advertisers rather than readers. This is why classical criticism and arts coverage are being cut back even as core subscribers remain loyal to that kind of writing. The advertisers don't like classical music because it generally doesn't appeal to their coveted young-male demographic.

    Well, maybe small-town newspaper editors can be bullied by advertisers, because there are so few businesses available to buy ads in Podunk, USA. And the content of many magazines, including some to which I contribute, is certainly guided to varying degrees by advertising. But as someone who has toiled many years in print journalism, as a reporter and an editor, I can assure Alex Ross that advertisers exert virtually no pressure in most midsize to large newsrooms. Oh, they complain, and they’ll be listened to politely, but I have never encountered an instance of an advertiser influencing coverage, or the lack of it. Indeed, when I was the editor of the Tucson Weekly, I was particularly hard-nosed about not letting restaurant owners, for example, influence coverage of their establishments, though many of them tried.
    Now, if a newspaper planned to put out a special section devoted to classical music and nobody advertised, the section would be killed and the blame could legitimately be placed on the non-advertisers. (Although really it should fall upon the paper’s sales staff. Exmple: It took years for TNI’s revolving-door sales team to figure out how to sell the Arizona Daily Star’s Sunday television supplement, which is exactly the sort of thing that should have businesses begging to advertise in. The low ad count was the fault of a poor sales effort.) But I’d like to know what advertiser is going to shun a newspaper because of the occasional music review or feature.

DEEP SCHMIDT

posted by James Reel

    Tonight’s Minnesota Orchestra broadcast features Yakov Kreizberg conducting one of my favorite symphonies, Franz Schmidt’s Fourth. A year or two ago I reviewed Kreizberg’s recording of that symphony with a different orchestra:

At long last, Franz Schmidt’s magnificent Fourth Symphony is becoming a staple of the CD catalog, if not the concert hall. The mournful, nostalgic, yearning score, an elegy for a dead daughter and a dying culture (Vienna, 1934), is one of the last great gestures of the Romantic era. It’s Strauss without the bombast, Mahler without the neuroses. … Now, just at the dawn of the SACD era, we already have a first-rate new version of Schmidt’s Fourth in superb surround sound from Yakov Kreizberg and the Netherlands Philharmonic on PentaTone. The recorded sound is a bit distant, but detailed (clear enough to reveal an occasional grunt from the podium). More important, Kreizberg’s performance breathes nicely, with a natural rubato that makes its effect over large musical paragraphs more than through individual phrases.

    The full review lurks in the clean, well-lighted online archives of Fanfare magazine.

ALL ABOARD

posted by James Reel

    At the beginning of November, I started dumping out of Music Through the Night before John Zeck had a chance to back-announce the last selection before 5 a.m. It makes the transition from the satellite service out of Minnesota to me in the studio smoother, but the real reason I did it was to eliminate an opportunity for Zeck to do something that drives me nuts.
    Zeck and his fellow golden-throats at C24, the source of Music Through the Night, often neglect to tell us who’s conducting the music. I once heard one of the announcers stumble all over herself in an effort to ignore the conductor; it was as if she wanted to say his name, but some consultant was standing beside her, threatening her with a gag. I have, indeed, heard one radio guru informing the program directors panting at his feet that the conductor is not an important element to include in a break. Wrong, wrong, wrong. (This particular guru studied voice in college, and singers are notorious for ignoring the conductor.)
    Announcing that a piece has been played by such-and-such an orchestra, conductor omitted, tells us nothing. First of all, orchestras have no personalities of their own anymore. You used to be able to identify a Russian orchestra by its throbbing, blaring brass; a French orchestra by the quality of its woodwinds; a German orchestra by the heft of its strings; an Italian orchestra by its utter incompetence. No more. You may still find the distinctive nasal, woody timbre of central European oboes in Czech and Slovak ensembles, but otherwise orchestras have adopted an all-purpose international sound that can be adapted to the scores at hand—if the conductor so insists.
    The members of the orchestra play the notes, but it’s the conductor who shapes the interpretation (or presides over a blank interpretation). Consider the recordings of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 made over the past 80 years by the Berlin Philharmonic: No two are alike. Even those directed by the same conductor are quite different. Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1926 version is fast and efficient; his 1943 version, like most of his wartime performances, is incredibly intense; his 1947 version is more varied, and actually more similar to his 1950 and 1952 performances with the Vienna Philharmonic than to any of his earlier Berlin Philharmonic traversals. These are all quite different from Herbert von Karajan’s recordings of the Beethoven Fifth from 1963 (his best), the mid ’70s and the early ’80s. And these would never be confused with Berlin Philharmonic performances under Hans Knappertsbusch, Zubin Mehta or Claudio Abbado. If you have to choose between mentioning the conductor or the orchestra, go with the conductor every time.
    But don’t overstate the conductor’s authority, either. One of my other pet broadcasting peeves is announcers who suggest that the soloist in a concerto, like the orchestra, is “conducted” by the guy on the podium. Except in a few rare cases, like Karajan having his way with a malleable youngster or Alexis Weissenberg, the approach to a concerto is set by the soloist, and the conductor follows along. Remember the famous little curtain speech Leonard Bernstein gave in the early 1960s, humorously disavowing any responsibility for the interpretation of the Brahms concerto he was about to perform with Glenn Gould? When even a willful conductor like Bernstein makes such a statement, you know without a doubt that the soloist is truly in charge.