CHAMBER MUSIC

posted by James Reel

    Broadcasts of last season’s Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concerts begin this Sunday at 1 p.m. Since I’m the host of that series, I have chamber music on mind a lot these days. One of the best appreciations of chamber music I’ve found in print comes from Andrea Lamoreaux, music director of Chicago’s WFMT-FM. Here’s the key paragraph from her notes for the recent Cedille release of Mendelssohn’s string quartets by the Pacifica Quartet:

Chamber music was originally an amateur musical occupation, but as the 18th century became the 19th and music of all types became more complex, the string quartet in particular evolved into a genre reserved for skilled professionals performing before an audience. This situation could be perceived as an active-passive division of responsibility: the musicians play, the listners sit back and enjoy. If all they do is sit back, however, they’re missing a great opportunity. Chamber music offers an inviation to sit up, not back; to sharpen your ears, extend your musical antennae, and become involved in what’s going on. Following the progress of a theme through various voices, listening to its transformations and its returns, is quite a different proposition when you’re faced with four players instead of dozens of symphony musicians. You can appreciate the slightest variation in tone color, hear the tiniest variation between a theme’s initial statement and its recapitulation. Even without the score, even without knowing the intricacies of formal procedures, you can hear with the greatest clarity the progression from opening statement through key changes and development to the final restatement that brings the music to a satisfying resolution. And when you are listening to a string quartet, you are often listening to a composer’s highest effort, his contribution to a rarified realm, but one that offers enjoyment for everyone involved.

    I don’t entirely buy that notion of chamber music being a composer’s “highest effort,” which is a cliché in classical-music circles (Lamoreaux wisely qualifies it with the word “often”). I think it’s true in the cases of Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartók, maybe Shostakovich. Not true, though, in the cases of Bach, Mozart, Nielsen, Stravinsky or Prokofiev. I won’t cheat by bringing up composers who wrote very little chamber music, like Verdi, Wagner and Liszt. There are times, however, when I’d gladly trade all nine Bruckner symphonies in on his sole string quintet.

"THIS IS NOT FOX NEWS" (FOR NOW)

posted by James Reel

    There’s been a lot of yelping about public broadcasting’s perceived political bias, despite the fact that neither the liberal nor the conservative CPB ombudsman has found any. But it looks like we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

QUIZ SHOW

posted by James Reel

    From time to time the contributors to Quizilla.com will come up with a personality test that allows me to pretend to be doing something intellectual while I’m completely wasting my time. One favorite is “What Key Signature Are You?” My current result, which is happier and sappier than the last time I took this, is “E-flat major—you are warm and kind, always there for your friends, who are in turn there for you. You are content with your comfortable life and what you are currently achieving; if you keep in this state you will go far.” This seems contradictory; how can one who is content with present achievements make any further progress?
    Another is “Which New York Times Columnist Are You?” Somewhat to my distress, and that of a good friend of mine who gets the same response when she takes the quiz, “You are Maureen Dowd! You like to give people silly nicknames and write in really short, non sequitur paragraphs. You’re the most playful of the columnists and a rock-ribbed liberal, but are often accused of being too flamboyant and frivolous. You tend to focus on style over substance, personality over politics. But your heart is in the right place. Plus, you are a total fox.”
    The New Yorker’s Alex Ross points the way to a quiz I hadn’t encountered before: “What Major Work of Alban Berg Are You?” My result: “You are Berg’s ridiculously complicated Chamber Concerto. No one will ever figure you out and when they do, it probably won’t be right.”
    Does that mean I’m not really Maureen Dowd in E-flat major? Or, worse, does this call into question the words “total fox”?

SENSES AND SENSIBILITIES

posted by James Reel

    Several weeks ago, my wife and I were treated to lunch by Carroll Rinehart, the man who goes into elementary schools to help students—not necessarily music students—write and perform original operas. He’s worked on at least 1,500 kid-created operas, and even though the man is now past 80 years old, I wouldn’t be surprised if he works on another 1,500 before he’s through.
    Carroll Rinehart is an evangelist for arts education and creativity in general, and like any evangelist he is well practiced in the delivery of his message. At lunch, he handed us a printout he may well give everyone he meets; it’s a sheet titled See Everything, Do Everything, Feel Nothing, displaying three quotes relating to Carroll’s interests. There’s a striking line uttered in 1959 by children’s lit specialist Leland Jacobs: “We must develop critics and creators rather than regurgitators and imitators.” You need only look at the lit programs in American universities to see that Jacobs’ remark has had zero impact during the past 46 years; the academy is infested with enough cultural parasites feeding on and degrading the creativity of othres to warrant immediate quarantine.
    Even more apropos to contemporary society is the text block occupying the top half of Carroll’s handout. It’s from a Norman Cousins editorial in the Jan. 23, 1971 issue of the long-defunct and much lamented Saturday Review:

    The highest expression of civilization is not its art but the supreme tenderness that people are strong enough to feel and show toward one another. Art proceeds out of an exquisite awareness of life. The creative spirit and the compassionate spirit are not things apart but kindred manifestations of response to life. If our civilization is breaking down, as it appears to be, it is not because we lack the brainpower to meet its demands but because our feelings are being dulled.
    What our society needs is a massive and pervasive experience in re-sensitization. The first aim of education should not be to prepare young people for careers but to enable them to develop respect for life. Related lessons would be concerned with the reality of human sensitivity and the need to make it ever finer and more responsive; the naturalness of loving and the circumstances that enhance it or enfeeble it; the right to privacy as an essential condition of life; and the need to avoid the callousness that leads to brutalization. Finally, there is the need to endow government with the kind of sensitivity that makes life and all its wondrous possibilities government’s most insistent concern.

    No further comment necessary.

WHAT CHARACTERS

posted by James Reel

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I review two plays that are worth seeing despite certain flaws—and in terms of strengths and weaknesses, the productions are mirror images of each other.
    Arizona Theatre Company has a beautiful hole-in-the-center show:

    Jon Jory's new adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, being launched at Arizona Theatre Company before moving on to other theaters, does almost everything right.
    It creates a fast-moving, involving stage work out of a beloved prose piece (not so difficult in this case, because Austen wrote a lot of dialogue). Jory gets the entire story told without either cramming the script with detail or omitting anything crucial. His clean, clockwork direction keeps everything clear and logical, even when a dozen people are swirling through the ballroom scenes. The cast conveys Austen's intelligent witticisms neatly, without resorting to physical or verbal pratfalls. The costumes are lovely; the simple set proves sufficiently versatile, and the sound and light design support it all effectively, without becoming distractions.
    This would be a fabulous production if it weren't for one thing: The depiction of the central character is absolutely wrong.

    The complete review awaits you here.
    Meanwhile, Borderlands Theater offers a script with some problems, but a most compelling central character:

    In 1982, a woman, bundled in several layers of odd clothing, is caught Dumpster diving in Kansas City. When the cops get her to say anything at all, it's some incomprehensible babble. Maybe she's Mexican; maybe she's Korean. But all that really matters at the moment is that she's obviously just one more homeless lunatic wandering the streets. After all, this is about the same time that Ronald Reagan has thrown open all the asylum doors and relocated America's mentally ill to the gutters. This woman ought to be put back where she came from.
    Except--as officials learn only after this woman has been institutionalized for a dozen years--she didn't come from some asylum. She's a Tarahumara woman from the mountains of northern Chihuahua. She doesn't babble; she simply speaks her native tongue, the Rarámuri language, and no other.
    This woman, who was not released until 1994, is the real-life subject of Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda's trilingual play The Woman Who Fell From the Sky/La Mujer Que Cáyo del Cielo. Tucson's Borderlands Theater first presented the play five years ago, and has now revived it with its original star, the phenomenal Mexican actress Luisa Huertas. As before, Barclay Goldsmith directs.
    Running for 90 minutes without a break, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky still suffers from a few dry stretches, and offers only the sketchiest characterizations of the three people with the greatest impact on this woman's life, two doctors who drug the humanity out of her and the man who accidentally comes to save her.

    You’ll find the rest of the review here.

EMERSONIAN REFLECTIONS

posted by James Reel

    The Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, which I help run, is opening its season tonight with a performance by the Emerson Quartet. This group’s concerts in Tucson almost always sell out—at least the concerts AFCM presents do—and with good reason. I suspect sometime in the near future we’d be well advised to book the quartet for a double engagement. The Emersons could easily offer an entirely different program the second night; indeed, unlike many other ensembles that offer the equivalent of a concert and a half for presenters to choose from, the Emersons generally travel the world with three or four different programs in their fingers.
    And they aren’t out there merely giving concerts in order to sell their latest CDs. Sure, they’re offering a fair amount of Mendelssohn this season, the complete Mendelssohn quartets and octet constituting their most recent CD release, but the Emersons are ready and willing to play much more than that. They’re pairing Beethoven and Shostakovich whenever they can these days—they’ve recorded those composers’ complete quartet cycles, but that was some years ago—and coming up with the occaisonal unexpected treasure, too. Tonight’s program consists of Beethoven’s Op. 18 No. 6, Shostakovich’s tenth quartet and Sibelius’ “Voces Intimae.” If you can’t get into the concert, we’ll probably be broadcasting it on KUAT-FM about a year from now.
    We didn’t ask the Emersons to play Mendelssohn here because we’ll have the Pacifica Quartet doing that later this season (the Pacifica’s fine Mendelssohn CD set was released just a few weeks after the Emersons’). If you’re curious about the Emersons’ work with Mendelssohn—especially their decision to record all eight parts of Mendelssohn’s Octet—you might like to read the cover story I wrote for last May’s issue of Strings magazine. The article gets a little technical near the end—the magazine is intended for string players—but violinist Eugene Drucker’s love of Mendelssohn comes through from the very beginning.