SPECIALISTS

posted by James Reel

English writer on music Norman Lebrecht can’t be trusted when he makes pronouncements on the state of the classical recording industry (for him, the decline of the major labels means the end of the world, ignoring the fact that small labels are taking up the task with greater competence and elegance than the majors). But he does opine intelligently on other matters, and his little essay on the death of conductor Vernon Handley is well worth reading. Lebrecht bemoans the demise of specialist conductors who could do a few things magnificently; they’ve been replaced by generalists who do everything at a level of basic competence but nothing with special insight. See what Lebrecht has to say here.

HAND-MADE

posted by James Reel

It’s Thursday, which means I have new spew in the Tucson Weekly. This time, a review of two plays and a restaurant. First, the theater story:

Two musicals are running on the eastside right now, and both of them are about people who create things with their hands. All right, that's stretching the point of the Gaslight Theatre show, a spoof of Frankenstein. More straightforward is what just opened by the Da Vinci Players: the mostly blue-collar musical called _Working_. The show is adapted from a 1972 book for which Studs Terkel recorded dozens of people musing about the work they did. Later in the decade, it was turned into a concept musical by Stephen Schwartz, who was then fresh from triumphs as the composer of _Godspell_ and _Pippin_; he is now best-known for _Wicked_. On _Working_, though, Schwartz has had a lot of help from his friends, especially as the show has continued to evolve, updating itself to accommodate the development of computers and barcode scanners. … The characters in _Working_ may have their troubles and disappointments, but all in all, they take pride in what they do. So should the Da Vinci Players. "Pride" is not the first word that comes to mind when the subject is the Gaslight Theatre, a company dedicated to the belief that any prideful character should undergo a pratfall. Gaslight's latest spoof is called _Frankenstein Lives, or the Jolt's on You_. It has less to do with the Mary Shelley novel than the 1930s Boris Karloff movies, and the gravest danger to a show like this is that Mel Brooks created the subject's definitive parody with the film _Young Frankenstein_. To his credit, writer-director Peter Van Slyke has stitched together his own version without seeming at all beholden to Brooks (other than the thunderclaps whenever somebody says "house of Frankenstein," which calls to mind the horses' terror at the mention of Frau Blücher).

You’ll find the full review here, after which you can move along to the Chow section:

A couple of years ago, I heard a rumor that a New York Indian restaurant had sent a headhunter to Tucson in an effort to lure chefs from our city's Indian restaurants. Apparently, it was just too difficult to find good Indian chefs in NYC, but they were easy to come by here. Until this year, all of Tucson's Indian restaurants had been modest family-style places, decorated with depictions of Hindu gods and gurus and sites like the Taj Mahal, and all serving intensely flavorful cuisine from the subcontinent. A few months ago, something different opened in Oro Valley: Saffron Indian Bistro. The food is similar to that already available here, if less spicy, confirming that restaurant heat increasingly dissipates as Tucson diners travel north.

The rest of the review awaits you here.

MENDELSSOHN, EARLY AND OFTEN

posted by James Reel

This morning I played something from Itzhak Perlman’s Concertos from My Childhood CD, a collection of pieces that many violin students learn and present in recital, then abandon as they turn professional. The first “real” violin concerto that advanced students take up is usually Mendelssohn’s. I just turned in an article for Strings magazine about that work, in which Daniel Hope and Nicola Benedetti talk about their love of it, despite learning it young, recording it and performing it everywhere. Here’s an excerpt:

Is it truly so great? The standard version of the work is so overexposed that one can actually come to dread the next performance of the thing. But both Hope and Benedetti agree that the E-minor concerto is worth playing early and often. “It’s a great thing for students to play great music, even if they’re not at a stage to cope with all the music’s demands,” Benedetti declares. Says Hope, “I think the Mendelssohn has absolutely everything that you could possibly want as a technical study and as an audience-winning piece. It has phenomenal melody, virtuosity, lightness and brilliance, and a big ending that’s pure sunshine. His ability to sing makes it so infectious. It’s perfection in every sense. I would encourage people to start learning it as soon as they can, for its combination of technical prowess and real music-making a its finest.” All well and good, but what about performing it again and again, season after season? “Perhaps it’s a shame that it is played through all the different stages of the learning process and the violinist’s career,” Benedetti admits. “People say, ‘There are only so many times you can play this piece, and it’s wonderful but … .’ If it weren’t played so much, it would remain a beautiful and incredible concerto in all aspects. I went through a period of my life when I was performing it all the time, and I’m actually not performing it at the moment, because it’s important to take a break from certain pieces. A fresh ear and fresh understanding encourage you to hear the music as it was heard in the era in which it was written; things that were shocking and genius, and things only that composer could come up with, should never feel predictable. To be playing the Mendelssohn and only focusing on your sound and just delivering a good job is professional and important, but in addition, the creative aspect of being a soloist is what this piece needs. It deserves something fresh with every performance.”

MEMORY LAPSE

posted by James Reel

Over the weekend, the Arizona Daily Star carried a pathetically short blurb noting the suicide of David Foster Wallace, an important and very well-known novelist. Nobody at that uncultured and anti-intellectual newspaper seems to realize that Wallace obtained his MFA from the University of Arizona in the early 1980s—exactly the sort of local connection that the paper always plays up, sometimes to the exclusion of more important details. Here’s the news item from the Los Angeles Times, which you can follow with an appreciation of Wallace’s work in this article from Newsweek.

A PASSIONATO

posted by James Reel

If you’ve been frustrated by the utter failure of the iTunes music store and other download purveyors to handle classical music in a logical way that is rational to classical-music lovers—in other words, not littering the catalog with crossover junk, making it easier to search by composer than by artist—a new download service has just opened in Britain. It’s called Passionato, and, not having tried to purchase anything myself, I’m not sure whether or not it’s legal to use in the U.S. (prices are given in pounds only, not dollars). But the site does look interesting. Passionato has tracks from Naxos and the Universal group (DG and such), and probably some other sources. But possibly not enough yet.

I did two sample searches to see how easy it would be to buy music by prominent B-list composers Albert Roussel and Walter Piston. Answer: There are several items available for each, but the offerings don’t reflect the breadth of material available on CD from a source like Arkivmusic.com or Amazon.com. (Piston would be in big trouble at Passionato if Naxos hadn’t taken a shine to him.) Furthermore, although it’s better than iTunes, the database has been compiled by people who don’t always know what they’re doing, especially when it comes to figuring out performers. The performer in Piston’s String Sextet, for example, is given as “Kuchar.” That’s actually the conductor of some of Piston’s orchestral pieces, not the name of the ensemble that plays the Sextet. And, even more tellingly, a Chandos recording of the Vaughan Williams “London” Symphony is credited to a conductor named “Williams.” Presumably as in “Vaughan Williams.” It’s actually Richard Hickox. And this is for a recording that Passionato is pimping on its home page.

I’m not entirely impressed, but the new company may yet get these things under control. You can read about the company’s launch here.

GAY OLD TIME

posted by James Reel

In the latest Tucson Weekly, I preview an arts sampler at an unusual performance location, and review two plays that happen to feature gay characters. This is how the preview begins:

It's a safety officer's worst nightmare: a warehouse full of Japanese and Afro-Brazilian drummers, fire artists, aerial dancers and--those most insidious threats to public order--mimes. Rhythm Industry Performance Factory hasn't yet run afoul of the law, and so far, there's been no need to station ambulances at the ready in the parking lot. But we'll see what happens when all the Rhythm Industry resident ensembles converge on the "factory" at once for a public sampling of their works in progress. This weekend brings Rhythm Industry's first quarterly review. Note that the word employed is "review," as in a literary quarterly, rather than "revue," as in a variety show. It's an evening of performance, not magazine-reading, but all the participants are very serious about their work. Besides, the facility isn't intended to serve as a performance venue; it's an arts-incubation space, where groups can rehearse, and build and store sets and instruments and costumes. The only reason the resident ensembles have decided to present a performance sampler there four times a year is to raise money to help pay the mortgage.

You’ll find the complete story here. Once you’ve digested that, you can move on to my two-in-one theater review:

It's been a long time since "gay" meant "happy." Certainly the homosexual characters in two plays that opened last week have more than their share of trouble; even though the plays they inhabit start out as comedies, the trouble quickly takes over at Live Theatre Workshop in its late-night production of Dog Sees God, and at Alternative Theatre Company's mounting of Dirty Secrets. In Bert V. Royal's Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead at LTW, the Peanuts gang has gotten 10 years older and gone to high school. If you think Charlie Brown was depressed when he was in elementary school, you should see him now. To skirt copyright law, Royal has billed his play as a parody and changed the characters' names a bit, but you know who they really are: Charlie Brown is now called CB; his sister, Sally, is now referred to merely as "CB's sister," and she has gone goth; Linus Van Pelt, now called Van, is a stoner who smoked the ashes of his security blanket when it was burned by his sister (formerly known as Lucy), who is a promiscuous pyromaniac who's been institutionalized and doped with lithium. Tricia, the former Peppermint Patty, and her sidekick, Marcy, are mean girls who make catty remarks about everyone while sneaking booze into the high school cafeteria. The piano-playing Schroeder is now called Beethoven, but he's going through some changes: He's developed an interest in Chopin, and he may be gay. This disgusts Matt, the former Pig Pen, who has internalized his filth; on the outside, he's a compulsive clean freak, but on the inside, he's a vicious homophobe. This is not a pleasant crowd. Instead of calling CB a blockhead, they now yell, "You faggoty asshole." Good grief! At least when they go to a party, they still dance to Vince Guaraldi.

The full review of both plays awaits you here.