THE OTHER AMADEUS
posted by James Reel
We’re almost caught up with links to my articles for Strings magazine that appeared during the blogging hiatus. A couple of issues back, I wrote a piece on the string music of a very interesting figure:
Karl Amadeus Hartmann may be the most significant 20th-century composer whose music you barely know. His _Concerto funèbre_, a mature, moving work for violin and orchestra, is the main composition that carries Hartmann’s name from one concert hall and CD player to another, but even string players familiar with that piece probably don’t realize there’s more violin music where that came from. Early in his career, Hartmann wrote two suites and two sonatas for solo violin. These pieces from the 1920s have only recently entered circulation. They don’t entirely suggest Hartmann’s later style, but they are recital-worthy and show Hartmann was an assured composer almost from the beginning.
There’s more, including a chat with German violinist Viviane Hagner about one of those early suites, available here.
Oh, and to motivate you to visit the site, here’s a picture of Viviane Hagner:
BEER TASTE ON A CHAMPAGNE BUDGET
posted by James Reel
Former singer and current opera marketer Rich Russell offers a nice metaphor linking orchestral programming to the beer selection at his local bar. I’m a wine guy myself, but what he says is right on. Of course, this is where I link to my recent article on the same subject—orchestral programming, not beer—which has generated more reader comments (most of them positive) than anything I’ve written in years.
LIKE NIGHT AND DAY
posted by James Reel
I’m teaching a four-session course on the history of the American musical theater for the Arizona Senior Academy this month, and boy, did I get lucky with my content this past Wednesday. This week’s session was about shows before the development of the “integrated musical” in the early 1940s. From Oklahoma! on, all of a show’s elements—the book, the lyrics, the music, the dance numbers—ostensibly worked together to define the characters and propel the story. During the period I was talking about this week, though, any old song could be dropped into a show, whether it was relevant or not.
Well, on Wednesday morning I watched online the first episode of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the latest project from Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel and Firefly/Serenity. Whedon produced Dr. Horrible on the fly and has posted it free online (until July 20, at which point you’ll have to pay to download it from iTunes). As I was driving out to Academy Village, I impulsively resolved to work Dr. Horrible into my presentation. The subject is a geeky young man who aspires to be a supercriminal. (Remember the trio of nerd villains in Season 6 of Buffy? This guy, who goes by the name Dr. Horrible, is cut from the same cloth as Jonathan and Andrew, but he’s not as malevolent as Warren.) Trouble is, Dr. Horrible has a crush on a girl he sees every week at the laundromat, and his first opportunity to have a real conversation with her comes when he’s in the middle of committing a crime. Said crime is foiled by Dr. Horrible’s arch-nemesis, Captain Hammer, who thereupon starts making googly eyes with the bad doctor’s love interest. That’s the gist of Episode 1, which you can watch here, except I forgot to mention that every couple of minutes the characters break out into song.
My audience on Wednesday had no familiarity with the Whedon oeuvre, and I doubt that they had any interest in Dr. Horrible’s subject matter, but I forced them to watch a few bits and pieces of the first episode because I think it’s a splendid, compact example of the craft of the integrated musical. Every single song reveals what the characters want, and follows them as they resolve to set the next course of action. Oh, and the whole thing is very, very funny.
So then I contrasted that with the hodge-podge approach of the creators of American musicals from the 1850s through the 1930s, and I ended the class with a clip from the movie version of Cole Porter’s Gay Divorce (retitled The Gay Divorcee for cinematic release). Honestly, I hadn’t really watched the cllip all the way through before I plugged it into PowerPoint, but as I stood there watching the whole thing with the class, I realized that it perfectly brought the session full circle. Here was the great transition to the integrated musical: In the song “Night and Day,” Fred Astaire lays out to Ginger Rogers exactly what his character wants and tries to persuade her to succumb to his blandishments; this doesn’t work, so Astaire resorts to dance, and in the dance sequence the relationship between the two characters develops further. The whole clip really moves the specific characters and the show’s plot along, and I was able to tie this in with the Joss Whedon material I’d shown at the beginning of class. Symmetry is a lovely thing. Here are Fred and Ginger, courtesy of YouTube:
OXYMORON: GOOD ENGLISH FOOD
posted by James Reel
Two plays and a restaurant fall under my critical scrutiny in this week’s Tucson Weekly. Unfortunately, “fall” is the operative word in the restaurant review:
Last year's most appalling local restaurant news: Alan Zeman, one of the founders of Tucson Originals, was closing his excellent restaurant, Fuego, and selling out to a Canadian chain. The word "traitor" was bandied about in some quarters, but it seemed only fair to wait and see how things turned out. Yes, one should, as much as possible, patronize locally owned restaurants with unique menus attuned to the region, but restaurant chains are not necessarily evil, and you can get a decent meal at many of them, and besides, the Canadian company, Firkin, is a franchise operation; technically, the spot on Tanque Verde is locally owned. We gave Firkin and Friar--completely unrelated to Frog and Firkin, near the UA--a full year to get itself together and develop a following before deciding whether or not we should forgive Zeman.
I’m afraid that Zeman must remain unforgiven, and you can learn why I think so here. I’m more favorably disposed toward the plays:
Two people building a relationship, counselors have told us for years, have to compromise; each must try to look at things from the perspective of the other person. That idea is fundamental to two plays that opened here last week, and it's what leads Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park to its obligatory happy ending--but it's disastrous for the couple at the center of Tracy Letts' Bug, the late show in Live Theatre Workshop's Etcetera series.
Details abound here.
WORK-AVOIDANCE PROJECT
posted by James Reel
Via the Face of the Future photo transformer, here’s what I’d look like as painted by Modigliani:
And this is me in the style of El Greco:
And now I have to write some radio scripts, unless Spider Solitaire proves more interesting.
PEARLMAN MAKES IT TO THE END
posted by James Reel
A very short review I wrote for Strings magazine:
Handel: Concerti Grossi, Op. 6 Nos. 7-12. Martin Pearlman conducting Boston Baroque (Telarc 80688)
Handel dashed off his dozen concerti grossi published as Op. 6 in barely a month, but it’s been a full 15 years since Martin Pearlman and Boston Baroque recorded the first half of the set. Now, at last, here’s the rest of the group, and it was well worth the wait.
In 1739, Handel’s publisher, John Walsh, was eager to cash in on the popularity of the concerti grossi of Corelli and Geminiani, so he asked Handel for something in the same manner. Handel quickly complied, and made his work a bit easier by dropping in quotes from his just-completed Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, not to mention pieces by Scarlatti and Muffat. Despite the borrowings, the whole set sounds like vintage Handel, and Pearlman and his little band of string players know exactly what to do with it.
As in their recording of the first half of the collection, and their more recent treatment of the Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, the playing is quite suave. The period-instrument group easily meets Handel’s greatest challenge: conveying stateliness without stiffening up. Beyond that, the musicians can also sound light, playful, even Italianate, as in the final concerto. Throughout, there’s a suppleness that stops well short of affectation, even while Pearlman devotes great attention to such details as attacking musical paragraphs differently from the way of attacking individual phrases within them. The only complaint: Telarc shouldn’t have taken a decade and a half to complete this fine cycle.
