I recently interviewed pianist Wu Han, co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and asked her why the society has launched its own CD label, even though it already has a download agreement with Deutsche Grammophon. She said, "I can’t imagine, after a concert, signing somebody’s iPod."
We’ve been running a lot of underwriting credits for performances this weekend of Handel’s Messiah. Here’s some background on the concerts:
Almost every year, Enrique Lasansky conducts performances of Handel's Messiah. Perhaps he's making up for lost time.You can read the rest of my preview here, in the Tucson Weekly.
"I had no exposure to it whatsoever as I grew up as a musician," he says. Lasansky started out as a clarinetist, and there's no clarinet part in this most beloved of oratorios. If you're not a singer, a string player or maybe a trumpeter or oboist, you're not likely to perform it.
"I never sang it," Lasansky says. "I don't think I even heard Messiah beyond the Hallelujah Chorus until I was in my 20s.
"After that, I realized it was one of those pieces that are performed all the time, and as a conductor, I figured I needed to know it. It was a wonderful discovery for me, but it wasn't in my roots."
As if to compensate for all those years of neglect, Lasansky has conducted Messiah most Christmases since he founded the Catalina Chamber Orchestra in 1991. (This season, the orchestra changed its name to Tucson Chamber Orchestra, to avoid confusion with the little town of Catalina, and it has completely professionalized. "There are a lot of new players," Lasansky says. "The old orchestra has gone away, in a way.")
This year, he has gone all out. Not only is he conducting the work with his chamber orchestra this weekend; he hand-picked and personally rehearsed the chorus (instead of employing an existing community choir, as in the past), and this month, he's been immersing students at St. Gregory College Preparatory School in Messiah lore. He gave guest lectures in music, English and European history classes, and presided over an all-school assembly, performing bits of the work with his chorus and a string quartet.
Tonight's Leo Rich Theater concert by the St. Lawrence String Quartet and pianist Stephen Prutsman, presented by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (of which I'm an officer), has some unfortunate changes. One of the quartet members won't be coming to town, because his father has just died; they've temporarily replaced the musician, but they haven't had time to work up the promised Hindemith string quartet; that will be replaced by something else, but at the moment I can't remember what--nothing so rare as the Hindemith, alas. The rest of the program (a Haydn quartet and the Shostakovich piano quintet) remains unchanged.
Last week, upon Amozon.com’s release of Kindle, its new e-book reader, I sent you to an old essay of mine about e-books, as well as Farhad Manjoo’s previews of the new device. Now Manjoo has a full-fledged review of it; here’s the gist:
If you're on the fence about the utility of an e-book reader—if you doubt that reading e-books can match the experience of reading "real" books—a few hours with the Kindle will do much to change your mind.And here’s his full report.
Still, there's a great deal Amazon could improve on. Its $400 price tag, its zany user interface, and some of its sillier restrictions make the Kindle a non-starter for all but the travelingest, readingest early adopters.
OK, here’s one for a very small audience: my piece in the current issue of Strings about bowing technique:
The ancient Greeks knew of four elements: earth, air, fire, water. The periodic table of elements is a lot more crowded these days, but many dancers still reduce everything to four elements of their own: weight, space, time, flow. That’s what 20th-century dance theorist Rudolf Laban emphasized in his study of movement.If you have obscure interests, you can read the rest here.
These elements could apply to string playing, too. What is bowing but a dance on a wire by wood and horsehair partnered by your arm? Janine Riveire, an associate professor of music at Cal Poly Pomona, has adapted Laban’s theories to help you bow like a dancer.
Last night I had dinner with actress Talia Shire (and nine other people). Toward the end of the meal, her son, actor Jason Schwartzman, called to find out how she’d done in that afternoon’s Chamber Music Plus Southwest show, in which she’d portrayed Fanny Mendelssohn (she was splendid, by the way). Earlier in the evening, Talia had been talking up her son’s latest film, The Darjeeling Limited, which she assured us wasn’t the usual oddball Wes Anderson sort of movie, but a serious and witty film that all serious and witty people should see, even though audiences have so far been in short supply.
On the subject of Talia Shire’s family, I took an opportunity to point out that her father, composer Carmine Coppola, was a character in a deleted scene of Godfather II, directed by her brother, Francis Ford Coppola. (Talia played Connie Corleone in the Godfather movies.) In this scene, young Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro) and his associates take a bag of guns to an immigrant identified as Augustino Coppola (the name of Talia’s grandfather; according to family lore, Augustino Coppola did, indeed, once receive a visit from what Talia calls “some very scary guys” like these). While Augustino sorts through the guns, he tells his young son, Carmine, to come out and play his flute for the visitors.
The real Carmine Coppola started out as a flutist; he played for Radio City Music Hall from 1934 to 1936, the Detroit Symphony from 1936 to 1941 and the NBC Symphony (under Arturo Toscanini) from 1942 to 1948, after which he worked as a music director in New York theaters and wrote film music. According to Talia, her father claimed to hate the flute, but he played it with a beautifully full, round tone. He said that Toscanini hired musicians for the NBC Symphony—bowers and blowers alike—on the basis of their vibrato. I’d never heard of that being used as the main criterion for working in an orchestra, but it does fall in line with Toscanini’s famous insistence on unanimity in all things musical.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
