THEY'VE GASLIGHTED SCROOGE

posted by James Reel

    Here’s my effort to reduce my carbon footprint in the Tucson Weekly: a recycled review of a recycled show:

    The biggest trend this year has been talking about how we can each reduce our carbon footprint (talking about it, rather than actually doing it). One excellent way to go green is to recycle, and I am pleased to report that the Gaslight Theatre is recycling an entertaining Christmas show, a not entirely serious but certainly heartfelt adaptation of A Christmas Carol called Scrooge, or Older but Miser.
    In the interest of reducing my own noxious emissions, I'll recycle some of my review of Gaslight's 2004 production of the show. Please note that this is not 100 percent recycled material, and some updates occur within and after the quoted material.

KINDLING

posted by James Reel

    Amazon.com has unveiled an e-book reader called Kindle, which may finally be the commercially successful non-book book device that has been promised us by various seers and manufacturers for at least 10 years. You can see what Farhad Manjoo has to say about it here and here, although he hasn’t yet gotten his hands on the thing. Maybe this will be the devicee that changes my mind; I’m a longtime skeptic of e-books, as you can read here.

TSO TO RECORD

posted by James Reel

    The Tucson Symphony Orchestra will soon record its first commercial CD, it says here. I just wish the composer to be showcased were less justifiably obscure. (The first time the TSO played one of his pieces, a former orchestra employee mouthed to me from a couple of rows away, “Wasn’t that crap?”)
    In the article, don’t completely trust George Hanson’s claim that this sort of recording and exposure are “unprecedented” for a regional orchestra. To take just one example, the Nashville Symphony was still classified as a regional orchestra when it began its extensive recording series for Naxos, a label that has given that orchestra far more exposure than the worthy but limited Canadian label Analekta can do for the TSO.

MOMADAY'S DAY

posted by James Reel

    N. Scott Momaday, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his novel House Made of Dawn, is one of the recipients of the 2007 National Medal of Arts, presented last Thursday. Momaday is currently the poet laureate of Oklahoma, where he has a home; he also resides part-time in Santa Fe, and it was from there that he used to commute every week to teach here at the University of Arizona. Momaday, a Regents Professor of English, retired from the UA not long ago, and he already seems to have been forgotten hereabouts. Or so you’d think from the cultural amnesia at the local daily newspapers; neither the Star nor the Citizen has mentioned Momdaday’s award, nor, as far as I can tell, the award at all. It’s not exactly an obscure honor; this year’s other medalists include composer Morten Lauridsen, guitar pioneer Les Paul and painter Andrew Wyeth, among others.

REVIEW: LARA ST. JOHN/TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

posted by James Reel

    American orchestras have locked themselves into two concert formats: a very heavy overture/concerto/symphony routine, and a shlocky pops formula of hack arrangements than can be played after only one rehearsal, before backing up performers who have no natural place in the orchestra habitat. So it’s especially refreshing that Tucson Symphony Orchestra music director George Hanson has broken that format for the orchestra’s current cycle. It’s the sort of thing that used to count as a pops program: an attractive soloist in an appealing concerto, sandwiched between sequences of well-rehearsed light classics.
    The hook: “At the Movies—Symphony Style.” It was mostly a program of classical items that found their way into films. Two of the three exceptions were violinist Lara St. John’s contributions: Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto, which incorporates themes from several of the composer’s film scores, and the encore, John Williams’ theme from Schindler’s List.
    Korngold was a Viennese child prodigy composer, born at the very end of the Romantic era, whose allegiance to Romanticism lost him credibility in the concert hall but served him well in Hollywood. His concert works for orchestra, aside from the Violin Concerto and Much Ado About Nothing Suite, are interesting primarily for their arresting orchestration and metric complexities; Korngold’s melodic gift seemed to fade when he wasn’t writing film scores or, oddly enough, chamber music. So the presence of themes from movies like Anthony Adverse and The Prince and the Pauper gives Korngold’s 1947 concerto a strength and memorability that it may otherwise have lacked. You could think if it as a counterpart to Samuel Barber’s violin concerto, but with more voluptuous orchestration; or, going back to Korngold’s decadent Viennese roots, it’s like Franz Schreker, but with more clear-cut tunes.
    The work was first recorded by the icily brilliant Jascha Heifetz, and more recently recorded by the smoldering Gil Shaham and Anne-Sophie Mutter. St. John’s performance fell between these polar extremes, so it would be tempting to call it “equatorial” if that didn’t imply a heat and humidity that, frankly, barely registered in an otherwise engaging performance. St. John’s tone was a bit thin, but that’s partly because Korngold keeps the notes in the violin’s upper positions most of the time. She did lead off in good Korngold style, with exaggerated portamento, big slides between notes that fit right in with Korngold’s time and place(s). In the slow movement, though, she couldn’t quite hold the errant main theme together (this is what the Berg Violin Concerto might have sounded like had Berg not gone 12-tone), and the mercurial finale, though very well played, seemed rather earnest, not sufficiently quicksilver. Ultimately, though, we should be grateful that this unjustly neglected concerto received a serious, more-than-competent presentation.
    That said, it might be churlish to wish that St. John and Hanson had instead offered John Corigliano’s Red Violin Concerto, another work derived from film music, simply to provide maximum contrast with the rest of a very Romantic program. The sole contrast came from Bernard Herrmann’s angular Psycho suite, with its preponderance of Bartókain night-music menace and its infamous, slashing shower sequence. Hanson led the TSO strings in a fine, incisive performance that boasted firm, resonant bass lines—something you can’t always hear when these string sections are competing with the brass. The strings also played admirably in Barber’s famous Adagio; Hanson elicited a significant change in their color for the final full statement of the theme, a very effective detail not often found in other performances.
    Even with the full orchestra on stage, this was one of the orchestra’s best-balanced performances in a very long time. Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries was especially notable in this regard. The performance didn’t achieve peak intensity, but that’s because, after all, the music isn’t about bombing a Vietnamese village but about airlifting dead Norse spearchuckers to heaven. Hanson kept every section, every line, perfectly clear, not an easy feat in a piece dominated by constant brass work.
    The Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann also fared well, but Hanson and the orchestra came through best of all in a witty and sparkling performance of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The woodwinds proved especially nimble here.
    The one real disappointment on opening night was attendance, which was miserable in the balcony and spotty down below. This might be a good time for TSO administrators to remember the law of supply and demand: When supply exceeds demand, lower your prices, don’t raise them.

WHY MINE IS A PAPERLESS OFFICE

posted by James Reel

    Without further comment, I advise you to read Douglas McLennan’s concise explanation of how newspapers have gotten so dumbed down.