A BORE ONLY A BRIT COULD LOVE

posted by James Reel

    English music critic Jessica Duchen adds to the archive of puff pieces that have helped the Brits persuade themselves that Edward Elgar was a great composer, despite abundant evidence to the contrary in the man’s own music. Let’s get this straight: Elgar was a gifted miniaturist, but the only large-scale work of his that shows technical competence as well as melodic interest is his cello concerto. Duchen alludes to Elgar’s “gift for flowing, inspired melody,” but what you get in the two symphonies and the violin concerto, not to mention Falstaff, are aimless, vaporous themes that refuse to linger in the mind. This is gouty, second-rate music by an unregenerate dullard, and the English continue to embarrass themselves by promoting Elgar as a major composer. Among English-speaking composers active in Elgar’s time and place, Charles Stanford is far more solid, but, as an Irishman, he’s not eligible for Brit boosterism.

ART OF DARKNESS

posted by James Reel

    Thursday is upon us, and thus a fresh Tucson Weekly, with me in it. First, a preview of a brand-new play:

    One day, Invisible Theatre's Susan Claassen took a break from bidding on eBay auctions of Edith Head costumes, and googled "Jewish plays." The query returned a link to a New York Public Library exhibit and reading of letters a young woman had received while she was interned at Nazi labor camps during World War II.
    "It was bashert!" Claassen says, using the Yiddish word meaning "destined." Claassen knew immediately that she wanted to develop the reading into a full production at Invisible Theatre. "The source material is riveting," she says. "It's the epic story of a pretty extraordinary person."
    The resulting play, Letters to Sala, opens March 20 and runs through April 8.
    The girl in question, Sala Garncarz, was a Polish teen who volunteered to take her older sister's place in what was supposedly a six-week assignment to a labor camp. It turned into a five-year imprisonment, but Sala was not entirely isolated. She had many correspondents: her sister Raizel, who kept her informed of events in the outside world; a persistent suitor named Harry Haubenstock; a friend named Ala Gertner, who would take part in the only armed uprising at Auschwitz, and be hanged for her trouble. There were other pen pals, too, sending Sala hundreds of letters by the end of the war.

    There’s a lot more background information, including family conflict over the release of the letters, which you can read about here. Then you might move on to my review of a play that almost short-circuits itself:

    Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy borrows its conceit from a 600-year-old Chinese play: Darkness and light are reversed, so when the characters stumble about during a power outage, the audience can clearly see everything the characters can't.
    Unfortunately, somebody installed a dimmer switch on Beowulf Alley's production of the play, which never quite achieves full farcical intensity.

    Kathy Allen of the Star saw a later performance than I did, and she had a splendid time. My problem was that by opening night lots of things were still unstable, including the all-important lighting cues. You’ll find my gripes here.

REVIEW: MALCOLM MCNAB/EXQUISITE

posted by James Reel

    If you’re not a trumpeter, you’ve never heard the name Malcolm McNab. But you’ve heard him play; since 1970, this Hollywood studio musician has contributed to some 1,500 movie soundtracks, including prominent solo work in Dances with Wolves and L.A. Confidential. When John Williams guest-conducted the Tucson Symphony once in the 1990s, with no disrespect to the local trumpet section he wanted to be sure he had a trumpeter who could handle the Hollywood style, so he brought McNab with him. In Los Angeles, this fellow commands the respect of a Wynton Marsalis.
    Hollywood is no refuge for musicians who can’t cut it in the classical world. Studio musicians must be able to sight-read anything, from simple melodies to wild excursions, and they have to put it all across with style and confidence, knowing that their work will be heard again and again, if sometimes only subliminally, by millions of people over the course of decades. (The next time you slip Jaws or E.T. into your DVD player, you’re hearing Malcolm McNab—for the umpteenth time—in the trumpet section.)
    Now McNab comes to the forefront with a classical CD, Exquisite, revolving around, of all things, Billy May’s trumpet transcription of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. The music is challenging enough for the instrument for which it was written, and the trumpet version is even tougher. But McNab has worked on the score for more than 25 years, and in this recording he plays it as if it were the most idiomatic trumpet concerto in the world.
    Well, almost. Tchaikovsky’s double and triple stops are impossible on the trumpet, and the brass instrument can’t match the violin’s variety of tone colors. (Part of the problem here is that McNab’s microphone is too close to allow his instrument’s sound to bloom.) Aside from the double stops, though, McNab plays the music pretty much as written, violinistic as it is. Something as straightforward on the violin as playing little ornamental notes while crossing the bow quickly from one string to the next translates into a wide and awkward leap on the trumpet, but even here McNab manages to sound more like a musician than a Hollywood stunt man.
    Most of his runs are pristine, with an even tone across the wide range. His flashy first-movement cadenza ventures into upper and lower extremes I didn’t know were possible on the trumpet (in truth, the bottom note sounds more like gastric distress than music). The second movement showcases McNab’s lyrical abilities, and throughout the three-movement work the soloist seems to have mastered the technique of circular breathing; you never hear him pause for a gulp of breath.
    Through overdubbing, McNab also plays both solo parts in a transcription of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. There’s a long tradition of reworking Baroque concertos for trumpet, although the source material was usually for oboe rather than violin. Even so, this concerto lends itself more naturally to the trumpet than does the flashy Tchaikovsky. McNab’s playing is crisp in spirit, although in practice it’s more legato than Baroque specialists might wish.
    The disc continues with a little suite called Saloon Music by the accomplished film composer Bruce Broughton (Silverado, Tombstone). Scored for cornet and pit orchestra, the suite has much in common with Jacques Ibert’s Divertissement, although Broughton’s music is more syncopated and American-sounding.
    The disc concludes with Frank Zappa’s brash and tricky Be-Bop Tango. McNab toured with Zappa during the latter’s Grand Wazoo days, and it’s amazing that McNab ever managed to play this difficult piece live. He certainly pulls it off in this studio recording.
    Throughout, McNab receives excellent support from a small pickup orchestra, no conductor credited as far as I can tell. If the idea of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto played on the trumpet is not just too freakish for you to wrap your mind around, this disc is well worth your attention. It’s apparently available only through McNab’s own Web site.

REVIEW: FABIO BIDINI/TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

posted by James Reel

    Fabio Bidini, as a finalist (but not a medalist) in the 1993 Van Cliburn competition, is expected to play a certain kind of repertory: big, beefy, Romantic Russian piano concertos. And so he does, among other things. Yet last night with the Tucson Symphony, Bidini didn’t play Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in the manner of so many other competition laureates—big, beefy, swooning, exhibitionist, rich enough to clog an artery. No, Bidini was a Rachmaninov classicist, with remarkable clarity of articulation, precise dynamic control and passagework that breathed gently. His playing was not tremendously emotive, though it was by no means uninflected, and Bidini developed a hard, brittle tone in chordal passages, which had more to do with his instrument than his own choice. So it wasn’t everyone’s ideal of Rachmaninov, but it was highly effective nonetheless, and the soloist was capable of summoning all the requisite power when necessary.
    It was the Chopin encore, though, that showed Bidini at his most effective. His playing here was elegant, poised, subtly expressive and delicately colored. A solo concert by Bidini of Chopin and Debussy would be something to hear.
    Conductor George Hanson and the orchestra lent Bidini excellent support, with Jeremy Reynolds offering an especially lovely clarinet solo at the beginning of the second movement. The orchestra didn’t produce a burnished, truly Russian sound, but it was sufficiently full-bodied to put the music across, and thankfully Hanson and company weren’t too polite to submerge Bidini in the orchestral texture when Rachmaninov threw the main material to the orchestra.
    Excessive politeness had been a problem in the concert opener, a little suite of dances from Anton Rubinstein’s opera The Demon. Like Edward Elgar, Rubinstein was a bloated bore in long-form works, but he was a fine miniaturist, and the Demon dances should have been a modest delight. Unfortunately, the playing was fatally underpowered; all the notes were in place, but they weren’t projected with any confidence or life.
    The second half was something else entirely: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, performed with all the crackling intensity one could wish. Well, almost. The slow first half of the first movement always needs a little extra edge imposed on it, but Hanson was content to take the score at face value. To his credit, he didn’t let the movement’s second half run away from him, yet he did allow the score its full measure of storm and stress. The second movement was a bit too stiff to be truly sardonic, but concertmaster Steven Moeckel had the right idea in his solo. The third movement was exceptionally well shaped, structurally as well as emotionally, and Hanson and the orchestra got the final movement just right: full of properly shrill controlled hysteria, not the fashionably lugubrious self-pity slathered over it by musicians trying too hard to present this as an anti-Soviet protest symphony.

TRAIN WRECKS

posted by James Reel

    Prowling the nether reaches of the Leo Rich Theater, I came across a Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival musician doing some head-shaking, admitting to me that some colleagues didn’t know their music very well and worrying over some upcoming concerts.
    Well, if some of the musicians have been slacking off, they’re managing to pull everything together brilliantly by concert time. I’m not saying that as somebody determined to be a festival booster no matter what; as one of the people running the festival, I have an interest in its success, which means maintaining quality control. So far, aside from the inevitable odd squawk you’ll get at least once in any live performance, all the performances have been outstanding. If some of our musicians aren’t that committed to practicing before they get to town, at least they’re committed to the performances, and manage to whip themselves into shape by curtain time.
    Of course, we still have two concerts and a dinner performance to go. I suppose there could be a musical train wreck in our immediate future. And oh, people do love to gawk at train wrecks.
    (One of the worse actual train wrecks hereabouts happened in 1903. More than 20 passengers and crew members died when two trains slammed into each other at what is now the intersection of Houghton and Rita roads. A century ago, that was out in the middle of nowhere, but remote as it was, people quickly got out there to rubberneck, even before the victims had been carried off. Here’s a page that tells you all about it.)

THE SENSUOUS BIBLIOPHILE

posted by James Reel

    In the book review section of Sunday’s New York Times, Ben Schott advocated doing things to books that would bring long prison terms if you did them to children or animals. Didn’t his mommy ever teach him how to take care of things? I really have low tolerance for books that aren’t in pristine condition, which is why I don’t patronize used-book stores anymore. My wife, on the other hand, has been known to splatter pages with little bits of her breakfast, and keep books in the spine-cracking face-down open position for hours. Once she even dropped a copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita into an airport toilet, yet continued to read the thing. It’s a wonder the marriage has survived all these decades.
    About 10 years ago, for a now-defunct literary e-zine, I wrote an essay on the sensual pleasures of bibliophilia, which I now resurrect for your pleasure. (Warning: Statistics and cultural references may be long out of date.) The following essay is rated R for sexual innuendo.

    WE BIBLIOPHILES LIKE TO THINK of ourselves as several cuts above the television addict, intellectually and perhaps morally. Reading connects us to a wider world of ideas than does lowest-common-denominator TV programming; the act of moving our eyes across a page and processing the words thereon engages us more fully than sitting passively before the tube. And so on. Or, as the TV fan would say, yadda yadda yadda.
    Yet, in our relationships with books themselves, we turn out to be every bit as vulnerable to sensory stimulation—not to mention every bit as manipulative, domineering, and even perverted—as the average drooling couch potato whose greatest contribution to society is to withdraw from it.
    Inveterate readers can be ghouls. We peruse mail-order lists of remaindered books, tsk over the brief shelf life of certain admired authors, and stifle a whimper of outrage that their worthy hardcovers are being sacrificed so quickly in the hope that cheap paperback incarnations will keep the titles active a few more months. But then we remember that we can now acquire this stuff for one-quarter the list price. Bring on the order blank, and the schadenfreude.
    It's like visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, reverently poring over the inscribed names, then zipping over to Arlington National Cemetery to dig up a few graves.
    All right, so it isn't that awful. We are, after all, discussing books, which, despite our sentimental fantasies, are merely commodities. Yet they can seem so much more than that—not when their titles are listed in some catalog, or when their bibliographic information surfaces during a journey to the mighty Amazon.com, but when wood pulp actually meets fingertips.
    Nowhere is this more true than in a bookstore. Libraries, too, are good places to come face to fascicle with a fine volume, but there the encounter is fleeting. At a library you meet a nice book, escort it out to lunch, engage it in a desultory two-week affair, but you cannot grow old with that book beside you. Soon it must return to the library shelf, ready for the next pick-up. Eventually, through its habitual promiscuity, the library book will lose its freshness, trade its glitzy, commercial but fragile binding for something sturdy and generic, and begin to smell. The library is a brothel of books.
    A bookstore, in contrast, lures the reader who is both inquisitive and acquisitive. No book is more seductive than when it beckons from the retail shelf, because it can be not merely borrowed, but possessed. And so can the book next to it, and the books across the aisle. Used and antiquarian volumes have their allure, but new books are particularly irresistible. The bindings are stiff, the pages white and crisp. The novels don't automatically fall open to the sex scenes.
    During a recent 24-hour visit to Portland, Oregon, I made my first pilgrimage to what is often called the finest bookstore west of the Mississippi, Powell's City of Books. It was a quick tour—I'd fed the parking meter enough to satisfy it for only 42 minutes, and didn't realize the store had its own free garage until I was driving away. The rain came down heavily that morning; perfect weather for book browsing. For the lover of books, rain is the ultimate make-out music.
    Powell's purveys one million new and used volumes in its 43,000 square feet. Yet—and this is essential for a bookstore, something that well-intentioned chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble can't manage—the place felt intimate. It was sectioned off into many rooms on different levels, and the shelves rose high toward the ceiling. Here, you felt you could be alone with a book for a few minutes, getting to know it privately before making what could be a life-long commitment.
    (In case you're wondering, I made it out with only three books: Peter Esterhazy's novel The Book of Hrabal, which I'd specifically sought, and a couple of cookbooks encountered by accident, one of them devoted to vegetarian Lebanese cuisine. I elected not to lug home the hefty, newly-issued second volume of the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages because I was already traveling with several books. One of them was Bernard Malamud's A New Life, a wonderful campus satire set in a fictionalized version of Oregon State University in Corvallis, which was my next destination. And, yes, judging from the preponderance of aggie-jock buildings, the school still seems to be the same liberal arts-deficient place Malamud skewered four decades ago. And the central town is just as lovely, and the surrounding farmland and mountains as compelling, as Malamud described.)
    So we commit to a book, and purchase it. Or, more likely, we purchase several, polygamously. (Those of us who restrict ourselves to reading one book at a time might be more charitably regarded as serial monogamists.) Then, when we get our lovely acquisitions home, what horrors we subject them to.
    Some of us crowd them into unstable piles in the corner, on a chair, or under a bed, without thought of preserving their physical integrity. Others force them to stand straight up on hard boards, sometimes even insisting that their spines be perfectly aligned side by side. (I count myself as one such tyrant, as do the people at the world headquarters of Bancroft & Associates, the not entirely disinterested [original] presenters of this column.)
    Oh, and the abuse some books must endure: marking, staining, ripping, page-folding, spine-cracking.
    This is the price the book must pay for being a desirable physical object—a commodity. Of course, we also value the book for its intellectual content, which provides this form of physical gratification a dimension not associated with rolling naked in money or frolicking with erotic toys. Yet, fundamentally, it is the book's corporeality that attracts us right there in the store or library. Otherwise, we'd read the classics strictly online, and seek the latest fiction only at the cineplex.