BAD NEWS

posted by James Reel

    NPR News is heavily playing the story of Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota undergoing surgery after an apparent stroke. This is valid national news—control of the Senate hinges on Johnson’s health, because his state’s Republican governor could replace him with a Republican—but to what purpose did NPR play a recording just now of Johnson becoming disoriented when the stroke hit during a conference call? You could call this a number of things; I’d start with “tasteless.” NPR News producers should be ashamed of themselves.

MUCHO PIN8

posted by James Reel

    Radio announcer conundrum of the week: How to pronounce the last name of dead-at-last Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet? The answer, according to Slate’s Andy Engber, is that you can find a justification for just about anything. Engber finally dug up a video of the man pronouncing his own name, though, and it came out “pee-no-chay.” You can read the whole pronunciation saga here. That's where you'll also learn how to pronounce the title of this post.

DEM BONES

posted by James Reel

    Courtesy of oboeinsight, here’s a link to a human-interest item that supports your parents’ notion that nobody with any good sense becomes a professional musician. This trombonist, at least, suffers an obvious sense deficit. It’s hard to resist an article that begins like this:

    Paolo Esperanza, bass-trombonist with the Simphonica Mayor de Uruguay, in a misplaced moment of inspiration decided to make his own contribution to the cannon shots fired as part of the orchestra's concert. In complete seriousness he placed a large, ignited firecracker, which was equivalent in strength to a quarter stick of dynamite, into his aluminium straight mute and then stuck the mute into the bell of his quite new Yamaha in-line double-valve bass trombone.
    Later, from his hospital bed he explained to a reporter through bandages on his mouth …

    Alas, this story is entirely apocryphal, right down to the conductor being blasted into the front rows of the auditorium. But what does it tell us about trombonists that it sounds like the sort of thing one of them would do?

DRAW EARLY, SHOOT SELF IN FOOT

posted by James Reel

    The University of Arizona is going after nearly all the Rio Nuevo tax increment financing money earmarked for development west of the freeway—money that’s supposed to cover a lot of things that have nothing to do with the UA’s museums. Get a load of this, from today’s Arizona Daily Star:

    Its request of $166 million for the Science Center and $62 million for the new state museum total $228 million in Rio Nuevo money—more than the city had suggested it intended to spend on the entire West Side.
    Alexis Faust, executive director of the UA's Flandrau Science Center, said the funding request demonstrates the UA's commitment to Rio Nuevo because the university would pay $10.6 million in operating costs per year on both structures. On a per-year basis, Faust added, the operating costs are more than the city's cost to build the structures.
    The request also said that if the UA pulled out, the attendance at West Side museums would fall about 30 percent to 40 percent.
    "We need to fully fund the West Side campus and museums," Faust said. "The Science Center is like an anchor, like a Nordstrom is at a mall. You really need the anchor tenant in a redevelopment."
    [City Manager Mike] Hein called the UA's Friday request "poor political brinkmanship." He said he was "stunned they would take such an aggressive approach so early in the process" and suggested Faust is trying to "either stir the pot or corner the market."
    "The biggest impediment to the UA Science Center succeeding seems to be the UA Science Center staff," Hein said.

    Read the Star story, and then take a look at an article I wrote on the subject for this month’s Downtown Tucsonan.
    UA officials have never really understood how despised the university is in some corners of the community. Nearby residents hate the UA for eating neighborhoods and treating their blocks as a dump for overflow parking and partying student residents. Some taxpayers think the UA is full of lazy, unproductive professors who pursue useless research (especially in the humanities), teach way too few students on their own and leave the real work to underpaid grad students. Grad students think they’re underpaid and overworked. Undergrads grumble that undergraduate education is neglected in favor of graduate programs and faculty research support. These opinions are by no means universal, nor are they necessarily fully supportable, but they are common. And the UA isn’t making any points with the community with what looks like an attempt to blackmail the city into funding its off-campus development program.
    Whatever may or may not be wrong with the UA, one thing is certain: Its leaders are dreadfully out of touch with the community, except when it comes to major fundraising campaigns. Speaking of which, it might be a good time to launch a campaign for the new cultural campus west of the Santa Cruz, because Mike Hein obviously isn’t going to stand for what looks like the university’s attempt at extortion.

DEAD AIR

posted by James Reel

    Read what the New Yorker’s Alex Ross has to say about the impending death of classical radio in our nation’s capital.

ABOUT THAT MENDELSSOHN CADENZA

posted by James Reel

    I don't think Strings magazine has gotten around to publishing that article I mention below about the Mendelssohn concerto, so I'll give you a sneak peak, even though it's a bit technical:

    “It has been butchered and malplayed by so many people, it’s time somebody pleaded the composer’s case,” declares violinist Vincent Skowronski. “This is not a soccer match or a hockey game. It’s a very nice piece of music to play.”
    Skowronski is defending the honor and integrity of Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. It’s a popular work that is arguably played too often, and in Skowronski’s opinion too early and too fast.
    “When you are a student,” he says, “after the Vivaldi A-major, and after one of the five Mozart concertos, you are immediately thrust upon the shoulders of Mr. Mendelssohn. I think young violinists get this piece way too early in their careers, because they approach as their first meaty concerto, the first thing Grandma would actually like to hear, and they’re taught to play it ‘impressively,’ at a breakneck speed. Yet Mendelssohn was a very refined, erudite composer; he was not a crasher and banger.”
    Skowronski became sensitized to the speed issue as a young man in New York City. “I went to hear Ruggero Ricci play the Mendelssohn violin concerto because I had recently worked on it and Ricci was one of the great virtuosos,” he recalls. “It was so fast and so out of control I thought Ricci had a plane to catch. From that time on, every time I heard the Mendelssohn I paid attention to the speed the violinist would take, and across the board, every violinist I’ve heard plays it way, way too fast.
    “In the 1950s, Ray Still was the principal oboist of the Chicago Symphony. One day he had to complain to Fritz Reiner, ‘Can’t you talk to Mr. Heifetz and tell him it’s almost impossible to double-tongue at the speed he takes the last movement?’ He couldn’t double-tongue that fast, and Ray Still was one of the fine, fine oboists. People just tear through that thing, and I don’t think it’s necessary at all, not to mention that it’s harmful.”
    Skowronski asserts that the true character of the concerto reflects Mendelssohn’s own character and milieu. “Mendelssohn came from a very well-to-do family. He was raised with people like Goethe and the great thinkers of the time coming to visit. He was refined. Even his physiognomy was refined. What he wrote was refined. So why brutalize the concerto? Among violinists, if you like to chop wood and you want to play Mendelssohn, you have to compromise in the middle and not beat the hell out of it.”
    Skowronski observes that the portion most subject to brutalization is the first-movement cadenza.
    “If you ask your average man on the street what is a cadenza,” he says, “nine out of ten will say it’s a piece of a concerto where you can do anything you want. Well, it’s not. In the case of this concerto, the composer notated it himself and had a good idea what he wanted from people. According to legend he was a hell of a violinist, and he knew what he was doing.
    “He starts off going up by arpeggios and ascending scales, always ending on E natural so you have no mistake what key it’s in. Then he gets to the marvelous trill section, which everyone mistakenly thinks should be done as fast as the last page of the Saint-Saëns Rondo Capriccioso. Mendelssohn has taken away all the eighth and sixteenth notes, and now he writes only half notes with trills. If you take the tempo you have established in the first part of the cadenza and translate it to the half-note notation, the trill section will not be as fast as people play it; they play it as if those were eighth notes. After that, with the arpeggios and spiccato, speed is ridiculous, because when the oboe comes in and states the theme, the theme would have to be three times as fast as the beginning of the concerto. That simply is not right.
    “Milstein, when he came to the bariolage section leading up to the recapitulation, he took it so fast it was laughable. It was machine-gun stuff. Any conductor should say it’s not that fast, but you don’t argue with the likes of Heifetz and Milstein and those boys. So basically the piece gets faster and faster and you get to the point where you can’t play it.”
    Skowronski insists that the proper tempo relationships are specified in the score for all to see.
    “Where the trills begin,” he says, “someone has written ‘Tempo I.’ I can only assume that comes from the pen of Mr. Mendelssohn. It means you have to go back to the beginning of the concerto, and what you took for a tempo primo at that time. You must try to replicate that in this section. If you start the concerto like a bat out of hell, that’s what you do here. If you use a more sensible tempo at the beginning, you return to it here.
    “No matter what, the trills will sound terribly slow. So if you write in ‘poco a poco accelerando’ or ‘stringendo’ to indicate, ‘Look out, folks, we’re gonna have a beginning and middle and end to this section,’ it takes a marvelous shape, through many brief modulations. Finally you arrive at that high E- natural harmonic, which you hope you can hold forever. After that, there are no tempo markings, so if you have accomplished a dramatic accelerando to the finale of the trill section, when the bariolage section starts you go back to Tempo I, so when you reach the oboe theme you’re back to the tempo where you started the whole thing.”
    Skowronski hesitates to recommend any recordings that demonstrate what he’s talking about. And although the concerto was once one of his specialties, he doesn’t play it anymore. “I want to remember how I did it the way I wanted to do it when I did it,” he says. Don’t look to other violinists for good examples, he insists; take your inspiration from what Mendelssohn wrote in the score.
    “It’s a classy concerto, or it should be,” he says. “Unfortunately, I have rarely heard it in the classy vein; it’s always at the virtuoso let’s-beat-it-to-death crash-crunch level. It’s a victim of speed and lack of refinement. To play this concerto the way Mendelssohn wrote it, you have to battle the majority of violinists who just want to make fast notes, play in tune, and convince people that this is all music should be.”