… all taking place within the next few days. CLICK HERE TO SEE MY LIST.
A reader calls
I listened to my phone messages this morning after a few days away from the office. A reader had called complaining of a headline on one of my reviews in Saturday’s paper. Readers always think that writers write the headlines, but we don’t, at least not usually, in print. So, the caller was all disgusted sounding with me. Acted as if I was a jackass for writing it, and bolstered her argument by quoting me her musical credentials, and those of her husband and daughter, who also thought the headline a blaring mistake.
She read the headline to me in the phone message. I suspected that it might indeed have been a typo or a full-blown blunder. It happens. So I went to the newspaper’s library down the hall and had a look at the headline in Saturday’s edition myself.
What was it? “Pacific Symphony offers ‘Pictures’ at an exposition.” Yes, “exposition.” Note the punctuation.
A writer can’t hope for a much better headline than that — a pun that perfectly captures the gist of my review. I thanked the copy editor responsible for it when I saw it.
Anyway, I called the reader back, and attempted to explain the headline to her, but she was still having none of it. She said puns were supposed to be funny. Really?
Some readers are just a pain. You can’t let it get to you.
Weekend roundup
Riccardo Muti released from hospital. … Sarah Chang chased out of Detroit. … Joan Sutherland dead at 83. Martin Bernheimer interviews her in his Volkswagen in 1966. … Lincoln Center invaded by bed bugs. … Anne Akiko Meyers becomes the proud new owner of a Stradivarius, the most expensive ever sold. … Support the arts; grow pot.
Click on the links to view full stories.
Unwinding ‘Peter’ and ‘Pictures’
Review: The Pacific Symphony explores visual elements in ‘Peter and the Wolf’ and ‘Pictures at an Exhibition.’ The Orange County Register, October 15, 2010. Click here to read my review.
Great moments in film music: ‘The Big Sleep’
The set-up is this. Bogart (as Philip Marlowe) has been captured by the bad guys and is being held in a remote cottage in handcuffs. This is his escape. Returning, the bad guys drive up and, as ordered, Lauren Bacall screams inside the cottage to distract them. The rest is clear enough.
Max Steiner, a Viennese composer who studied with Brahms and Mahler, wrote the music. Again, as we saw with “The Sting,” there is little dialogue, the music carries the scene. Steiner composed a Straussian tone poem as score to this movie, with themes reminiscent of Till Eulenspiegel and the Symphonia Domestica. Marlowe’s theme is heard for the first time in this scene (not the movie) just as he closes the door to the car — it’s a trickster’s theme, perfectly suited to Marlowe. Steiner then repeats the theme in several guises shortly thereafter, and uses fragments of it as well.
The high point is Canino’s (the bad guy’s) death, when the Warner Bros. orchestra is unleashed.
(Note: When you click on the video, it will take you to YouTube to watch it.)
Dudamel, Florez, open Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 92nd season
Review: The gala concert is highlighted by a star turn from Juan Diego Florez. The Orange County Register, October 8, 2010. Click here to read my review
Photo: Mathew Imaging
Free screenings of ‘Il Postino’
News: L.A. Opera’s production to be given two free outdoor screenings. The Orange County Register, October 5, 2010. Click here to read my story
Muti cancels rest of fall concerts in Chicago
And he had just started. John von Rhein has details.
Honest, dissenting ears
Should a music critic be honest about his or her failings and blind spots, or should he attempt to teach his audience to have the “correct” view, pretending to hold a truth that he himself does not feel?
“The Knight of the Rose,” or The Rose Cavalier, as the Metropolitan Opera program so drolly translates it, was the operatic fare of the last evening. The audience adored it and the singers seemed to be having a good time. The performance all through was remarkably even and smooth. I am sure it is a personal shortcoming that I did not find myself taking much interest in the affair.
If I may be permitted the confession, I have never been able to keep my mind on Der Rosenkavalier. I can take a cat nap here and there without seeming to miss anything, because when I wake up the music is always doing exactly what it was when I dropped off. It is full of waltzes that all sound alike and that have nothing to do with the play, which is about mid-eighteenth-century Vienna. It is full of broken-up vocal lines that have no musical necessity, because the orchestra always has the tune anyway, and that always have to be sung loud because the orchestration is thick and pushing, owing to Strauss’s constant overwriting for the horns. I think it is really an acting opera, because the vocal line is not very interesting and the orchestral writing, though elaborate, is to my ear wholly inconsequential. I make exception vocally for the final trio, which is as pretty as can be, and instrumentally for the well-known passage where the celesta comments in another key.
— Virgil Thomson, The New York Herald Tribune, March 14, 1942
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