Archives for October 2009

One of the least satisfying musical experiences I think I’ve ever had was catching Bob Dylan at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 2002. This is really saying something as the combination of Great Bob and the Greek ought to have been a recipe for perfection. But the singer sadly failed to deliver. He played the piano badly, slurred and bleated his words more than I’ve ever heard him do previously and generally made every song sound unintelligible. My friend and I spent the entire gig playing a game of “guess which famous Bob Dylan song the singer is singing right now?” More often than not, we couldn’t make out the titles of his most beloved hits until the songs were halfway through.

So it was rather a relief to attend the great jazz singer Paula West’s latest San Francisco Performances concert at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco over the weekend and hear Dylan’s lyrics and melodies come through loud and clear. West often includes a couple of Dylan songs in her sets. Her interpretations feel startlingly fresh even though she sticks quite strongly to Dylan’s way of doing things — you won’t catch her attempting any over the top jazzy embellishments.

The main transformation that occurs when you hear the warm-granite-voiced West do Dylan is in the lyrics: You can actually understand every word that Dylan wrote, which is more than can be said of the auteur’s own performances of his songs. As West stood up on stage singing “LIke A Rolling Stone” alongside the rapturous George Mesterhazy Quartet, the song span around me in a way that was completely unlike any interpretation I’d heard before. For the first time ever, I heard fallen gods and descending night in Dylan’s music:

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They’re drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

The Kronos Quartet is more than 30 years old. Three of its members, including founding violinist David Harrington, are grey and ever so slightly stoopy. But the San Francisco-based string quartet continues to attract young audiences nonetheless. In a climate where chamber music is about as thrilling to the under 30 crowd as mortgage insurance, this achievement is remarkable.

At the ensemble’s latest San Francisco concert on Friday night (a benefit for the 40th anniversary of stalwart local classical music presenter Old First Concerts), at least half of the audience, by my estimation, was under 40 and quite ethnically diverse. Most of them were hipsterish in style. The girls wore vintage dresses and the guys, skinny jeans, plaid shirts, waistcoats and trainers (that’s vests and sneakers to US readers.)

How does Kronos do it? I think it’s the group’s unflinching combination of constant exploration, fearless use of electronic and other recorded sounds and global outlook. Brand plays a key role too. The fact that the ensemble has recorded music for such culty films as 21 Grams and Requiem for a Dream and regularly collaborates with pop artists such as Sigur Ros and the Nine Inch Nails helps its image among the younger crowd.

Kronos’ sound is constantly arresting. At intermission, the two young women sitting behind me were in ecstasies about what they had just heard, a freewheeling program of short works with a Middle Eastern outlook written by composers from that part of the world as well as elsewhere. They also chatted excitedly about such things as the way in which the players had swatted the air during selections from The Dead Man, John Zorn’s death rattle of an homage to Robert Mapplethorpe, creating whooshing noises that were at once threatening and funny. Like Zorn, most of the scribes on the evening’s roster, like the Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and the late Nubian composer Hamza El Din, had been commissioned specially to write for the group. Knowing that Kronos can play anything, they went all out in terms of stretching the stringed instruments to their limits. Both young and old audiences in the house on Friday night seemed to revel in Kronos’ endless spirit of invention.

Of course, being the big brand in town has its downsides for the chamber music community as a whole. Kronos has such a strong reputation and growing following among the 20s and 30s hipster crowd, that people, especially young people, tend to think of the group as the only string quartet in town. This is a shame as there are many other high-class ensembles working in the Bay Area such as the Alexander Cypress quartets. I hear that it’s hard for these groups to attract younger audiences with Kronos stealing all the limelight.

It’s been a fiendish day what with hangovers and three hours of sleep to contend with. On the positive side, these signs point to the fact that Gustavo Dudamel’s debut at Walt Disney Concert Hall as the Los Angeles Philharmonic‘s new music director last night was a raging success.

I was especially impressed with the world premiere of John Adams’ City Noir, a blazing symphonic work which does nothing if not bring a looming metropolis to mind in all its gritty, engulfing splendor. I was breathless by the end of the piece.

I need to go nurse my hangover, so on this occasion, I’ll cop out of writing anything substantive about last night’s music and festivities and leave it to the inimitable Mark Swed of the LA Times instead.

Radio presenters — especially ones engaged in hosting cultural programs — are very particular about the way they pronounce proper nouns. This is of course very important: You have to get names right or you risk causing offense to the bearer of the noun in question and/or being completely misunderstood by listeners.

I was having a conversation about this topic yesterday over lunch in downtown Los Angeles with the classical music radio station KUSC‘s great veteran host, Jim Svejda (pictured). Jim talked about how annoying it is that radio hosts mispronounce names like John Barbirolli — turning the penultimate noun in the faous 20th century British conductor and cellist’s last name into a long “oh” instead of a short “o”.

Sometimes there’s a case to be made for mispronouncing proper nouns on the radio, though. A seasoned radio producer who listened to the pilot episodes of my vocal music radio series, VoiceBox, brought this fact home to me a couple of months ago when he pointed out the shortcomings of saying certain proper names in the way they absolutely should be pronounced. The name in question was Edith Piaf. On the radio, I had pronounced the French chanteuse’s name with a perfect French accent, instead of employing the fashion in which the singer’s name is usually pronounced in the US, with the stress placed on the first syllables, as in EEdith pEEaf. On the radio, I pronounced the name in this way: “edYt piAHf”, with a clipped “e” and “t”, and the stresses placed on the second syllable, rather than the first.

My pronunciation was correct by French standards. But because it sounded so different to how most American listeners would say and hear the name, it made more sense to mispronounce it on the radio than use the French articulation.

This all goes to stress one important point about speaking on the radio (or indeed any oral medium): Comprehension should be the ultimate arbiter of pronunciation.

Never before have I been in a theatre with so many sleeping people.

I think I dozed off for about ten minutes or so in the middle of UCLA Live‘s production of Medea starring Annette Bening as Euripides’ vengeful mother and wife. When I woke up to the sound of the black-rubber-suit-and-red-bustier-clad female chorus letting out a blood-curdling ululation, I noticed that my guest, the man sitting next to her, and the two people behind him were all out stone cold. To my right, the couple looked like they’d just been startled awake like me. Five minutes later, I overheard two people sitting in the row behind me a little to my left say to each other: “Should we wake Robert up?” After the play, my friend mentioned that one of the musicians on stage looked like she was in a stupor.

And here’s the kicker: The show is only an hour and 15 minutes long.

The people of the Rogue Artists Ensemble have a wonderful way of working with puppets. The Los Angeles-based theatre company is currently presenting a show based on three of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories — Diary of a Madman, The Overcoat and The Nose at the scrappy-wondrous Bootleg Theater space — which seamlessly grafts together human and marionette actors to take the audience into an off-kilter world where surreality rules.

The ambitious project was created on a shoestring budget, but you wouldn’t know it from the quality of the acting and story-telling and the cleverly manipulated and gorgeously constructed puppet creations. Among my favorite of the puppets were the two dogs from Diary of a Madman. The puppeteers handled the mutts so brilliantly that they seemed to have absolutely distinct personalities. Other puppets, such as the old office clerk with his big, angry cuboid head and the towering, spindle-armed tailor from The Overcoat, were slightly sinister. Meanwhile, puppets like the postal workers, constructed out of stationery, also from The Overcoat, and the enormous nose puppet from The Nose, were as comical as they were works of art.

I don’t often feel strongly enough about a theatrical production to think it merits the effort of touring to other places. But Rogue Artists Ensemble’s Gogol Project should be seen elsewhere. I think I am going to badger some of my Bay Area producer friends to get down to LA to catch the show before it ends its run on November 1. San Francisco audiences would adore the production.

Just about every minute of the five hours I spent sitting in the nosebleeds at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles was worth the one and a half hour slog in the broiling heat I undertook to reach the venue from my friend’s place in West Hollywood on Saturday afternoon. The occasion — Gustavo Dudamel’s inaugural appearance as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — was a passionate, inclusive affair which filled the 18,000-seat arena by the time the orchestra sat down to play Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9.

I wasn’t crazy about the acoustic from where I was sitting. The Beethoven sounded much more sluggish than I expected it to. But the vistas of the huge crowds were something to behold from up high.

Some personal highlights of the afternoon/evening:

Actor/Comedian Jack Black coming on stage and remarking of the Venezuelan maestro: “Dude’s on Fire!”

The Silverlake Conservatory Ensemble’s take on several Stevie Wonder songs, sung with great verve by a group of young vocalists. The singers were backed by a crack team of musicians led by Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and violist, saxophonist and harmonica player Keith Barry. Barry and Flea are co-founders of the Silverlake Conservatory, a neighborhood music education center. I was really impressed by the energy and fun of this group. They performed with a lot of natural flair.

The community-mindedness of the event as a whole. The LA Phil did a pretty good job of highlighting local community music organizations, especially those that work with children. Performers other than the Silverlake group included The New Christ Memorial Church Adult and Children’s Choir, the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts Jazz Band, Los Cenzontles (A youth group specializing in Mexican musical traditions founded in the Bay Area) and the the LA Phil’s own YOLA Expo Center Youth Orchestra. YOLA obviously has a long way to go before it starts resembling anything like the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra that grew out of the Venezuelan El Sistema program upon which the LA Phil is basing its own education projects. Still, the young musicians, many of whom didn’t pick up their instruments until two years ago, did a serviceable job with Steven Venz’s arrangement of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. If there was one major message to take away from the celebration as a whole, it’s that Dudamel is absolutely focused on music education and multiculturalism.

Last, but not least, here’s my favorite quote of the enire ¡Bienvenido Gustavo! celebration, overheard from a conversation between two nearby music journalists: “I’m glad this day is soon going to be over, cos I’m tired of looking for the upside down exclamation mark on my keyboard.”

The first ever National Arts Journalism Summit at UCLA’s Annenberg School for Communication took place this morning. It was a bit of a marathon for the 200 or so people present in the room — four hours of presentations and round table discussions with only two five minute breaks to catch our breaths and run to the loo!

I would like to say that the event was a thumping success, but to be honest, I left feeling somewhat disappointed. There was a lot of flashy technology and fluff (300 people Twittering as we speak!” It’s an exciting time!! I feel very positive about the future of arts journalism!) and at the end of the day not a whole lot of substance to the discussions.

Obviously, no one expected one four-hour-long summit to provide answers to the many pressing issues facing the field of arts journalism at the moment. But the main question on everyone’s lips — the one about business models — ended up being avoided almost entirely or trampled on.

The truth is that even the heads of the innovative and supposedly sustainable arts journalism-oriented projects presented at the summit don’t see a clear way forward. Business models, which range from paid advertising to foundation support to subscriptions, are hardly secure. When project presenters proudly declared — as several of them did — “we pay our journalists!” during the course of the morning, I felt my spirits sag. No one cared to admit how much they pay. To my mind, 150 dollars for an 800 – 1000 article is a pittance and, frankly, unacceptable if you’re looking to publish quality work by professionals rather than the hokey ramblings of amateur art enthusiasts. But I suspect that this sort of level of compensation is at the top end of writers’ pay for the projects presented at the summit.

Least satisfying of all was the final roundtable discussion between Richard Gingras, the CEO of Salon.com and Deborah Marrow, director of the Getty Foundation. Gingras basically said that arts journalists shouldn’t expect money for their endeavors until they build huge capacity and attract advertising and investment. But his success story examples had nothing to do with the arts. It’s one thing for a top political blogger to attract upwards of a million eyeballs a day, but even the most widely-read arts blogs can’t hope to gain this sort of traction. As for Marrow, she managed to skirt each of moderator Andras Szanto’s questions with a vague, empty comment and a half smile. I learned absolutely nothing about the potential role that philanthropy might play in the future of arts journalism from her. I felt quite frustrated on the moderator’s behalf!

Still, I don’t mean to sound so down on the event. It was a step in the right direction. Hopefully by having more of these conversations, we’ll start to find a way out of the fog. Thanks to the organizers and sponsors for making the summit happen. It was a privilege to be present. 

Tomorrow, – October 2 from 9AM-1PM PDT – The Annenberg School of Journalism, USC, is hosting its first ever National Summit on Arts Journalism. The summit will present ten projects in arts journalism from around America, each one geared towards saying something interesting about the future of how we cover the arts. The event will take place in the auditorium of the journalism school in front of an audience of 200 (I’ll be there!), but it’s primarily conceived of as a virtual online event. The Summit will be streamed here.

You can also watch the webstream right from this blog:

Live video by Ustream

And here’s where you can follow the chat stream:

San Francisco Performances launched its 30th anniversary season yesterday evening with a recital by the great American baritone Thomas Hampson. Hampson is currently touring the US on a join project with The Library of Congress – Song of America – aimed at celebrating the history of song in this country and highlighting the library’s expansive collection of scores. Hampson’s repertoire encompasses music from the 1700s to the present day. Concert programs on the current tour (the second since the original iteration of the project in 2005-2006) feature Psalm settings and hymns, folksongs, cowboy songs, war songs and spirituals.

Hampson looks like the quintessential American Hero on stage — the sort of character that a Civil War era songwriter might dream of as the subject of a famous war ballad. With his stature and square-cut jaw (not to mention patriotic interests!) he reminds me strongly of the 1960s cartoon character, Roger Ramjet.

My favorite parts of last night’s program were newly commissioned works by Michael Tilson Thomas and John Corigliano (both of them lush and freewheeling works in which the singer and pianist collaborate as equals) and Hampson’s crowd-pleasing and emotional rendition of Shenandoah. Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Charles Ives all made appearances as well as songs penned by lesser-known composers, including Harry T. Burleigh, Arthur Farwell, and Elinor Remick Warren.

Hampson’s Song of America tour continues at Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on October 3.

In other news of 30th anniversaries, Beach Blanket Babylon leading lady, Val Diamond, is retiring after 30 years in the show. Congratulations to Val.