Shop talk

Julia Keller, the Chicago Tribune book critic, admits that she would rather write a positive review than a negative one, which "makes me sound like a wimp, a softie, a sap, a pushover." In deciding what to review, and how to phrase her critique, "I can . . . show you how fiendishly clever I am by a take-no-prisoners attack on a book I don't like, or I can tell you about a book that may move you, inform you, entertain you. If choosing the second option makes me sound like a weakling, then fine. Pick somebody else for your side in dodge ball:"

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ae-1107-lit-life-20101106,0,5123218.column

Anne Midgette, The Washington Post's music critic, sympathizes but begs to differ. Critics who accentuate the positive nourish "a school of thought that the arts, like cooking and travel, belong in the category of marvelous lifestyle enhancements: things that adorn our lives and make them nicer. The role of a critic, in this view, is simply to alert readers to the wealth of marvelous things that are out there, and act as a consumer advocate, preferably by recommending nice things, or writing about the nice things that have taken place:"

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/

The late Edith Lindeman, longtime theater and movie critic of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and spare-time lyricist of popular songs ("Little Things Mean a Lot," "The Red-Headed Stranger"), liked to recall a faithful reader who rarely agreed with her reviews but still found them useful. If you don't like it, I expect I will, the reader told the critic.

That constructively adversarial relationship is surely common among critics (and opinion writers in general) and their readers. It's also fairly common among critics and the artists and organizations they cover, sometimes leading to exchanges of heated missives, occasionally to public confrontations.

Constructive adverseness, emphasizing the former, avoiding nastiness in the latter (grumpiness is OK, in moderation), strikes me as an efficacious arrangement. The critic can stick to a set of standards and opine honestly and freely. Readers can find their points on the artistic compass relative to the critic's and adjust their expectations accordingly. The review serves its purpose, albeit backhandedly.

And when the critic and reader agree, you can be sure that something special has occurred on the stage, screen or page.

Who gives, and how much

The most affluent Americans, with incomes above $200,000 and seven-figure or higher net worths, "devoted 7.5 cents out of their charitable dollar to the arts during 2009, compared to a penny for the population at large," reports Mike Boehm on the Los Angeles Times' Culture Monster blog.

Boehm cites a "Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy" by Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, which also found that the recession led to a 35 percent decline in philanthropic giving by high-income donors between 2007 and 2009:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/11/rich-arts-charity-merrill-lynch.html

Earthly delights (not)

Musicologists and instrument-makers at Oxford University set out to replicate the instruments pictured in Hieronymus Bosch's early 16th-century triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights," only to find that most were "either impossible to make or painful to hear," Sam Leith reports in The Guardian (UK):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/07/sam-leith-shocking-news-oxford

The Bosch is in the online gallery of the Prado museum of Madrid; most of the musical action, you'll notice, is in the hell panel on the right:

http://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/galeria-on-line/galeria-on-line/zoom/2/obra/el-jardin-de-las-delicias-o-la-pintura-del-madrono/oimg/0/

Review: Richmond Symphony

Steven Smith conducting
Nov. 5, The Steward School, Richmond

Steven Smith, the Richmond Symphony’s new music director, leads his first pair of Metro Collection chamber-orchestra concerts this weekend, obtaining rhythmically alert, tonally refined performances of works by Brahms, Copland, Haydn and Michael Torke that draw inspiration from, or at least make reference to, popular and vernacular musics.

In the Nov. 5 performance, rich string and well-integrated wind sound and nuanced gradations of waltz tempo marked a performance of the orchestration of Brahms’ "Liebeslieder Waltzes," followed by a crisply pointed reading of Copland’s "Music for the Theater," a 1924-vintage pre-echo of the composer’s later "Americana" works, only with jolts of hot-jazz syncopations and voicings that Copland largely cast aside in his maturity. (Leonard Bernstein picked up where Copland left off.)

The second half of the program sets Torke’s "Lucent Variations" (1998) alongside Haydn’s Symphony No. 82 in C major ("The Bear"), first of the six symphonies written for performances in Paris in the mid-1780s. A canny pairing: Torke’s "post-minimalist" style sets musical figures and rhythms from modern American pop in constructs that come straight out of the classical period; Haydn, who invented some of the classical style and perfected the rest, also drew liberally on popular and folk songs and dances of his time in works such as this symphony.

Torke describes "Lucent Variations" as an orchestral play on light. This performance emphasized its shifting tone colors, somewhat at the expense of rhythmic articulation. More of the crispness heard in the Copland would have greatly enhanced the Torke.

The Haydn was well-paced, not too fast, not too slow, tending slightly more to elegance than earthiness except in the finale, which earned the piece its nickname with its seeming evocation of a bear dancing to the drone of a bagpipe or hurdy-gurdy. Smith’s treatment struck me as a bit too metrical, needing more of the "skating" effect that Haydn produces rhythmically and dynamically.

If I were devising a program to introduce a newcomer to the symphony orchestra, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a better assortment of pieces than these four works. They cover all the stylistic bases from classical to post-modern, do so in reasonably bite-sized chunks (Torke’s 12-minute piece is the longest stretch of uninterrupted music); they’re all accessibly tonal, rhythmically active and largely upbeat.

If you were thinking of taking the kids to a non-kiddie symphony concert, this would be an excellent choice.

The program repeats at 3 p.m. Nov. 7 at Blackwell Auditorium, Randolph-Macon College, 205 Henry St., in Ashland. Tickets: $20. Details: (800) 982-2787 (Ticketmaster); http://www.richmondsymphony.com/

Shirley Verrett (1931-2010)

Shirley Verrett, the New Orleans-born soprano famed for her singing and acting in the title roles of Bizet's "Carmen" and Bellini's "Norma," has died at the age of 79.

Following an operatic career that reached its pinnacle in the 1960s and ’70s, Verrett taught at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she died.

An obituary by Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/arts/music/06verrett.html?ref=obituaries

Symphony concertmaster leaving

Karen Johnson, concertmaster of the Richmond Symphony since 2002, will leave the orchestra at the end of the year to join the U.S. Marine Band ("The President’s Own") in Washington.

Her husband, Karl Johnson, is a bass trombonist with the band.

Although the ensemble is best-known as a wind-and-brass band (led by John Philip Sousa from 1880 to 1892), it is also the resident orchestra of the White House. Its string complement, which the violinist is joining, performs in chamber-orchestra and chamber-music programs, usually in conjunction with social events.

In joining the Marine Band, Johnson also will join the U.S. Marine Corps. "But I won’t have to go through boot camp," she says. "That would’ve been a deal-breaker for a mother of three."

Johnson was to have been the soloist in Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in the symphony’s May 2011 Masterworks program. That performance will be rescheduled in a future season, she said.

The orchestra has scheduled auditions early next year to fill the concertmaster vacancy.

'Porgy and Bess,' revised

"Porgy and Bess," the opera by George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward, will be recast as a musical in a shortened version devised by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, director Diane Paulus and composer Diedre Murray. The "updated" version will be introduced by Paulus' American Repertory Theater in September 2011, Laura Collins-Hughes reports in the Boston Globe:

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2010/11/05/updated_porgy_and_bess_to_open_arts_season/