Step toward cross-pollination is highlight of retrospective

By James Reel
The Arizona Daily Star
Since I got myself wedged into the editor's seat, I've broken free for very few concerts. So my experience is too limited for any sweeping superlatives about 1996 classical music performances to be taken seriously.

That doesn't mean I haven't kept my ears open.

Several people whose judgment I respect have raved about the Colorado String Quartet's performance of Bartók's String Quartet No. 5 last month. Alas, I missed that Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concert.

I was also away for that organization's Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival last March, but many of those concerts have been preserved on compact discs and a video.

Sometime in the next few weeks, our new classical music critic probably will review the three CDs drawn from the 1996 festival. Right now, based on a viewing of the videotape, I'd like to praise the festival's presentation of the two string quartets of Leos Janácek.

The video production is less sophisticated than the performances it preserves. The simple two-camera setup tends to focus on instruments that aren't playing the primary material, and the audio quality is sometimes erratic. But the tape does capture the year's most interesting interdisciplinary presentations.

The concept is simple: Actors dramatize the stories that inspired Leos Janácek's quartets; four musicians periodically comment on the dramatization with excerpts from the works, and in the end they play each quartet straight through.

Music and words could have been better integrated, even overlapped. But the performances by the Prazak Quartet and actor Kirby Wahl skittered with all the requisite nervous intensity required by the quartet dubbed ``Kreutzer Sonata,'' after the Tolstoy story of the same name.

(In the ``Intimate Letters'' quartet, actors Jeff Cyronek and Maedell Dixon aren't to be slighted, but their material was less emotionally draining.)

This was a modest yet excellent first step toward the artistic cross-pollination that could make Tucson an innovative regional arts center.

Optimism aside, a chamber festival is a special event that may have little lasting impact. Local day-to-day classical music presentation has improved significantly thanks to the work of three newcomers.

Radio announcers Alan Campbell and David Harrington have helped give KUAT-FM its most consistently professional sound ever. No more awkward pauses while the announcers figure out what's supposed to happen next. Hardly any serious mangling of foreign names (although French remains a bit of a bête noir).

These fellows are smooth, relaxed, friendly and informed; I never feel they're telling me too much or too little about the music they play.

Campbell joined the KUAT staff in August, following more than a decade of radio work in Hawaii and previous duty in armed forces radio.

Harrington, a native of Texas who sounds like it as soon as he turns off his microphone, moved up through the ranks at the public radio station in Beaumont, Texas.

The third newcomer is having an even more dramatic effect on local classical music. George Hanson is the Tucson Symphony Orchestra's new music director and conductor.

In just a few months, he has transformed the orchestra's sound into something glowing and luscious. And he's done it without any personnel changes beyond the usual small season-to-season turnover.

These musicians had it in them all along; Hanson has the special ability to bring it out, while applying some interpretive touches all his own.

Every time some new guy takes over an orchestra, there's hype about a ``new era.'' This could be the real thing.

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