Tag Archives: Noble Viola

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, Food, General, Music, Theater

What wedding? — on Chekhov, string quartets, bridges, drums and locavores

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  • The royal whatzis
  • The Cherry Orchard at Artists Repertory Theatre
  • Noble Viola on Opus at Portland Center Stage
  • Brian Libby on the failed Columbia River Crossing
  • Portland Taiko tells a tale
  • James E. McWilliams on eating locally and globally

Portland Taiko. Photo: Rich Iwasaki/2009Portland Taiko. Rich Iwasaki/2009

By Bob Hicks

We’re given to understand some sort of white-tie wedding is taking place in the wee hours of Friday morning, and much of the world is agog. Art Scatter does not plan to cover it. With any luck — if the cat doesn’t come slapping at our cheek with her paw, demanding to be let outside — we’ll be snoozing.

And now, on with the news.

Chekhov the composer: On Wednesday night the Scatters took in The Cherry Orchard, playwright Richard Kramer’s world-premiere adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s final dramatic masterpiece, at Artists Rep. It struck us again that, like so many leading playwrights, Chekhov thought like a musician.

Like a string quartet: Linda Alper, Tim Blough (background), Michael Mendelson and Tobias Andersen in "The Cherry Orchard." Photo: Owen CareyThere isn’t much story to The Cherry Orchard, but there are themes, counter-themes, motifs. It’s chamber music, and the way we hear it can be startlingly different from production to production, depending not just on our own life experiences (interpreting Chekhov relies to an extreme on what the audience brings to it) but also on the emphases of interpretation on the stage: Do we concentrate on the cello tonight, or the bassoon? In truth, I suspect that even more so than ordinarily, every member of the audience sees a different play when watching Chekhov.

Kramer’s intermissionless adaptation, which I like quite a lot, sets out to rough up the Chekhov-as-wistful-yearning school of thought, and it succeeds. To extend the musical metaphor, it’s a bit like Bach rearranged by Bartok: depths and balances and gorgeous tones, but syncopated and spiked up.

Continue reading What wedding? — on Chekhov, string quartets, bridges, drums and locavores →

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Television, Visual Art

Thursday links: Trash-art TV, unkind cuts

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By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter doesn’t watch much television (especially since the Mariners have taken a dive into baseball’s primordial ooze of futility: where are you now, Edgar and Buhner and Big Unit?), and he doesn’t really go in for the American Idol model of determining cultural “winners.”

Nao Bustamante, not shocking enough for TV. Shows like Idol and So You Think You Can Dance certainly reflect the effect of the marketplace on the art world — an effect that a lot of people like to pretend doesn’t exist but is in fact crucial. That doesn’t necessarily make it a positive, only an inescapable fact of life. Still, as we’ve all become excruciatingly aware, an unchecked marketplace can be an arena for disaster, and Mr. Scatter is not convinced that his musical listening habits, for instance, should be determined by a popular vote.

This is a long route to confessing that he hasn’t actually watched an episode of the Bravo network’s Work of Art, in which visual artists advance or fall by the wayside according to a Trump-like theory of failure and success. Fortunately Regina Hackett, from her perch at the provocative and insightful Another Bouncing Ball, has watched, and thought, and written.

Her post Reality TV: artists as female stereotypes is a good read, and typically for ABB, it rattles the cages of conventional wisdom. And Hackett can be funny. Musing on Work of Art‘s judges, whom she judges to be pretty lame, she wonders whether the show couldn’t be goosed up a bit if venerated critic Donald Kuspit joined the panel: “When being fed nonsense, I prefer it to be elegant nonsense, like Kuspit’s.”

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Hackett’s post here on Dave Hickey (she calls him “the great tap-dancing art critic of our time”) is also a refreshing read. Here’s Hickey on university life: “It took me a few years to realize you can’t talk to other English teachers about literature. You can talk to them about their pets, though. That’s why you want to learn all the names of the professors’ pets, so when you see them in the hall you can ask, ‘How’s Roscoe?’ and they will go on for half an hour, and you can nod along and think about whatever you want.”

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Meanwhile, Barry Johnson at Arts Dispatch and David Stabler at The Oregonian have been having an interesting conversation about whether it’s smart or dumb for arts groups to  slash budgets in tough times. Should you cut budgets and programming, because it’s prudent to balance your budget? Or does that simply make you look desperate? The ping-pong has been interesting, and so have the comments by a lot of smart onlookers.

I like the latest (so far) take on the fray, by Oregon Symphony violist Charles Noble at Noble Viola: “What you cut is almost as important as how much you cut. … For example, cutting all pops programming because ‘the audience is all dying anyway’ is catastrophic cutting, whereas searching for the audience that we most want to develop and then catering to them within the general pops genre is the better route, though possibly more expensive and time consuming. The difference is what you or I might do to our prized Japanese maple tree if we just randomly hack off stray limbs instead of hiring a skilled arborist to perform careful pruning to make the tree more healthy.”

In other words: Constantly reassess, in good times and bad. And spend smart.

This is a discussion that might actually have an impact. If you haven’t already, catch up on the conversation at these links and throw in your own two Euros’ worth.

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Illustration: Nao Bustamante’s performance piece wasn’t shocking enough for the judges on Bravo’s “Work of Art.”

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, General, Journalism, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Art Scatter officially runs off at mouth

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prolific-blogger-award

Here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re identifying proudly these days with the good townswomen of River City, Iowa, in The Music Man: “Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little, cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more.”

With emphasis on the “talk a lot.”

Thanks to the silver-tongued Mead Hunter of Blogorrhea and The Editing Room, who generously passed this honor along to us, we are now recipients of the coveted Prolific Blogger Award, a sort of Oscar for best supporting prattler. In other words: You can’t shut us up. Mrs. Scatter made passing reference to this blogospheric milestone in this post, in which she got all sentimental and teary-eyed over Mr. Mead’s enshrining of her with the honorific “retinue.”

But we blather.

Here’s what it’s all about. Adhering to the biblical code of sevens (like Joseph and his dream-interpretations), the Prolific Blogger Award moves in waves. Each recipient must in turn pay it forward to seven other bloggers who feed the beast regularly. They must also link to the original PBA post (we did that above; it’s on the blog Advance Booking) and, most confoundingly, hook up with the mysteriously named Mister Linky.

Our friend and benefactor Mr. Mead has noted the dismaying phenomenon of once-prolific bloggers who have fallen by the wayside, some no doubt waylaid by the strumpet sirens of Twitter, Buzz and Facebook; others perhaps realizing that there is Life on the Other Side. Yet we found many good and noble blogs worthy of this award. Without further ado ….

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN


Noble Viola. Charles Noble, assistant principal violist for the Oregon Symphony, subtitles his blog Life on the Working End of the Viola, and that’s the view he gives you: the world of art music from the inside. It’s smart, provocative, sometimes funny, and almost always illuminating. A good musician isn’t always a good writer. Noble is. Like Lenny Bernstein, he knows how to use words to get inside sounds.

Rose City Reader. You’d think RCR would already own the franchising rights to the Prolific Blogger Award. A busy lawyer by day, she’s a compulsive reader, list-maker and blogger by night (or maybe early morning). Her reading is catholic, roaming from classics to contemporary lit to arcane food-and-drink books to history, politics, and the occasional P.G. Wodehouse caper. And she writes about her literary adventures with wit and savvy independence.

Portland Through My Lens. Having completed (with occasional additions) the terrific Fifty Two Pieces, in which she and a friend spent a year writing about art and artists connected to the Portland Art Museum, LaValle Linn has picked up her camera and embarked on this visual adventure, recording life and images around and about Portland’s streetcar line. Following it is like taking your morning coffee in a different little hangout every day.

Portland Architecture. If you build it, they will argue. Brian Libby’s ambitious blog serves the dual purpose of keeping up with the city’s maze of architectural news and providing a platform for architects and planners and citizen-advocates to vent on issues as broad-ranging as neighborhood design and the fates of Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter.

Powell’s Books Blog. We aren’t sure who actually puts this together, but Portland’s iconic bookstore runs an excellent blog. It’s wide-ranging, with lots of topics and lots of guest bloggers, often writers with fresh books on the market. Sure, it’s a commercial blog, but it pops with good writing and stimulating ideas. You can never keep up with what’s going on in the publishing biz, but this is a good start.

Splattworks. Playwright Steve Patterson’s blog begins with matters theatrical but often veers sharply into other obsessions, from photography to guitars to the inanities of the political world (on which he can be witheringly caustic). Smart, funny, passionate; a blog of admirable exasperations.

Eva Lake. A lively checking-point for gallery hoppers. The artist and journalist Eva Lake, whose Art Focus program on KBOO-FM features often fascinating interviews with Portland artists and curators, tracks what’s happening on the city’s art scene.