dehyphenated

In a massive display of wasting space on the Internet, Slate has published a grammar nazi's rant about punctuation in Woody Allen film titles.

As it is no longer possible to comment on Slate without giving up your first-born privacy, I will place my note here, and that is a response to Mr Heller's complaint that Small Time Crooks is "not, in fact, a film about dwarf ne'er-do-wells who steal time, although [I] might have found that premise more rewarding."

I just would have liked to have informed him that there already had been a film about dwarf ne'er-do-wells who steal time. It was called Time Bandits and it was directed by Terry Gilliam. It's a pretty good film; he might like it. What I do not know is whether the fact that he was making, in truth, a film about small time crooks had occurred to Mr Gilliam. Knowing his work, I wouldn't put it past him to have buried in his movie a pun that wasn't discovered for thirty years.

At least this reading of Woody Allen's title is at least as amusing as the confusion, noted by amused commentators at the time the movie came out, over whether Eight Legged Freaks was about freaks with eight legs, or about eight freaks with legs.

encores encore

In an earlier entry I wrote about the perils for reviewers of identifying encores. Little did I know I was about to face my most frustrating encounter yet.

After Saturday's concert, with its rough, energetic encore by the rough, energetic solo violinist, I dropped a phone message on the symphony administration to query the piece. I got a call back Sunday afternoon after the matinee reprise (at which, they told me, he played Bach instead). My informant didn't have the name of the composer in front of him, but it was a recitative and scherzo by someone whose name he pronounced Cry-sir. If that were German it would be spelled Kreiser. I didn't know any Kreiser, so I said, "Is that Kreisler?", meaning (though I didn't say so specifically) Fritz Kreisler, the renowned early/mid 20C violinist known for writing his own encores and whimsically attributing them to obscure earlier composers. No, he repeated, Kreiser. I grabbed my handy ex-lib copy of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and hastily flipped through it. "Could it have been Kreutzer?" I asked. I pronounced that roughly Croy-tsur, and I thought it might be rendered Cry-sir by someone who didn't know German. I read off the name Rodolphe Kreutzer, a historically important violinist who wrote etudes and caprices for violin (though I didn't add that he was the dedicatee of a Beeethoven work that's since been known as the Kreutzer Sonata).

"That's it," said my informant, and I prepared to submit a review saying so. But before sending it in, I read the review in this morning's Mercury, which attributed the encore to Fritz Kreisler. "Oh, boy, did he ever make a mistake," was my first thought, but then I decided to Google the title given there, "Recitative and Scherzo-Caprice", with each composer's name, and found that Kreisler apparently indeed wrote one by that title, and nothing turned up at a hasty glance for Kreutzer. But this is teh Interwebs. The entire spectrum of Google results could easily have equally gotten the two mixed up, or maybe Kreisler wrote the piece and whimsically attributed it to Kreutzer. Baker's was no further help. I don't really know Kreisler's compositions. The idiom seemed a wee bit advanced for Kreutzer's time, but a showpiece encore would not be written in the same somber language as the heavy concert staples I know best.

My deadline was upon me, and there was no time to search further. So what the review now says is "by Fritz Kreisler (apparently: I was told it was Rodolphe Kreutzer)," which is my written equivalent of throwing my hands up in disgust. If it is Kreisler, could it be that the administrator of a semi-major symphony orchestra was not familiar with his name? Pfeh! I may well have just barely wiggled out of being led into making a major fool of myself. Or maybe I still have; I don't know yet.