Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

First New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert as a Musical America blogger and now Los Angeles Opera Music Director James Conlon. Welcome Maestro Conlon!

His blog, entitled “A Rich Possession,” made its debut last Thursday, February 16, and demonstrated that those who love the arts really can make a difference. All of us have seen government funding for the arts tank during the current money crunch. But when the L.A. School Board proposed cutting all arts instruction in elementary classes, Conlon writes, “The public outcry against these cuts was loud and clear—and effective.”

The elementary school years are the most impressionable time for introduction to the arts. Thank goodness for Mrs. Kirk, the music teacher at Westview Elementary in Muncie. She taught me clarinet in second grade, and every Halloween she played a recording of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre, which fired my imagination and a love for classical music that burns unabated.

Read Conlon’s eloquent letter to the superintendant of the L.A. Board of Education and watch for his further contributions in the list of blogs on the right side of the Web site home page.

Copland House Comes to Manhattan

For years I’ve been tempted by Music from Copland House concerts, at Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home in New York’s lower Hudson Valley, but they always seemed out of reach. On Monday (2/20), however, the Mountain came to Mohammed when several of the ensemble’s artists played a tasty program of mostly lightish American music at a dual benefit concert at Christ and St. Stephens Church on West 69th Street.

Following a performance by students and teachers of UpBeat NYC, a “grassroots organization” in the South Bronx modeled after El Sistema, the Copland House portion began with a world premiere by Rob Smith of Chaw, followed by works by Pierre Jalbert, Paul Schoenfield, Derek Bermel, Copland, and Grainger. All were executed winningly, especially Copland’s Vitebsk, which was given a stunning reading by violinist Harumi Rhodes, cellist Nicholas Canellakis, and pianist Michael Boriskin.

Music from Copland House next performs in Manhattan at the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Hall on March 28.

Callas in My Dotage

This being the video and audio age, it seems asinine that people would watch films on computers, in the air, or, god forbid, on a cell anything. Lincoln Center to the rescue!

LC has been offering live-performance and documentary films for many years at Walter Reade Theater. I’ve attended numerous screenings even when I own the DVDs for the same reason I go to old movies in a theater: They were made for each other. I have a lot of Bernstein videos, but I still go to the Reade when they are shown. (How about his Verdi Requiem, Jane?) I hope that one of these days a Carlos Kleiber video festival will pop up. But I especially go for the artists I never experienced live, and this year it’s Maria Callas.

I often say that I’m saving such-and-such for my dotage, when there are no performers around anymore capable of producing what I want to hear in, say, Mahler, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, et al.—and that’s happening with alarming rapidity! Most music before Haydn, Schubert, and grand opera fall into my dotage category. Of course I have Callas’s irreplaceable 1954 recording of Tosca but none of her bel canto efforts. (Tristan, Otello, Pelléas, Bluebeard’s Castle, and Lulu are my favored operatic speed.)

So I’m looking forward to the first two Callas on Film presentations at the Reade on March 17. There’s one on the 18th too, but I can’t resist another of Leon Botstein’s last-chance-in-a-lifetime concerts over at Carnegie at the same hour—this time of Franz Schmidt’s opera Notre Dame.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

2/22 Alice Tully Hall. Britten Sinfonia/Thomas Adès (conductor and piano); Pekka Kuusisto (violin). Couperin: Les baricades mistérieuses. Couperin (arr. Adès): Les baricades mistérieuses. Adès: Three Studies After Couperin. Ravel: Le tombeau de Couperin. Stravinsky (arr. Dushkin): Airs du rossignol et March chinoise; Suite Nos. 1 and 2. Adès: Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths.

2/24 Carnegie Hall. Berlin Philharmonic/Simon Rattle. Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 (completed performance edition by Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca, rev. 2011).

2/25 Carnegie Hall. Berlin Philharmonic/Simon Rattle; Camilla Tilling, soprano; Bernarda Fink, mezzo; Westminster Symphonic Choir. Wolf: “Elfenlied”; “Der Feuerreiter”; “Frühlingschor” from Manuel Venegas. Mahler: Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”).

2/26 at 3 p.m. Avery Fisher Hall. Pittsburgh Symphony/Manfred Honeck; Hilary Hahn, violin. Stucky: Silent Spring. Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 1. Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5.

by Sedgwick Clark

Am I the only one who found Audra McDonald’s Bess jarring?

The controversial pared-down adaptation of Porgy and Bess now on Broadway—updated, rewritten, politicized, feminized, call it what you will—was initially attacked by Stephen Sondheim prior to its Cambridge tryout last summer, sight unseen, for having the audacity to change the text. But whatever problems the critics had with the adaptation by Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray, Diane Paulus’s directorial concept, or the other actors/singers, McDonald emerged triumphant and, as Susan Elliott wrote in her Musicalamerica.com review, will probably get a Tony.

My problem with McDonald—who may be my favorite singer in the world—is that she is playing neo-realism, complete with a nasty scar on her left cheek and a downright ugly tone of her alluring voice. Alright, I get it: Bess is a drug-addicted ho, and the rest of the cast could be right out of Gone with the Wind. Crown (Phillip Boykin) could take a lesson from Wagner’s Hunding, and David Alan Grier’s drug-dealing Sportin’ Life is no more reptilian than a garter snake. Norm Lewis portrays a noble Porgy but can’t compete vocally with the aggressive Audra, whose show this clearly is.

Today being today, the set is as deliberately depressing as possible. The choreography is crippled (was this deliberate too?). Perhaps worst of all, Gershwin’s lush orchestral writing is reduced to a hideously tinny, gratingly amplified 20-piece band, clodhopperishly conducted by Constantine Kitsopoulos. I knew we were in for a rough evening when the piano jumped out clangorously in the texture early in the overture.

No amount of bowdlerization by the current Broadway production will stop sold-out audiences from standing and cheering, however, and the run has been extended. At intermission, a woman behind me said to a friend, “I’m caught up in the music. What did they cut?” Just goes to show ya’ that even pockmarked by an unmusical rendering, Gershwin’s songs can’t be beat.

Many critics referred to Simon Rattle’s recording as an interpretive touchstone. I’ve not heard it, but I was struck when I listened again this weekend to the excellent 1977 Houston Grand Opera recording on RCA by how the music could only have been composed in the 20th century. I happily recall the Met’s fine production from the 1980s, but the most memorable production I’ve seen was at Radio City Music Hall in 1983, unerringly conducted by C. William Harwood. I recall thinking how much I looked forward to hearing him conduct again; tragically he succumbed to AIDS a year later at age 36.

The Unpredictable Jed Distler

Jed once composed a string quartet styled as a set of variations on the Mister Softee theme, in which the final variation was a triple fugue combining the Mister Softee and Mister Ed themes with Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge.

Friday (2/17) is the 30th anniversary of the great jazz composer-pianist Thelonius Monk’s death. At the Cornelia Street Café (29 Cornelia Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan) Jed will play two sets of what he calls “The Complete Works of Thelonius Monk,” at 9 and 10:30. The complete works? That seemed preposterous even for Jed, so I called him.

“Basically I’m interweaving all the pieces into one continuous fabric. Sometimes there might be seven blues themes played in quick succession over a pedal point, but in contrast Blue Monk provides a framework for more extensive, complex improvisation. In a few instances I’ll be playing the songs exactly as written.  In others the themes might suggest Shostakovich or Strauss, but of course through my own demented filters.”

My Night with Gluck  

Being a picky opera and baroque fancier, the combined Met+Juilliard alliance in a concert performance of Gluck’s Armide (1777) at the School’s Jay Sharp Theater may have been and is likely to be my sole encounter with this composer’s music, which struck me as formulaic/uninspired. The plot is set at the time of the First Crusade and deals with the sorceress Armide, princess of Damascus, who has, shall we say, issues with men and is horrified to find that she is falling in love with the one who alone has withstood her charms. Look to Tommasini’s glowing review in the Times for a more informed appreciation. But I must say that I agreed with Tony completely on the quite impressive performances by the young cast. I’ll list them in full below and bet that several of these names will be well known in the near future. Emalie Savoy in the title role and Renée Tatum as La Haine, in particular, were dramatic dynamite.

The cast: Emalie Savoy (Armide), Alexander Hajek (Hidraot), David Portillo (Renaud), Alexander Lewis (Artémidore), Luthando Qave (Ubalde), Noah Baetge (Le Chevalier Danois), Wallis Giunta (Phénice), Devon Guthrie (Sidonie), Evan Hughes (Aronte), Renée Tatum (La Haine), Soo Yeon Kim (La Naïade), Pureum Jo (2^nd Coryphée), Deanna Breiwick (Une Bergère), Lilla Heinrich-Szász (Lucinde), and Raquel González (Mélisse). The British conductor Jane Glover was the workmanlike leader.

To give full due to the presenters: The Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program in partnership with the Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts at The Juilliard School.

by Sedgwick Clark

A confident handshake? It happened in the 1980s in David Dubal’s office at the late, lamented New York classical-radio station WNCN, where I edited the station’s music magazine, Keynote. David, who was music director of the station, always had a string of notable pianists visiting. On this day it was Alexis Weissenberg who smiled and extended his hand. It was a large hand and enveloped mine completely with muscular but warm and welcoming pressure. Absolute confidence. He could have crushed my hand to smithereens if he had wished. In contrast, the grasp of another pianist, who shall remain nameless, left my hand aching for days. Guess who had the bigger career.

Weissenberg died on January 8 at age 82 of Parkinson’s disease in Lugano, Switzerland. The Times obit characterized him as “known for his thundering aggressiveness and rational detachment at the keyboard.” I suppose. He certainly wasn’t known for his singing tone and pliant phrasing. But he was one of two pianists in my experience—Martha Argerich is the other—able to make a Hamburg Steinway “speak.” I recall a Carnegie Hall performance on March 2, 1980, of Rachmaninoff’s First Sonata that did indeed “thunder” with a massive tone and power that pinned me to the back of my seat. Most pianists I’ve heard seem wimpy when seated at a Hamburg. I’ll take the color, detail, and impact of an American Steinway any day.  Dubal could probably tell you why.

Russian Visit

A friend is in town for the next couple of weeks before giving a paper at a Princeton University conference oddly entitled “After the End of Music History” to honor Richard Taruskin, the prolific American author of Russian musical subjects. She is Olga Manulkina, author of From Ives to Adams: American Music in the XXth Century, the first book in Russian to cover the entire century of the subject. While I can’t claim to have read it, I can say that it’s chock full of wonderful photos from the Musical America Archives! Also that its first printing is all but sold out, so readers of Cyrillic should order it ASAP.

Anyway, one of Olga’s projects is to instill a love of baroque music in me, so friends and readers of this column should brace themselves if they see me at unaccustomed concerts. Thank goodness there’s a lot of 20^th-century and contemporary American music being performed too!

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

1/26 Alice Tully Hall. Juilliard415/William Christie. Purcell: The Fairy Queen (excerpts). Rameau: Les Fêtes d’Hébé (excerpts).

1/27 Zankel Hall at 6:00. Making Music: David Lang. the little match girl passion (N.Y. premiere). Theatre of Voices/Paul Hillier; vocalists; Nico Muhly, keyboards.

1/28 Metropolitan Opera. The Enchanted Island. William Christie; de Niese, Oropesa, DiDonato, Daniels, Constanzo, Domingo, Pisaroni.

1/29 Le Poisson Rouge at 7:00. Philip Glass’s 75^th Birthday Celebration. Kronos Quartet, Dennis Russell Davies, Maki Namekawa, Ira Glass, Michael Riesman, et al.

1/30 Peter Jay Sharp Theater. FOCUS! Festival. Juilliard Percussion Ensemble/Daniel Druckman; Benjamin Sheen, organ. Cowell: Ostinato Pianissimo. Cage: Three²; Third Construction; Credo in Us. Harrison: Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra.

1/31 Metropolitan Opera. Wagner: Götterdämmerung. Fabio Luisi. Voigt, Harmer, Meier, Gould, Paterson, Owens, König.

2/1 Paul Hall. FOCUS! Festival. Cage: Five Songs (1938); Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard (1950); Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939); Etudes Boreales, Nos. 1 & 3 (1978); Sonnekus² (1985); Satie Cabaret Songs; Child of Tree (1975); The Perilous Night (1944).

by Sedgwick Clark

Just the other night a colleague was saying how much we owe Leon Botstein for programming rarely (and often never) heard music. Nonetheless, my friend was nowhere to be seen at the conductor’s Sunday afternoon pairing of two 70-minute Romantic behemoths at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra: Busoni’s sole piano concerto and Liszt’s A Faust Symphony. Then there was the critic last August who replied that he loved the composer too much when I asked why he didn’t attend Botstein’s “Sibelius and His World” concerts at Bard College’s summer music festival.

One can understand both. One looks at Botstein’s invariably enticing, over-rich programs from a distance, licking one’s lips at the proffered smorgasbord, but in the end usually wishing the conductor had been more mindful of his players’ and his own capabilities. My first friend missed a strong reading of the Busoni and a perfunctory, inadequately rehearsed Faust; the second an excellent, sensitively shaded Sibelius Fourth and a shockingly played Third. One just never knows what to expect.

One can venture a pretty good guess, however, when an intellectually inspired program such as the Busoni-Liszt pairing meets current economics. Both pieces require short choral sections and soloists—a virtuoso pianist (the dexterous Piers Lane) in the former and a tenor (the sweet-toned Ryan MacPherson) in the latter. But even the greatest of orchestras and conductors require intensive rehearsal for two hours and twenty minutes of Romantic soul searching that few of the players could have previously encountered, and it was clear that the Liszt got short shrift. Moreover, Botstein’s impatient pacing of Liszt’s slower tempos indicated more of an eye on the clock and the damnation of overtime than a sympathetic interpreter. Go to the Beecham and Bernstein recordings for total conviction.

Botstein has been music director of the American Symphony for 19 years. Basically a pickup orchestra, it has performed mainly at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York City and in the summer at Bard College’s Summerscape festival, which the conductor (who is also president of the college) founded in 1990. Its imaginative programming of orchestral, chamber, and solo music is centered on a single composer each year and includes works by other composers who influenced him and whom he, in turn, influenced. A lavish, beautifully printed  program booklet, containing essays, art, and photos, is available at no cost, and a full-fledged book of essays may be purchased by those desiring further immersion into the composer’s world. Add the extra-musical opportunity to explore one of the Hudson Valley’s most attractive terrains, Annandale-on-Hudson, and you have a pair of memorable weekends.

I hadn’t been to a Bard summer festival since 2005, even for such favorite composers as Elgar, Prokofiev, and Berg, but I couldn’t resist Sibelius and His World. Seems the regulars couldn’t either, for nearly all the orchestral concerts in the 900-seat Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Hall appeared sold out, and the 400-seat Olin Hall chamber-music recitals were respectfully full too.

Ever since Fisher Hall’s opening night in 2003, with the ASO playing Mahler’s Third Symphony, Botstein encouraged the orchestra to play full force throughout, which may work in New York’s 2,800-seat Avery Fisher or Carnegie halls but was painful above forte at Bard. The only Botstein performance I recall with pleasure in this hall was a sensitively conducted Appalachian Spring suite in Copland’s original 13-instrument chamber version in 2005.

What a surprise, then, in the gruff introduction of the first weekend’s opening work, Finlandia, that the brass were commanding, not excruciating. As this all-Sibelius evening progressed, I savored the orchestral sound as never before in this hall—the sprightly woodwinds, burnished brass, and tonally ingratiating, if not always precise, strings. I don’t know when Botstein began holding back the ASO musicians in Fisher Hall, but one can now look forward to their playing at Bard.

Botstein’s performances are presentations rather than interpretations. It was said of Alfred Hitchcock that he enjoyed the planning of his films but was less interested in the actual process of filming. That may have been a façade, and it may be with Botstein as well. No one could doubt that he is committed to the music and wants to communicate with his audiences. Still, he would do well to consider what impression his podium demeanor creates. Avoidance of showmanship or outward display of emotion is one thing, but he drags onto the stage as if he would rather be anywhere else. At the end of a performance he lets his hands drop to his side as if nothing of import had occurred, makes a curt bow, turns, and slumps off. In nearly every performance I heard this summer, the polite applause stopped instantly the moment he disappeared from view. Perhaps this cool response validates his self image as a “serious” musician. But make no mistake, an audience craves confirmation that what it has heard matters, and if the performer behaves like a stage hand, the music, the composer, and the audience will be short-changed, no matter how expert the performance.

He seems especially engaged in the works involving choruses and those with soloists. In the all-Sibelius program that opened with Finlandia, he and the orchestra were attentive partners to violinist Henning Kraggerud’s rustic projection of four of the six Humoresques, Opp. 87 and 89, and to soprano Christiane Libore, whose impressive voice was never overwhelmed in that spooky ten-minute tone poem Luonnotar. The two symphonies fared less well. Imagine if the rehearsal time for the disastrous Third, mentioned above, had been devoted to the Fifth, which followed? The monumental Fifth is far more difficult to bring off, and while it received a more successful performance than the Third, its elemental wonderment and power were never suggested. An interesting thing happened at the symphony’s conclusion, which ends with six fortissimo, widely spaced chords. Botstein obviously had rehearsed his players to a tee. He actually looked involved, and he achieved powerful, purposeful, precise results.

The composer’s early choral symphony, Kullervo, revealed Botstein at his best, vigorously in control of the orchestra, two soloists, and an all-male chorus. Brimming with memorable Sibelian melodies and imbued with youthful energy, Kullervo tells of a vengeful Finnish folk hero who seduces his long-lost sister and finally falls on his sword out of guilt. (This is a hero?) Other notable Sibelius performances by Botstein were The Swan of Tuonela, The Oceanides, and the Seventh Symphony. The latter was part of my favorite program of the season: Sibelius, Tapiola; Barber, Symphony No. 1; Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 5; Sibelius, Symphony No. 7. Come to think of it, one of my favorite programs of all time.

A final note: Bard’s is the oldest audience I’ve ever seen—far older even than the Philadelphia Orchestra’s at Carnegie Hall. Observing the aged upstate males negotiating the cement steps in the steeply raked auditorium was frightening; fortunately, they had their sturdier wives guiding them. And the kids? They were spilling out of a tent not far away, their rock music proudly declaring their vote. A portent, perhaps, for the festival’s future.

Virtuoso Prokofiev from Yale

A two-concert marathon of Prokofiev’s nine piano sonatas, played by Yale University students of Boris Berman, was a highlight of the season so far. Given these young artists’ technical perfection and obvious commitment, it was difficult to imagine the composer being better served. For a mere $10 a ticket, this was a bargain of many a year.

Hearing such impressive performances live in concert banished any comparisons with the memorable recordings by Richter, Gilels, Horowitz, or Berman himself. It seems unfair to single out any of these talented pianists, but Henry Kramer in the Sixth Sonata and Esther Park in the Ninth were especially successful in investing these fingerbusters with expressive character, and Larry Weng’s torrid attack on the well-known Seventh fully realized “the anguish and struggle of the war years” referred to by Berman in his insightful program notes.

The two concerts (with an hour between for dinner), at Weill Recital Hall, instantly lifted the gloom engendered by Botstein’s immediately preceding Liszt next door.

Program 1:

Sonata No. 1, Op. 1 – Naomi Woo

Sonata No. 2, Op. 14 – Euntaek Kim

Sonata No. 5 (second version), Op. 135 – David Fung

Sonata No. 9, Op. 103 – Esther Park

Sonata No. 4, Op. 29 – Scott MacIsaac

Program 2:

Sonata No. 8, Op. 84 – Lee Dionne

Sonata No. 7, Op. 83 – Larry Weng

Sonata No. 3, Op. 28 – Melody Quah

Sonata No. 6, Op. 82 – Henry Kramer

by Sedgwick Clark

Soon after I moved to New York in the fall of 1968, Charles Munch brought the Orchestre de Paris on tour to Carnegie Hall. He programmed three of his favorites: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Barber’s Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, and the second suite from Daphnis et Chloé. The next afternoon, Jean Martinon led the orchestra in Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite, which he had recently recorded for RCA with the Chicago Symphony. Having money for only one concert, I figured that I could hear Munch do those pieces anytime. Two weeks later he dropped dead of a heart attack. 

I’ll never forgive myself for missing my one opportunity to see and hear Munch in the flesh, even though I am glad to have heard Martinon’s Bartók, which turned out to be the only time I would hear him live.

These concerts come to mind as I think of my friend Andrew Kazdin, who died on Monday after a four-year battle with cancer. I didn’t know he was ill and hadn’t seen him or spoken with him since running into him a couple of years ago at Lincoln Center. Like his protégé at Columbia Records, Steven Epstein, who wrote an affectionate appreciation of Andy and his work for MusicalAmerica.com on Wednesday, I knew and admired several Kazdin recordings before I met him. Many were by Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic. Boulez spoke highly of Andy, and indeed they were a perfect team, for they were both fanatical about clarity of detail and ensemble perfection.

Andy let me attend many Boulez recording sessions at Manhattan Center. Foremost in my memory is the mind-boggling sonority conjured in the ballroom’s immense acoustic in Stravinsky’s Firebird, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, and Varèse’s Arcana, superbly captured by Andy’s army of microphones. His multi-miking technique was controversial, to say the least, and the golden-ear crowd consistently panned his productions. Andy didn’t mind bad reviews as much as he did critics who claimed to know how he had achieved his results. He did not suffer fools gladly, for he knew his craft absolutely—and an extraordinary range of other subjects as well.

One of those subjects was pizza. Wherever Andy went to make a recording—Cleveland, Israel, Los Angeles, Marlboro—he first scoped out the town’s best reputed pizza parlor. He had to have pizza on Friday nights. In all his travels he thought Grimaldi’s, underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, was the tops. We had planned to go together one Friday night for years but, I’m very sorry to say, never got around to it.  

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

12/1. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Daniel Harding. Mahler: Symphony No. 10 (Deryck Cooke performing version).

by Sedgwick Clark

I’ve had cymbals and triangles on the brain. I was obsessed with them the other day because I had just heard the New York Philharmonic under Bernard Haitink play Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. The climax of the slow movement was punctuated by fortissimo cymbal and triangle (I’ll spare you talk about editions and how he intermingled Haas instrumental details with the purported use of Nowak), and the players assaulted the ear with unrestrained vengeance—crude, brittle, monochromatic, as sensuous as the screech of the subway downstairs. The players only did what most percussionists do when confronted with an ff sign, which is to create as much noise as possible until the conductor says to cool it. I hasten to add that in all other respects the performance was admirable and the audience gratifyingly silent. But why Haitink allowed the artillery to blast away with such violence at a moment of such transfigured release escapes me still.

The Mariinsky cymbals at the orchestra’s Carnegie Hall Tchaikovsky festival, which I rhapsodized about last week are still shimmering in my ears. Like the Curtis Institute of Music triangle in Rossini’s Overture to La gazza ladra back in February 1984 at the same venue, I don’t think I’ll ever forget that hauntingly musical sound. And from cymbals, no less!

Is it the player, the conductor, the instrument, or the hall who/that bears the most responsibility? I’d bet on the conductor. Leading the Mariinsky, as we all know, was Valery Gergiev, and at the head of Curtis’s student orchestra was Sergiu Celibidache, age 72, making his American debut. John Rockwell in the Times called the concert “about as revelatory an experience, both thrilling and thought-provoking, as this writer has encountered in 25 years of regular concert-going.” Googling John’s review last night, I see that he even referred approvingly to “the tiny ping of the triangle.” Celi, who was known to rehearse details without end, must have worked with his young player for hours, explaining patiently why less is infinitely more. That feathery ping resounded in Carnegie’s pre-renovation acoustic with unearthly beauty and color, a philosophical statement on its own.

Koussy and Springsteen

Note to the cynics among us: Did you see in MusicalAmerica.com (11/23) that Serge Koussevitzky’s 1940 recording of Roy Harris’s Third Symphony was selected along with Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run for the 2012 Grammy Hall of Fame? Yes, there’s only one classical entry out of 25, but someone picked a great one.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

11/29 Metropolitan Opera House. Metropolitan Opera/Yannick Nézet-Seguin; Jonas Kaufmann (Faust), René Pape (Méphistophélès), Marina Poplavskaya (Marguerite). Gounod: Faust.