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Tchaicoughsky at Carnegie

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

One would have cough thought it a TB ward in February. But, no, it was Carnegie Hall’s opening cough night in October. Yo-Yo Ma’s pianississimos in Tchaikovsky’s Andante cough cough cantabile took the breath away from the non-coughers at Carnegie Hall’s opening night (10/5). Too bad the coughers couldn’t hold their breaths because they missed some truly ravishing playing by the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev as well.

Traditionally, Russian orchestras have been praised for their excitement but rarely for refinement. My previous concert encounters with the frequently under-rehearsed Mariinsky had left me unprepared for its virtuosic ensemble, perfect sectional balances, and sheer tonal luxuriousness. Not a coarse bar to be heard in this welcome Tchaikovsky festival. Even the cymbal player avoided shattering ears, eliciting striking color and shimmer from his dangerous instrument.

The festival included Tchaikovsky’s six numbered symphonies, Rococo Variations with Ma, and the First Piano Concerto with the latest Tchaikovsky Competition winner, 20-year-old Daniil Trifonov, who emphasized melodic detail over structural rigor, caressing the keys with generous, colorful tone; Gergiev’s accompaniment never overbalanced him. Of the Tchaikovsky symphonies I heard, Nos. 3 and 4 favored luminous sonority and plush attacks over searing intensity.

Scheherazade and Shostakovich’s First Symphony were festival interlopers. The Rimsky used to turn up each season, but it’s played relatively rarely these days. Gergiev was content to revel in the score’s sensuous glories, especially in a seductively broad third-movement, but the finale’s turbulent shipwreck fell short of Witold Rowicki and the Warsaw Philharmonic’s memorable maelstrom at Carnegie in January 1974. The Shostakovich, which in lesser hands can fall apart structurally, turned out to be my favorite of Gergiev’s performances. The second-movement scherzo, especially, was thrillingly precise.

I have to go back to November 1973 at Carnegie for the most unforgettable Tchaikovsky performance I’ve ever heard: a hair-raising Francesca da Rimini during several concerts of Russian music with the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Philharmonic under Gennady Rozhdestvensky. (Fairness report: In 2005 Gergiev and Mariinsky played a helluva Francesca in Carnegie too.) Also on that series was the fastest Glinka Ruslan and Lyudmilla Overture one could possibly imagine, with every hemidemisemiquaver astonishingly in place, and Tchaik’s Fifth. In my mind’s eye I can still see the timpanist marking the march tempo of the finale’s coda, showily brandishing his sticks in the air as the music strode to its triumphant conclusion. Whatever happened to such joy and flair in music-making?

The unique character and commitment of the Mravinsky-trained Leningraders was simply overwhelming. No orchestra today matches that style of playing—certainly not the current internationalized version that now exists under the St. Petersburg name—and I doubt we’ll hear its like ever again. Get the electrifying Deutsche Grammophon recordings made in London on tour in 1960 of Rozhdestvensky in Francesca and Mravinsky in the last three Tchaikovsky symphonies. Imagine the intensity level ratcheted up tenfold, and you’ll have an idea of what I heard that evening.

Anecdote time: The fall in 1973 when the Leningrad played, I had a brief stint with the firm handling Carnegie Hall’s p.r., and I was involved in a Times photo shoot of Rozhdestvensky for a feature in Arts & Leisure. One of my colleagues offered the conductor a comb before the photo was taken. He ran the tines over his bald pate, smiled broadly, and said, “It’s for my brains.”

Haitink at the Phil

Bernard Haitink led the New York Philharmonic last week for the first time since 1978. Zachary Woolfe spent three-quarters of his Times review castigating the orchestra for its conservative programming this season, exemplified by Haitink’s selection of Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Beethoven’s “Pastorale” Symphony. Zack is correct about the overall programming, but the trend is epidemic throughout the world’s orchestras, even in San Francisco, if they wish to stay in business.  He was also correct in judging the performances to be “eloquent” and “enjoyable.” I heard the Tuesday performance (11/15) and particularly warmed to the performances of the orchestra’s Principal Cellist Carter Brey and Principal Violist Cynthia Phelps in the Strauss.

But, to come full circle, I bring up this concert to point out that the audience was uncommonly quiet and respectful, which I expect at Carnegie but not at Lincoln Center. I’ve not been to a Tuesday concert at the Philharmonic in years, choosing to attend on Thursday nights despite the noisier audience. The orchestra players seemed relaxed and enjoying themselves. It showed in their music-making.

Haitink, who was Musical America’s Musician of the Year in 2007, leads more standard repertory for the second of his two programs with the Phil this season: Haydn’s “Miracle” Symphony and Bruckner’s Seventh. Let’s hope he is invited back soon.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

11/18 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Bernard Haitink. Haydn: Symphony No. 96 (“Miracle”). Bruckner: Symphony No. 7.  (Also 11/19.)

11/19 Carnegie Hall. Baltimore Symphony/Marin Alsop; Caroline Dhavernas, Speaker (Joan of Arc); Ronald Guttman, Speaker (Brother Dominic); other soloists; various choruses. Honegger: Joan of Arc at the Stake.

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Dutoit’s Shostakovich in Carnegie and Verizon

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

Lang Lang got the flowers, but a blistering Shostakovich Tenth Symphony dominated the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first Carnegie Hall concert this season under Charles Dutoit (10/25). It’s his fourth and final season as the orchestra’s interim “chief conductor,” between the unfortunate five-year tenure of Christoph Eschenbach and Philly’s music director-designate, the 35-year-old French Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Having conducted the ensemble regularly for three decades now, Dutoit knows how to get the best from these players, as European critics affirmed repeatedly during the ensemble’s summer tour of Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Britain. Some expressed surprise that an orchestra with its financial duress could play so superbly. Perhaps they had taken seriously Gramophone magazine’s ludicrous dismissal of the Philadelphians in its December 2008 rating of “the world’s best orchestras.”

Dutoit has always been at his best in Shostakovich, moving the music along judiciously and avoiding post-Testimony point making. The desolate end of the Tenth’s opening movement can seem interminable, for example, but here the composer’s gravitas registered without dragging. The Swiss conductor was equally adept in the first half’s lovely Fauré Pavane, Op. 50, and the crisp, reduced-forces accompaniment to Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto, with Lang Lang a capable soloist. From the viewpoint of one who hears the Philadelphians each year in New York’s Carnegie Hall, Dutoit deserves all possible laurels from the orchestra.

Hearing these musicians under Dutoit on their home turf, as I did 13 months ago, is no less impressive. In a dynamite performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony in the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall, the absolute unanimity and tonal resonance of fortissimo Philadelphia pizzicatos was an awesome experience, and the depth and power of the lower strings when they entered in the Shostakovich’s third-movement Allegro was staggering.

What is most important to report, however, is that the acoustics of Verizon Hall now seem worthy of the Fabulous Philadelphians. Yes, this is the same hall that received mixed reviews on its official opening night, ten years ago, on December 16, 2001. Some thought it lacked resonance; others wrote that the sound was coarse. Even acoustician Russell Johnson said in a press conference the day before, “The hall is not ready to open.” The late acoustician’s design philosophy allows a hall’s sound to be “tuned” for varieties of repertoire, and he was at a performance of the Mahler Fifth under Simon Rattle that I attended in Verizon a year later. When I opined that the strings sounded richer, Johnson agreed hesitantly but said there were still improvements to be made.

Shostakovich’s pile-driving opening bars in the Fourth last October made instantly evident that improvements had been made. The winds, brass, and percussion had retained the remarkable clarity and presence I had noted at the hall’s opening night, and the strings were now in proper focus and balance. Moreover, the resonance was quite sufficient to display the famed “Philadelphia Sound,” which the orchestra’s prior home, the deadly dry Academy of Music, could never do.

Verizon Hall deserves a rehearing from all those critics who were negative on opening night.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

11/10 Kaplan Penthouse. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Harbison: Six American Painters for Flute, Violin, Viola, and Cello. Schnittke: Piano Quartet. Kurtág: Hommage á Robert Schumann for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op. 15d. Penderecki: String Trio. Harbison: Songs America Loves to Sing for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, and Piano (2004).

11/15 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Bernard Haitink; Carter Brey, cello; Cynthia Phelps, viola. R. Strauss: Don Quixote. Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”).  (Also 11/10, 11, 12.)

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Bernstein Recordings Never Die

Friday, November 4th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

Leonard Bernstein is one of the few artists whose recordings have continued to sell after his death, and last fall Sony Classical reissued a “limited edition” set of the conductor’s 1950s-70s symphony recordings, most with the New York Philharmonic. But it sold out before I could rehear the CDs, and this write-up has been sitting in my computer awaiting a second run, which is now at hand again to beguile the Christmas gift crowd.

Many of these recordings are my favorites of the works, and those happy with a classy coffee-table presentation need look no further. It’s a beautiful looking design, to be sure, but an utterly impractical fit in a CD collection. The box is LP size and two and a half inches thick. One must lay the box flat and remove the top to get to the CDs. A plastic divider holds four stacks of the 60 CDs, each encased in a cardboard sleeve. Without long fingernails, one must often resort to an implement to pry the bottom-most CD from the holder. For three months while I spot-checked the discs, the box shuttled from room to room in fruitless search for a home. I was tempted to discard the box and file the discs on my conventional CD shelf, but the spine copy is infinitesimal, with titles of the works too dark to be read without klieg lights and a magnifying glass. The 32-page b&w booklet with two adoring tri-lingual tributes to Bernstein and a mixture of familiar and rare photos has no notes on the symphonies; no texts and translations for choral works. Nor is recording info as specific as in earlier CD releases.

Nevertheless, these are Bernstein recordings, and in general I prefer these more spontaneous Columbia/CBS recordings now on Sony Classical to the later, more carefully coiffed Deutsche Grammophon ones, usually with the Vienna Philharmonic, which many see as his “mature” statements. Tempos are broader on DG—sometimes egregiously so—and often preferred by European critics. DG has released most or all of them in smaller, more manageable bargain sets, but the only ones I can recommend unreservedly are the American and Haydn sets, the latter containing an irresistible “Oxford.”

My Sony picks:

Beethoven: Exciting and unpredictable. I prefer Bernstein’s “smaller” symphony performances, especially Nos. 1 and 2, over the uneven-numbered later ones, where he is concerned with making Big Statements. I found the DG remakes cautious and overly refined, an opinion reaffirmed after rehearing the recently reissued CD set.

Bizet: Symphony in C. Less than immaculate ensemble, but what joie de vivre!

Copland: Organ Symphony and Third Symphony. His Copland is indispensable.

Dvořák: Symphony No. 9. An exciting “New World.” Avoid the bloated DG.

Harris: Third Symphony. Also indispensable, as most of his American rep is.

Haydn: Symphonies Nos. 82-88, 93-104. The staff of life. Also available in a handy set of all his Haydn for the label.

Hindemith: Symphony in E-flat. Revivified Hindemith! (Also get his recording with Isaac Stern of the Violin Concerto—gorgeous melodies, sparkling wit, my favorite Stern recording.)

Ives: Symphony No. 2. The height of Ivesian Americana, superb on all counts. Avoid the sleepy DG.

Liszt: A Faust Symphony. Romantic drama with tumultuous conviction.

Mahler: Symphonies Nos. 1-9. Yes, we know that others championed Mahler first, but these are the recordings that brought about the Mahler Boom. Some, such as the Third and Seventh, are still unsurpassed, even by Bernstein.

Nielsen: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 5. Peerless performances of the life-affirming “Sinfonia espansiva” and the profound, wartime Fifth.

Prokofiev: Classical Symphony. The New Yorkers sound downright tipsy in this jolly, Haydnesque interpretation.

Schumann: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3. Schumann was in marital bliss when he wrote his “Spring” Symphony, and no one captures the music’s unbounded joy like Bernstein. The “Rhenish” is equally vital.

William Schuman: Symphonies Nos. 3, 5, and 8. The rip-snorting Third is one of the great American symphonies, incomparably rendered here by Schuman’s most galvanic interpreter. Far superior to his DG remake of 25 years later.

Shostakovich: All of Bernstein’s Shostakovich CDs have good points, but the Fifth is one of his half-dozen greatest recordings, taped at Boston’s Symphony Hall on the way home from the Philharmonic’s famous Soviet tour in 1959. For me, it has no competition.

Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 1-7. Big, broadly paced, and hyper-emotional—right from the Russian tradition. Numbers 5 and 7, in particular, are immensely powerful.

Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4. A searingly intense interpretation of this explosive 20th-century masterpiece.

 

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The LSO’s Unforgettable Beethoven and Britten

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

If I never hear another concert I will die a contented music lover, having heard the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus perform Beethoven’s Missa solemnis under Colin Davis and Britten’s War Requiem under Gianandrea Noseda last weekend. To see Davis, now 84 and in declining health, haltingly ascend the podium to sit and conquer this craggy Mass was almost unbearable. But his musical powers were undiminished in a performance of logical and emotional power from first note to last. It was the slowest Missa I’ve ever heard—over an hour and a half, not counting time between movements—and I hung on every single note.

I was not alone. Lincoln Center’s usually noisy and inattentive audience was utterly rapt until some yahoo shouted bravo before the last note had a chance to settle. For nearly two centuries the Missa has defeated listeners far more comprehending and spiritually inclined than I. One has to work, unlike in the contemporaneous Ninth Symphony, which abounds in engaging melodies.

No praise could be high enough for the conviction and execution of the LSO forces. British reviews for their Proms concert this past summer with Davis were more respectful than laudatory; if accurate, all I can figure is that the performance was a warm-up for this American engagement. Mezzo Sarah Connolly stood out among the vocal soloists. Concertmaster Gordan Nikolitch played the extended “Benedictus” violin solo eloquently. The timpanist’s dynamic use of hard Beethovenian sticks provided ideal punctuation. And Davis? He has always been true to the composer, if at times too reverently. On this evening his leadership was positively humbling. 

The LSO’s performance of Britten’s War Requiem on Sunday afternoon was no less affecting. The composer, a pacificist and apparent non-believer, combined the traditional Latin Requiem Mass and poems written by Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action seven days before the Armistice. Critics have split hairs since the premiere in May 1962, but Britten’s message has never escaped any audience I’ve been a part of.

The work is no stranger to New York. Kurt Masur led heartfelt performances of it twice and recorded it during his 13-year tenure with the Philharmonic; he once said he would program it every season if he could. Robert Shaw gave distinguished performances in Carnegie Hall. My own touchstone has been an emotionally devastating performance by the National Symphony Orchestra under Mstislav Rostropovich at Carnegie in early 1979, with Peter Pears, Galina Vishnevskaya, and John Shirley-Quirk as soloists. The LSO performance under Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda was in that league.

One knew that Noseda meant business when he stood on the podium for nearly a minute until all audience pre-performance rustling had ceased and then brought in the chorus’s “Requiem aeternam” at the threshold of audibility. There were a few more coughs throughout this performance than in the Beethoven, but not many, and at the very end Noseda drew out Britten’s pppp for all it was worth. The audience held its collective breath until he lowered his arms some 20 seconds later. In our day, when silence is intolerable, there is no higher compliment.

The success of the performance was also due, in no small measure, to the vocal forces: the LSO Chorus, again directed by Joseph Cullen; American Boychoir, directed by Fernando Malvar-Ruiz; soprano Sabina Cvilak, tenor Ian Bostridge, and baritone Simon Keenlyside.

Britten might have found it ironic that his War Requiem would be paired so rewardingly with Beethoven, a composer he disparaged. But his music, like Beethoven’s, has always spoken to distinctly human concerns, and the War Requiem may be his most enduring testimony.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

10/27 Carnegie Hall. Minnesota Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä; Stephen Hough, piano. Tchaikovsky: Voyevoda Overture; Piano Concerto No. 1. Nielsen: Symphony No. 3 (“Sinfonia espansiva”).

10/28 Carnegie Hall. Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer; András Schiff, piano. Schubert: Overture to Die Zauberharfe; Symphony No. 5. Bartók: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 3.

10/29 Carnegie Hall. Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer; András Schiff, piano. Bartók: Hungarian Peasant Songs; Piano Concerto No. 2

10/30 Metropolitan Opera. Jonas Kaufmann, tenor; Helmut Deutsch. Works by Schumann, Mahler, Duparc, R. Strauss.

11/2 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic; Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble; Collegiate Chorale. Conducted by Michael Riesman. Live performance with film. Glass: Koyaanisqatsi.

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Time Out for Bard

Friday, August 19th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

Last weekend I attended the opening concerts of the Bard Music Festival. This year’s subject is “Sibelius and His World.” There were the usual fascinating works being heard for the first time in perhaps a century (and possibly never again) and some thought-provoking panel discussions as befitting the academic environs. Musically, Sibelius’s early choral symphony, Kullervo, found conductor Leon Botstein and the American Symphony at their most impressive. But we’ll consider these and the second weekend’s treats next week.

We’ll see if Botstein dares to play the ending of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony mezzo-forte, without ritarding, as written (only Colin Davis has the nerve to do that). To hear if he captures the rich, Romantic humanism of Nielsen’s Third Symphony (“Sinfonia espansiva”). Also to hear his brilliant combination of works for the festival’s final program: Sibelius: Tapiola. Barber: Symphony No 1. Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5. Sibelius: Symphony No. 7. He’s set himself a mighty aspiration.

Tune in next week.

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Mostly Mozart/Some Stravinsky

Friday, August 12th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

Lincoln Center’s attempt to add variety to Mostly Moz is just fine with me, especially if the variety is Stravinsky. Audiences seem to agree too, for a Saturday afternoon of Stravinsky films and two concerts of his chamber music by the spiffy International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) were packed.

The first of the films was the familiar CBS New Special on the composer, narrated by Charles Kuralt. There’s a lot of good material here (unfortunately in a washed-out video source so typical of the 1960s), particularly an appearance in Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, where Le Sacre du printemps received its scandalous premiere on May 29, 1913. The aged composer tells of that infamous occasion and walks to the seat in which he sat that night. But not for long, as the audience’s catcalling began almost immediately and the infuriated composer arose from his seat, shouted “Go to hell,” and headed backstage.

The second film documents a powerfully emotional 1963 Budapest performance of the composer leading the Hungarian Radio Orchestra in his Symphony of Psalms. Ensemble is iffy, tuning of the winds is wishful, and the orchestra is obviously following the concertmaster rather than Stravinsky’s jerky beats. But none of this matters in light of a mesmerizingly slow third movement that never loses its rapt concentration and buoyant rhythm. How could he ever have said — even to make an anti-Romantic point — that “music is powerless to express anything”?

The third film was choreographer Pina Bausch’s 1978 rendering of Le Sacre (to Boulez’s Cleveland recording), overpowered by the music as usual. The fourth film was Julie Taymor’s fanciful production of Oedipus Rex, which was about as far from the composer’s austere conception as could be imagined, and presumably welcome to those who find the music marmoreal. Jessye Norman and Philip Langridge sing well, with Seiji Ozawa leading the Saito Kinen Festival Orchestra.

Stravinsky on ICE

The pair of ICE concerts on Monday, August 8, offered rarely played works in sterling performances. The 7:30, in Alice Tully Hall, was all Stravinsky, and the 10:30 concert in the Kaplan Penthouse was Stravinsky and several short works written in memoriam to him by Denisov, Berio, Carter, Finnissy, Schnittke, and Zorn. (The complete listing of works is at the end of my previous blog.) So, let’s talk about the guest conductor, Pablo Heras-Casado. The day after this concert, my friend Mark Swed, music critic of the Los Angeles Times, called to ask if I had heard these concerts (silly question) and what I thought of Pablo. To tell the truth, I hadn’t heard of him before reading Steve Smith’s Times review on Monday of an earlier concert in which H-C reportedly set very fast tempos in Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, which is the only way I can abide the piece (after all, Wolfy did specify Molto Allegro and Allegro assai for the outer movements). But now that I have I won’t miss his next local appearances. His bio says he’s “A champion of contemporary music” and that he has the imprimatur of Pierre Boulez. Oddly, however, there’s no mention of his home country and age. He’s 34, hails from Granada, Spain, and has a bush of dark, curly hair that rivals Gustavo’s. He, too, is blessed with matinee idol looks. From the Tully balcony he looked to be all of 20 when he smiled, but seemed closer to his given age in the intimate Penthouse.

He certainly knows his way around a score. Stravinsky’s Ragtime, “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto, Eight Instrumental Miniatures, and the Octet downstairs zipped along delightfully. He might have reined in his ICE players a bit and achieved crisper textures, but such sins of youth are forgivable in light of such clean rhythms and lively tempos. Only the thorny Concerto for Piano and Winds disappointed; had I not heard the revelatory performance last season at Zankel by Jeremy Denk and John Adams conducting the Ensemble ACJW, the performance in Tully would have seemed impressive. But Peter Serkin’s technically unimpeachable yet comparatively monochromatic solo work paled next to Denk’s fleet-fingered, balletic romp.

Perahia’s Bach

A Sony Classical re-release in a three-CD set (88697 82429 2) of Bach keyboard concertos played by Murray Perahia is so darned musical that one wonders where nearly everyone else went wrong. So warm, expressive, joyous, naturally paced—if you don’t have these recordings already, don’t hesitate.

Contents: Keyboard Concertos Nos. 1-7; Concerto for Flute, Violin & Harpsichord in A minor, BWV 1044; Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050; Italian Concerto in F major, BWV 971.

Looking forward

8/12-13 Bard Music Festival. Sibelius and His World.

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Precision Isn’t Everything

Friday, August 5th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

We’ve been in the thrall of “perfect” playing for so long that sometimes it takes a less than precise ensemble to remind us of genuine character. The Royal Danish Orchestra, under its music director Michael Schønwandt, had it in spades last week in its delightful program of native son Carl Nielsen’s strange little Pan and Syrinx and his irresistible Clarinet Concerto, followed after intermission by Stravinsky’s complete Pulcinella.

Nielsen’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humor informs both of these works. Nila Parly’s program notes on Pan and Syrinx tell us that “Five days prior to the premiere, Nielsen’s daughter, Anne Marie, was married to Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi. Nielsen had been slow in granting his permission for the marriage, and the fact that his wedding gift to the young couple was the dedication of this particular symphonic poem about a lascivious musician who pursues an innocent nymph and transforms her into his instrument, speaks volumes about Nielsen’s own perceptions of his son-in-law.” Perhaps, except that Telmányi soon became his father-in-law’s closest friend and a lifetime champion, performing and recording his Violin Concerto and other works as well as conducting the first performance of the Clarinet Concerto.

The clarinet is hardly overrun with solo vehicles, yet Nielsen’s high-spirited, thoroughly engaging concerto is not often played. (Nor, mysteriously, is his more playful Flute Concerto.) He had intended to write concertos for all his friends in the Copenhagen Wind Quintet but only finished two before his death. Both pieces were impishly tailored to their soloist’s personalities. The hot-tempered clarinetist’s fiery solo line was challenged by the subversive rat-a-tat-tat of a snare drum; the fastidious flutist was pursued by a buffoonish trombone, interestingly the instrument that Nielsen himself played in military band.

The Nielsen works received superbly committed, idiomatic performances by all, notably the orchestra’s principal clarinetist, John Kruse, in the solo role.

I was sitting way down front on audience right of Alice Tully Hall. Balances would have been better in a central location, but I might not have appreciated as much the wonderful double bass players in my lap or the virtuoso bassoonist in my sideways sight line. Under no circumstances could I have overlooked the fine concertmaster, Tobias Durholm, but never before have I been so aware of his quasi solo role in Pulcinella. On the debit side, while the strings were always expressive, ensemble was untidy at times; moreover, the oboe’s quacking tone was not to my taste, and the flute couldn’t always negotiate Stravinsky’s scurrying passagework. The singers were challenged, as ever, by the composer’s unrealistic demands. This is a really difficult piece! But music was being made, and I walked out of Tully a happy concertgoer.

Woody and MoMA

Sunday afternoon at MoMA followed by Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, turned out to be the most enjoyable artistic couplet since the last time I saw Paris. Entranced in the flesh, so to speak, by Picasso’s Seated Bather (1930) and then seeing it onscreen hours later was a treat available only in New York.

“You’re Next! You’re Next!”

. . . shouts Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) as he stumbles frantically between cars on a California freeway, trying to warn the drivers of impending doom in the classic 1956 sci-fi film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott did a well-timed piece on this celluloid shocker in the paper’s Web site on Tuesday (8/2), the day of the final congressional vote on America’s debt ceiling controversy. The plot: Seed pods from outer space take root in Santa Mira, California. They reproduce themselves in identical human form, complete with the minds and memories of the local inhabitants—except that they are devoid of emotions and their only instinct is survival. Fifties’ critics saw it as a commentary on McCarthyism or Communism. Today one might imagine the pod people as Tea Partiers or the Republican Party.

I was struck by a readers’ response to Scott from Brian in Philadelphia:

“As far as I’m concerned, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ has already occurred in my lifetime. As a middle-aged man who can easily remember a time when no one cell phoned, blackberried, or even wore a beeper, I think I perceive what a good many cannot, apparently: That the world is now cluttered with the bodies of people who simply are no longer present.

“If you happen to look up from your glowing handheld device, you too may see them wandering down the street, texting as they walk, oblivious, for all practical purposes, gone. Persons to whom one might pose a question, who stare at you blankly until they’ve removed their earbuds to blearily ask you to repeat yourself. Gamers lost in fantasy worlds, inaccessible, frozen. People who come to a sudden standstill in doorways, persons parked in the middle of public stairways, who have slipped into a cell phone coma, not so much expecting others to accommodate them but unaware that others exist at all. As everyone accepts this as normal.

“It is not my fault that I can see this. ‘Body Snatchers’ conveys what it’s like.”

In a slightly different take on Wednesday’s Op-Ed page, in a piece entitled “Washington Chain Saw Massacre,” Maureen Dowd evoked not only Body Snatchers but also Alien and The Exorcist as well as nearly every other horror film image from Dracula and Frankenstein to “cannibals, eating their own party and leaders alive.” It would be hilarious if it weren’t so true.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

8/6. Walter Reade Theater. Stravinsky on Film. 2:00: Janos Darvas’s 2001 documentary, Stravinsky: Composer and the composer leading his Symphony of Psalms in Hungary. 4:00: Julie Taymor’s 1992 production of Oedipus Rex and Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring with the Tanztheater Wuppertal and the Cleveland Orchestra.

8/8. 7:30: Alice Tully Hall. International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)/Pablo Heras-Casado; Peter Serkin, piano. All-Stravinsky: Study for Pianola; Fanfare for a New Theatre; Lied ohne Name; Epitaphium; Three Pieces for String Quartet; Ragtime; Concertino; “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto; Eight Instrumental Miniatures; Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments.

8/8 10:30: Kaplan Penthouse. ICE/Pablo Heras-Casado. Stravinsky: Pour Pablo Picasso; Bach (arr. Stravinsky, ed. Hogwood): Four Preludes and Fugues (sel.); Stravinsky: Epitaphium; Finnissy: Untitled piece to honour Igor Stravinsky; Denisov: Canon in Memory of Stravinsky; Berio: Autre fois: Berceuse canoníque pour Igor Stravinsky; Carter: Canon for Three Equal Instruments: In memoriam Igor Stravinsky; Schnittke: Canon in Memoriam Igor Stravinsky; Stravinsky: Octet.

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Strange Bedfellows: Bruckner and Adams

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

Mahler and Bruckner were once considered the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee of composers. Today, Mahler cycles are a dime a dozen, but Bruckner remains a harder sell. Critics snickered when Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst maintained at a press conference last year that Bruckner was the musical granddaddy of John Adams and minimalism in general. As it turned out, the two composers made surprisingly simpatico concert partners at Lincoln Center Festival’s “Bruckner: (R)evolution” with the Cleveland two weeks ago. Adams stated in the program book that “Bruckner, from a very early age, spoke to me.” And despite Fisher Hall’s empty balcony, the wild standing ovations made one wonder if Bruckner’s time has come at last.

Some moments of stridency aside, the Clevelanders sounded gorgeous in Fisher, where they haven’t played for some 30 years. Lincoln Center execs and a few audience members floated the notion at intermission that perhaps the hall didn’t need altering after all. (Dream on, friends.) Word was that W-M liked the hall and felt that one need only hold back the brass and battery a smidgen. Sorry, gang, that only resulted in muffled timpani and tentative brass attacks here and there in the Bruckners; textures in the Adams works, on the other hand, were transparent as could be.

The lightweight, hasty Bruckner recordings made by W-M several years ago for EMI, were happily effaced by these solidly traditional readings. Especially welcome was his cogent sense of structure in music that easily descends into stop-and-go patchwork. Many conductors further sectionalize the works by inserting unmarked cadential ritards. W-M also, more than most, gave full value to the composer’s famed pauses. Rarely have Bruckner symphonies seemed so logical.

That said, rarely has Bruckner seemed so poker-faced. One prayed in vain for a slight expansion of the phrase, but the deeply emotional, spiritual depth of the music had to be recollected from other performances. W-M’s dutiful conducting of the Fifth Symphony on opening night (7/13) was short on character, expressiveness, and, believe it or not, playfulness. The droll tango-like dance at rehearsal letter F in the first movement, the impetuous Scherzo, and the perky solo clarinet statement of the fugue motive in the finale, were hopelessly flatfooted. Yes, Bruckner skeptics, the composer actually had a sense of humor! (So did the Minnesota Orchestra, according to the orchestra’s long-time observer Dennis Rooney, whose members so detested their conductor’s interpretation of the Fifth that they made up a rude lyric to the fugue subject, below: “F–k you, Skrowacewski, you can shove it up your ass right now!”)


Once one accepted W-M’s interpretive approach — more akin to Beethoven than to Wagner — the subsequent Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth were more easily appreciated, even if one recalled more moving performances in the past. Indeed, apart from a less-than-demonic Scherzo, W-M’s Ninth was quite impressive. Such details as his well-judged tenuto in the first movement to allow the solo clarinet in letters G and V to make its poetic point and the lambent loveliness of the forte strings at L in the finale demonstrated an eminently sensitive Brucknerian.

For me, the Eighth Symphony (7/16) was the high point of W-M’s Bruckner performances. He elected to perform its original 1887 version and has declared it to be “the best view of Bruckner’s true vision for this symphony,” according to Cleveland Orchestra program annotator Eric Sellen. Other than scholars and critics, however, I’d be surprised if many audience members were even aware or cared about which version was used.

Briefly, Bruckner had a lot of second thoughts about his music. According to the British musicologist Deryck Cooke in his c. 1970 essay, “The Bruckner Problem Simplified,” no less than 34 different scores for the nine symphonies exist in the composer’s own hand and those of others. Only the Fifth (which was never performed in his lifetime) and Sixth (of which only the second and third movements were performed in his lifetime) are free of such intervention. Compounding The Bruckner Problem, an article in the Times on July 10 by Benjamin Korstvedt debunks the long-reigning British Bruckner scholars led by Cooke and Robert Simpson, and by extension American critics who have followed them in lockstep. His book on the Eighth in the superb Cambridge Music Handbooks series is necessary reading for all Brucknerites.

There are two modern editions of the Eighth, by Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak, both based on Bruckner’s 1890 revision. The controversial Haas reinstates 50 bars from the 1887 original, which to my ears provides smoother transitions and breadth, but scholars and many conductors reject it. Hearing the Eighth in the original 1887 version after years of acquaintance with these two editions is positively surreal. While the music’s basic thrust was the same in 1887, continuity suffers throughout due to inferior voice leading and orchestration; the quiet ending of the revision is incomparably superior to the grotesque 30 bars of fortissimo in 1887; the Scherzo is substantially different, with a quite inferior Trio; repetitions continue to sometimes laughable lengths; the elongated climax of the third movement is far less focused and effective; the fortissimo of the last-movement coda is jarringly interrupted by fussy changes in dynamics. That W-M could seriously prefer the 1887 version over Bruckner’s 1890 revision or Haas’s expert conflation of the two is hard to believe. But we can thank him for his clear, musicianly performance — far superior to the Inbal and Tintner recordings of the original — because it settled forever in my mind that Bruckner’s first thoughts were drastically in need of revision.

And what about John Adams?

I confess I haven’t always found myself in agreement with my colleagues’ praise. Of the old Glass-Reich-Adams trio of minimalists, Adams has moved the most into the mainstream. I can’t help being distracted when a composer’s influences are so apparent, even if the strongest is Stravinsky. The attractive 20-minute Guide to Strange Places (2001), on the opening concert, bustled innocently at the beginning like Petrushka’s Shrovetide Fair before settling into less comfortable resonances of Copland’s dissonant Organ Symphony.

Leila Josefowicz seemed an ideal soloist in the composer’s Violin Concerto (1993), but after three hearings of the piece I despair of ever agreeing with its champions. Its whiffs of Szymanowski, Prokofiev, and Barber in the outer movements are never as distinctive as the originals, and the slow Chaconne was both shapeless and faceless. Just what is Adams’s voice, anyway? Curiously, the end of the last-movement Toccare petered out with a most ineffectual thud. Sure couldn’t say that of the Bruckner Seventh, which followed.

To my astonishment, I was blown away by Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony. Okay, like the opera, it opens with one of his cheekiest ripoffs: Carl Ruggles’s Sun Treader. But it works — boy, does it work! I had heard the world premiere with the BBC Symphony, conducted by the composer at London’s Proms in 2007; at 40 meandering minutes, it was not ready for prime time. The next year I saw the Met production and subsequent PBS broadcast of the complete opera and couldn’t hack more than an act of either. At some point, Adams slashed 15 minutes from the Symphony version. Thus tightened to 25 minutes (the same length as that other powerhouse symphony-from-an-opera, Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler) and liberated from Peter Sellars’s unsingable, unintelligible libretto, one was able to concentrate on Adams’s music for the first time. David Robertson led a fine performance at Carnegie with the Saint Louis Symphony and recorded it for Nonesuch, paired with Guide to Strange Places. Who would have thought that Franz Welser-Möst would efface them all with a performance of humbling emotional commitment and a trumpet soloist, Michael Sachs, singing the vocal line of Oppenheimer’s first-act aria with surpassing beauty? Doctor Atomic Symphony was the revelation of LC’s Bruckner: (R)evolution.

Adams was present for each performance, smiling broadly. Who wouldn’t be thrilled hearing his music conducted with such care and played with such orchestral sheen? As to whether he is a musical descendent of Bruckner, the jury remains out.

As Time Goes By

America’s favorite Hollywood classic, Casablanca, will be shown at Saratoga tonight (Thursday, 7/28) with the Philadelphia Orchestra playing the immortal Max Steiner’s music and encored at Wolf Trap, down D.C. way, on Saturday, 7/30, with the National Symphony. On September 8 and 9 the New York Philharmonic under David Newman (grandson of noted Hollywood composer Alfred Newman) will play Leonard Bernstein’s greatest hit, West Side Story, as the film is projected at Avery Fisher Hall.

This merging of superb film music and live orchestra performance was the inspired brainchild, some 20 years ago, of Lincoln Center’s master of video (Live from Lincoln Center), John Goberman. His initial venture was Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, perhaps the best film score ever written and almost certainly the worst recorded one. He’s done The Wizard of Oz (why not in New York?!!), Hitchcock’s Psycho on Halloween, scenes from R&H musicals, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So, John, how about The Big Country, North by Northwest, King Kong, The Magnificent Seven, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, and How the West Was Won . . . and, of course, Gone With the Wind?

Name your tune!

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

7/28 Alice Tully Hall. Royal Danish Orchestra/Michael Schønwandt. Nielsen: Pan and Syrinx; Clarinet Concerto. Stravinsky: Pulcinella.

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Taking Chances in the Spring

Friday, July 15th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

It seems odd that Carnegie Hall’s 2010-11 season concluded in mid May and that the New York Philharmonic continued into the last week of June, with the final concert of its Summertime Classics coda at the end of last week. It also seems to me that the official seasons in both halls concluded in fine fettle — good news for orchestras that wholeheartedly deserve their community support in these parlous times.

Carnegie’s Provocative Season Roundup

The first thing to point out about Carnegie’s seven-concert “Spring for Music” series is that it cost a paltry $25 a ticket for some of the most riveting programs of the year. Several of the orchestras and their music directors were a welcome discovery, being virtually unknown in these parts and proving that not all concerts break the bank.

The first of the three concerts I heard, played by the Albany Symphony under its music director, David Alan Miller, included Copland’s popular Appalachian Spring but in its rarely heard complete orchestral version. When arranging the ballet’s well-known suite, Copland judiciously tightened connective passages and eliminated an entire anti-slavery pantomime section (nearly one-quarter of the ballet, timing out to 8:20 in this performance). Stylistically it harks back to his angular Stravinsky-influenced works from the 1920s and really belongs in another score, but it was good to hear for a change. Also on the program was a group of eight spirituals, each arranged for orchestra by different composers — a big success for the fine young baritone Nathan De’Shon Myers, of whom the standing and cheering audience demanded and was rewarded by an encore. Miller and his players also deserve praise for their recordings of American music for the enterprising Albany label.

Jaap van Zweden and his Dallas Symphony took the biggest chance of the series with composer Steven Stucky and librettist Gene Scheer’s “concert drama,” August 4, 1964. Commissioned by the orchestra to commemorate the 100th birthday of Texas-born President Lyndon B. Johnson, Stucky and Scheer settled on the subject of two fortuitous events on that particular day: the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which resulted in the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the discovery of the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers. Serious stuff, this, and ultimately a rewarding musical experience, but obviously not what many prematurely departing audience members expected. The music isn’t overly challenging harmonically, and that pertaining to the civil rights matters is particularly moving. Still, most of it is slow and somber, with a good deal of sustained pianissimo chords underpinning quiet singing and declamation. Stucky recalls in the excellent program notes that he consciously tried to avoid writing another Britten War Requiem, which is ironically the work that keeps poking through musically. All the singers and the excellent Dallas Symphony Chorus acquitted themselves proudly, supported by orchestral players of extraordinary concentration, superbly conducted by the ensemble’s Dutch music director.

My favorite concert of the series — and, as it turned out, the entire season — was by a conductor and orchestra making their New York debuts: the Oregon Symphony under its music director of eight years, Carlos Kalmar, in a remarkably imaginative program. Ives’s The Unanswered Question, John Adams’s The Wound-Dresser, and Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem were played without pause, an often pretentious practice but one that in this instance worked stunningly. After intermission came a positively searing Vaughan Williams Fourth Symphony, with fearless edge-of-seat tempos in the third and fourth movements, breathtakingly negotiated by all, the strings in particular. Kalmar and his virtuoso Oregonians will return to “Spring for Music” in 2013.

“Spring for Music” is the brainchild of classical-music biz veterans Mary Lou Falcone, David Foster, and Thomas Morris, in partnership with Carnegie Hall, and deserves a long life. Next season includes concerts by the symphony orchestras of Houston, Edmonton, New Jersey, Alabama, Milwaukee, and Nashville.

June at the Philharmonic

June 2. Music Director Alan Gilbert led the best performance of a Bruckner symphony I’ve ever heard from the Philharmonic. While the players’ supercharged style is perfect for Mahler’s open wounds, Bruckner’s serene mysticism has been largely alien to them. But under Gilbert, the Second Symphony had that rapturous, long line and richly textured glow of all successful Bruckner performances, with the broadly paced Andante a standout. Only a few unmarked ritards detracted from an already structurally episodic work. Earlier in the evening, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter was soloist in the world premiere of Sebastian Currier’s Time Machines, a subdued half-hour piece that was hopelessly sabotaged by coughers and sneezers.  

June 9. David Robertson equals stimulating programs. His Shostakovich First Symphony swaggered with brightly lit mirth, and Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead was appropriately dark and moody, with an impassioned middle section. Schoenberg’s nightmarish monodrama Erwartung (1908) concerns a distraught woman combing a forest for her missing lover, whom she may have killed. At one point she stumbles over a tree stump (ah, Sigmund!). This fascinating half-hour work was on Robertson’s first Philharmonic concert, in 2001, equally masterfully on all parts. Deborah Voigt appeared a bit casual at first, but she sang well and was infinitely more subtle than Jessye Norman at the Met in 1989, who was bonkers from the outset.

June 16. The young French conductor Ludovic Morlot doesn’t tarry. I missed his highly praised Philharmonic debut last season, but I won’t make that mistake again. Mussorsky’s Prelude to Khovanschchina, Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante défunte, and Ravel’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition moved along smartly at refreshingly old-school tempos, shaving off two and four minutes, respectively, from the last time I endured the latter two works in concert. The high point, however, was Gil Shaham’s dazzling traversal of Walton’s Violin Concerto, an engagingly melodic, virtuosic showpiece written for Heifetz. It was the most recent in the violinist’s imaginative project to perform the wealth of concertos composed in the 1930s by such masters as Stravinsky, Berg, Prokofiev (his second), Bartók, Hindemith, Barber, and Britten, among others. No less accomplished was the New Yorkers’ colorful, spot-on accompaniment. Morlot succeeds Gerard Schwarz as music director of the Seattle Symphony next September, and in 2012 becomes chief conductor of Belgium’s opera house, La Monnaie/Da Munt, which I hope won’t keep him from more Philharmonic appearances.

June 22. Alan Gilbert capped off his first season last year with a stunning presentation of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre and this year chose Janáček’s magical opera The Cunning Little Vixen as a grand finale. Once again, Gilbert’s Harvard buddy Doug Fitch commandeered a thoroughly winning, all-but-fully staged production, luminously sung by a huge cast and warmly played by the Philharmonic under the music director’s sympathetic leadership.

Economic realities appear to have taken their toll on Gilbert’s plans next season. Despite purported sold-out houses for both of these operas in concert, next season’s final subscription concert is a standard all-Mozart affair. The spin is that Gilbert and the Phil will repair a week later to the cavernous Park Avenue Armory for two performances of a fascinating program that exploits spatial layouts for multiple orchestras: Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Boulez’s Rituel, the party scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Ives’s The Unanswered Question. Perhaps this will help to mollify those who find Gilbert’s third season less adventurous than his previous ones.

Frank Milburn (1927-2011)

I hope you read the moving memorial to Frank Milburn last week (7/8) on MusicalAmerica.com by New York Philharmonic archivist Barbara Haws. Frank was p.r. director and artistic administrator of the orchestra for over three decades. He was also an assistant editor of Musical America in the 1950s. I interviewed with him soon after arriving in New York, fresh out of college in September 1968. I didn’t get the job, but afterwards he kindly let me in to hear the Friday afternoon concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Are you ready? Haydn’s Symphony No. 87, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Talk about why I left Muncie!

Frank was peripherally involved later that season in one of my favorite anecdotes. I was at the long-gone Footlights cafeteria at Lincoln Center (in the job I eventually did get, p.r. gofer at The Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center), and Bernstein was finishing lunch with a group at a nearby table. They got up to join Frank who was at the door and left, and two girls walked hesitantly over to the table. They stood next to Bernstein’s chair, looked at each other and giggled, and one of them picked up the pie crust he had left, wrapped it in a napkin, and put it in her purse.

Frank Milburn, New York Philharmonic music administrator, and Leonard Bernstein on the orchestra's 1968 European tour. Photo: New York Philharmonic Archives.

A word about that unassuming title, “artistic administrator”: He or she coordinates all aspects of the programming and advises the music director on works to be played. Frank had that job during the tenures of Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, and Zubin Mehta. Barbara relates in her memorial that just before Frank died, Mehta called him and said that he would dedicate his evening’s performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony to him. It can’t have been lost on Frank that Dimitri Mitropoulos had died while rehearsing the Third in Milan in 1960, that Bernstein conducted it at his final concert as Philharmonic music director in 1969, and that Boulez conducted it at the first concert held in Avery Fisher Hall after the 1976 renovation.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

7/16 Avery Fisher Hall. Lincoln Center Festival. Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst. Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (original 1887 version).

7/17 Avery Fisher Hall. Lincoln Center Festival. Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst. Adams: Doctor Atomic Symphony. Bruckner: Symphony No. 9.

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An Ode to Audra

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

Carnegie Hall celebrated its 120th birthday party on May 5. Some thought it could have waited five years, but I would welcome a Carnegie fête every night if Audra McDonald were singing. On this evening she sang four Duke Ellington songs with the New York Philharmonic and once again revealed that her emotional truth in any music she sings is blinding. Her four-year gig on TV’s Private Practice ends this season, and her manager reports “a bunch of concerts scheduled between now and Thanksgiving.” This includes a Carnegie concert all her own on October 22, which is as great a cause for rejoicing as any I know. If there is a more entrancing singer in the world, I’m not aware of her (or him).

This was one of Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert’s best nights.

His well-judged celebratory program began with a rousing Dvořák Carnival Overture and continued with a downright bubbly Beethoven Triple Concerto, garnished with an unbeatable trio of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Gil Shaham, and pianist Emanuel Ax. His Ellington accompaniments had just the right elegant swing. I couldn’t stay for Gershwin’s An American in Paris, but I’m told I shouldn’t miss the PBS broadcast on May 31. You shouldn’t either.

Dutoit’s All-Stravinsky
Two nights before, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first Carnegie Hall concert since its board filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (April 27 blog) was an all-Stravinsky program conducted by Charles Dutoit. There were bravos amidst the applause as concertmaster David Kim walked onstage, and some members of the audience stood, to the evident pleasure of the musicians. The performances, however, were mixed. Dutoit’s devitalized Apollo sorely lacked balletic verve; moreover, except for Kim’s bewitching violin solos, the string ensemble sounded unaccountably coarse and monochromatic. Things improved immeasurably in the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, which was conducted with a taut sense of drama, played with power and rhythmic acuity, and sung effectively by Paul Groves (Oedipus) and Petra Lang (Jocasta), in particular, and the Men of the Philadelphia Singers Chorale. David Howey was the appropriately haughty narrator.

Curse of the Proofreader
Poor Igor. In recent years his last name has become one of classical music’s most frequent typos. The Times review head of the Philly concert shouted out in 26-pt. boldface type: “A Stravinksy Program With Ancient Inspiration.”

Have any commentators pointed out that the license plate of The Royal Newlyweds’ car did not read “JUST WED,” but “JU5T WED”? One hopes it’s not a harbinger of thrings to come.

And then there was the “beautification” of Pope John II on the TV. Good lord.

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