Archive for April, 2009

Trash Cans and Murk

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

A Blog by Sedgwick Clark

Man(ny) of the Year.  A ray of hope in our embattled biz.  A world-famous pianist learns that an orchestra he has performed with for decades may go under, and he waives his fee for a pair of concerts (MA.com, 3/20).  The orchestra is Ohio’s financially strapped Columbus Symphony, and the pianist is Emanuel Ax.  It was his idea, reported the CSO management, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has basked in the warmth and generosity of his playing.  So, who’s next?

Southern Turn at Tanglewood.  Ever notice how newly appointed music directors charge into their jobs with enterprising, challenging programs, only to turn south after a couple of years?  James Levine, for instance, loaded his first few Boston Symphony seasons with Carter, Babbitt, Wuorinen, and Schoenberg.  Critics raved and audiences ran.  For a time, some of those works turned up at the orchestra’s summer music festival at Tanglewood, and last season featured a daringly inclusive tribute to Carter for his 100th birthday.  But that experiment appears to be history.  The newly announced season opens with Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” and the First Piano Concerto, closes with Beethoven’s Ninth, and contains a single unfamiliar name on the weekend orchestra concerts: the late George Perle, for his brief, sweet-natured Sinfonietta No. 2, performed “in memoriam.” 

Trash Cans at Tully.  My ecstasy was short-lived.  As reported in my second blog, the 12-tone bells signaling the end of intermission—which made their debut in the ’60s at Philharmonic, now Fisher, Hall—were resurrected at Tully’s reopening.  On further trips to Tully those evocative tintinnabuli were replaced by what sounds like the banging of garbage cans or at least the world’s most cacophonous cow bells.  Is this a musical decision?  Scarier still, do the New Populists at Lincoln Center worry that the tone rows might alienate audiences? 

Perahian Perfection.  Murray Perahia’s recital last week (3/31) at Fisher of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, capped off by an encore by Schubert, was so exquisite that I felt underdressed.  Normally I wouldn’t go near such a rearguard program, but he’s one of two or three pianists I would willingly hear play an evening of Hanon.  Brahms’s “Handel” Variations, my favorite of his solo piano works, has been lodged in my head all week like a tape loop.  I must remember to wear a coat and tie to his next recital.

Fisher’s Murk.  I love you, Lincoln Center.  But the lighting in Fisher Hall has been impossible this season.  Any farther back than row R seems remote under the best of circumstances.  But sitting in row Y, with hall lighting suitable for necking and the stage barely bright enough to find the bathroom at night, poor Perahia seemed to be in the next county.  Need I add that such dim lighting compromises the music-making as well?  I once asked a British friend what he thought of the concert we’d just heard at Fisher, and he replied, “I kept wanting to turn the volume up.”  Hey guys, I know you want to attract young’uns to your concerts, but the majority of your patrons are aging—nay, OLD—and presbyopic (like me), which brings me to another subject: the program type.  It’s the same point size as Carnegie’s program (8/11), but LC’s is lightface and CH’s is medium. Even in a reasonably illuminated house, LC’s programs would be more difficult to read.  Let’s be reasonable.

Patelson’s music store, in back of Carnegie Hall for 70 years, will close up shop for ever on April 18.  The mice had preceded me when I stopped in yesterday for visitation, and the few remaining items are 35 to 40 percent off, depending on which clerk you speak with.  What’s next? 

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HAIR: The Early Morning Singing Song Still Sings

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Forty years later, Hair is still letting the sunshine in.  Anyone involved and/or educated in musical theater writing will tell you that on a structural level, Hair is seemingly a disaster.  If it were pitched today, its inherent riskiness would appear imminent to a producer.  There’s relatively no script and the lyrics are largely incomprehensible.  The music in-and-of-itself is the only aspect of the show that can entirely stand alone.  But the reality is that the script and lyrics DO work, and particularly well with the score.  In fact, Hair, as a whole can be beautifully executed.  It creates an environment that is contagious to the multi-generational audience, and leaves them laughing, crying, and fulfilled.  

I was lucky enough to music direct a version of Hair last summer in Asbury Park, New Jersey (I will be music directing The Full Monty there this summer).  It finally became clear to my why this show works: there is great a similarity between the rehearsal process (as always, invigorating but difficult and painful) and what you ultimately see on stage.  The sex, drugs, and rock and roll mantra of Hair does not differ terribly much from the lives of many of the actors involved.  The characters in the show, who are ecstatic at times, but also unstable and unsure of their anxious lives, parallel the lives of all actors (and most people in general).   What you get is a wild display of the human condition: concurrently joyous and sad, triumphant and tragic, thoughtful and flawed.  Add a rockin’ score, nudity, and the Draft, and you’re in for a night that everyone can relate to.  

Luckily, the phenomenal “happening” that was Hair this summer in Central Park has transferred in all of its greatness to Broadway.  If shows with the ingenuity and power of Hair continue to be written and produced today, we can hope for a true dawning of the Age of Aquarius for the musical theater.  

Andrew Hertz is a composer/lyricist, music director, and professor of musical theater.

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