Musical America Blogs

The Clearing
All of a sudden the bloom is on Lincoln Center’s newly planted trees, and construction is clearing after what has seemed a lifetime, as construction always does. In the arts world’s current, shameless fund-raising ploy of attaching husband-and-wife donors’ names to every square millimeter of property—stages, box offices, bathrooms, anything (for the time being) that doesn’t move—even a grove of trees adjacent to the David H. Koch Theater backstage entrance is named. Actually, I’m eager to see if these arboreal additions will soften the cold travertine visage that critics have dissed since Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall opened in 1962. Landscaping is much like clothing in making bare bones look healthy, and presumably the tree donors will help pay for the landscapers.

Look where we are now:
(1) Once again we can enter the subway on 64th Street instead of having to walk up to 66th Street. (Gawd, what an ordeal that has been—nearly as annoying as slogging down to the Chase ATM on 61st Street!)
(2) The Juilliard Bookstore is moving this week from its temporary mobile-home location of the past two years to its permanent (a dangerous word) location, opening on May 10.
(3) The awful clutter around the reflecting pool is gone at last; I’m taking bets now as to how long it will be before it begins to leak again. What a pleasure to see Eero Saarinen’s beautiful Vivian Beaumont Theater again.
(4) And the uptown half of 65th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway is paved.

I have it from good sources that the end of May should bring further clearance in front of Avery Fisher.

Encouraging Kids at the Phil
It’s great to see so many kids at the New York Philharmonic’s “Russian Stravinsky” concerts—students on some group sales program, I figure. And they genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves. Watching a hundred men and women making an exciting sound together in the flesh, rather than on TV or a video, is inspiring. That’s it, guys, get ’em early, when their ears are still open to new sounds (although Stravinsky, dead these 40 years, is by no means new).

So I was pleased to read the Phil’s announcement on Tuesday that Music Director Alan Gilbert would conduct six School Day Concerts next month. His commitment to music in this community is welcome after his predecessor’s lack of involvement. “These concerts, which are designed exclusively for school children in grades 3 through 12, will showcase world-premiere compositions by six New York Philharmonic Very Young Composers, ages 10 and 11, and three composers participating in the Making Score program of the New York Youth Symphony, ages 13 to 16. Also on the program: the score of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka.“

Just imagine—being 10 and hearing something you yourself created played by the New York Philharmonic, topped off by Petrushka. Wow! There’s a subscriber for life.

Martin Segal’s Good Works
Speaking of the Beaumont, one of my favorite Lincoln Center events of the year is the annual luncheon to announce the Martin E. Segal Award recipients. The awards were established in the former Lincoln Center Chairman’s name upon his retirement in 1986. Each year two performers nominated by Lincoln Center constituents receive $7,500 “for career advancement and future study.” This year’s engaging young artists were New York City Opera baritone Quinn Kelsey and New York City Ballet principal dancer Daniel Ulbricht.

The astonishingly sprightly, 94-year-old Segal is high on my indebtedness list because he single-handedly scotched Joe Papp’s addlepated idea to convert the Beaumont’s dynamic “thrust” stage into the common proscenium variety. Papp, otherwise a theater visionary, claimed during his brief tenure running the Lincoln Center Theater that Jo Mielziner’s thrust design was unstageable, which has been disproved in my experience—as a press department gofer at the Theater during Jules Irving’s tenure and more recently as a theatergoer, including the long run of South Pacific, which I may have objected to musically and interpretively but not as stagecraft.

Photo: MARTHA SWOPE
That was a credit line I saw often during my three years at the Beaumont, when I was in and out of her 72nd Street studio regularly to pick up photos she had taken of Rep Theater productions. I hadn’t seen Martha for ten years, since we published some of her Sondheim show photos when he was Musical America‘s Composer of the Year for 2000. So when I heard that her photos would be on exhibit for a benefit auction of the Humane Society of New York on April 27th, I hightailed it down to the DVF Studio on West 14th Street.

There she was, hair white, a bit distracted from all the attention, and sporting an elegant-looking cane but otherwise same as ever. And there were several of her wonderful photos—of Lee J. Cobb as Lear, whom I had met in Press Director Susan Bloch’s office during my first interview with her in February 1969; of Tennessee Williams, whom I also met in Susan’s office, at the time of Camino Real a year later; of Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams rehearsing Agon, with Balanchine and Stravinsky in the background; Balanchine with Maria Tallchief, Suzanne Farrell, Lincoln Kirstein, and his cat Mourka in flight; and shots of several shows I saw over the years, such as A Chorus Line, James Earl Jones and Kevin Conway in Of Mice and Men, Elizabeth Ashley in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, Blythe Danner in her undies and Keir Dullea in Butterflies Are Free, Meryl Streep in Happy End, and Frank Langella in Dracula.

The rest of the scene was, well, different. Several ladies walked around with dogs, presumably theirs, in their arms; another was stroking a white doggie doll, which I kept looking at, expecting, hoping to see it move. Again and again I saw people I thought I should know, and whose photos I may well have seen in the Times‘s Styles section. But since all the photos weren’t Martha’s, my attention flagged and I was just about to leave when the auction began and I was momentarily trapped. A photo of Marilyn Monroe in peasant garb went for $6,000 and one of Martha’s for around a thousand. And then I left. I wonder how much the photo of a nude woman lying in bed atop her bull mastiff went for?

No Times Rich Obit?
Those who have been awaiting a New York Times obituary of Alan Rich have been given another dash of reality. Allan Kozinn’s evocative obit of Alan appeared online on April 26, and it apparently won’t reach newsprint. Go to www.newyorktimes.com.

P.S. Thursday, April 29: Well, the Times came through at last. Check out Alan’s obit on page 13 of the Business section. He’d act blasé, but, deep down, he’d probably be amazed that they gave him so much room, and with a photo too!

by Sedgwick Clark

MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND. This has been some week! My wife and I have been here to celebrate a friend’s 70th birthday. At the same time, I have been looking forward avidly, as readers of this space know, to the New York Philharmonic’s “Russian Stravinsky” festival, which begins tonight. But I won’t be at Avery Fisher because we weren’t able to get home in time due to that damned volcano in Iceland. (Calls to mind the volcanos in the Sacre section of Disney’s Fantasia.) I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic—perhaps at the same time as the Mariinsky Chorus, which also couldn’t make it to New York in time.

The confluence of events seemed made in heaven. Three weeks of Stravinsky concerts preceded by the pleasure of visiting near the town where the great man composed his most famous work, Le Sacre du printemps. In the warm sunlight glittering off Lake Geneva we strolled along Quai Ernest Ansermet, named after the man who conducted the first performance of L’Histoire du soldat in 1918 and was a lifetime champion of Stravinsky. We cut over in front of the Casino to walk up perhaps the shortest road in the world, Rue Igor Stravinsky.

Before leaving Montreux proper, we dropped by the Auditorium Stravinski; the season had ended, but my Musical America business card was evidently impressive enough to get us a personal tour by the hospitality manager, Nathalie Tippmann, a friendly young woman who had lived in Atlanta for six years. The Montreux Jazz Festival, which just celebrated its 40th year, is obviously the town’s primary musical event. There are statues of Vladimir Nabokov, B.B. King, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and Freddie Mercury (of the rock group Queen) on prominent display, but no I.S. Then we drove to Clarens, hoping to find the house where Stravinsky lived when he composed Le Sacre. Apparently it no longer exists, but at least there’s a street named after the work.

The dreaded volcano dust seems to be abating, so it’s “Home, James.” We considered several possibilities: flying from Milan for $36,000 on Tuesday; $32,000 from Geneva on Friday; $8,000 from Paris on Sunday. Instead, we take a train from Lausanne at 6 a.m. to Zurich, fly to Amsterdam for a three-hour layover before flying to Kennedy and arriving at 10 p.m.

I wonder if there’s a Concertgebouw matinee? 

by Sedgwick Clark

It was in 1969, as a reference librarian at the University music library, that Vivian Perlis began taping interviews with many friends and colleagues of Charles Ives and subsequently fashioned them into a revelatory, award-winning book for the composer’s centennial in 1974, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (Yale University Press). Here she is, speaking about the genesis of her invaluable Oral History of American Music (OHAM) at Yale.

“[T]he university librarian at that time told me when I wanted to broaden the project and work with many composers that he really did not see that he would want anything but written material in his library.”

Holy cow! Talk about short-sightedness.

This quote leapt out at me from an article about Perlis and OHAM by Laura Pelligrinelli on the Internet yesterday, forwarded to me by MA.com’s intrepid editor, Susan Elliott. As we know, Perlis wrote and collaborated on several more books that even her old (in every sense of the word) boss would want in the Yale Library:

An Ives Celebration (University of Illinois Press, 1977), edited with H. Wiley Hitchcock
Copland, 1900 through 1942 (St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984), with Aaron Copland
Copland, Since 1943 (St. Martin’s Press, 1989), with Aaron Copland
Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale University Press, 2005), with Libby Van Cleve

Paperback versions of all but the last named are available, and in December The Complete Copland will be published, which is certain to contain new material. It’s a tossup as to which composer benefited most from her scholarship: the irascible Uncle Charlie or the man generally considered to have been America’s greatest composer. Ives was revealed in myriad ways by those still alive who knew him best, and Copland received an autobiography at last. He had wanted one for some time, but by his late seventies his memory had begun to fail and he needed a knowledgeable collaborator to help dredge up and organize his thoughts. Perlis was perfect. With infinite patience and wisdom she produced a pair of books in which Copland’s voice was identical to that in his many writings, lectures, and interviews over his long life. To flesh out the composer’s words, she added those of his colleagues recorded for her Oral History program and her own insightful comments.

It was “a musical autobiography,” said Copland to those who questioned the lack of his private life in the book. That’s what he wanted. Of course it was inevitable in our tell-all world that his private life would be revealed—along with those of other homosexual American composers who preferred to remain in the closet. For that, one may refer to Ned Rorem’s diaries, Joan Peyser’s psycho-biography of Bernstein (Beech Tree Books, 1987), which claimed to be the first to “out” American composers and performers, and Howard Pollack’s biography of Copland (Henry Holt, 1999). Paul Moor dealt with this question in his review of the second Copland/Perlis volume in the May 1990 issue of Musical America. He concluded, “[The first] volume made fascinating reading; this one tops it.”

Perlis herself addresses Copland’s private life and his memory failure on pages 294-98 of the Ives to Ellington volume. For the so-called “general” American music reader, this is an ideal bedside table companion. One can open it at random to read the composers and their friends in their own words, interlaced with Perlis’s perceptive comments about all things germane. Two CDs of the composers’ voices are included. And as with all her other books, the photos are fabulous!

On April 8 at Zankel Hall, the Yale School of Music presented “Voices of American Music: a tribute to OHAM on its 40th anniversary.” American composers I saw included Musical America Composers of the Year Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (1999) and Steve Reich (2001), and I’m sure there were dozens more. Several Yale musicians performed music by Ives, Copland, Zwilich, Ellington, Blake, Reich, Druckman, and Cage, concluding with Fanfare for the Common Man. I was over at the Philharmonic for the program’s first half and only arrived in time for Reich’s New York Counterpoint (1985), played by clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, who gave its first performance. All performances were excellent, but I was bowled over by Cage’s exhilarating Third Construction (1941). Mark, you shoulda been there! Several percussionists played cymbals, cowbells, claves, teponaxtle (a Mexican drum), quijadas (jaw bones), tin cans, rattles, conch shell, lion’s roar, and many other instruments. I was particularly thrilled to be so close to the lion’s roar—one of Varèse’s favorite instruments—and see how it was “played.” Believe it or not, the Copland Fanfare at the end was actually anticlimactic!  Interspersed between the music were audio and video recordings of the composers.

This was ostensibly a tribute to OHAM, but we all know who is most deserving of our tribute. I first met Vivian in 1974, at the Ives Centennial concerts in New York. Charles Ives Remembered had just been published, and she had given me editorial advice for the cover article on Ives in the long-gone FM Guide, which I edited. She has given me invaluable advice and assistance over the years with articles on American composers in Keynote, another magazine I edited, and with various Musical America composer tributes.

She has been, and remains, simply, the American composer’s best friend.

Perspectives on Andriessen
Unfortunate scheduling has led to my being away when Musical America‘s 2010 Composer of the Year, Louis Andriessen, will be in New York for his Carnegie Hall “Perspectives” concerts. All readers should go and enjoy in my stead and tell me next week what they thought! Hear that, Sarah and Zizi?

The Russian Stravinsky
The music season’s most exciting event starts next Wednesday—seven programs of Stravinsky, with Valery Gergiev leading the New York Philharmonic. Anyone who loves music should hie to Avery Fisher Hall’s box office ASAP.

by Sedgwick Clark

Steve Smith made a pointed accusation in his New York Times review (4/3/10) of last Thursday’s all-William Schuman concert (see my blog, 3/24/10) by the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin.  After marveling at the Third Symphony, he wrote: “That American orchestras can neglect so vital a creation in favor of any number of second-shelf European works seems criminal.”

Amen.

In over 40 years of New York concertgoing, I’ve heard the piece only four times: by the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein twice, most recently in 1985; by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Carlo Maria Giulini in the early 1980s; by the New Yorkers under André Previn in April 1997. That the symphony had not been performed in New York for 13 years according to Schuman’s publisher, G. Schirmer, is indeed criminal.

There is considerable American music for orchestra that I’m sure would appall Steve by its absence. How many works by those 20th-century American greats Copland, Ives, Barber, or Bernstein turn up these days on ordinary concerts simply because the music is good—as opposed to being on all-American music concerts? The Harris Third, Hanson Second, Creston Second, Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes by Paul Klee, Ruggles’s Sun-treader? And this is only the beginning.

William Schuman composed seven other symphonies he allowed to be performed. How long before we hear one of those again in a New York concert hall?

Addendum. Those who love American music should know about a ten-disc CD set of New York Philharmonic broadcast performances called “An American Celebration” (NYP 9904), released directly by the orchestra. It contains 13 hours of music by 38 American composers—a total of 49 live performances, from 1936-1999, under 21 conductors. I hesitate to mention this because I was involved with its production, along with Barbara Haws, the orchestra’s archivist/historian. But it’s really too good to go unmentioned out of false modesty.

Elijah‘s Language
In his review this morning of the Boston Symphony performance of Mendelssohn’s oratorio  Elijah at Carnegie Hall on Monday (4/5/10), Jim Oestreich questions the use of “the original German [text] despite the availability of a lovely English translation made for its premiere—in Birmingham, England, in 1846—and since used widely by Mr. Frühbeck and others. At a time when we hear no end of talk about demystifying classical music and broadening its audience, wouldn’t the use of English in a case like this be a sensible place to start?”

Point well taken. But it wasn’t Frühbeck’s decision. A friend in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus informed me that the chorus had performed it in English in the past and that it was James Levine’s decision to sing it in German. As is widely known by now, Levine had to cancel due to continuing back problems, and Frühbeck was fortunately available to lead an excellent performance.

Looking forward
My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/8 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Antonio Pappano; Joshua Bell, violin. Mozart: Symphony No. 31; Bruch: Scottish Fantasy; Brahms: Symphony No. 4.

4/12 Leonard Nimoy Thalia. Cutting Edge Concerts/Victoria Bond. Works by Kristin Kuster, Laurie San Martin, Anna Weesner, Sean Shepherd, Jeremy Thurlow, Sebastian Currier, and Harold Meltzer.

4/13 Carnegie Hall. Philadelphia Orchestra/Charles Dutoit; Piotr Anderszewski, piano. Szymanowski: Symphonie concertante; Debussy: La Mer; Stravinsky: Le Sacre du printemps.