Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

Alan Gilbert’s first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic ended last week in a blaze of press release glory. His first and last concerts contained world premieres by his appointed composer-in-residence, Magnus Lindberg—EXPO and Al largo, respectively. The first concert, broadcast on PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center, also offered Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi, sung by Renée Fleming, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. The last concluded with Beethoven’s imposing Missa solemnis.  Daring programming to say the least.

In between I heard superbly played readings of Mahler’s Third, Ives’s and Rachmaninoff’s Second, a world premiere by Christopher Rouse entitled Odna Zhizn (A Life), and a masterfully conducted, inventively staged performance of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, the triumph of Gilbert’s first season. He also proved his accompanist mettle in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Emanuel Ax, Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto with Yefim Bronfman, and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto with Lisa Batiashvili, all playing at the top of their form. There’s no doubt that this orchestra performs at its technical Everest for him. The Lincoln Center Festival’s presentation of the complete works of Edgard Varèse should profit immensely from Gilbert’s keen ear and the Philharmonic’s playing of the orchestral works on July 20.

The jury is still out, however, regarding the music that lights his emotional fires. Typically for his generation, Gilbert appears most comfortable in works of the past hundred years or so—music whose expressivity arises more from accuracy of the composer’s notes and bar lines than a performer’s personality. The Classical era also seems to be a comfort zone to today’s performers. I’ve mentioned before that Gilbert’s conducting of the Juilliard Orchestra in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro overture at an early concert in the renovated Alice Tully Hall was extraordinary: witty, affectionate, ideally paced.

The Romantic era is something else, and Gilbert’s Berlioz, Mahler, and Rachmaninoff seemed to me emotionally at arms’ length, despite (or perhaps because of) their immaculate ensemble. In many ways, he reminds me of Eugene Ormandy, whose performances were nearly always reliable if not always inspired. There was one infuriating Ormandy/Philadelphia gloss I’ll never forget, though: Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in the 1970s, with Janet Baker singing gamely along with the conductor’s rushed tempos. Come the final “ewig” of the last-movement “Abschied,” Ormandy—who has seen fit to inflate Mahler’s pianissimo ending to a fat mezzo-forte—just stops, puts down his baton, turns to the audience, and gestures to Baker. I wanted to scream.

Gilbert’s Missa solemnis wasn’t quite that detached. His care for the vocalists’ pronunciation of the text (e.g., the hard g in “agimus”) and the controversial choice of having the timpanist play B natural instead of B flat in his solo near the end of the piece indicated that he has thought deeply about it. But whatever he felt about the Missa wasn’t communicated. Bruno Walter refused to perform Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 until he was age 50 because he didn’t think he was ready, and I respectfully suggest that Gilbert wasn’t ready for the Missa. It struck me as a prosaic rendering of a work that cries out in frustration for belief in something—God, man, Harvard, who knows?—and in the end collapses into ambivalent consolation. He conducted the last chord offhandedly, without a hint that anything important had elapsed in the past 70 minutes. In fact, nothing had. Gilbert may be the blessed anti-Maazel to the Times, but he won’t build an audience with such performances. As I think so often after a concert: Bernstein! His performance of the Missa in his final season as NYPhil music director was galvanizing, and his Concertgebouw recording on DG is my favorite.

Still and all, whatever my criticisms of some of his performances, Gilbert’s programming next season offers loads of delicious music not heard at the Philharmonic in years. We can all look forward!  

by Sedgwick Clark

We like to define our favorite artists as “another this” or “another that.” One of my first professional articles, for the Village Voice in the mid-1970s, was about promising young pianists. My editor wanted some sort of angle to enliven a standard subject, so she asked me if there were “a new Horowitz” among this group. That night at Carnegie Hall I ran into Claudio Arrau’s personal manager, Friede Rothe, and told her of this angle. “But Sedge, dear,” she replied, “who wants to be another Horowitz?” I had my title.

We just can’t resist it—this branding of an upcoming young artist with a famous elder’s pedigree. Gustavo Dudamel, the 29-year-old Venezuelan firebrand who just concluded his first season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic [see my May 26th blog], is only the latest to be labeled “another Bernstein” by some critics. At least there are obvious similarities: his demonstrative, emotional conducting style, his romantic interpretive approach, his instant audience appeal; and he has admitted that he listened to many Bernstein recordings when he was young(er). In another case, a recent article suggested that the New York Philharmonic had found a new Bernstein in its first-rate, if rather restrained, new music director, Alan Gilbert! Such nonsense can only be detrimental to a developing career.

So many musicians’ reputations fade after their demise, but not Leonard Bernstein’s. The books written since his death at 72 in 1990 attest to that. Nearly all their titles begin with his full name, followed by an explanatory subtitle. Schuyler Chapin’s little “[L.B.] Notes from a Friend” (Walker, 1992), should be the uninitiated’s first read—short and sweet, an infinitely engaging memoir of the man and musician as we all want to remember him.

In 1994 came a pair of biographies: The first was just plain Leonard Bernstein without a subtitle by Humphrey Burton (Doubleday), and the second was “[L.B.] A Life,” a johnnie-come-lately effort by Meryle Secrest (Knopf). Burton, a Bernstein friend and colleague for 30 years, who directed many of the conductor’s videos, had the Bernstein family’s blessing and entrée to his papers. Secrest did not, and most reviewers considered the “official” Burton effort more authoritative.

A time followed in which his main record companies, Columbia/CBS (now Sony Classical) in his earlier period and Deutsche Grammophon in his last 15 years, rereleased nearly all (if not all) of his recordings on CD. DG has released the lion’s share of the videos on DVD, most recently the Schumann symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic. Kultur has released two nine-disc sets, the first of 25 New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts and the second of several concerts with various orchestras. Bernstein videos have also turned up on EuroArts (Bruckner’s Ninth with Vienna) and Medici Arts (a rehearsal and performance of Shostakovich’s First and Peter Rosen’s film Leonard Bernstein—Reflections, which includes a performance of Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le toit, made at the same time as the 1976 EMI recording).

The past three years have seen a Bernstein book per annum, and there are several more in the works—including a coffee table book of photos from his last six years by the New York photographer Steve J. Sherman to be published by Amadeus in October, a study of West Side Story, a biography aimed at children, and various studies aimed at separate aspects of his art.

In 2008 the New York Philharmonic published “[L.B.] American Original: How a Modern Renaissance Man Transformed Music and the World During His New York Philharmonic Years, 1943-1976” by Burton Bernstein and Barbara B. Haws, Lenny’s younger brother and New York Phil archivist/historian, respectively. The subtitle pretty much tells the story, and is more than a little reminiscent of Joseph Horowitz’s subtitle for his controversial 1987 book, Understanding Toscanini (“How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music”). It’s a collection of essays by several well-known commentators (including Horowitz) on the maestro’s multi-faceted interests and career. The texts rarely depart from the “rah-rah Lenny” program (“Bernstein was a born conductor”), and lord knows there’s plenty to rah-rah about. But despite the many insights, for me the main attraction of this handsomely designed, 223-page oversize volume is the wealth of photos, which bring the man’s persona vividly alive. Great conducting shots abound, of course. Open the book at random, and—ahh, here’s a shot of Bernstein getting a haircut in an open pavilion in Moscow during the Phil’s 1959 Soviet tour, surrounded by Soviet girls, some of whom are actually smiling, but none as broadly as Lenny and his barber. Also, ominously, are many photos of him with his ubiquitous cigarette, reminding us of the lung cancer that eventually claimed him.

I’ve not yet finished Barry Seldes’s book, “[L.B.] The Political Life of an American Musician” (University of California Press, 2009), but its subject is a fascinating one: the consequences of his liberal politics during his career—which embraced Cold War America, the Army McCarthy Hearings, being blacklisted by the State Department in 1950, the founding of Israel, the Sixties’ upheaval in civil rights and Vietnam, being placed on the Nixon administration’s “enemies” list—and how these contentious events affected his composing.

Composer Jack Gottlieb was Bernstein’s assistant at the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1966. His new Working with Bernstein (Amadeus Press, 2010) has the immediate distinction of being the first book on Bernstein in the last 20 years not to be entitled with his full name. More importantly, it’s a witty, irreverent memoir that no Bernstein fan should miss. “Is this book biased?” he asks in his Introduction. “You bet it is! However, I fervently hope it is not hagiographic.” It’s not. “The man certainly was not a saint,” Gottlieb continues, “and I dearly want to be honest in my assessment. . . .” He appears to be, even if he has undoubtedly pulled some punches. He divides his book into two parts: (1) a “grab bag” of reminiscences, anecdotes, and observations of working with his boss and (2) his program notes about Bernstein’s music. Of many revelations, I discovered that my favorite Bernstein concert work, Chichester Psalms, consisted of largely recycled music written for an abandoned stage project in 1964, the year he took a sabbatical from the Phil to compose: a collaboration with Jerome Robbins and Comden and Green in an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Maybe I knew that factoid before, but Gottlieb details what music came from where. Recycling is a noble art dating at least back to Handel, Mozart, Beethoven et al., but to my mind it rarely had it so good.

by Sedgwick Clark

My friend and MusicalAmerica.com editor Susan Elliott bequeathed this piece to me the morning after Sunday’s Tony Awards show on CBS. She is rarely shy about injecting her own opinions into Web site pieces—which is one reason the site is so fun to read, in my humble opinion—but in this case, she wrote, “I don’t want to post it on the site because it’s pure, irresponsible opinion off the top of my head.” Which is why I’m pleased to rescue it from cyberspace.—S.C.

Denzel Washington accepted the award for Best Actor in a Play without knowing who was giving it to him: “Who is it that presents these things?” he asked without the slightest embarrassment. The American Theater Wing, you ingrate.

Theater actors strive for eons for these little statues. Hollywood actors take a few weeks off from their latest billion-dollar movie contracts, get gift roles (e.g., Troy Maxon in August Wilson’s Fences) and are rewarded for their marketing power at the box office.

Ditto Catherine Zeta-Jones as Desirée in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. On the Tony broadcast (less so in the theater), she performed the most God-awful rendition of “Send in the Clowns” ever—bringing new levels of nausea to the term “treacly.” Talk about obscuring the composer’s voice with your own affectations—small wonder the show ran into overtime, so long were her dramatic pauses between phrases.

The segment from American Idiot belonged on the Grammy Awards—bunches of quasi-talented punk rockers throwing their heads around to show how incredibly angry, tough, dangerous (pick one) they are. The broadcast’s distorted audio of their segment reminded me of a high school performance of Fiddler on the Roof viewed recently. Then there was the confused and occasionally out-of-focus camera work, inclusive of the show’s overused strobe lights, video screens (yes, it’s come to that, TV broadcasts of stage productions that use video), and all those angry young teenyboppers, looking like go-go dancers let out of their cages.

While it is not without its merits—thanks largely to the Brits and revivals—quality on Broadway is increasingly elusive. The Tony Awards broadcast certainly confirmed that. 

My Own Take

In a remote area of New York I tuned in late to part of the Tony broadcast, arriving during the American Idiot segment that Susan didn’t warm to and proving my own alienation from much of the evening’s proceedings by hitting the mute button. I missed Lady Catherine’s “Send in the Clowns” but caught her acceptance speech and ecstatic boast, after thanking her husband Michael Douglas, that she was the one sleeping with him. Unlike the more laid back Oscars, the Tony mode is always in an unseemly race to finish by 11 p.m., and this year it missed the deadline by a couple of minutes. From what I observed, Zita-Jones’s pause-ridden interpretation couldn’t have taken more time than the interminable shuffling on and off of so-called producers (actually, for the most part, investors).

Come Fly Away

If “quality on Broadway is increasingly elusive,” as Susan says, I lucked out Tuesday night at the Marquis Theater with the Twyla Tharp-Frank Sinatra musical, Come Fly Away. Tharp “conceived, choreographed, and directed” this kinetic evening of dance without dialogue, and Old Blue Eyes appears courtesy of vocal tracks of his recordings backed by a live band of fabulous players. Without a storyline, the dancers enter and develop relationships, revealing an abundance of personality, charm, and allure. The less than two-hour duration, including a 15-minute intermission, is perfect. Don’t hesitate to see it.

Psycho at 50

Astonishing as it may seem, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho opened exactly 50 years ago yesterday. I watch it when I can on TCM (if only to hear Bernard Herrmann’s extraordinary score, which is the second main reason I watch Vertigo and North by Northwest so often, too). But my wife, who saw its first run with her sister when she was 11, adamantly refuses to allow it on the screen when she is home. As for the laserdisc and DVD copies I own, they remain shrinkwrapped. AOL ran an excellent appraisal of Psycho‘s influence yesterday and linked the shower scene. It looks so tame now in comparison to its gory successors, and far shorter than I remembered, but PK wouldn’t even consider watching it .

by Sedgwick Clark

A love affair between Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel must be among the least expected subjects for sexy summer film fare. It should come as no surprise that the composer of a ballet in which a sacrificial virgin dances herself to death and the designer of the 20th-century’s most famous perfume had sex lives. But the image of this bare-assed couple coupling on the floor is bound to stretch one’s comfort level.

Dutch director Jan Kounen’s cinematographic concern for historical accuracy is evident in every frame of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which opens in New York on June 11. The depiction of Le Sacre du printemp‘s scandalous premiere in the Champs-Elyseés Theatre, on May 29, 1913, takes the breath away, and impresario Sergei Diaghilev, choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and conductor Pierre Monteux look uncannily true to life. Cut to seven years later. Chanel, who had attended the ballet premiere, is a rich and successful designer. Stravinsky is a refugee composer in Paris, struggling to support his family of four children and a wife who suffers from tuberculosis. They meet, are attracted, and Chanel offers him and his family the opportunity to live in her villa to compose. The inevitable occurs.

The story fascinates, but the pacing is glacial even for an “art” film. Director Kounen remains emotionally at arm’s length, and Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen’s Stravinsky is defiantly one-dimensional, taking the composer’s aversion to expression in his early photos too much to heart: “I will not speak until you have finished taking my picture,” Stravinsky told an interviewer in 1939. “I must be photographed plainly, seriously. I detest being snapped in so-called action, with the mouth open.” Only later in life did he allow candid photos to be taken. 

I don’t know much about Coco, but she comes off as calculating and self-involved rather than passionate in Anna Mouglalis’s icy portrayal. Consequently their love scenes are pretty sexless, despite the nudity. No surprise that the actress found those scenes boring to shoot, according to last Sunday’s New York Times. “We just wanted it to be over.” Igor’s consumptive wife, Catherine (Elena Morozova), is the only one of the three principals allowed to have convincing human qualities. 

Perhaps this intellectualized film is all true to Chris Greenhalgh’s novel. But Stravinsky told his amanuensis, Robert Craft, that the opening night of Le Sacre du printemps made him angrier than he had ever been, before or since, and Mikkelsen betrays only minor annoyance at the pandemonium. Anyone who knows and loves Stravinsky’s music will feel that there is much more to the man than this.

Le Grande Macabre Broadcast This Week       

For those unfortunates who couldn’t get into the New York Philharmonic’s sold-out run of the Ligeti opera a couple of weeks ago, the performance will be broadcast countrywide this week. Tune into 105.9 FM WQXR in New York on Thursday, June 10, at 9:00 p.m.; check local listings for full details or visit nyphil.org to listen online.  

Quotable Chuckle

“Ligeti was a fine composer, probably a genius, but Le Grand Macabre is not an immortal composition. It is not to be confused with the B-minor Mass, no matter how much it’s ballyhooed.”—Jay Nordlinger, City Arts, June 15, 2010

Jack Beeson (1921-2010)

I’m sad to report that only a month after writing about American composer Jack Beeson (“Why We Left Muncie,” May 6), word came from his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, of his death in New York on Sunday, June 6, of congestive heart failure. The 88-year-old composer had won an ASCAP Honor on May 21, 2009, and an American Music Center Letter of Distinction on May 3, 2010. In January of this year, Beeson was one of the American composers whose music was performed at Juilliard’s invaluable FOCUS! festival. Reviewing the concerts for MusicalAmerica.com, Peter G. Davis noted the “two lovely arias from The Sweet Bye and Bye (1956) by Jack Beeson, perhaps the only composer of the period whose elegantly crafted operas will certainly live on.”

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concert:

6/10 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Lisa Batiashvili, violin. Lindberg: Arena; Sibelius: Violin Concerto; Brahms: Symphony No. 2.

by Sedgwick Clark

Last week Alan Gilbert scored the biggest success of his first season as New York Philharmonic music director. The event was the orchestra’s ambitious staged concert version of György Ligeti’s wild mid-1970s opera, Le Grand Macabre. And wonder of wonders, the three performances sold out the house.

We’d better give the public relations people credit now because they’re inevitably blamed when sales are poor. I don’t recall ever being so inundated with press materials. I was besieged by e-mails called “PHIL FLASH,” which (among many other missives) included dress rehearsal photos, new dress rehearsal photos, and a release about a Grand Macabre flipCam Series, whatever the dickens that is. “Making of Le Grand Macabre” (henceforth LGM) videos arrived in my New Mail box seemingly every other day and may be found on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/Breughelland), which includes three “humorous” skits of Gilbert talking with the LGM character Death, presumably intending to show what a regular guy the conductor is. A couple of the videos involving director Doug Fitch and one of percussionist Christopher Lamb discussing Ligeti’s use of the instruments are actually interesting in part.

Attempts to “humanize” the music director of an orchestra are, I submit, wrong-headed and frequently embarrassing, for his or her essential qualities will become apparent in performance. And in this regard, Anthony Tommasini in the Times and Peter G. Davis in Monday’s Musicalamerica.com were unequivocal.

“The hero of this production, of the whole endeavor,” wrote Tommasini, “is Mr. Gilbert, who conducted the score with insight, character and command. The Philharmonic players seemed inspired as they executed this complex music with skill and conviction. . . . This was an instant Philharmonic milestone.”

“[S]urely,” wrote Davis, “the presiding force that made the evening so seamless and exciting was Gilbert on the podium. Pacing, instrumental gesture, textural richness, hair-trigger coordination of every complex element—it was all there, along with a thrilling take-no-prisoners musical exuberance that other performances of Le Grand Macabre I’ve heard never quite duplicated. Suddenly the New York Philharmonic’s future looks very bright indeed.”

These raves came hard on the heels of Gustavo Dudamel’s New York debut [see last week’s blog] with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the end of his first season as music director of that orchestra. His two concerts at Lincoln Center were the conclusion of a 12-city countrywide tour that garnered mixed reviews—a first for the Venezuelan dynamo’s heretofore spotless image. New York magazine music critic Justin Davidson compares the two maestros and their orchestras in this week’s issue (“Sometimes it takes L.A.’s anxious ambitions to prod New York to be superb.”)

Representatives of both orchestras have disingenuously denied any competition between these talented young maestros and their bi-coastal orchestras, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the LAPhil has been smarting and that the NYPhil’s administrative halls and the offices of Gilbert’s p.r. firm, 21C, have been resounding with “gotchas.”

The fact is, unless we’re to descend to television’s patience level in decision making, any intelligent critical decision regarding these two musicians and their orchestras is a long way off. Let’s give them—and ourselves—the necessary time, ladies and gentlemen.

My question to the NYPhil is this: At what point does such a p.r. blitz sound like desperation—and, moreover, disbelief in one’s “product”? I hope the Phil will henceforth allow Maestro Gilbert’s talents to reveal themselves naturally.

Looking forward
My week’s scheduled concerts:

6/6 Town Hall. Free for All. Stephanie Blythe, mezzo-soprano; Warren Jones, piano. Works by Poulenc, Duparc, John Drake, and James Legg.