Archive for September, 2013

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Back in the Trenches Again

Thursday, September 26th, 2013

by Sedgwick Clark

The bloated pomposity of Lorin Maazel’s “interpretation” of the Star-Spangled Banner was the first reason PK swore off his concerts. I’m certain she would have been relieved initially by Alan Gilbert’s spiffy tempo last night at the New York Philharmonic’s season opener. But by the final cadence I could imagine her saying, “There’s no singing line. No freedom.” Ever the contrarian, I would point out that he slowed the tempo for the final couplet. “That was an intellectual decision—where was the feeling?” I can’t disagree. Loosen up, Maestro: It’s okay to love our national anthem.

I wanted to shout, “Sing out, Louise,” during Gilbert’s curiously muted performance of the concert’s first work, Ravel’s Dawn Song of the Jester, better known as Alborado del gracioso. There was no fun, no lilt, no rhythmic snap or abandon in fortissimos, no atmosphere or yearning in the quiet middle section. As usual with the Philharmonic strings in Avery Fisher Hall, massed pizzicatos—so important in this piece for their evocation of Spanish guitars—went for nothing. It doesn’t help that conductors these days see a pianissimo marking and have the strings play at the brink of audibility. Nor is it helpful to drape a (festive?) curtain over the back reflecting wall of the stage.

But everything changed the moment the evening’s soloist, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, walked onstage. Working with a musician with such a natural sense of rubato and expressiveness, Gilbert loosened up too. Osvaldo Golijov’s Azul, for cello and orchestra, bathes the listener in a half hour of lambent melody, and it was gorgeously played by all. Equally enticing was the tuneful Suite from Piazzolla’s La serie del Ángel, which followed.

The gala ended with a smashing performance of Ravel’s Boléro. The Philharmonic is in great shape these days, and it will be fun to compare this with the Philadelphia’s performance at Carnegie Hall’s opening next week.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

9/28 Metropolitan Opera. Mozart: Così fan tutte. James Levine (cond.) Susanna Phillips (Fiordiligi), Isabel Leonard (Dorabella), Danielle de Niese (Despina), Matthew Polenzani (Ferrando), Rodion Pogossov (Guglielmo), Maurizio Muraro (Don Alfonso).

10/2 at 7:00. Carnegie Hall. Philadelphia Orchestra/Yannick Nézet-Séguin; Joshua Bell, violin; Esperanza Spalding , vocals and double bass. Tchaikovsky: Slavonic March. Saint-Saëns: Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Ravel: Tzigane. Saint-Saëns: Bacchanale from Samson and Dalila. Performances by Esperanza Spalding. Ravel: Boléro.

10/3 Carnegie Hall. American Symphony Orchestra/Leon Botstein. Antheil: A Jazz Symphony. Griffes: Poem. Ruggles: Men and Mountains. Copland: Organ Symphony. Varèse: Amériques.

Posted in Why I Left Muncie | Comments Closed

Finding a Publicist for your Project

Thursday, September 26th, 2013

By: Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

Having written an article in Musical America’s 2011 Directory entitled Getting Noticed in the 21st Century, I am often approached by young artists who are contemplating a variety of projects such as recordings or special concerts and who want to know how to get noticed for them. In my early years as an artist manager, it was common for publicists to build the majority of their business around clients who paid a year-round retainer. Times have changed and it would appear that virtually all of today’s most active publicists are open to taking on individual projects. However, they definitely have criteria for determining which to accept. It is my hope that this blog post will help to enlighten artists regarding how to maximize their chances for teaming up with an effective public relations representative and what the financial parameters of such an investment might be.

In speaking with various colleagues of mine in the public relations arena, I was not surprised to hear all of them say that the most important criteria for them in accepting a project are newsworthiness and quality. This would only seem logical, since it is the job of a publicist to attract as much attention as possible to an artist’s activities and in these times, that may be no small feat. There is considerably less coverage of new album releases than there was five to ten years ago and also less airplay. There are fewer arts critics on staff and consequently less performances being reviewed.  A concert performed by a relatively unknown artist which offers an interesting program (unusual repertoire or juxtaposition of repertoire, a newly discovered, original or commissioned work), and which might take place in an unusual venue, stands a greater chance of attracting coverage than one that consists of what would be considered “standard repertoire”, offered for no other reason than to make a debut in a particular city. A concert with a story behind it, such as an artist overcoming a hurdle in their life or returning to their home town to perform with the youth orchestra, is also more likely to attract attention.  A publicist may be far more inclined to take on a record release project if there is some touring around it that offers some of the same repertoire. Visits to individual markets on tour create more of a story and offer a broader context for coverage of the artist and their new release.  The publicists I spoke to also stressed the importance of a personal connection with the artist seeking to engage their services, meaning that they want to sense the artist’s passion for the project and feel that they can feel equally passionate about it. Rebecca Davis told me that her goal is to always work for clients who she hopes she can make people care about.

It would seem that the typical time span for an individual project might be anywhere from four to six months. Most publicists want to have at least two months before the concert or record release to lay the groundwork for coverage and two to three months afterward to follow up and prepare a proper report for the client. The average fee per month seems to range from $1500 to $3000.

If an artist is far enough along in their career to benefit from and be able to afford a publicist’s ongoing services, working together initially on a project might be an excellent way to assess the potential chemistry and effectiveness of such a collaboration. Often an artist will discover that the publicist has valuable advice to offer, ranging from using their social media contacts more effectively to finding the perfect concert attire. Amanda Sweet, President of Bucklesweet Media, told me that when she took on the New West Guitar Group, they had no manager. She gave them advice about how to promote themselves, how to seek a recording partner, and how to reach out to presenters, especially universities. Veteran publicist Jay K. Hoffman told me that he works closely with an artist on strategically enhancing the potential interest in their project. He called it “finding a format to make an event one of a kind”. If an artist approaches him about an all-Bach concert, he might suggest that they present it at 8:00 but follow it up with a short “after concert” of totally different repertoire at 10:30, providing they have the stamina for it!

I asked a number of the people I spoke to whether artists could hope to achieve coverage for their projects on their own, without the assistance of a publicist. Not one of them said no, although they cautioned that it involved a lot of persistence and very hard work. Some were kind enough to give me pointers which I will share very soon in a follow-up column on this subject.

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2013

Posted in Ask Edna, Publicity and Promotion | Comments Closed

Visas for Recording Artists

Wednesday, September 25th, 2013

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.

Dear Law and Disorder:

If a foreign singer (who is not a citizen of a country that is eligible for the visa waiver program) gets a record deal in the USA, what kind of visa would they need to apply for? And if the singer is currently living in a different country with a residency permit, can they apply in that country where he or she is living, or would they need to return to their own country to apply for the visa? Thanks.

Thanks. This is an easy one.

To work in the US, which includes entering the US for the purposes of recording an album (regardless of whether or not the singer is paid), the singer would need to apply for an O-1B visa. An O-1B visa is for individual artists of “extraordinary ability.” To obtain the visa, a US-based petitioner (which could be the record label or an appointed agent) would need to prepare and file a visa petition with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). (Naturally, there are fees and costs to file the petition.)

Once the visa petition is approved, USCIS will issue an “approval notice.” The singer will need that to make an appointment at a US Consulate and schedule a visa interview. He or she will need to complete an on-line application form and pay a visa application fee. However, the singer can go to any US Consulate in the world that is convenient for him or her. He or she does not have to return to their home country or even use the consulate in the country where they are a living. Any consulate in any country with a US flag outside will work. (Just make sure it’s a consulate that issues visas—not all do.) Assuming there are no problems with the background check, and assuming the singer is not from a country the US doesn’t like (which, sadly, is a larger list than you may think), the visa should be issued in 3 or 4 days.

There is a rare exception you should be aware of which may or may not be applicable. An artist is not required to have an artist visa to enter the US for the sole purpose of using a recording studio to record an album that will not be sold or distributed in the US, and provided there will be no public performances or concerts. If this applies, an artist only needs to have a visitor visa (unless they are citizen of a visa waiver country, in which case, they will only need their passport to enter as a visitor for up to 90-days.)

Remember, everything you could possibly want to know about visa and tax issues for foreign artists wishing to perform in the US, including things you didn’t even know you needed to know, can be found on: www.artistsfromabroad.org

__________________________________________________________________

For additional information and resources on this and other legal and business issues for the performing arts, visit ggartslaw.com

To ask your own question, write to lawanddisorder@musicalamerica.org.

All questions on any topic related to legal and business issues will be welcome. However, please post only general questions or hypotheticals. GG Arts Law reserves the right to alter, edit or, amend questions to focus on specific issues or to avoid names, circumstances, or any information that could be used to identify or embarrass a specific individual or organization. All questions will be posted anonymously.

__________________________________________________________________

THE OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER:

THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE!

The purpose of this blog is to provide general advice and guidance, not legal advice. Please consult with an attorney familiar with your specific circumstances, facts, challenges, medications, psychiatric disorders, past-lives, karmic debt, and anything else that may impact your situation before drawing any conclusions, deciding upon a course of action, sending a nasty email, filing a lawsuit, or doing anything rash!

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Posted in Artist Management, Arts Management, Law and Disorder: Performing Arts Division, Touring, Visas | Comments Closed

Ives: Violin Sonatas on CD

Wednesday, September 25th, 2013

Violin sonatas of Charles Ives on CD

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: September 25, 2013

MUNICH — Hilary Hahn threw a spotlight recently on benchmark American chamber music: the four violin sonatas of Charles Ives. Fond of the Third Sonata (1914), she recorded the whole cycle for Universal Music Group in 2009, up the Hudson Valley accompanied by Internet pianist Valentina Lisitsa. The scores are probing, refined and intimate here, bold and sovereign of spirit there. They make an engaging group, and a lucid one: Ives’s propensity for throwing in the kitchen sink faces the agreeable constraint of two voices. The First Sonata (1908), at least, attests to Yankee genius.

But the highly touted CD from Hahn and Lisitsa is one of a dozen Ives cycles around and, it turns out, has not always the most to say. The discreet Munich label ECM Records, for instance, sells a 1995 traversal by violinist Hansheinz Schneeberger and pianist Daniel Cholette. To this recording, made near Heidelberg, the duo brought twenty years’ experience playing Ives, and Schneeberger, at 69, a certain éminence, having premiered violin concertos of Frank Martin and Bartók in the 1950s.

Not surprisingly, Hahn is at her most persuasive in the 1914 work. Its central Allegro lights up the Deutsche Grammophon disc, buoyed throughout by Lisitsa’s gutsy playing. The last movement, which Schneeberger and Cholette allow to turn saccharine, is saved by Hahn’s sense of purpose and cool clean manner. Similar qualities bring shape to the extended and ambitious first movement, where the ECM pair sparsely limp along.

Schneeberger and Cholette excel elsewhere. Their masterful First Sonata finds Ives’s lyrical and energetic impulses deftly balanced, and its Largo cantabile — affectionate, never precious — is traced with palpable American style. Here Hahn and Lisitsa sound cursory and the violin part wants more personality.

The Second and Fourth sonatas are shorter. The Second (1910) shares thematic material with the First; it is a more direct and perhaps lesser work than the other three despite the nostalgic labels on its movements. Schneeberger, and only he, makes an effort to present it in independent colors.

The concise, perplexing Fourth (1916) bears the title Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting. Ives began its composition with a child’s playing ability in mind but soon veered off in dark and tricky directions. Hahn and Lisitsa find the sonata’s lyricism but not much else. Schneeberger and Cholette adopt a painfully slow pace in the middle movement, famously marked Largo—Allegro con slugarocko, lending gravitas. Cholette is forceful here. The ECM musicians then bathe in irony the truncated last movement, with its reference to Shall We Gather At the River? Ambiguity reigns as the music trails off.

Alternative readings of the Ives cycle include: Rafael Druian, violin, and John Simms, piano, recorded in 1956 (Mercury); Paul Zukofsky and Gilbert Kalish, 1963 (Folkways); Zukofsky and Kalish again, 1972 (Nonesuch); Millard Taylor and Frank Glazer, 1975 (Vox); János Négyesy and Cornelius Cardew, 1976 (Thorofon); Daniel Stepner and John Kirkpatrick, 1981 (MHS); Gregory Fulkerson and Robert Shannon, 1988 (Bridge); Alexander Ross and Richard Zimdars, 1992 (Bay Cities); Curt Thompson and Rodney Waters, 1998 (Naxos); Nobu Wakabayashi and Thomas Wise, 1999 (Arte Nova); and Lisa Tipton and Adrienne Kim, 2004 (Capstone).

Photos © Edition Zeitgenössische Musik and © Universal Music Group

Related posts:
Volodos the German Romantic
MKO Powers Up
Plush Strings of Luxembourg
Pollini Seals His Beethoven
Zimerman Plays Munich

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Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed

Martha Argerich at the Musikfest

Friday, September 20th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid

The Musikfest, Berlin’s 20th-century music festival, took a welcome occasion to revisit the opus of Lutosławski upon his centenary this year. Following the appearances of guest ensembles such as the Royal Concertgebouw, Philharmonia Orchestra and Bavarian Radio Symphony, the Staatskapelle Berlin performed his Mi-Parti (1976) under Music Director Daniel Barenboim alongside works by Beethoven and Verdi at the Philharmonie on September 15. The main event, however, was the appearance of Martha Argerich as soloist. The pianist is famous for her last-minute cancellations; health problems in recent years have further diminished public performances. She seemed in high spirits, however, as she and Barenboim took the stage. It is not to any pianist that he would cede the bench, having made the Beethoven Concertos something of a signature in performances which he has conducted from the piano with both his own orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic.

Argerich’s touch can be feather-light or bold and spontaneous, much like Barenboim, but never sloppy. She created a playful atmosphere in the opening movement of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, in C-major, which reflects the composer’s high spirits shortly after arriving in Vienna. The orchestra responded with a hefty but elegant sound. In the following Largo, Argerich’s pianissimo was uncanny in its gentle quality that nevertheless carried to back of the hall. The strings of the Staatskapelle in fact struggled to match its beauty until the end of the movement, while solo clarinet passages were sensitively phrased. The musicians’ energy exploded in the Rondo. Barenboim revealed one of his main strengths as he leaned back and let the orchestra go, only to dig in unexpectedly to create powerful climaxes. At times he was clearly following Argerich’s lead as she swept through the galloping chords with a tremendous freedom but immaculate articulation.

In the wake of thunderous applause, Barenboim had to grab her elbow and force her to bow a second time. He also coaxed her to give an encore before joining for a four-hand work by Schubert. Their rapport was evident in the easy coordination between registers and homogenous phrasing, although Barenboim seemed to enjoy the spotlight more than Argerich. Mi-Parti, one of the most important works from Lutosławski’s middle period, opened the program in a finely-wrought execution which speaks to the care Barenboim has invested in every section of the orchestra over nearly two decades. The strings created a transparent, glassy backdrop for the fragmented entrances of individual wind instruments, a tapestry which recurs in a rigorous structure emulating medieval fabric that is colored differently on either side.

The coda evokes a spiritual realm, moving from a celeste and harp rhythms that are picked up by the timpani until the harp is plucked over muted but screeching strings. Verdi’s Quattro pezzi sacri (Four sacred songs), alternating devotional a-cappella with fully scored operatic drama, were more uneven in performance. The first sopranos of the Rundfunkchor Berlin sounded uncharacteristically under the weather in numbers such as Ave Maria and Laudi alle Vergine Maria, while the brass section in numbers such as Stabat Mater was slightly too Wagnerian for this listener. Nevertheless, it was impossible to resist the dramatic power of the final Te Deum as a male a-capella ensemble cedes to full chorus and orchestra, a direct expression of the personal faith Verdi managed to sublimate in his art.

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Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

There’s No Place Like Home

Thursday, September 19th, 2013

by Sedgwick Clark

 

This ecstatic smile has popped up on my computer screen saver nearly every morning for the past 11 years. She’s Scarlett, our second bichon frise, a week after giving birth to her first litter at around 5 a.m. in our living room. How’s that for a proud parent? That gleam of life’s excitement rarely left her eyes for over 14 years. When we walked the dogs in Central Park, people couldn’t believe that she was mother to the other two from her second litter, Bentley and Lilli.

Our previous bichon, Gaby, had lived until 17½, and Scarlett’s illness took us by surprise. When she returned home from the hospital the first time she began eating like a horse and regaining weight, pleasing doctors and parents no end. Out in the Park ten days ago she romped around like a puppy. But the next day she stopped eating. We went to see her at the hospital last Sunday and took her out to a park across the street to enjoy the sun. When Peggy put her down on the pavement she immediately turned east and began to trot in the direction of our apartment.

We brought Scarlett home for the last time on Tuesday, and she died that night. A wise friend said to me after Gaby died, “When you have pets in your life, you’re going to have your heart broken every ten years.” Yes, but even with the heartbreak, what I’ll remember most is Scarlett heading home.

Posted in Why I Left Muncie | Comments Closed

“Thanks For All The Trouble, But I Made Other Plans!”

Wednesday, September 18th, 2013

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.

Dear Law and Disorder

I work for a venue that engaged an artist for a concert. I agreed to pay for hotel and travel. After the engagement, the artist told me that she decided to stay with friends and drive. I can’t get my money back. Can I deduct my losses from her fee?

No, you cannot under any circumstances deduct these costs from her fee. That would be like agreeing to provide food for an artist backstage and then asking the artist to reimburse you for the left overs.

I realize that times are tough (though, in the performing arts, times have always been tough, so, perhaps I should say that I realize times are tougher), and every penny counts. Certainly, had the artist informed you in a timely manner that she didn’t need the hotel or travel arrangements, you could have cancelled or even saved yourself the time and expense of making the arrangements in the first place. However, presumably, the engagement contract did not require the artist to inform you if she did not require hotel or travel. As a result, these were not “losses”, but, rather, “costs” which you contractually agreed to incur.

I would argue that, from a professional standpoint, the artist or her management should have informed you of the artist’s change of plans regardless of whether or not they were contractually or legally required to do so. However, if you agreed to pay for hotel and travel, then you were contractually obligated to incur these costs. If the artist decided to make her own arrangements and not avail herself of the hotel and travel you provided, that was the artist’s decision to make. Your only obligation was to comply with the terms of the contract, which you did.

In the future, you may want to consider adding a provision to your engagement agreements that, if you agree to incur hotel and travel costs, an artist must inform you in a timely manner if they decide to make their own arrangements and reimburse you if they fail to do so. In addition, should you ever consider re-booking this particular artist in the future, I would expect you to ask for the engagement fee to reflect the unnecessary expenses you incurred…or, at the very least, tell the artist to stay with her friends and drive.

_________________________________________________________________

For additional information and resources on this and other legal and business issues for the performing arts, visit ggartslaw.com

To ask your own question, write to lawanddisorder@musicalamerica.org.

All questions on any topic related to legal and business issues will be welcome. However, please post only general questions or hypotheticals. GG Arts Law reserves the right to alter, edit or, amend questions to focus on specific issues or to avoid names, circumstances, or any information that could be used to identify or embarrass a specific individual or organization. All questions will be posted anonymously.

__________________________________________________________________

THE OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER:

THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE!

The purpose of this blog is to provide general advice and guidance, not legal advice. Please consult with an attorney familiar with your specific circumstances, facts, challenges, medications, psychiatric disorders, past-lives, karmic debt, and anything else that may impact your situation before drawing any conclusions, deciding upon a course of action, sending a nasty email, filing a lawsuit, or doing anything rash!

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Posted in Agents, Artist Management, Arts Management, Contracts, Law and Disorder: Performing Arts Division, Liability, Presenters, Touring, Venues | Comments Closed

BACK TO WORK

Tuesday, September 17th, 2013

By James Conlon

Done! My convalescence officially came to an end last Thursday when I started rehearsing Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Metropolitan Opera.

Having recently come through surgery to correct damage from repeated bouts of diverticulitis, the fragility of life is on my mind. In general, I write rarely about myself but want to publicly thank the many friends and fans who have sent me good wishes.

“What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger” is a rough translation of a famous adage of Nietzsche. A crisis can disrupt and then create a new and better equilibrium. I have come through the operation and recovery reinvigorated and determined to live every day to its fullest.

I hadn’t realized until after the operation that I had had a close call. From this experience, I have learned not to ignore the body’s messages. Recuperating from surgery has given me an opportunity to reflect deeply and re-order priorities.

I am thankful to be alive; indebted to the excellent medical care I received from my doctors (both in Italy and New York) and New York Presbyterian Hospital. I am grateful to my wife, daughters and friends, all of whom took great care of me afterwards. Now, except for the predictable post-surgery soreness, I feel better than I have in years.

Yesterday, I rehearsed with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra returning for the first time in several seasons. Just being there was life affirming. It felt great to be conducting again, to hear their brilliant sonority and to be reunited with friends and colleagues.

I believe in the healing power of music, now more than ever. While recuperating, especially when too tired to read, music focused my mind outside the body in a salutary way. I had conducted for months with intermittent pain, which gradually became chronic and more intense.

Mind over matter, I thought, making my way through the marathon schedules of the Cincinnati May Festival and Ravinia Festival, only feeling good while rehearsing and performing. I had “survived” weeks of rehearsals and five consecutive performances of Verdi’s Macbeth in Florence in the Teatro della Pergola (the theater in which the composer conducted its premiere in 1847), as well as concerts in Paris, Rome and Spoleto.  Making music was the only pain-free part of my day. But its almost addictive powers, liked a double-edged sword, proved dangerous. It helped me, stubborn and determined to keep going forward, to disregard pain that was a sign of the seriousness of my condition. I will never do that again.

I want to thank my friends, and even people whom I do not know, for their thoughtfulness in writing to me. Regrettably it is impossible to respond to every individual. I am grateful for the indulgence of the editors of Musical America who have been gracious about my absence from the web site, and who have given me the opportunity to say thank you.

And now back to work, to health, and to music.

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Posted in A Rich Possession | Comments Closed

Being in Bayreuth

Sunday, September 15th, 2013

By James Jorden

There’s a remarkable synergy about the Bayreuth Festival: it’s not just the theater, or the performers, or the programming or even the “mission,” considered broadly. It’s the whole experience, including the audience. They– we– are integral to making the Festival not just a lot of high-priced music stuffed into a short summer season (though it is that too) but an actual festival, a serious celebration.

Serious, yes, but not gloomy, not (quite) severe. It’s a kind of joyous seriousness, the feeling of being part of a vast team working toward a common, very important goal. In a way, attending Bayreuth feels a bit like what I imagine working on the Manhattan Project or Bletchley Park must have been like: a sort of low-level buzz of excitement in the background, punctuated by bursts of something close to ecstasy.

For the audience member, this sense of community is achieved through a series of acts of separation from the rest of the world. First off, you have to travel to the town of Bayreuth, which is in a not very convenient corner of Bavaria: four hours from Cologne, three hours from Berlin, two hours from Munich. Once you’ve settled into a clean but overpriced hotel or pension, the days and nights fall into a pattern: rise late, breakfast, find something to do for a couple of hours (this is when critics write), nap, dress and, at around 3:00 PM, start the half-hour stroll (uphill) to the Festspielhaus.

Everyone arrives early; during a week there I think I witnessed a single latecomer. At a quarter hour before the first act begins, a brass choir assembles on the so-called “Königsbau,” a balcony facing the city, to play a fanfare based on an important motif from the act to come. At this point the doors to the auditorium are opened and the audience files in.

If the seating plan in the Festspielhaus seems a little Spartan to us now, I can only imagine what kind of mad folly it must have appeared to an audience in 1876. The theater breaks conclusively with the “ring” configuration then universal in opera houses, creating a space that is almost completely “orchestra” or platea, with arc-shaped aisleless rows gradually expanding in a wedge shape from stage to back wall. Each row is stepped higher than the one before it, a similar arrangement to “stadium” film theater seating. Across the back wall is a modest series of three balconies containing a total of only about 400 seats of the theater’s 1,925 capacity.

The interior of the auditorium suggests more a 19th century municipal building than an opera house: restrained columns lit by globe lamps, arranged on a series of short angled walls suggestive of the forced-perspective wings of the baroque theater. The eye is irresistibly drawn forward, toward the stage, which is framed by a pair of proscenium arches on the near and far side of the hidden orchestra pit. The effect is curious: the stage seems almost infinitely far away, which makes everything on it, sets and singers alike, seem fantastically oversized, as if we are viewing the entire stage action in a sort of closeup.

Adding to this effect is the astounding Bayreuth acoustic, which somehow makes every bit of music sound as if it is originating only a few feet away, though, paradoxically, even in the most overheated climaxes the sound never gets anything more than pleasingly, viscerally loud, never noisy or oppressive. In a way it’s like listening to a really superb recording in one’s own living room, only without any sense of electronic mediation.

The acoustic is particularly flattering to voices, and the smarter singers know how to “play” the auditorium to create effects that would be impossible in just about any other theater. For example, in Lohengrin, Klaus Florian Vogt sang “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan” in a relaxed half-voice while walking slowly from upstage to downstage, and the voice sounded like it was approaching from miles away, gradually gaining body and focus. It was as if Lohengrin materialized from thin air, becoming real as we watched and listened.

The combination of visual and aural closeness creates that most desired theatrical effect, the sense that the performer is not singing for a mass of people, but just for you. A number of great theatrical artists have this gift of “intimate” performance, but at Bayreuth, the effect is not dependent on any given artist’s personal charisma: you feel disarmingly close to every sight and sound.

Meanwhile, of course, everyone else in the theater is feeling that same sense of intimacy, so when the lights come up, there is a little moment of shyness, as if that stranger sitting next to you has seen into your soul. But then the timidity fades away and what is left is a strong sensation of a profound shared experience: not something you saw happen, but rather something you helped to make happen.

It’s astonishing, and honestly it’s not like anything else on earth, at least not like anything I’ve run into in an opera house. It’s borderline mystical, in fact, which is one reason I found it extremely difficult to write critically about what I actually saw and heard at Bayreuth this summer. For the Ring I did a quick roundup in the New York Post and a good deal of of thinking out loud over on parterre.com, but so far I haven’t had much to say about the two non-Ring productions I saw this summer, Lohengrin and Der Fliegende Holländer. I’ll try to take those on next week in this space.

Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Closed

Minnesota Chicken

Thursday, September 12th, 2013

by Sedgwick Clark

Will the Minnesota Orchestra board of directors and musicians union commit corporate hari-kari? The deadline imposed on the players by the board is this Sunday, September 15. Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak is quoted in the local StarTribune, “Lock yourself in a room and shut up about it until you come back with a solution. The community is disgusted and desperate.” Among my vivid memories of these artists is a program of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge and Sibelius’s Kullervo at Carnegie Hall on February 28, 2010. One does not need to live in Minneapolis to be “disgusted and desperate.” See my blog of August 31 for details.

Are Recordings “Honest”?

For over three decades now, digital editing has rendered studio recordings unreliable as documents of a performance, just as photoshop has destroyed the verity of photographs. It’s only in a live concert that we can truly judge a performer’s technical acumen or artistic ability—and still one may legitimately wonder if the hall might be assisted by discreet miking.

So my interest was piqued a few days ago by this paragraph in a Decca press release of a Liszt recital by a young pianist who has reportedly achieved renown via U Tube:

“A fiery performer who likes to take risks, Valentina Lisitsa recorded one version of the recital direct to analogue tape, transferred without edits for a special edition LP product. Due to size limits, the LP edition contains slightly less repertoire than the full album.  Lisitsa simultaneously recorded in high-resolution 24-bit digital audio to make the most of modern music formats.”

I don’t know how the two separate performances could be recorded “simultaneously”—“in the same sessions” would be more accurate—but I’m being picky. Actually, truth in recordings became a thing of the past about 30 years before digital editing. Prior to the advent of tape, in 1948, records were made in approximately four-minute “takes,” and the artist(s) would make as many takes as necessary (or affordable) to achieve a releasable result. Some were barely that: Listen to the shocking hash that Artur Schnabel makes of the mighty solo-piano fusillade that opens the development section of the Brahms D-minor Piano Concerto’s first movement. I played that passage for David Dubal and Ruth Laredo one afternoon at WNCN, and they nearly fell out of their chairs.

No pianist today would dare play like that in public. Note-perfect performances are simply expected. We’ll see how Lisitsa’s honest LP measures up to the digital “product” when the recordings are released on October 8.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

9/17. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Constantine Kitsopoulos; Alec Baldwin, narrator. Hitchcock! Excerpts from Vertigo, North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, Dial M for Murder, and Strangers on a Train with soundtracks performed live.

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