Pros and Cons of Parks Concerts
by Sedgwick Clark
Last night as we girded our loins for the murder, rape, and mayhem report on the 11 p.m. news, and I impatiently awaited inspiration for the weekly and almost inevitably tardy words that absorb you now, Central Park reverberated with what sounded like World War Three. We were surprised because we had expected the Philharmonic’s post-concert fireworks the night before. Living a couple hundred feet from Central Park but not having a view of it from our apartment, this child of 9/11 may never feel really comfortable with fireworks again. The unease was not helped by the claps of genuine thunder a few minutes later. After a Philharmonic Parks concert several years ago, a woman subject to panic attacks who lived in the apartment next door forced herself to walk out to Central Park West to actually see the fireworks and reassure herself that our city was not under siege.
If I needed reassurance, Anthony Tommasini’s review in Thursday’s Times (7/15) explained it all: Due to Monday’s weather report, the Philharmonic had skipped the fireworks on Tuesday in anticipation of rain, switching them to the end of Wednesday’s Central Park concert. The first Parks concert was particularly interesting because the Philharmonic was sharing it with the same Shanghai Symphony, conducted by Long Yu, that made such an impressive showing at Carnegie Hall’s China festival last fall, which is the only reviewer-like remark I’ll make since I didn’t hear the Parks concert: Nothing could have dragged me to endure Lang Lang play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. (Tony was gentlemanly, as always, but couldn’t avoid describing “a Lang Lang trademark—he teased melodic lines for maximum expressiveness and jerked the music this way and that.”) I do hope that Lang Lang acquires a sense of structure someday because he has the most ravishing color palette of any pianist I know. If only he wouldn’t Bang Bang.
Another reason I skipped the Parks concert was the audience. I attended my first Philharmonic concert in Central Park with a college buddy, soon after I arrived in New York in August 1968. Lorin Maazel conducted Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla Overture, Paganini’s First Violin Concerto, with solo violinist Ruggiero Ricci, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. It was nearly 100 degrees, and we were sitting three-quarters of the way back in a jam-packed Sheep Meadow. The players doffed their coats, but Maazel and Ricci kept theirs on, to my astonishment. The audience was attentive and appreciative. All I remember about the performances was that Maazel omitted the big pause toward the end of the finale, before the majestic march treatment of the motto theme played by clarinets in the first bar of the piece. (Stoki used to do the same thing, presumably to keep the audience from applauding prematurely.)
But the last time I went, a few years ago, I took an out-of-town friend who wanted to hear the concert for largely sociological reasons. I wanted to hear an excellent young violinist, Karen Gomyo, whom I’d heard at the Bard Festival a couple of years before. We sat about three-quarters of the way back in the Great Lawn, where the concerts have been held since the refurbishing of the Sheep Meadow in the late 1980s, and all we could hear were cell-phone conversations, radios, and a level of noise that obliterated any semblance of the live performance. I was even hit in the head by a frisbie. Okay, my friends at the Philharmonic, if I had really wanted to hear the concert I would have sat in the reviewers’ seats you kindly provide up front. But a point of sorts, I guess, of this incoherent blog entry is that audiences have changed. With the broadening of this elite art to wider audiences, something has been lost. At least in my experience.