By Cathy Barbash
“Front of House” critics have been raving about Zaha Hadid’s recently opened Guangzhou Opera House. However, this just in from backstage:
Yes, the space is amazing, but they made a major flaw in the electricity design: the smaller theater electricity can only be used if the large theater is also in use, therefore, if there is no performance in the large theater and you want to rent the small theater, you have to pay the fee for the large theater too.
Ouch!
Aside from a few intrepid pioneers who independently gravitated toward technology (Loïe Fuller, Alwin Nikolais, Yvonne Rainer), dancers have historically stuck to dancing. The hi-tech aspects of their productions they have outsourced to others.
But times are changing.
The carefully constructed division between dance making and dance production is going the way of the typewriter. Anyone with a digital camera, a computer, and access to the Internet can design a visual effect, a website, or launch a marketing blitz.
But there is a caveat.
Many dancers, who were born before the 1980s, have been slow to embrace the tech revolution. Computers are not central to their work. People are. Making choreography or lesson plans means working with the body, not necessarily with computer applications.
At the 92nd St. Y’s Dance Education Lab last week, dance and technology expert Doug Fox (greatdance.com) and lauded elementary school dance teacher Kathleen Isaac (http://www.dancestudiolife.com/2010/05/kids-make-dance/) led a five-day, 25-hour intensive called “Dancing with Technology.”
As I walked into Buttenweiser Hall, my tech dread momentarily subsided. The Gothic-style studio space with its hand-painted, gold leaf ceiling of Jewish symbols is historic. American dance masters José Limón, Doris Humphrey, and Martha Graham (pictured sequentially below), used the space to make important works.
On the first day, I learned about the diversity of the workshop’s 30-odd participants. The youngest is a junior in the dance department at University of Wisconsin – Madison. There are a dozen veteran public school dance teachers. Also representative were people interested in teaching dance, making dance, and marketing dance to their schools, universities, and (blogs).
On the second day of the workshop, we closed our laptops. Then Fox and Isaac asked us to focus on something more familiar: Making a mirror dance. We divided into twos and threes and tried to make an exact copy of each other’s evolving motions. (This is a great activity for kids, beginner dancers, or overly-sophisticated adults attending boring cocktail parties.) After the dance making, the class took turns filming each other’s studies with Flip cameras. Then came the harrowing part for the oldsters. Each group was encouraged to edit, add special effects, music, and titles to the film footage that we downloaded onto our laptops. My groups, all novices and deeply freaked out, decided to call ourselves “the virgin techies.” Here is our first attempt at being techies:
But these short films, made by the younger generation, are much better:
by Sedgwick Clark
It’s time to say “no” to water bottles on the concert stage.
When did this unseemly swig become acceptable? It was said that Franco Corelli would wander offstage for refreshment between arias. (I do remember him unaccountably disappearing mid-scene a couple of times in the Met’s Macbeth 38 years ago, the only time I saw him live.) I’ve yet to see a singer whip out a Poland Spring or Evian at the Met, but I suppose it would be okay in a Gen X staging of West Side Story.
Obviously it began when plastic water bottles became a whole generation’s blue blanket. On occasion we used to see a glass of water placed under a presumably ailing soloist’s chair for a sip. But a plastic, labeled vessel looks tacky. City Arts music critic Jay Nordlinger took after one of the soloists in the New York Philharmonic’s recent Missa solemnis (“This is gross. It looks terrible. From time immemorial, singers managed without bottles of water at their feet, and on their lips. Today’s singers should discard this crutch-like and ugly habit.”) My wife always sees red when singers indulge themselves. “It’s a distraction for both the audience and fellow performers,” she insists. “They are leaning down to pick up the bottle, unscrewing the top, leaning their heads back to take a drink, screwing the top back on, and leaning down again to put it on the floor. No matter how discreet, they are calling attention to themselves and away from the music.”
The worst example within memory was at Carnegie Hall in April, 1991. Luciano Pavarotti was singing his first (and last) Otellos with Kiri Te Kanawa as Desdemona and the Chicago Symphony under Georg Solti. He had a cold. But he couldn’t cancel because a live recording was being made. He sat through much of the performance I heard, and next to him was a table of waters and what looked like bottles of
(left to right) Kiri Te Kanawa (Desdemona) struggles to hold the stage in Verdi’s Otello while Luciano Pavarotti (Otello) steals the limelight with his shenanigans. Georg Solti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on April 16, 1991. Photo: ©Steve J. Sherman; www.stevejsherman.com.
medicines. Often when he wasn’t singing or drinking he draped a white towel over his face, leaning back in his chair, breathing heavily. Distracting? You bet. Especially when his poor Desdemona was singing her “Willow Song” and “Ave Maria.” Te Kanawa, who maintained her composure and singing throughout that appalling spectacle, deserved a “Trouper of the Year” award.
In the good old days there were people who nixed such artistic missteps. Who will take the lead in condemning this unbecoming nip—performers, impresarios, critics?
Curious P.R.
James Levine may have had to cancel his performances at Tanglewood this summer, but his programs remain. This Saturday night is one of his most thoughtful: Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, conducted by Juanjo Meno. Is it my imagination, or is the press department trying to hide the less popular Berg work? In all its e-mailed announcements the Strauss and Mahler works have been emblazoned in large, bold-faced display type, but the Berg is mentioned only in the body of the release. All p.r. people know that pressure-prone editors tend to glance only at the release headlines. While my MA Directory deadline has yet to make me that harried, I did wonder at first if the Berg had been dropped when I was preparing my portion of the MA Web site’s Annotated Calendar.
By Rachel Straus
When Bill T. Jones’s narrator began referring to President Obama in the same breath as Abraham Lincoln, I knew that Fondly Do We Hope, Fervently Do We Pray wasn’t going to be low on didactics. Jones is a preacher choreographer. His work about Abraham Lincoln has an agenda. It’s large scale and in your face. It’s also seeringly beautiful. To enjoy Fondly you’ve got to be okay with being lectured at.
Commissioned by the Ravinia Festival (and co-commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival and Indiana University), Fondly was made for the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. I saw it on July 15 at Rose Hall. It premiered last September. Its message is clear: The United States is in the throws of political and cultural upheavals the likes of which we haven’t seen since Lincoln’s Civil War.
With ten young dancers, one tall, handsome narrator (Jamyl Dobson), and four instrument-exchanging musicians (including dynamo singer Clarissa Sinceno), Jones shapes a declaration about the circularity of history. He uses his acclaimed and favored structuring device: collage, which allows him to jump around historically and chronologically. One moment it’s the early 19th century. LaMichael Leonard, Jr.’s body parts—lips, gut, shoulders, buttocks—are being enumerated. His arms are lifted, one slightly higher than the other, to resemble Lady Justice. But something about this picture is off. Leonard’s palms face forward, like Jesus Christ on the cross. By the second time we see this image, we realize Leonard is on the slave block. He is being sacrificed to the marketplace.
In another moment, Antonio Brown performs a solo in a circular space that juts out of the Rose Hall’s proscenium while the narrator gives Jones’s biography. We learn that the Tony Award winner’s grandmother was probably a slave. Jones grew up with many, many siblings. When he went to Binghamton University, he discovered dance and met Arnie Zane. (The couple later founded their group, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company).
Some dance people can’t stand that Jones boldly inserts himself into a work that isn’t specifically about him. Jones has defended his position, arguing on radio and in print that the mythology of Lincoln touches all Americans. This president and our perceptions about race in America are deeply intertwined. For Jones, Lincoln is an integral part of his narrative. Lincoln was the only white man that the young Jones was allowed to love.
Aside from Jones’s biographical presentation in Fondly, four other narratives make their way onto the circular stage designed by Bjorn Amelan. The last biography is of the 16th President’s wife Mary. Asli Bulbul strides and falls, the blood red underbelly of her skirt, designed by Liz Prince, flashes, and we learn from the narrator that the First Lady lost three of her four children before they became adults. Jones’s ability to weave together text, dance, and costume can be wonderful.
During Fondly only two audience goers departed the theater. I was surprised that there weren’t more. During one scene, sound designer Lindsay Jones cranked the folk, rock and gospel woven composition—arranged by Jerome Begin, Christopher William Lancaster, and George Lewis, Jr.—to rock concert sound levels. During this aural apex, Fondly felt hysterical, much like when a chef realizes she has added too many ingredients to a dish. At another hysterical moment, the dancers enacted a mock congressional debate on immigration, marital miscegenation, and money. They shouted. They gesticulated with pointy fingers. They did not dance.
Soon after Jones found his directorial footing. The company began flocking around four columns (which recalled the Lincoln Memorial) like carrion birds looking for a kill. Robert Wierzel’s lighting design projected their forms into giant-size shadows. The effect was of a massive riot. But then a strobe light began whirring and the circular scrim (think fishbowl designed by Philippe Starck) closed. On its front, dates from the time of Lincoln to 2098 ticked past. With these theatrical elements, Jones returned to creating by adding more, more, and more. It felt a wee gratuitous. But since I can’t think of a better ending for Fondly, I’m not condemning it. Since the work’s premiere, Jones has continued to tinker with his big, courageous, earnest oeuvre. Perhaps by 2011 its conclusion and its message, about what Lincoln means in the age of Obama and beyond, will feel less unwieldy. If that doesn’t happen, Jones should be commended for giving us a work that we can sink our teeth into. It tastes full of protein. It’s anything but anemic.
***
On July 8, I went to Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. Devoted to less conventional performance fare than seen uptown, the organization was presenting four nights of Roadkill. The multi-media piece created by German choreographer Johannes Wieland trafficked in Samuel Beckett existentialism, home movie voyeurism, and homespun German nihilism. On the black box stage only two performers were fortunate enough to speak absurdly, engage in combat fights, and rip up pieces of paper.
The performers, Americans Eva Mohn and Ryan Mason, looked like they had just emerged, via the L train, from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Hip in her thigh high boots and cool in his checked flannel jacket, we got double doses of the couple (who never engaged in anything remotely intimate) via a large screen, which projected a black and white film of the pair walking, running and lounging aimlessly on an empty, rain soaked, landing strip.
As is often the case with multi media dance, the live dancers and the filmed dancers occasionally enacted the same poses and movements. They became doubled, which is visually clever but is unfortunately becoming a multi media dance cliché.
Wieland, who has been the choreographer/artistic director of the State Theater of Kassel since 2007, became known to the New York downtown dance scene, following his 2002 graduate studies in dance at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Previously, the choreographer performed with Béjart Ballet in Switzerland. Since emerging from NYU, Wieland has cast off all of his ballet training. His aesthetic sensibilities are firmly couched in contemporary European dance theater, which integrates theater and pedestrian movement, philosophy and text, self-examination and self-referentialism. Having seen a half dozen of Wieland’s dances, I can safely state that this choreographer mines a specific psychological space: the tortured state of our souls.
Like Beckett, Wieland works with repetition and abruptness. Unlike great interpreters of Beckett, Wieland’s dancers are not adept with language. They need more acting training. However, when they tumble and strike, shake like caged animals, and cut corner like robots, they demonstrate Wieland’s oddness and his questioning nature:
Should we spend our weekend on an empty landing strip (where we will get wet and become bored)? Should we give up on life? Should we shout? Wieland’s answer is to report through art the ambiguous angst of living. It’s provocative and tiring.
***
On July 6 the City College of New York hosted a two-day conference called “The World of Tap Dance.” Brian Seibert, who writes for the New Yorker and the Village Voice, curated the marathon event. It included 133 film segments featuring tap, the first of which dated from 1894. While the temperature outside reached 103 degrees inside Seibert manned his podium for seven hours. He spoke intermittently to identify a dancer or to drive home his two points that A) Hollywood and Broadway’s racism undermined crucial contributions made by great black tappers into the 1960s, and B) well-known white tappers (Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly) stole from these greats and simplified their material.
My favorite film aired around 3 p.m. and came from the era titled “The Drought” (1950s to the mid 1960s). In a grainy video from Duke Ellington’s 1965 Sacred Concert, Bunny Briggs laid down a skein of notes with his feet. His taps’ fluency and speed resembled a concert pianist’s command of his fingers across a keyboard. Briggs tapped in concert with a singer and the Ellington orchestra. His dance space was minimal: no more than three feet wide and 10 feet long. He performed below the orchestra and above the featured singer, becoming integral to the sound and the scene. With minimal or no upper body swings, torques, or gestural exclamations, his energy had a ceaseless ease, much like the feeling of being transported on those horizontal escalators in international airports.
Briggs’s innovation—tapping as music—helped shape and define the careers of Gregory Hines in the 1980s and Savion Glover in the 1990s. Hines and Glover became international stars and their celebrity statuses helped tap get its second wind. Today tap is everywhere. On the second day of the conference, Siebert and others mapped out the international tap dance scene with performances, film and lectures.
***
Anthony Dowell was the consummate British noble danseur. In 1961 he joined The Royal Ballet. Two years later he was chosen by Royal Ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton to create the role of Oberon in The Dream. Dowell’s combination of lightness and solidity, seamless technique and dramatic expressiveness, speed and balance fostered continual awe.
On June 30th, American Ballet Theatre principal dancer David Hallberg’s performed Dowell’s part, the Fairy King Oberon, with mercurial ease and fiery energy. While learning the role, Hallberg worked with Dowell. The transmission of certain key performance qualities—gestural, rhythmic, tonal—from one major dancer of his era to the next felt historic.
Besides working with Hallberg, Dowell staged the entire Ashton ballet, based on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and created to Felix Mendelssohn’s concert overture (Op. 21), incidental music (Op. 61) and Wedding March.
Toward the end of this deliciously unified, hour-long fairy ballet (with shimmering, voluptuous sets by David Walker and shadowy glowing lighting by John B. Read), Hallberg performed a series of non-stop, interminably long, dastardly turns, which many have said only Dowell could do (because they were made on him). On the Metropolitan Opera House stage, these pirouette variations created by Ashton looked ready made on Hallberg.
Ashton’s decision to transform his male lead into a maniacal spinner wasn’t just an audience-pleasing virtuoso trick. It was a narrative conceit. Oberon’s spinning represents an act of potion making—his stirring into air magic. Once concocted his magic moves the mismatched couples, modeled after Shakespeare’s, back to their rightful partners. Then Oberon applies his magic to Titiana, the Queen of Fairies, which was performed by Gillian Murphy. On this night, the redheaded ballerina responded to being bewitched with uncommon elegant abandon.
As is often the case Ormsby Wilkins conducted. The Young People’s Chorus of New York City produced an angelic affect from the pit. The corps dancers, dashing in and out like Zephyrs, added to the enchantment. Also on this Ashton program was three of the choreographer’s partnering gems: Birthday Offering (1956), Thaïs Pas De Deux (1971), and The Awakening Pas de Deux (1970) from Sleeping Beauty.
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.
by Cathy Barbash
I recently caught up with Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop’s excellent NYTimes article, “China’s Offering New Culture Venue to Its Citizens.” While one correction was made re: the Nederlander’s corporate structure, there is another China-side correction necessary, should the Times choose to make it.
The article states that the Beijing Music Festival is managed by The China Arts and Entertainment Group. In fact, CAEG, with the Ministry of Culture, manage the “Meet in Beijing” cultural festival each spring, not the Beijing Music Festival. The Beijing Music Festival is directed each fall by Yu Long, with the backing of the Poly Group.
In fact, I’ve heard reports that the Poly Group and CAEG are now competing for venue management contracts across the country, with, as the article mentions, a few foreigners like the Nederlanders and AEG in the mix as well. “Waiguoren (foreigners) beware: AEG tried to manage the Wukesong Arena but was misguided enough to sign an untenable contract, and gave up after several months. This “territorial dispute” will merit an interesting article of its own at some point.
by Rachel Straus
In the summer of 1976 my creative movement teacher took out a mat, asked us to tuck our chins into our chests, and do a somersault. I was horrified. I refused. This, my six-year-old self counseled, was not dance. I had developed this philosophy while prancing through the house in a torn tutu to the strains of Stravinsky’s Firebird. I imagined that dancers leaped, spun, and finessed their limbs into positions unnatural. They did not put their head on the ground and use it as a fulcrum.
In time my ideas changed. While a dance major at Tisch School of the Arts, I learned how to penché (an extreme version of an arabesque) into a hand stand into a somersault. In my first job as a dance critic, I reviewed hip-hop and its virtuoso head spins, which resemble sparklers. Today I am as excited about seeing Butoh, where there is definitely no prancing, as I am about looking at ballet. My definition of dance is borderless and featureless. Anything where the body’s rhythmic motion is the focus (and the aim is not copulation, though that may be a side bar) is dance.
In this blog I will write about events at Lincoln Center and lofts spaces. My observations may come from dance classes, rehearsals, and subway cars. Like most critics, I want to see the “hot” tickets and choreographers. They, however, are often not as rewarding to observe as the less touted show and new works by emerging dance makers. So, those too will be given attention.
Edwin Denby (the most influential American dance critic of the 20th century) wrote, “There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.” The insane aspects of dancing—artists’ short careers, the miniscule shelf lives of dances, the expense of productions, the financially paltry rewards—may discourage the sane to become part of the field, but to partake of its pleasures as a theatergoer can be insanely good. Denby knew that.
I’ve learned that while doing a MFA in choreography from Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, a MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and in my current work as a Scholar in Residence at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. I experienced the insane part while teaching dance for seven years in Miami and the New York metropolitan area. I’ve celebrated the insanity while writing for Ballet Review, The Journal News, VIBE, New York Sun, Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher, Dance Spirit, Dance Studio Life, and most recently Musical America.
by Cathy Barbash
Ping Chong’s Cathay: Three Tales of China will finally premiere in China in late October 2010. Almost five years ago, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ month-long Festival of China commissioned Ping Chong to set a new work on the Shaanxi Folk Art Theatre’s puppetry troupe. Ping Chong worked with the company in Xi’an, and Cathay was assembled and premiered at the Seattle Rep before playing at the Festival, the New Victory Theatre in New York and at the Vienna Festival.
I knew the company from my work as consultant to the Kennedy Center for the Festival, and went on Ping Chong & Company’s board to help them try to “repatriate” the work. Ping Chong wanted to see the work performed in China, and wanted to give the production to his Xi’an colleagues as a legacy. Only now have the infrastructure and priorities of China’s culture industry evolved enough to make this a reality. The China premiere, fittingly, will be held in Xi’an, and it is hoped that it can develop into a long run that will create a steady income stream for the company.
by Sedgwick Clark
Friday night I’ll be dog sledding with Sergeant Preston of the Yukon!
Gawd, does that date me. How many of my loyal readers have the vaguest notion of what I speak? The title music for this mid-’50s TV show was the Overture to Donna Diana by Emil Nikolaus von Rezniček. True, the Sarge couldn’t quite compete with the Lone Ranger, whose show was forever associated with Rossini’s William Tell Overture, but once heard, it was never forgotten.
Bramwell Tovey will open the final program of his New York Philharmonic post-subscription Summertime Classics series (July 8, 9, and 10) with Donna Diana, and I was delighted to read Steve Smith’s review of the Phil’s penultimate program in today’s Times, asking “why these works don’t play a bigger role in the Philharmonic’s standard routine.” Tovey has been putting together enjoyable programs since the series began in 2004—just as André Kostelanetz used to do for the orchestra’s Promenade concerts—and most of the pieces would be just what the doctor ordered to enliven the usual dour subscription offerings. Seriously, can anyone imagine a frothier opening to a concert than Chabrier’s España? In 2007, Franz Welser-Möst led the Cleveland Orchestra in Suppé’s Light Cavalry Overture at Carnegie Hall’s opening-night concert, and tomorrow night, Tovey will lead it in Avery Fisher Hall.
I can’t wait.
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!
