Musical America Blogs

By Sedgwick Clark

Next week, for the first time as a citizen of New York County, I shall descend to the lower depths of Manhattan and perform my solemn rite of jury duty without the concomitant joy of combing through the record bins of J & R Music. J & R closed its classical department early last year, leaving Academy Records and CDs on 12 West 18th Street as the sole remaining retail store for New York’s serious classical-music record collectors. For shame!

The closing of a treasured book or record store is no less indicative of mortality than an obit page. Last week the esteemed Berkshire Record Outlet announced that it would close its retail store at the end of this month and henceforth operate solely as a fulfillment operation. A record-collector mecca since 1974, the BRO was a “must visit” whenever I went to Tanglewood in the summer (an increasingly rare pleasure in the past two decades). One saw Boston Symphony players, visiting soloists, concert-going friends from New York, Boston, and the outlying area, and, above all, bins of recordings on various labels that rarely reached these shores.

It was shocking when Discophile, on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, went out of business in 1984, not long after Tower Records blew into town from the West Coast. Discophile’s owner, Franz Jolowicz, angrily prophesied that it would wipe out all the City’s specialized record stores because they couldn’t compete with Tower’s huge stock and markdown prices. He was right, of course. And I was a turncoat customer because Lincoln Center’s Tower branch claimed to carry every record currently in the catalogue—and it was only a block from my apartment! How could I resist?

When Barnes & Noble opened a vast, four-story branch across the street from Tower in 1995, Lincoln Square seemed perfect. I was in pig heaven for a fleeting decade. But Tower bit the dust in late 2006 as the record industry faced its own customer crises. A Raymour and Flanigan furniture store currently occupies the building. The Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center had the same problem, bookwise, but its downstairs was a decent record and video department, and I spent a fair amount there in lieu of Tower. It closed in February  2011, destined to be a Century 21 department store. I avert my eyes when I walk by those stores.

Looking Forward

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

3/20 Carnegie Hall. St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/David Robertson; Katie Geissinger and Theo Bleckmann (vocalists). Debussy: Nocturnes. Meredith Monk: Weave (New York premiere). Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4.

3/21 at 8:30.  Iridium. David Chesky’s Jazz in the New Harmonic.

3/24 at 7:30. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Inon Barnatan, piano. Salonen: Nyx. Ravel: Piano Concerto in G. Debussy: Jeux. R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite.

3/26 at 7:30. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Leila Josefowicz, violin. Lyadov: The Enchanted Lake. Stravinsky: Petrushka (1911 version). John Adams: Scheherazade.2 –Symphony for violin and orchestra.

3/27 at 2:00. Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia. Philadelphia Orchestra/Gianandrea Noseda; Carol Yantsch, tuba. Michael Daugherty: Reflections on the Mississippi, for tuba and orchestra. Mahler: Symphony No. 5.

By Sedgwick Clark

Thank heavens, at least this move on the musical scrabble board is settled. Local hero Simon Rattle will return home in 2017 from his 16-year Berlin odyssey to become music director of Britain’s foremost musical organization, the London Symphony Orchestra. He describes it as his “last job.”

He is indisputably an international star, with his recent Sibelius symphony cycle with the Berlin Philharmonic in London having sold out months in advance. His pop-culture image is right up there with that of Gustavo Dudamel and Lang Lang, and his magnetic personality and ability to talk about whatever music he performs is second to none, which should keep the box office teeming. He admirably declared in an interview in the Guardian that the LSO must act as evangelists rather than high priests for classical music “and spread the word right across the country.”

It remains to be seen, however, if he is the right man to advance the heritage of fellow Sirs Adrian Boult, John Barbirolli, and Colin Davis as representative of all that’s great in British music-making. His performances of 20th- and 21st-century music are most convincing, but those of the standard repertoire seem to me over-detailed and lacking a taut line. His admirers might call this expressive; I call it flabby. It’s nothing new: I recall a Mahler Second with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie in November 1997 in which a beaming Rattle seemed completely oblivious that the strings were rarely in sync (probably because they were unused to his left-right placement of first and second violins).

My guess is that the Berlin musicians were less bothered by Rattle’s programming of contemporary music than his meandering readings of the classics. His Beethoven has been most disheartening in this regard, but we’ll see how they do next season when he leads the BPO in a Beethoven symphony cycle at Carnegie. For those who recall Bernard Haitink’s energized Beethoven cycle with the LSO at Lincoln Center in October 2006, he’ll have a lot to live up to.

Originally, Rattle was said to demand that a new hall be built in London for him to accept the post, but he has denied it. Still, his ardor for a new hall is clear, as he stated in a BBC interview: “You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall.” The raising of money for such a project is daunting but crucial. When the New York Philharmonic returns from an international tour—playing in the likes of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw or Vienna’s Musikverein—the musicians sound renewed, especially the strings, which produce substantially greater tone and presence. Within a month, their collective sonority has reverted to its accustomed Fisher Hall coarseness, with strident violins, weak lower strings, and glaring brass. New York will get a new hall. London, at least, now will have a conductor determined to force the issue.