Archive for the ‘Why I Left Muncie’ Category

Trash Cans and Murk

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

A Blog by Sedgwick Clark

Man(ny) of the Year.  A ray of hope in our embattled biz.  A world-famous pianist learns that an orchestra he has performed with for decades may go under, and he waives his fee for a pair of concerts (MA.com, 3/20).  The orchestra is Ohio’s financially strapped Columbus Symphony, and the pianist is Emanuel Ax.  It was his idea, reported the CSO management, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has basked in the warmth and generosity of his playing.  So, who’s next?

Southern Turn at Tanglewood.  Ever notice how newly appointed music directors charge into their jobs with enterprising, challenging programs, only to turn south after a couple of years?  James Levine, for instance, loaded his first few Boston Symphony seasons with Carter, Babbitt, Wuorinen, and Schoenberg.  Critics raved and audiences ran.  For a time, some of those works turned up at the orchestra’s summer music festival at Tanglewood, and last season featured a daringly inclusive tribute to Carter for his 100th birthday.  But that experiment appears to be history.  The newly announced season opens with Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” and the First Piano Concerto, closes with Beethoven’s Ninth, and contains a single unfamiliar name on the weekend orchestra concerts: the late George Perle, for his brief, sweet-natured Sinfonietta No. 2, performed “in memoriam.” 

Trash Cans at Tully.  My ecstasy was short-lived.  As reported in my second blog, the 12-tone bells signaling the end of intermission—which made their debut in the ’60s at Philharmonic, now Fisher, Hall—were resurrected at Tully’s reopening.  On further trips to Tully those evocative tintinnabuli were replaced by what sounds like the banging of garbage cans or at least the world’s most cacophonous cow bells.  Is this a musical decision?  Scarier still, do the New Populists at Lincoln Center worry that the tone rows might alienate audiences? 

Perahian Perfection.  Murray Perahia’s recital last week (3/31) at Fisher of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, capped off by an encore by Schubert, was so exquisite that I felt underdressed.  Normally I wouldn’t go near such a rearguard program, but he’s one of two or three pianists I would willingly hear play an evening of Hanon.  Brahms’s “Handel” Variations, my favorite of his solo piano works, has been lodged in my head all week like a tape loop.  I must remember to wear a coat and tie to his next recital.

Fisher’s Murk.  I love you, Lincoln Center.  But the lighting in Fisher Hall has been impossible this season.  Any farther back than row R seems remote under the best of circumstances.  But sitting in row Y, with hall lighting suitable for necking and the stage barely bright enough to find the bathroom at night, poor Perahia seemed to be in the next county.  Need I add that such dim lighting compromises the music-making as well?  I once asked a British friend what he thought of the concert we’d just heard at Fisher, and he replied, “I kept wanting to turn the volume up.”  Hey guys, I know you want to attract young’uns to your concerts, but the majority of your patrons are aging—nay, OLD—and presbyopic (like me), which brings me to another subject: the program type.  It’s the same point size as Carnegie’s program (8/11), but LC’s is lightface and CH’s is medium. Even in a reasonably illuminated house, LC’s programs would be more difficult to read.  Let’s be reasonable.

Patelson’s music store, in back of Carnegie Hall for 70 years, will close up shop for ever on April 18.  The mice had preceded me when I stopped in yesterday for visitation, and the few remaining items are 35 to 40 percent off, depending on which clerk you speak with.  What’s next? 

Thoughts of the Day

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

“Pulcinella” month. On opening night of the reconstituted Alice Tully Hall (2/22), David Robertson conducted Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” Suite. On 3/8, Cho-Liang Lin and Jean-Yves Thibaudet played “Suite Italienne,” the composer’s arrangement of the music for violin and piano. The next evening, Pierre Boulez led the Chicago Symphony and three vocalists at Carnegie Hall in the complete ballet. So, New York, what about the “Suite Italienne” transcription for cello and piano?

Lenny and Schuy. I opened the Times on 3/9 to see that Leonard Bernstein’s children have donated “the carefully preserved contents” of their father’s composing studio to Indiana University. On the obit page was the sad news that Schuyler Chapin had died at age 86 over the weekend. They met on October 14, 1959, when Chapin was the new director of Bernstein’s exclusive recording label, Columbia Masterworks, and the relationship deepened into a personal friendship that ended with the conductor’s death on October 14, 1990–a coincidence that Chapin dubbed “serendipity of the calendar” in his affectionate, witty memoir of the conductor, Leonard Bernstein: Notes from a Friend. And now a final coincidence. I pulled the little book from my shelf and with renewed delight devoured its 171 pages of large type in an hour (I’m a slow reader). “How do I explain the impact of Leonard Bernstein on me?” Chapin asks. “How do I explain my love for this colorful, explosive, wildly talented, sometimes impossible man?” For those of us who knew Bernstein only from a distance, thank goodness for those recordings and videos . . . and for his eloquent friend.

Second entry from our esteemed, don’t-make-me-do-this blogger

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Why I Left Muncie. Half a dozen things to do every night without turning on a TV; Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall a stone’s throw from home; the Sunday Times on Saturday night; MoMA and the Met; theater and film; in the good old days, record stores. This title is kind of unfair to my home town because my move to New York 40 years ago was emphatically a positive one, not anything negative about Indiana. All I knew was that I, myself, didn’t belong in the Lynds’ Middletown U.S.A.

Bells of the Hall. By now everybody has read that Tully Hall’s Second Coming is the bee’s knees. But what about the icing on the cake: the intermission bells? No, I’m not kidding. Remember those exotic intermission bells at Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall? In 1965 Leonard Bernstein wanted a new signal for the audience to return to its seats, so he asked his assistant, the composer Jack Gottlieb, to select some felicitous 12-tone rows as prompters. “I chose rows written by the second Vienna school, Stravinsky, and Bernstein,” Jack recounted earlier this week, “and recorded them on a celesta for Lenny’s approval.” After Bernstein retired as music director in 1969 and George Szell, who detested 12-tone music, became interim “music advisor,” the bells were replaced by what sounded like foghorns. Soon after Pierre Boulez became music director in 1971, I urged him after a concert to reinstate the bells. Boulez hadn’t known about them, but he must have approved of Jack’s recording because they reappeared not long afterwards. They disappeared again at some point after Boulez’s departure, but now someone at Lincoln Center has had the brilliant idea to revive them at the newly reopened Alice Tully Hall. Bravo! Long may they resound.

A Revelatory Onegin. Tony Tommasini in the NYTimes wrote that Karita Mattila (MA’s Musician of the Year, 2005) as Tatiana was “a revelation” in the Met’s “Eugene Onegin.” Some critics wrote she was a bit long in the tooth. Peter Davis summed it up to me in conversation, “She’s astonishing—fifty and nifty.” [See his review.] The Met Tatiana I recall most warmly was the 57-year-old Mirella Freni in 1992. For me, on February 9th, the revelation was Thomas Hampson (MA’s Vocalist of the Year, 1992), who made me realize for the first time what an s.o.b. Onegin is. His singing was top-notch too, as was Poitr Beczala’s as Lenski. All of this fine vocalism was compromised by the flat-footed conducting of Jirí Belohlávec.

Classical Music in the Movies. OK, let’s see if anyone is reading this thing. Classical music was a natural for the early talkies: It was cheap (no copyright problems), and it was handy seed inspiration for a composer on deadline. My first strains of Liszt, Schumann, Schubert, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky were courtesy of the movies—in particular, Universal’s sublimely silly horror films, which I loved and still do to my wife PK’s bewilderment (“a guy thing”; “arrested development,” she says). The title music for Dracula, Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Mummy—all made in the early ’30s—is Tchaikovsky’s sinister Black Swan theme from Swan Lake. A veritable treasure trove of this sort of thing is the 1934 Karloff-Lugosi thriller, The Black Cat. Its soundtrack is all classical, and I identified ten pieces when I watched it recently (on an inexpensive, decently transferred Universal DVD called The Bela Lugosi Collection). How many classical pieces can you identify? See what you can find, and we’ll compare notes.

Whatever Happened to Ben Zander? He has made several recordings for Telarc in recent years, most notably of Mahler symphonies—Nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9. But after the Mahler First in 2005, not a peep. One hopes the Seventh will show up one of these days, but like many aborted Mahler cycles, we may never get the expensive Second and Eighth, or Das Lied von de Erde, for that matter. Too bad. Zander’s Eighth at Carnegie several years ago—with his Boston Philharmonic, a group of professional and amateur players—was the best I’ve ever heard live. Now, after nearly four years, he has turned to Bruckner—the Fifth Symphony (Telarc 2CD-80706). That this distinguished recording can even be mentioned in the company of Furtwängler’s extraordinary 1942 live performance (DG or Music & Arts)—possibly the greatest performance of any piece of music, ever—or Karajan’s immensely powerful DG recording, speaks highly for Zander’s accomplishment. As with his previous Telarc releases (all with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra), a second CD contains the conductor’s truly insightful comments into the music. I recommend them all.

A Reluctant Blogger Joins the Fray

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

My publisher made me do this.

I’ve always been leery of blogs, from the disgusting sound of the word to the colossal self-importance of the act. Still, I admit to a good read and insight courtesy of bloggers Alex Ross and Alan Rich, and I’m sure I’d find others out there if I took the time. I am told I needed a title. Among friends’ suggestions are “Musical Rants and Raves,” “Bloviation on a Theme by Sedgwick,” “Symphony in E Flatulence,” “Why I Left Muncie,” “High Forehead, Low Brow.” No—too many notes, Mozart. The publisher wants my name in the title, but I can’t hack that. (I’m still working on it.) My only diary experience lasted a few months after I arrived in New York City. Come my first real job, as a press department gofer at The Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, I no longer had time for such things. Samuel Pepys I am not.

I knew since at least the eighth grade that I would make my life in New York. I wanted to be a movie critic. My father was born in New York, but after the war my mother wanted to raise her family in her home town in Indiana. We vacationed in the Mohawk Valley each summer, so the move after college was as normal as blueberry pie—or Carnegie Deli strawberry cheesecake. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. For 40 years I have had the inestimable opportunity to savor all the arts in what I consider the center of the world. Perhaps my enthusiasm for my adopted city’s offerings will ring some others’ chimes.

Two young conductors. I got here in time for Leonard Bernstein’s final season as Philharmonic music director, 1968-69. His concerts and recordings have colored my tastes more than that of any other musician—no surprise, my being a child of his Young People’s Concerts. Nearly 20 years after his death, I walk out after many concerts wondering what Bernstein would have done. Obviously, I’m not alone. The night before going on vacation three weeks ago (1/14), I heard young Venezuelan hotshot (and Bernstein aficionado) Gustavo Dudamel conduct the Mahler Fifth at the Philharmonic. It was a young man’s performance, all drama and climaxes and exciting as all get out, and not even St. Martin’s balmy rays could expunge the memory of that Fifth. He may well be Bernstein reincarnated: all over the podium, barely containing his excitement, and sharing an instinctive sense of rubato that seems to have escaped most conductors and soloists of the last half-century. The orchestra played as if possessed, and then the damnedest thing happened: He comes out for bows, the audience goes wild, and the players sit there stone-faced like Eurydice. Eventually some of them can’t help breaking rank, smiling and tapping their bows. Why? I didn’t see him, but I’ll bet my blog that the New Yorkers’ new music director, Alan Gilbert, was in the house, and the New York Philharmonic wasn’t about to display any favoritism for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new music director. (Both conductors take over their new orchestras in September.) Gilbert had just introduced his new season programming three days before on the Fisher Hall stage. He’s a child of the Philharmonic. His parents were violinists in the orchestra (his father is retired), and young Alan heard Bernstein lead the Phil often. He’s a much different animal than Dudamel—earnest, laid back, perhaps even a little embarrassed at being in the limelight—and the contrast will provide press fodder on both coasts. He’ll be a breath of fresh air after Lorin Maazel’s unadventurous programming . . . if he’s allowed. He wants to encourage young contemporary composers at the Phil, and there are two concerts of world premieres scheduled—safely performed at small venues so that the usual audience suspects won’t look so lonely in Fisher. The other season treat is a three-week Stravinsky festival conducted by Valery Gergiev. I can’t wait! But, and it’s a big but, most of the subscription programs are awfully careful.

Artists of the Year. Last week (2/5) I took Charles Rosen (MA’s 2008 Instrumentalist of the Year) to Zankel Hall to hear Pierre-Laurent Aimard (MA’s 2007 Instrumentalist) juxtapose excerpts of Bach’s “Art of Fugue” with piano works by Elliott Carter (MA’s 1993 Composer). It’s hard to avoid “our” artists these days! February is quite the month for this. Like Aimard, Charles recorded the “Art of Fugue” and most of Carter’s piano music—in fact, he was one of the pianists who commissioned Carter’s “Night Fantasies”—and it was a treat to hear his comments on the works and watch his fingers mime certain passages. On Monday (2/2) at Carnegie I heard an extraordinary recital by Christian Tetzlaff (MA’s 2005 Instrumentalist) and Leif Ove Andsnes—edge-of-seat performances of Brahms’s Third Violin/Piano Sonata and Schubert’s “Rondo brilliant” and hardly less impressive ones of Janácek and Mozart sonatas. Although I already had planned to attend, I was cued by Alan Rich’s blog (soi’veheard.com) in his review of their LA performance of the same program the previous week: “This was a great evening: violin and piano without flash or schmaltz. . . .”

The Cleveland Orchestra played three concerts at Carnegie last week under Franz Welser-Möst (MA’s Conductor, 2003). I have never heard this most European of American orchestras sound so sumptuous! For months I had looked forward to hearing Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” live (2/4) at last—remember its use in Kubrick’s “2001”?—and it didn’t disappoint. The Carnegie Hall audience was absolutely quiet as W-M beat several “silent” bars at the end, as Ligeti requests; thank goodness he didn’t try that with a Philharmonic audience. Wagner’s “Wesendonck” Lieder featured ravishing pianissimos from soprano Measha Brueggergosman and a perfectly judged accompaniment. And what Strauss’s Technicolor “Alpine Symphony” lacked in drama, it thrilled in sheer tonal beauty. I see that Peter Davis (MA.com, 2/6) found the Ligeti a “quaint period piece,” and the soloist in the Wagner “underpowered and lacking firm support” as well as “overly fussy” interpretively. The Strauss “lacked panache and seemed excessively rushed,” he felt. I skipped the second concert, with Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony. I don’t understand why conductors prefer this melodically barren tub-thumper to the far superior Fourth, Sixth, or Eighth. I had greatly anticipated Janácek’s glorious Glagolithic Mass on the third concert (2/7), but after a rather unsettled Mozart 25th and beautifully performed Debussy Nocturnes, W-M chose to play a recent version by Janácek scholar Paul Wingfield “that seeks to restore the composer’s original vision.” Seems that “numerous compromises . . . had been made to accommodate practical needs in the first performance. . . .” Well, maybe so, but on first hearing I found the changes highly disconcerting and deeply disappointing, despite fine playing, solo singing, and superbly solid work from the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. I was astonished to see no mention whatsoever of the different version in Jim Oestreich’s otherwise perspicacious review in the Times.

Political hypocrisy. Once again the Loyal Opposition is contesting money to the National Endowment for the Arts. Why can’t they accept that the arts generate billions annually, employ millions of Americans, and most importantly, teach kids that everyone has unique talents to offer the world? But no, they’re still equating all the arts with Andres Serrano’s supposedly blasphemous “Piss Christ” and the homoerotic Mapplethorpe photos that were so controversial two decades ago. And now, believe it or not, after eight years of kneejerk voting of billions for a questionable war that may eventually bankrupt the American economy, they’re feigning concern about the monetary legacy we’re leaving our grandchildren. They say the arts aren’t an immediate concern. Like education? The mind boggles.