by Sedgwick Clark
Hurricane Sandy left a humbling amount of destruction in its wake, including a breath-catching sight in midtown Manhattan: a construction crane dangling 1,000 feet above West 57th Street, just east of Seventh Avenue, across from Carnegie Hall. Traffic was cordoned off between Sixth and Eighth avenues on 55th through 58th streets, bringing Carnegie concerts to a halt until the crane is brought down. It was initially thought that the street could be reopened when the crane was secured to the scaffolding, but second thoughts determined that the whole kit and caboodle—crane, cab, and 90-story scaffolding—would have to come down and then be replaced for utmost safety.
How long the replacement would take varied in several reports. But on Thursday, November 1, protests by consulates of international hotel guests and pleas from apartment residents within the restricted area grew to the extent that they were allowed to enter their rooms briefly for selected belongings and pets, accompanied by the police, according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek. This indicates a long haul at the very least, which will change the status of concert appearances this season by many favorite artists on Carnegie’s stages.
For a time the hall was optimistically announcing the cancellation of concerts day by day, but late on Thursday it e-mailed a press release covering concerts through November 5. Among 11 concerts rescheduled, cancelled, or moved to alternative venues, Murray Perahia’s annual New York recital, scheduled for 11/2, was handily moved to Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday, 11/4, at 7:30. But the Belcea Quartet’s first of three Beethoven quartet concerts on Saturday, 11/3, in Zankel Hall was rescheduled for Tuesday, 11/6, “pending the reopening of West 57th Street in Manhattan”—most likely wishful thinking under the circumstances.
Ticketholders were encouraged to check carnegiehall.org for the most up-to-date information.
Free Mozart from the New Jersey Symphony
I wonder if New Jersey Governor Chris Christie likes classical music? He has displayed such a statesmanlike profile in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that nothing would surprise me from now on. His state’s fine orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony, has just announced that this weekend’s all-Mozart concerts at the State Theatre in New Brunswick on 11/3 at 8 p.m. and at NJPAC in Newark on 11/4 at 3 p.m. will be open to the public at no charge on a first-come, first-served basis. Works on the program are the Violin Concerto No. 3, Symphony No. 29, and Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364. Augustin Dumay is violinist and conductor; Frank Foerster is violist.
Another Yannick Angle
I’ve always enjoyed others’ opinions whether I agree with them or not. As it happens, George Loomis and I largely agreed about Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Verdi Requiem with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. When I e-mailed George to say how much I had liked his review (Musicalamerica.com, 10/26), he replied: “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Verdi Req where the focus was so much on the orchestra.” Perhaps that’s one reason I liked the performance so much (Musicalamerica.com, 10/24). I have admitted before that vocalism is not my strong suit, but it certainly is (one of) George’s, which is why anyone interested in the arts should read as many different opinions as possible.
George concluded his review with a good point I had forgotten: that Yannick had held up his arms to silence applause when the last note of the “Libera me” died out—but for too long, and one could sense the audience champing at the bit to register its approval. It was pretentious. Giannandrea Noseda got it just right last fall at Lincoln Center after his devastating performance of Britten’s War Requiem: about 20 seconds.
Botstein Overreaches
Music Director Leon Botstein’s celebration of the American Symphony Orchestra’s 50th anniversary was typically ambitious—two monumental works identified with Leopold Stokowski, founder of the ASO: Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 4 and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (“The Symphony of a Thousand”), with Stoki’s 1969 arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner thrown in as an opener. Ticket prices matched 1965’s: $1 to $7.
Three of the Ives Fourth’s movements had been performed previously—Nos. 1 and 2 conducted by Eugene Goossens in 1927 and No. 3 by Bernard Herrmann in 1933—but Stokowski’s was the premiere of the complete, four-movement work (1910-25), on April 26, 1965. Coincidentally, one of the 83-year-old maestro’s assistant conductors for the Ives premiere—José Serebrier (the other was David Katz)—was downstairs in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall leading the American Composers Orchestra in Ives’s Third Symphony and other works. I had planned on attending the ACO but, alas, I heard about the Botstein concert the morning of the concert and was able to get a ticket.
The Ives is still a rarity these days, with the complex rhythmic layering of its second and fourth movements still requiring considerable virtuosity. I’ve heard Boulez/New York Phil, Ozawa/BSO, and Dohnányi/Cleveland of the Fourth in concert; the first and third of these had much to offer technically but were hardly idiomatic. The Stoki and Serebrier recordings remain superior. It was announced on Bernstein/Philharmonic programs in the Sixties and Eighties but to my knowledge was never performed. Botstein’s performance was surprisingly accomplished technically, but it was emotionally unsympathetic, especially the lovely third-movement Andante moderato, and devoid of the folkloristic American elements that Stoki unearths in the busy second movement. It was also awfully fast—27 minutes; six minutes faster than the timing listed in the program.
Stokowski led the American premiere of Mahler’s Eighth in 1916 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and gave it a notable reading in 1949 with the New York Philharmonic, preserved on several sources, including a historical broadcast set of the symphonies released by the orchestra, which, incidentally, I produced. The Eighth is an extraordinarily difficult piece to unify and was neither memorably played, sung, or conducted. Imagine, Maestro, if you had given the rehearsal time you took for the Ives and applied it to Mahler’s gargantuan symphony. You could have worked to honor the composer’s pianissimo directions. Loud portions, such as the end of the first movement, might have been more than a chaotic noise. You might not have had to stop twice in the second movement’s instrumental introduction, and more than that, you might have had time to invest it with some meaning.