Crisis and Charisma

Lisa Hirsch thoughtfully points us to Matthew Guerrieri's post today on the succession issues at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As ever, I'm both dazzled by and envious of Matthew's combination of erudition (Max Weber! Garry Wills!) and splendid prose style, and I love his optokinetic test for conductorial efficacy.

Where he loses me is in the actual analysis of the situation, which strikes me as, well, completely wrong. The moment he pivots from politics to music we get "music directors rarely depart except under circumstances of crisis" — which is simply not true. Levine's departure is a crisis; Philadelphia's struggle to find a music director is, as Matthew quite rightly points out, part of a larger institutional crisis; and, let's see, André Previn's precipitous departure from Los Angeles was, oh, a small crisis. There are others.

But much more common, surely, is the orderly succession of music directors such as we've seen in Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Baltimore, Minnesota, San Francisco and so on. One conductor announces that he'll step down at the end of next season or the one after that, and at that point, or soon thereafter, the next guy (or, in Baltimore, gal) takes over. Note that by "orderly" I don't mean "entirely without bad feeling, controversy or turmoil." But "crisis"? As in, "the Cuban Missile Crisis"? I don't see it.

Nor do I believe Matthew's suggestion that a crisis is essential — or even particularly beneficial — in the establishing of conductorial charisma. Quick, where's the biggest known deposit of such charisma in the United States at the moment? And a follow-up: Where was the most serene, least crisis-driven transfer of podium power in the last five years? Right both times — Los Angeles, where Esa-Pekka Salonen's angst-free departure has not detracted in the slightest from the extraordinary charisma of his Venezuelan successor.

Now, it's possible the successful resolution of a crisis — once it's safely past — can contribute to a general sense of elation and vitality among an orchestra, its new music director and its public, in just the same way that a narrow escape from being hit by an oncoming semi will give you a renewed sense of the value of life. But it's no goddam way to run a railroad. A well-run orchestra, or organization of any kind, doesn't so much resolve crises as keep them from arising in the first place.

Nelsons' Ninth

I was all set to begin this post with a little paean to serendipity. With one free night during my weekend pleasure jaunt to New York, I surveyed the field a couple of months ago and decided to spend the evening at Carnegie Hall, hearing James Levine lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's Ninth. Then the whole Levine thing happened, and there was the unknown (to me) Andris Nelsons taking over; and after that he swiftly went from unknown to the next hot new thing, and I couldn't believe my luck at being in the right place at the right time.

Yeah, well. I'm not in a position to tease out what was Nelsons, and what was the BSO, and what was presumably a shortage of rehearsal time, but Thursday's was not what I'd call a good performance of the Ninth. Others felt differently (there was tumultuous applause, and Big Marc Geelhoed, for one, nigh about wet his pants in delight) but to these ears the whole thing was a struggle and a disappointment. Nelsons often didn't do much to delineate the formal outlines of the piece (without which the first movement in particular can easily sound like just one damn thing after another); and when he did decide to mark a formal juncture, it was generally with an exaggerated ritard followed by a muddy entrance.

On no evidence at all, I'm going to chalk up some of the tentative Alphonse-and-Gaston footwork between Nelsons and the string players in the outer movements to lack of rehearsal, and give a pass to the technical infelicities elsewhere. But I'd still like to think that a conductor so extravagantly lauded could bring out the ironic wit of the Ländler a little more deftly, and make the finale sound really tragic rather than simply becalmed. Maybe next time.

Breaking from Boston

As predicted elsewhere by those with their ears to the ground and their noses in the wind, the official word just came in that James Levine is stepping down as music director in Boston as of Sept. 1. This isn't exactly a surprise — Levine's been in poor health and missing appearances for a while now — but it does bring a premature close to what sounded by all reports like a fairly exciting chapter in the history of an orchestra that has badly needed same. (I was on the list to hear Levine and the BSO do the Mahler Ninth in Carnegie later this month — no word yet on who or what will replace that.)

For me, the interesting tell now will be how quickly and how skillfully the BSO management finds a successor for Levine. I know I tend to harp on this, but the business of lining up and landing music directors is one of those areas that really do separate the orchestra managers who know what they're doing from those that operate at Lincoln Center. I don't have a good sense of where Mark Volpe falls on that spectrum, but this could be the make-or-break moment for him. Levine's health issues have been obvious for so long that there's no excuse for not having someone ready to step in on short notice. If that happens, then bravo for Volpe and the BSO; if this is their cue to start forming committees and launching a search, then they're hopelessly behind the curve.

Wiener Nachschlag

I got up on my soapbox in the Sunday paper on the subject of the Vienna Philharmonic — which is about to hit the Bay Area for the first time in more than 20 years — and its ongoing reluctance to integrate its ranks despite a nominal change in policy dating back 14 years. As usually happens in such cases, there was a whole lot more to say on the subject than either the pages of The Chronicle or the patience of readers could quite accommodate, so it seemed like the right moment to take a dustbuster to this abandoned warehouse space and park some of the overage here. Mostly what got squeezed out were the responses to expected counter-arguments — the part of the essay that features phrases like "now, some might object that..." — and this would be a good place for that.

The most substantive point worth addressing would be the argument from tu quoque, i.e., the one pointing out that American orchestras have, by and large, a very poor record themselves when it comes to racial integration. This is undeniably true, but it's also both irrelevant logically and not comparable in certain obvious ways.

The reason American orchestras have so few black and Hispanic players is because so few black and Hispanic classical musicians emerge from our conservatories. That happens because there are few going in, which in turn is because few black and Hispanic kids get started on classical music, which in turn has to do with the shoddy conditions and questionable priorities of our public school system, as well as a host of other facts about the socioeconomic realities of life in America. The racial makeup of American orchestras is admittedly shameful, but the shame is not that of the orchestras themselves. The problem is that the entire supply chain is faulty.

The situation of Asian musicians in Europe is different. There's plenty of supply, as you can tell by looking at the rosters of other European orchestras, all of which have found room for them. The problem in Vienna is one of demand, not supply.

A second point is timing, i.e., "you're bringing this up now?" I can't deny that this is an article that would have been more appropriate in 1997 — or better yet, 1996, or 1990, or 1965. But here's the thing: Nobody wrote it then. There was a pretty studied silence on the subject among music writers in the cities where the VPO was visiting regularly. I cracked wise on the subject in 1997, briefly, and maybe I could've gone further; but by that point that chapter of the story was over.

But here it is 2011 and apparently the argument still needs to be made. I'm sure the day is coming when this kind of article will truly be out of date. We don't seem to be there yet.

Fan Mail From Some Flounder

There was a lot to pack into my review of Monday and Tuesday's L.A. Philharmonic concerts in Davies, much more than I had room for. And one of the things I regret having to squeeze out is the observation that this guy, bassoonist Shawn Mouser, is friggin' awesome.

Let's face it, you don't always take notice of the bassoonist (it kind of depends on the repertoire), but I noticed Mouser right away — by which I mean measure 7 of Mahler's First. As soon as the bassoons came in, the whole intro just lit up, with a kind of depth and weight that wasn't generally evident elsewhere in the woodwind section. And when he took his solo turn in the third movement, he matched his beautiful sound with a knowing, slightly mournful and insinuating Mahlerian phrasing that did wonders for that passage.

Where you do notice the bassoonist is in the Tchaikovsky Pathétique, so second night I was ready, and Mouser didn't disappoint. Both the big solos, in the first and fourth movements, were magnificent — forward but not blustery, shapely, expressive in the best way.

Oh, and also? Mouser is the associate principal, because apparently the Phil is between principals just at the moment. That's some serious depth of bench right there.

Things That Make You Go "Buh?"*

Xiyun Yang at the NYT says:

Mao’s infamous wife, Jiang Qing...insisted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony be swapped out for the Sixth. Eugene Ormandy, the orchestra’s conductor at the time, detested the piece and refused to play it.

Seriously? Ormandy "detested" the Pastoral Symph, with its cute li'l centaurs and fauns and whatnot? I can't even imagine what story that's a garbled version of.

* Thanks to Lisa Hirsch for the sound effects.

Alan Rich (1924-2010)

News of Alan Rich's death on Friday, at 85, was not unexpected — he'd been in poor health for a while, I gather — but it still came as a painful shock. Alan was an important, even indispensable figure for anyone writing or reading music criticism in this country over the last half-century and more, and as trite a cliche as this sounds, he leaves a gap that won't be filled.

He wrote with a passion, and an air of authority, and a ferocity of response, that few could match. Plus, of course, there is a little something extra that comes from sheer longevity — not for nothing did he let drop at every opportunity the fact that he had met Bartók in 1944, on the occasion of the world premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra. His love for music of all kinds, and the zeal with which he defended it against its various abusers, was an example. I can think of few writers on music who so thoroughly lived Shaw's maxim that "the true critic is the man who becomes your personal enemy on the sole provocation of a bad performance, and will only be appeased by good performances."

Which is to say, of course, that Alan was much easier to admire than to like, even from afar. We had an odd, sometimes testy relationship, friendly but not overly warm. He was not a particularly nice fellow even if you were in his good graces, and being in his good graces was at best a tentative dispensation. (At least, that was my experience and that of others. Perhaps Alex Ross and Mark Swed and others who, like him, had four letters in each of their names — a point on which his numerological fixation was as strange as Schoenberg's — found otherwise.) And as Marc Geelhoed points out in his admirable tribute, there was a savagery about him that found an outlet in regrettable directions.

Still, for all his personal and professional weaknesses, Alan remained a lodestar for me — largely because it was he who put the idea of being a music critic into my head in the first place, and showed me how it might be done. I wrote about all this — both the good and the bad — a couple of years ago, when the LA Weekly gave him the heave-ho, but I'm still struck today by the depth of his early influence on me, and the extent to which it shaped my own thinking.

Many of us, for instance, have had the experience of discovering, rather late in life, that something we always thought of as a fact was simply a firmly held opinion inherited from some parent or teacher. My music-critic's version of that phenomenon came the first time I saw someone refer in print to Alan's devotion to Carlo Maria Giulini. It was a revelation — without ever thinking about it, I'd always simply numbered Giulini (whom I never heard live) among the Great Conductors. Where did I get that idea? Because Alan liked him, nothing more.

But more than just the actual opinions — which, like anyone else's, could be on or off the money — there was the example he set, as an observant, engaged and thoughtful listener and thinker about music. People noticed, too. Steve Reich once told me about a concert very early in his career, at some gallery space in Manhattan, which Alan had reviewed with uncommon interest and sophistication, even to the point of grasping an arcane metrical detail on the fly. He could do that, and did.

I thought this might be the occasion to finally tell the yarn about how Alan and I first met, but the post is getting too long, so I'll leave it for another day (if at all). The last time I saw him was a couple of years ago, in a crowded men's room at the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz. I was at the far urinal when Alan walked in; he spotted me, and said — in a voice pitched to be heard clearly by everyone in the place — "Ah, Mr. Kosman, preparing your review for tomorrow's paper, I see."

I'm going to miss the old bastard. I think we all will.