On a Pacific Aisle

Crisis and Charisma

2011-04-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-02T12:49:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-24T14:12:00.000-08:00

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

2010-05-12T14:36:00.001-07:00

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?"*

2010-05-09T13:46:00.001-07:00

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)

2010-04-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Half a Century

2009-10-27T08:31:00.001-07:00

Quand j'étais petit, on me disait toujours, "Tu verras quand tu auras cinquante ans." Eh bien m'y voilà à cinquante ans. Et je n'ai rien vu. Rien. — Erik Satie

The Rest is Unquiet

2009-10-14T15:59:00.000-07:00

Things have been a little quiet of late around Noiseville (not that I should talk), and now we know why. Alex Ross has moved his blogging emporium over to The New Yorker, under the rubric Unquiet Thoughts. Initial musings are on György Kurtág, Stile Antico, and more; update your records accordingly.

Now, That's Retro

2009-09-15T14:21:00.000-07:00

A package from Sony waltzed across my desk this afternoon, bringing with it the new recital disc by the strange and wonderful German soprano Simone Kermes. (I haven't spun it yet, but it goes right to the top of the pile; although I haven't reached the levels of Kermesomania that some inhabit, anything she does is automatically of interest.) The package included a couple of CDs in the familiar jewel case, a robust press release, and something else. Something big, flat, and shrink-wrapped.

Honest to God, I didn't know what it was.

My first guess was a wall calendar, my second a video laserdisc. It was my editor who sussed it out: "It's vinyl," she said, and she was right.

We opened it together and shared a little Proustian moment, savoring the gleaming black plastic, the perfect circular center, the broad bands offering visual cues to the different tracks. And it was 1978 all over again.

Monopoly

2009-09-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

I'm told that following Friday's season-opening Trovatore, the members of the San Francisco Opera Chorus have decreed that Sondra Radvanovsky should be the only singer ever again allowed to sing Verdi with the company. A little extreme, perhaps, but I take their point.

In Fond Memory

2009-09-11T22:52:00.000-07:00

Kitty Carlisle Hart (1910-2007)

Because I never hear Trovatore without thinking of my first, and for many years only, Leonora. Requiescat in pace.

Are We Post-Racial Yet?

2009-09-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

There was one interesting nugget o' news out of last night's surprisingly enjoyable San Francisco Symphony season opener: Nicole Cash, the orchestra's recently appointed associate principal horn, is African-American.

In a perfect or even marginally rational universe, of course, this fact would not be worth remarking on. But in this fallen world, Ms. Cash is a rarity. The most recent survey by the League of American Orchestras, taken in 2007, found that just under 2 percent of orchestral musicians were black.

To bring it a little closer to home, Ms. Cash is the first African-American member of the SF Symphony since Basil Vendryes departed to become the principal violist of the Colorado Symphony in 1993. That's, um, a long time. Good to see a little progress on that front.

Ringblogging IV (belated): Götterdämmerung in Seattle

2009-08-21T23:14:00.000-07:00

OK, Friday's Götterdämmerung made it official — I'm in the Janice Baird camp now. Whatever was going on during her unimpressive Walküre Brünnhilde (nerves, adjustment, an off night) faded away during Siegfried and was fully gone by the last opening night of this first cycle. Instead, we got a full-blown, vibrantly heroic rendition that was every bit as impressive vocally as it was theatrically. She's the real deal.

My Ring date (Mom) didn't care for something about Baird's tone, and I understood her objection without sharing it — there's a dark and slightly acidic quality that could hit you in the wrong place if you're in the mood for something laser-like and clean. And there's no denying that her power is iffy in the lower register. But her voice gets bigger and bolder as it goes higher, and she had no problem at all being heard over the orchestra in the more athletic passages of the role.

Nor was it all stratospheric exertions — Baird's more intimate singing in the emotionally charged second act was shapely and specific, informed throughout by a very detailed take on Brünnhilde's travails. I'd also add that she's just about the best-looking Brünnhilde I've ever seen, which is not dispositive, but it's not, y'know, nothing either. This is theater, after all, and when Siegfried starts hollering about a beautiful warrior maiden, it's kind of exciting for once not to have to suspend your disbelief for a second.

Aside from Baird's contributions, Götterdämmerung was somewhat hit-or-miss. Stig Andersen was either recovered from his ailment or not, who can say; there was no announcement, but there was still something a bit hesitant and underwhelming about his Siegfried. Maybe that's all he's got.

The whole Gibichung plotline, as is so often the case (at least for me) didn't amount to much. There are few things that make me more impatient than people who complain, in connection with some work of fiction or theater or cinema, that there aren't any characters they "like" or "care about" or "can identify with"; but it's a sin that I myself am guilty of when it comes to this aspect of Götterdämmerung. The various Nibelungen live the fullness of their villainy, Hagen no less than his father and uncle, and Siegfried, for all his obvious character flaws, really is a Held. But Gunther, and to a lesser extent Gutrune, are merely contemptible and tedious; it's a rare performance in which I don't feel they're wasting my time with their whining and sniveling. This wasn't one. Gordon Hawkins, a middling Donner in Rheingold, thundered unconvincingly as Gunther, and Marie Plette, who had brought such fresh ardor to Freia, sounded acerbic as Gutrune. Daniel Sumegi's Hagen came to life most fully in the Act 2 scene with Alberich, perhaps prompted by Richard Paul Fink's insinuating ferocity.

Stephanie Blythe, God love her, returned as both the Second Norn and Waltraute. I had slightly conflicted feelings about the former assignment — her singing was so extraordinary, so potent and full of dark, rich colors, that she put her colleagues into the shade, which in turn upset the balance of the first scene. I'm not sure what a performer is supposed to do in that situation — tone it down to the level of her lesser collaborators? Maybe so, but on the other hand I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity of hearing her sing at full strength. Waltraute's scene, in which Baird held her own, was unalloyed delight.

Whatever intermittent misgivings there might have been about individual performances, there were none about Stephen Wadsworth's staging. The big crowd scenes of Act 2 were impeccably choreographed, as was the more intimate scene of the Norns; the frolicking of the Rhinemaidens in Act 3 was the funniest I've ever seen. And although the ecological theme runs very lightly through this production, the final, post-cataclysmic stage image — the very pine forest we saw in Das Rheingold, now charred almost beyond recognition but still clearly poised for eventual regeneration — felt deeply, movingly apt. Only four more years until the next go-round.

Ringblogging III: Siegfried in Seattle

2009-08-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

Seattle's Siegfrieds are evidently somewhat snake-bit. When the Stephen Wadsworth production was first unveiled in 2001, Alan Woodrow tripped over an exercise machine shortly before his company debut and severed his quadriceps, which left him unable to walk; he sang from the wings while the cover tenor, Richard Berkeley-Steele, leapt and cavorted and slew dragons.

This week, the Danish tenor Stig Andersen kept up the tradition by coming down with a viral infection just before his company debut. Speight Jenkins made the announcement before the curtain went up on Wednesday's Siegfried, and it brought on all the usual emotions — apprehension at his appearance, relief that there was no cancellation, frustration over the fact that there was going to be no reliable way to gauge what we were about to hear. And so it was.

Andersen sounded convincingly like a decent heldentenor still in the grips of a bronchial something-or-other, which is about all I can say. His singing was ragged and hazy by the end of each act (the Forging Song was particularly strained), although he did muster a sweet, precise tone in Act 2. I wasn't much taken with his stage presence (somewhere between nimble and heroic without quite being either) but again, there's no knowing how much of that was due to the vocal struggles.

Oh but look — I buried the lede. The great revelation on Wednesday was Janice Baird's Brünnhilde, as potent and gleaming and theatrically vivid as her Walküre Brünnhilde had been wan and unimpressive. This was a Tarnhelm-like transformation (though to judge from some of the comments here, this sort of inconsistency or unpredictability is something of a trademark), and once again the direction things were headed was obvious before she even opened her mouth.

The first moments of Baird's awakening were an intensely physical display — rubbing one arm and then another, raising her face to the sun in a worshipful grin of delight, moving each muscle in her body, and at last turning a slow whirl of exuberance that would have been an awkward milkmaid cliché under any other circumstances. I don't know when I've seen the thrill of being conscious and alive conveyed with such solid specificity.

And then came "Heil dir, Sonne," and I practically fell out of my chair. Here at last was the big, radiant and superbly controlled sound that you want for Brünnhilde (and especially at this juncture). And she kept it up all the way through the long final scene, launching volley after volley of effortlessly heroic tone over the din of the orchestra and evidently inspiring Andersen to similar feats. If this version of Baird shows up again for Götterdämmerung we're all in for a treat.

The rest of the evening was no less fine. Greer Grimsley finished out his assignment with a resplendent Wanderer, full of regrets and autumnal wisdom; his dialogue with Erda (the rich-toned Swedish contralto Maria Streijffert) was particularly probing. Richard Paul Fink's saturnine Alberich made a welcome return.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the night, though, was tenor Dennis Petersen as a strong-toned and incisively acted Mime. Petersen came up through the San Francisco Opera training program a good while back (I'm pretty sure I reviewed his debut recital as a cub critic more than 20 years ago) and since then he's been mostly relegated to small character roles — at least in San Francisco, where he's been the go-to Goro practically forever.

Turns out he's been underused all these years. His Mime was a prodigious display of vocal muscle and unapologetic physical vigor, with nary a hint of cringing, whining or wheedling. The effect was to make him loom as a formidable antagonist both to Siegfried — the notion that he might succeed in chopping off the boy's head suddenly didn't seem so laughable — and to the Wanderer in the riddle scene, which I like to think of as the Wagnerian version of Wait Wait … Don't Tell Me! ("Answer three questions about the events of the past few nights and win Carl Kasell's voice on your answering machine!").

Siegfried also contains what may be my favorite of Thomas Lynch's gorgeous sets, the mountain-and-forest combo of Neidhöhle in Act 2. Most of the sets to this point have been either rocky cliffs or piney woods, and whenever the curtain goes up on this new setting — divided right down the middle of the stage between the two — I start trying to figure out which of those previous sets we're revisiting. The answer, of course, is none. This is a transmuted blend of themes already encountered — which is to say, nothing less than a visual counterpart of Wagnerian leitmotif technique.

Ringblogging II: Die Walküre in Seattle

2009-08-13T12:13:00.001-07:00

To exemplify the sensitivity and imagination at work in director Stephen Wadsworth's superb Ring production, you could hardly do better than the scene between Wotan and Fricka at the beginning of Act 2 of Walküre. I've had occasion to rhapsodize about other aspects of this scene before, but what struck me on Monday night was how fierce and yet tender the argument between these two becomes in Wadsworth's staging.

Think about that showdown too often goes — an onslaught of legalism and passive-aggressive whining in which a henpecked husband is brought to heel (yes, he concedes that Fricka's right, but always reluctantly and generally without a hint of grace). But Wadsworth takes a much more humane view of this marriage — particularly in Rheingold, which is studded with little interludes of smooching and schmuggling, but here too, as the relationship comes under its most severe pressure.

In this version — and I've never witnessed the scene enacted with the degree of musical and theatrical vividness that Greer Grimsley and Stephanie Blythe lent it this time around — Fricka brings Wotan around to his better side through the sheer force of her love and the bond they share. She looks him face-on — fearlessly and firmly but sympathetically — and leads him, rather than merely chivvying him, through the steps of her unassailable case. And when she invokes the sanctity of marriage, it's not (or not only) in the spirit of a patroness protecting the prerogatives of her constituency. She's reminding Wotan of their own marriage, of what it has meant and still means to him. It's as though Brünnhilde, with her catty, callow remarks about storm and strife and womanly battles, is the child watching a parental fight with no understanding of the depth of feeling underlying it.

As I say, that's just one splendor among many. You could also point, for instance, to the extraordinary flux of emotional tension in Act 1, dispelled in a huge rush of liberation in the Winterstürme duet, or the contrapuntal skill with which Wadsworth deploys and individuates a gaggle of Valkyries in Act 3. It's a joy to hear and see this story told so fluidly and with such resourceful energy.

Musically, the performance was mostly superb as well, though I continue to wish that Robert Spano's conducting could match the zest and vibrancy of the staging. Stuart Skelton and Margaret Jane Wray were phenomenal Wälsungs, singing with unbridled power, precision and tonal freshness; their Winterstürme was a masterpiece of erotic urgency. Andrea Silvestrelli made a strong Hunding, and Grimsley was first-rate, from that detailed beginning to Act 2 all the way to the emotionally capacious Farewell.

The one problem — a big one — was Janice Baird's tentative, underpowered Brünnhilde. I knew even before she opened her mouth for the first "Hojotoho" that trouble was on the way, because I could see her going through the same mental calculations my cat makes before leaping onto the kitchen counter: gauging the height of the ascent, envisioning a practice run or two, re-checking the calculations, and finally making the jump. She boasts a lively, girlish stage presence, and there was some probing lyricism to her singing in Act 3; but she's no warrior maiden.

Ringblogging I: Rheingold in Seattle

2009-08-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

One of the first things people like to point out about the Ring cycle is that the "cyclical" part is key — by ending Götterdämmerung where Rheingold began, Wagner reinforces the idea that this is a timeless yarn that plays out again and again into eternity. And not just the story, but the reenactment thereof, so don't wait to buy your tickets for next year as soon as this year's performances are over.

Like so many of Old Klingsor's ideas, this one is easy to mock and hard to resist. When the curtain went up on the first scene of Rheingold Sunday night and I saw those wonderful swimming Rhinemaidens, twirling and somersaulting in the depths of the river, it felt exactly like the recurrence of an old and welcome ritual. It's been four years since the last outing of director Stephen Wadsworth's brilliant, emotionally probing Ring for the Seattle Opera, and those years melted away in an instant.

I can't even pretend to any kind of equanimity about this production, with its phenomenally beautiful physical trappings (sets by Thomas Lynch, costumes by Martin Pakledinaz, lighting by Peter Kaczorowski) and Wadsworth's riveting blend of traditionalism and theatrical vividness. I absolutely love it.

Freed from the crippling dictates of an overarching concept, Wadsworth's staging is at once faithful to its roots and entirely autonomous. He relies on the basic story as Wagner conceived it, but finds room for innovative or imaginative touches that shed new light on what's happening — particularly the lively erotic charge between Fricka and Wotan, which makes clear that his philandering has nothing to do with any caricatured notion of her as nag or shrew. Wadsworth also makes Fricka a force of conscience by having her linger behind, contemplating Fasolt's corpse in silent horror, while the other gods process over the Rainbow Bridge to Valhalla.

The sheer visual splendor of the production is almost embarrassing in its profusion. The green, piney mountaintop of the even-numbered scenes is like an idealized version of the reality looming nearby; the waters of the Rhine look cool and fluid enough to dive into.

And the opening night promised the best musical incarnation of this production yet, even under Robert Spano's blandly capable leadership. As always, Stephanie Blythe's Fricka outshone everyone else for vocal heft, tonal elegance and interpretive clarity. If you're determined to do so, you could spin that negative, as an all-too-cynical young critic of my acquaintance managed to do ("You know you're in trouble when Fricka is the best singer of the night"), but really, why would you want to? In what opera is Stephanie Blythe not the most magnificent performer on stage?

The happiest news was that Greer ~~Garson~~ Grimsley has finally grown into the role of Wotan. When he took on the role for the first time four years ago, Speight Jenkins' advocacy for him seemed touching but a bit misplaced; he was callow, tentative, underpowered. Not any more. This was a commanding, vocally resplendent performance.

Most of the rest of the cast was first-rate, too — Richard Paul Fink returning yet again in his signature role of Alberich, Marie Plette as a bright-toned Freia, Jason Collins, a new name to me, as a clarion Froh (yikes — turns out I heard him as Froh in San Francisco just a year ago, but he didn't make a similar impression). The one weak point was Kobie van Rensburg, a dull, blockish Loge; with all the magic happening onstage, his performance was the least magical.

Objectivity "Я" Us

2009-06-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

An on-line commenter on one of my recent reviews has some sage advice:

Spare us your subjective judgements and report on the concert. How were the performances?

Runnicles in the Park

2009-05-27T16:29:00.000-07:00

One thing that I unfortunately didn't have room to include in today's exit interview with Donald Runnicles was his stated fondness for the company's Opera in the Park concert. For those not familiar with this institution, it's a free annual event that takes place outdoors in Golden Gate Park, on the Sunday afternoon following the opera or operas of the opening weekend. Basically, whichever singers are in town for the first two or three productions of the season offer a mixed lineup of arias, duets and ensembles, massively amplified, while people picnic on the grass and the sun beats down and the breezes threaten to blow the music off of the players' stands.

I probably shouldn't say this, since my employer is the event's main sponsor, but Opera in the Park has never done much for me. I appreciate it in theory — sunshine, fresh air, picnic baskets, music — but for anyone with a strong connection to the art form, it's so completely not the way you want to hear opera. And I would have bet any amount of money that the artists, more than anyone, would regard this as just one of those onerous obligations that come with the job.

So imagine my surprise when Runnicles said this:

A highlight for me, year in and year out, was the park concert. In the first years, I took so much trouble with the lineup, planning what to put in and how. And then over the years — I won't say we winged it but it took less and less work. I loved that concert. What a unique event! If there are 50 people hearing their first Winterstürme or Turandot, you may have sown a seed.

I don't know when I've felt so small or cynical.

Dresdenszenen II: One of These Things...

2009-05-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

On the facade of the Kunstakademie, the Germans make a game stab at establishing their national bona fides in the field of the visual arts. Can you guess which of these is not like the others?

(Sorry that I couldn't quite squeeze the whole thing into the frame without falling into the Elbe or reading the manual of my digital camera. Still, you can probably figure out the truncated name on the right. Click to enlarge.)

Notes from Abroad (2)

2009-05-27T16:05:00.001-07:00

One of the things the cellist Jan Vogler is trying to do as the new head of the Dresdner Musikfestspiele is to expand the range of performers who show up on the schedule. So on Tuesday night in the Frauenkirche — the large and beautiful church in the city center, destroyed by bombs in 1945 and painstakingly rebuilt in the subsequent decades — Valery Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic performed music of Sibelius and Shostakovich. The VPO tours far and wide, but this was the orchestra's first appearance in Dresden in 12 years and the locals were in a state of high anticipation.

My God, it was magnificent. There's no way to listen to the VPO without feeling some tinge of moral unease at that unbroken sea of white male faces (some of my fellow critics amused themselves during the applause by scanning for the two or three women that are now scattered among the orchestra's ranks). But it's just as hard to resist the magical sound of this orchestra — the warm, fluid string textures, or the glowing, utterly distinctive brass.

And Gergiev was in top form (not always a sure bet with this notoriously uneven artist). The Sibelius First was full of dark splendor, its rhetoric forceful but unconstrained. After intermission came "The Firebird," in a rendition that mixed dramatic urgency (the opening low string passages pushed forward like some kind of techno rhythm track) with vivid pictorialism. Even the weather was in on the game — the whole performance was punctuated by lightning bolts flashing through the upper windows of the church. Sounds corny, but when the last one came exactly in time with the downbeat for a big orchestral chord, it sure seemed like something unusual was going on.

Dresdenszenen I: Time's Wingless Chariot

2009-05-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

Most of us occasionally find it hard to keep from looking at our watches as a less than scintillating performance drags its way through its prescribed course. What does one do on an off night at the Semperoper, where the slow progress of the evening is tauntingly marked right there above the stage, five cruel minutes at a time?

Notes from Abroad (1)

2009-05-26T08:38:00.001-07:00

I had to come to Dresden to get a line on the much-ballyhooed young British conductor Daniel Harding. Well, somewhat ballyhooed — the torrents of extravagant praise that have been heaped on him (mostly among his fellow countrymen) have been followed more recently by the revisionism and bewilderment that so often come in the wake of such an introduction. There seem to be only two categories among people who've heard him conduct — those who think he's the Second Coming and those who can't imagine what the fuss is about.

Based on Harding's mediocre performance Sunday night with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and Chorus, I'm going to claim membership, at least tentatively, in the latter camp. In Brahms' "Haydn" Variations, Harding managed to be fussy and sloppy all at once — conducting the life out of every note and phrase without bringing any kind of discipline or direction to the music. (The red-faced gentleman seated in front of me in the Kreuzkirche turned to his neighbor when it was over and proclaimed in a stage whisper, with the kind of outrage that only cultured Germans can truly muster in these situations, "That was a joke!") The rest of the program, including Schumann's Nachtlied and Schubert's Mass No. 6 — which Michael Tilson Thomas, coincidentally, will conduct June 10-13 in Davies Symphony Hall — skated by on the strength of the chorus, a truly first-rate ensemble. Aside from a couple of deft touches scattered throughout the Schubert, Harding's role was largely to get in the way.

I'm not in Dresden, of course, to scout conductors (for that matter, Harding was actually a last-minute substitute for Nikolaus Harnoncourt). The city's tourism office brought a passel of music critics over to take in a bit of the Dresdner Musikfestspiele, the intensive 2½-week festival that fills the various churches and concert halls of this neo-Baroque/Cold War/21st century city. This is the festival's first season under the artistic leadership of Jan Vogler, the genial and energetic young cellist who's busy planning seasons ahead that build on the festival's traditions while taking it in new directions.

This year's title and theme is "The New World," and the schedule is replete with nods toward the Americas among the expected Teutonic faves. Saturday night, before I got here, Gustavo Dudamel led the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Semperoper in a program that included Carlos Chávez's Symphony No. 2, the "Symphony India"; on Monday, the New York organist Gail Archer provided the unusual chance to hear the music of Barber and Persichetti played on Gottfried Silbermann's majestic 1755 organ (his last) in the Hofkirche. Also, and unrelatedly, Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking is on at the Semperoper tonight; also, and totally unrelatedly, the city is semi-agog over next week's visit by Barack Obama.

There's no mistaking the fact that Dresden is a city in transition, still recovering day by day from the twin calamities of the 1945 firebombing and the ensuing decades of Communist rule. The old center of town is split about equally between painstakingly reconstructed historic facades and massive construction sites; this view of the Frauenkirche from just off the Neumarkt is pretty representative.

Remembrance of Things Pastreich

2009-05-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

Lisa Hirsch is on something of a tear today about the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra's decision to hire former San Francisco Symphony executive director Peter Pastreich as its new manager. She seems to feel that it's a pretty ominous development, which of course is her prerogative — though I might have wished for her to bolster her argument with something other than a tendentious and weirdly selective quote from an old article of mine.

She also feels that my announcer in this morning's paper glosses over the unhappiest episode of Pastreich's SFS tenure — the bitter nine-week strike that disrupted the orchestra's 1996-97 season — and she may well be right. If something that big happens on your watch, maybe it deserves to get mentioned every time you do something new that puts your face back in the paper. I dunno.

But I have to take issue pretty strenuously with the notion that I'm "ducking" the points raised in the 1997 thumb-sucker, mainly because — well, because Lisa doesn't seem to have quite understood what those points were. That post-mortem pinned the blame for the strike on both parties with almost namby-pamby even-handedness, laying out exactly the ways in which I thought each side was at fault. You have to read the article from way over to one side for the takeaway to be that Pastreich is bad news.

For the benefit of out-of-towners and those coming in late, here's the Cliffs Notes version. Pastreich is a brilliant, far-sighted and deeply experienced orchestra manager, whose leadership was one of the key elements of the Symphony's rise to its current stature and prominence. He's also a hard-driving sumbitch, and no one who's worked for him has ever looked back on the experience and said, "Well, that was fun." There were currents of bad blood between him and some members of the orchestra, and those got worse with time, until the animus exploded in a puerile and wildly unfocused strike, which Pastreich made worse by mishandling it.

I guess you could take the moral of that story to be "Never hire Pastreich again," but that kind of leaves a lot out of the equation, doesn't it? If I'm running an orchestra board, I'm going to see whether I can't get the benefits of his wisdom and leadership while dodging the negatives (either because the situation is different or because Pastreich himself has changed, or both). The Philharmonia board thinks they can do that, and more power to them; personally, I'm going to assume they're right until proven otherwise.

Of course, not every organization has what it takes, as Lisa inadvertently reminds us by pointing us toward this little item (third one down). I'm not sure how much mileage we can get out of an item that consists exclusively of unsourced gossip ("That's no rumor — some guy on the internet said it was true!"). But just for fun, let's stipulate that every word in there is gospel, and review the bidding.

The Honolulu Symphony — which according to our gospel writer has been "crisis-torn," "rudderless" and "without effective administrative or musical leadership" — brings Pastreich in for a consult. He looks the situation over and tells them they're in deep trouble. He's willing to hang around on an interim basis and help them get their shit together. They say, "No thanks, please go away," and he goes. And he's the jackass in this little yarn? No, I don't think so.

The Poignancy of Belatedness

2009-05-07T18:04:00.000-07:00

Shortly before his death, Wagner dreams of Schopenhauer, and Cosima records it in her diary:

R. drew Sch.'s attention to a flock of nightingales, but Sch. had already noticed them.

The End of History

2009-05-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

A week or two ago, responding to the wonderful NYTBR essay by the great Jim Holt (yeah, I'm a fan) about memorizing poetry, letter-writer Gene H. Bell-Villada remarked that most composers "can cite at length from the entire classical repertoire, from Bach and Handel to Bartók and Stravinsky." Then today, in a reprise interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Booker T. Jones of MG's fame reminisced about his days in the music library of Indiana University "listening to the old masters — everything from Bach to Stravinsky."

I'm struck by this idea that Stravinsky represents the endpoint of the mainstream classical tradition. I have no objection to it whatever — it's probably the name I would come up with myself in a comparable situation (Booker T. left a long, drawling pause after mentioning Bach, long enough for me to lean into the car radio in anticipation and make a little bet with myself that Stravinsky was coming next). And it certainly tallies with the unavoidable sense that Schoenberg and the tradition he represents haven't made it into the consciousness of the general public as a landmark (not that there's anything wrong with that, aside from the whole "supremacy of German music for the next hundred years" metric).

Still, it does raise some intriguing questions. As for example:

• Where exactly, in Stravinsky's long and varied career, do you suppose the line should be drawn? Surely we can stipulate that everything up through Le sacre is counted among the "entire classical repertoire," while, say, Threni and the Requiem Canticles probably aren't. But what about in between? Does the tradition come to an end before or after Oedipus Rex? How about the Symphony in C? Or The Rake's Progress?

• Who was Stravinsky's predecessor as the terminus ante quem of classical music, and when did he move into that spot? This is actually a factual question, which I bet some canny historian of musical sociology knows the answer to. My money's on Debussy, but that's only a guess.

• Finally, who's going to succeed Stravinsky, and when? Not Carter, obviously. To me, the likeliest candidates would seem to be Reich or Adams, but it's still awfully early for them to take on the old-master mantle to this degree. Is the "Bach-to-Stravinsky" paradigm really going to be with us for decades to come?

Fireworks

2009-04-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

Last week was a hellishly busy one around here (four concerts, three interview features, a handful of news stories) so I skipped Friday's Berkeley recital by Krystian Zimerman despite my unbridled awe at his artistry. Big mistake. Not only does it turn out that this was his final U.S. tour for the foreseeable future (who knew?) but evidently he had some weighty stuff on his mind, to judge from this report of Sunday's recital in L.A. Nothing so overtly dramatic happened up here — I checked — but it would've been good to witness that kind of passion in action.

Kudos

2009-04-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

The NEA is out with its second round of Opera Honors. This year's winners are John Adams, Frank Corsaro, Marilyn Horne, Lotfi Mansouri, and Julius Rudel, which seems like a pretty blue-chip lineup to me.

Anne Midgette, in a bit of either subtle derision or simply breeziness (I genuinely can't tell) refers to this slate as "more of the usual suspects." Is that so wrong?

A Tale of Two Kiddies

2009-04-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

I had a bit of a scare at the start of this afternoon's wonderful Berkeley concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. No sooner had I settled into my seat than a young family — mom, dad, and 4-year-old son — trooped down the aisle and settled into a pair of seats in the center section of Zellerbach Hall.

Uh-oh. In my experience, 4-year-olds aren't generally too great about concert etiquette, and not being on the aisle made any possibility of a hasty exit even more problematic. Plus, the kid was sitting directly in front of The Opera Tattler, who I knew — even if he didn't — would open up a can of tattle-ass on him if he got out of line.

Turned out the danger was somewhere else altogether — in the left-hand balcony, to be specific, where some chattering toddler, out of sight but perfectly within earshot of everyone on stage and in the house, began commenting as soon as the orchestra filed on stage. There were some cries of "ssh!", ignored by the cretinous custodial parent. Richard Tognetti, the orchestra's leader and artistic director, tried a little ironic reverse psychology but misjudged his target. Fortunately, though, he held off starting the performance, which gave the house manager enough time to remove both parent and child — evidently with a crowbar.

And what about the potential problem child across the aisle? Well, he sat through a Haydn symphony and a short piece by Australian composer Roger Smalley leaning forward on his mother's lap, his gaze as rapt and unblinking as that of a normal kid watching Saturday morning cartoons; he dozed off when Andreas Scholl sang Handel; and after intermission — his cultural thirst evidently slaked — he was gone. A perfect angel, with wise and praiseworthy parents.

Moral of the story: Know how much classical music your kid can take, and act accordingly. Which I suppose is yet another subset of the Unified Field Theory of Good Behavior, namely, don't be such an asshole.

Haiku

2009-04-20T09:02:00.000-07:00

Vaz has decided
To write complete paragraphs.
I'll pick up the slack.

On the Money Front

2009-04-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

This morning's New York Times brings news of Barrett Wissman's guilty plea last month on securities fraud charges in connection with some sort of shenanigans at the New York's state pension fund. He's reportedly on the hook for a $12 million fine.

To business reporter Danny Hakim, Mr. Wissman is a "hedge fund executive" and a "Dallas businessman," which I suppose is indeed his day gig. But here on the music beat, we know him better as the head of IMG Artists, which is to say that he manages — or rather, signs the paychecks of the managers of — hundreds of the classical music world's starriest conductors, singers and instrumentalists. He also — along with his wife, the cellist and composer Nina Kotova — runs a couple of sun-dappled music festivals in Tuscany and the Napa Valley, where those very musicians appear regularly.

It's like Balzac almost said: Behind every music festival lies a great crime.

Betty

2009-01-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

Alan Rich brings the sad news of the death yesterday of Betty Freeman, the great music patron and photographer. I never met her — although I always sort of expected, or at least hoped, that the occasion might arise — but of course my life was immeasurably enriched by her largesse, as was yours.

The list of ways in which Freeman helped shape the course of contemporary music over the past 50 years is nothing short of astonishing. It includes commissions and financial support for individual works — Nixon in China, L'amour du de loin, Different Trains, and many more — as well as funding for recordings, rehearsals and other projects. And then there were the broader, unspecified, let's-make-this-happen bequests: annual living grants for John Cage and Harry Partch, the creation of Lou Harrison's Gamelan Si Betty, and Lord knows what else. (There's a jaw-dropping list, probably a little out of date by now, here, as well as a fascinating interview from 2000 with Frank J. Oteri, from which I lifted this photo montage by David Hockney.)

What I always liked best about Betty Freeman was the conviction — I'm not sure where I got this idea, but Alan's obit would seem to bear it out — that her money went to a wider range of music than she actually appreciated or liked. Composers didn't have to cater to her tastes to get her support; that's one of the ways she differed from, say, the Medicis (also, no poison). They just had to be doing serious creative work, in a way that seemed apt to broaden everyone's cultural experience; if Betty herself liked the results, well, that was a bonus.

She was, as far as I could ever tell, a paragon of enlightened patronage. And at this unpleasant juncture in our national life — when accumulated wealth carries with it a particularly noxious stink — she stands as a much-needed role model. R.I.P.

But Aside from That, Mrs. Lennon. . .

2008-11-16T18:47:00.000-08:00

This full-page ad for a local Realtor is currently running in the San Francisco Opera's program book. I caught it at this afternoon's Bohème opening and just about lost my lunch.

Aside from the ineptitude on display just from an advertising perspective — what is the message here, that she's selling condos in the Dakota? — it's inconceivable to me how a piece of fetid necrophilia like this could have got loose into the world. Even if we assume, very very generously, that not one person in the entire production chain recognized one of the most iconic photographic images of the last quarter-century, or grasped the obvious tastelessness of using it in this fashion, that still leaves someone at the start of the process who actually had the idea and then said to himself, "Yeah, that'll work." Seems to me that guy's got a little explaining to do.

Unless — and here I'm maxing out on my capacity for generous invention — he's on the phone in a panic at this very moment saying, "Wait — dude — you thought I was serious?"

Carnac in the House!

2008-11-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

As the political blogger Atrios likes to say, nobody could have predicted that Gerard Mortier's tenure at the New York City opera would be brief and ill-starred.

Except, you know, me.

Just like the last time around, I remark on this latest development with regret rather than pleasure. Nothing would have pleased me more than to see Mortier's bold and lavish plans for an artistically revivified company come to fruition — unless it were a plan calling for free ponies and ice cream for everyone.

But come on. I can't claim to have foreseen a year and a half ago the precise way this would all shake out — I sort of figured Mortier's programming would actually find its way to the stage, where it would be a succès d'estime and a fiscal catastrophe — but it was obvious even from a continent away that this was never going to work. There was way too much magical pixie dust built into the blueprints.

Idle Query

2008-10-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

I got no kick against modern jazz
Unless they try to play it too darn fast
And lose the beauty of the melody
Until it sounds just like a symphony

Obviously, this is at least 90 percent a matter of stringing together words about music that will rhyme and scan (and really, who among us hasn't been there, mutatis mutandis?).

My question: Is it 100? Is there even the germ of a trace of an inkling of something meaningful here? I'm guessing no, but I ask because I came to this realization quite late — listening to The Beatles' Second Album at age 8 or so, I took it for granted that the Fab Four (Chuck Berry being as yet undiscovered) knew more about modern jazz than I did.

Look Out Cleveland

2008-10-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

My screed on the shameful treatment of music critic Don Rosenberg by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, scheduled to run in this Sunday's Chron, is now up on-line. It includes one obvious rhetorical gaffe that I wish I'd caught in time (you'll spot it), but otherwise it sums up my feelings on the matter pretty well.

There's one point, though, that I left out of the piece for a variety of reasons but which may be worth adding here — namely, the way in which this episode is essentially different from the other misfortunes that have lately befallen the fraternity of newspaper critics.

Music critic positions, as many of us know, are disappearing with frightening suddenness in the U.S. — just in the past year or so, critics in Miami, Kansas City, San Diego, Seattle, Minneapolis and probably others that I can't think of at the moment have retired or been bought out or reassigned. It's an unnerving development, not only for those of us in the field but for anyone who believes that informed and conscientious commentary on classical music is, let's say, a cultural net plus.

But those developments are based on bottom-line decisions about how to keep a newspaper profitable in the face of economic difficulties. I don't agree with those decisions — from where I sit, they're short-sighted and regrettable — but conversely, editors aren't under any ethical or moral obligations to balance their books in accordance with my preferences.

One recently cashiered colleague, when I suggested this, pointed out that his newspaper is now covering classical events through the combined agencies of their TV writer and general features reporter. Again, that strikes me as sad but not reprehensible — it's simply an overt admission that in this area, quality is a luxury the paper doesn't feel it can afford.

This is analogous, say, to the question of whether a restaurant can afford to insist on using only the best local produce (yeah, it's a Bay Area analogy; sue me). That gets you bragging rights, and puts your restaurant into a certain elite tier. But it's not imperative, if you find the cost is too high relative to the benefits.

The Plain Dealer's behavior toward Rosenberg, though, is in another category entirely — the culinary equivalent, let's say, of serving rotten meat. It wasn't a financial decision — unlike at other papers, no one at the PD ever said that a classical music critic was an asset they simply couldn't afford — and it wasn't even based on some misguided idea that making a change in the classical coverage would have, I don't know, attracted younger readers or something.

This was lack of ethical standards, pure and simple. And it stinks.

5769

2008-09-29T16:32:00.001-07:00

L'shanah tovah um'tukah a tutti quanti!

Forever Amber

2008-09-26T12:38:00.001-07:00

Mark Morris's new Romeo and Juliet, which opened a four-night run at Cal Performances last night, is every bit as drab and undramatic as you've heard. It has all the traditional Morrisian weaknesses — slavish adherence to the rhythms of the score, a little repertoire of signature gestures repeated ad nauseam — while adding some extra just for you, as Mr. Larkin might say; those include several uncharacteristically clunky crowd sequences and a scene in Friar Laurence's cell that will have you clawing at your face out of sheer tedium. There's also some newly discovered music by Prokofiev and a happy ending, but by the end of three hours it's hard to care. My colleague Steven Winn should have the bloody details in tomorrow's Chron.

But, but, but . . . There is one thing in this production that is truly mesmerizing, namely Morris' choreography for Mercutio and Amber Darragh's breathtaking rendition of same. Let's face it, Mercutio is generally the best part of any Romeo, whether spoken, sung or danced. But I don't think I've never seen his insouciance and wit so vividly or so physically rendered.

Morris has a couple of cross-casting bits here: Tybalt is also danced by a woman (Julie Worden), which doesn't add anything that I can see. But Darragh is tall (taller than some of the men onstage with her) and gangly, and she looks like one of those adenoidal teenagers from a progressive high school who's discovered that sullenness, erudition and verbal flair can be combined to annoy the piss out of the grownups.

Best of all, Mercutio's wit is made flesh in Darragh's dancing, with its slightly unsteady bravado and knowing sarcasm. This is a young man just discovering the power of his satiric gift — sometimes he simply lets it fly, sometimes he pauses to gauge its effect and make little corrections. His disruption of the ball in Act 1 is comically priceless, and by the time Act 2 began (and I'd realized that nothing else on stage would be as rewarding to watch as Darragh) I was convulsed in laughter at just the sight of Mercutio's mincing steps.

And then he dies. The incredible emotional power of Mercutio's death, sardonic to the end, goes back to Shakespeare, of course ("ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man"). But Morris translates that spirit beautifully into movement, as Mercutio stays upright by sheer force of will in between sudden collapses to the stage, and Darragh infuses the scene with heartbreaking pride and ferocity.

I can't say Darragh's performance is worth putting up with the surrounding humdrumitude. But if you're going anyway, and feeling the urge to flee after Act 1, suppress it until the second intermission. Act 2 will amply reward your fortitude; after that you're free to leave.

Fall Cleaning

2008-09-24T12:15:00.000-07:00

Boy, these summer hiatuses (hiati? No, my inner classicist says fourth declension, hence hiatūs, and I ain't going there) do sneak up on one. Take a break from blogging one fine spring afternoon and the next thing you know Labor Day is only a memory.

I've taken the occasion to finally rationalize the blogroll, something I've been meaning to do for years; easier and more fun than cleaning my desk. Overdue apologies to those who've pointed herewards all this time without reciprocity.

Yahoo Genius

2008-09-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

The MacArthur Foundation today acknowledges what many of us have known for a long time: that nut's a genius. Kudos to Alex Ross, who certainly deserves this honor for his erudition, his energy, his imagination and his knack for setting the bar right where the rest of us can see it but not quite reach it.

It's not often that these prizes go in such a self-evidently correct direction. To my great shame, I'm not familiar with the work of local genius Walter Kitundu, but if M. C- feels the award is well-merited then I believe him implicitly.

But the award to Leila Josefowicz perplexes me, and not merely — or not solely — because I haven't heard her give a really great performance since she was about nine years old. It's more that the criteria for giving an award like this to performing musicians seem to be even blurrier than most. I would think this was an award for someone who's actively changing the shape of the musical landscape — which, yeah, by definition is going to mostly mean composers, but can also make room for someone like Dawn Upshaw or Marin Alsop, who've both won the thing, or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who should've got one, or Yo-Yo Ma [pause, search MacArthur website. . . wow, no, never won it. What an astounding oversight.] Josefowicz is a decent violinist and all, but really?

Update: There's a general feeling in comments that I'm talking out of my ass on this last point, than which assertion nothing could be more likely. OK, point taken. I wouldn't paint myself as convinced, exactly, but I'm persuaded at least that my reservations may not have been as well-grounded in, y'know, fact as one would wish, and might have been better left unexpressed. Than which, again, &c.

Bomp Bomp Bomp, Bomp Bomp

2008-06-03T10:31:00.001-07:00

“You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like. You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!” — Bo Diddley (1928-2008)

Separated at Birth

2008-05-31T08:17:00.001-07:00

This Magic Moment (one in a series)

2008-05-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

Brahms, A German Requiem, first movement, nine measures after B

This one snuck up on me during last night's San Francisco Symphony concert, I suppose because I hadn't listened to or thought much about the German Requiem in a few years. My autonomic nervous system knew what was coming, though. About ten seconds before this passage, I suddenly got a little Pavlovian telegram from deep inside that said, "Something you love is about to happen"; a few seconds later I remembered what it was, and sat upright in gleeful anticipation.

On one level, the effect here is fairly standard word-painting. The psalm text shifts from Tränen to Freuden, and Brahms dutifully injects a note of joy into the music; Schütz, the presiding spirit throughout so much of the German Requiem, would have understood and approved.

But what I find particularly moving about this passage is the method Brahms uses to convey a sense of exaltation: He quickens the rhythmic pulse of the music, without changing the tempo or the meter at all. This is a characteristically Brahmsian trick (I'm pretty sure he does something similar in the Second Piano Concerto, although I can't put my finger on it at the moment), adapted from the Renaissance polyphonists he knew and loved so well. And it's a contrast to Wagner, say, who when he wants a change in tempo simply indicates a change in tempo.

What Brahms does here, it seems to me, carries rich metaphorical weight: It's a musical image of locating joy in the mundane. The surrounding structures remain constant, but within the constraints they establish, there's room for the sublime. And the effect is only heightened by its being so temporary — within a few measures the feeling of exaltation has passed, and we're back to the steady, thrumming quarter-note pulse of the opening. But during those few short moments, we had a little glimpse of heaven. Nothing changed, and everything changed.

Der fliehender Holland

2008-05-13T21:55:00.000-07:00

I was just sitting down to write something about Bernard Holland's strange review of Paul Lewis's piano recital when La Cieca brought word that Holland has taken a buyout and is on his way out. So let me return to Paul Lewis another day, and instead take the opportunity to say a word or two about the former chief music critic of the New York Times.

Holland's work has come in for a good share of bashing around the blögôsphère over the years, and today's news will probably unleash more. But on the old Latin principle of de exemptis nil nisi bonum (speak no ill of the bought-out), I'd rather laud his virtues. For me, three in particular stand out.

• Holland has a remarkable ability to conjure up the essence of a composer or a piece of music in a few deftly chosen words. He is, I think, an aphorist of unparalleled virtuosity. I remember as though it were yesterday — and good Lord, it's been 11 years! — the awe and envy I felt on encountering over my morning coffee this passage about Giacinto Scelsi:

The music, with its emphasis on single tones or at least the implication of a single tone, exchanges one dimension for another. Beethoven has length; Scelsi has depth. A Beethoven sonata begins at the front door, takes a trip, meets new friends, goes home. A Scelsi piece closes the front door and digs in the basement.

That paragraph is both beautiful and true. But even when Holland's notions about a particular piece or about music history in general are wrong-headed — which, let's face it, they often are — they're expressed with wonderful efficiency. He can pack more into a couple of allusive sentences than many of us can into a painstakingly argued paragraph.

• At his best, Holland has been a fearless critic. It's hard to recall now, after so many years during which his anti-modernist bent has hardened into unexamined shtick, replete with reflexive, ill-considered sneers at everyone from Schoenberg on down.

But there was a time when that position was both better argued (on his part) and presented in the context of a more fraught cultural environment. The emperor's-new-clothes argument put forth by Andrew Porter and his ilk — "you'd love Elliott Carter's music as much as I do if only you were as smart as I am" — carried a certain coercive force, and it took real courage to face that down.

Here's Holland, writing in 1988 about Carter's Piano Concerto:

I believe I share with the large majority of musical audiences — trained and otherwise — an utter defeat before most of Mr. Carter's music. Full of energy, power and impressive sophistication though it may be, it occupies a world remote from my senses. The cognoscenti who extol his genius ask us to try harder so that we, too, may leave the ranks of the unwashed and join the anointed.

Posterity, furthermore, fills us with dread; for none of us wish to join the philistines of history who sneered at Schumann and made Berlioz's life a misery. We are in effect buyers in a futures market. The recognition of greatness is the commodity, and none of us want to miss a chance to get in on the ground floor. . .

My broker says, ''Buy.'' My heart says, ''Don't.''

• Finally, Holland has a delightful willingness to get weird, to do the quirky and unexpected thing. I understand that's what drives his detractors crazy — it often drives me crazy too — but when it works, he comes up with stuff no one else could ever have thought of. Who can forget his mad decision to include Count Basie in a roundup of minimalist CDs?

But the best Holland moment ever — and for years I used to bring up this episode whenever anyone said a word against him — happened sometime in the early '80s. (I suppose I could now confirm the details of this story in the Times archives, but I prefer to cling to my memories of it — as the late great Herb Caen used to say about a good yarn, "check it and lose it.")

Holland got sent to Fort Worth to cover the Van Cliburn Competition, and he dutifully filed the necessary reports on all the subsidiary rounds and on the eventual winner. But then, before he packed up and came home, he filed one last report. It was a scene-setter about Dallas nightlife, and in particular about the hard-drinking, rough-and-tumble milieu in a cowboy bar of the sort depicted in the John Travolta/Debra Winger flick Urban Cowboy — mechanical bull and all.

And because it was all done in the best New York Times third-person style — completely straight-faced, completely impersonal — I was two-thirds of the way through the article before it dawned on me what he'd done. He'd gone out and got shit-faced after the competition, and then turned it into a feature for the Times.

Seriously, how can you not admire that kind of journalistic enterprise? Ten to one he put his whole bar tab on his expense report.

Update: Aah, I couldn't resist (sorry, Herb). Turns out the bar was in Fort Worth, not Dallas; it was in 1989, not the early '80s; and there was no bull. Otherwise, though, I'd say my recollection of Holland's brief stint as the Hunter Thompson of classical music criticism wasn't far off the mark.

Mi chiamano Meme

2008-05-07T12:14:00.001-07:00

When Lisa Hirsch first tagged me with the latest blog meme, I was inclined to let the whole thing pass, partly because I didn't (and still don't) quite grok the point of the exercise and partly because, like Matthew Guerrieri, I had a suspicion I'd seen this one come around before. But when I got double-teamed by the Detritus boys, I figured it was time to hunker down and do as I'd been told (acknowledging that in the meantime, Patrick V. had definitively whupped my ass in the punning-blog-post-title sweepstakes).

So to reiterate, the assignment is like this:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The nearest book to hand these days is The Vicar of Bullhampton, the 36th leg of my life-nourishing pilgrimage through all 46 novels of Anthony Trollope, and the relevant passage looks like this:

"My lord, his father's house is his own, to entertain whom he may please, as much as is yours. And were I to suggest to you to turn out your daughters, it would be no worse an offence than your suggesting to Mr. Brattle that he should turn out his son."

"My daughters!"

"Yes, your daughters, my lord."

Taken out of context like that, this exchange probably sounds a little Pythonesque. You'll have to take my word for it that the processes of chance have actually coughed up a rather exquisite little moment (Cage would've been delighted), as the fearless and dry-witted title character deftly punctures the hauteur of the odious Marquis of Trowbridge by daring to speak of his wizened spinster daughters in the same breath as young Sam Brattle. The vicar's offense is so grave, in fact, that later, after stewing about it all the way home, the marquis will write an outraged letter of complaint to the bishop, which that wise clergyman will duly laugh off.

But rather than dwelling on this passage, let me take the opportunity to don my fanatic's hat and proselytize for the splendors of Trollope's work. He's the Heinrich Schütz of English literature, the greatest creative artist whose work the average educated Joe doesn't know at all. (Years ago, I ran into a local arts writer on the street while toting a volume of Trollope under my arm. He was intrigued and nonplussed. Trollope's was a new name to him, he said, adding fatuously, "and I'm very well-read!")

Even those who know of Trollope may not realize what a treasure lies here undiscovered. One reason is that too many readers are introduced to him through The Warden or Barchester Towers, two of his dullest and least successful novels. A related problem is the likelihood of coming to Trollope from Dickens, who is admittedly zestier, broader in scope and of course far funnier. If you pick up The Warden while under the impression that Dickens represents the summa of Victorian literature — as I originally did, all those years ago — you could easily conclude that Trollope's writing is wan, flavorless stuff.

But start somewhere else and you will soon find a writer keenly alive to the moral and interpersonal struggles that all of us go through daily, and able to render them with both vividness and subtlety. Trollope's great party trick is to get his characters into moral quandaries that are brought about through no one's fault, but from which there is really no virtuous way out. Sometimes the plotting required is, in its quiet way, worthy of Feydeau. In He Knew He Was Right, for instance, a young clergyman who is a little dull-witted but not at all malicious manages to let each of two sisters believe she is engaged to marry him; yet if you go back through their conversations it's nearly impossible to find the moment when he could have acted otherwise than as he did.

Another of Trollope's great themes is the politics of personal strength, the quality that determines the winner in a battle of wills. The Way We Live Now features, among other things, a young man who can't break up with the American divorcée he's seeing and marry the girl he loves because — well, because she won't let him, that's all. And like any Victorian novelist, Trollope is fantastically good on the question of how to decide what to do with your life (even if the distaff version of that question is, inevitably, "whom shall I marry?").

As I say, Trollope lacks Dickens' verbal flair, but he also completely lacks Dickens' taste for bathos; there's no Little Nell dying laughably within his pages. He also boasts a degree of moral nuance that Dickens — whose characters are almost all clad in big black or white hats — sorely lacks (and by the way, read Richard Russo's Straight Man for the definitive moral takedown of David Copperfield). The one danger in taking up Trollope, in fact, is that you may find your love of Dickens sorely tested.

So where to begin, then? Well, despite what I said earlier, Trollope's greatest achievements are the two six-book series, the Barchester and Palliser novels. The catch is that each of those really must be read in a single stretch; themes and characters recur throughout, and in each series, the last novel only attains its full grandeur with specific reference to the first.

The best single novels, in my opinion, are He Knew He Was Right, as heartbreaking a portrait of obsession and marital dysfunction as was ever written; The Way We Live Now, Trollope's bold, slightly overambitious attempt to take in the entire sweep of Victorian culture in a single book; and The Bertrams, which Tolstoy specially admired.

Those are enough to let you know whether Trollope is your cup of tea. If he is, then other joys await — not only the two great series, but also obscure and no less wonderful gems: Lady Anna, an unusually frank (for Trollope) examination of the class system; the dark morality tale An Eye for an Eye; John Caldigate and Rachel Ray, twin indictments of religious fanaticism; the fresh-faced comedy of The Belton Estate; or the autumnal sweetness of Trollope's last novel, An Old Man's Love.

And more, and more, and more. Because here's the clincher: Trollope wrote 46 novels, most of them in the 500-800 page range. He published, on average, two or three a year, writing for four hours every morning before trooping off to his day job with the Post Office (in addition to his literary accomplishments, he also came up with the idea of the street-corner mailbox). And with one or two exceptions (avoid The Fixed Period at all costs), they're all good.

So once you join the cult, you can be sure that you will never go hungry again. In this respect, Trollope-lovers are the happiest people on the planet. We smile benevolently upon the Jane Austeners, rereading the same six dog-eared books over and over and over; but in our hearts we pity them, and feel grateful to have escaped their fate.

Time now to tag others. Since this meme has bounced around the classical blögôsphère pretty comprehensively, I think I'll pass the torch to some literary, non-musical blogger friends: Cowboy Dave Dickerson (no, he ain't a fer-real cowboy, but he is one helluva stud), Eric Berlin, and Francis Heaney. We'll see what they come up with.

Chicago Pinstripes

2008-05-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

The news on the rialto today is that the Chicago Symphony has signed Riccardo Muti as its next music director, effective in 2010. Bloggers are passing the news from site to site, but I haven't seen any commentary yet on what it all means, or whether or not this is a good call, and why. Big Marc? Andrew? How say you both?

I'd speculate myself, if I knew a damn thing on the subject. My own experience with Muti live has been sparse and inconclusive, and in any case, the issue is not about this performance or that, but the day-to-day operations, both musical and non-. I accept the maestro's testimony, and that of orchestra president Deborah Card, that his recent collaborations with the orchestra have been all kinds of wonderful. But I'm curious about his stated commitment to doing all the grunt work — the auditioning, the fund-raising, the administrative stuff — that comes with an American music directorship. This was the sticking point for Barenboim, and supposedly in Muti's negotiations with the New York Phil. What changed his mind?

The more interesting point, though, is the direction that the orchestra has chosen to go with this appointment. In general, I think there are deep and revealing parallels to be drawn between the building of a sports franchise — a baseball team, say — and an orchestra, and I live in hope that someone who actually knows something about sports (why not Matthew?) will lay out the analogy in detail.

Yet even with my spotty knowledge of baseball, I grasp that, roughly speaking, you can try to win a pennant either by a) attracting proven, high-performing (and therefore expensive) talent — that's the George Steinbrenner method — or b) building a team out of young and still-developing players. The same sorts of options present themselves to orchestra managers.

The problem with the second plan is that it takes time — as well as a good nose for talent. The Pittsburgh and Dallas Symphonies, for instance, have both committed themselves to young, little-known Europeans (Manfred Honeck and Jaap van Zweden, respectively). That means a period of a few years in which those orchestras' reputations and achievements will be more or less put on hold while everybody gets used to each other. And at the end of that time, the leadership is going to look like geniuses or jackasses, depending on how things work out.

To hire Muti, on the other hand, is like signing — well, whoever stepped into Reggie Jackson's cleats after I stopped following baseball. Let's assume that, as with the Yankees, money is no object for the CSO, and figure that, like Jackson, Muti can hit the symphonic long ball. Still, the catch here is that you're grabbing today's glory at the potential expense of tomorrow's. I'm not saying that's a bad decision — who else deserves a conductor like Muti if not the CSO? — only that it's got a comparatively short-term payoff horizon. (Is that a real phrase? If not, I'm proud to have invented it.)

To see the risk of this kind of strategy, you only have to look at our friends the New York Phil, always the poster child for bass-ackwards game-theory decisions. They wanted a big-name music director and couldn't get one; they bought time with Maazel; they bought more time; they wound up back where they started. Taking the long view when it mattered could have helped them avoid that embarrassment (by which I don't mean either the appointment of Maazel or Gilbert, but rather the fumfering and flailing that accompanied them).

On the other hand, there's something smart and self-fulfilling about refusing to settle for anyone but a proven, older, A-list conductor (for as long as there are any around). It makes your orchestra seem consequential, as indeed it should. "We're the Chicago Symphony, dammit!" There's something kinda thrilling about an attitude like that.

Saint-Exupéry justifié

2008-05-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

I first read The Little Prince at 7, and when I was through I wept with such unbridled, full-throated abandon that my mother speaks of the incident to this day. When I reread it last week in preparation for tonight's opening of the Rachel Portman opera, the book turned out to be twee, smug and sentimental. Who knew?

Not until last night did it occur to me that the problem lay not in the text, but in the reader. Just as Saint-Exupéry had predicted, I've lost the ability to appreciate his little fable. I've become that most benighted of beings, a grownup. How sad.

On the other hand, I can drink scotch now. On balance, I think I got the better end of that bargain.

For the Anti-Ligeti League

2008-05-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

Let's imagine that for your own twisted, philistine reasons you really, really hate the Poème symphonique. This is what you do about it.

h/t Eric Berlin

Public Displays of Aggression

2008-04-10T16:54:00.000-07:00

This isn't really the place for this conversation, but ACD over at Sounds & Fury doesn't allow commenting in his house, presumably out of fear that the "proles" — which is to say, you and I — might scribble on the walls with crayons. So, faute de mieux en effet, here we be.

Mr. D has his knickers in a twist over my suggestion that Alan Rich's vile 2006 bitch-slapping of music critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles might not have been, y'know, his finest hour. Yet in one of those wonderfully self-refuting moments of which he is himself a connoisseur, ACD makes my point for me by adding "(whoever they might be)." The fact that Baer and Pasles cast such comparatively small shadows upon the musical-critical landscape is precisely what makes the act of going after them — and doing it in such a bloodthirsty fashion — so small, and so unworthy.

Bernheimer, now — Bernheimer is another story. Whatever your views on the merits of Rich's 100-year crusade against Bernheimer, there's no denying that the powerful, Pulitzer Prize-winning chief music critic of the Los Angeles Times was at any rate a target worthy of his efforts. Bernheimer had an enormous influence on the cultural life of Southern California for a very long time. If you felt, as Alan did — and felt passionately, as only Alan can — that that influence was malign, then it became a moral imperative (and, let's face it, probably a pleasure as well) to combat it tooth and nail. But Adam Baer, the young freelancer? You've gotta be kidding me.

The inability to distinguish between those two kinds of aggressiveness has always been a flaw in Rich's writing, and it's a flaw that ACD's chest-beating paeans to "courage" and "hair-mussing" and "offensiveness" share in spades. To put it another way, Alan's willingness to say whatever is on his mind, regardless of consequences, comes in two flavors (both in print and in person). One is courage, properly understood; the other is merely thuggishness. I think it's important to celebrate the first while deploring the second.

Rich

2008-04-09T21:51:00.000-07:00

Like all right-thinking people, I join the chorus of deploration (is that a word? Evidently not, unless you're Josquin) over the news that Alan Rich has been ousted from the pages of the LA Weekly. Perhaps the surprise is that they let him hang around as long as they did, given the longstanding and almost explicitly stated commitment of Village Voice Media honcho Michael Lacey and his troupe of flunkies to Lack of Quality at all costs. I'm not intimately conversant with the LA Weekly, but the SF Weekly up here where I live certainly carries the banner for all that is smug, fatuous, and thought-deadening. Alan's columns must have seemed defiantly, definitively out of place.

The good news, of course, is that he is still among us (note to bloggers: never title an item about an 83-year-old widely beloved legend "Bad news from LA" unless your express intention is to give your readers a nasty shock), and that he will continue to post his columns on the internet. I for one couldn't do without them — not so much for the window they provide onto Los Angeles' musical life as for the entree they offer into Alan's amazing musical consciousness.

It was reading his reviews in New York throughout the 1970s that first made me want to get into this game. Imagine what an eye-opener those articles were — the smart, pugnacious prose style, the insatiable curiosity, the breadth of knowledge, and best of all, the passion for music (it's a fortunate critic who loves and hates as keenly as Alan does). They opened up whole new worlds, and continue to do so, week after week.

Not, of course, that there haven't been missteps. In a post from Bizarro World, ACD singles out for praise Alan's most regrettable recent episode, his shameful tirade against fellow critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles. True Richophiles would prefer to blot out the memory of that one; it was, in the memorable words of Tibor Fischer on Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, "not-knowing-where-to-look bad. . .like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."

I wish I could counter with an extended quotation of Alan at his best, but my copy of his recent published collection seems to have absquatulated. And in any case, as I say, the Richerei I savor most dates from the old New York period, and lives on in my memory in bits and pieces — a glorious Mozart's Birthday essay (an annual staple in those days) connecting "Porgi amor" with the slow movement of the Bassoon Concerto, an unforgettable excoriation of George Rochberg's (in)famous Third String Quartet, a sidelong self-outing in something like 1970 (!).

Probably Alan's single greatest gift to me was a column he wrote, God knows when, about his declining ability to listen to and enjoy Brahms' symphonies. Drawing the comparison to a love gone cold, he wrote, "We have grown apart, Brahms and I." I caught my breath on reading that, not because I shared the sentiment — my love for those symphonies continues unabated — but because I hadn't known you were allowed to say things like that. Alan gave me courage, and an example. He still does, LA Weekly or no.

Nobody Listens to Me

2008-04-07T21:52:00.000-07:00

Does Bob Dylan Deserve a Pulitzer?
By Gary Shapiro
"I don't think Bob Dylan needs a Pulitzer Prize," said a classical music critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman...
— New York Sun, 10/19/04

A Special Citation to Bob Dylan for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.
— Pulitzer Prize Committee, 4/7/08

Note that the Sun headline doesn't reflect what I said, or believe; the quote does, though.

Toward a Typology of Juvenilia

2008-04-04T17:43:00.000-07:00

An interesting concert last week by a dynamite local syndicate of teen composers reminded me that there are two principal ways of being a beginning composer, roughly speaking. (Yes indeed, if you divide the world into those who divide the world into two categories and those who don't, I'm in the former camp.)

One type is the kid who's bursting with weird, distinctive, half-formed ideas and hasn't yet figured out how to get them under control, or how to organize those thoughts in the most effective or coherent way. The other is more interested in doping out and mastering the technical aspects of the game, with the (perhaps) unspoken assumption that the ideas will come along in due time. Maybe another way of saying this is that the motivation for some young composers is to write stuff nobody's ever written before, and for others it's the desire to join the party by imitating the music they love best.

I'll bet there are plenty of (grown-up) folks with a strong preference for one type or another, but personally I have a soft spot for both — or rather, my feelings of indulgence and impatience settle at about the same equilibrium point in both cases. There's something simultaneously charming and frustrating about the reach-exceeds-his-grasp type of composer, just as the work of the skilled-artisan-in-parvo can feel both impressive and limited.

And it isn't clear to me that either predilection is necessarily a better marker for future success. "Give her time, she'll learn how to channel that imagination" seems just as plausible a proposition as "He's accumulating some useful skills; he'll be something to watch when he figures out what to do with them."

As a relentlessly dualist schematizer, I'd also point out that this dichotomy bears a strong family resemblance to one that applies to adult composers. You know the one I mean, as crude and reductive as it undoubtedly is: Lennon/McCartney, Schumann/Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky/Tchaikovsky, Mahler/Strauss, Flansburgh/Linnell, I'm sure there are jazz ones for those who know their jazz (pas moi, hélas).

What I'd be curious to know is whether composers tend to stay on the same side of that divide as they develop. Mendelssohn certainly did, but he's one of the only composers whose juvenilia we hear much (Mozart of course transcends all of this). Who's got access to funding for a longitudinal study?

Start Making Sense

2008-03-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

The Carl Orff edition.

(h/t Jon Delfin)

Mea Culpa

2008-02-09T18:15:00.000-08:00

Roger Bourland's blog post about bad first impressions provides the nudge I needed to offer him an overdue public apology. Many years ago, when I first started in this gig and was laboring under a variety of misconceptions about how it should be undertaken, I made some regrettable remarks in print about his music; it's one of the handful of things I'm most ashamed of having written, and I trust I would never write something similar today. I'm sorry, Roger.

As he says, many of us neglect to update our first impressions, and I've always figured that if he thinks of me at all, it's with the assumption that I'm still the same old schmuck. Not so. I might still be a schmuck, but I'm not that schmuck.

Why I Love Blogs

2008-02-05T10:41:00.000-08:00

Because of things like this, which brought a burst of joy to a largely sorrowful day.

Agree or not, that hardly matters. But take the historical view for a moment. Here's a person who is clearly both wise and smart, plus funny and eloquent and generous and broad-minded and demanding. And until a few years ago, he would have been dispensing these pearls where? Presumably in one-on-one conversations and at dinner parties and salons that I would never have been invited to.

Now everything's changed, and for my benefit (the only relevant metric, in the end). It's as though — to conjure up an image not remotely at random — there are all these digital Boswells running around, making sure no one's sparkling table talk gets lost. And that's why I love blogs.

That, and La Cieca dubbing the forthcoming product of the Schrott-Netrebko double love cadenza Li'l Schrebbs.

See Those Two Little Dots?

2008-01-31T23:41:00.001-08:00

So now we've had two Schubert "Great" C-Major Symphonies in the space of two weeks — led, respectively, by Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco and Kent Nagano in Berkeley — and neither conductor took the exposition repeat in the first movement. What's up with that?

I know there's a line of thought out there that says that repeats, and Schubert's repeats in particular, are kinda sorta optional. (Alfred Brendel wrote something to this effect in an essay in the New York Review of Books a number of years back, and I really ought to try to dig it up, because the argument couldn't possibly be as flimsy as it seemed at the time.) But I'm not buying. What's the thinking, that we're all busy people with someplace else to get to? Wouldn't the default position be to, y'know, play what the composer wrote? Maybe I should just be grateful they did all the movements.

Because look, the narrative in a traditional sonata-form movement isn't "Here's some music, now we'll mess it around, now it all comes out nice in the tonic." It's "Here's some music — wait, you sure you've got it fixed in your mind? OK, now we'll mess it around, etc." Skipping the exposition repeat jettisons a structurally essential part of that narrative. It's like a card trick in which the magician doesn't bother to make certain everyone sees the card that's been drawn.

Not only that, but you can lose some great music in the process (though not, admittedly, in the Schubert C-Major). In my callow youth, I got to know the Brahms First through a recording that omitted the first-movement repeat — and with it, one of the most glorious moments in that movement. I'm talking about the jolting shift from E-flat minor back to C minor by sheer force of compositional fiat, a grandchild of Beethoven's similarly willful move from E-flat to C as he launches the coda to the first movement of the "Eroica." It was years before I heard Brahms' scintillating passage, all because some conductor (Bruno Walter, I think, though I could be wrong) decided to drop it on the floor.

I don't mean to be doctrinaire about this, except that yes I do. As a general rule, the composer knows more than you do, for most values of "you." So play the damn repeat, why don'tcha. Or if you don't think Schubert's music is interesting enough to hold up for two go-rounds, then program, I don't know, Respighi or J. C. Bach instead. Sheesh.

Margaret Truman, R.I.P.

2008-01-30T12:42:00.000-08:00

I think I can speak for all working music critics when I say that the threat of a punch in the snout from a sitting president is the kind of honor most of us can only dream of.

Read It and Weep

2008-01-30T07:57:00.000-08:00

I was sad to have to skip Sunday's Berkeley performance of Messiaen's Vingt Regards by the brilliant Christopher Taylor (called out of town by an unmissable opportunity). Then I read Patrick Vaz's beautiful account of the recital, and was heartbroken.

The Virtual Reviewer

2008-01-21T09:07:00.000-08:00

Innovative as ever, Bernard Holland pioneers the New Music Criticism^® in this morning's New York Times:

Anyone familiar with the reputations of these three singers can imagine the quality of the performances.

Yessss. I think my work life is about to get a whole lot easier.

• Anyone with an internet connection can determine the music on the program and the names of the performers.

• Anyone with access to the New Grove can learn the background and history of these pieces.

• Anyone familiar with my work can imagine my critical reaction to the evening's performances.

Anyone familiar with music criticism can imagine the possibilities.

Modern Music Explained

2008-01-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

During intermission after last night's San Francisco Symphony performance of À l'Île de Gorée, Xenakis' exciting but slightly daunting 1986 harpsichord concerto, I happened to overhear a white-haired subscriber just at the moment of what seemed to be a genuine revelation.

"Oh I see," she said to her friend — "it's weird. Like a Picasso."

Which not only sums it up, as far as I'm concerned, but throws the spotlight, for about the millionth time, on the central problem of 20th-century music. Why is Picasso a useful reference point for understanding Xenakis (or Schoenberg, or Bartók, or Stockhausen) rather than vice versa? Why is there such a vast gap in the rate of acceptance of novelty between music and the other arts (all of them, really)?

It could be a historical anomaly, since it's more obviously true of the 20th century than earlier periods. It could be a function of inherent differences in the art forms (e.g., musical performances unfolding in real time vs. paintings that can be taken in at a glance), although that dodges other questions. Maybe it's a matter of economic and societal influences, or maybe Picasso was a better painter than Schoenberg was a composer (whatever that might mean, exactly). Hell if I know.

What we need is a cultural version of Jared Diamond's magnificent Guns, Germs, and Steel, explaining how different art forms can start out in the same place and wind up so far apart. I bet it all goes back to crop domestication and food surpluses.

Wälsungs in Shropshire

2008-01-12T09:05:00.000-08:00

The NYT has the story.

A brother and sister who were parted at birth and adopted by different families married without knowing of their biological relationship, and then won an annulment, a leading anti-abortion campaigner, David Alton, said in the House of Lords on Friday.

[snip]

A parliamentary transcript of the peer’s December speech, published this week, quoted him as saying that the couple were never told they had been born as twins. “They met later and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences,” he said.

Discerning

2008-01-03T16:14:00.000-08:00

Baltimore audiences know new music, to judge from this heartening snippet of Alex Ross's article on Marin Alsop's first season:

John Adams drew a sizable house for his concerts; Tan Dun's sold poorly.

Black Wednesday

2007-12-08T08:20:00.000-08:00

Back in the '60s, the deaths used to come in threes, but not on the same day. On Wednesday, the world of music lost three important and irreplaceable figures: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Andrew Imbrie and H. Wiley Hitchcock.

December 5 was also the day Mozart died.

Karlheinz Stockhausen R.I.P.

2007-12-07T16:21:00.000-08:00

Stockhausen features in one of my all-time favorite composer-meets-composer stories, but unfortunately not as the hero. Still, I can't resist sharing, and trusting that it takes nothing away from today's well-merited eulogies.

The narrator is Morton Feldman.

Stockhausen asked for my secret, "What's your secret?" And I said, "I don't have any secret, but if I do have a point of view, it's that sounds are very much like people. And if push them, they push you back. So, if I have a secret: Don't push the sounds around."

Karlheinz leans over to me and says: "Not even a little bit?"

Cruising

2007-10-10T16:44:00.000-07:00

Alex Ross points us to Graham Vick's recent whining about carpetbagger opera directors (i.e., ones with a background in theater and film), and puts in a vote of confidence, or at least open-mindedness, in connection with Woody Allen's planned opera debut, directing Gianni Schicchi for the L.A. Opera next year.

Personally, I don't feel all that optimistic about Allen — he makes the requisite charmingly self-deprecating noises, but history suggests that so-called "high art" can bring out some of his less attractive traits (insecurity, peevishness, a desire to overcompensate).

But some of the best opera directing I've encountered in recent years has indeed been the work of a film director, who as it happens is signed up for the other two-thirds of that L.A. Trittico. That is, of all people, William Friedkin, the auteur of The French Connection, The Exorcist, the underappreciated To Live and Die in L.A. and, most recently, Bug (which I missed in the theater but have moved to the top of my Netflix queue).

In 2002 he directed a double bill of Bluebeard's Castle and Gianni Schicchi in L.A. that was remarkable for the way it joined two disparate works together while giving each one its own identity. He has a wonderful eye, an obvious knowledge of and love for music, and he moved easily between the worlds of tragedy and comedy (and you have to feel for Allen, not only directing opera for the first time but directing a work that Friedkin staged so unforgettably just a few years ago for the same company).

Two years later, Friedkin topped himself with an amazing production of Ariadne auf Naxos, set amid the egomaniacs and power brokers of Hollywood — natch — but done with wit and pathos and visual energy. Best of all, it was genuinely funny. Sure, Ariadne gets billed as a comedy, but I've always taken that in some specialized, Bayerisch, dumpling-laden sense. Until Friedkin's, I'd never encountered a production that was truly comic, in the sense of, you know, making you laugh.

I can't wait to see what he does with Tabarro and Suor Angelica. And if it means fewer gigs for Graham Vick and his ilk, we'll consider that a fringe benefit.

The Fine Print

2007-10-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

Just returned from the San Francisco Symphony's open rehearsal, where I witnessed something surprising: Roberto Abbado conducting the Chopin F-Minor Concerto from one of those little yellow Eulenburg miniature study scores. As I creep into presbyopic middle age, I find myself increasingly unable to use those things even for study. And he's got it on the podium? What an ophtho-stud.

Point Counterpoint

2007-09-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of blogger Tristero (a/k/a composer Richard Einhorn), the latest in fugal technique.

All In One Place

2007-09-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

Of all the things to lament in the lamentable new Graham Vick production of Tannhäuser that opened at the San Francisco Opera this week — the ham-fisted treatment of sex in Wagner's second-most-erotic opera, the crawling zombies infesting the Song Contest, the doltish pilgrims with their illegible red sin tattoos — the one that keeps chafing at me, oddly enough, is designer Paul Brown's unit set.

It's inside, it's outside; it's a hall, it's a field, it's a road, it's a forest. It makes no damn sense at all, and it tells us nothing about the drama being played out upon it.

And by an obvious contrast, it put me in mind of one of the most sleekly revelatory staging decisions I've seen in recent years, which also uses a single location in a Wagner opera — except this time, to brilliant effect.

It comes at the beginning of the second act of Die Walküre in director Stephen Wadsworth's pretty-darn-swell Ring for the Seattle Opera. The curtain goes up, and there's Wotan and Brünnhilde, not on a mountaintop, but in front of Hunding's hut. Everything is just the way we left it at the end of Act 1 — including, most notably, the housewares that Siegmund and Sieglinde left scattered behind in their mad rush to passion — and for a moment it's as though the intermission had never happened. But something is different: the light. It's not just that it's now daytime instead of night; the atmosphere looks thinner somehow, as though the mountain peaks of Valhalla had descended to Hunding's forest.

At that moment, the audience instantly apprehends a number of noteworthy things very clearly. We understand that the world of the gods and that of men and women are not distinct places on the map, but two spheres that somehow occupy the same physical location; they're interwoven, or overlaid on each other like plastic transparencies, and so we feel how closely the fates of these characters are bound up with one another.

We understand, too, with a new force, how similar godly matrimony is to its mortal counterpart; we get a brisk, intuitive sense of the psychological rhymes that join these two disparate marriages, and of the emotional and sexual imperatives that dominate both races. And later, when Fricka makes her entrance, there's a magisterial moment in which she surveys the broken crockery and (as portrayed by the great Stephanie Blythe) grasps in an instant everything that has happened in Act 1 — because, you know, she's a married woman herself.

All of this, as I say, is conveyed in a flash, with the potency of an elemental truth. There's no bizarre imagery, no elaborately coded system that can be forced to give up its meaning if you read the director's apologia in the program book after you get home; just a simple, clear revelation that changes how you understand the drama. And that, secondo me, is how it's done.

Back

2007-09-20T21:00:00.000-07:00

Boy, you walk away for a week or two to concentrate on some other projects, and the next thing you know you're estivating. Sorry for the long hiatus — anything groovy happen while I was out?

Déjà Vu à la Belge

2007-05-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

Allow me to don my Carnac the Magnificent headgear for a moment and make the following prediction: Gerard Mortier's tenure as head of the New York City Opera will be brief and ill-starred. I say this without pleasure, indeed with a fervent hope to be proven wrong; but also without much doubt. The reason is that I lived through Pamela Rosenberg's brief and ill-starred tenure as head of the San Francisco Opera, and the parallels seem to be shaping up with eerie exactitude.

It would be simplistic and wrong to call Rosenberg's stewardship of the San Francisco Opera a failure — her time here was marked by an invigorating spirit of adventure, and of course a number of genuine theatrical triumphs, including Saint François d'Assise, Le Grand Macabre, and Doctor Atomic. But it was also based on some very deep-rooted errors in judgment, both by her and by the folks who hired her. And the most fundamental one can be summed up in two hypothetical sentences: "It worked in Europe. Why on earth wouldn't it work here?"

You can take that "it" to refer to any number of things: repertoire choices, production styles, casting decisions, marketing strategies, financial priorities. They all apply. The Rosenberg era was based on a belief that San Francisco could become Stuttgart if we all just wished it hard enough. But Peter Pan isn't an opera, and the observers (out-of-towners, mostly) who still insist that Rosenberg was "run out of town" by mobs of provincial burghers-by-the-bay are actually just mad at reality for failing to conform to their own desires.

Now comes M. Mortier, with what looks from here like the exact same game plan. The priorities he cites in this morning's New York Times interview with Dan Wakin include the familiar intention to "bring in fresh European faces as directors," and his repertoire choices are positively Rosenbergesque: Stravinsky, Janácek, Bartók, and — oh, yeah — Saint François d'Assise.

Well, look, those are my repertoire choices, too; and when I win ten lotteries and can support my own opera company, they'll be on the boards nightly. But the real world isn't so malleable. Because here, if you'll forgive me, is the money quote:

Mr. Mortier said two prospects "scared" him. One is having to raise large amounts of money from private donors without the kind of government money that finances the Paris National Opera.

Exactly. Of all the things that don't replicate well from one side of the Atlantic to the other, funding is number one on the list. Maybe two, three, and four as well. And from there, all things flow.

"It worked in Europe. Why on earth wouldn't it work here?" If history is any guide, M. Mortier and the board that hired him may find out soon enough.

This Magic Moment (one in a series)

2007-05-05T21:41:00.000-07:00

Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, second movement, m. 225

The fact that this is my favorite single moment in the Beethoven Fifth is bound up with the fact that it comes during my least favorite movement. Not by a lot, I hasten to add — I'm not weird about it or anything, to quote Tom Waits — but I do always find myself getting slightly itchy as the Andante wears on. Even though the thrill of hearing Beethoven blast his way from A-flat to trumpet-and-drums C major never palls, the variation form feels somehow constrained here, in a way that it never does with Haydn. And most cloying of all is the falling-thirds gesture, which is so beautiful that it keeps coming back exactly, like a five-year-old who gets a laugh from the adults and repeats the same wisecrack in hopes of more.

Then, out of nowhere, comes this amazing rush of melodic liberation, as if the entire orchestra shared my sense of confinement and had decided to dispel it once and for all. That leap to the seventh degree is stirring enough in itself, but what's most stunning is the harmony — a stroke of unbelievable lushness that seems to presage the next 100 years of Romanticism in a single chord. It's as though Tchaikovsky had walked into the room, tipped his hat, and left again. Beethoven is so prophetic all the time in so many ways, but I don’t know another spot where he anticipates this particular aspect of the future. And precisely because the rest of the movement has felt (to me) so hemmed in and so formal, it feels like a hint of other, more bountiful worlds yet to come: "I have discovered a truly marvelous harmonic language, which this manuscript paper is too narrow to contain."

Slava, R.I.P.

2007-04-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

The world is a quieter and sadder place today.

News from the Big Apple

2007-04-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

New York, April 25 — Conceding that the task of finding a music director to succeed Lorin Maazel was "far beyond our capabilities," officials of the New York Philharmonic yesterday announced a plan to make the orchestra's podium available to "anyone who wants to take a crack at" the job.

"After years of trying to locate and hire a music director who would make this organization culturally relevant again," executive director Zarin Mehta said at an imaginary press conference, "we had to finally accept the fact that we simply don't know how to do it.

"I mean, we're flailin' here."

Instead of appointing a single music director whose artistic vision could provide the orchestra with a distinctive character and sense of direction, Mehta said the new plan — which he called the "wiki model" of orchestra management — would divide leadership among a principal conductor, various guest conductors, a composer-in-residence, a festival director, and the guy who brings the donuts to the morning staff meetings.

"If collaborative projects like Wikipedia teach us anything," he said, "it's that the collective intelligence of a community is always better than a single guiding figure. Right here in the orchestra world, you can look at the Pittsburgh Symphony's experiment with multiple leadership — that was a tremendous success.

"Oh wait, no it wasn't."

The New York Philharmonic's move comes on the heels of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's electrifying decision to appoint 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel as its next music director — a development that Mehta treated with barely concealed scorn.

"This whole idea of conductors being exciting, dynamic, or innovative figures has been completely discredited," he said. "Look, this orchestra tried something similar with Leonard Bernstein, and that was a total fiasco.

"Oh wait, no it wasn't."

The ghost of Virgil Thomson declined to comment.

Update: Matthew Guerrieri maps it out for you.

I Give Up

2007-04-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

Composer, pianist, conductor, critic, blogger extraordinaire — and now hilarious cartoonist to boot? It is to weep.

Frame Down

2007-04-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

If 4' 33" adds a frame where none had been, the widely remarked-on Joshua Bell stunt does the converse. Take the Bach Chaconne out of the museum and plunk it down in the subway at rush hour, and it turns out that many people don't recognize it as Great Art — or have too many other things on their mind to react to it with the kind of pious reverence some might expect.

I'm not sure why this comes as such a surprise to so many people. As Cage understood and demonstrated, the presence of the gilt frame is not value-free; it fundamentally changes, even defines, our experience of art.

The writer does uncover some fascinating variations among the responses to Bell the busker, and I'm not wholly out of sympathy with the exercise. But he lost me early, with this bit of transparent phoniness:

These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

Oh please. Next time around, let's put a priest in the metro station elevating the Host, and see how many commuters stop to take communion.

Frame Up

2007-04-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

Belatedly catching up with Steve Smith's eloquent recap of Pierre-Laurent Aimard's Zankel Hall concert, I was startled to find him treating Cage's 4' 33" as though it were an O. Henry story, susceptible to plot spoilers:

At its inception, 4' 33" was about challenging preconceived ideas of listening as mediated by the concert hall experience. That's a good trick, but it really only works once, after which reported accounts spoil the surprise.

With all respect, that's nonsense — as I, at least, discovered the first time I actually heard the piece performed, after years of merely knowing about it. Sure, 4' 33" is "about" rethinking the way we listen, but only in the same sense and to the same extent that Beethoven's Ninth is "about" rethinking the question of whether a symphony can have words in it. Before either piece has that kind of propositional content, it has auditory content.

4' 33" consists of a particular group of sounds, around which Cage placed the gilt frame of Art. Experiencing the piece means listening to those sounds, no less than in the case of the Sibelius Violin Concerto. It doesn't sound like Aimard was prepared to let anyone do that.

To suppose, as Steve and evidently Aimard do, that the ideas behind the piece exhaust its essence is like mistaking the act of putting an item on a to-do list (memo to self: listen attentively to ambient sounds) with actually, you know, doing it. I would never claim that 4' 33" repays as much repeated listening as Der Ring des Nibelungen — that's one of the things that makes the latter a greater work of art — but once would probably be a good start, spoiler or no.

Afterthought: I once heard the poet and memoirist Mary Karr talking in a radio interview about the importance of memorizing poetry. She said that a poem is the only kind of artwork that you can keep with you in all its dimensions, and that struck me as wise and true. Your memory of Le Sacre or The Potato Eaters or Moby-Dick will never be other than incomplete, but memorize Kubla Khan and you can carry it with you in its entirety. It occurs to me that 4' 33" — which you can arrange to have performed for you at any time you choose — may actually be in the same category.

Profiles in Courage

2007-04-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

Until today's news that 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel would be taking the reins of the L.A. Phil, I didn't think there was anything an American orchestra could do that would surprise me quite this much. Well, let's rephrase that. I didn't think there was anything that would fill me with such awe at an orchestra's sheer fearlessness (as opposed to thinking, "Jeez, I would never have guessed that even [exec's name here] could come up with something this bone-headed").

Awe, and also a bit of unease. This is a kid, fer chrissake — and after 15 minutes of genius they're going to toss him the keys to the van and say, "Here, you drive now"? How good could that Tchaikovsky Five at the Hollywood Bowl have been? How good does the Tchaikovsky Five get?

It's the kind of thing that makes you want to mutter, "I sure hope you folks know what you're doing" — if not for the fact that Deborah Borda, the L.A. Phil's executive director, is someone who knows exactly what she's doing. And so a decision that might have seemed entirely dubious coming from any number of other administrators becomes an insanely, excitingly bold step in a new direction.

Really, the joke's on me. Like a lot of people, I've been whining for years about orchestras that make safe, obvious, overly pasteurized decisions. And now that the Phil has decided to take a big blind leap into the semi-unknown — to take a risk that's truly worthy of the name — it's like that bluff has been called. I can't wait to see how it all shakes out.

Q & A

2007-03-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

Matthew Guerrieri asks 'em, we answer 'em.

1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.
Cavalleria Rusticana, although "love" is putting it a little strong. Give me hot-blooded Sicilians any day; I just wish Leoncavallo had written the score.

2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.
Vingt regards (he didn't, did he?)

3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?
Ives. Duh.

4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.
The People United Will Never Be Defeated!

5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?
Haydn, Symphony No. 93, slow movement, m. 80: the original bassoon fart joke.

6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)
Billy Budd in the era of "Don't ask, don't tell."

7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.
Nigel Kennedy in what I called in my review "Emmett Kelly chic": one spotted cravat around his neck and another serving as a belt, shirt hanging out, jacket sleeves hiked up above the elbows, and one black and one pink sock. What a wanker.

8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?
Donald Fagen.

9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?
Per Nørgård. Don't push me, man.

10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?
Never again, not even once. The Schubert C-Major Quintet stays on my playlist even if it brings a slow gruesome death.

Action Alert

2007-03-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

If the political bloggers can do it, why not I? Bay Area folks: Tonight and tomorrow afternoon are your last chances to experience Paul Dresher and Rinde Eckert's astonishingly great opera Slow Fire, probably forever. They've brought it back for a 20-year anniversary revival, after which it almost certainly goes into mothballs for the duration.

I caught up with it last night, and it's as potent and funny and ridiculously beautiful as ever. No time for a full review, though I concur with the leaping enthusiasm of the Chron's Little Man, serving as the faithful sock puppet of my colleague Rob Hurwitt. Don't dally; go.

The Dreams and Prayers of Kosman the Blind

2007-03-09T08:42:00.000-08:00

Sebastian Currier's career boost from winning the Grawemeyer Award takes us one step closer to the hope I've sustained ever since Anne-Sophie Mutter started bringing his music around all those years ago: to see it on a concert program alongside that of Charles Ives. Mutter played the duo Aftersong — why not one of Charlie's violin sonatas to go with? Or Microsymph (which I've never heard) and the Fourth Symphony? Call me shallow, I don't care.

I Can't Believe I Beat Ross to This One

2007-02-27T09:26:00.000-08:00

The long-awaited meeting of two great 20th-century artists. It's longer and more effortful than the payoff quite warrants, perhaps, but don't miss #5, a lament for life's lost opportunities whose beauty brought a tear to my eye. (h/t Eric Berlin)

Much Appreciated

2007-02-23T22:59:00.000-08:00

Here's a data point tangentially related to the recent discussion of applause and its variants. Shortly after Michael Morgan and the Oakland East Bay Symphony had delivered a pretty swell account of the first movement of Brahms' Fourth tonight, a voice rang loudly through the Paramount Theater: "Right on, brother!"

That guy was my hero — not because I shared his sentiment or appreciated the contextually unusual choice of phrasing (though both of those are true), but because his timing was so impeccable. He didn't interrupt the music, and he didn't interrupt the bubble of silence afterwards during which the entire audience was still jazzed by what we'd just heard. He waited until the moment was right — until everything that needed respecting was truly over with — and then he weighed in.

Month after month and year after year, I sit in concert halls and opera houses with music "lovers" who consider themselves all that because they can decline "bravo" in its various genders and numbers, but who don't have a clue about when to just sit still and let the echos be. Come the revolution, we're going to send them over to Oakland for a little remedial music appreciation.

From Bad to Verse

2007-02-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

Rex Lawson supplies the definitive word on the scandal du jour:

The critics' acclaim for Joyce Hatto
Had reached an impossible plateau,
And her falling from grace
Was quite clearly a case
Of her spouse over-egging the gateau.

Gut gezugt! (h/t Scott Marley)

Off the List

2007-02-21T17:39:00.000-08:00

Patrick Vaz gives up after last fall's Fledermaus at SFO:

The staging, the singers, and the orchestra were all excellent, for which I was truly grateful, since I can now feel that I have seen a top-notch production of Fledermaus, that I still disliked it, and therefore I need have no guilt about wanting never to see it again.

I recognize the feeling, though not specifically in connection with Fledermaus, for which I retain a possibly indefensible fondness. But I know and treasure that sense of relief that comes when an encounter with an artist or artwork at their best enables you to strike them off the list with an easy conscience. There are a number of very highly regarded film directors, e.g., whose work I never have to try again, now that their acknowledged masterpieces have left me cold.

Great Moments in Yahoo-dom

2007-02-21T15:53:00.000-08:00

Listening to Paul Hillier's ravishing new choral version of Terry Riley's In C put me in mind — as a mention of that title so often does — of the occasion many years ago when I interviewed a well-known instrumentalist who was then just beginning an illustrious (though not uncontroversial) career.

The morning interview got off to a shaky start, a result of undercaffeinated surliness on her part and what I confess was my less-than-complete success at masking my lack of enthusiasm for her latest recording. Then I made the mistake of asking her about contemporary music. It was a fairly bland conversational opening, but it drove our heroine into high dudgeon as she proceeded to explain to me why the very concept was out of the question.

"Did you know," she said, sitting suddenly erect and fixing me with a gimlet glare of indignation, "that John Cage wrote this piece called In C? And what it is, is two players come out on stage, and they both play a C for as long as they can, and the one who holds it the longest wins!"

"Well," I suggested a little timidly, "I'm not sure that's exactly —"

"No," she insisted, "believe me, that's what the piece is."

At which point I yielded, deciding that education was not what the moment called for. Instead, I offered a silent prayer to the minimalist gods that this artist and new music would continue to tread separate paths — which, for the most part, is exactly what they've done.

The Piazzolla Perplex

2007-02-15T13:44:00.000-08:00

Today we ponder the following mystery: How and when did Astor Piazzolla become an honorary classical composer?

I must come across his music something like a dozen times a year — in violin recitals, on string quartet programs, and this week courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony — and I can never quite fathom what it's doing there. It doesn't seem to share any of the genre expectations of anything else on the program (except in cases where genre boundaries are deliberately blurred, like concerts by the Kronos Quartet). It's always a visitor from the world of pop music, on the scene with a special visa. Who stamped it?

I don't mean to sound snobby about this, and certainly the fact that Piazzolla's music bores me to distraction is my problem, not his. I'm happy to stipulate that he was an innovative genius who invested the tango with an unprecedented degree of artistic sophistication (how would I know otherwise?). But you could say something similar about many other artists working in vernacular traditions whose music doesn't show up on concert programs. A working classical critic, for example, never hears music by Prince, Thelonious Monk, Bill Monroe, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Brian Eno or even Lennon & McCartney in the course of his daily rounds. And OK, violinists like Piazzolla for obvious reasons, but somehow they never play "Orange Blossom Special," do they?

There seems to be an unspoken agreement not to play "One of these things is not like the others" when faced with a program of, say, Bach, Mozart, Shostakovich, Britten, and Piazzolla. I suspect that that reluctance has something to do with lingering unease around how we talk about non-European and/or popular music. I also suspect, more cynically, that Piazzolla — like the equally ubiquitous and equally dull Arvo Pärt — is one of the standard methods performers have developed to get their "contemporary music" ticket punched without scaring anybody. Either way, it's a very peculiar phenomenon.

Piano Follies

2007-02-15T12:48:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, when Richard Dyer called Joyce Hatto "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of," he was at least half right. But evidently there was something of a cult following for this obscure British pianist, who died last year at 77, and it mostly had to do with her massive discography of 100+ CDs.

Which — wait for it — were apparently not all by her, according to Gramophone. The choice detail is iTunes using the track timings to lead folks to the original discs.

Cheap Typo Humor

2007-02-12T07:42:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times review of the Met's Eugene Onegin: "...the powerful Russian bass Sergei Aleksashkin was very moving as the decent older Prince Gremlin..."

Happy Days Are Here Again

2007-01-31T21:54:00.000-08:00

OK, we're going to do this in slightly allusive fashion, and with no links, because the last time we all had this much fun we brought The Man down on us and he took away our toys.

Remember the party a few months back, the one with Beethoven and Britten and Kurt Weill? Well, it's started up again, in another house a little ways down the block, and now Schubert and Fauré are there too. If you know what I'm talking about, you know what to do; if you don't, poke around a little bit, either here or elsewhere in the blögôsphère (® Alex Ross).

The Gold Paint Guy is my hero.

Half-Full

2007-01-31T12:08:00.000-08:00

Philip Glass turns 70 today. I've been trying without success to remember when I first became aware of his music. Unlike Steve Reich — who came into my life unforgettably through my first exposure to Music for 18 Musicians — Glass seemed to have always been there. It's an illusion, of course, and probably an accident of historical timing — a function of having begun to pay serious attention to new music just after the Big Bang of Einstein on the Beach, so that Glass's expanding musical universe was the one I was already living in.

What I do remember, though, is the U.S. premiere of Satyagraha — still my nomination for Glass's profoundest and most beautiful work — at BAM in 1981. The idea that these distinctive musical techniques could be put in the service of a spectacle that was (unlike Einstein) narrative without being conventionally dramatic, expressive without being emotional, and simultaneously repetitive and developmental, felt earth-shaking. Years later, after all the operas and quasi-operas and film scores, it still does.

What's been interesting too is to watch the progress of Glass's name as a cultural signifier, from obscurity through the phase of stupid knock-knock jokes and out the other side again. It's unfortunate that that last stage has had a lot to do with his involvement with Hollywood; but that's the world we live in, and it's better than nothing. As Mr. Satyagraha almost said, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they give you an Oscar.

Happy birthday, Philip.

Mad Dad, Glad Dad

2007-01-29T18:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday brought back-to-back concerts in which young (or youngish) musicians played under senior conductors, and it made me wonder how far the different typologies of parental style carry over into the orchestral world.

Lorin Maazel, who conducted the Symphonica Toscanini in Berkeley in the afternoon, came off like an embodiment of that scary archetype, the dad who's always mad. He was actually quite gracious to the musicians, who played very well on the whole, but the interaction never felt entirely safe. There was a vibe in the air all afternoon that made you feel as though anyone who flubbed an entrance would be going to bed without any supper.

Then I crossed the Bay for a concert inaugurating the new concert hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and heard the finale of Tchaikovsky's Fourth played by Michael Tilson Thomas and the Conservatory Orchestra — and man, did they have a good time! It was as though MTT's goal was not just to elicit a fine performance out of these kids — which he did — but also to jolly them along, and to help them get why it was really worthwhile to do their best. Good parenting, in other words.

I don't want to oversell the contrast — obviously, there's a world of difference between being the music director of an ensemble of fully trained professional musicians, and doing a short one-night stand-in with a group of undergraduates. And I've heard enough stories about life in the New World Symphony — not just from former players, but from MTT himself — to know that you really, really don't want to be the oboist who suddenly forgets how many sharps there are in the passage you're in the middle of.

Still, if I were a young Bratschenspieler, I think I know who I'd rather play under.

Gockley, in Depth

2007-01-26T18:41:00.000-08:00

This realization sort of snuck up on me, but I have to say I think David Gockley's first fully planned season is the most exciting one the San Francisco Opera has offered in a quarter of a century. The claim to fame isn't the rep list itself — it's slightly chestnut-laden, and although I love me some Civil War, the prospect of Philip Glass's Appomattox doesn't set the pulse racing like Saint François d'Assise or Le Grand Macabre, to say nothing of Doctor Atomic.

But what this season has going for it, unprecedentedly in my experience with the company, is that it's entirely filler-free. Every single production promises some reason to get excited — the first visit by intriguing directors like Robert Lepage and Mary Zimmerman, starry debuts by Natalie Dessay, Ewa Podles and Angela Gheorghiu, a huge list of debuts by singers I never heard of, or, what the hell, even just Maurice Sendak's Magic Flute production, coming here for the first time.

The only thing on the schedule that leaves me cold is the opening-night Samson and Delilah, and that's a function of my own idiosyncrasies: I have no particular use for any 19th-century French music that isn't by Berlioz (remember, "Gounod" is an anagram of "ungood"), and although I'm an Olga Borodina fan, I'm not, you know, the world's biggest Olga Borodina fan. If you're a little more normal than I am on either of those two points, then even that one should get you going.

What's lacking from this season is the Bohème or Traviata revival trotted out in a familiar old production, with singers we all love but have heard a bunch of times before and an amiable time-beater in the pit. And that's not something you can say about any prior season that I can recall. If Gockley's tenure turns out to be as successful as I hope, it'll be due in part to this kind of conscientious consistency. He just doesn't seem to do throwaways.

P.S. To clarify, and forestall some needless whining: I don't care what the calendar says, as soon as Debussy picked up his pen the 19th century was over.

Da Bomb

2007-01-26T17:52:00.000-08:00

So the Met is set to do John Adams' Doctor Atomic next year, but word on the rialto is that it won't be in the Peter Sellars production from the 2005 San Francisco premiere that's also going to the Lyric in December. Mr. Gelb was evidently not amused — no word on why, or who he'll get to direct in lieu of everyone's favorite manic sprite.

Hell (n.), see Other People

2007-01-17T12:08:00.000-08:00

Condolences to Patrick, who spent last night in the company of some folks I know all too well, and thanks for turning it into comic fodder for the rest of us. Avoiding those people was not the primary reason I stayed away, but it turns out to have been a welcome side benefit.

Dept. of Gender Confusion

2007-01-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

As part of his Schwabacher Debut Recital last night, tenor David Portillo sang Antonio Maria Abbatini's "Quanto è bello il mio diletto." The program included the Italian text as sung, but the English alongside it was a careful mistranslation, in which each masculine reference had been assiduously switched to a feminine one. The actual words must have struck someone as, I don't know, kind of...gay.

Nicola Ancora

2007-01-10T18:04:00.000-08:00

Bloggy speculation about the forthcoming Luisotti Era at the San Francisco Opera has spun off in directions that I'd like to demur from, ever so gently — if only because some of it seems to have been spurred on, at least in part, by yesterday's post here.

At Out West Arts, for instance, the haplonymic Brian, after seconding my observation about Luisotti's limited track record with non-farinaceous opera, sighs, "Great — just what San Francisco needs, more Toscas and Traviatas" (which might should be "Tosche and Traviate," but leave it be). And in the Hills, these words were Reverberating: "I have to echo the concern that this means the opera is moving back to a repertory of about ten operas, all by Verdi and Puccini...I haven’t really been particularly impressed by many of the SF Opera's Verdi and Puccini performances through the years."

Well, I hate to put words into Mr. Gockley's mouth, but I think the point here is — neither has he. The goal of the Luisotti appointment, as I understand it, is to fix that chronic problem by hiring a music director who won't treat the Italian repertoire as the afterthought it too often is. This doesn't mean that spaghetti will become the sole staple of our operatic diet, or even that its frequency will necessarily increase significantly — only that what spaghetti we do get will be cooked really, really well. (And again, this is all based on just the one amazing Forza; I'd love to hear what people thought about his Seattle and Met debuts.)

Anyway, my worry was not about the proportions of the season schedule, but about whether Luisotti will be able to hold up his end as music director in other areas of the repertoire. Will he do as well with Mozart, for instance, or with French and Russian rep, as with Italian? How deep does he go, or, failing that, how fast can he get there? We'll see.

It's Nicola

2007-01-09T16:39:00.000-08:00

So the speculation was correct after all (and a big hat tip to Ching Chang, who had the inside dope way in advance). The San Francisco Opera today named Nicola Luisotti to succeed Donald Runnicles as the company's music director. He'll take over in 2009.

As far as one can tell with these things, this promises to be an excellent development all around. His 2005 company debut in La Forza del Destino — his only prior appearance here — was nothing short of amazing, he's an ebullient, likable fellow, and by all accounts the members of the Opera Orchestra and Chorus do like him and trust him. Course, they're also only going on the evidence of the one production, but that should tide everyone over until we see what else he can do.

The one cause for concern might be his range of repertoire, which doesn't seem to be very broad. The only non-Italian opera listed anywhere in his management bio is Carmen; for that matter, Pagliacci is the only other opera that isn't by Verdi or Puccini. He doesn't seem to have much knowledge of or interest in contemporary music. Runnicles was nine years younger when he got the nod, and he already had a much larger working repertoire.

Still, it's too soon to worry about that now. Anyone who can shape a performance like Luisotti's Forza — and inspire the confidence of the excellent but somewhat demoralized Opera Orchestra — can only be a force for good.

Now we just have to persuade his people to come up with a better mug shot. He's not Bela Lugosi, you know.

Wrong and Wronger

2006-12-03T23:01:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, in a land far away, I worked for a publication that employed (among other folks) a Very Bad Writer and a Very Bad Editor. The two of them had a little dance that they did nearly every week. VBW would submit his column, a turgid, pompous, unreadable mess. Then VBE would change it to his own kind of unreadable mess (blunt, clumsy, often ungrammatical). Then they would fight.

Periodically one of them would complain to me about the other, and despite holding both of them in roughly equal contempt, I found it easy to sympathize with each while remaining entirely truthful. "You're right," I'd say to VBE, "it's impossible to figure out what he's trying to say." "I agree," I'd say to VBW, "he has no right to change your copy to this embarrassing stuff."

Around my house, this ongoing argument is remembered for having given its name (well, the names of the two men involved) to a type of dispute that comes up not infrequently: one in which both parties are equally wrong, but each has at least the justice of having correctly diagnosed the other's bad behavior. If you've ever been called on to referee, or even just lend a sympathetic ear, in connection with an intergenerational family squabble, you'll know whereof I speak.

This past week's example is the case of Maazel v. New York Philharmonic. Lorin Maazel, you may recall, interrupted an unrelated press conference on Tuesday to remark that he thought the Philharmonic's board ought to name Daniel Barenboim as his successor.

At first (seeing only the headline) I assumed that this was one of those bouts of impolitic frankness that most public figures are prone to now and again — that he had let something slip without thinking in the presence of reporters. But no. It turns out that this was a deliberate, considered move, evidently designed to light a fire under the board.

Obviously, Maazel's ploy was preposterous — arrogant, counterproductive, and all the rest of it. But grant him at least this much: He understands that when it comes to naming music directors, the management and board of the Philharmonic doesn't have a clue. This has been amply demonstrated in previous go-rounds — most clearly, ironically enough, in the frantic last-minute scramble that led to Maazel's own hiring.

So now Maazel's more-or-less stated reason for his outrageous behavior is that the people in charge are screwing it up yet again. And by all appearances he's right (they seem to be pursuing Riccardo Muti once more, presumably on the theory that he didn't humiliate them enough last time around).

What can you say about a situation like this (other than, "Boy, I'm glad I live in San Francisco!")? A number of years ago I wrote that the simplest way to be an orchestra administrator was to watch the New York Philharmonic and do the opposite. Some things don't seem to change.

No. 12...No. 12...

2006-12-01T08:59:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the compulsively linkable Matthew Guerrieri, the simplest explanation yet of the rudiments of serialism.

Dudley, More!

2006-11-16T09:42:00.000-08:00

Last month, when Dudley Moore's brilliant Britten/Pears parody from Beyond the Fringe was all the rage, I spent some happy hours revisiting the classic Dud 'n' Pete routines, but there seemed to be no more musical riches available. That's changed, thanks again to poster giebergoldfarb. Here's Moore doing Weill and Beethoven. Priceless!

Update: Alas, as Richard Friedman notes in comments, the party's over. The offending videos have been safely removed from the public arena. Oh, but didn't we have fun while it lasted?