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At the opening of this year's Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
season, there weren't any violins. And the music wasn't Brahms or Beethoven. Instead, we
heard a banjo -- yes, a banjo -- along with a mandolin and double bass, playing works that
were partly improvised and at times sounded oddly like bluegrass.
 What was going on? "There's a
very easy answer," says clarinetist David Shifrin, artistic director of the Chamber
Music Society, sounding so comfortable that you could almost believe his group put banjos
on stage every day. The key to the whole thing was Edgar Meyer, the Chamber Music
Society's regular bassist, who also plays bluegrass and records country music in
Nashville, where he lives. "I'm constantly asking all our members if they have
musical dreams they want to bring to my attention," Mr. Shifrin says, and Mr. Meyer
had one.
He's great friends with Bila Fleck,
the avant-country banjo player (leader of Bila Fleck and the Flecktones), and Mike
Marshall, an out-there bluegrass mandolinist. The three of them had recorded an album
together called "Uncommon Ritual" for the Sony Classical label, and when Mr.
Meyer asked if the Chamber Music Society might want to present the work in live
performance, the response -- says Jacqueline Taylor, the group's executive director -- was
"absolutely yes."
See how easy a revolution can be?
"Knowing the full range of Edgar's talent," Ms. Taylor warmly explains, "we
were sort of just waiting for the opportunity to do something like this. I suppose that if
you ask if we're taking a step out toward the boundary, the answer is yes. But it's
necessary. The language available to musical people today is so vast and eclectic. If we
don't grow naturally with that, we're dead." 
And that's how nearly 1,000 people came to be at Alice Tully Hall for Messrs. Meyer,
Fleck and Marshall. Some 20% were hardcore Chamber Music Society subscribers; the rest
were what Ms. Taylor calls "a different crowd" (adding "and we can get them
into our database").
But how did this extravaganza get on
a classical label? Here we meet Peter Gelb, the president of Sony Classical and a man who
likes his revolution with a little hot sauce. The classical recording industry has
collapsed, he announced a month ago, in a speech in Germany. New CDs of standard classical
repertory aren't selling, which means, he said, that the record industry must
"redefine the meaning of classical music." Provocatively, he said that in the
pop world, "creativity is encouraged," while classical music, by contrast, is
short on new ideas.
His own unorthodox notion is that
people will buy new classical compositions if, as he told me, "composers free
themselves to write new music that can be emotionally available and accessible." Here
he finds himself in huge disputes about style and taste, thanks to his love of promotional
devices like movie tie-ins, his delight in bringing pop artists into classical music, and
his frank suggestion that Tan Dun -- the Chinese composer whose wildly uneven
"Symphony 1997" celebrated the return of Hong Kong to China -- cultivate a more
popular style.
But in fact he's part of a larger
movement, which we might call "alternative classical" (to invent a term only the
record business could love). This might start with Philip Glass, continue with the
theatrical Kronos Quartet, reach mystical heights with composers like Gorecki and Arvo
Pärt, and reflect grunge and postmodern irony with New York's Bang on a Can. With Mr.
Gelb it finds an easier, more mainstream groove. What unites it all is an immediacy --
along, often, with an informality and an openness to the world at large -- that you don't
normally hear in classical concert halls.
Edgar Meyer, by this definition, is
one of Sony's chief alternative classical prospects, or as Mr. Gelb calls him, "a
cornerstone artist for us." Mr. Meyer himself is too busy playing the bass to think
about these issues much -- he even describes himself, engagingly, as
"conservative" -- though he finds it natural to play in many styles, and thinks
that classical music "has gotten in a little bit of trouble, boxed itself into a
corner."
On stage at Tully he was all business at first, letting Messrs. Fleck and Marshall
greet the audience. (He was nervous, if the truth be told.) Mr. Fleck, playing the banjo
with a tone as rich as a clarinet, proved instantly that his instrument is
"serious" (as a classical musician would say), both when he shaped a tune and
evoked a deft shimmer of background harmony.
Mr. Marshall, playing a variety of
mandolin-family instruments, was the trickster, the one most clearly having fun. The three
together were, quite possibly, the sharpest and at the same time the most relaxed ensemble
I've ever seen, distinguished first by pinpoint rhythm, next by endless shades of tone and
touch (tender, raucous, stark, you name it), and finally by sheer enjoyment. The three
competed. But if, for a moment, one stood out, nobody was happier than the other two.
The music leaped from style to
style, rushing headlong from the Renaissance to a Celtic reel and then to a Southern
county fair, lingering at a lovely pop-style lullaby that Mr. Meyer wrote, then plunging
into the sober depths of a Bach fugue. The Bach didn't quite work; though Mr. Meyer says
he likes Bach "simply presented, without a lot of carrying on," I sensed
caution, even a certain plodding awe (especially from Mr. Fleck), except toward the end,
when Mr. Marshall started wailing on Bach's counterpoint.
But one classical transcription that triumphed was Sarasate's
"Zigeunerweisen," a virtuoso violin showpiece that Mr. Meyer -- on his
lumbering, intractable instrument -- sailed through with an ease most violinists would
envy. For Mr. Meyer's playing elsewhere there are hardly any words; even in a simple
walking bass he'd offer a palette of colors, shaping the rhythmic flow even while he
faithfully accompanied someone else's melody.
At the concert, I had one doubt,
about the music's inner strength. I wanted more depth and a firmer point of view, the kind
that Poulenc, writing art songs in France between the wars, brought to his wry evocation
of Parisian boulevards, or that guided The Band, recording rock in the '60s, when it
forged American folk and popular styles into something new and haunting.
But afterward, hearing the
"Uncommon Ritual" CD again, I relented. The CD is tighter than the concert was;
I've played it five times or so, while I've written this review, and it hasn't bored me
yet. Peter Gelb is right -- there's a place in the emerging new classical universe for
music anyone can like. When it put a banjo on its stage, the Chamber Music Society took a
small, neat step toward our musical future.
Wall Street Journal, October 28, 1997
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