Noise in New York
"Sometimes there's an event that seems to be an emblem of
an era, not because it tells us anything that's new or startling, but because
it shows us where we are. ** 'The New Yorkers' -- an event at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music (BAM) last week -- did that for composers of new classical
music. At the heart of it were works by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia
Wolfe, who 16 years ago founded a group called Bang on a Can. Now they're an
established, happy alternative to the sound and sometimes airless ambience of
the classical concert hall; 'The New Yorkers' showed how that can work."
Noncooperation
"Like just about everybody in the classical music
business here, I'm trying to understand the Big Event -- the June 2
announcement that the New York Philharmonic will merge with Carnegie Hall, and
in 2006 will move its concerts there from Lincoln Center. ** This is momentous,
like a planet changing places in the sky…"
Targeting Teens
"Melissa Fathman had a question she couldn't answer. She's
education director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a lofty
classical group, and she wondered how she could bring chamber music to
teenagers. But then she had a light-bulb moment, one that just might help to
change classical music forever. 'Why do this thinking alone?' she wondered.
'I'll ask some teens myself.'"
Powerful Certainty
"Daniel Barenboim comes out on stage at Carnegie Hall,
where he's presenting an eight-concert cycle of all the Beethoven piano
sonatas, and space seems to curve itself around him. He knows that he's a
consummate professional, and -- since he's not just a pianist, but one of the
world's most powerful conductors -- also a celebrity. He brushes off applause.
He doesn't need it; he's just here to play."
It's Exhilaration, I Know
"When I realized Rene Jacobs was my favorite classical
musician, I was driving my car. As I drove, I was listening to a Harmonia Mundi
CD on which Jacobs conducts 'The Coronation of Poppea,' a Monteverdi opera
written way back in 1643, and in its unsparing view of life more modern than
most operas written now. ** Early on, a hapless lover lurks outside the palace
of a woman who's flagrantly sleeping with somebody else. As the lover whines,
he's interrupted by the bodyguards of the man inside, who've awakened and
wonder who's carrying on. They sound so tired, bored and mocking that it's hard
to believe they're opera singers; they sound like they're interrupting the
recording itself."
Building on Genius
"I have a flip book of the Mona Lisa. You know flip
books; you might have had them when you were a kid. You hold them in your hand
and flip the pages; the pictures come to life, like frames in a cartoon. * In
this one, the Mona Lisa's famous smile morphs into a grin, a melted grimace,
and -- as she winks -- into a final toothy smirk. All good fun, but it reminded
me of Eric Gibson's April 8 essay on this page, which blasted artists who make
their art by changing other artists' work. Mr. Gibson came down on Cornelia
Parker, who wrapped string around Rodin's "The Kiss," and on Jake and
Dinos Chapman, who scrawled demonic heads on Goya prints."
On the Brink
"Hector
Berlioz, the French composer, was born exactly 200 years ago, which I wouldn't
call exciting news for the public at large. But everybody jumps on these
round-numbered anniversaries, so we've been plunged into Berlioz performances.
I've just heard two at Lincoln Center, two-thirds of a three-concert festival.
And I'm left with a funny feeling. People say classical music is endangered,
and certainly there's trouble -- fewer classical radio stations, less media
coverage, near-disaster at major classical record labels, which have to sell
pop crossover CDs to survive. Will classical music still be here 30 years from
now? Beats me, but reading the program notes from Lincoln Center's Berlioz, I'd
give the field about five minutes to live."
The Music of Gesture
"What,
exactly, does a symphony conductor do? * The simplest answer might be that
conductors keep the orchestra together. But that's not always true, because
professional musicians can often stay together without anyone conducting. And
some conductors simply get in the way. There's even a joke about that. A bad
conductor is rehearsing one of the world's great orchestras. He says that the
musicians aren't playing well, and one of them yells: "Say that again, and
in the concert, we'll follow you!" * But then the strange truth is that
even many good conductors don't have a clear beat. "
Transcribing Rock
"You
have to love Christopher O'Riley. He's a serious classical pianist, and last
Friday -- at Columbia University's Miller Theater, site of many classical
events -- he played music by his favorite rock band, Radiohead. Though really I
should say, as he does, that Radiohead is his obsession. And he's not alone --
ever since 1997, when it broke through with its third album, "OK
Computer," Radiohead has been one of the top cult bands in the world. I've
heard classical composers rave about its music, and I'd rave myself.
Radiohead's songs are lit with hopeful radiance, even while they ache with
melancholy; they're made of sounds that tug at you, and make you think."
Classical Music's Next Big Thing?
"There
were two overlapping performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week.
One was the long-awaited New York premiere of 'La Pasion Segun San Marco' ('The
Passion According to St. Mark'), a musical work by the Argentine composer
Osvaldo Golijov. And the other was an enactment, so to speak, of the work's
reputation, which had spread by word of mouth and in the media. It surfaced
mightily two Sundays ago in the New York Times, where Mr. Golijov (pronounced
'go-lee-ov') was hailed as an emblematic voice of our new century, the herald
of a new wave of composers 'who will change the way music is heard and
played.'"
Bad Acoustics, But There Was Beer
"Playing
classical music in a rock club isn't such a bad idea. At least in theory, you
can give the music legs, taking it to people who'd never hear it otherwise. And
young classical musicians -- some of them, anyway -- complain about the
formality of the classical concert world. They say they can't even tell if
their audience is listening. No wonder, then, that some of them are taking
their music to more informal venues, including rock clubs. ** But there are
pitfalls, as cellist Matt Haimovitz unfortunately demonstrated last Friday,
when he played at the venerable punk club CBGB."
Kurt, We Hardly Knew Ye
"Kurt
Masur is stepping down as music director of the New York Philharmonic, and this
past Saturday the audience nearly rose in revolt. ** My friends at the
orchestra will wince when they read that, and say both that I'm exaggerating
and that I'm reinflaming scandals that should be old news by now. But something
extraordinary really did happen, something so unusual -- since classical-music
audiences are normally so timid -- that it almost did amount to an
insurrection."
Gould Variations: Playing Bach Two Ways
"In
some ways, this is a marketing story. The classical record business is in
trouble. But big classical labels have huge catalogs, full of fine old
recordings by classical music's biggest names. These can be reissued, over and
over again, in new packaging, essentially at no cost. ** And now Sony
Classical, one of the biggest classical record companies, has a new way to do
this. It shares a corporate owner with an operation called Legacy, which
repackages -- with striking graphics, careful research and even more careful
attention to sound -- milestone recordings from Sony's pop and jazz labels. So
someone got a really good idea. Why shouldn't Legacy also mastermind some
classical reissues, using its pop marketing clout to sell them to a new
audience? ** That led to a wonderful project, the Legacy/Sony Classical reissue
of one of the most famous classical records ever made, Glenn Gould 's 1955
performance of Bach's "Goldberg Variations," radiant with an
impossible combination of innocence and perfect certainty…"
Enigmatic Debut
"Last Wednesday wasn't a routine night at the New York Philharmonic.
The orchestra's new music director, Lorin Maazel, made a gala debut, and -- at
least to people in the music business -- questions swarmed around him. Why was
he chosen? If you believe Mr. Maazel's reputation, he's mostly famous for two
things: virtuosity and cold self-absorption. Is this what the Philharmonic
needs? I asked that myself, in these pages nearly two years ago, when Mr.
Maazel's appointment was announced. (Orchestras plan things long in advance).
But now that he's arrived, I want to be fair, so I'll describe his debut as
dispassionately as I can."
I'm Wolfgang, And I'll Be Your Composer
"Not
long ago I had dinner at a fine country restaurant , a comfortable place
that offers serious, even thoughtful cuisine. But the music that was playing
troubled my stomach. Somebody had chosen a full-blooded orchestral piece, full
of surges and figurative shipwrecks. Very dramatic, of course, in the concert
hall, but was drama what I wanted with my dinner?" [with
recommendations for better dinner music, and a modest proposal -- that restaurants
should commission their own dinner compositions]
Vivendi's Fall and Your CD Collection
"It
wasn't so long ago -- not much more than a year -- that I met Jean-Marie
Messier, a smooth and compact man who used to be CEO of Vivendi, a media
conglomerate that now may be collapsing."
Whose Radio Station Is It?
"Last
month, New York's public-radio station, WNYC, stabbed classical music right in
the heart. Or that's what many people think."
Right Man for the Job
"I've
heard nothing but acclaim for James Levine's appointment as music director of
the Boston Symphony and was thrilled to hear the news myself. I've also been
impressed that the excitement doesn't only come from music critics; it echoes
just as strongly inside the music business, especially from people who work
with orchestras. Sometimes we hear questions about other new appointments --
about Franz Welser-Möst, for instance, music director-designate of the
Cleveland Orchestra. Does he really have the stature for the post? Is Christoph
Eschenbach good enough for Philadelphia? Is Lorin Maazel plausible at all for
the New York Philharmonic? But nobody has doubts about Mr. Levine. Everyone
assumes -- and rightly so -- that he deserves to lead any world-class orchestra
he wants."
A Piano Man Turns from Pop to Classical
"Billy
Joel has been writing classical music. He writes it like a fan, which is hardly
a surprise, since he's not a classical-music sophisticate. He took classical
piano lessons when he was a kid and then got turned on again eight years ago or
so, when he listened to Beethoven. 'I let these symphonies pound over me,' he
says. 'Last time I felt like this was the first time I listened to Led
Zeppelin. I felt puny. I am nothing, I am insignificant.'"
Grove: Sees Trees But Not Forest
"Officially
known as the 'The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition,'
the work under review, published earlier this year, is in fact the seventh
revision of a colossus that now encompasses 29 volumes -- some 25 million words
-- and is accepted, though not always with delight, as the standard
English-language reference work on classical music."
Surprising Evolution
"I
first heard the New Jersey Symphony by accident, three years ago, on public TV.
I hadn't known, back then, how powerful -- incandescent -- the orchestra could
be, or that it was emerging as a model of enlightened management. I was only
flipping channels on a quiet New Year's Eve and found myself arrested by a
telecast of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I didn't recognize the glowing concert
hall or the intense -- sometimes even feverish -- conductor, but the
performance couldn't have been more gripping, and I stayed with it, rapt, until
the end. This, as I learned at the end of the telecast, was the New Jersey
Symphony. The conductor was its music director, Zdenek Macal; the hall was the
then brand-new New Jersey Performing Arts Center, built in Newark with hope
that it might help reawaken that famously troubled city. And all this surprised
me, because when I'd last heard of it, the Symphony was a gritty touring group
that nobody outside New Jersey ever wanted to talk about."
Silence and Eccentricity
"Weill
Recital Hall was all but silent. Margaret Leng-Tan -- tall, erect and dedicated
-- sat barely moving at the piano. The silence was luminous, lit by her devoted
attention, and the audience's. This was John Cage's '4'33",' a landmark of
20th century art…"
Hearing Webern
"Last
year Deutsche Grammophon released the complete works of Anton Webern. By
reputation he was one of the 20th century's most difficult composers. But I
love his music. He was passionate, very nearly overwrought, and yet his work
was not only emotional, but also pure, precise, and sometimes structured like a
puzzle, full of the musical equivalents of anagrams and palindromes. His
feelings, I'm convinced, were so excessive that they needed boundaries; his
need for structure was so profound that the most basic act of musical
composition, placing one note beside another, could be a painful struggle."
Demanding Teacher
"No
one can say that Christa Ludwig, teaching master classes at Carnegie Hall,
didn't get right to the point. Out on stage came a young baritone, with a shiny
resume and even shinier top notes, singing the second song of Mahler's
"Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen." The top notes, though, had been
polished at the expense of the singer's lower range. When he finished, Ms.
Ludwig let him have it. "You have not much on the bottom, but you have
much in the high notes. You are a lazy tenor," she declared, sounding
pleasant but utterly decisive. In her opinion, the gentleman had misunderstood
his voice. His high notes may have come easily, but he should have been singing
even higher; he hadn't worked hard enough to stretch his top notes into the
tenor range."
Conductors Take Their Turn
"There we were in Avery Fisher Hall, we
being more critics than you'd usually find at the New York Philharmonic. What
drew us was a rare one-off event, not the normal four-concert run that guest
conductors get on the Philharmonic's main subscription series, but instead a
single evening led, in his Philharmonic debut, by Mariss Jansons, widely touted
as a top choice to be the orchestra's next music director. And there in the
lobby was a man I'll call the Veteran, someone who's been around the block a
few times in the orchestra biz and knows more about orchestras than any
critic."
The Real Shostakovich
"Yevgeny Yevtushenko -- the weathered,
haunted, extravagant Russian poet -- is telling me stories he's surely told
many times before. He was the first, he says, to inform Castro about Soviet
forced labor camps. In the early '60s -- when Soviet Communism briefly softened
-- Mikhail Gorbachev heard him read his poetry and was changed instantly. Thus
the seed was planted that would later bear the fruit of glasnost, perestroika,
and the fall of Soviet power. We're sitting, as Mr. Yevtushenko says all this,
in a leafy, calm hotel bar, a place that (like so much of our America) seems to
have no history."
A Taciturn Modernist Loosens Up
"You
have to love Pierre Boulez, even if his reputation tells you that he's distant
and severe. Maybe years ago -- when he was the enfant terrible of contemporary
classical music, and later the unpopular music director of the New York
Philharmonic -- he might have been like that. But now, at age 75, he's
wonderfully relaxed."
Who's After Masur?
"There
were two reasons -- apart from innocent pleasure -- to hear Riccardo Muti
conduct the New York Philharmonic two weeks ago. First, I'd heard that the
orchestra sounded resplendent when he'd led it last season. Second, persistent
rumors say he'll be the Philharmonic's next music director, after Kurt Masur
leaves in 2002. I put these thoughts together and got curious. Suppose the
rumors are correct? What sort of music director might Mr. Muti -- one of the
world's most vivid conductors, former music director of the Philadelphia
Orchestra and now in charge of music at Milan's La Scala opera house -- turn
out to be?"
Whose Complete Bach?
"It
wasn't as large as I expected, only the size of a small suitcase, and at 22
pounds it weighed less than I thought it would -- 'it' being 'Bach 2000' from
Teldec records, the complete works of Bach on 153 CDs."
A Cautious Classical Ride
"'I'm
concerned about the future of orchestras and new composition,' Aaron Jay Kernis
told me, looking wary, and at the same time eager. He's the 1999 Pulitzer
prizewinner in music, and along with Michael Torke was one of two youngish but
established composers who got commissions from Disney -- yes, the Disney that
gave us Donald Duck and 'The Little Mermaid' -- to greet the millennium with
huge choral symphonies. This commission, Mr. Kernis said, might address his
concerns about the future, since, with Disney's visibility, it might draw
attention not just to himself, but to all new classical music. His words seem
poignant now, because the New York Philharmonic has presented premieres of both
Disney works, and in response, some prominent critics -- not loving what they
heard -- thought that Disney might have bought the two composers' souls."
Literary Liners
"I’m
reading a lovely piece of prose, which -- to my astonishment -- is the liner
note to a classical CD, the Penguin Music Classics release of Bruch’s first violin
concerto. 'I was not exposed to classical music as a child,' writes Colleen
McCullough, author of 'The Thorn Birds,' who might not be the world’s most
distinguished novelist, but writes here from her heart. 'Truly,' she continues,
'I don’t think I had ever heard a solo violin until I attended Holy Cross [a
Catholic girls’ school a few miles from her childhood home in Sydney,
Australia]…But I took to classical music immediately, hungrily.' Who wouldn’t
read on, curious to know how her hunger led her to Bruch?
An Orchestra That Lets Loose
"There
are two quick ways to understand why the Wild Ginger Philharmonic might be
important. First, you could go to one of their concerts. If it’s like the
recent performance I heard at the Good Shepherd-Faith Church near Lincoln
Center, the audience won’t be just clapping, and jumping to its feet. It’ll be
shouting, even roaring with excitement." [with a link to
an audio excerpt]
Jessye Norman Swings
"I
admit I was skeptical. Nor was I alone. To many of us in the classical music
world, the conjunction of diva-to-the-max Jessye Norman and the irrepressible
choreographer Bill T. Jones didn’t seem promising, even with the imprimatur of
Lincoln Center, which produced their dual creation under the jittery title
'How! Do! We! Do!'"
Crowds and Heat
"If
you come here in July for the Festival d'Avignon, there are two things you
can't escape. Crowds are one of them, jammed together in the walled center of
the city, baking in the Provence sun -- inevitable crowds, since Avignon,
inhabited normally by just 87,000 souls, attracts enough visitors in July to sell
half a million tickets to the festival events, and to the 500 unofficial
spectacles that happily surround the festival. These advertise themselves with
street theater -- slow-moving cars with eager costumed actors perched on them,
or African performers dancing on the already crowded pavement."
Roll Over Beethoven
"Last
season, the New York Philharmonic presented the premiere of a piece by David
Del Tredici that answered two big objections to contemporary classical music:
New classical works don't sound like any other music that most people know, and
don't concern themselves with any part of life that many people care about. But
Mr. Del Tredici weaves a very different web. His Philharmonic premiere, for
soprano and baritone soloists and orchestra, was called "The Spider and
the Fly," and one area of modern life it touched on was sex."
Opera With Lobsters
"Supercilious.
Baffled. Preening. These words don’t describe the bright. plastic lobsters
sitting on a rock at the center of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence stage.
Instead, I’m thinking of the people with black-with-white ruffles round their
necks, who made their entrance one by one, then nibbled grapes and stalks of
celery with fierce, absent-minded need. These, clearly, were supposed to be
Renaissance aristocrats, arriving for a banquet where they’d hear a group of
Monteverdi madrigals, which had been assembled as an evening’s entertainment
under the title 'Cena Furiosa.'"
Schoenberg as More Than Music Theory
"The
Bard Music Festival devoted itself this year to Arnold Schoenberg. Oddly, it
also reminded me of Bob Dylan, who since 1970 has recorded a new album almost
every year. Sometimes, when one was released, a critic would say "Dylan is
back!" as if he’d regained the force he had in the ‘60s. But that was
never plausible, because if Dylan really had gotten his old power back,
everyone would know it, as in fact we did when he found a new kind of strength
in "Time Out of Mind" two years ago. At Bard we were asked to believe
that Arnold Schoenberg, the godfather of atonal music, was an unequivocally
great composer. If that’s true, I wondered, why doesn’t everyone agree?"
Two pieces on classical music in Cuba:
Tuneful Coexistence
"Aurelio
de la Vega, one of the world's best-known Cuban composers, lives near Los
Angeles and has twice won the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, one of America's
most prestigious honors in the arts. Harold Gramatges, the most celebrated
composer in Cuba itself, lives in Havana and was given the Medal of the
Underground Struggle by the Cuban Council of State. For nearly 40 years, these
two men, once friends and colleagues, hadn't communicated -- until the American
Composers Orchestra recently held its sixth and last Sonidos de las Américas
festival here, celebrating Cuban music".
Half-Alive With the Sound of Music
"When
you go to Cuba to learn about classical music there, you're not exactly doing
something trendy. Baseball, yes, that's a subject everyone's discussing, and
pop music, too -- Cuban rhythms are popular word-wide now, and Cuban singers
are making fortunes. But classical music?"
Competing With Liszt's Memory
"Garrick
Ohlsson is a pianist with rare wit, and the most delightful part of his recent
recital of Beethoven and Liszt at Alice Tully Hall came in his encore -- a
Beethoven bagatelle barely 30 seconds long, delivered with a wry smile, as if
to say, "That's all folks!" He'd just done the exhausting "Hammerklavier"
sonata, one of Beethoven's craziest pieces, and everybody got the joke: He just
didn't have more piano playing in him." [with an audio
excerpt]
Putting the Music First
"I'd
heard the New England Bach festival 14 years ago, or rather not quite the
festival itself, but a Bach performance in New York conducted by its founder
and conductor Blanche Honneger Moyse. She'd brought her festival chorus, the
Blanche Moyse Chorale, and when I wrote about them for this page, I chose my
words like a man stricken with love." [You can also read my review from 14 years ago.]
Conduct(or) Unbecoming the Boston Symphony
"I got interested in the Boston Symphony
almost by accident. I'd gone to one of its concerts in Carnegie Hall last year
to hear a new work on the program, but it was the orchestra that left the strongest
impression - and not a happy one. Rarely had I heard such coarse, unmotivated
playing from such a celebrated group."
She Is What She Is
"If
I could whisper – respectfully -- to Aretha Franklin I'd suggest she find a
more convincing overture than the one she used when she sang with the Detroit
Symphony. Her idea, I think, was to introduce herself as someone grand and
inspirational. But does she need that? She's one of the most important
musicians of our age and surely the most powerful singer alive. And the music
she used -- a medley of the '2001' fanfare, the 'Chariots of Fire' theme and a
snatch of 'Jesus Christ Superstar' -- has lost its conviction, because too many
people have drawn on it. 'You're better than that,' I'd like to whisper. 'And
if you're going to sing with orchestras, why not use real orchestral music?'"
Rolling Through Beethoven
"People
in the music business have been badmouthing the New York Philharmonic. And why?
Because the orchestra played all nine Beethoven symphonies at special concerts
at the start of its new season. That, I’ve been told, is 'unimaginative
programming.' It’s a cynical ploy to sell tickets, by turning the Philharmonic
into the classical equivalent of a top-40 radio station. The public, however,
either disagreed, or responded to the ploy, since the concerts sold out. And I
side with the public. I went to the series largely out of curiosity --
'Everyone’s so negative,' I kept thinking, 'so I wonder what the concerts will
really be like' -- but I ended up enthralled."
When The Solid Dissolves
"The
21st century is barely more than a year away. And yet the 20th century, even as
it ends, is still a problem in the classical music world. This is odd. The
Museum of Modern Art takes out big ads in the New York Times, enticing people
to visit its shows of 20th century painting and sculpture, but the New York
Philharmonic does no such thing with 20th century music. Though there are 20th
century pieces that everyone likes -- by Copland, Bartok, Shostakovich,
Stravinsky, Sibelius and others -- the very notion of 20th century music still
troubles the classical music audience." {This is a review
of an Arnold Schoenberg retrospective, and I've added a lengthy supplement to what was published, explaining
my views in much more detail.]
Something New Is In The Cards
"We
know we’re hearing a CD of contemporary classical music, so we surely don’t
expect the speaking voice, self-contained and just a little sad, addressing us
in English with a European accent. 'Good evening,'it says. 'Welcome once again
to a man in a room gambling.'" [with an audio excerpt]
Renovating Mozart
"Every
field has its orthodoxy, and one of the rules in classical music is that you
don’t change what the composer wrote. Oh, you can make cuts, and you can add
flights of fancy for a soloist, in certain works which, historians tell us,
were written to allow that. But you aren’t supposed to second-guess Mozart. You
aren’t supposed to decide that you could have written parts of his music better
than he did, and substitute your version for his -- which makes it fascinating
to hear a hybrid work in which another member of the classical composer’s
pantheon, Richard Strauss, did precisely that." [with a severe
criticism of conductor Gerard Schwarz]
Cultural Revolution
"'The first doubt was that people from the suburbs
wouldn't come," says Lawrence Goldman, the amiable president and CEO of
the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, improbably built in Newark, a city whose
name is synonymous with urban ills. "And the second doubt was that only
people from the suburbs would come.' That's how he began two conversations, one
this past winter, midway through NJPAC's inaugural season, and the second just
a few weeks ago, after the season triumphantly ended. We might draw two
conclusions. First, that people who are interviewed a lot keep saying the same
things. And, more importantly, that social questions, some of them critical,
keep being asked by everyone who wonders why Newark needs a shining new
performing arts facility."
Inner City Symphony
"Go
one block north from Powell Symphony Hall, where the St. Louis Symphony plays,
and suddenly it's hard to think about classical music. All at once you're in
the projects, on streets with cluttered yards and broken windows, though some
homes, let's note, are immaculate.And if we can't think of classical music when
we're passing through, what about the people who live here?"
"Titanic" Floats Sony Classical
"Not
long ago I was talking to Peter Gelb, the president of Sony Classical records,
about a new work we'd both heard. 'It sounded,' I said, 'like movie music!' Mr.
Gelb jumped in, and we both laughed. We both knew that the words 'movie music'
are pronounced with a sneer in the classical music world, as if they meant
'gaudy, cheap and far too popular.' Meanwhile, though, a movie score has given
Mr. Gelb a commercial triumph. He snagged the 'Titanic' soundtrack for his
label, and watched it go to No. 1 on the pop album chart…"
Suspense in the Aisles
"We
don't often think about the ushers at a place like Carnegie Hall, but they hear
more music than most of us. And after the Pittsburgh Symphony played
Shostakovich not long ago, they were almost speechless. I passed a little knot
of them after the concert, and found them struggling for words, trying to
describe the power of what they'd just heard. I agreed with them, and told them
so. You could go to concerts all your life, I said, and hear a performance like
this only once or twice."
Folk Pioneer
"The
CD came in the mail, as CDs will if you're a critic. On the cover was a man
I've known about for years -- Richard Dyer-Bennet, who sang folksongs, and
whose reputation as a deeply serious artist was at its height in the '40s and
'50s. I couldn't recall ever hearing him, so I slipped the disk into my CD
player and discovered a voice the poet Keats would have loved, full of truth
and beauty." (with an audio example)
Settling Some Old Scores
"The
holidays can be a time for family reminiscences, and that's true even in music,
which has its own kind of family life. Alan Feinberg, for instance, gave a
brainy, brawny piano concert at the 92d Street Y in December, featuring works
by some of the members of his own musical family. These happened to be atonal
composers from what I used to call the 'complicated music gang,' people who
ruled the small, contentious world of new classical music in New York during
the '70s and '80s. Even when they made me itch, they were part of my own
artistic community, and now that they've been dethroned, I wanted to hear them
again. How do they sound, now that they've lost their power?"
(With two audio examples.)
Beethoven, Beyond the Surface
"Eugene
Drucker, one of the violinists in the Emerson String Quartet, is quietly
elegant, and just as quietly passionate. Philip Setzer, the other violinist,
can be equally intent, but he's also the class clown. When I asked the group
why some critics think they're superficial, he shot right back, more amused
than sarcastic: 'Because it's true!'" (With an audio
excerpt.)
Listening With Innocent Ears
"We're
at Carnegie Hall, and there's a concert going on. As we sit listening, our
hearts beat and we breathe; our thoughts rustle and shout. If we were hearing
Beethoven, we could map his music to our heartbeat. But tonight the music is by
Luciano Berio, the great, fierce, cerebral modernist from Italy. How can we
connect to that?"
Pickin' and Grinnin' at Lincoln Center
"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."
Talent in Tallinn
"Against
all odds -- geographical odds, for instance, or marketing odds -- an orchestra
and choir from Estonia are performing at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts.
Estonian TV is on hand, and the space is packed. The crowd sits hypnotized,
awed by the sound, which echoes upward with almost the depth it would have in a
vaulted cathedral. But people from the center will giggle when they read this,
because I've left out one little detail…"
Improvised Rules
"As a new musical season begins, we might ponder the most
astounding event of the last one. Wynton Marsalis shook the world, making
history as the first jazz artist to win the Pulitzer Prize- -- even though, by
any commonsense reading of the Pulitzer guidelines, his winning work wasn't
even eligible."
Postcards from the Edge
"'I
like the ponytail,' said my companion, as the conductor walked out on the stage
of Carnegie Hall. And, yes, Dennis Russell Davies, music director of the
American Composers Orchestra, draws his graying hair back in a discreet little
twist, more hip than classical…"
Bach on Bass
"I’m
listening to a performance of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto, one that’s a
little quiet at the start, perhaps, but gains fire as it goes along -- and has
an extra, loving touch. Early on, I hear a bassist playing pizzicato against
the bowed strings of Bach’s orchestra…"
Versatile Virtuoso
"If I'd been looking for adventurous
classical musicians, Jean-Yves Thibaudet might have caught my eye at the
Metropolitan Opera, acting a role onstage in Giordano's faded but irresistible
old warhorse Fedora. Or I might have noticed him performing Schubert impromptus
in the film version of Portrait of a Lady. Or I might have been intrigued by
his latest CD, on which he plays music by jazz great Bill Evans. But what got
my attention was his 1995 recording of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto…"
Brooklyn's Musical Bridge
"Four
subscription concerts . . . one Sunday afternoon chamber-music extravaganza . .
. an outreach program at a local high school . . . music from John Adams to
Frank Zappa -- I've been to the Brooklyn Philharmonic quite a lot this year…
"
Not Your Father's Classical Music
"To
learn a thing or two about current classical music, say these names softly to
yourself: The Group for Contemporary Music, Speculum Musicae, The American
Composers Orchestra. These organizations got famous during the past generation
for performing works by living composers. Now smile, and speak the name of the
current contender: Bang on a Can."
Hong Kong Handoff
"True
or false? No state occasion is complete without a newly-commissioned piece of
classical music. The correct answer, I suspect, is 'Who cares?' Because if some
official entity -- a government, even -- decides to honor itself with a splashy
composition, does anybody really notice?"
Jazz at the Philharmonic
"Before
I talk about Ornette Coleman the symphonic composer or Ornette Coleman the
multimedia ringmaster, I want to say a word about the man who started it all --
Ornette Coleman the alto saxophonist, and the still, soft center of the
storm."