Boulez and the Met
by Sedgwick Clark
No surprise that Pierre Boulez’s first encounter with the MET Orchestra struck sparks last Sunday afternoon (5/16) at Carnegie Hall. The orchestral playing was in the same league as the astonishing Minnesota/Vänskä performance of Sibelius’s Kullervo Symphony on March 1, also at Carnegie. Boulez conducted the complete ballet music to The Wooden Prince and Schoenberg’s Erwartung, sung by Deborah Polaski. The Wooden Prince, which he considers “one of Bartók’s greatest scores,” has always brought out the best in his conducting. He led the New York Philharmonic in its local premiere and a recording on Sony Classical in 1975, a recording with the Chicago Symphony on Deutsche Grammophon in the late 1990s, and the London Symphony in its Carnegie Hall premiere in 2000. This MET performance may have been the most emotionally expressive of all, and the Schoenberg was extraordinarily clear, his own benchmark for success.
Polaski’s portrayal of the troubled, and possibly homicidal, protagonist worked toward the music’s climax subtly—quite unlike Jessye Norman’s characterization at the Met several years ago, which began at a fevered pitch of Freudian hysteria, with darting eyes and jerky body movements, so that she had nowhere to go.
A sign of Boulez’s connection with this great orchestra was not only its superb playing, but that he shook hands with all the principal strings and waved to the double basses after each work—not something I recall before from this reserved maestro. It’s too bad he never conducted a Met production, but let’s hope that James Levine invites him back immediately for another Met Orchestra concert.
The Louisville Orchestra Story
Imagine this impossible dream. A small semi-professional Midwestern orchestra struggles to make ends meet in a stressful economic climate similar to ours right now. The town mayor is a booster of the arts and suggests that the orchestra needs a unique approach: Instead of challenging the big-city star ensembles in the warhorses and paying big fees to star soloists, this 50-member band will make its renown by commissioning new works and then recording them.
The orchestra was the Louisville Orchestra, its conductor was its founder, Robert Whitney, and the prescient mayor was Charles Farnsley. In 1953, with the help of a Rockefeller Foundation grant—its first to an arts organization—the orchestra was able to commission 46 compositions a year for three years. A further Rockefeller grant, in 1956, enabled the orchestra to commission more works for premiere performances and to begin recording them for its own First Edition label, selling the records by subscription. Among the composers were Hindemith, Honegger, Milhaud, Villa-Lobos, Copland, Thomson, Schuman, Harris, Piston, Cowell, Foss, Shapero, Schuller, Rorem, Bolcom, and Carter.
The records were sold throughout the world and broadcast by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, disseminating the works of American composers far more than ever before. In 1959, a delegation of Soviet composers, including Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, and Khrennikov, insisted on visiting Louisville to see what this community had accomplished in the name of music.
Louisville’s inspiring story is told in an equally inspiring documentary film entitled Music Makes a City: A Louisville Orchestra Story, which has its premiere in Louisville tomorrow, May 20. It was screened in New York last Thursday with the directors Owsley Brown III and Jerome Hiler present to talk about the six years it took to make the film. A DVD release is projected, but first the filmmakers hope to enter the documentary in film festivals. It also would seem a natural for PBS. Anyone interested in classical music should see this uplifting story of American ingenuity at its best.
Generational Shift at Juilliard Bookstore
Juilliard’s Bookstore Trailer had its three-year interim stint and has now been replaced by a spanking new high-ceiling room with plenty of space to stock . . . books?
Well, yes . . . and no. It’s now called The Juilliard Store, and the first thing one sees upon entering are Juilliard tee-shirts, sweatshirts, and musical tchotchkes. Sure, there are books and music and CDs, which the old, pre-trailer store always had, but there was no question about the emphasis before.
There’s another change too: the personnel. They are now eager-to-please student types, smiling like in McDonald’s commercials. I glanced through the CDs on sale and then walked over to a guy behind the register and asked for Michael. Pause. Then, “Uh, he’s no longer here. He was retired.”
Michael Sherwin is one of those quirky New York music types who know everything—and I mean EVERYTHING—about recorded music and musicians, and he’s the reason the old Juilliard Bookstore had the best stock of historical CDs in town. All the great names were there: Toscanini, Furtwängler, Horowitz, Melchior, Heifetz, Lipatti, Rubinstein, Milstein, Budapest Quartet, Horenstein, Cantelli, Szigeti, Richter et al., as well as the near great.
And the reason I’m writing this is to tell anyone interested in recordings by dead musicians to get over to the Store right away and buy what’s left of the sale items because I’m pretty sure we’ll never see such a treasure trove again. On the new shelves you will find recordings by Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Lang Lang, James Levine, Plácido Domingo, and even a fair amount of the dead ones. But there are scant surprises or discoveries here—just the same recordings available across the street at Barnes & Noble.
To be fair, they’ve just started to restock. But it’s not an encouraging sign.
Looking forward
My week’s scheduled concerts:
5/20 Avery Fisher Hall. Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel. Bernstein: Age of Anxiety (Jean-Yves Thibaudet); Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6.
5/22 Avery Fisher Hall. Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel. Adams: City Noir; Mahler: Symphony No. 1.
2/27 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert. Ligeti: Le Grand Macabre.