Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert has joined Musical America’s roster of bloggers. It’s an exciting development for us and, we hope, no less for him. If you haven’t heard yet, he filed his first blog on Tuesday and will be contributing on further Tuesdays when he can—we hope every other week or so, depending upon his schedule. His blog is called “Curiously Random,” and his first piece is entitled “A Day in the Life”—of a modern major music director, that is. Already, according to our overnight stats, his blog has been read by hundreds of people. So log on to his blog in the same column on the MA.com desktop as you log on to mine.

And speaking of schedule, as deadline for the MA Directory encroaches, back to proofreading.

by Sedgwick Clark

Having avoided concerts almost completely this summer, I’m ready for the new season to start. In some ways, it’s too bad that economics has led to 52-week performance schedules. Everyone, listeners and players alike, needs a rest. Constant anything dulls the senses, and even though I missed a few events I would have liked to attend under the right circumstances—Bard College’s “Berg and His World” uppermost—there was nothing I couldn’t hear on record. I could have skipped Lincoln Center Festival’s pair of complete Varèse concerts, as the music exists in superb recordings by Pierre Boulez and Riccardo Chailly, but it should really be heard live, and the performances—by the International Contemporary Ensemble and Alan Gilbert leading the New York Philharmonic—were well worth hearing and furthermore only required my walking a block.

Gilbert will lead the first concert on my schedule in the new season, the Philharmonic’s Opening Night Gala on next Wednesday, September 22, which will also be broadcast on Live from Lincoln Center. The program features the U.S. premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Swing Symphony (oddly, being performed only this one time), Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, and Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, a thoroughly delightful and far lighter work than its cumbersome title indicates.

The Met opens its new season on September 27 with a bang: Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the first installment of the company’s new hi-tech Ring cycle. A steady stream of articles in the Times over the summer has examined Robert Lepage’s audacious production and whether the Met stage can physically support it. Vocal lovers look forward to Bryn Terfel’s first Met Wotan and Stephanie Blythe’s Fricka (I can’t wait to hear these two megavoices face off toward the end of this season in Act II of Die Walküre, the second Ring opera). The music industry has been on tenterhooks, however: Will James Levine, who has been recovering since last spring from lower back surgery, be well enough to conduct opening night? Met representatives have been mum all summer. Rumors have it that he was leading rehearsals last week as scheduled. And just this morning a Met patron friend sent me a flyer about Levine signing copies at the Met store next Monday of two huge CD volumes of his personally selected favorite performances that the company is releasing to celebrate his 40th-anniversary season. Met reps remain mum. All fingers are crossed.

Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala always feels like homecoming, undoubtedly because it has been dark all summer. At my last concert there, on May 16, Boulez conducted the MET Orchestra, so I’m really looking forward to September 29, even if it’s all Beethoven. But the Vienna Philharmonic will be playing, and these guys know their Beethoven, even if conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s recordings haven’t convinced me that he is up to snuff. I’m hoping he will have loosened up for the second night’s glorious folk-nationalist cycle of tone poems by Smetana, Ma Vlast (My Homeland), since he recorded it. The last two VPO concerts will be conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, whose visits are a must with any orchestra.

Actually, the concert I look forward to the most will be in Philadelphia on October 1, when my friend Laurel E. Fay, author of Shostakovich: A Life, and I venture south to hear Charles Dutoit lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Soviet composer’s Fourth Symphony, preceded by British musicologist Gerard McBurney’s enlightening Beyond the Score presentation of the historical background of this unsettling work. If ever a piece of music benefited from explication, it’s this—an approximately hour-long symphony written in 1936 but not given its first performance until 1961. It signaled what appeared to be an entirely new direction for the 29-year-old composer: sort of Mahler on speed. But after the composer’s withdrawal of the symphony under pressure during rehearsals and the Stalin-inspired shuttering of his hit opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, he reverted to the more popular style we know in his Fifth Symphony. Laurel and I first saw the McBurney presentation when it was done in tandem with Andrey Boreyko’s New York Philharmonic performances of the Fourth in 2007. McBurney did an encore in Chicago two years ago to accompany Bernard Haitink’s towering performances, and it is wisely included with the live recording released on the orchestra’s own label, CSO Resound. The last New York performance of the Fourth, at Lincoln Center in March by the London Philharmonic under Vladimir Jurowski, was a hair-raiser. This piece grows more compelling with each hearing.

by Sedgwick Clark

A number of people commented to me on my report last week on the imminent demise of the Lincoln Center branch of Barnes & Noble: from Harmonia Mundi’s René Goiffon (“How things have changed since we first met!”) to composer and record company owner David Chesky (“Apple is going to put everyone out of biz!”).

CDs were still on the horizon when René and I met.

The Apple store, with its appealing, wide-open, two-story glass façade, gets more traffic than any store in the Lincoln Center area except perhaps the largest grocery store. The building’s previous tenant, Victoria’s Secret, literally had no business being in this neighborhood, but even it had more traffic than Tower’s or B&N’s classical-record departments in their declining months—both of which joined the hapless HMV store at 72nd and Broadway in redefining the word “empty.”

A friend who lives upstairs from B&N told me that apartment owners were aghast to learn that B&N’s successor will be Century 21 clothing store. They did all they could to stop it, but to no avail. I’d like to rail at greedy landlords, but it’s our way of life that they can quadruple rents as long as people continue paying them.

So an appropriate pair of superstores for Lincoln Center attendees and Juilliard School students—a record store and a bookstore—will have been replaced by cheapo furniture (Raymour and Flanigan) and threadbare clothing. Such stores have come and gone almost as quickly as restaurants over the years. Aunt Fish was the nadir, garnering perhaps the most LOL restaurant review (from Mimi Sheraton in the Times) ever written. And just this summer, the affordable O’Neal’s and Peter’s gave up the ghost after many years of comfortable surroundings and sometimes barely edible dishes.

Time marches on.

What is Contemporary Music?

In the following piece from yesterday’s Musicalamerica.com, the canard about pop music being “contemporary” music is perpetuated. I’m sure my friend Roger Wright didn’t mean to insult the many “classical” contemporary composers whose works received their premieres at this summer’s Proms concerts.

BBC Proms Breaks Attendance Records
Attendance at this summer’s BBC Proms concerts, which opened July 16, has broken all records. Halls this year averaged at 92 per cent full compared with 87 per cent in 2009.

Among the sell-out performances were programs of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim’s 80th birthday celebration, Plácido Domingo in “Simon Boccanegra” and Bryn Terfel in “Meistersinger.”

“The incredible attendance figures are a testament to the spirit of the Proms audience, and their eagerness to embrace both core classical music and the more contemporary performances,” said Roger Wright in his comments. Wright is the director of BBC Proms and controller of BBC Radio 3.

by Sedgwick Clark

As if record and video companies didn’t have enough problems, Barnes & Noble announced on Monday (8/30) that in January, after 15 years, it would close its four-story superstore across the street from Manhattan’s Lincoln Center. The stated reason: high rents. (Surprise!) B&N will try to find a more reasonably rentable location on the Upper Westside.  

Fellow geezers still wedded to retail shopping for CDs will have no alternative than to go downtown to J&R, a store I get to only when I’m on jury duty. Living near Lincoln Center, I’ve never shopped anywhere else for DVDs. It’s the worst news for West Side book lovers since the demise of Coliseum Books, at 57th and Broadway, and the most heart-stopping event since the demise of Tower Records, across Broadway from B&N.

But, in all honesty, my household has no grounds to complain because I rarely go into B&N—I might be tempted to buy something! (I’ve got so many shrink-wrapped CDs and DVDs that it would be crazy to add to the pile.) And my wife bought a Kindle last month and can’t bear to turn the damn thing off.

A Hot Time at Lincoln Center Tonight

Continuing in its march to, uh, broaden its appeal, here’s the first paragraph from a recent Lincoln Center press release:

Starting this fall, there will be a new destination for some of the hottest DJ parties in New York, when Lincoln Center launches its new LCDJ series at the David Rubenstein Atrium.  On six consecutive weekends (October 2, 9, 15, 22, 29 and November 6), from 9 p.m. to midnight, cutting-edge DJ’s will present evenings of eclectic listening and dancing—with rhythms and beats from the heart of Brazil to indie clubs from across the East River—as the David Rubenstein Atrium is transformed into an [sic] modern lounge.  And the best part—admission is FREE!  There is no cover charge, and although drinks and refreshments will be available from ‘wichcraft, there is no minimum. 

Rafael Nadal’s Serious Side

During play-by-play on Tuesday night’s Open, talking about how Rafael Nadal is a serious guy, unlike Roger Federer who stays up late and goes to fancy bars, John McEnroe remarked, “Nadal’s a big classical-music fan: He’s seen Phantom of the Opera six times.”

Composer-friendly Pianism at Bargemusic

I haven’t been to a Bargemusic concert in several seasons, but MA.com editor Susan Elliott convinced me to take a breather from my MA Directory deadline to hear an attractive program by 32-year-old American pianist Steven Beck. A Juilliard grad, he’s a regular at Bargemusic and recently played all the Beethoven piano sonatas there.

Beck had planned to open with Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka but changed it to that composer’s Serenade in A. The 1925 work was written specifically to fit on to a pair of ten-inch 78s, with each of the Serenade’s four movements totaling approximately three minutes in length. I’ve never warmed to its dry neoclassism (Charles Rosen writes in the liner notes to his recording that it “is the most loveable, and the most original of Stravinsky’s works for piano”), and this poker-faced, rather soft-edged rendering didn’t change my mind. I’ll try again, starting with the Stravinsky and Rosen recordings.

More impressive was Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Op. 25. It’s the composer’s first completely 12-tone work, and Beck’s unfussy approach allowed the music to unfold naturally. Again I sensed a lack of characterization—three of the movements are dances, after all, and Schoenberg prided himself as being directly in the German tradition—but I bow to Susan, whom I discovered played the Suite when she was studying piano. She was mightily impressed!

Debussy’s Twelve Etudes filled the second half of the program, and here I felt Beck was the complete master, offering an ideal balance of color, wit, and virtuosity throughout.

P.S. The Fulton Ferry Landing, home of Bargemusic, has undergone an extraordinary transformation since my last visit. It was too close to concert time to look around, and the sun was setting, but I could see enough to know that a post-deadline visit is definitely called for.

It Was Howdy Doody Time

“Cowabunga,” Chief Thunderthud would rumble. It’s another boomer memory, vividly etched in the Peanut Gallery of our minds—far more indelible than the concerts we attended last week or the rubber-stamp movies Hollywood has been churning out for the last 30 years.

Edward Kean, the creator of the chief and his unforgettable greeting, died on August 13 at age 85. In fact, according to Say, Kids! What Time Is It?, Stephen Davis’s 1987 book about the Howdy Doody Show,  Kean wrote “almost every line spoken and every note sung” on the program, which ran from 1948 to 1956 and totaled over 2,000 episodes. It’s doubtful that anyone out in early television land knew Kean’s name (he was only a writer, after all), but what boomer doesn’t recall his inspired characters: Howdy Doody, Clarabell, Phineas T. Bluster and his flunky, Dilly Dally, Princess Summerfall Winterspring, and Flub-a-Dub? This is the first time I’ve ever seen the Princess’s name in print, and a poetic inspiration it was, too.

The Times got around to memorializing him last Thursday (8/26), and a huge chunk of my childhood was resurrected in my reading of Dennis Hevesi’s evocative obit. I, in my youth, figured that Buffalo Bob Smith was responsible for it all. Sounds like Davis’s book is another I won’t be able to put down. Maybe PK will have it on her Kindle.