he waives his fee <\/a>for a pair of concerts (MA.com, 3\/20).\u00a0 The orchestra is Ohio’s financially strapped Columbus Symphony, and the pianist is Emanuel Ax.\u00a0 It was his idea, reported the CSO management, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has basked in the warmth and generosity of his playing.\u00a0 So, who’s next?<\/p>\nSouthern Turn at Tanglewood.\u00a0 <\/strong>Ever notice how newly appointed music directors charge into their jobs with enterprising, challenging programs, only to turn south after a couple of years?\u00a0 James Levine, for instance, loaded his first few Boston Symphony seasons with Carter, Babbitt, Wuorinen, and Schoenberg.\u00a0 Critics raved and audiences ran.\u00a0 For a time, some of those works turned up at the orchestra’s summer music festival at Tanglewood, and last season featured a daringly inclusive tribute to Carter for his 100th<\/sup> birthday.\u00a0 But that experiment appears to be history.\u00a0 The newly announced season opens with Tchaikovsky’s “Path\u00e9tique” and the First Piano Concerto, closes with Beethoven’s Ninth, and contains a single unfamiliar name on the weekend orchestra concerts: the late George Perle, for his brief, sweet-natured Sinfonietta No. 2, performed “in memoriam.”\u00a0<\/p>\nTrash Cans at Tully.<\/strong>\u00a0 My ecstasy was short-lived.\u00a0 As reported in my second blog, the 12-tone bells signaling the end of intermission\u2014which made their debut in the ’60s at Philharmonic, now Fisher, Hall\u2014were resurrected at Tully’s reopening.\u00a0 On further trips to Tully those evocative tintinnabuli were replaced by what sounds like the banging of garbage cans or at least the world’s most cacophonous cow bells.\u00a0 Is this a musical<\/em> decision?\u00a0 Scarier still, do the New Populists at Lincoln Center worry that the tone rows might alienate audiences?\u00a0<\/p>\nPerahian Perfection.<\/strong>\u00a0 Murray Perahia’s recital last week (3\/31) at Fisher of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, capped off by an encore by Schubert, was so exquisite that I felt underdressed.\u00a0 Normally I wouldn’t go near such a rearguard program, but he’s one of two or three pianists I would willingly hear play an evening of Hanon.\u00a0 Brahms’s “Handel” Variations, my favorite of his solo piano works, has been lodged in my head all week like a tape loop.\u00a0 I must remember to wear a coat and tie to his next recital.<\/p>\nFisher’s Murk.<\/strong>\u00a0 I love you, Lincoln Center.\u00a0 But the lighting in Fisher Hall has been impossible this season.\u00a0 Any farther back than row R seems remote under the best of circumstances.\u00a0 But sitting in row Y, with hall lighting suitable <\/strong>for necking and the stage barely bright enough to find the bathroom at night, poor Perahia seemed to be in the next county.\u00a0 Need I add that such dim lighting compromises the music-making as well?\u00a0 I once asked a British friend what he thought of the concert we’d just heard at Fisher, and he replied, “I kept wanting to turn the volume up.”\u00a0 Hey guys, I know you want to attract young’uns to your concerts, but the majority of your patrons are aging\u2014nay, OLD\u2014and presbyopic (like me), which brings me to another subject: the program type.\u00a0 It’s the same point size as Carnegie’s program (8\/11), but LC’s is lightface and CH’s is medium. Even in a reasonably illuminated house, LC’s programs would be more difficult to read.\u00a0 Let’s be reasonable.<\/p>\nPatelson’s<\/strong> music store, in back of Carnegie Hall for 70 years,\u00a0will close up shop for ever on April 18.\u00a0 The mice had preceded me when I\u00a0stopped in\u00a0yesterday for visitation, and the few remaining items are 35 to 40 percent off, depending on which clerk you speak with.\u00a0 What’s next?\u00a0
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