Lincoln Center’s Audacious Festival 96

By Sedgwick Clark

Musical America talks with John Rockwell, the master puppeteer behind the scenes.

Audacity” was the word that came to mind. And at stodgy old Lincoln Center, of all places. New York performing-arts lovers hadn’t been offered such a stimulating summer since Martin Segal’s International Festival of the Arts in 1988. For three weeks, America’s foremost shrine to European art music was host to some 200 performances of 64 programs. Included were 11 world premieres, 13 U.S. premieres, and six New York premieres. In addition to the music and dance events (covered elsewhere in this issue), U.S. debuts were made by Dublin’s Gate Theatre performing the complete stage works of Samuel Beckett, London’s Theatre de Complicite in The Three Wives of Lucie Cabral, and Hanoi’s Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre.

The risk was immense. Lincoln Center already had a sure summer thing in the 30-year-old Mostly Mozart Festival, which was popular (94 percent average attendance) but predictable. The Center’s increasingly urgent quest for younger and more diverse audiences is well known, and as rumors of Mostly Mozart’s possible demise began to circulate, influential critics prophesied the beginning of the end for the Center’s original mission. The road to Sodom and Gomorrah was cemented in their minds by Lincoln Center’s bold choice of former New York Times music critic John Rockwell as festival director. A figure of controversy for his unwavering conviction in a cross-pollination of the classical and popular—or, as he prefers, cultivated and vernacular—arts, Rockwell has long been viewed in traditional classical-music circles as an enemy of the business (a charge he doubtless enjoys).

It was a difficult first birth. Eventually Mostly Mozart was curtailed from six to four weeks. Political battles raged between Lincoln Center and its constituents, who feared that the new festival would steal their fund-raising sources. Nervous P.R. attempts to quell the fires only fueled the press’s cynicism, and the official festival announcement was anticlimactic. Industry veterans clucked that the exotic programming would not succeed at Lincoln Center (and everybody knows that New Yorkers abandon the city in the summer). Advance ticket sales were glacial, and Lincoln Center President Nathan Leventhal described himself in a state of “raw terror.” On opening night, Valery Gergiev conducted the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus in Avery Fisher Hall. Leventhal, Lincoln Center Chairman Beverly Sills, and New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sat totally alone in the left side of the Hall’s first tier, overlooking sandbars of empty orchestra seats. Meanwhile, the New York Philharmonic serenaded tens of thousands in Central Park.

But the palpable excitement in these photos doesn’t lie. The inevitable mishaps were quickly forgotten as critics and audiences cheered, and attendance picked up as the reviews and word of mouth took effect. The less expensive seats were nearly always packed to the gills, and even such quixotic Rockwell favorites as the Morton Feldman concerts sold far better than expected. In a postmortem interview, Leventhal told The New York Times that he was “astonished” at how close the final tally came to Lincoln Center’s projected sales. Eighty-one thousand tickets sold at the box office, only 3,000 fewer than hoped for. Seventy-six percent capacity had been anticipated in the plaza halls, and Leventhal expressed pleasure with 73 percent. “The festival’s board had hoped to take in about $3.6 million in ticket sales,” noted the Times, “and it sold about $3.3 million worth. The total budget for the festival was $8.5 million, but, as planned, the remaining money has been raised through contributions.”

The morning after the final concert, Rockwell expressed a mixture of relief and letdown that, after two years of planning, the three weeks had passed so quickly. “Our idea was that the festival sort of hit people like a fireball. We wanted intensity, geographical focus, specialness, acts that are extremely unusual and not likely to be encountered in a regular season. A classic example is the complete plays of Beckett: You could have done Happy Days, Endgame, and Godot, but why not do them all? The cost was not overwhelming, and it became a real centerpiece of the festival.”

The Beckett canon, performed in appropriately small auditoriums on the periphery of Lincoln Center’s campus, was one of the festival’s undisputed big hits, along with the Theatre de Complicite, Merce Cunningham’s Ocean, the Alvin Ailey dance company, and the Vietnamese Water Puppets. Rockwell mentions the Kirov, Four Saints in Three Acts, Feldman, Gardiner, and Reigakushu as artistic, if not S.R.O., successes. Orchestral concerts seemed to be the most difficult overall to sell, perhaps because of their ubiquity during New York’s regular season.

Even anti-Rockwellians in the press had to admit the liveliness of his concoctions in much of the traditional repertoire. Two of the four Gergiev/Kirov concerts were devoted to “official Soviet music” by Shostakovich and Prokofiev. The second concert opened provocatively with the latter’s fawning birthday greeting to Stalin, Zdravitsa (“A toast to Stalin, the murderer?” muttered a woman behind me, who left at intermission). Three Beethoven programs introduced John Eliot Gardiner’s acclaimed period-instrument Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir to America. Their two semi-staged performances of Leonore (the first version of Fidelio), were offered alongside three concert performances of the final version by Kurt Masur and the hometown Philharmonic. The libretti, arranged on opposite pages in a single booklet, made for fascinating comparison. Choreographer Maguy Marin’s imaginative integration of film and dance in Coppelia remained in the memory long after her cheesy setting—a contemporary housing project, with the aged inventor as a dirty old man and his “daughter” as a prostitute—was forgotten.

Rockwell is content with what one critic called “grabbag” programming. “I think it limits the festival to have a really rigid overarching theme. I want all world music. I want all world arts. Not because I’m PC—I honestly do not believe I can be accused of that—but because I generally like the stuff. And I think that the best contemporary arts are coming from those kinds of clashes and mixtures. I think the festival could and should be emblematic of what really is going on out there.” He promises “more popular music in the festival for years to come. Not because I want to turn this into a pop-music festival, but because a larger amount of exciting and interesting work occurs on the vernacular side of the scale than was represented in this festival.”

Rockwell’s critical odyssey in search of the New has served him well; the hard-nosed journalist has made a comfortable transition to an enthusiastic first-time impresario. When asked how to define success: “It can be measured in terms of a general feeling that the festival made a mark and was exciting and was appreciated and enjoyed by people. By knots of people standing around outside a theater long after it’s over, discussing the event. By going to restaurants and seeing different groups of artists. One night I had dinner with all the Brain Opera folks, and there was John Eliot Gardiner eating three tables away. And another night I had a dinner for all the Feldman artists, and three tables away Masur was having a dinner for the Fidelio cast. I mean, it’s fun, that kind of stuff. So you can measure success in a lot of ways other than strictly box office. That said, if we had come in way short of projections, which we did not do, one could blather on about excited groups of people outside the theater until the cows came home and there’d still be a problem.”

With one summer under its belt, Lincoln Center has time to tinker. Sales were slow at first and only gathered momentum toward the end of the first week. “The first sell-out was the Beethoven Ninth—surprise, surprise—with Gardiner, which was also nationally telecast,” says Rockwell, “and from then on the vast majority of our events sold at 125 percent of budgeted capacity.” Not the matinees, however, which sold disappointingly throughout. “We pegged our ticket prices to the standard prices that operate in those theaters,” he continues. “In other words, Philharmonic prices are their regular prices.” Next year, Leventhal told the Times, there will be more medium-priced tickets for sale.

Next summer the New York Philharmonic won’t be playing in Central Park on opening night. Lincoln Center is committed to two more summer festivals, with further ventures if it catches on. Rockwell’s vision extends nationwide: “The reason that there have been so few big international performing-arts festivals in this country, in my opinion, is largely the cost of bringing people from other parts of the world. To bring in a 30-member gagaku ensemble or 200 Russians or 75 Irish or whatever is expensive. Lincoln Center itself spawned other arts complexes around the country. Maybe this festival will spawn other festivals around the country and enable us to set up tours of European companies, which could then lower everybody’s costs.”

Sedgwick Clark is editor of Musical America Directory.