{"id":8123,"date":"2012-11-02T04:50:43","date_gmt":"2012-11-02T08:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=8123"},"modified":"2012-11-27T12:57:41","modified_gmt":"2012-11-27T16:57:41","slug":"carnegies-crane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=8123","title":{"rendered":"Carnegie’s Crane"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Sedgwick Clark<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hurricane Sandy left a humbling amount of destruction in its wake, including a breath-catching sight in midtown Manhattan: a construction crane dangling 1,000 feet above West 57th Street, just east of Seventh Avenue, across from Carnegie Hall. Traffic was cordoned off between Sixth and Eighth avenues on 55th through 58th streets, bringing Carnegie concerts to a halt until the crane is brought down. It was initially thought that the street could be reopened when the crane was secured to the scaffolding, but second thoughts determined that the whole kit and caboodle\u2014crane, cab, and <\/em>90-story scaffolding\u2014would have to come down and then be replaced for utmost safety.<\/p>\n

How long the replacement would take varied in several reports. But on Thursday, November 1, protests by consulates of international hotel guests and pleas from apartment residents within the restricted area grew to the extent that they were allowed to enter their rooms briefly for selected belongings and pets, accompanied by the police, according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek<\/em>. This indicates a long haul at the very least, which will change the status of concert appearances this season by many favorite artists on Carnegie\u2019s stages.<\/p>\n

For a time the hall was optimistically announcing the cancellation of concerts day by day, but late on Thursday it e-mailed a press release covering concerts through November 5. Among 11 concerts rescheduled, cancelled, or moved to alternative venues, Murray Perahia\u2019s annual New York recital, scheduled for 11\/2, was handily moved to Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday, 11\/4, at 7:30. But the Belcea Quartet\u2019s first of three Beethoven quartet concerts on Saturday, 11\/3, in Zankel Hall was rescheduled for Tuesday, 11\/6, \u201cpending the reopening of West 57th Street in Manhattan\u201d\u2014most likely wishful thinking under the circumstances.<\/p>\n

Ticketholders were encouraged to check carnegiehall.org for the most up-to-date information.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Free Mozart from the New Jersey Symphony<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wonder if New Jersey Governor Chris Christie likes classical music? He has displayed such a statesmanlike profile in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that nothing would surprise me from now on. His state\u2019s fine orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony, has just announced that this weekend\u2019s all-Mozart concerts at the State Theatre in New Brunswick on 11\/3 at 8 p.m. and at NJPAC in Newark on 11\/4 at 3 p.m. will be open to the public at no charge on a first-come, first-served basis. Works on the program are the Violin Concerto No. 3, Symphony No. 29, and Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364. Augustin Dumay is violinist and conductor; Frank Foerster is violist.<\/p>\n

Another Yannick Angle\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always enjoyed others\u2019 opinions whether I agree with them or not. As it happens, George Loomis and I largely agreed about Yannick N\u00e9zet-S\u00e9guin’s Verdi Requiem with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. When I e-mailed\u00a0George\u00a0to say how much I had liked his review (Musicalamerica.com, 10\/26), he replied: \u201cI don’t think I’ve ever\u00a0been to a Verdi\u00a0Req where the focus was so much on the orchestra.\u201d Perhaps that\u2019s one reason I liked the performance so much (Musicalamerica.com, 10\/24). I have admitted before that vocalism is not my strong suit, but it certainly is (one of) George\u2019s, which is why anyone interested in the arts should read as many different opinions as possible.<\/p>\n

George concluded his review with a good point I had forgotten: that Yannick had held up his arms to silence applause when the last note of the \u201cLibera me<\/em>\u201d died out\u2014but for too long, and one could sense the audience champing at the bit to register its approval. It was pretentious. Giannandrea Noseda got it just right last fall at Lincoln Center after his devastating performance of Britten\u2019s War Requiem<\/em>: about 20 seconds.<\/p>\n

Botstein Overreaches<\/strong><\/p>\n

Music Director Leon Botstein\u2019s celebration of the American Symphony Orchestra\u2019s 50th anniversary was typically ambitious\u2014two monumental works identified with Leopold Stokowski, founder of the ASO: Charles Ives\u2019s Symphony No. 4 and Gustav Mahler\u2019s Symphony No. 8 (\u201cThe Symphony of a Thousand\u201d), with Stoki\u2019s 1969 arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner <\/em>thrown in as an opener. Ticket prices matched 1965\u2019s: $1 to $7.<\/p>\n

Three of the Ives Fourth\u2019s movements had been performed previously\u2014Nos. 1 and 2 conducted by Eugene Goossens in 1927 and No. 3 by Bernard Herrmann in 1933\u2014but Stokowski\u2019s was the premiere of the complete, four-movement work (1910-25), on April 26, 1965. Coincidentally, one of the 83-year-old maestro\u2019s assistant conductors for the Ives premiere\u2014Jos\u00e9 Serebrier (the other was David Katz)\u2014was downstairs in Carnegie\u2019s Zankel Hall leading the American Composers Orchestra in Ives\u2019s Third Symphony and other works. I had planned on attending the ACO but, alas, I heard about the Botstein concert the morning of the concert and was able to get a ticket.<\/p>\n

The Ives is still a rarity these days, with the complex rhythmic layering of its second and fourth movements still requiring considerable virtuosity. I\u2019ve heard Boulez\/New York Phil, Ozawa\/BSO, and Dohn\u00e1nyi\/Cleveland of the Fourth in concert; the first and third of these had much to offer technically but were hardly idiomatic. The Stoki and Serebrier recordings remain superior. It was announced on Bernstein\/Philharmonic programs in the Sixties and Eighties but to my knowledge was never performed. Botstein\u2019s performance was surprisingly accomplished technically, but it was emotionally unsympathetic, especially the lovely third-movement Andante moderato, and devoid of the folkloristic American elements that Stoki unearths in the busy second movement. It was also awfully fast\u201427 minutes; six minutes faster than the timing listed in the program.<\/p>\n

Stokowski led the American premiere of Mahler\u2019s Eighth in 1916 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and gave it a notable reading in 1949 with the New York Philharmonic, preserved on several sources, including a historical broadcast set of the symphonies released by the orchestra, which, incidentally, I produced. The Eighth is an extraordinarily difficult piece to unify and was neither\u00a0memorably\u00a0played, sung,\u00a0or conducted. Imagine, Maestro, if you had given the rehearsal time you took for the Ives and applied it to Mahler\u2019s gargantuan symphony. You could have worked to honor the composer\u2019s pianissimo directions. Loud portions, such as the end of the first movement, might have been more than a chaotic noise. You might not have had to stop twice in the second movement\u2019s instrumental introduction, and more than that, you might have had time to invest it with some meaning.<\/p>\n