Archives for July 2003

A reader writes:

You recently mentioned “snobbery” in your blog:

I can’t think of many things I loathe more than the hyper-aggressive snobbery whose effect–perhaps even its purpose–is to frighten away well-meaning people who want to dip their toe into the pool of beauty for the first time.

Question: Do you believe in pre-concert audience talks? I’m not talking about those pre-concert lectures which some concerts and operas offer (like my Houston Grand Opera), which take some time before the show, in a special room, to discuss the piece in detail. They might be great, but my wife and I are too busy grabbing a bite before the show.

I’m talking about when the conductor comes to the podium, turns to the audience, and says a few words about the piece just before playing it. Do you think this would be a good or bad thing to do?

My personal opinion is that it would double orchestra attendance overnight.

I couldn’t agree more–if the conductor in question can talk. Some can, some can’t. One who can is Michael Tilson Thomas of the San Francisco Symphony, who has an uncanny knack for getting his audiences on the side of difficult new music by chatting about it in a direct and engaging way from the podium. Needless to say, it helps that Thomas is also a great conductor who has turned the San Francisco Symphony into one of America’s top orchestras. And all things being equal, I’d rather hear a good performance by a mute conductor than a fair performance by a talkative conductor. But all things aren’t equal anymore, and it seems to me that conductors who can’t talk as well as Thomas would do well to learn how–or hire speechwriters. Sure, it’d be nice if they wrote their own speeches, but talent is not apportioned equally or logically, and the ability to write a good pre-concert talk probably isn’t found on the same chromosome as the ability to conduct Beethoven.

I just finished reading the galleys of a new biography of Alfred Hitchcock. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, whose episodes he used to introduce in the driest, drollest manner imaginable. Well, Hitchcock didn’t write those introductions. They were written for him by a witty playwright named James Allardice, the same fellow who knocked out his after-dinner speeches. Hitchcock just read them–brilliantly–and they helped make him a star in his own right.

Me, I think all musicians, classical and non-classical alike, should talk to their audiences. If I ran a conservatory, I’d require every student to take a class in public speaking. Failing that, though, I think a little discreet ghostwriting might prove to be a shrewd investment in the future of classical music in America.

If you long to purchase real art that won’t require you to take out a second mortgage, Lincoln Center’s List Art Poster & Print Program is worth a visit. Each year, the program commissions signed limited-edition screenprints from well-known artists, subsequently turning them into high-quality posters advertising a Lincoln Center constituent. Prints are limited to 108 copies, posters to 500. The batting average, artistically speaking, is impressively high, and several List screenprints, like Helen Frankenthaler’s Grey Fireworks, have sold out quickly and appreciated considerably in value since their publication. I own a List print, and look at it lovingly several dozen times each day. (I paid for it, too–this is not a commercial!)

“Celebrating 40 Years of List Posters,” an exhibition drawn from the 160-plus prints commissioned to date, goes up August 11 at the Lincoln Center Gallery (across the hall from the downstairs entrance to the Metropolitan Opera House) and will remain on view through September 6. Artists in the show include Frankenthaler, Jennifer Bartlett, Wolf Kahn, Robert Motherwell, Jules Olitski, Gerhard Richter, and Jamie Wyeth. All works on display will also be available for sale. In addition, you can purchase List prints and posters on line any time by going here.

“Interesting is easy, beautiful is difficult.”

Gustav Mahler, quoted in Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler

The New York Times ran a story last week about a now-deceased Texas oil heiress whose estate is suing the Metropolitan Opera. During her lifetime, Sybil Harrington, the lady in question, gave the Met $27 million, with the explicit (and obviously well-lawyered) proviso that the money be used in support of “at least one new production each Metropolitan Opera season by composers such as Verdi, Puccini, Bizet, Wagner, Strauss and others whose works have been the core of the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera during its first century, with each such new production to be staged and performed in a traditional manner that is generally faithful to the intentions of the composer and the librettist.” The Met obliged, going so far as to name its auditorium after her.

After Harrington died in 1998, her estate gave the company another $5 million to televise its productions, with a similar stipulation that the gift be used “exclusively for the televising of traditional/grand opera productions of the Metropolitan Opera…set in a place and time and staged as the composer placed it.” The estate charges, among other complicated things, that the Met spent some of that money on a telecast of a non-traditional production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and wants her money returned.

Joe Volpe, who runs the Met, isn’t talking, except to say he’s “confident that, at the end of this affair, the name of the Metropolitan Opera will remain unsullied.” Right. In fact, the Times story seems to leave little doubt that the Met did what the Harrington estate says it did, though if you’ve followed the eternalitigation in which Philadelphia’s Barnes Collection is entangled, you know nothing is simple when cultural institutions find themselves in legal hot water.

What interests me, though, is less the suit than the terms of the original gift. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Met agreed to let a Texas oil heiress dictate a good-sized chunk of its artistic policy, which strikes me as…well, where shall I begin? Provincial? Irresponsible? How about downright boneheaded? On the other hand, the whole thing starts to sound less surprising when you consider the past decade or so of new Met productions. Yes, I’ve seen some theatrically breathtaking things there (Mark Lamos’ Wozzeck comes immediately to mind), but in recent years, with only a few exceptions, the company’s productions have typically oscillated between rigidly hyper-traditional stagings of standard operas like Madama Butterfly and Eurotrashy anything-for-an-effect stagings of non-standard operas like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All of which makes me wonder: To what extent were Sybil Harrington and her oil money responsible for the fact that the Met has become so tired and unadventurous, theatrically speaking?

Granted, it isn’t easy for the Met to put on a theatrically serious show–the house is too large. Nor do I believe that neo-traditional stagings of standard operas are necessarily a bad thing (though I can’t remember the last time I saw a good one). In any case, I’m well aware that older operagoers as a group tend to hate adventurous operatic productions. They want trees with leaves. So maybe Harrington simply made it possible for the Met to do what it would have done anyway, only with more leaves.

All I’m saying is that when I go to the opera, I want to see something that’s worth seeing, not just hearing. Which may be why I now go to New York City Opera far more often than the Met. But that’s another posting.

(Incidentally, the Times is also reporting that the powers-that-be have decided against including a new downtown house for New York City Opera in their Ground Zero redevelopment plans–a huge disappointment for those, myself included, who thought it a terrific idea. I suspect it won’t be the last such disappointment as the plans start to take clearer shape.)

From time to time, one of New York’s theatrical publicists sends out an e-mail called “Who Was Seen at the Theatre Last Week?” Here are excerpts from the most recent edition (all spelling and punctuation guaranteed unaltered).

Last weekend in London Arnold Schwarzenegger, in town to promote with opening of Terminator 3 in Europe, was spotted at the West End
production of MAMMA MIA! along with wife Maria Shriver and their children.

Toni Braxton, dressed in an exquisite gown designed by special guest and dear friend, Marc Bouwer, was feted at Laura Belle last Thursday (July 17) by family, friends and Broadway luminaries celebrating the 6-time Grammy-winner’s return to the Great White Way in AIDA.

“Friends” star David Schwimmer caught up with Broadway’s long running URINETOWN at the Henry Miller.

The sensational Broadway show NINE was visited this week by a variety of sensational Broadway stars: Jon Secada, Rebecca Luker and Lou Diamond Phillips. Also seen was Broadway newcomer, and Antonio’s wife, Melanie Griffith.

I never fail to be amused by this charming little relic of the stone age of press agentry, redolent as it is of the dear departed days when Walter Winchell ruled the earth. I mean, does anybody, anywhere, care how Lou Diamond Phillips spends his spare time? Then again, maybe it’s just me. Obviously somebody, somewhere, is paying attention, otherwise the publicist in question wouldn’t bother, right? Or is “Who Was Seen at the Theatre Last Week?” actually being knocked out on an Underwood manual (that’s a typewriter, Gen-Xers) by an 85-year-old guy who wears a fedora at his desk and doesn’t know that the only kind of gossip people want to hear these days involves the sex lives of the rich and famous? As Captain Renault might have said, that’s what I like to think–it’s the romantic in me.

A reader writes, apropos of my recent here that younger New Yorkers don’t seem to be collecting affordable serious art:

When I go to people’s houses, I routinely have to drool at the art on the walls, and if there’s not real art, there’s really nice posters and reproductions. See, baby boomers and Gen-Xers who are science fiction/fantasy or comics fans routinely have inexpensive high-quality art on their walls, as
well as sketches by the famous tucked away in various places. I’m not an especially huge art collector and I’m not making much, but I have the following in my collection: (1) A painted cover layout by Jack Gaughan. (2) Two sketches by Hannes Bok (I paid too much for these, frankly). (3) Six pages of sketches by Phil Foglio. (He gives out his old scratch paper for free at conventions. We like.) (4) A quick-sketched portrait by Mark Wallace (“William Blackfox”). (5) A drawing by Matt Roach. I’ve also got five paintings by lesser-known folks and a ton of laser prints. Oh, and I’ve been known to buy animation cels and artwork as gifts for others.

I could easily pick up a really good cover painting for 500-1000 dollars if I attended the right science fiction conventions, but frankly, I don’t have enough space on my wall and my apartment has this little thing called rent. But lots of fans make lots more money than I do, and they buy. A lot. Most fans have more art stuck away somewhere in the house than on the walls, and there’s plenty on the walls. But every convention features an art show, with work by the most revered professionals cheek-by-jowl with rank beginners. A lot of stuff is clumsy, and some of the stuff with good technique is too pretty-pretty or too dark or too interested in showing large expanses of female flesh. But there’s a lot of good and interesting stuff out there.

Shh! Don’t tell anybody!

Pop quiz: What do you think my reaction to this letter was?

If your answer was (A) amused snobbery, you are sooooo wrong. One of my most prized pieces of art is an original cel setup (animation cel plus background painting) from The Cat Concerto, an Oscar-winning Tom & Jerry cartoon. It shows Jerry Mouse scampering up a piano keyboard, a vexed expression on his face. I love animated cartoons, and I think they’re art, too, the same way I think All About Eve is art–that much, and no more. That’s the reason why my Tom & Jerry cel setup is hung in my office, but my John Marin etching is hung in my living room.

To quote from the preface to A Terry Teachout Reader, out next spring from Yale University Press: “Just as city dwellers can’t understand what it meant for the residents of a rural town to wake up one day and find themselves within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, so are they incapable of properly appreciating the true significance of middlebrow culture. For all its flaws, it nurtured at least two generations’ worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows–but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture.”

The point being that it’s absolutely O.K. to like both John Marin and Tom & Jerry, so long as you know that there’s a big difference between them, and that one is better than the other. Which ought to be needless to say…but we all know it isn’t anymore, don’t we?

“The Thomas Crown Affair is pretty good trash, but we shouldn’t convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from our study of the other arts. That’s being false to what we enjoy. If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to be ashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular entertainment, it’s even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition.”

Pauline Kael, Going Steady

I wonder how many readers of the New York Times remember Harold C. Schonberg, who died Saturday at the age of 87. He was the Times’ chief music critic from 1960 to 1980, during which time he published two very popular books about classical music, The Great Pianists (1963) and The Lives of the Great Composers (1970), and won a Pulitzer prize for criticism, the first ever awarded to a music critic. Yet he was regarded as increasingly irrelevant even during his tenure at the Times, and though his old paper gave him a proper sendoff, by now I suspect he is best remembered (if at all) for having taken memorably worded but ultimately philistine potshots at Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould, neither of which was quoted in his Times obituary. (It was Schonberg who wrote of an especially flamboyant Bernstein performance that “he rose vertically into the air, a la Nijinsky, and hovered there a good 15 seconds by the clock.”)

A no-nonsense journalist who understood in his bones that a performance is also news–something many working critics never figure out–Schonberg was conservative to the point of reaction in his musical values, and this, I suspect, is what has caused his memory to fade. It wasn’t just that he rejected the avant-garde: The Lives of the Great Composers, otherwise a rather good book, is surprisingly unreceptive to 20th-century classical music in general. But he got one thing on the nose, as he recalled in his farewell column, from which the Times did quote:

I thought the serial-dominated music after the war was a hideously misbegotten creature sired by Caliban out of Hecate, and I had no hesitation in saying so. Nor has it been proved that I was all wrong. Certain it is that the decades of serialism did nothing but alienate the public, creating a chasm between composer and audience.

Schonberg lived long enough to see time prove him dead right about the music of Schoenberg, Webern, and their progeny–although a good many of his fellow critics have yet to figure out what he sensed at once. And as unfashionable as his rejection of 12-tone music was in the Sixties and Seventies, he never hesitated, then or at any other time, to say exactly what he thought.

Not the worst possible epitaph for a critic.