Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
In case you haven’t heard, Book Magazine, for which I used to write regularly and with pleasure, is closing down.
Sure, Book had its problems, and its relationship with Barnes & Noble was inevitably tricky, but the bottom line is this: Yet another publication devoted to books and authors has bitten the dust.
All of which strongly suggests (once again, and at least to me) that the future of high-culture journalism is on the Web.
“The question of capital punishment arising in connection with In Cold Blood, he says, ‘At least in England they don’t keep them waiting about for five or ten years.’ I point out that in the Christie case they should have and ask whether he thinks the death sentence is ever justifiable. ‘Well, there have been people on whom I can picture it being carried out. [Bertolt] Brecht, for one. In fact I can imagine doing it to him myself. It might even have been rather enjoyable, when the time came, to have been able to say to him, “Now let’s step outside.” I’d have given him a good last meal, of course. Still, you must admire the logic of a man who lives in a Communist country, takes out Austrian citizenship, does his banking in Switzerland, and, like a gambler hedging his bets, sends for the pastor at the end in case there could be something in that, too.'”
W.H. Auden, in conversation with Robert Craft (quoted in Craft’s Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship)
A reader writes:
I appreciated Monteux’s comments on audiences. Interestingly enough, my experience is almost always otherwise here in Houston. Audiences applaud when they feel like it, and are quite enthusiastic (if I were writing for the Eastern media, perhaps the obligatory comment about “cowboys” goes here…). Houston is quite friendly and rather friendly to the arts. Our symphony and ballet are in the black the last time I checked. Ditto theater. We’re second tier in the arts world, but an honest second.
Some years ago my wife noted the transformation, over his tenure, of conductor Sergiu Comissiona as he slowly went from “tolerating” the not-at-the-end-of-the-piece applause … to welcoming and appreciating it. We aren’t boors, we just enjoy what we like and are here to have a good time.
Actually, I’ve always thought Houston was a terrific arts town–good orchestra, good ballet company, close enough to Fort Worth that you can zip over and see the Kimbell Art Museum, which ranks right up there with the Cleveland and the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City in my cool-museums-from-elsewhere book. So I’m more than pleased to hear that the citizenry of Houston is enlightened when it comes to having a good time in the concert hall.
Not to be obvious, but maybe it isn’t so obvious: The first responsibility of art is to give pleasure. If it doesn’t, I’m out of there, or wish I were. (Alas, being the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal means never getting to say, “Wow, this really blows, want to leave at intermission?”)
I occasionally find in my blogmailbox a teasing note from a reader who feels the need to point out that this blog is supposed to be about the arts in New York City. And so it was, three months ago, and so it usually is today, but in my own mind I now render the subtitle of “About Last Night” as follows: “Terry Teachout in New York City on the arts (with additional dialogue by Our Girl in Chicago).” It’s true that New York is the arts capital of America, and maybe even the whole world, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t important and interesting things constantly happening all over the place. Sometimes I note these IAITs from afar, and sometimes I get on a plane (shudder) and go see for myself. Earlier this month, for instance, I paid visits to Raleigh, N.C., and St. Louis, Mo., about which I’ve been meaning to tell you, so now I will.
As regular readers know, I take a serious interest in the activities of Carolina Ballet, America’s youngest ballet company, and since it won’t come to me, I go to it. On my last visit (which took place, you may recall, mere hours after the Great Hard-Drive Crash of 2003), I saw two different programs of new and recent ballets. Robert Weiss, the artistic director, did himself proud with a pair of dances accompanied by string quartet. The first, Grosse Fuge, seemed on paper like a terrible mistake, or at least a high-risk proposition. Why would anybody in his right mind dare to make a dance accompanied by Beethoven’s knottiest, most rebarbative string quartet, 16 minutes of ultra-fraught counterpoint? Well, Weiss did, and it’s something to see.
Though he’s a disciple of George Balanchine, Weiss rarely makes plotless pure-dance ballets in the manner of the master, and when he does, they tend to have a poetic overlay or subtext. Grosse Fuge, for instance, interweaves two corps of dancers, one dressed in white and the other in black, making simultaneous reference to the Black Swan/White Swan dichotomy of Swan Lake and to the famous M.C. Escher drawing in which a flock of birds seems to change color in mid-flight. The result is a complex, richly watchable ballet (I’ve seen it three times) that has the same kind of emotional resonance as Balanchine’s Serenade, another nominally “plotless” ballet which is actually full of mysterious events and encounters.
On the same bill was Des Images, choreographed by Weiss to the Ravel String Quartet (which is, by the way, an absolutely perfect piece of music–I can’t imagine why it hasn’t been previously used by a major choreographer). Here, the poetic content is explicit: Des Images is a ballet about the making of a ballet, with costumes and lighting by Jeff A.R. Jones and Ross Kolman inspired by the dance-themed paintings and pastels of Edgar Degas. If any of this sounds obvious to you, rest assured that the results are completely involving, a Robbins-like theatrical concept realized in Balanchine-like movement to wholly personal effect. No set, but the hot, high-keyed colors of Kolman’s lighting plunge you into the world of late Degas so effectively that you don’t feel the absence of a backdrop.
As for Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s Lost and Found, I wrote about it in the Journal two weeks ago in connection with the 9/11 plays currently afflicting New York theatergoers. If you didn’t see that piece, here’s what I said:
I flew down to North Carolina in between “Omnium Gatherum” and “Recent Tragic Events,” where I saw Carolina Ballet dance the premiere of Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s “Lost and Found,” a remarkably poetic dance about–you guessed it–9/11. Ms. Taylor-Corbett has taken some of the postures and gestures of grief she saw in New York City two years ago and woven them into an abstract ballet (set to Schumann’s “Symphonic Etudes”) that scrupulously shuns melodrama and portentousness and is all the more poignant for it. I mention “Lost and Found” because it reminded me of a remark made by the great dance critic Edwin Denby: “Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening–nobody on the stage at least. That’s why it becomes so popular in any civilized country during a war.” Need I say more?
Here in New York, we occasionally use the word “provincial” to describe artistic events taking place in medium-sized cities–sometimes invidiously, sometimes not. I suppose you could call Raleigh a “provincial” city, but there was nothing even remotely provincial about these new dances, or about Carolina Ballet. The only problem is that you have to go to Raleigh to see the company (which I don’t consider a problem–I like Raleigh–but it does entail my getting on a plane). In a better-regulated universe, Carolina Ballet would dance for a week each season in New York and Washington, and the critics in those benighted cities would say, Gee, look what we’ve been missing! All I can say is, I’m glad I’m not missing it.
Time’s up, so I’ll write about the St. Louis Art Museum’s “German Art Now” exhibit tomorrow, or maybe the next day. Still, you get the idea, right? New York’s just fine, I wouldn’t live anywhere else, but it doesn’t have a monopoly on anything worth having. Remember that the next time you wish you lived here.
Wesla Whitfield, the greatest cabaret singer in the world, is singing for one night only this Saturday at the Oak Room
of the Algonquin Hotel. Two shows, at nine and 11:30. If you’ve never seen her, call now and make a reservation. It isn’t cheap, but it’s definitely worth it.
If you need further persuading, here’s part of a piece I wrote a few years ago about Whitfield and the Oak Room:
Eighty well-dressed people sit silently in a darkened, oak-paneled room in the center of Manhattan. Some have plates of food in front of them, others have drinks at their elbows, but nobody is paying much attention to food or drink right now, not even the waiters. Instead, they’re all listening to a woman seated on a high stool placed in the bend of a piano, her handsome face lit by a single baby spotlight. Her name is Wesla Whitfield, and she’s singing a song everyone here knows by heart: Somewhere over the rainbow/Bluebirds fly/Birds fly over the rainbow/Why then oh why can’t I? It takes a lot of nerve, and a lot of talent, to sing a song like that in a room like this. The woman has both, which is why the crowd is so quiet: you could hear a pin drop across the street…
[Whitfield] has been a West Coast cult figure for years; her full, fine-drawn mezzo voice, easy swing, and miraculously direct way with a lyric are in the great tradition of American popular singing, and more than a few admirers, myself included, consider her the best cabaret singer in the world. But it was only after she opened at the Oak Room that the rest of the world caught on. “It was a very big deal,” she says of her first booking in the room where she now sings regularly to sold-out houses. “I had tried for five years to get a gig here. And when I finally got one, it was a do-or-die thing. The first night, Al Hirschfeld, Burton Lane, George Shearing, and Michael Feinstein were all sitting three feet from me. It was terrifying.”
What makes the Oak Room so special? Obviously, the singers who perform there are the heart of the matter, though the room itself contributes significantly to the effect they make. Cabaret is an intimate art, and the 80-seat Oak Room, with its amber sconces and red velvet banquettes, is as up close and personal as a love seat at midnight: there is no finer place to listen to songs of passion and despair. “It’s nice singing in a room this small,” Whitfield says, “because I get feedback from the people. I know what works–and what doesn’t work. When they’re bored, you can hear them scrunching up their toes in their shoes. You can get that kind of response in a larger room, but it’s very slow, and very limited.”
Enough said? See you there.
Felix Salmon
is on my case (in a very gentlemanly way) regarding my recent link
about applause between movements:
Audiences these days can’t be trusted only to applaud the good stuff: give them half a chance and they’ll cheer the downright mediocre as well. And there’s no doubt that too much applause in the middle of a symphony, opera or concerto can definitely break up its drive and flow.
Besides, if people get the idea that it’s fine to clap at the end of movements, they’ll start clapping at every false ending as well, with disastrous consequences. I’m having visions here of people bursting out enthusiastically half a dozen times within ten minutes at the end of a Haydn symphony: something I’m sure no one thinks is a very good idea.
If asked, then, I’ll continue to tell novices to classical music that, in general, one doesn’t applaud until the end of the whole piece
A reader writes:
Regarding your blog entry about Kind of Blue: Coincidentally, this morning at the coffeeshop I frequent–in the middle of western Pennsylvania, as small-town as small-town gets–Kind of Blue was playing. One fellow who stopped in commented on it. This gentleman was black, which is not-so-common in this particular, quite homogeneous small town. Anyway, he, the proprietor, and the girl working behind the counter talked for a while about how seminal the album was, the geniuses who played on it and the music they made afterwards.
I thought at the time that the interchange was a great example of the bonding force of music, demonstrating its ability to help people find enough common ground to begin friendships. Perhaps it’s the music’s essential simplicity, as you say, that is truly at the core of this bonding force.
For those of you wondering why in hell OGIC and I haven’t answered your e-mail, the answer is that as of about ten minutes ago, the pile in the mailbox had shrunk to 47 unanswered items. This may not sound like much progress from yesterday, but bear in mind that I also replied to every piece of new mail that came in since then!
The point being, I both delight and regret to say, that “About Last Night” is now starting to get a whole lot of mail. We love it. We read all of it. We’re trying to answer all of it (except for the dear-sir-you-cur letters and the spam from Liberia). We’re a bit daunted by it.
The following tips may help us to get back to you sooner:
(1) If you’re writing to Our Girl in Chicago, put “OGIC” in the subject header. Otherwise, I’ll assume you’re writing to TT (or both of us).
(2) If you know either of us personally, write to us directly, not through the blog. That slows everything down.
(3) Please don’t put “About Last Night” on any routine mailing lists, not even yours. That also slows everything down.
(4) Please don’t write only to say Thank you or Ditto or I’ll do that. We know it’s polite to acknowledge e-mail, but every piece of incoming mail we get, however brief, takes the same amount of time to open and scan. We’ll take your thoughtful sentiments for granted.
(5) Be patient. I’ve turned off the autoresponder (the one that used to automatically send a Be patient response to everyone who wrote to the blog) because it stimulated the spammers. We promise to write you back as soon as we can.
Thanks for your thoughtfulness. Like I said, your mail means a lot to us, absolutely, no fooling, and we’re doing our damnedest to chew through it. You’re the best.