Archives for December 2003

“The little maid came into the silent room. I looked at her stocky young body, and her butter-colored hair, and noticed her odd pale voluptuous mouth before I said, ‘Mademoiselle, I shall drink an ap

“My philosophy of dance? I make it up, and you watch it. End of philosophy.”

Mark Morris, quoted in Joan Acocella, Mark Morris

The tempo of pre-holiday life is accelerating rapidly, leaving OGIC and me with less time for blogging, just as you probably have less time for reading.

We promise something new every day–beyond that, all bets are off. But we won’t forget about you!

I returned last night to Zankel Hall, the brand-new 650-seat concert hall located underneath Carnegie Hall, to hear a double bill by two of my favorite jazz singers, Luciana Souza and Karrin Allyson. The show was terrific–I would have fallen down dead with surprise had it been anything else. But what about Zankel Hall itself?

If you were reading this blog in September, you’ll probably remember my long posting about Zankel’s press preview concert. (If you didn’t see it, or want to refresh your memory, go here.) I promised to report in due course on the impression the hall made upon closer acquaintance, and this seems like a perfect occasion, so here goes.

Design. Back in September, I called Zankel “attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism.” That’s more or less what I thought last night, though I should add that the stage picture is quite handsome, thanks to skillful lighting and three vertical black hangings placed behind the performers for acoustical reasons (about which more later). The ceiling, an exposed black lighting grid which I compared to “a giant assemblage by Louise Nevelson,” still looks terrific. What remains oppressive-looking are the slabby walls on either side of the audience, which made me feel as though I were penned in.

Comfort. The lobby seemed more inviting this time, possibly because of better lighting and more elaborate decoration (it had previously struck me as “cramped and claustrophobic”). This time, though, I noticed with displeasure the street-level entrance and vestibule to Zankel Hall, which has no box office of its own (you have to go to the main box office at Carnegie Hall to pick up your tickets). It’s functional and ugly, a discouraging-looking transition from Eighth Avenue to the escalator, and does nothing whatsoever to put you in the festive mood appropriate to concertgoing.

Acoustics. Souza, Allyson, and their bands were amplified, so I can’t tell you anything new about the hall’s natural acoustic. I can say, however, that last night’s concert sounded infinitely better than the performance I heard in September by the Kenny Barron Quintet. The on-stage hangings, which I’m told are intended for use at amplified performances, seemed to have improved things, and I also suspect the hall’s managers now have a better sense of what works and what doesn’t, electronically speaking. Whatever the reason, the drums weren’t nearly as boomy last night as they were in September (though I also suspect both drummers were under orders not to play too loudly), and the amplified bass sound was clearer and more concentrated. It still lacked the kind of low-end punch for which I’d hoped: this is definitely a bass-shy hall. Generally speaking, I thought the amplified sound of both bands was a bit tubby–too much midrange, not enough treble and low bass. It’s tolerable, and certainly better than what one too often hears in New York nightclubs, but it’s not there yet.

The subway. Zankel Hall is only a few feet from a subway tunnel. At the press preview concert, subway noise was audible–and obtrusive. I couldn’t hear it at all last night, though the performers could (Allyson mentioned it midway through her set). I can’t tell you how much of a problem it will continue to be at classical concerts, but it appears that it won’t be a problem at performances that make use of amplified instruments.

Again, these are purely preliminary reactions. Zankel Hall isn’t going anywhere, nor am I. We’ll have a lot of time to get used to one another. Still, I thought you’d like to know what I thought of the place now that some of the newness has rubbed off, and my feelings, though not uncontrollably enthusiastic, are nonetheless more favorable than they were three months ago. That’s good news.

I’m thinking of a famous 20th-century author who used to be immensely popular for his comedies, which made him the most successful commercial playwright of his generation. For a brief time he was even taken seriously by the critics, who saw in his work a reflection of the spirit of the age, and who also thought that at least some of his plays might have a permanent life in revival. Then he hit a bad patch, turning out a string of ineffective scripts at the very moment that a new generation of theatergoers was looking for something new. Tastes changed, and he woke up one day to find himself unfashionable.

If you thought I was talking about Neil Simon, whose Rose’s Dilemma opens tonight at the Manhattan Theatre Club (and which I will be reviewing in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal), you were right. But with one small addition, the same things could be said of No

A reader writes:

Isn’t expecting the New York Philharmonic to be adventurous a bit like expecting a major retail chain to begin its life in Manhattan?
In other words, the stakes are so high these days in NYC that one
can’t help but be conservative with one’s choices. You go to NYC
to announce that you have arrived, not to start your ascent to
greatness. For all of its glitter and glitz, NYC isn’t terribly
interesting from some angles. Its commercial radio is mindnumbingly
conformist. Its politics are very narrow. Its major opera companies
are fairly staid. Now its flagship orchestra is becoming fusty.
No surprise, I guess. Is it a mistake? Sure, but that’s not going to
change anyone’s mind in the near term. If you want innovation you’re
going to have to hope that the smaller, second-tier orchestras come
up with something interesting. The majors can’t afford to alienate
their core constituency.

Nicely put, and quite possibly right…and it it is, then there are dark days ahead for the New York Philharmonic, and every other big-city performing-arts group of which the same thing can be said.

No names, but I went to a Wednesday matinee of a play last week, and every male head I saw was either gray or bald. I know, I know, Wednesday matinees are highly uncharacteristic, but I just got back from a Tuesday-night performance whose audience looked almost the same. Contrary to the apparent belief of a great many people in the arts world, dead people don’t buy tickets.

“All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.”

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Here’s Bob Gottlieb in the New York Observer:

Because it’s December, it’s also Alvin Ailey time–five weeks at the City Center. What is there left to say? The dancers are fabulous, the repertory isn’t. As usual, there are 20-odd performances of Revelations–it’s a ritual, the audience lapping it up from first to last. You feel they might not mind if it were done backwards. There was live music at the performance I saw, and it was so over-miked that it coarsened the whole experience.

(Read the whole thing here, including more on Ailey, New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, and Never Gonna Dance.)

Devastating but true, and it goes a long way toward explaining why I’m not doing Ailey this year, and didn’t last year, either. I already know what good dancing looks like, and it’s not enough to get me into a theater unless it’s enlisted in the service of good choreography. Revelations is a good dance, perhaps even a great one, but the Ailey company does it so often that it’s lost its effect–I never see anything new in it anymore. Ailey’s other dances are terribly inconsistent in quality, and Judith Jamison has so far failed to give the company the kind of wide-ranging, high-quality repertory that would make its programs worth seeing on more than isolated occasions. Every once in a while Jamison manages to come up with something good (the company is doing a new dance by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, for instance, and I have no doubt that it’s worth seeing). But her batting average is far too low.

This is a fundamental problem of dance, by the way. How many modern-dance choreographers–or ballet choreographers, for that matter–have created a body of work sufficiently large and varied enough that it constitutes a working repertory all by itself? George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, and maybe Merce Cunningham (and even Balanchine was smart enough to add Jerome Robbins to the mix, though he didn’t really need to). Period. As for all the others, well, you tell me: how many times can you see an all-Ailey, all-Robbins, all-Antony Tudor or all-Martha Graham program without glazing over? And why should you, for that matter? There’s no such thing as a symphony orchestra that plays nothing but Beethoven (though God knows there are times when it seems that way), an opera company that performs nothing but Puccini (ditto), or a theater company that produces nothing but No