Our Girl is back in Chicago (sigh) and I’m back at work on the Balanchine book. I’m also plumb tuckered–we had a busy weekend, without a whole lot of down time, in addition to which I’ve got two pieces and a speech to knock off between now and Friday. For all these reasons, I doubt I’ll have much to offer for the rest of the week, though I’ll poke my head in whenever possible.
In the meantime, here are some interesting links that merit your attention:
– The New York Sun‘s Knickerbocker column visited last week’s artsjournal.com get-together and filed a report:
At the bar at Landmark Tavern in Midtown, Doug McLennan this week greeted a crowd of about 75 who avidly follow his Web site, Artsjournal.com, a weekday digest of arts and cultural journalism. The Seattle resident was in town with plans to meet some of the Web loggers for his site — James Russell, Tobi Tobias, Kyle Gann, Jan Herman, Greg Sandow, and Terry Teachout — and decided to invite general readers as well. An invitation on the home page read,”Wonder what your favorite ArtsJournal blogger looks like on the other side of that computer screen?”
“It’s like a blind date,” said one attendee who was standing at the mahogany bar, originally built in 1839 and cut from a single tree….
– My December posting about the plight of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts kicked up a royal fuss. The fuss has died down, but the company is still on the spot, as
Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times reports:
The Metropolitan Opera plans to ask the public to help save its venerable Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts after losing the support of its longtime sponsor, ChevronTexaco, and being rebuffed by other corporations that had been asked to pick up the slack.
Beverly Sills, chairwoman of the Met, is going on the air today during the intermission of a broadcast of “La Traviata” to, asking listeners worldwide to help the Met raise $150 million over the next five years….
ChevronTexaco announced in May that it would withdraw its $7 million annual support of the broadcasts after the 2003-4 season, ending the longest continuous commercial sponsorship in broadcast history. The company has been the sole sponsor of the program since 1940, presenting operas without commercials except for references to the company in the commentary. (Chevron bought Texaco for $36 billion in 2000.)
Ms. Sills said she was not optimistic about finding another company to replace ChevronTexaco, which had footed the program’s entire bill. “I think in these times it’s unrealistic,” she said.
Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Met, who recently announced that he would retire in two years, said the search for another corporate sponsor had been difficult. “The corporate community looks at the radio broadcasts and doesn’t believe it’s a good media buy, that we don’t reach enough listeners,” Mr. Volpe said yesterday. “They are better off having commercials on big sporting events.”…
– Speaking of the Met, Luciano Pavarotti is singing his farewell performances there, and the Times’ Anthony Tommasini caught the first one. He minces few words:
Physically he has never seemed heavier. Bad knees and bad hips have made him almost immobile. As he lumbered about the stage, sometimes propped up by his Tosca, the soprano Carol Vaness, you wondered why he was subjecting himself to the ordeal of a staged performance.
When Cavaradossi is shot by a firing squad at the end of the opera, poor Mr. Pavarotti had to sink slowly into a pile of beanbags, bracing his fall with his arms outstretched.
Vocally, once in a while there was a flash of that incomparable Pavarotti sound, a supplely shaped legato phrase, a honeyed pianissimo. He roused himself for a couple of ringing cries of “Vittoria! Vittoria!” in Act II. But after sending the sustained high note into the balconies, his voice essentially gave out for the rest of Cavaradossi’s outburst against the villainous Scarpia, the bass Samuel Ramey….
Mr. Pavarotti had already been having vocal troubles when he rallied in 1998 for a gala performance at the Met to celebrate his 30th anniversary. He had lost nearly 70 pounds and had worked hard to get in vocal shape. Though his voice that night was a little underpowered, he essentially sounded great and performed with joy. It would have been an ideal time to take his leave from opera.
No fooling. I spent the last few years of my tenure as the classical music and dance critic of the New York Daily News covering what I thought of as the Pavarotti Deathwatch, attending his increasingly insecure performances just in case something catastrophic went wrong. It didn’t–not quite–but once I left the News, I vowed never again to see Pavarotti in person. My memories of his great days had already been blotted beyond repair. Nothing becomes an artist quite like knowing when to quit.
– O.K., Banana Oil, since when is it April 1?
Mostly unkown today, Mortimer Brewster was a widely read drama critic on the New York scene in the 1920s and 1930s, somewhat analogous to Terry Teachout today: smart, sharp-tongued, with a grander vision of what was possible than most of the producers of his day….
My brother doesn’t look a bit like Boris Karloff.