Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Mabel Mercer sings Cole Porter’s “Where, Oh Where” (from Out of This World) in an undated video clip of a live performance:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
The greatest classical guitarist of the twentieth century died today. I reviewed one of his New York solo recitals for the Daily News back in the Nineties, and have never forgotten how wonderful it was. Here’s part of what I wrote.
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Julian Bream, who gave a recital Tuesday at Alice Tully Hall, made his professional debut a half-century ago. When he started out, guitar recitals consisted of fluff: second-rate Spanish pieces, miscellaneous arrangements and transcriptions, encore-type lollipops. Today, classical guitarists have a huge repertoire of challenging music on which to draw, much of it—including most of the best of it—either discovered or commissioned by Bream. No one since Andres Segovia has had so powerful an influence on guitar playing, and no one has played the guitar better.
Though Bream’s technique is no longer what it used to be, he remains a master interpreter, as well as an unsurpassed musical communicator. He offered a characteristic program Tuesday: suites by Bach and Visee, striking new works by Leo Brouwer and Toru Takemitsu (the first commissioned by Bream, the second dedicated to him), Isaac Albeniz’ ever-popular “Suite Espanola.” He chatted with the audience between pieces, introducing each one simply and memorably. And—most important—he played with a range of tone color and expressivity unrivaled by any other guitarist in the world….
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Julian Bream plays the closing “Passacaglia” from Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal, which he commissioned, premiered, and recorded:
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You can count on the fingers of one hand the Hollywood films based on important stage plays in which all the members of the cast of the original production reprised their roles on the big screen instead of being replaced by movie stars of varying wattage. Of them, the most artistically successful is “The Boys in the Band,” William Friedkin’s 1970 film version of Mart Crowley’s hit play about a group of unhappy gay Manhattanites who get together for a birthday party and spend the second half of the evening hacking away at each other’s emotional scabs.
Widely regarded as shocking when it opened off Broadway in 1968, “The Boys in the Band” later became controversial in a different way because it portrayed its gay characters as bitter and self-hating, a stance that appalled younger men not old enough to remember the tightly closeted world portrayed with unflinching candor by Crowley. Today it is regarded as a kind of time capsule, a gay history play that shows how things were in the bad old days—but it’s also increasingly seen as a first-rate piece of dramatic work in its own right, and Mr. Friedkin’s adaptation conveys with singular brilliance the way “The Boys in the Band” plays on stage….
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Read the whole thing here.The original theatrical trailer for The Boys in the Band:
Art Carney and Garson Kanin are interviewed on The Bill Boggs Show in 1979:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.”
C.S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I consider the New York Philharmonic’s plan to renovate the interior of David Geffen Hall, its home, and suggest an alternative. Here’s an excerpt.
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As most music lovers know, the interior of Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, is about to be completely reconstructed. Perhaps the third time will be a charm for the 2,738-seat concert venue, whose acoustics were so poor when it opened in 1962 that the conductor George Szell called it “an insult to music.” Geffen has already had two overhauls, in 1976 and 1992, but neither one solved its underlying inadequacies, so the final design for a third try costing $550 million was announced in December….
Yes, the unsatisfactory interior of Geffen Hall should be gutted immediately, but the problem of what kind of performance space should replace it in the Covid era and beyond remains unsolved. So instead of committing the Philharmonic to the traditional “shoebox” concert-hall plan that was unveiled in December, why not install a temporary interior shell sturdy enough to satisfy city building and safety codes and use it as an experimental space—a lab, if you will—in which the Philharmonic can try out a variety of designs?…
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Read the whole thing here.“Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.”
C.S. Lewis, “Is Criticism Possible?”