I was queasy when I first heard that the New York Philharmonic might go to North Korea. This is the sickest country on earth, the place with the most repressive, most deranged, and most cynical government.  If you offend the regime, and get sent to a labor camp, they'll send your entire family, including little kids. There's brutality in these camps, of course, and not enough food. And in the midst of all that, the kids are forced to go to schools -- or, rather, sick parodies of schools -- where they do nothing but recite praise of the … [Read more...]

I've raved recently --  here and here -- about the cabalettas in 19th century Italian operas, the rousing pieces that bring each scene to a crashing close. I talked especially (in the second link above) about the cabaletta from a duet in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, where the music just sweeps along, mostly ignoring the drama playing out on stage. Listen, and see what you think. Doesn't physical verve trump everything else? And if it does -- and if these pieces crop up over and over again in every opera from this period -- what does that say … [Read more...]

Well, I'm joking a little. I mean reactions to my  "shocking proposal," which really wasn't so shocking. The real shock may come in something else I'll post today or tomorrow. There's a bad moon rising about tax deductions for donors to the arts -- a lot of people, some quite distinguished, are starting to believe that these tax deductions aren't warranted. What would that do to classical music? But more on this later. My shocking proposal was that classical music institutions be written about, in newspapers, the way real journalists … [Read more...]

My quiz question has been answered, and I'm delighted to welcome La Cieca, the divine creatrix of the Parterre Box queer opera zine to my humble blog. She knew the answer, as of course she would. But first! Parterre Box has reported the most delicious scandal. A top conductor -- a name known, I'm sure, to almost everyone who reads this blog -- was conducting in Beijing just now, and arranged a little tryst. "I WANT TO FIND YOU NAKED when I arrive," he e-mailed to his paramourlette, adding instructions for retrieving the key to his hotel … [Read more...]

I've gotten some very vivid e-mail encouragement for what I proposed in my last post, my shocking proposal that newspapers (and of course other media outlets) cover classical music the way they'd cover anything else, with probing questions and all the factual data they can get. I'm even encouraged to think that some people who write about classical music are going to do at least some of what I suggested. So I want to append a little how-to guide, about things to look out for when you ask orchestras (or of course other classical … [Read more...]

Recently I heard that the culture editor of a newspaper somewhere in the US had been told about me, as someone who could give him ideas about improving newspaper coverage of classical music. I don't know if this person will ever contact me, but I started thinking of what I'd say, if he ever did. And here's what I came up with. Everyone talks about covering classical music in a livelier, more accessible way. But while I think that's certainly a good thing to do, I don't think it's the main problem. I think the main problem is that -- from any … [Read more...]

Let me quickly -- well, maybe not; I tend to write long -- summarize my thoughts about the Met Opera season opening. Old news by now, maybe.But... Conducting/orchestra: I read reviews full of comments on James Levine's energy, his thoughtful, savvy approach to a score he hadn't conducted before, in a style he doesn't like. It would be fascinating to get a recording of the performance, and go over it with some of the people who wrote those reviews. As I said earlier, I heard an orchestra that for most of the first two acts seemed to be … [Read more...]

Lucia di Lammermoor at opening night of the Metropolitan Opera -- a perfect example of a piece that ought to feel more like the era it comes from. And would be more exciting if it did. The performance, by the way, was dreary, up until the stretta at the end of the second act. Then all at once it heated up, and the third act, especially the last two scenes, had some emotional punch. But don't believe what you read in some of the reviews! For most of the first two acts, the orchestra sounded like it was sleepwalking. The director clearly hadn't … [Read more...]

I want to restate here some things I wrote in answer to Gabriel Solis's comment on my last post. Thanks, Gabriel, for getting me thinking. Classical music performances -- even of music of the past -- are always contemporary. That is, they smell of the present more of the past. That's because the style of performance has changed over the years (as anyone can hear from recordings). So any performance we hear of anything in the classical repertoire is going to be done in one of our contemporary performance styles. (I say "one of," because by now … [Read more...]

I didn't write my "Capitano Sangue" post as well as I might have, and maybe some things weren't clear. I especially should stress that I'm not objecting to art from the past, including classical music from the past. This year I think I've read six Trollope novels, just for instance (the first four from the Barchester series, and the first two Pallisers.) And I've listened with pure happiness to two Verdi reissues from the LambertoGardelli series that came out on Philips in the '70s , I masnadieri (Carlo Bergonzi is such a joy to hear) and … [Read more...]

If you want to know why classical music has receded from our culture, just watch some of Captain Blood, the classic (and wonderfully silly) 1935 pirate film, starring Errol Flynn. It might as well be an opera. Its plot, dialogue, and aesthetic are almost operatic, and so is its score, by Erich Korngold. Which meant that in 1935 you could go to the opera, and go to the movies, and see practically the same thing. So opera was close to everyday life, in a way that it just can't be now. Why not? Because the horizons of our culture have … [Read more...]

I took a long trip over Labor Day, to attend anniversary celebrations for a marvelous art project my wife's stepfather has funded for the past 40 years. And while I was there, I made my debut as a free improviser, either on piano (when one was available), or else with anything that might make sound -- chairs I could drag along a concrete floor, my voice, resonant steel stairs I could stamp on -- when we improvised inside a sculpture as large as a house (larger than many houses) that my stepfather-in-law commissioned on the land near his … [Read more...]

I'm in the July issue of Gramophone, the cheerful, energetic British classical CD magazine. That's old news by now, I guess, but they were late in sending me the issue, and I was late in looking at it. They like to reprint things they read in blogs, and they chose my "Boring Old Handel" post from this past April, which they cut very skillfully, to fill the space they had for it. My title, of course, was ironic. What I meant was that Handel, in his time, was anything but boring, and that his operas were unabashed spectacle, visual, vocal, and … [Read more...]

Here's the second statement I promised, outlining where classical music currently is. It's from the extraordinary musicologist Robert Fink, who explodes with ideas, and connections between music and the rest of the world. (See, for instance, his book on minimalism, Repeating Ourselves). Here I'll quote from Robert's paper "Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon" American Music, Vol. 16, No. 2. (Summer, 1998), pp. 135-179). This paper was delivered to an audience of pop critics, and academics who … [Read more...]

Our discussion of classical music and pop -- or vs. pop --seems to resonate very deeply for many people, and one reason has to be its larger context. We're in an era of great change. One long-term change has been the dethroning of classical music -- when I grew up in the 1950s, it reigned unchallenged as musical art, but for decades now, this hasn't been true. But I don't think we've caught up to this understanding yet (And by "we," I mean not only those of us who take part in this blog -- which I'm starting to think of as very much a … [Read more...]