November 2004 Archives

The critics' conference Jen Graves writes about -- in a story linked on ArtsJournal today -- was pretty interesting. It was held in New York in October, and involved critics from all over the country, plus some from abroad.

Graves talks about one important thread in the discussion, a fear that critics write too timidly, and that this, as Graves says, is partly due to "the same intimidation that keeps people out of concert halls and art galleries." She goes on to say that

Like orchestras, classical critics allow themselves to be suffocated by false burdens of “greatness” and posterity. This music is important, nearly sacred, stuff, the wisdom goes, so don’t go stomping around or you might break something. But music is not an object in an archive. It happens in time, in the present. Vigorous human contact is the only thing keeping it alive.

Then, after a flattering quote from me, about my willingness to make my own judgments, and take the chance of being wrong, she says

Any mistake is better than the fatal one of sucking the life out of music with an overly deferential, reverential attitude. By responding to music with fearless honesty, we encourage readers to do the same. Music is not great because it was written in the past, it is great if the performance is truly present.

To which I can only say "bravo" (though, quite honestly, my own memory of what she quotes is somewhat different). She's nailed an important issue, I think, and I can only encourage her to keep on writing what she thinks.

(Joan Tower, incidentally, tries to encourage people who hear her music to respond honestly to hit. She does this -- in pre-concert lectures -- by telling her audience things she herself doesn't like in her work. She figures that if she doesn't like things in her music, and is willing to say so, that then the people in the audience will give themselves the same freedom.)

Something else fascinating about this critics' conference -- how radical some of it was. Right at the start, for instance, two composers spoke on a panel, Meredith Monk and Osvaldo Golijov. Neither is exactly a mainstream classical figure, despite Golijov's success; neither writes mainstream concert music. Meredith has always taken a completely personal approach to composition, using the sounds that she and people in her ensemble know how to make, and Golijov mixes classical and popular idioms, drawing on cultures from around the world. Fascinating that these two should, at the conference, be taken as emblems of where composers are right now -- and that the critics took for granted that this represented the true state of contemporary classical music.

Not long ago I went to a New York Philharmonic concert -- Peter Lieberson's Red Garuda, and the Mahler First Symphony, with James Conlon conducting. The lights in Avery Fisher Hall dimmed before the music started, evidently a new Philharmonic policy. I sat there in row HH, further back than I usually sit. The location seemed perfect, with the musicians, of course dressed in black, framed by the brownish wood of the stage. Looking at this, in semi-darkness, I felt something I hadn't felt in years, at an orchestral concert -- a sense of anticipation. I could hardly wait for the music to begin. And me, a professional, not exactly jaded, but certainly prepared, after years of concertgoing, for something slightly less than transcendent!

But the lighting changed all that. See what a small change in presentation can do? Let's have more of it.

One footnote: the lights were so dim that I couldn't read the program. I think that's a plus. True, the same week I'd gotten bored at another concert, and fled to the program notes for something to distract me. But if the lights had been as dim as the Philharmonic made them, I might have stayed with the music, and given it another chance, very likely to my benefit.

Let's have more dim lights. A concert is a show, remember? (Whatever else it might also be.) Let's make it one.

It's fun reading Norman Lebrecht. He's inaccurate and irresponsible, but classical music suffers from too much responsibility. So in a way Lebrecht is a good corrective -- tabloid journalism, of a pretty extreme sort, right in the middle of the classical music world.

But his column on Peter Gelb, linked in ArtsJournal, is a good example of why we can't take anything he says very seriously. He thinks Peter is a bad choice to run the Met, and of course he's got the right to think that. But when you examine what he says, it's a tissue of illogic and mistakes.

For instance, right at the start, he writes:

As the sole gateway to US fame, the Met has a monopoly on singing talent. Renee Fleming, Magdalena Kozena, Anne-Sofie von Otter — divas beyond the reach of Covent Garden — appear several times each season at the Met. Everything the Met does is massive. With 3,800 seats to sell, programmes are familiar and stagings spectacular. The archtepyal Met show involves a gold curtain, several zoo animals and Franco Zeffirelli. When the Met sneezes, the rest of the opera world catches pneumonia.

So when the Met replaces its manager, the implications are felt sooner or later by everyone who sings, plays or attends opera in any setting larger than a church hall.

As far as I can see, the European opera world has no close connection with the Met. In recent past decades, in fact, the Met had trouble attracting European singers. Its fees weren't high enough; income tax made the precise amount any artist would take home difficult to calculate in advance. And if you sang in Europe, you were within each reach of other European opera houses. If you were rehearsing Salome in Munich, and somebody got sick in Paris, you could fly there and do a performance or two, to fill in. You can't do that if you're singing at the Met.

It's news to me that the singers Lebrecht names sing "several times" each season at the Met. Whether the Met has, on the whole, a more starry lineup than big European opera houses I don't know. But if it does, and Peter Gelb ruins it for serious opera -- which is what Lebrecht thinks will happen -- then won't Fleming, von Otter, Kozena, and many others be more available to European houses? So won't the European opera world be better off, not worse?

There's much more to be said on this, but I want to move on. Lebrecht goes on to say this:

And when the new boss is picked in a backroom deal, beyond artistic or public scrutiny, that's cause for alarm.

He then sets forth a scenario he finds shocking, no doubt leaked to him from backstage sources. The Met was considering candidates for the top job. Deborah Borda, former executive director of the New York Philharmonic, who now runs the LA Phil, was the leading candidate. But not everybody liked her. She didn't know opera; she was a woman. Enter Peter Gelb, not up to then a candidate, but mentioned privately to Beverly Sills, the chair of the Met's board of directors, by Ronald Wilford, president of CAMI, the huge (but, by all reports, slipping) management agency. At Wilford's request, says Lebrech, Beverly meets with Peter. Now suddenly he's the leading candidate! It's a "fix," screams Lebrecht. Peter was chosen -- let me quote this again -- "in a backroom deal, beyond artistic or public scrutiny."

But since when were CEO's of American arts organizations chosen by any kind of public process? Since when weren't they chosen by boards of directors, meeting secretly -- and in fact, more realistically, by the executive committees of boards, with the other members simply giving their consent? Music directors of orchestras are chosen the same way. Was Zarin Mehta picked to run the New York Philharmonic after open public discussion? Is that how Robert Harth, and now Clive Gillinson were picked to run Carnegie Hall? Very often, people up for these positions won't even tell their friends that they're serious candidates. One good friend of mine, who now runs a major arts organization, wouldn't even tell me she'd been chosen, until the public announcement was made. There are all sorts of reasons for this, starting with the fact that candidates for these positions already have other jobs, and might not want to rock the boats they're already in until they've been chosen.

And isn't there a far less contentious explanation of how the Met made its choice? Like Lebrecht, I'd heard that Peter was a relatively late addition to the list of candidates. But in the version I heard, the Met wasn't happy with any of its choices. That's why it was open to another name. So when Peter came along, there wasn't any fix. Instead, the Met was happy to have someone new to look at. And why, by the way, did the board pick Peter, if he's as bad as Lebrecht thinks he is? What would their reasons be for their choice? Lebrecht never mentions that, and may not have even tried to ask anybody at the Met -- characteristic signs, by the way, of amateur journalism. For what it's worth, one person I know on the Met staff is thrilled with the choice, and this isn't someone who even shares Peter's populist views of art.

Moving on, Lebrecht says this about Peter:

At Sony Classical he stripped out classical music, announcing "I know what good music is, I just don’t want to record it." Another catchphrase of his was: "I’d rather lose a million on a movie score than make $10,000 on a small shit," — meaning a mainstream classical CD.

This is the basis for Lebrecht's overall take on Peter, which is that he's "done more than anyone in the past decade to remove classical music and opera from public consumption."

Well, first Lebrecht distorts Peter's position, which Peter has very clearly stated on the record (in a well-known speech he gave at a record industry gathering in 1997) and off (to me, and of course many others, in private conversations). He's not completely free to choose what to record. Classical recordings don't sell. If they cost a lot to make, they may never be profitable. If they involve large orchestras, major conductors, and major soloists, then of course they cost a lot to make. Major classical labels, like Peter's label, Sony Classical, have traditionally been in the business of recording standard repertoire with major artists. So in the present climate, their entire business has become unprofitable -- which means, since they're commercial companies, their business is completely untenable.

That's what Peter responded to. Beyond this, we might want to look at the demands of the conglomerates that own the major classical labels. Universal, from what I've been able to pick up, has operated and still apparently operates in a more benign corporate climate than Sony Classical. BMG and Warner were the worst corporations for classical music -- they basically gutted their classical labels. At Sony, I've gotten the impression that the corporate owners demanded heavy profits from their classical label, thereby putting Peter in a difficult position. It's true, of course, that some people therefore wouldn't have wanted his job, but at least we should understand the pressure he was under.

As for Peter's alleged "catchphrase," ""I’d rather lose a million on a movie score than make $10,000 on a small shit," well, I never heard him say anything remotely like that. I wonder what Lebrecht's source was here. What I always heard him say was that he couldn't make $10,000 on (relatively) small classical releases. He was much more likely to lose a quarter of a million. And how could anyone in his position talk about losing a million dollars on a movie score? What would his bosses have thought of that? If he kept doing it, he'd have been canned. His movie scores were expected to make money.

Then, talking about what Peter actually did at Sony Classical, Lebrecht warbles this offkey tune:

Gelb set about buying film soundtracks and mining the mongrel seams of crossover. He had the classical cellist Yo Yo Ma play country music and the pop star Billy Joel perform piano suites. The gimmicks worked — Titanic sold 11 million CDs in the US — but the novelty soon wore off. Gelb's job was now on the line. He was 51 and, as they say, ready for a new challenge.

Nobody, it's safe to say, can "have" Yo-Yo Ma play country music. Yo-Yo Ma -- one of the few classical stars recognizable to a wider audience, and one of the few who actually does sell CDs (a modest number, maybe, by pop standards, but still they sell) -- does what he wants. And the crossover Lebrecht's talking about here wasn't country music. It was Appalachia Waltz, a wonderfully artistic project (at least in my judgment) that Ma recorded with Edgar Meyer and Mark O'Connor. Meyer was the artistic leader of the project. As a bass player, he in fact has played some Nashville sessions, but in the country world he's known as someone from the artistic -- and definitely not mass-market -- wing of bluegrass. Mainstream country music fans would never listen to him. And Ma, of course, played this because he wanted to, not because Peter Gelb could force him.

As for the Billy Joal CD, it wasn't piano suites. It was piano music Joel composed -- a small detail, but telling, because once again it shows how careless Lebrecht can be with facts. But what's most important is that this CD wasn't even Peter's project. I've said this here a couple of times before, because some people in classical music are so ready to hate Peter that they don't stop to find out what he actually does. Billy Joel has for years had a recording contract with Columbia, Sony's largest pop label. Years before his classical CD came out, he announced that he wasn't going to write pop music any more. He was going to do classical. Eventually he made good on that declaration, and, when it was time to give Columbia his latest music, gave them his classical CD, instead of a collection of pop songs.

They freaked. This wasn't what they wanted. But on the other hand, they couldn't do anything about it. Billy Joel is one of their biggest stars, and they didn't want to lose him. So they had to release his classical CD -- and naturally turned to Peter, their classical colleague within the Sony Music company, to help them sell it. (My source for this information, by the way, is Joel himself.) What Peter might have thought of Joel's work has nothing to do with any of this. The project wasn't his idea, and he had no choice about working on it.

Finally, it's not completely accurate to say that Peter's "gimmicks" worked. Universal sold far more crossover CDs than he did, thanks to the great success of Andrea Bocelli and Andr

Since I've been ragging publicists here, it's only fair to quote a really good press release that arrived via e-mail a week ago:

New York City Opera presents the world premiere of CHARLES WUORINEN's long-awaited opera

"HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES"

Based on the fantasy novel by SALMAN RUSHDIE

Libretto adapted by British poet JAMES FENTON

Directed by MARK LAMOS

World Premiere, New York City Opera

Performances October 31, November 3, 6, 9, and 11, 2004

On Halloween, New York City Opera mounts perhaps its most important commission to date: composer CHARLES WUORINEN’s "HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES," based on the 1990 novel by the elegant and controversial SALMAN RUSHDIE.

"Haroun and the Sea of Stories" was the first book Rushdie wrote during the tumult and violence of the fatwa, or death warrant (decreed in 1989 after his fourth novel "The Satanic Verses"). The book began as a bedtime story Rushdie told to his son, and has an effervescent style full of rhymes, humor, and wordplay. But despite its delightful and charming exterior, Haroun is a serious parable about free speech and a warning of the dangers of political repression.

In a feat of spare brilliance, British poet JAMES FENTON created the libretto for "Haroun and the Sea of Stories." Fenton's libretto stays very close to the spirit of Rushdie’s original novel, conjuring up a fantasy world in which one never entirely loses sight of harsh political reality and the great issues of freedom of expression and imagination. The libretto was published last year by Faber and Faber in a book entitled "The Love Bomb."

This unusual cross-section of artists (Wuorinen, Fenton, Rushdie) is serendipitous: unflagging in the face of criticism, they share uncompromising integrity in their work and personal lives; they are all towering intellects in their respective fields, and not only of sharp mind and aesthetic, but with similar (and rather wicked) senses of humor. "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" is sure to be around for some time.

City Opera’s new production is to be directed by the renowned theater and opera director Mark Lamos. Haroun will be conducted by City Opera’s music director George Manahan, with sets by Riccardo Hernandez, video projections by designer Peter Nigrini, costumes by Candice Donnelly, and choreography by Sean Curran.

[Here I've snipped a listing of the cast, which makes sense to include in the press release, but wouldn't make exciting reading here.]

THE PLOT:

The child Haroun lives in a city so sad its citizens have forgotten its name.

Their only source of joy is the cheerful storytelling of Haroun’s father, Rashid, "The Shah of Blah." The greatest of all storytellers, Rashid conjures up magical worlds and brings laughter to this sad city. Then, one terrible day, everything goes wrong. Haroun’s mother leaves home and his father runs out of stories to tell, haunted by his son’s question: "What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?" Haroun is determined to return the storyteller’s gift to his father, so he begins a fabulous quest across strange lands, flying on the back of the Hoopoe bird to The Ocean of Stories to find out what could possibly be wrong. In a series of brilliantly imagined adventures, and with the help of water genies, mechanical birds, and other curious creatures, Haroun defeats an evil despot and restores happiness to his family and the city, returning the free flow of speech for eternity.

In the words of Wuorinen:

"Part of Salman’s impetus for writing 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories' was a promise to tell a story his 11-year-old son Zafar could understand. So the surface is very delightful, full of fantastical adventures and very entertaining and colorful. Then a little bit below that surface is the general idea of the little boy who feels it’s his fault when bad things happen to his parents—an all-too-common phenomenon. Salman took this problem and said, 'Why not arrange this so that the little boy actually saves his father?' Which of course is what happens in the book and the opera. And then behind all that is something I’ve said many times about the book and about Rushdie: he wrote this immediately after the infamous 'fatwa' was pronounced, and in that context, the novel is a cry against the suppression of the imagination and free speech. So it has a kind of underlying social or political message as well, which also attracted me. But what I found particularly admirable was that the tone of the book is uniformly light-hearted, even thought Rushdie was under mortal threat at the time he wrote it. There is no bitterness, there’s no self pity, there’s no hint of any of that. It’s not a polemic; it’s not preachy. And that spoke a kind of character, both in the book and in Rushdie himself, that I admired."

About Charles Wuorinen:

Native New Yorker Charles Wuorinen is one of the most distinguished, active, and prolific composers on the scene, one who has never caved from his own personal vision. A self-proclaimed "Maximalist," his music has drawn interest from all quarters, not uptown, not downtown, but a healthy mix of everything.

His more than 200 compositions span all types of music, from chamber to orchestral to songs to operas to concertos to ballets.

His awards and accomplishments—among them the Pulitzer Prize (he holds the distinction of being the youngest ever to win the prize, for his 1970 electronic composition "Time’s Encomium") and the MacArthur "Genius grant"—are too numerous to list. His works have been recorded on a number of labels, and of serious variety, from Nonesuch to Koch to downtown composer John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and his pieces have been performed by a number of illustrious musicians.

He is not only a refined composer, but a formidable pianist and conductor as well, performing as soloist or conductor with many fine orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony.

Wuorinen has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory, SUNY Buffalo, and currently presides as professor of composition at Rutgers University. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I'm picking up some changes going on in at least a few orchestras, involving the musicians' role.

First, musicians are getting involved in artistic planning, formerly the exclusive province of the music director, the artistic administrator, and (sometimes) the executive director. One reason, in fact, that some orchestras wonder whether they want a traditional music director is that they want the musicians to have some of the power the music director traditionally has. And not just in programming -- also in hiring musicians, giving them tenure, and, if necessary, firing them. At some orchestras, these decisions might be made only by the music director. But now I'm hearing about orchestras where the music director (or principal conductor, or artistic advisor; titles might vary) is just one member of decision-making committee, and gets just a single vote.

I also know one orchestra that wants its public face to be its musicians, not some world-famous conductor who might spend just 10 weeks a year in this orchestra's city. The musicians, the thinking goes, are there more or less permanently -- and in any case are playing a far greater artistic role in planning and hiring than they used to. Plus, since they live in the city where the orchestra plays, the orchestra can try to build community roots by featuring them.

These changes come after many years of bad feeling between musicians and management, and also at a time when orchestras can't afford to pay musicians as much as they used to. In some orchestras, at least, hostility between musicians and management is being replaced by steps toward cooperation, as everybody starts to realize that they're all facing the crisis of classical music together. And there's also a sense of a tradeoff -- if musicians are going to get less money, in exchange they're given more power.

And about that classical music crisis: I hear many people in the business saying that there simply aren't as many people interested in classical music as there used to be. The crisis, then, boils down to something very simple. The audience is smaller. Makes me wonder how some orchestras can sustain such long seasons, and makes me wonder even harder how the Metropolitan Opera can. But that's a question for another time. Right now it's just striking that the shrinking audience isn't treated (at least in the circles I move in) as a theory, or a future danger. People talk as if it's a verified fact.

At a meeting this weekend involving orchestras, talk turned at one point to the possibility that at least some orchestras might disappear. The board chair of one major orchestra had said, "If we don't put more butts in seats, we're going to have a difficult time surviving as we're presently organized." (Exact quote.)

There was also talk about what kind of concerts orchestras present, and what kind of audience they can reach. Some people said that programming couldn't be like art films; it had to be more popular than that. So at one point, I found myself saying, "If we really do go down the drain, it's sad that we won't do it playing the musical equivalent of Almodovar. We'll be playing Brahms for the nine thousandth time."

But then I pondered the analogy. If the artistic side of the equation has a film equivalent, so should the popular side. What would that be? It wouldn't be Hollywood; whatever a safe concert of standard classics might be, it's not Titanic or Troy.

And then it hit me. Classical concerts -- classy, in their way, but safe, familiar, and comforting -- are like 1940s movies. Orchestras and opera companies (and chamber music groups) are like theaters that show Casablanca, over and over and over again, with a little Almodovar thrown in. Or, maybe more precisely, and at the biggest orchestras, a little Bergman, since new music programming (to the extent that it circles around dissonant music) often seems mired in the past in its own way.

And if Casablanca won't attract an audience…