Vanity Fair

In the October Vanity Fair—the one with Paris Hilton on the cover, covering her breasts in a way that looks like a commercial provocation, not a sexual one—there’s a two-page spread on Franz Welser-Möst, music director of the Cleveland Orchestra. The photo, spread over the two pages, is wonderful, relaxed, friendly, a little impish, just as Franz is in real life.

Congrats to everyone involved in placing this lovely tribute. But also some questions:

• Franz, as I said, looks wonderfully informal in the photo. But anyone who goes to a Cleveland concert will find him in his penguin suit, along with the men in the orchestra wearing theirs (and the women more or less comparably formal). Does this mean that people attracted by the splash in the magazine will be disappointed? If you’re going to position yourself informally in the media, do you need to position yourself the same way in your performances? Or does everybody understand that classical music traditionally is formal, and that of course they’re not going to see informal Franz when they go to a concert? I don’t pretend to know the answer.
  
• The text in Vanity Fair, by New York Times critic Jeremy Eichler, talks about something reasonably well known, Franz’s work to change the way the Cleveland Orchestra plays, making them more fluid, more romantic. I’m not saying Jeremy shouldn’t write about this; it’s the current Cleveland news, and gives his brief evocation more heft than similar things in classical music usually have. (There is artistic news from Cleveland!) But at the same time, I can’t forget how much more substance something similar in pop might have. Pop people always stand for something—a point of view, ideas, at least a distinctive personality. Even if that’s not evoked in a short paragraph attached to a photo spread, everybody knows what the artist in the photo stands for. Which is yet another reason why pop has more resonance in our culture than classical music. It’s actually about something.  

Vanity Fair, by the way, highlights classical music reasonably often. I don’t often read the magazine, so I’m sure I’m missing a lot, but I’ve seen gorgeous photo spreads with Anna Netrebko and Juan Diego Florez, in one of Vanity Fair’s recent music issues, and something comparable to what they’ve now done with Franz, about Paul Kellogg, the departing director of the New York City Opera. And last month their online event guide touted several classical performances—the opening of the LA Philharmonic and LA opera seasons, and the City Opera Butterfly I wrote about here (apparently because Jeremy Irons was supposed to introduce the performance; in the end, Cynthia Nixon took his place). (There's nothing about classical music this month.)

On its website, Vanity Fair promotes a mix, in its words, of intellect and image. By paying attention to classical music, they might mean to demonstrate the brainy half of their mix.