September 2008 Archives

My Wall Street Journal piece about the Don Rosenberg fiasco ran today. The link will take you to it.

I'll have a piece in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow -- Saturday -- about the mess in Cleveland. Most of us know about it, I'd think. Don Rosenberg, for 16 years the very good classical music critic of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been demoted, presumably because his reviews of the Cleveland Orchestra weren't favorable enough.

Not that my piece breaks new ground. The New York Times wrote a story, after Tim Smith, classical critic of the Baltimore Sun, admirably broke the news in his blog. The comments he's gotten, many from Cleveland, are must reading.

I raise some strong points, though, and I challenge the orchestra to fix what might be a serious hit to the perception of its integrity.

...one of the world's top opera singers sings La Gioconda at the Met, and gets just polite applause for her big killer aria. But that's what happened to Deborah Voigt last night. What went wrong?

She's not a strong presence onstage. She keeps leaning forward, which makes her look weak. And she's not a diva. When she first comes onstage, you don't even notice her. In the old days, when a star Gioconda made her first entrance, not singing a note, a shockwave went through the opera house, and the crowd would go wild. Voigt might think she's an actress, avoiding all that bad old operatic exaggeration. But the opera demands that grand old style. Without wild, grand heat, the music will die. Listen to Zinka Milanov singing the aria, from a live 1953 performance in New Orleans. Hear the electric shock in her very first notes. She grabs you by the throat, and doesn't let you go. (And you can't fault her dignity.)

Voigt's voice is too light for the role. Especially in her middle range. She can pump up the low notes, and belt out the highs. But the middle -- where the role demands that she sing with great empahsis -- doesn't have any force. Listen to Milanov, in the aria's climax. Hear how she goes up the scale, hurling the high note out from the notes that lead up to it. And then how powerfully she comes down from the high note! This (along with the size of the note, and its sheer diva force) is why the climax is powerful. Voigt can't do this. Her high notes came out of nowhere, and mostly had no effect.

OK, I can't resist. Just a few notes about the very blah show onstage at the Met Opera opening.

Renée Fleming. No heat onstage at all, either in her singing, or her presence. Occasionally an emphatic moment in her acting, but none of the acting was sustained. She doesn't (to my ear) act through her voice in crucial long legato passages, like "Dite alla giovane" in the big Traviata scene with Thomas Hampson. But above all -- no heat! If this is our reigning prima donna, than opera isn't what it used to be, or what I want it to be.

And one vocal note. In the final part of the gala, when Fleming sang the final scene from Strauss's Capriccio, she finally sounded fabulous. Here the wonderful evenness of her sound from top to bottom pays off for her. She sounds easy and natural. But not in Traviata! Verdi -- even in a role that's lighter than most of his other soprano parts -- asks for more emphasis in the bottom octave of a soprano's range than Fleming can easily give. She's worked out a way to pump out some low notes artificially, but it doesn't sound comfortable, and can't work in the lower middle range, where so much of the role lies.

But then we already heard this when she did Bellini's Il Pirata at the Met. Her role lay very low, with hardly any high notes at all -- in most of her duet with the tenor, she doesn't sing above G. And she just wasn't effective. Her voice didn't soar.

And now this year she's going to sing Trovatore! Her role there is heavier and lower than either Pirata or Traviata. How's she going to make that work? (Just think of the "Miserere," where she'll really have to dig into her lower octave.) I don't get it, not at all.

As somebody commenting noted (though very kindly not in these words), I was completely out to lunch there. The Met will mount a new Trovatore this year, but not with Fleming. Though she will be singing Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia in Washington this year, which is also not very plausible, for the same reasons. Like so many bel canto roles (despite the stereotype that equates bel canto opera with high notes), it's written fairly low, and because it's an intensely dramatic opera, requires the singer to hurl out strong emphasis in her lower range. Which Fleming's voice just doesn't naturally do.

Thomas Hampson. Fabulous singing, as Germont, in the Traviata scene. And strong, committed acting. To my ear, he doesn't really have a Verdi sound, but what he does is marvelous despite that. The part lies very high -- constant Fs and G flats -- and he sang them easily. Most baritones, including many of the great ones (Tito Gobbi would be a notable example) sound like they're working hard in that range. The notes sound high. They don't come out easily. But not Hampson. He sounds like his range is just a whole step below the normal tenor range, or at most a minor third lower. So F and G flat come out like notes at the top of his high middle range, and he can sing them with marvelous color and ease, and with lyrical phrasing.

As he made his entrance in the Traviata scene, the orchestra played his music almost with ferocity. I just about jumped out of my seat. What was that about? But it turns out that, in Hampson's idea of the role, Germont enters just about shaking with rage. James Levine had clearly caught onto that, and got the orchestra to play what Hampson was about to act. Bravo for that. Operatic artistry flying very high.

The orchestra. Of course the Met orchestra is marvelous, but I'd guess they didn't have much rehearsal for this performance. Traviata, of course, they can play in their sleep, and the scenes from Manon, too. Not that they sounded asleep. Under Levine, they sounded wonderful in Traviata. But in the Capriccio final scene, they didn't sound good at all. Clearly they don't know this music well, which isn't their fault -- they don't play it much, and some members of the current orchestra may never have played it all. And it's tricky music, full of subtle shifts from one harmony to another. Or, often, in typical late Strauss fashion, shifts through several harmonies in succession, a kind of iridescent shimmer of evanescent chords.

And here the orchestra unfortunately sounded more than a little lost. They hadn't learned to hear those shimmering chords as yet, and didn't project them cleanly. There were ensemble, balance, and intonation problems, too, and the overall sound was often coarse. Maybe the conductor, Patrick Summers, wasn't up to the job. I don't know his conducting, and wouldn't venture to judge. But I'm sure that if Levine had conducted all three scenes, instead of just Traviata, or at least if he'd led Capriccio, he'd never have let the orchestra sound that way. I can't believe he wouldn't have given himself enough rehearsal to make the music sound. I trust he'd never settle for less. (And so he shouldn't settle for less when others conduct.)

It's a new delight for me. I used to think fashion was frivolous, not anything (God help me!) serious people should care about.

Then I started watching Project Runway. And got hooked. Of all reality shows (at least in my experience), it's the fairest. To viewers, I mean. You can see the fashions the contestants design, just as well as the judges on the show can. You can see who does well, and who does badly. You can develop your eye, as I did. You can learn to see how fashion can be art. You can hear the judges -- expereinced fashion people, some of them top designers -- talk about the work they're seeing. You can see that their standards are high, and their judgment artistic.

And finally it came to me. Fashion can be exciting because it's a place where art, commerce, craftsmanship, and sexuality all come together. Which, if you ask me, is hot. And (as I hardly need to say) that's not a place where classical music very comfortably lives. Though why shouldn't it? It certainly did in past centuries. Handel's opera companies in London -- artistic (just listen to the music), commercial to the hilt, and with a lot of sexual excitement about some of the singers (the prima donnas, and, inevitably, the castratos, who were infertile, but as sexually potent as any other man).

Why can't classical music do that now?

I went to the Metropolitan Opera season opening last night, and didn't see much glamour, in the audience or on the stage. And since we've been talking about clothes here, let me stress something that hit me very strongly. A man in black tie doesn't look dressy any more, at least not to my eye, and certainly doesn't look fancy or glamorous. I saw a few men in tuxes, and the effect was blah, no more striking than a man in a business suit.

And why? Because fashion has moved beyond that. Fashion designers -- along with plain old non-designer people -- have come up with sharper, more interesting, more striking, more contemporary looks than black tie, and that's now what you want to wear if you want to be festive or glamorous.

Which is yet another reason why formal dress -- and even business suits -- on classical musicians makes hardly any difference. It all just looks blah. I go back to the Northern Sinfonia, in Newcastle/Gateshead in England, all dressed in spiffy black. That made an impression. The musicians looked as if they were about to do something that mattered, something other people might enjoy. Other people, that is, oriented toward the world as it is now.

What did I wear to the Met? I have a Kenneth Cole outfit, jacket and pants, that I think looks sleek. I wouldn't wear it with a tie. I normally wear it with a black Kenneth Cole shirt, with subtle stripes, a shirt that's both dressy and casual, as I think the entire outfit is.

But this time -- after an informal conversation at lunch the other day with someone who knows fashion really well -- I decided to push things a bit. So I wore the jacket and pants with a black t-shirt, one with a striking white design on it. And it's a t-shirt celebrating Meredith Monk, one of my favorite artists of any kind, so I was doubly happy to wear it.

I felt a little uneasy -- would I look too dressed down? But when I saw how blah the crowd looked (and this was downstairs, in the pricey seats), I felt completely comfortable. The Met opening is supposed to be glamorous, and at least (without making any great claims about my success) I was trying. I wish I'd thought to have someone take a cell phone photo. Then I could show you all how, at least, I tried.

And as for the performance -- utterly blah. Don't get me started!

I've said before that I don't love English titles onscreen or in the opera house when an opera is sung in English. (Scroll down to the section on Britten's Peter Grimes if you follow the link.) They seem geeky, to say the least, and only reinforce the notion that opera is -- by nature -- remote and unfathomable. (Even while they make it accessible. There's a paradox there.)

Well, late in July, I saw Britten's Billy Budd in a quite good production at the Santa Fe Opera. Of course there were titles, but I was also able to understand most of the singers, a good deal more than half the time they sing. And yes, the singers in this opera all are men; it's women who have an especially hard time being understood, thanks to acoustical peculiarities with certain vowels sung on high notes. But still -- I understood these singers most of the time.

And it was when one of them suddenly sang one line -- in the midst of a longish aria --  that I couldn't understand, that I suddenly realized what one of the problems is. There might be inherent problems in understanding the words when opera singers sing. There may have been problems like that even in smaller theaters in past centuries. (The texts of the operas being performed were routinely on sale, for instance, in 19th century Italy.) But how hard do we work, even now, on making sure opera singers can be understood?

Yes, an opera singer will be trained in diction -- clarity and correct pronunciation of all languages -- and coaches sometimes will work on those things, even with established professionals. But is there anyone sitting out in the house during rehearsals, telling singers when their words aren't clear? I've never heard of that being done. Would a rehearsal be stopped because someone couldn't be understood in the 25th row? Would anyone have told the singer who made me think all this, "Look, almost everything you sang was understandable, except the two phrases at the start of page 193 in the vocal score"?

And if we don't work on this, why should we be surprised when singers' words aren't clear? They themselves can't know when they're understandable, and when they're not. Maybe if we made this a higher priority, those strange, redundant, English-on-English titles wouldn't be needed.

When I was younger, into the 1960s, the president of the US never appeared in public without a suit and tie. Or at least a jacket and tie.

Then late in the '70s Jimmy Carter went on TV wearing a sweater. That was the beginning of a huge change. Now it's routine to see presidents and presidential candidates in shirtsleeves. Our society, in other words, has gotten lots less formal.

So why shouldn't classical music follow suit? And if the might and majesty of the U.S. government now doesn't have to be represented by a gentleman in business clothes, why should classical music need to underline its importance with the kind of clothing even presidents would never wear?

(A portion of a famous photograph by Weegee, showing society women on their way to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera season in 1943. Yet another example of formal dress of a kind we just don't see anymore in real life.)

First, the new comment system -- I love it, love it. Comments go online without waiting for my approval. So they go up fast, many of you comment on the comments, conversations start. And I don't have to do anything at all. I don't have to take time to approve each one, and I'm freed from the temptation of adding my own replies, nearly every time. This is good for my schedule, and good for, oh, let's say my lightness of being. Many thanks to the readers who suggested I adopt this system.

But, a question -- would you all prefer that I commented on the comments more, as I used to? Yes? No? Tell me what you think.

And about the formal dress discussion -- I loved that, too. Seems like you all covered a lot of ground, and that a lot of points of view were represented, very fairly. One thing I noticed: some of us (me included) are very sure that our point of view is right. Or, maybe more precisely, that it's the most important point of view. People who like formal dress think concerts would suffer without it, and think that many others in the audience agree. People who don't like formal dress (me included) think it weakens concerts, and think it might keep (or at least help to keep) a new, young audience away.

The most fair conclusion I can come to, observing this, is that both sides are partly right. Both kinds of people really do exist, the ones who like formal dress and the ones who don't. What we don't know, as Rebecca wisely pointed out, whether formal dress really does keep any large number of people away.

I'd also add that we don't have numbers -- we don't know how many people are attached to formal dress, how many people in the audience already (and among musicians) would like to see it go away, and how many people might be more likely to come to concerts if the dress was looser, less predictable, less formal, more fun. And is either group growing? Is either group shrinking? Are there fewer people each year who demand formal dress, and more who want it over with? Is less formality the trend of the future, and formal dress a remnant of the past? I think that's true, but I don't have data. I can't prove it.

Yvonne is right -- we have to be adaptable. This is one of many areas in which classical music might have to play both sides of the fence, at least for a while. We might need formal concerts for the people who want them, and less formal ones for other people. And I guess there should be studies of what people in the audience -- or the prospective audience -- might really want. Maybe studies like that already exist! If anyone has heard of any, please let me know.

But studies might not be accurate. That is, many people may never have seen a full orchestra, for instance, dressed informally, and therefore don't know how they'd really feel if they were hearing one. The study, in other words, might end up skewed toward favoring formality, just because too many people haven't experienced the alternative.

And new music, as Wendy noted, doesn't go well with formality. Bill, I think, implied something like that when he cited the Kronos Quartet as an ensemble that defines its brand -- so to speak -- and also supports its art by dressing in an individual way. Which reminds me that, as far as I know, very few chamber ensembles -- and certainly very few made up of young musicians -- dress formally for concerts. For new music, white tie and tails (and the women's equivalent) really doesn't seem to fit. Especially if a piece sounds and moves with echoes of pop culture, or is a happy or devastating assault of noise. What's the meaning then of tails? Irony wouldn't begin to be the word that might describe the disconnect.

Finally, I might note some successful ways I've seen ensembles dress. Way back in the 1960s I saw a performance of Stravinsky's Les Noces at Harvard, conducted by Leon Kirschner. The chorus wore black pants or skirts, and brightly colored t-shirts. I'd guess the choral singers picked their t-shirts independently. The look was festive and alive, perfect for the festive piece. (Well, OK, the piece lives partly in the Russia of centuries ago, and the t-shirts were very up to date American, but still they worked.)

And once I saw the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in a purely orchestral concert, featuring new music, dress similarly -- black below the waist, colors above. But no t-shirts (if I remember accurately), and with more muted colors. Finally, the Northern Sinfonia, the orchestra that serves the twin cities of Newcastle and Gateshead in England, dresses in informal spiffy black, not a jacket or a tie in sight. They play in a large modern concert hall, exactly the kind of space where most of us are used to seeing tails. When the musicians walked on stage, the hall came alive. They looked relaxed and happy, with no need, apparently, to invoke an atmosphere of sanctity, or any sense of the importance of what they were about to do.

In Britain, I can imagine, orchestras are more likely to be informal, because the musicians tend to be younger. (Orchestral pay is very low, so not so many people continue playing in orchestras as they grow older.) And for the Northern Sinfonia, it's a way of life. At the concert, I happened to be sitting next to the man who ran the arts center that includes the concert hall. He himself is informal -- his trademark dress is a shirt with no jacket. He looked quite spiffy. I asked him if the orchestra always wore what they were wearing, and he said -- very proudly, I thought -- "Yes! They even dressed this way a month ago, when the Queen came to a concert."

Which again shows how very differently people can react to this issue.

In response to DJA -- thanks for alerting me to check whether the new comments process really does work.

Apparently it does, with just one glitch. All comments are posting automatically, as they're supposed to. Except for one, a comment on my formal dress post, which somehow landed in my inbox, marked "unapproved." I have no idea why that happened. Maybe there's a delay, sometimes or always, before comments appear, but with the one exception I've noted (and which I don't understand), everything you all post is getting on the site.

If any more comments end up in limbo, I'll alert ArtsJournal. Thanks again, DJA.

While I was away, I had many thoughts I could have posted in the blog. Here's one of them:



This photo was taken in 1937. It shows two boys from Eton, one of England's leading public schools (we'd call them prep schools in the USA). They're visiting London -- not to go to the opera, or meet the king, but to attend a cricket match, with Eton's rival, Harrow. Working-class boys are gawking at them.

The photo ran in the Guardian, the British paper, at the end of August. They used it to illustrate a piece on continuing inequality in British education. But the classical music implications are about formal dress. In 1937 -- when the classical music audience was the same age as the population at large, and classical music played a much larger part in everyday life than it does now -- it also made more sense for classical musicians to wear formal dress. As the photo shows, people outside classical music wore formal dress, too. It wasn't just Eton boys. Men in the British upper class might wear tuxedos when they ate at leading restaurants, or at theater openings, or even at dinner at home. In American films from that era, we can see men wearing white tie and tails as evening dress.

So formal dress for classical musicians had some social roots. We might find those social roots too upper-class -- I know I do. Men in orchestras look like old-line British aristocrats, or else like those artistocrats' highest-ranking servants. But still there was a context, when musicians dressed that way.

There isn't any context now. Formal dress for classical performances just looks weird, and ancient. Time to put a stop to it.

Singing in the shower this morning. "Il balen," the baritone aria from Il Trovatore, a good exercise for breath support.

And as I sang, I suddenly heard the words I was singing:

Il balen del tuo sorriso
D'una stella vince il raggio

The light of your smile
Of a star outshines the rays

Stilted, no? I had to laugh. "Balen," also, is a poetic or obsolete shortening of the current word, "baleno." So how often, when we're reading titles in the opera house, are Italian operas translated in their full archaic glory? Hardly ever, I'd think, maybe never. The translations are made smooth and modern.

But doesn't that falsify the operas? When I was in college, I put on two evenings of excerpts from early Verdi operas (Ernani, I Lombardi, I due Foscari, and Attila; the last three pieces were almost never heard back then). One of my friends came, and brought his girlfriend, who was Italian. She kept laughing at the words.

So why do we falsify this experience? Why do we -- in effect -- pretend that these pieces are smoother and more modern than they are? Even the highly literate librettos of Otello and Falstaff pose translation problems. They're filled with uncommon, highly literary language. How often are the titles in our opera houses written to reflect that?

So, yes, I'm back from vacation, and already plunged deep into the new year. (Years really do seem to start in September.) Wednesday my Juilliard graduate course on music criticism began, and today, Thursday, I spent the day at a major music school outside New York, serving on a private panel to help the school decide what to do with technology. My Juilliard link, by the way, takes you to the same webpage the students use in the course, so you can do the assignments along with them, if you're somehow interested in doing that. You can also look at the course overview page, for a quick look at what the course is about.

And I also started working with Jenny Lin, the terrific pianist, on some pieces of mine she's going to premiere. These are evocations of Anne Carson poems, in which Jenny not only has to deal with some tricky rhythms (and fleeting musical metaphors for Carson's words), but she also has to play a drum, at the same time that she plays the piano. So we spent time Tuesday at the Harlem School for the Arts, where Jenny (along with her other distinctions) is artist in residence, looking at drums, deciding what kind of drum to use, where it should stand or sit while Jenny plays it, and whether she should use a stick or her hand. Plus many more details. Tricky stuff.

I longed for a comprehensive composers' website, something like the astonishing Ravelry site for knitters. A knitter, who, let's say, has just acquired the entire fleece shorn from a sheep, and wants to know how to turn it into knittable yarn (cleaning the fleece is the hardest part), can go to Ravelry and find people who've already done that. But I don't know any site where I could ask thousands of composers if any of them have written pieces for a pianist who also drums, and how they solved the technical problems involved. Fascinating, that knitters (Ravelry has nearly 200,000 members) should be better organized than classical composers.

What I said (or some of what I said) at the private technology panel: that there was always a danger of solving last year's problems, or, to use a military metaphor, arming your forces to refight the last war. Thus you think of the web as a way to get information out, when all the most vivid current online stuff is focused on participation, on bringing people in. I even suggested that this school open-source its questions (if "open-source" is a verb), by asking potential users of their technology to join an online discussion of what they should do. I also warned of some dangers, especially the dangers of doing something simply because technology makes it possible -- starting a blog, for instance, when you haven't figured out what you want to say, or streaming thousands of musical performances online, when you don't know who wants to hear them.

A housekeeping note: comments now can be posted here without my apprpoval, just as some readers urged. This means discussions can break out as soon as someone writes a comment, with no need for me to sign off on what anyone says. Not that I ever rejected anything (except for a couple of nonspecific one-line flames that must have come from teenagers). The approval process was designed to weed out spam, but the captchas on the comment page (the graphics you have to read and interpret before you can post) seem to have taken care of that. I'll surely jump in, and comment on the comments, so if you find yourself reading a discussion here, you might want to come back another time, and see if I've added anything.

Vacation, as usual for Anne and me in recent years, was a month in the Yorkshire Dales in England. We never did see any hedgehogs, but (despite the coldest, wettest August on record) we took some marvelous, strenuous walks up the high fells (as they call their stark, steep hills), and enjoyed many British things you just can't get here, from Coronation Street (the best TV soap opera ever), to the BBC's intent coverage of the triumphant British Olympic team, to the fabulous flavors of British potato chips (which they really are starting to call chips, as opposed to the more traditional "crisps"). Beef and horseradish was my favorite, I think, but other flavors involving lamb, or chicken, or Thai spices ranked pretty high, too. The Brits are way ahead of us here.

And here's one of my musical delights of recent weeks. It's something I heard from Ben Verdery, who teaches guitar at the Yale School of Music. Ben wants to know which guitarists auditioning for the school have real musical imagination, so he asked a Yale composer to write an audition piece for auditioners to play -- a piece with all the notes written down, but no expressive markings at all (no tempo markings, no dynamics, no articulations). The students had to decide for themselves how the piece should go. This is a brilliant idea, and Ben tells me it worked out just the way he hoped. It weeded out the students who play stunningly -- as long as someone else tells them how to play.

I was going to return from vacation with a post about -- what else -- myself? (I'm a blogger, right?) But then I thought it'd be more fun to start with something about Joan Tower's concert last Saturday night, at Merkin Hall in New York. She celebrated her 70th birthday, and some top musicians played her music. I love her stuff, and especially liked hearing pieces live that I only knew from recordings. Even though I'd studied some of the pieces, and wrote liner notes about them for Joan's Naxos CD, I was struck by how physical they sounded live, even -- or especially -- the very quiet beginning of Joan's piano trio Big Sky. Just some soft notes, very long, but they draw you into a space they create.

The real delight of the concert wasn't music by Joan, though. She's irrepressible -- someone who always says what she thinks. So when she came onstage after intermission, she said (just about licking her lips with anticipation), "Now comes the interesting part of the concert!" This was the part when some of the musicians who'd played Joan's music played pieces of their own -- pieces she'd just about forced them to write, no matter how afraid they were. And the results were wonderful. Joan, I should add, thinks (and I agree) that every musician should compose, and that every composer should perform. (I'm working on my piano improvising, and -- who knows? -- might even return to singing! I've got someone ready to give me voice lessons...)

So now Lisa Kaplan, of eighth blackbird, had written a piece, and so had Joseph Kalichstein. And others, too.  Lisa may not believe it, but her piece was fabulous -- witty, alive, propulsive, surprising. eighth blackbird should commission her! Kalichstein probably thinks that his piece was a throwaway, just some oddball takes on "Happy Birthday" fragments, in the styles of various great composers (with samples of those comopsers' actual work stolen, magpie-like, and thrown into the mix). But he stitched it all together with delightful wit and finesse. Not easy to do!

Which isn't to slight the pieces by pianists Blair McMillen and violist Paul Neubauer. All these musicians rose to the occasion, and showed -- to Joan's delight (mine, too) -- that composing isn't a special talent, given only to a few. Anyone can do it, and that's a good thing. (And just hold on, any purists out there who think I've dumped standards out the window. I didn't say that some people don't do it better than others. But the ability to compose, simply to compose, at whatever level, putting one note after another, isn't any God-given miracle. The people who become composers are the ones determined to do it, the ones who sit on our butts and finish our pieces. Which doesn't mean we have any more talent for it than plenty of performing musicians who don't compose. Or, for that matter, than non-musicians who've never even thought about it, as Jon Deak, the composer and NY Philharmonic bassist, proves with his astonishing composing workshops for adults and children. I've heard him evoke notable music from orchestra administrators, just for instance.)

A wonderful evening, Joan's 70th. And she's addicted to her iPhone! Who knew?