An email from Marian Skokan, publicist at Lincoln Center, helpfully reminds me that their White Light festival, earlier this season, is designed to draw the same kind of new audience the Tully Scope festival did, as I've been describing in recent posts. (Here and here.) By which I mean people who don't normally go to classical performances, but do go to these festivals. These two festivals are the two bookends, fall and spring, of Lincoln Center's flagship Great Performers series. Which means quite a notable change in how Lincoln Center is … [Read more...]

Continuing from two days ago (and apologies for not delivering the post I advertised for yesterday)...The Tully Scope festival lasted from February 22 to March 18, and offered 13 concerts, ranging from mainstream classical events (Emmanuel Ax playing Schubert, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlighenment, with Roger Norrington conducting C.P.E. Bach). And early music (Jordi Savall and Les Arts Florissants). And six events featuring new music (sliding over into alt-classical, in one case featuring a star from a hot local indie band). Which is a lot … [Read more...]

A wonder. An epiphany. A piece of the future. I'd heard good things about Lincoln Center's Tully Scope festival, but hadn't gotten to any of the concerts. So I made sure to go to the last one, this past Friday, where two long pieces by Heiner Goebbels were played by two substantial British ensembles, the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. And -- leaving aside for the moment anything about the music -- the wonder, epiphany, and piece of the future was (crossing my fingers) the audience. Here we had a … [Read more...]

...been blogging. Because I've been on vacation, a blessed vacation, in Barbados. Great place to go -- no crushing poverty, as on many other Caribbean isles, and no private beaches! You can sunbathe right in front of the most exclusive hotels, if that's what you'd like, or (better choice) on the beach right next to the hotels, with nobody on them. There's not an inch of beach on the island that anyone can bar you from. And they have monkeys. Blog posts did show up here while I was gone, because I wrote them in advance. But then, when … [Read more...]

It's an art piece at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But not by an artist on display. Instead it's by someone on the museum's staff, the Senior Library Assistant, Rachael Morrison. The piece is called "Smelling the Books." Morrison has been working her way through all the books in MoMA's library, smelling every one, and recording the smells in a handwritten journal, which we can read on the web. "Used bookstore, faint smokey smell." "Late summer rain, old paper." "Dusty attic, under the couch." These descriptions are precise … [Read more...]

In a previous post, I linked to one of Kaiser's blog posts, in which he forthrightly says that popular culture is more fresh, daring, and inventive than what happens in the arts. So people might object to this. I won't bother with objections from people who think pop culture is worthless. I'm tired of those debates. But one key objection might be that terrific, fresh, daring things do go on in the arts, but just mostly not at the big institutions, Kaiser's own Kennedy Center among them.That's a fair criticism. I've been excited, for … [Read more...]

Forgot, in my earlier posts about opera acting, to mention Carlo Bergonzi, one of my dearest, most loved opera actors. Which is interesting, because on stage he was more or less a lump. I remember seeing him late in his career in Ballo at the Met. When he first entered, you'd be forgiven if you wondered if he even knew he was on stage. Or supposed to be acting.Then he started to sing, and (especially if you knew the opera) you'd be mesmerized. Such truth, such revelation, such honesty, and such moment-to-moment acting detail in his … [Read more...]

Silly title for a blog post. Since, after all, the whole world swims in popular culture. It's only in the arts that people seem to have trouble with it. So, following on my post about art (and art-making) spreading into popular culture, and in fact into our whole society, here are endorsements of more or less that concept, from prominents arts people. Michael Kaiser, who of course runs the Kennedy Center (and is maybe the most prominent arts administrator in the US) said in his blog that the arts can't compete with popular culture, … [Read more...]

When -- at the Southwestern University symposium I've blogged about -- I said what I outlined in my last post, I got some pushback. One academic on stage with me said, rather pointedly, I thought (and she had every right to speak pointedly, if she wanted to), that it wasn't a good idea to equate artistic worth with popularity. Is that what I got because I said good things about popular culture? There's an ingrained belief among some reasonably large number of arts people that popular culture is, basically, defined by commercial success. … [Read more...]

Here's something I said at the Brown Symposium at Southwestern University, a gathering I raved about in my last post. What I said wasn't a formal presentation, since there weren't any, in the conversations I was part of. But it's what I wanted to add to the discussion. Our moderator, for the symposium on "Ethics, the Arts, and Public Policy" posed some questions we might want to address. (He was Paul Gaffney, Professor of Theater at Southwestern, and dean of their Sarofim School of Fine Arts. And also quite a fine actor, to judge from how … [Read more...]