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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 9, 2004

TT: Dear Diary

December 9, 2004 by Terry Teachout

7:05 A.M.: I wake up an hour and a half ahead of the alarm clock, notice with disgust that sentences are already starting to take shape in my head, sigh deeply, and crawl down from the loft to face the inevitable and start writing my Friday column for The Wall Street Journal, an extra-long four-play special.


9:00 A.M.: Laura Lippman arrives on my doorstep for a tour of the Teachout Museum, after which we stroll over to Good Enough to Eat. (Mmmm, bacon waffles!) Laura and I are old friends who rarely see one another nowadays, since she lives in Baltimore and spends half the year writing mysteries and the other half flying around the country on author tours, so we always try to have breakfast together whenever she’s in Manhattan for more than a day. She brings greetings from Lizzie and Sarah, and I in turn tell her to go see Doubt as soon as she can. We then exchange the latest high-octane media gossip, furtively glancing around the room every few minutes to make sure nobody is eavesdropping.


11 A.M. Back to the office to finish my column, spurred on by an e-mail from my editor asking when the hell I’ll be filing. (Actually, she was perfectly nice about it, but I like feeling put upon.)


12:35 P.M. All done! I ship the column off to the Journal, then check my e-mail. Maccers says I should bring Apple Blossoms II with me to the Phillips for my lecture. At the moment I’m inclined to agree, but I’m fickle when it comes to my favorites….


12:45 P.M.: Tidings of great joy: Our Girl in Chicago calls to say she can come to New York on December 29 to spend a few days as my houseguest. Midway through our chat I fire off a round-robin e-mail to all our blogfriends, advising them to make appointments now to meet the mysterious OGIC in person.


1:15 P.M.: My copy editor at the Journal returns my column with four easy-to-fix queries. I knock them off, then pause briefly to catch my breath and look out the window. Is that sunshine I see out there?


1:20 P.M.: Karen Wilkin reviewed the new Museum of Modern Art for the Leisure & Arts page of yesterday’s Journal. I bookmarked her piece for later perusal, and now I read the last paragraph with approval:

But one glaring omission goes beyond such differences to become a serious distortion of art history. American modernism before Abstract Expressionism is virtually absent at the new MoMA. Only token representation is accorded pivotal figures like Stuart Davis and Arthur Dove; other influential pioneers, such as Marsden Hartley, are ignored. Davis is relegated to a corridor, hardly an appropriate place for an American master accorded a retrospective at MoMA in 1945. Clearly some things haven’t changed for the better at the new museum. Let’s hope it’s a temporary aberration.

This gives me an idea. I call the Mutant on her cell phone and schedule a last-minute rendezvous.


2:00 P.M.: As if I didn’t have enough to do today, I head down to MoMA and meet the Mutant, who teaches voice at the New School on Wednesdays and has three hours off between classes. We spend an hour and half looking at art, then grab a bite in the second-floor caf

TT: Almanac

December 9, 2004 by Terry Teachout

“The life of the spirit, like that of the body, is inevitably the source of

TT: Another country

December 9, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I just got back from Lincoln Center, where I heard Hilary Hahn play the Elgar Violin Concerto with Sir Colin Davis and the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall. I rarely go to orchestral concerts nowadays–it’s been months since I last heard the Philharmonic live, and I only went this time at the urging of a friend–and I was struck anew by how alienated I am from the increasingly tedious experience of traditional classical concertgoing, at least as it’s practiced in Manhattan. The ugly hall, the gray acoustics, the snidely knowing intermission chat, the coughing and ill-timed applause and near-complete lack of young faces in the audience: all these depress me so much that I find it hard to push them aside and attend to the music. The first half of the program, Janacek’s Taras Bulba and Sibelius’ En Saga, was well played, but I simply wasn’t there: I pulled my head into my shell and sat it out.


Not so the second half. For one thing, Hilary Hahn is an extraordinary artist, far more so than is generally understood, her fast-rising fame notwithstanding. I wrote about her four years ago in Time, whose editors had just dubbed her “America’s best young classical musician,” a fatuous mass-media plaudit that I did my best to put into some kind of sane perspective:

Yes, classical-music whiz kids are as common as laid-off dot.com executives, but Hilary Hahn is no robotic virtuoso. Her tone is lean and sweet, her interpretations smart and unshowy; even the hardest-boiled prodigy-hating critics in the business go all mushy when she plays Bach, Beethoven, Barber and Bernstein….


Hahn began studying violin at the age of four, entered Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music at 10 and signed an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical at 16. But she doesn’t think of herself as a prodigy. “A prodigy, in my mind, is someone who practices eight hours a day and has a big concert career at 13,” she once told a reporter. “That’s not my style. I practice maybe half that much, and I’ve had a pretty normal life.”


“Normal” may not be a totally accurate way to describe the life of someone who made her debut with a major orchestra when she was 12 years old. Still, Hahn has a point. The hot glare of big-media publicity can affect prodigies like a sun lamp: first you blossom, then you blister. But this wunderkind has paced her career sensibly, steering clear of the pitfalls that await unformed artists who push themselves (or are pushed) too hard. Now, at 21, she is a fully mature musician with a style all her own….


Listening to Hahn’s glowing recording
of Samuel Barber’s gently poetic Violin Concerto, one has the same feeling of intimacy as if the two of you were having dinner together. Only a very real person–a whole self–can make music that way. Far too many prodigies crash, burn and vanish, but this remarkable young woman seems here to stay.

All this was true enough when I wrote it, but it doesn’t come anywhere near describing what I heard a couple of hours ago. Hahn is now a profoundly gifted woman who has somehow retained much of the child prodigy’s mystery. Her playing is simple and wholly unaffected, though in no way na

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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