Archives for March 2006

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Bridge & Tunnel* (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza* (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd* (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes April 8)

– Bernarda Alba (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes April 9)

– Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes May 7)

– I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes April 9 and moves to Broadway April 18)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

“‘It seems sometimes that we must hurt people we love,’ said Fabian, stroking her hair. ‘Oscar Wilde said, didn’t he…?’

“‘Let’s not bother about him,’ said Jessie. ‘I always think he must have been such a bore, saying those witty things all the time. Just imagine seeing him open his mouth to speak and then waiting for it to come out. I couldn’t have endured it.'”

Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

I’m getting ready to ease myself back into the blogging way, but here’s a little appetizer while I get warmed up: our newest addition to the “Screenblogs” category of the

A reader writes, apropos of yesterday’s posting on the sorry state of the classical-music concert:

Please don’t do classical music any more favors, Terry. Just go back to your CDs and keep telling yourself that Schnabel is the last word on Beethoven.

Of course there is no “last word” on Beethoven, or any other composer–but after a lifetime of listening to multiple interpretations of the classics, I’m simply not interested in the Latest Version of anything. What I care about is the piece itself, far more than the way any one particular artist happens to play it, and now that each and every piece of standard-rep music has been recorded in multiple versions of very high quality, I find I have very little motivation to go out and hear Op. 111 done in yet another way, however “different” or “original” it might happen to be. Yes, the experience of hearing classical music in live performance is in and of itself worthwhile, but when the environment in which one consumes it has been degraded, I’m not so sure it’s cost-effective (speaking from an aesthetic point of view) to put up with the distractions.

This, by the way, is an unintended consequence of the invention of recording that nobody foresaw a century ago: that it might eventually make public performance obsolete, or at least moribund. It is, however, something that I’ve been writing about for years. Here, for instance, is a column called “No, Never” that I wrote for Fi a decade ago. I was talking about how I was no longer interested in listening to new recordings of the standard repertoire, but the same logic applies to my changing feelings about the institution of the traditional classical concert. It sums up what I think so completely that I’ve decided to post it here rather than trying to say it all again in a different way. I hope it interests you.

* * *

I received in the mail the other day a review copy of a new recording of the Brandenburg Concertos (I won’t say by whom), accompanied by a slightly shamefaced letter from a well-meaning publicist (who shall also remain nameless) suggesting that even though I probably wasn’t interested in listening to yet another recording of the Brandenburg Concertos, this one was worth my while. Candor from a publicist is as refreshing as it is rare, and I was tempted to give the album a listen for that reason alone, but the temptation passed in mere seconds. At the time I was knee-high in review copies, some of which were really interesting, and most of which were at least marginally more interesting than yet another recording of the Brandenburg Concertos. So I dropped the letter in the wastebasket, placed the CD atop my burgeoning giveaway pile, and meditated, not for the first time, on the folly of re-recording the classics.

What is it that causes an otherwise sensible musician to conclude that the world is waiting breathlessly for him to reduce to digits his interpretation of a score that has already been recorded twenty times or more? Presumably vanity has a little something to do with it, and so does youth–it never ceases to amaze me how many younger classical musicians, singers in particular, don’t listen to other people’s records–but two other reasons worthy of closer scrutiny come to mind:

• Musicians re-record familiar pieces of music because they think they have something new to say about them that is worthy of preservation and promulgation.

• Musicians also make records to make money, and historically speaking, the standard repertoire has always been what sold best.

I’ll come back to the second reason in a moment, but for now let me concentrate on the desire of artists to document their interpretations for posterity, which is almost as old as the invention of a means of doing so–that’s why we call records records–and which is, I think, perfectly understandable, if not always forgivable. When Adelina Patti heard the playback of her first 78, she exclaimed, “Ah, my God! Now I understand why I am Patti! Oh, yes! What a voice! What an artist! I understand everything!” I doubt anyone since then has responded quite so effusively to her records (she made them when she was sixty-two years old, a bit late in the game for a coloratura), but it’s important to remember that they date from 1905, prior to which time the most celebrated soprano of the nineteenth century had never before heard the sound of her own voice. Being a diva, Madame Patti no doubt instantly took it for granted that opera buffs as yet unborn would want to hear it, too, and sure enough, the old girl was right.

Save for a few eccentric holdouts, classical musicians have from that day to this made as many records as possible, more than a few of which have proved to be of permanent interest. But most of the records made between 1900 and the day before yesterday are either forgotten or soon will be. Posterity is ruthless, and only remembers the best of the best, rave reviews and impressive sales figures notwithstanding. My record collection is a time-lapse simulation of posterity, for I’ve lived in six different apartments in the past quarter-century, and thus have had to be scrupulous about disposing of review copies that I thought were less than indispensable. You’d be surprised at how many CDs I’ve given away over the years, and how few I’ve kept.

To be sure, there are certain works of which I’ve accumulated a reasonably large number of recorded versions, but very few of them were composed prior to 1800. This isn’t because I don’t like pre-romantic music, but because I don’t find it all that rewarding to compare different interpretations of music written before the dawn of romantic subjectivity. Take the Brandenburg Concertos: I love them passionately, but find it quite possible to scrape along with only four complete sets, the ones conducted by Adolf Busch, Benjamin Britten, Raymond Leppard, and Trevor Pinnock. The Busch, Leppard, and Pinnock sets represent the three major phases to date of evolution in the interpretation of eighteenth-century music (as well as recording technology), while Britten’s version earns its place on my shelf by virtue of its status as a wild card–a performance by one great composer of the music of another great composer. As far as I’m concerned, that’s enough. Interpretatively speaking, what is there to say about the Brandenburgs that Busch, Britten, Leppard, and Pinnock haven’t already said?

I fully expect to be bombarded with letters about that last sentence, some friendly and some obnoxious, but to all of you who are even now booting up your computers, I urge you not to waste your time trying to change my mind. I’ve been listening to the Brandenburgs ever since I was a teenager–I’ve even played a few of them, on violin, viola, bass, and in Max Reger’s wonderful four-hand piano arrangements–and I long ago decided that immortal though they are, they don’t lend themselves to idiosyncratic interpretation. To my mind, the way to play them is beautifully, briskly, and straightforwardly, and between them, my four complete sets cover all the interpretative possibilities I’m interested in experiencing. Anything beyond that is hair-splitting or perversity.

I hasten to point out that this rule of thumb doesn’t necessarily apply to nineteenth-century music, in which the performer’s personality can and should play a much larger role in the shaping of his interpretations. I’ve held onto nine of the many recorded versions of the Brahms Second Piano Concerto that have passed through my hands over the years: Cliburn/Reiner, Fischer/Furtwängler, Fleisher/Szell, Gilels/Jochum, Horowitz/Toscanini, Richter/Leinsdorf, Rubinstein/Coates, Schnabel/Boult, and Solomon/Dobrowen. But even that list barely begins to scratch the surface–the last time I looked, there were forty different Brahms Seconds in print–and I wonder just how much I’m likely to get out of any of the new versions that continue to turn up in my mailbox on an annoyingly regular basis.

It so happens that I have reached the time of life when you start wondering when you’re going to die, and thinking about what you want to do between now and then. There is a great line about this in Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, the poem set to music so eloquently by Sir Edward Elgar: “And, ere afresh the ruin on me fall,/Use well the interval.” Especially given the fact that we now live in an age when new music has finally gotten good again, I am less and less inclined to use that interval writing about new recordings of old warhorses. I’d much rather hear a piece of music I’ve never heard than a new recording of the Brandenburgs, no matter how good it is. This isn’t to say I can’t be surprised, even by baroque music–I still remember how much unexpected pleasure I got out of Gil Shaham’s recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons–but there comes a time when the smart man starts following the odds, and in my experience, the odds are that there aren’t going to be any more recordings of the Brandenburgs that I really, truly need to hear.

I’m not the only person who’s made this discovery, of course: so have most of the smart A&R people at the major classical labels, who are grimly aware that new recordings of the standard repertoire have fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. I talked not long ago to a young soprano who is very famous, very intelligent, and very realistic, and she told me matter-of-factly that given the current climate of opinion at her label, she didn’t expect to record very many of her roles; instead, she intends to stick to imaginatively planned recital discs that have a chance of selling a respectable number of copies. I think she’s onto something, and I wish more artists of her generation felt the same way.

I also wish more of today’s big-name performers would start taking a closer look at the accessible, attractive music of our time. Until very recently, the surest way for a performer to make it into the history books was not to play old music better than anybody else, but to seek out and perform first-rate new music. I wouldn’t be greatly surprised if some of Serge Koussevitzky’s recordings are still being played a hundred years from now, but even if they aren’t, he’ll still be remembered for having premiered the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, a piece he didn’t even bother to record commercially. Good performers are never as important as good composers. The best ones know it, and act accordingly.

As for me, I am drawing my personal line in the sand here and now: I do solemnly swear that I will never again review a new recording of the complete Brandenburg Concertos. If you want to get my attention, you’ll have to think of another way, preferably not involving plastic explosives. Furthermore, I have every intention of regularly adding other warhorses to my do-not-resuscitate list, so if you want to know what I think of your upcoming recording of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, you’d better get on the stick. I’m sure this decision will cause me to miss out on something good–probably even several hundred somethings–but I don’t expect to lose any sleep over it. If God had meant me to spend the middle of my journey writing comparison reviews of two dozen different versions of the Eroica, He would have given me more patience, a bigger apartment, and a longer life.

“I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyze the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.”

Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

I’m off tomorrow morning to Washington, where I’ll be attending a meeting of the National Council on the Arts and looking at paintings at the Phillips Collection and the National Gallery. I may blog from the road, or I may not. Either way, I’ll put up my regular Thursday and Friday drama-related postings, so don’t despair.

See you soon.

I rarely go to classical concerts. It’s not that I love the music any less, but over time I’ve become increasingly alienated from the experience of concertgoing: the noisy audiences, the unimaginative programs, the feeling that not nearly enough is at stake. Now that I’m spending less time out on the town, I find that few classical-music events in New York City are capable of inspiring me to surrender a precious evening I could spend doing something else.

Hence it was unusual—extraordinary, really—that I decided to attend the first two installments of Ian Bostridge‘s ongoing five-concert series at Zankel Hall, the miniature concert hall downstairs from Carnegie Hall. What possessed me to do such a thing? For openers, I was curious about Bostridge, the Oxford grad turned highbrow tenor who in recent years has emerged as the ultimate critics’ darling. I’d very much liked The English Songbook, his recorded recital of turn-of-the-century English art songs, and I wanted to hear how he sounded in the flesh. What’s more, the Zankel series, in which Bostridge is singing an imaginatively chosen assortment of music in five widely varied settings, struck me as a kind of best-case scenario for the classical concert as a cultural institution. I was especially interested in the first two programs, an all-Britten evening and a program with string quartet that featured On Wenlock Edge, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ cycle on poems by A.E. Housman, and La Bonne Chanson, Gabriel Fauré’s exquisite musicalization of the poetry of Verlaine. So I booked press seats for both performances, wondering how they’d strike me.

I mostly enjoyed myself, though Bostridge himself is an odd cookie, a skinny, stork-like caricature of English youth who looks as though he’d wandered off the set of a stage version of Brideshead Revisited. His voice is smallish, reedy, and hopelessly unheroic, and though he’s obviously in love with the words he sings, his English diction is fuzzy in the extreme. Yet the overt passion of his singing is hard to resist, and once I got past his surface mannerisms and accepted him on his own terms, I found his singing involving.

I had a good time—and yet I can’t help but wonder whether a program less precisely suited to my tastes could have lured me into a concert hall, least of all one whose indifferent acoustics are blighted by the near-constant rumble of the New York subway. The trains roared by, the cell phones twittered, my neighbors coughed at regular intervals…but you know how it is. It’s been a long time since I attended a classical-music concert given in the presence of a silent, fully attentive audience.

I’m writing these words immediately after having returned from a private concert held in the art-laden living room of a friend of mine who owns a wonderful old Bösendorfer grand. The performer was a serious amateur pianist who played two Beethoven sonatas, Opp. 109 and 111 (frivolous amateurs don’t play late Beethoven). I sat close enough to the keyboard to read the music over his shoulder. The audience consisted of twenty people, most of whom knew one another more or less well, and after Op. 111 we retired to the host’s dining room for a sit-down meal. That’s the way to hear classical music.

Yes, my friend is wealthy, and no, I’m not. I don’t even own a piano. But I do have a comfortable chair, a good-quality Nakamichi stereo, and some three thousand CDs, and whenever I please I can take one of them into the living room and listen to it, surrounded by the lithographs and etchings of the Teachout Museum. Had I cared to, I could have stayed home from Zankel Hall last week and spent the evening listening to a recording of On Wenlock Edge by Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten, and the Zorian String Quartet, or a performance of La Bonne Chanson by the great French baritone Charles Panzéra, who knew Fauré and sang for him innumerable times. Can Ian Bostridge compete with that? Yes—just. But not many other classical musicians can.

I still love going to ballet and opera and plays and jazz clubs, mainly because they offer me something I can’t get at home. Hearing late Beethoven in my friend’s living room was a different kind of experience, to be sure, but it, too, was unique and irreplaceable. Hearing a decently played program of oft-recorded standard repertoire in the company of noisy strangers is not. Why should I come hear you play Op. 111 in Alice Tully Hall when I can stay home and listen to Artur Schnabel playing it?

I should mention, by the way, that the friend I brought with me to Bostridge’s recitals didn’t know any of the pieces on either program, and her response to them was little short of ecstatic. I don’t think she even heard the rumble of the subway. So much the better for her. It may simply be, after all, that I’ve heard too many concerts in my lifetime. Anthony Powell remarks somewhere in A Dance to the Music of Time that intensive womanizing leads to specialized tastes. But I think it goes deeper than that. In fact, I have a sneaking feeling that the institution of the classical-music concert as we know it has just about run its course—and I won’t be sorry to see it go. It’s way past time for a change.

“She’s the sort of woman who lives for others–you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters