• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2007 / Archives for July 2007

Archives for July 2007

TT: Er, who’s Alan Gilbert?

July 19, 2007 by Terry Teachout

The New York Philharmonic’s surprise decision to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director is the talk of the classical-music world, in large part because Gilbert himself is not the talk of the classical-music world. He is chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and recently spent three years as Santa Fe Opera’s music director–both important posts, but not exactly high-profile slots. Though he’s led the Philharmonic in thirty-one concerts since making his debut with the orchestra six years ago, Gilbert is all but unknown to the public at large.
But, then, who isn’t?
The sad fact is that the days of the celebrity conductor are basically over, not because there aren’t interesting conductors out there but because our increasingly popular culture has essentially withdrawn its attention from classical music. According to news accounts, the other conductors who were considered by the Philharmonic to succeed Lorin Maazel were Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti. Both men are well known to regular classical concertgoers, but they have no name recognition whatsoever outside that small world. Moreover, they’re both senior citizens. (Pop quiz: name five indisputably major under-sixty conductors. Hello? Is anybody there?)
Spend a few minutes looking through the news stories about Gilbert’s appointment and you’ll come away knowing four things about him:
• He’s the first native-born New Yorker to be appointed music director of the Philharmonic.
• Both of his parents have played in the orchestra.
• He is (in the words of New York Times critic Tony Tommasini, who has been pushing hard for this appointment) “an unpretentious musician with no whiff of the formidable maestro about him.”
• He’s forty.
All interesting, though none save the last intrinsically encouraging. The New York Philharmonic has the oldest-looking audience of any major performing-arts organization whose performances I’ve attended in recent years. If Gilbert can attract a new generation of listeners, more power to him–but I very much doubt that the mere fact of his age will persuade anyone under thirty to come hear his concerts. The classical-music generation gap goes far deeper than that.
Far more important, I suspect, will be whether Gilbert proves to be an effective communicator–and whether he can find new ways of getting his message out to a new generation of listeners that is largely indifferent to classical music. I can’t imagine, for instance, that he’ll have any luck getting on network TV, or persuading the national newsmagazines to cover his activities. Instead, he’ll have to go a different route. Does he understand how the new media work? Does the management of the Philharmonic understand?
A half-century ago, the New York Philharmonic hired another fortysomething music director, who promptly proceeded to put the orchestra at the center of postwar American culture. But Leonard Bernstein was already famous. By 1958 he had written West Side Story, scored On the Waterfront, made the most highly publicized conducting debut in the history of American classical music, made dozens of well-reviewed major-label recordings, and spent countless hours talking about music on network TV. Alan Gilbert has done none of those things, nor will he have the opportunity to do anything like them.
To be sure, part of the key to Gilbert’s success will lie in the quality of his music-making. About that I can say nothing: I’ve never seen him conduct or heard any of the handful of recordings he’s made to date. Nothing that I’ve read about his Philharmonic appearances has made me feel that I had to go hear him. Yes, his programs look interesting, but I don’t need to go to Avery Fisher Hall to hear interesting orchestral music: all I have to do is go to my CD shelf and pick at random.
Needless to say, I wish Alan Gilbert the best of luck, but for the moment I can’t honestly say that I’ll be more likely to start attending the New York Philharmonic’s concerts when he takes over in 2009. That could change–quickly. Alex Ross, whose taste I trust, calls him “a man with an inquisitive, contemporary mind” who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into “a markedly different, more vibrant organization.” That sounds good to me. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic want to get people like me to go to their concerts, though, they’ll have to transform the experience of classical concertgoing in such a way as to make it more attractive than staying home–or doing something else.
UPDATE: Says Marcus Maroney:

If you think “The New York Philharmonic has the oldest-looking audience of any major performing-arts organization whose performances I’ve attended in recent years,” come on down and go to a Houston Symphony concert….

I’ve also seen a lot of walkers at Paper Mill Playhouse‘s weekend matinees, which presumably is a big part of the reason why they got themselves into such dire financial straits this past season.

TT: Talking to ourselves

July 19, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Dana Gioia, my boss at the National Endowment for the Arts, gave a widely reported commencement address at Stanford University last month. Now The Wall Street Journal has published a condensed version of it. Highlights:

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show, I saw–along with comedians, popular singers and movie stars–classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.
The same was true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman and James Baldwin on general-interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American–because the culture considered them important. Today no working-class kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.
The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture’s celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young. There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child’s imagination, and we’ve relinquished that imagination to the marketplace….
At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even an orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training.
I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available. This once visionary and democratic system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic school boards, county commissioners and state officials, with the federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price. Today a child’s access to arts education is largely a function of his or her parents’ income.
In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we experienced this colossal cultural decline? There are several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.
This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to re-establish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life….

Ever since I launched this blog–and for many years before that–I’ve been writing about the significance of what I call the middlebrow moment in American culture. (It’s one of the unifying themes of A Terry Teachout Reader.) Dana didn’t use that phrase in his speech, but it’s exactly what he has in mind, both in this speech and in the various programs, including The Big Read, Shakespeare in American Communities, American Masterpieces, and Poetry Out Loud, with which the NEA is seeking to stem the tide of cultural ignorance in America. I’m proud to be associated with that effort.
To read the rest of Dana’s speech, go here.

TT: So you want to see a show?

July 19, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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)

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, 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:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)


CLOSING SOON:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)

• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)

• Old Acquaintance (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)


CLOSING NEXT WEEKEND:

• 110 in the Shade * (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, closes July 29)

TT: Almanac

July 19, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“I’ve never made the trip to or from Connecticut without its resembling the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”
Pat Buckley (quoted in the New York Times, Nov. 20, 1984)

TT: Heads up

July 18, 2007 by Terry Teachout

New stuff in the right-hand column! Take a peek.

BOOK

July 18, 2007 by Terry Teachout

L.E. Sissman, Night Music. All but forgotten today, Sissman died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1976 at the age of forty-eight, leaving behind a slender but indelible legacy of poems and essays, many of which were about the illness that was to rob America of one of its finest and most promising writers. Twenty-three years later, Peter Davison edited this well-chosen collection of Sissman’s verse, whose cool, crisp iambs sit well with the highly individual sensibility of a poet-businessman who looked his fate in the eye without blinking: “Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,/A booted man in black with a peaked cap/Will call for me and troll me down the hall/And slot me into his black car. That’s all.” Read him if you dare (TT).

CD

July 18, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Giovanni De Chiaro, Scott Joplin on Guitar. “The Entertainer,” “Maple Leaf Rag,” “Elite Syncopations,” and eight other rags and character pieces, recorded in 1989 by the first classical guitarist to take a serious and sustained interest in Joplin’s music. De Chiaro’s lucid arrangements pare the non-stop oom-pah bass of the original piano versions down to the bare essentials, allowing the gentle lyricism of such pieces as “Solace: A Mexican Serenade” to come through with spring-like clarity. Don’t give away your Joshua Rifkin albums, but once you listen to this CD, I bet you’ll feel like playing it again right away (TT).

CD

July 18, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, Beethoven Complete Symphonies and Selected Overtures (Music & Arts, five CDs). Startlingly vivid new transfers of Toscanini’s 1939 radio broadcasts of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. Christopher Dyment calls these performances “the most lucid, dramatic and intense Beethoven cycle ever captured by recorded sound” in his crisply written, comprehensively informed liner notes, and I’m not going to argue. The seventy-three-year-old conductor was at the peak of his ruthless powers, and the NBC Symphony was still an enegetic ensemble of (mostly) youthful virtuosos who were capable of giving as good as they got. Airchecks of the 1939 cycle have been in circulation for decades, but they’ve never sounded half as good as this. Yes, there are other, equally valid ways to play Beethoven, but when you’re listening to this explosively vital set, you’ll likely have trouble remembering them (TT).

« Previous Page
Next Page »

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

July 2007
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Jun   Aug »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in