No doubt you’re all way ahead of me, but I only just discovered Jonatha Brooke last Friday night (courtesy of Kristin Chenoweth, who sang one of Brooke’s songs at her Carnegie Hall concert). I’m still well and truly blown away.

Brooke is kind enough (and smart enough) to allow visitors to her Web site to listen to her albums in streaming audio, so if you’re curious, go here and give Live a spin. I’m sure she’s not for everyone–otherwise she’d be rich and famous–but she’s definitely for me. Don’t bother if you don’t care for female singer-songwriters of the Joni Mitchell/Aimee Mann/Allison Moorer/Ani DiFranco variety, but if you do, check her out.

Here’s Allan Kozinn in the New York Times:

In the weeks since American and European authorities approved the merger of the recorded-music businesses of Sony and Bertelsmann, two of the world’s five biggest record companies, virtually all the discussion has been about what the deal means in the vast popular-music market, with barely a mention of the labels’ classical catalogs….

No one at either Sony or BMG, either in their classical divisions or among corporate spokesmen (to whom journalists are immediately referred by workers terrified to talk, lest they earn an instant spot on the list of 2,000 employees expected to be sacked), has been able to say what will become of the labels’ classical operations. So faintly do the classics register on the corporate radar that BMG’s spokesman, when told that his company had recorded the likes of Enrico Caruso, Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubinstein, said he was pleasantly surprised to hear it.

(Read the whole thing here.)

This is an important story, right? Sort of. I’ve been writing about the crisis in classical recording since 1996, and I summed up my thoughts two years ago in an essay called “Life Without Records” (it’s reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I predicted, among other things, that the major classical labels were doomed:

What remains to be seen is whether existing classical labels can operate profitably on the Web, especially given the fact that sound recordings go out of copyright in Europe fifty years after their initial release. This means that by the year 2015, the classic early-stereo recordings of the standard classical repertoire currently being reissued by the major labels will have entered the public domain, meaning that perfect digital copies can be legally distributed by anybody who cares to make them available for downloading. Callas’ Tosca, Heifetz’s Beethoven and Brahms, Herbert von Karajan’s Strauss and Sibelius–all will be up for grabs. Once that happens, it is hard to see how any of the major labels will be able to survive in anything like their present form.

Well, the future is now, and judging from Allan’s Times story, it seems perfectly clear that Sony-Bertelsmann, Inc., isn’t going to give a good goddamn about the classical-music treasures in its vaults. On the other hand, it’s only a matter of time–and not much of it, either–before all those old records become universally available on the Web, there being no way that American computer users can be kept from downloading them from European Web sites.

And what about the new records that Sony-Bertelsmann, Inc., won’t care to make? Once again, I refer you to “Life Without Records”:

I, for one, think it highly likely that more and more artists, classical and popular alike, will start to make their own recordings and market them directly to the public via the Web. To be sure, few artists will have the patience or wherewithal to do such a thing entirely on their own, and new managerial institutions will presumably emerge to assist them. But these institutions will act as middlemen, purveyors of a service, as opposed to record labels, which use artists to serve their interests. And while even the most ambitious artists will doubtless also employ technical assistants of various kinds, such as freelance recording engineers, the ultimate responsibility for their work will belong–for the first time ever–to the artists themselves.

For all these reasons, I’m not too terribly disturbed by the recent developments described in Allan’s piece. I’ve been expecting them for a long time, and thinking about what they might mean to the culture of classical music:

[O]ne aspect of life without records is not only possible but probable: henceforth, nobody in his right mind will look to classical music as a means of making very large sums of money. Of all the ways in which the invention of the phonograph changed the culture of classical music, perhaps the most fateful was that it turned a local craft into an international trade, thereby attracting the attention of entrepreneurs who were more interested in money than art. Needless to say, there can be no art without money, but the recording industry, by creating a mass market for music, sucked unprecedentedly large amounts of money into the classical-music culture, thereby insidiously and inexorably altering its artistic priorities….

Hard though it may be to imagine life without records and record stores, it is only a matter of time, and not much of it, before they disappear–and notwithstanding the myriad pleasures which the major labels have given us in the course of their century-long existence, it is at least possible that the 21st century will be better off without them.

To be sure, this prospect is understandably disturbing to many older musicians and music lovers, given the fact that the record album has played so pivotal a role in the culture of postwar music. Nor do I claim that life without records will necessarily be better–or worse. It will merely be different, just as the lives of actors were irrevocably changed by the invention of the motion-picture camera in ways that no one could possibly have foreseen in 1900. But one thing is already clear: unlike art museums and opera houses, records serve a purpose that technology has rendered obsolete.

We’ll sure see, anyway–and soon.

“The only brickbat that angered Orton was the grudging praise of his plays as ‘commercial’ from John Russell Taylor in his introduction to the play [Entertaining Mr. Sloane] in Penguin’s New English Dramatists 8. ‘Living theatre needs good commercial dramatists as much as the original artist,’ Taylor wrote. Orton was furious at such critical stupidity. ‘Are they different, then?’ he asked, quoting John Russell Taylor’s distinction between commercial success and art to his agent and asking to withdraw the play from the volume. ‘Hamlet was written by a commercial dramatist. So were Volpone and The School for Scandal and The Importance of Being Earnest and The Cherry Orchard and Our Betters. Two ex-commercial successes of the last thirty years are about to be revived by our non-commercial theatre: A Cuckoo in the Nest and Hay Fever, but if my plays go on in the West End, I don’t expect this to be used as a sneer by people who judge artistic success by commercial failure. There is no intrinsic merit in a flop.'”

John Lahr, introduction to Joe Orton: The Complete Plays

Tom Scocca wrote a funny column about bloggers called “TomScocca.com: Blogging Off Daily Can Make You Blind” for this morning’s New York Observer. He interviewed a number of old-media writers who’ve taken to blogging on the side, myself among them, and his tone is slightly snarky but basically friendly, if you know what I mean:

What blogging provides, [Teachout] said, is an “immediacy, informality and independence that you can’t find in the print media.”

He’s not worried, he said, about using up his ideas on the blog. “I really see the blog as a kind of public notebook or sketchbook,” he said. Part of the appeal, he said, “is that backstage glimpse it gives of the writer’s life.”

Blogging is more spontaneous than regular writing, but it’s writing nonetheless–as opposed to spontaneous blathering on cable TV, he said: “Blogging, by contrast, I think …. ” (Here my notes, in my hasty scrawl, appear to say “CRIDLY OCITHS”) ” … takes us back to a more considered but spontaneous” form of expression….

Not that any carefully constructed device can protect you from the withering and omnipresent scorn of the blogosphere, should it think it’s being attacked. The blogosphere is sensitive.

“I could write an account of this conversation while we are having it,” Terry Teachout said. I checked–he didn’t. Whew.

Indeed not. In fact, I happily certify that all direct quotations attributed to me in “Blogging Off Daily Can Make You Blind” are pristinely accurate and not taken out of context. (Scocca takes better notes than I do!)

Still, I want to mention one thing I said that Scocca didn’t print, which is that writing a piece solely about print-media journalists who’ve taken up blogging seems to me to be more than a little bit beside the point. In my opinion, most of the really interesting people in the blogosphere–all of whom, needless to say, are represented in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column–launched their blogs without any significant print-media experience. They’re the pioneers, whereas I’m just a Johnny-come-lately who’s having a ball and making all sorts of cool new friends along the way. What’s more, I think it’s a hugely significant development that these bloggers are now migrating to the print media in fast-growing numbers–without giving up their blogs. If you seek the future of American journalism, look to them.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s the big story of blogging, and I hope Tom Scocca gets around to writing it soon.

The reason why I posted so much yesterday is that there really wasn’t much else I could do. A three-man film crew moved into my apartment after lunch to tape me talking about Paul Taylor. Their arrival time fluctuated throughout the morning (first they wanted to come at two, then they wanted to come at four, then they wanted to come at two…), and though they were perfectly nice in every possible way, the vacillations disrupted my writing rhythms. Once they finally arrived, it took them an hour to set up and another hour to knock down. Unable to summon up enough consecutive thought to write a piece, I gave up and started knocking out blog entries instead.

Today will be different. It’d better be. I have two Wall Street Journal pieces due, a profile for Wednesday’s paper and a drama column for Friday’s paper. Assuming I get them done on time, I can start working on the 2,000-word book review that I’m scheduled to ship off to a magazine some time tomorrow. (To my credit, I’ve already written 500 words’ worth of the review, but the rest has yet to make itself manifest.)

For all these reasons, I’m leaving the show to Our Girl today, and maybe tomorrow, too, depending entirely on how smoothly the prose flows. For the moment, I put out enough food on Monday to keep you happy, right?

Later.

UPDATE: One down, two to go….

UPDATE #2: Two down, time for a nap.

“The loss of excitement is the beginning of professionalism. The thrill of standing on a stage, of receiving the audience’s attention and admiration, the release of becoming someone other than yourself: all these stimuli are transient and superficial. They must be replaced by something much more deeply rooted which takes as its starting point the audience’s experience rather than your own.”

Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

Regular readers will recall that I wrote earlier this year about Rick McKay’s film Broadway: The Golden Age, both here and in The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. McKay is one of those starry-eyed small-town types who moved to New York in the ’80s, found that the parade had already gone by, and longed to know what he’d missed. Instead of retreating to his apartment to play his original-cast albums, he bought a digital-video camera and finagled more than a hundred Broadway stars of the pre-“Hair” era into letting him interview them. He shaped the resulting footage into “Broadway: The Golden Age,” in which talking-head interviews with the illustrious likes of Carol Channing, Ben Gazzara, Robert Goulet, Angela Lansbury, Jerry Orbach, Shirley MacLaine, John Raitt, Gwen Verdon, and Elaine Stritch are ingeniously commingled with heart-stoppingly rare performance footage lifted from home movies, newsreels, theatrical trailers and videotapes. The result is an irresistibly nostalgic portrait of a lost era, albeit one that zips along like the Twentieth Century Limited. The editing alone deserves an Oscar.

Not to worry, for Mr. McKay knows when to ease back on the throttle and simply let his subjects talk. And talk they do, often amusingly and always movingly, about what it was like to work alongside such near-forgotten giants as Laurette Taylor (who is seen in her Hollywood screen test, the only sound film she ever made) and Kim Stanley (where on earth did Mr. McKay dredge up what looks like a kinescope of a live performance of “Bus Stop”?). You’ll weep–I did–to hear them share their fond memories of crummy apartments, Automat meals and big breaks.

Produced and marketed on half a shoestring, this one-man labor of love is slowly making its way across America, one screen at a time….

Well, you know what? It still is. I recently received an electronic press release from McKay announcing still more openings for Broadway: The Golden Age, which is already showing all over the place. To find out whether it’s headed for a multiplex near you, go here. A DVD is in the works, but trust me–this film deserves to be viewed in a theater, in the company of hundreds of other stage-struck men and women who either remember the good old days or wish they’d been alive to see them. I myself look forward to its return to New York on Sept. 28. See you there.

Last Friday I saw Kristin Chenoweth make her Carnegie Hall recital debut. I was there as a fan, not professionally, but I’ve written about Chenoweth quite a bit in my Wall Street Journal theater column, most recently in my review of the New York Philharmonic’s semi-staged concert performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide:

Cunegonde, Candide’s shopworn sweetheart, is far beyond the reach of ordinary musical-comedy singers, for “Glitter and Be Gay,” her big number, is an all-stops-out coloratura aria requiring a rock-solid high E flat. I knew the diminutive Ms. Chenoweth had operatic training, but it never occurred to me that her high notes would have survived years of Broadway belting, much less that she could still nail them with the brilliance and panache of a full-time opera star. Add to that her impish charm and switchblade-sharp timing and…well, let’s just say I’m no longer capable of being surprised by the amazing Ms. Chenoweth. After “Glitter and Be Gay,” I wouldn’t have boggled if she’d picked up the baton and conducted the second act.

Though Chenoweth didn’t conduct the band on Friday night, nothing else happened that was inconsistent with what I wrote about her performance as Cunegonde. Yet what impressed me most forcibly about her concert was the fact that it was a concert–an experience whose impact relied in substantial part on her physical presence. Tiny though she is, Chenoweth has the kind of outsized charisma that is impossible to capture on record. I hadn’t seen her on stage when I first heard her solo album, Let Yourself Go, and so I didn’t quite get what she was all about. It wasn’t until I covered the opening of Wicked last year that I got the point, which was hammered home by Candide and her Carnegie Hall recital. As the saying goes, you have to be there, the way earlier generations claimed that you had to see Al Jolson or Ethel Merman on stage to understand why they were so great. I hope Chenoweth someday finds a record producer (or TV director) who can figure out how to translate her astonishing energy into a medium that puts so high a premium on one-to-one intimacy. In the meantime, all I can say is that if you’ve never seen her in the theater, do so as soon as you can.

Last Friday was also, of course, the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, an occasion Chenoweth marked by singing a touching version of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times (Come Again No More).” On the day itself I was awakened by the sound of jets flying overhead, presumably on their way to the ceremonies at Ground Zero, and by the time I got outside to partake of the glorious weather, I was startled by how thinly populated the streets were. Perhaps everybody was downtown–or out of town.

Me, I had a press preview to cover, and I’d given quite a bit of advance thought to what I wanted to be seeing that day. In the end, I settled on the Dodger Stages revival of Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique, which opens on Thursday. Since I’m reviewing it for the Journal, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I’ve written about Symphonie Fantastique before, most recently in my Washington Post column when it was performed at Lincoln Center a couple of years ago as part of a Berlioz festival. Here’s what I said back then:

I’d been looking forward to Lincoln Center’s revival of Basil Twist’s “Symphonie Fantastique” ever since it was announced last year, but when my friends asked me exactly what it was, I hemmed and hawed and finally said, “Well, uh…it’s an abstract puppet show in a thousand-gallon water tank, set to a recording of Berlioz’s