Yesterday I sat for a while watching the Met Opera DVD of Rossini's Armida, starring Renee Fleming (who mugs and gesticulates far more than she should, but I digress) This, I thought, was a perfect example of a piece written for -- and suited for -- a time when most of the audience didn't listen attentively. Or at least not to most of the performance. Please don't get me wrong -- I love Rossini. But this isn't top-drawer Rossini, or at least most of the first act isn't. (And the first act was the part I watched. I'm perfectly open to watch … [Read more...]

I haven't said anything here about the Detroit Symphony mess, even though it's the leading conversation topic these days among people involved with orchestras. Or at least it is in my experience. It's the one topic someone's sure to bring up.What's happening is a mess, of course, because it might finish the orchestra. The institution was reeling, financially, which i'm sure shouldn't be a surprise, because it's in Detroit, a city that's in such ghastly trouble that nearly one-third of it has been abandoned. Hard to write those words and … [Read more...]

Over the years, I've heard prominent people in classical music talk privately about the trouble classical music is in. I've sometimes heard things that go beyond -- even far beyond -- what these people would say in public. But now I've seen something presented in public that matches things I've heard privately. It's a blog post that Tony Woodcock wrote last week. Tony used to run the Minnesota Orchestra, and now runs the New England Conservatory. So his credentials -- and his inside knowledge of the classical music field -- are … [Read more...]

All of us, if we're lucky, will sometimes meet people who shine with everything we most deeply care about. For me, one of those people was Blanche Honneger Moyse, who just died at the age of 101. I heard her conduct three times, always a Bach passion, once in New York at Symphony Space, and twice at the New England Bach Festival, which she founded and led in Brattleboro, VT. I reviewed her twice, in my critic days. You can find the reviews here and here. But what I remember most was a Vermont performance of the St. Matthew Passion … [Read more...]

Forgot to say, in yesterday's post about the Met in the 1920s, that they did more than 40 operas every year. In 1924-25, they did 44 operas (plus Petrushka, as a ballet) in 24 weeks. Some weeks had eight performances, other weeks had nine. All of which might help to explain why the quality wasn't very high. And when I said that Mozart wasn't a large part of the repertoire, I should have been more specific. Three 1929 performances of Don Giovanni were the first since 1908. (But then, thanks to Ezio Pinza in the title role, it was done every … [Read more...]

A week or so ago, I posted a New York Times story from 1922, about Geraldine Farrar's farewell performance at the Metropolitan Opera, complete with screaming teens and a parade through the streets. But this wasn't the only thing at the Met in the 1920s that we wouldn't find today. Because in those long-gone days...The company made a profit. Purely on ticket sales. Each year, it took in more money than it spent. So it functioned as a commercial operation. The wealthy people we might think of as patrons bought subscriptions -- tickets, more or … [Read more...]

A brief excerpt from the recording I talked about in my last post. Here's Giuseppe Valdengo, sounding relaxed and collooquial -- nonoperatic, in fact -- in a short excerpt from his big aria in The Barber of Seville, "Largo al factotum." From a live performance at the Met in 1950.To listen, just click. (For a short time, he's hard to hear. This was a live performance; he must have faced away from whatever mics they were using.)And I must say...listening to Valdengo again makes me think better of him than I did when I wrote my last post. Likewise … [Read more...]

...of Seville, I mean. A Met Opera performance broadcast in December of 1950, and newly released (or soon to be released) on Sony Classical.  I was interested initially for opera geek reasons. The cast included Lily Pons (the Met's leading coloratura of those days) as Rosina, and Giuseppe Di Stefano as the Count. Pons has always struck me on commercial recordings as rather feeble, and while I've known that Di Stefano began his career singing light, lyric tenor roles, I'd never heard him in anything this light. Instead I've known him from … [Read more...]

A worthy question -- did Geraldine Farrar have screaming girl fans only because of her opera success, or because she was also a silent movie star? I don't have any information that would help me answer that. But other divas had followings of excited women -- for instance, Amelita Galli-Curci, the early 20th century coloratura, and (according to a 1940s piece in Time magazine) also Lily Pons, the glamorous coloratura of the mid-20th century. (See my sidebar on the age of the audience for documentation.)Pons made films, too, in the 1930s, … [Read more...]

That's my Juilliard course on the future of classical music, which I teach every spring, on Wednesdays. You can go to the class webpage, and see the full schedule, as well as all the assignments. Which, if you're interested, or curious, you can do yourself. All the reading and listening can be done online. The course this year -- at least for me -- has been bedeviled by weather. Now that I don't have a NYC apartment (as one change in my life created by my fulfilling NY-Washington lifestyle), I have to come into the city from my place in … [Read more...]

A footnote to yesterday's post on the classical music aura, from Richard Pevear's introduction to the rightly acclaimed new translation of War and Peace (which he made in collaboration with Larissa Volokhonsky):The first thing a reader today must overcome is the notion of War and Peace as a classic, the greatest of noveIs, and the model of what a novel should be. In 1954, Bertolt Brecht wrote a note on "Classical Status as an Inhibiting Factor" that puts the question nicely. "What gets lost," he says of the bestowing of classical … [Read more...]

Shortly I'll resume my posts about culture (aka how classical music hasn't kept up with the rest of it). And I'll respond to some of the comments. But here's something that struck me on Friday, when I was making my last post, about the composition/conversation contest hosted online by Southwestern University. (If you follow the link, scroll down to find out what the contest is, and how it works.) If you read the post, you'll remember that I got excited about a video of a Hermann Prey performance, in which the spirited … [Read more...]

This hard-to-resist photo -- taken at the French Cultural Center in Khartoum, Sudan -- is an entry in a photo contest, for photos showing conversations. It's a semi-finalist, a contender for the prize. But let me backtrack, because I'm part of this. The photo contest is a spinoff from a symposium held every year at Southwestern University, near Austin. This year's topic -- the dates are February 23 to 25 -- is salons and conversation, and I'll be taking part, first as part of a salon discussion titled "Arts - Sciences - Religions: Conflict or … [Read more...]

This past weekend I went to the see the now-famous -- or should that be notorious? -- Hide/Seek show at the National Portrait Gallery, the show that offers images of gays and lesbians in American art from the 1880s to the present. It's notorious, to some people, anyway, because under pressure from religious groups and the political right, a video was removed that showed, however briefly, ants moving on a Christian cross. But that's not what i thought of when I saw the show. I thought about the history of gays, their hiding in past … [Read more...]