{"id":1877,"date":"2020-10-06T23:18:38","date_gmt":"2020-10-07T03:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1877"},"modified":"2020-10-07T16:56:41","modified_gmt":"2020-10-07T20:56:41","slug":"nothing-left-to-lose-my-first-orchestra-job-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2020\/10\/nothing-left-to-lose-my-first-orchestra-job-etc.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Nothing Left to Lose&#8221; &#8212; My First Orchestra Job, etc."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/D5ySpYLvhJE?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I was delighted today to join my friend Donato Cabrera for his latest \u201cMusicWise\u201d youtube show. We talked about Dvorak and Revueltas, about PostClassical Ensemble&#8217;s <strong>\u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.postclassical.com\">More than Music\u201d <\/a><\/strong>films \u2013 and about my own professional odyssey, which I traced back to feeling \u201cdisillusioned\u201d and \u201cbetrayed\u201d as a young <em>New York Times <\/em>music critic in the 1970s.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After that, as I told Donato, I wrote <em>Understanding Toscanini<\/em> \u201cas an act of therapy.\u201d At the end of that once notorious book, I identified Harvey Lichtenstein\u2019s Brooklyn Academy of Music as a place with a hungry and sophisticated audience \u2013 a place where classical music might be renewed. Harvey took me out to lunch and informed that the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in residence at BAM, had lost over two-third of its subscribers in two years. Would I be interested in taking over? I said yes \u2013 providing I could do what I wanted. And what is it you want? Harvey asked. Having had the experience, at the 92<sup>nd<\/sup>Street Y, of curating cross-disciplinary festival programing, I said that was what I wanted. Harvey said OK \u2013 he had nothing left to lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that was how I happened to wind up CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and turned it into a humanities institution with NEH funding (and tripled BPO audiences). Donato wanted to know more and I told him about the origins, at BAM, of my first \u201cDvorak and America\u201d program, based on recent research by the music historian Michael Beckerman.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I met Donato when he was assistant conductor of the New Jersey Symphony. This was post-BAM, when Larry Tamburri, the adventurous NJSO CEO (and someone who reads books), entrusted me with an annual winter festival. One such festival was \u201cDvorak and America.\u201d I then had occasion to meet with some NJSO musicians, including Donato. I inflicted my usual Dvorak quiz, playing a little of the F major Humoresque and asking people to guess the composer. The point of this quiz is that the invariable guess is Gershwin \u2013 which proves my point that the American Dvorak sounds \u201cAmerican.\u201d Donato ruined the quiz by becoming the first person ever to correctly guess \u201cDvorak.\u201d He\u2019s now music director of the California Symphony and the Las Vegas Philharmonic. We\u2019ve collaborated twice in Las Vegas: on \u201cDvorak and America\u201d and \u201cCopland and Mexico.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Copland\/Mexico program ignited one of the most memorable post-concert discussions in which I\u2019ve taken part, starting off with a woman raising her hand so eagerly she could not be ignored. \u201cI HATED it!\u201d was what she needed to say. Donato and I were delighted. Forty-five minutes later, when we disbanded, she came to the lip of the stage to talk some more with Roberto Kolb, who had joined us from Mexico City as the world\u2019s leading Revueltas scholar. Others in the audience (as recalled today by Donato) were exceptionally moved to encounter a symphonic program extolling the revolutionary political art &#8212;  on the far left &#8212; of 1930s Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Our chat is punctuated by some of my favorite excerpts from PCE\u2019s recent \u201cMore than Music\u201d films, with their extraordinary visual presentations by Peter Bogdanoff. \u201cGroundbreaking,\u201d says Douglas McLennan of Arts Journal. The next MTM film, on Bernard Herrmann, streams this coming Friday.&nbsp;&nbsp;Here\u2019s a glimpse: William Sharp on playing \u201cWalt Whitman\u201d for the 1944 radio play \u201cWhitman,\u201d hypnotically scored by Herrmann.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video height=\"800\" style=\"aspect-ratio: 1600 \/ 800;\" width=\"1600\" controls src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/William-Sharp-on-Whitman1.mp4\"><\/video><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was delighted today to join my friend Donato Cabrera for his latest \u201cMusicWise\u201d youtube show. We talked about Dvorak and Revueltas, about PostClassical Ensemble&#8217;s \u201cMore than Music\u201d films \u2013 and about my own professional odyssey, which I traced back to feeling \u201cdisillusioned\u201d and \u201cbetrayed\u201d as a young New York Times music critic in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1877","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-uh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1877"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1885,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877\/revisions\/1885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}