{"id":3013,"date":"2024-04-11T13:13:55","date_gmt":"2024-04-11T17:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3013"},"modified":"2024-04-11T13:13:58","modified_gmt":"2024-04-11T17:13:58","slug":"ripeness-is-all-what-may-be-the-fate-of-classical-musics-new-superstars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2024\/04\/ripeness-is-all-what-may-be-the-fate-of-classical-musics-new-superstars.html","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0\u201cRipeness is All\u201d \u2013 What May Be the Fate of Classical Music\u2019s New Superstars?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Yunchan Lin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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Today\u2019s biggest controversy in classical music is the Chicago Symphony\u2019s appointment <\/a>of Klaus Makela<\/strong>, who will become music director in 2027-2028. He will concurrently take over Amsterdam\u2019s Concertgebouw Orchestra \u2013 one of the half dozen most eminent European ensembles. He will be all of 32 years old. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one can reasonably dispute Makela\u2019s precocious talent. The attendant outcry takes various forms, of which the trickiest and most momentous is that his interpretations will lack \u201cripeness.\u201d What, exactly, does musical \u201cripeness\u201d connote? How is it manifest in performance? And is it imperiled by our ever accelerating world of social media and AI? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My ruminations — today published online<\/a> <\/strong>by The American Scholar<\/em> \u2013 lead me to Wilhelm Furtwangler and Claudio Arrau (who once remarked to me: \u201cI\u2019ve always been told I\u2019m a \u2018late developer.\u2019\u201d). I write of Arrau’s 1976 recording of Liszt\u2019s \u201cChasse-neige<\/a>\u201d <\/strong>that \u201cit jars open a bygone world of feeling and experience both conscious and subliminal. It exudes a veritable elixir of memory. Could any young pianist or conductor accomplish such a feat?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thence to Van Cliburn, who peaked at the age of 23, and to the winner of the most recent Cliburn competition: Yunchan Lin, now twenty years old. I write: \u201cHe has catapulted into a major international career. As it happens, one of his acclaimed competition performances was of Liszt\u2019s \u2018Chasse-neige<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong>\u2019 . . . His rendition is riveting — never glib, never superficial. But it would be vain to look for anything like the scope of Claudio Arrau\u2019s reading. Arrau\u2019s Liszt echoes and re-echoes through corridors of time, a performance for the ages.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also have occasion to recollect the Cliburn Competition’s most esteemed gold medalist: Radu Lupu \u2013 in 1966, when Lupu was 21 years old. “To the surprise and consternation of the Cliburn Foundation, he had pocketed his first prize and returned to Russia, refusing to undertake the high-profile concert tour prepared for him. Suppose that Klaus Makela had told his manager Jasper Parrott: Thank you very much, but I am not prepared to take over two of the world\u2019s most prominent orchestras<\/em>. That was Radu Lupu.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My ultimate topic is the erosion of cultural memory: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Socially accelerating atoms of human experience today undermine all previous understandings that art is necessarily appropriative; chaotically askew, they support the illusion that, locked in our disparate identities, we cannot know or speak for one another. What is more, a privatized, atomized lifestyle promotes neither arts patronage nor production. Rather, its diversion mode is the soundbite: particulate cultural matter; stranded arts particles. . . . <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Commensurately, cultural memory \u2013 for untold centuries, a precondition for creativity and appreciation of the creative act \u2013 risks becoming a stack of flashcards processed as media clips. Will sustained immersion in lineage and tradition remain an organic prerequisite for composition, interpretation, and reception?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Gloucester, in King Lear<\/em>, counsels: ‘Ripeness is all.’ Never has Shakespeare\u2019s observation more resounded as an admonition.\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can read the whole thing here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read Alex Ross in The New Yorker<\/em> on the Makela appontment, click here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s biggest controversy in classical music is the Chicago Symphony\u2019s appointment of Klaus Makela, who will become music director in 2027-2028. He will concurrently take over Amsterdam\u2019s Concertgebouw Orchestra \u2013 one of the half dozen most eminent European ensembles. He will be all of 32 years old.  No one can reasonably dispute Makela\u2019s precocious talent. […]<\/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-3013","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-MB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3013","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=3013"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3036,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3013\/revisions\/3036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}