As those who have endured my opinionated rants on rock music have known for a long time, I maintain a slightly fanatical loyalty to artists, groups and albums that I considered underappreciated by mainstream opinion. Near the top of my list of all time favorites come rock bands that may be nearly unheard of (e.g., Nektar), or well-known for a few pop singles but unrecognized as the top notch artists I think they are (The Fixx, 10cc). The same goes for my take on individual albums, singer-songwriters, etc.
It is not much different when it comes to classical music. For example, being a violinist, I keep a mental list of violin concerti that I know well and often play recordings of, but which are all but completely neglected by touring violinists. It saddens and sometimes infuriates me to see the repertoire of concert pieces narrowed to a handful of big name composers (the canon would be Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Bruch and Sibelius) with maybe another small handful occasionally thrown in to be "adventurous" (every once in a while someone decides to haul out a concerto by Elgar, Shostakovich or Bartok). It's not the place for it, but I could probably name 20 other concerti that are fully worthy of frequent concert performance. At least in New York - and outside Europe there are few better places from which to observe - not one of them is played even once a decade.
The feeling of great historical-aesthetic injustice extends to other parts of the classical music canon as well. In particular, since my teens I have felt such a deep connection to the music of Anton Bruckner that it seems we must have shared a soul at some point. (As well as a name.) I own multiple recordings of most of his symphonies, the Te Deum, other choral works and even some of his chamber music. Sadly, for whatever reason, the classical music world does not have the same affection for Bruckner that I do. Not that recordings of Bruckner's music are hard to come by; he has had his champions, for sure. But performances are rare. I have managed to catch a performance of the 3rd Symphony (Masur, NY Phil) and the 6th (can't recall who) and I believe, though I can't remember the exact occasion, that I have heard his two most popular symphonies, the 4th and the 7th, at some point or other. But entire seasons of most major U.S. orchestras can go by without a single Bruckner performance.
The worst of the situation is that two of his greatest symphonies, the 1st and the 9th, are hardly ever played; and of these, the 1st is the more sorely neglected. It has been said that Bruckner was the first composer to take up the challenge of Beethoven's 9th. Perhaps that is an exaggeration - there were many romantic composers before him who helped expand the vocabulary of romanticism. More apt would be the statement that he was the first to take up in symphonic form what Wagner and Liszt had created through the opera and the tone poem. In any case, in his first symphony (completed in 1866) you hear for the first time the new vocabulary of high romanticism melded with the formal structure of the romantic symphony.
For me it is like the sounds come directly from the earth itself: deep, awe-inspiring, complex, hauntingly beautiful - in a word, sublime. Once, travelling by car through the hills of Austria, I felt like I was surrounded by a Bruckner score. If nature could speak, it seemed, it would be singing Bruckner.
There have been few greater advocates of Bruckner than Daniel Barenboim, and last night he began the first (almost) complete Bruckner symphony cycle in my lifetime, at Carnegie Hall. Each of the symphonies except the 8th is to be preceded by a performance of a Mozart piano concerto, played and conducted by Barenboim. I will not tell you what I spent on the ticket, but having no love for that hall with its extreme ticket prices, I will mention that I spent about an extra $30 for a "keyboard side" seat on the left, only to find that the keyboard was placed parallel to the stage. Shameful bilking of music lovers in that place. But back to the concert.
Barenboim paired the first "official" Bruckner symphony with the last Mozart piano concerto. The latter, unlike the last Mozart Symphony (for example) is a quieter and more subtle piece than many of the earlier ones. Barenboim was entirely equal to its silky textures and delicate phrasing, giving a performance that was as masterful and nuanced as it was understated. It is hard to imagine a better one, and the audience responded by calling him back for several bows.
How interesting, then, that he gave the Bruckner every bit of gusto and power that it deserved, pulling off, with the help of the top notch musicians of the Staatskapelle Berlin, a performance that did all it could to make amends for the years of neglect this symphony has endured in New York. The opening of the first movement (which surely must have inspired the opening of Mahler's much more famous 6th Symphony) progresses from gracefulness to raw power in just a few bars. By the time we hear it again in the recapitulation an entire world of new sonorities has unfolded. The delicate second movement was brought off perfectly, no small task given the individual refined contributions needed from so many members of the orchestra.
But the real fireworks in this piece come in the Scherzo, which all but lifts you out of your chair and makes you want to pump your fist in the air like some catapulting performance by a Seattle grunge band. This would be the first of numerous Bruckner Scherzos that follow a similar pattern, but it is clear that he has already perfected the form. It is tough for the last movement to live up to this level of energy, but Barenboim took no prisoners. While the rest of the performance seemed to be inspired by the early Jochum recording in sonority and tempo, here Barenboim led the orchestra on a frenzied chase that did as much as possible to keep the energy up right through the dramatic close.
The audience on its feet, conductor and orchestra were kept standing and bowing for quite some time, with individual kudos to the horns and the outstanding timpanist (the program lists two, Torsten Shönfeld and Dominic Oelze) until a no doubt exhausted Barenboim, age 74, smiled and waved what was clearly "goodbye".
The series continues tonight with the 2nd symphony, the only one I can't say I know very well. I am bit disappointed they are not going to do the so called "nullified" symphony, known as Symphony #0; this excellent early symphony was officially withdrawn by Bruckner after harsh critical commentary, but the man was notoriously thin-skinned and obsessed with perfecting and revising what were already brilliant works, so there is no good reason to think withdrawing it was a good artistic decision. If harsh critical reviews were always to be respected we probably would not have a good chunk of today's standard repertoire.
I hope I can find a way to get back for more of the series. Perhaps for the equally sublime 9th. But already a major gap in my listening experience has been filled.
It could be a great week, in spite of today's scheduled political event, which once again brings us from the sublime back to the ridiculous.
Showing posts with label classical music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classical music. Show all posts
Friday, January 20, 2017
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The Tommasini Ten
What? Two classical music posts in a row? Since when did the Parrot get such an urbane bug in his tropical ear? Well - when a leading NY Times music critic like Anthony Tommasini indulges himself and his readers in an exercise like "name the ten greatest composers who ever lived" the Skeptical Parrot cannot resist the challenge.
But while Tommasini and his readers may have had their fun, the entire exercise lacked one thing from the start: criteria. Rather than offer X, Y and Z as the criteria of greatness, and then engage in a fact-finding study as to who best fulfills them, the crtieria got hauled out here in half-baked form, hidden under the tones and rants of subjective impressions and assessments of individual accomplishments. Only by such constant tipping of the scales one way or another did Tomassini end up with a list in which, for example, Bartok is included but not Handel, Haydn, Grieg, Mahler, Tchaikovsky or Schoenberg; Verdi is in, but Vivaldi, Schumann, Dvorak, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt and Elgar don't make the cut. Tomassini does not so much as apologize, in his final essay, for the fact that he couldn't squeeze Mendelssohn into his list; after all, he is only the composer of the world's most popular violin concerto, two of the most popular symphonies, some of the greatest works of chamber music, the Elijah oratorio, the Hebrides Overture and Midsummer Night's Dream Overture (including what is perhaps the world's most frequently performed piece of classical music, the Wedding March) and the Songs Without Words for piano; and, since Tommasini likes to refer to extra-musical facts about his choices, he is also largely responsible for our current appreciation of Tommasini's #1 composer, J.S. Bach. Not enough, apparently, to place him above the illustrious Bartok, whose influence on anyone or anything is debatable and whose quality is as uneven as that of many other 20th c. options.
What sort of nonsense is denoted by "top ten classical music composers in history"? I can't even begin to imagine. There is a sort of grudging consensus among classically trained musicians that from the Baroque on, J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart and L. van Beethoven are the three greatest composers. Beyond that, there is a slightly less firm consensus that Handel, Haydn, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms make the cut. You get Chopin, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Mahler in the late romantic contingent. And in the "be fair to the 20th" category it goes without saying that Debussy (whose most importat works were writtne after 1900), Stravinsky and Schoenberg had the biggest impact (though "greatness" at this point already depends more on "admirable" than "lovable"). So there are your "top sixteen classical music composers in history" and I did virtually no work to arrive at it. You want to cut, then you cut the late romantics and Schoenberg because they are more controversial than the others (or in Chopin's case, more limited in range of composition). Now you've got eleven, a nice prime number. And if anyone wants to challenge this, I'm just going to say: "Look, I have my personal favorites too. For example, Purcell, Teleman, Bruckner and Elgar definitely make my pantheon. But I am not talking about personal favorites, I'm talking about consensus. And that, I can virtually guarantee after almost half a century of appreciation, study, training and performance of classical music, is what I just said it is. So there you go."
Someone will no doubt be inclined to respond like this: "Yeah, but even if you're right, the consensus is wrong, because so-and-so is really greater than so-and-so". In that case I'm going to ask for your criteria for greatness; and you may find that once you state it, and apply it consistently, people who you don't want to be on your list will be, and others who you want will be excluded. And that is no doubt what would have happened with Tomassini's list if he hadn't been backing up his choices with an ever-changing arsenal of justifications for the people he included. Each choice is secured on somewhat different grounds. By such methods, anyone with a reasonable knowledge of classical music can produce and back up a list of his own and write off Tomassini's arguments. What is the value of that exercise?
The fact that Tommasini came up with so many of the consensus guys I just mentioned shows perhaps that they are the ones who get on the list by any reasonable standard. But Tomassini goes even further than identifying the 10 "greatest" composers; he actually goes so far as to rank them in order! Here's his list: (1) Bach (2) Beethoven (3) Mozart (4) Schubert (5) Debussy (6) Stravinsky (7) Brahms (8) Verdi (9) Wagner (10) Bartok. The reasons for these rankings probably belong in a joke book: Wagner, for example, was an anti-semite and therefore ranks behind Verdi as a composer! Sqwuakkk! Beethoven beats Mozart because Tomassini thinks he is more daring, or something like that. Brahms slides down, apparently, because he tried to walk the line between conservatism and the progressive pull of the Romantic. (One might just as well say this is why he should slide up, but why argue with such wily logic?) It's all very silly, but hey, it sure pulls readers into that web site. They all want to have their say. And so do I. Oh sorry, I didn't play by the rules and posted this on my own site. Well, you're free to use the permalink at the top.
So here are a few of my non-"Comments".
First, Bela Bartok is not even on my list of top ten post-Romantic pre-War 20th century composers. Of course the caveats are necessary to exclude not only Mahler, Elgar, Rachmaninoff and Sibelius but also Stockhausen, Ligeti, Cage and other great figures of the second half of the 20th century from consideration for this very exclusive list. This seems fair since the late Romantics would win hands down and the post-War period is still being evaluated. The list would then go as follows (in no particular order): Schoenberg, Ives, Stravinsky, Webern, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Copland, Barber, Vaughan Williams. Is Bartok next? Maybe; for Bluebeard's Castle, Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta, the 2nd Violin Concerto, and some of the quartets (though the middle ones get him negative points). The problem is that few of those pieces really send me as much as the best ones by the other guys. But he tried harder, I have to admit that. Another BB, Tommasini's favorite Benjamin Britten, never impressed me much. Good thing I'm not a Big Berg fan or BB1 would slide below AB, who's definitely in front of BB2. According to BP (the Brooklyn Parrot).
Next, by what logic, exactly, is all the classical music prior to Bach somehow dismissed from this exercise? Or does "history" begin in the late 17th century? Guillaume de Machaut, Josquin des Prez and Palestrina were each, in their day, considered among the greatest composers of all time; and history, I think more or less backs up this judgment. Shame on Tomassini for ageism. Byrd, Dufay, DiLassus, Gabrieli and a few others may also deserve consideration.
If consistency is a criterion of greatness, as I think it should be, there are only, to my knowledge, two composers whose mature work contains no second-rate pieces: Bach and Brahms. Beethoven's execrable Wellington's Victory and one or two other late pieces bar him from this list. Mozart's juvenilia can be discounted by virtue of the "mature" clause; but his ridiculous parlor music output of divertimenti and serenades, with one or two well-known exceptions, take him off the table. I will admit that I can't actually name a Schubert piece I dislike, but of his many quartets and piano sonatas, I think they do not all rise to the level of the greatest classical music. Chopin is probably beyond criticism, but as I said, the fact that his output is all but limited to solo piano music and a couple of concerti means he should not be compared with composers who tried and consistently succeeded at a variety of musical forms. Handel is a serious possibility; though with over 200 vocal works, of which I am terribly familiar with exactly one, it is hard to pretend that I really know much about Handel's consistency. (It is interesting to note that though he does not make Tommasini's list, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are all on record as considering him their master. Go figure.) And that's about it for composers who even might be perfectly consistent at a very high level.
I now return to my own "favorites" list. First, let me say this: Telemann wrote more works than any other composer; he wrote over 2000 cantatas alone, which amounts to a cantata a week, every week, for 40 years, in addition to at least 1000 other pieces. Neither I nor, I think, any other living person has heard even a majority of Telemann's music. I have, however, heard quite a bit of it, and I think it is fair to say I have not only never heard a bad work, but never heard a work that is less than fully satisfying, original, and stocked with passages of great beauty. I think it is at least possible that by some criteria, such as quantity of high-quality output, Telemann deserves to be called one of the greatest composers of all time. Next, though his output is much more limited in quantity, I find Henry Purcell's music to be of such unearthly beauty that I could listen to nothing else for weeks. He has a permanent piece of real estate in my Composers' Heaven. Staying with the English for a minute (who grossly overvalue their dry, unadventurous types like Britten and Frank Bridge and undervalue more interesting figures like William Walton and Michael Tippett) I find Edward Elgar's music to be the equal of any composer from the 19th century on. Of his many underrated pieces, the String Quartet and Violin Concerto stand out to me. Again, I have never heard a less than completely satisfying piece by Elgar. He's in my Top Whatever list, by almost any criteria.
Moving right along, while I recognize that Anton Bruckner had his less than stellar moments - the 2nd and 6th symphonies primarily - I find several of his symphonies so deeply moving that upon the 100th hearing they still reduce me to tears. These would include the First, Third, Fourth, Seventh and Ninth at least; while the Fifth and Eighth are almost at that level, and even the Sixth, surely an imperfect work, contains many passages of beauty. My admiration for him is so high that even his "student" symphony, "#0" so-called, I find as satisfying as many composers' mature works. He is among my top 5 symphonists, for sure. Next, anyone who underrates Ives is a fool; the Concord Sonata alone is enough to label him a musical genius, and when you add his greatest orchestral works, his string quartets and violin sonatas, and some of his best songs and piano works, Ives has a secure a place in the Top Whatever as anyone.
I am also going to put in another plug here for Paul Hindemith. Ever since my high school orchestra took up his small, hauntingly gorgeous piece called Trauermusik I have loved almost everything I've heard by Hindemith. His Symphonic Metamorphoses is the greatest orchestral theme and variations I known; his Violin Concerto is extremely underplayed and should be hauled out regularly; his more well-known works like the several Kammermusik pieces and the Mathis der Maler symphony are also brilliant. (I will admit that his setting of When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd is a bit challenging, but I think it will eventually reward repeated listenings.) That said, other than Stravinsky, Prokofiev is surely the greatest tonal modernist of the 20th century; how there can even be a doubt about it is beyond me. I love much of Shostakovich's work, but he is surely not very consistent and tends to get in a rut. Prokofiev towers over Bartok, IMHO; I would say that even his film scores are superior to almost anything Bartok ever wrote, to say nothing of his magnificent symphonies, ballets, concerti, violin sonatas, piano works, etc. Head and shoulders over Bartok, and most other 20th century tonal composers.
The French don't get much respect in classical music; between Dufay and Debussy they are practically ignored. But I think Ravel is almost as great as Debussy. His influence on modern music is, in my opinion, vast and little appreciated (except by film composers!) and his output of great works is considerable. I happen to be a Faure fan; he is perhaps too subtle to get a lot of accolades, but pieces like the Requiem and Piano Quartet are some of my favorites. And I wonder at the fact that Saint Saens does not get much attention; though he was very uneven, and could be borderline kitschy, his output as a whole includes a remarkable amount of memorable music. Lastly, Sibelius seems not to be getting his due in the discussion. I don't have to go through the list of his enormously popular and beautiful works, but I would say at least that the 2nd Symphony is one of the most profound pieces of instrumental music ever written.
Okay, I'm done. What does all this prove? There is no such thing as the "10 greatest classical composers in history". There are two or three dozen composers who have made classical music what it is, and without whom it would be a musical genre of very modest interest. There is really no whittling it down to "10 greatest"; the best classical composers are great for many different reasons, and which reasons trump other reasons will always be a very subjective affair. My top-16-by-consensus is about as good as you can get; and the fact that the favorites I just listed are not among them only further demonstrates that when you change your criteria to accommodate the people you like, the list is limited only by the broad class of composers who have written several great classical works. So let that be the epitaph for top-10 lists in classical music. At least until I need to attract more people to this web site.
[Note: Updated 14 January 2013 - corrected a misstated lead sentence in Par.10, plus some minor typos and stylistic issues.]
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
The Trouble With Tosca
If one's answer to the question "What's in a name?" is anything other than "nothing", one is probably best served by not having the name Bondy in New York Cty right now. This year one such unfortunate has managed to get himself fired from a top City job; that would be "Joel" Bondy, who is at least unofficially accumulating much of the blame for what has become known as the CityTime scandal. But my concern right now is with another Bondy, the almost equally maligned Luc, who last year offered us a new Met production of Tosca, the Puccini opera that has managed to stay in the forefront of the repertoire in spite of its rather dubious dramatic premise.
Bondy's production, which I saw Monday night, replaced Franco Zefirelli's longstanding one last year. Though I never saw the Zefirrelli production (they didn't have $20 Varis rush tickets then) it is not hard to imagine what it was like if you have ever seen his films (which I have). Zefirrelli's staging and set design are descendents of the Hollywood blockbuster style of the '50's, Cecil B. DeMille in particular. Fancy costumes and oversizes sets fill all the available space, with enough extras to employ a small town in full. Luc Bondy is the opposite: stark, indeed dark, spare staging, with unadorned sets that loom like huge geological outcrops.
Bondy's Tosca was roundly criticized when it appeared last year, with calls for bringing back the Zefirrelli show at all cost. The Met resisted. I wonder why! Read Donald Henahan's review of their 1985 opening of the Zefirrelli production and you'll see. In case your Times access is restricted, let me give you an idea. It begins, "Poor Franco Zefirrelli," and gets a little worse from there. Of the famous procession in the Te Deum sequence Henahan writes: "Given a modicum of talent onstage and in the pit, it is difficult to keep this scene from making a tremendous theatrical effect. Mr. Zeffirelli, however, succeeded in failing simply by crowding his procession of panoplied worshipers downstage close behind Cornell MacNeil" (Scarpia). What further galled some people was Zefirrelli's use of an elevator stage in the third act, literally lifting the courtyard into the air to reveal Cavaradossi in a dungeon, awaiting execution.
No elevator in the Bondy production. Everything's cut back to the bare walls. Ed Pilkington wrote in the Guardian that Scarpia's office looks like "a waiting room in an institution". Then there is the odd bit of antithesis to this restraint: three sluts who hang out with Scarpia in his office fawning over him in various sexual positions - a man who declares only a few moments later that he could care less for this sort of affection, who only gets excited when he has a woman caught in his iron grip, after which he tosses her aside. And there's the tremedous Cavaradossi painting, not much smaller than Chagall's Met murals, which Pilkington inaptly compares to "a Mills and Boon cover portrait"; it is rather vaguely reminiscent of some Italian Renaissance painting, though certainly not a good painting - a bit of washed out Rembrandt or toned down Rubens perhaps, and certainly nothing that would have been painted in Italy during the time of the Napoleonic wars.
But all that in itself would not make or break a production. Why, then, does this one seem so, let's say, not very satisfying? I have a theory. It goes like this: take a problematic drama and dress it up and no one stops to think about what a problematic drama it is; take the same one and cut the frills back to recession levels, and there is no avoiding the painful fact that the play is just not very good. The problem, in short, is not so much Bondy as what happens to Puccini, or perhaps Sardou, when Tosca is allowed to stand on its own as a drama.
What happens, to my sensisbilities, is that the action is seen as so simplisitic - formulaic, if you will - that it fairly insults the intelligence. The crux of it is that an evil police chief is going to try to get Tosca to sleep with him by torturing her lover until she relents in order to save him. Torture does not really work on the stage. It can work fine in movies, from Open City to Casino Royale; it falls flat on stage just because it is so over the top. Male sexual predation also does not work dramatically when the situation has no subtlety; there is no room there to plumb any deep human insights, as we are all a little too familiar with this sort of character flaw. Sexual conquest guaranteed by torture is about as naked as it gets, and even the leather that Bondy injects into the scene (how 1800... not) cannot make it more interesting.
But what if the sexual exploits are a vehicle for some higher-order meaning? After all, there are quite a few themes that surround and contextualize the underlying sexual tension (such as it is): there is the Napoleonic invasion, and the fate of the Republican Angelotti, who depends on the favor of Napoleon for his office as Consul. There is Tosca's jealousy. And there are numerous references to the relationship between art, politics, religion and morality. Does this save the play? Not really. Perhaps Scarpia's dictatorial pretensions are being equated with sexual domination; I doubt, though, that that was a new or interesting metaphor 100 years ago, and certainly isn't today. Another problem is that when the action turns this way and that based on the fate of the Napoleonic invasion it has the quality of an ad hoc device: someone runs in and declares that his forces are losing, or winning, and bingo, deus ex machina, the dramatist has what he wants to alter the fates of the characters.
The role of Tosca's jealousy, other than to give rise to a duet or two, is to cause her to run to Cavaradossi's love nest in the woods, unwittingly leading Scarpia's men to where they think Angelotti is hiding and to the arrest of Cavaradossi himself. I guess you can say that her jelousy leads to her undoing and that of her lover. The problem is that that idea, though it has some merit as irony, is so completely overshadowed by the sexual power play in Act Two that it really does not get exploited much for dramatic or philosophical value. Here you have not only an ignoble man dominating two great artists, but an inferior theme dominating a much better one. And as for that art and morality idea, I am at a loss to see that it gets a very insightful treatment here. Art does not seem to have much power in this depiction, and perhaps that is the point, though it is an odd point for a drama. After all, it's what everyone thought all along (though I suppose Plato would be an exception - he thought it had the power to distort our understanding of reality). The painter is murdered, the singer is betrayed and commits suicide... aside from a pile-up worthy of Shakespeare, what does this ultimately say about the human spirit or the role of art in uplifting it? It's not as if the tragic flaws here are so well exploited that we can get any further message out of it.
Lastly, there's an art-love-religion conjuncture here, but again, I can't see that much coming out of it. Tosca is a deeply religious woman, and her love for Cavaradossi is first enacted in a cathedral, where she at first refuses his advances due to the presence of a depiction of the Madonna. But Cavaradossi's painting is apparently also compared with the Madonna, so Tosca's jealousy, inspired by the painting, has a double edge to it as more than slightly immoral. Perhaps this is why she has it within her to commit murder - in self-defense, or is it revenge? A little of both, perhaps. As for Cavaradossi, the torture he is subjected to in Scarpia's hands is described as having a spiked ring tightened around his head. Uh, right, let me see, does that remind me of anything? The artist as Messiah, tortured and murdered by the... Roman guards? Okay, I get it. But in what way, exactly, is art supposed to save the world here? That part I don't get. There may be something about faith and freedom going on, though the equation of Napoleon with liberty and justice might not resonate very much today. I guess one could explore this more. I am convinced, though, that whatever philsophical content there is here is too deeply hidden beneath the sordid action to have much theatrical power.
Quite a bit could be added about Puccini's role in making the opera difficult to bring off dramatically. I mean, for example, the not exactly faint vocal part assigned to Cavaradossi as be emerges from the torture chamber - is that supposed to be believable? No, it's supposed to be opera... All the same, there are some dubious choices here. Admittedly, there is a certain genius to the device of having an offstage "cantata" (sung by Tosca and choir) competing with the vocal lead in Scarpia's office; I'd love to examine the score to see if they are even in the same key. (A foreshadowing of Stravinsky and Ives?) But no one has ever denied that Tosca is a great work of music.
So am I saying "buy the CD, don't go to the opera"? Not quite, though I could see an argument for it. Why then go into this lengthy dramatic analysis of a 110-year-old opera? Because in my opinion that's what underlies the Zefirrelli-Bondy debate. The former tried to mitigate the play's dramatic failures; the latter perhaps thought that was dishonest and it is best to let it speak for itself. I'm all for honesty, but it can only be brought off if the quality of the acting is as high as that of the singing. In the case of this production, at least, that was not really so. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an admirable performance of the music. She had sufficient range and power to bring off the part, and was particularly impressive in the magnificent Vissi d'arte, the aria in which she compares her dedication to art with her present horrible situation, after which the audience erupted in enthusiastic applause. If she had one or two minor difficulties with some of the vocal leaps demanded by Puccini it did not, overall, detract from the beauty of her singing, which included some perfectly executed pianissimo tones up in the coloratura range. Unfortunately, her dramatic skills are all but nonexistent. I was seated in the orchestra, not close, but close enough to appreciate the difference between a rote performance and real acting. Falk Struckmann's Scarpia was quite a bit better dramatically; as the imperious police chief he was sufficiently domineering but capable of pulling off the good-cop-bad-cop thing that is implied by this character's machinations. His singing, and that of Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi, whose dramatic options are really quite limited in this opera, was strong and fully up to the part.
In light of all this, I guess the question to ask is whether there was anything really wrong with the Zefirrelli production. Should it be brought back? Actually, Zefirrelli produced the opera not only for the Met, but for La Scala and Covent Garden, and given the differences in the stages and the state of technology at the time, I'm not sure all these productions were the same or even very similar. One thing I can say without hesitation: there is nothing wrong with this Zefirrelli production - though bringing it back would be something like a scene from The Uninvited. I doubt there is a true opera fan who would not have given his left ear to have been there. Until somebody brings back these dramatic skills, I'm afraid that Bondy's production will continue to highlight the awkwardly simplistic drama at the heart of Tosca.
Ultimately, people go to opera for the music, not the play, and I suspect that in the long run they will continue to go to Tosca regardless of what the production is. Nevertheless, this production should be taken as a warning. There are quite a lot of operas based on weak underlying dramas. If the drama is not the point anyway, I say let the production take over when it has to. The music will be heard, and may be more satisfying, because a bad play is in the end more distracting than a good spectacle.
Bondy's production, which I saw Monday night, replaced Franco Zefirelli's longstanding one last year. Though I never saw the Zefirrelli production (they didn't have $20 Varis rush tickets then) it is not hard to imagine what it was like if you have ever seen his films (which I have). Zefirrelli's staging and set design are descendents of the Hollywood blockbuster style of the '50's, Cecil B. DeMille in particular. Fancy costumes and oversizes sets fill all the available space, with enough extras to employ a small town in full. Luc Bondy is the opposite: stark, indeed dark, spare staging, with unadorned sets that loom like huge geological outcrops.
Bondy's Tosca was roundly criticized when it appeared last year, with calls for bringing back the Zefirrelli show at all cost. The Met resisted. I wonder why! Read Donald Henahan's review of their 1985 opening of the Zefirrelli production and you'll see. In case your Times access is restricted, let me give you an idea. It begins, "Poor Franco Zefirrelli," and gets a little worse from there. Of the famous procession in the Te Deum sequence Henahan writes: "Given a modicum of talent onstage and in the pit, it is difficult to keep this scene from making a tremendous theatrical effect. Mr. Zeffirelli, however, succeeded in failing simply by crowding his procession of panoplied worshipers downstage close behind Cornell MacNeil" (Scarpia). What further galled some people was Zefirrelli's use of an elevator stage in the third act, literally lifting the courtyard into the air to reveal Cavaradossi in a dungeon, awaiting execution.
No elevator in the Bondy production. Everything's cut back to the bare walls. Ed Pilkington wrote in the Guardian that Scarpia's office looks like "a waiting room in an institution". Then there is the odd bit of antithesis to this restraint: three sluts who hang out with Scarpia in his office fawning over him in various sexual positions - a man who declares only a few moments later that he could care less for this sort of affection, who only gets excited when he has a woman caught in his iron grip, after which he tosses her aside. And there's the tremedous Cavaradossi painting, not much smaller than Chagall's Met murals, which Pilkington inaptly compares to "a Mills and Boon cover portrait"; it is rather vaguely reminiscent of some Italian Renaissance painting, though certainly not a good painting - a bit of washed out Rembrandt or toned down Rubens perhaps, and certainly nothing that would have been painted in Italy during the time of the Napoleonic wars.
But all that in itself would not make or break a production. Why, then, does this one seem so, let's say, not very satisfying? I have a theory. It goes like this: take a problematic drama and dress it up and no one stops to think about what a problematic drama it is; take the same one and cut the frills back to recession levels, and there is no avoiding the painful fact that the play is just not very good. The problem, in short, is not so much Bondy as what happens to Puccini, or perhaps Sardou, when Tosca is allowed to stand on its own as a drama.
What happens, to my sensisbilities, is that the action is seen as so simplisitic - formulaic, if you will - that it fairly insults the intelligence. The crux of it is that an evil police chief is going to try to get Tosca to sleep with him by torturing her lover until she relents in order to save him. Torture does not really work on the stage. It can work fine in movies, from Open City to Casino Royale; it falls flat on stage just because it is so over the top. Male sexual predation also does not work dramatically when the situation has no subtlety; there is no room there to plumb any deep human insights, as we are all a little too familiar with this sort of character flaw. Sexual conquest guaranteed by torture is about as naked as it gets, and even the leather that Bondy injects into the scene (how 1800... not) cannot make it more interesting.
But what if the sexual exploits are a vehicle for some higher-order meaning? After all, there are quite a few themes that surround and contextualize the underlying sexual tension (such as it is): there is the Napoleonic invasion, and the fate of the Republican Angelotti, who depends on the favor of Napoleon for his office as Consul. There is Tosca's jealousy. And there are numerous references to the relationship between art, politics, religion and morality. Does this save the play? Not really. Perhaps Scarpia's dictatorial pretensions are being equated with sexual domination; I doubt, though, that that was a new or interesting metaphor 100 years ago, and certainly isn't today. Another problem is that when the action turns this way and that based on the fate of the Napoleonic invasion it has the quality of an ad hoc device: someone runs in and declares that his forces are losing, or winning, and bingo, deus ex machina, the dramatist has what he wants to alter the fates of the characters.
The role of Tosca's jealousy, other than to give rise to a duet or two, is to cause her to run to Cavaradossi's love nest in the woods, unwittingly leading Scarpia's men to where they think Angelotti is hiding and to the arrest of Cavaradossi himself. I guess you can say that her jelousy leads to her undoing and that of her lover. The problem is that that idea, though it has some merit as irony, is so completely overshadowed by the sexual power play in Act Two that it really does not get exploited much for dramatic or philosophical value. Here you have not only an ignoble man dominating two great artists, but an inferior theme dominating a much better one. And as for that art and morality idea, I am at a loss to see that it gets a very insightful treatment here. Art does not seem to have much power in this depiction, and perhaps that is the point, though it is an odd point for a drama. After all, it's what everyone thought all along (though I suppose Plato would be an exception - he thought it had the power to distort our understanding of reality). The painter is murdered, the singer is betrayed and commits suicide... aside from a pile-up worthy of Shakespeare, what does this ultimately say about the human spirit or the role of art in uplifting it? It's not as if the tragic flaws here are so well exploited that we can get any further message out of it.
Lastly, there's an art-love-religion conjuncture here, but again, I can't see that much coming out of it. Tosca is a deeply religious woman, and her love for Cavaradossi is first enacted in a cathedral, where she at first refuses his advances due to the presence of a depiction of the Madonna. But Cavaradossi's painting is apparently also compared with the Madonna, so Tosca's jealousy, inspired by the painting, has a double edge to it as more than slightly immoral. Perhaps this is why she has it within her to commit murder - in self-defense, or is it revenge? A little of both, perhaps. As for Cavaradossi, the torture he is subjected to in Scarpia's hands is described as having a spiked ring tightened around his head. Uh, right, let me see, does that remind me of anything? The artist as Messiah, tortured and murdered by the... Roman guards? Okay, I get it. But in what way, exactly, is art supposed to save the world here? That part I don't get. There may be something about faith and freedom going on, though the equation of Napoleon with liberty and justice might not resonate very much today. I guess one could explore this more. I am convinced, though, that whatever philsophical content there is here is too deeply hidden beneath the sordid action to have much theatrical power.
Quite a bit could be added about Puccini's role in making the opera difficult to bring off dramatically. I mean, for example, the not exactly faint vocal part assigned to Cavaradossi as be emerges from the torture chamber - is that supposed to be believable? No, it's supposed to be opera... All the same, there are some dubious choices here. Admittedly, there is a certain genius to the device of having an offstage "cantata" (sung by Tosca and choir) competing with the vocal lead in Scarpia's office; I'd love to examine the score to see if they are even in the same key. (A foreshadowing of Stravinsky and Ives?) But no one has ever denied that Tosca is a great work of music.
So am I saying "buy the CD, don't go to the opera"? Not quite, though I could see an argument for it. Why then go into this lengthy dramatic analysis of a 110-year-old opera? Because in my opinion that's what underlies the Zefirrelli-Bondy debate. The former tried to mitigate the play's dramatic failures; the latter perhaps thought that was dishonest and it is best to let it speak for itself. I'm all for honesty, but it can only be brought off if the quality of the acting is as high as that of the singing. In the case of this production, at least, that was not really so. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an admirable performance of the music. She had sufficient range and power to bring off the part, and was particularly impressive in the magnificent Vissi d'arte, the aria in which she compares her dedication to art with her present horrible situation, after which the audience erupted in enthusiastic applause. If she had one or two minor difficulties with some of the vocal leaps demanded by Puccini it did not, overall, detract from the beauty of her singing, which included some perfectly executed pianissimo tones up in the coloratura range. Unfortunately, her dramatic skills are all but nonexistent. I was seated in the orchestra, not close, but close enough to appreciate the difference between a rote performance and real acting. Falk Struckmann's Scarpia was quite a bit better dramatically; as the imperious police chief he was sufficiently domineering but capable of pulling off the good-cop-bad-cop thing that is implied by this character's machinations. His singing, and that of Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi, whose dramatic options are really quite limited in this opera, was strong and fully up to the part.
In light of all this, I guess the question to ask is whether there was anything really wrong with the Zefirrelli production. Should it be brought back? Actually, Zefirrelli produced the opera not only for the Met, but for La Scala and Covent Garden, and given the differences in the stages and the state of technology at the time, I'm not sure all these productions were the same or even very similar. One thing I can say without hesitation: there is nothing wrong with this Zefirrelli production - though bringing it back would be something like a scene from The Uninvited. I doubt there is a true opera fan who would not have given his left ear to have been there. Until somebody brings back these dramatic skills, I'm afraid that Bondy's production will continue to highlight the awkwardly simplistic drama at the heart of Tosca.
Ultimately, people go to opera for the music, not the play, and I suspect that in the long run they will continue to go to Tosca regardless of what the production is. Nevertheless, this production should be taken as a warning. There are quite a lot of operas based on weak underlying dramas. If the drama is not the point anyway, I say let the production take over when it has to. The music will be heard, and may be more satisfying, because a bad play is in the end more distracting than a good spectacle.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Double Standard? Deaccessioning in Art and Music
Everybody who follows the art world at all knows that the National Academy museum in New York has been coming in for merciless criticism over its sale of two Hudson River School paintings to raise money for basic operating expenses. The Association of Art Museum Directors has prohibited its members from entering into any collaboration with the NA. The so-called "deaccessioning" of holdings to pay operating expenses is like the cardinal sin of the museum community. And there are some good reasons for this; for example: (a) it suggests that the museum leadership is sitting on its duff instead of fundraising; (b) it sends an awful message to people who might contribute artworks with the intention of improving a particular museum's holdings; (c) it threatens to dismantle collections that were painstakingly built up over decades to represent a particular style or school (d) since the only works worth selling for this purpose are those of great merit which bring high prices, it is a sure road to the diminution of the status of the institution - a slippery slope, so to speak; and (e) it demoralizes patrons, staff, audiences, critics, and just about anyone else the museum might count as its base of support.
Whew! Plenty to be concerned about, there. The NY State Legislature has even begun to consider a bill that would legally prohibit deaccessioning to pay operating expenses. And though I personally doubt they would be able to prevent such sales, which can be executed under a variety of pretenses, there are more than enough examples to worry anyone who thinks that important collections have a life of their own and need to be preserved. In 2005 the New York Public Library sold a large number of paintings, including another Hudson River School work of inestimable cultural value to the area and the institution (Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits"). It ended up in the hands of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who also wished to denude Fisk University of half their interest in a world-class collection of Georgia O'Keefe paintings. With the full complicity of the university Board, who pleaded financial distress, she hoped to stash some of them in her Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas. If Arkansas travellers can smuggle some artworks out of the NYPL, maybe we can kidnap some backporch country fiddlers and move a couple of swamps to Queens? (What's that you say - Queens already has enough swamps?) And in what must be the Nightmare on Elm Street of deaccessioning, Brandeis University recently announced that they would close the highly regarded Rose Art Museum due to a budget shortfall, and use the money to improve "arts education" (there's plenty of art in Beantown, they reasoned, so who needs this particular collection?)
And now for something not completely different: everybody who follows the music world knows that in 2007 the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra sold its recently acquired collection of classic Cremonese instruments. All sorts of shenanigans accompanied the acquisition of the instruments in 2003, including a gross overestimate of the value of the collection by the seller, Herbert Axelrod, questions about the authenticity of some of them, and doubts about the appraisal process. What is not in question, though, is that the NJSO in one leap became an orchestra renowned for its string sound (something it took the Philadelphia Orchestra many years to achieve), and the repository of a substantial share of the greatest violins ever made. Yet in 2007 the orchestra sold the collection to pay down debt and support future operating expenses. The collection, some 30 historic string instruments including several Stradivaris and del Gesus, was purchased by hedge fund managers Seth and Brook Taube. The twin bankers, whose Columbus Nova Partners fund was allegedly closed for poor performance, helped themselves to two Strads and gave the orchestra a 5-year loan on the rest.
For this act of deaccessioning, the NJSO was not roundly criticized in the press or condemned by their peers. No professional organization said, "okay, don't lend these guys any instruments". They were not censured by critics or made the goats of music bloggers. So - double standard, or what? Think about it. A museum's "product" is the display of art. An orchestra's "product" is the performance of music. The art that a museum collects gives it a particular strength, or personality. The orchestra's strength or personality is more complex, and depends on the type of music it performs, the skills of its players, and the personalities of the conductors it has had; but the instruments it acquires and uses are definitely a part of the mix, and perhaps the main component of the tonal qualities of its sound. Many orchestras will purchase or commission instruments according to certain principles of sound or taste. So the presence of 30 of the world's greatest string instruments on one stage is not exactly a minor aspect of the orchestra's sound. Replacing them with other, more modern and less sonorous, instruments is comparable to to the Metropolitan Museum saying, "You know, we could really fix the bottom line here if we just get rid of these Rembrandts and Vermeers and pull up some of that French neo-classical stuff out of the basement".
Now let's go back to some of the arguments against deaccessioning in the museum world: (a) it suggests that the museum leadership is sitting on its duff instead of fundraising (this would see to apply equally well in the music world); (b) it sends an awful message to people who might contribute artworks with the intention of improving a particular museum's holdings (contribution of instruments may be a less typical situation in music, but the argument is equally coherent when it applies); (c) it threatens to dismantle collections that were painstakingly built up over decades to represent a particular style or school (less compelling in this case, since this particular collection was acquired all at once and deaccessioned fairly quickly) (d) since the only works worth selling for this purpose are those of great merit which bring high prices, it is a sure road to the diminution of the status of the institution (ditto for an orchestra with a collection of fine instruments); and (e) it demoralizes patrons, staff, audiences, critics, and just about anyone else the museum might count as its base of support (no question the same applies in this case, in spades).
In fact, let's be blunt, the Axelrod transaction put the NJSO on the cultural map for the first time in its history, allowing it to compete for audience with the far more famous orchestra across the Hudson, and was an important factor in their ability to lure a world class conductor, Neeme Jarvi. And let's not forget, the National Gallery sold off two major paintings, and had plans (apparently now abandoned) to sell off a few more; whereas NJSO sold off what was essentially the single most important physical component of its sound!
But there are other facts that make this decision more complicated. Bringing the sound of the rest of the orchestra in line with what amounts to one of the most resonant string sections in the world certainly would take a concerted (nyuk nyuk :-) effort. I suppose the storage, security and insurance costs must be considerable. The sale was executed only a few years after the purchase, before one could say that it was part of the NJSO tradition. And of course one can now add the standard recessionist logic, in-these-difficult-times-one-must-be-prepared-to-make-tough decisions: if they had not sold them when they did, would they be able to survive a major economic crisis?
All this, however, doesn't quite cut it as a reason to sell off the collection for operating expenses. For one thing, by the time the 5-year loan is up, the orchestra will have been using the collection for about 10 years. Those years will have been the ones in which the orchestra first drew serious attention in the music world, gained new status and audiences, and perhaps even lured a few of us across the river to check out the new sound. (I admit I have not gone to hear them yet, but it's been on my agenda. Like going to the Barnes Collection before they deaccession their original quarters. Even the Parrot can't take wing and fly to every worthwhile cultural event in this area.) Furthermore, none of these excuses would have been accepted in the art world as a reason to sell holdings in order to pay debt or operating expenses. That is considered just bad management, selling what will attract people tomorrow in order to pay what you owe today. Fool's gambit, is the thinking over in artland.
So what to make of all this? My basic instinct is that all the arguments and assumptions aren't getting to the heart of the problem, which seems to always lie a little below the surface of the institutional fracas. What it's about is that in a world where more and more people are willing to trade slot cars for video games, guitars for Guitar Hero, real life for Second Lives, real books for Kindles, real friends for Facebook "friends" and real thought for Twitters, cultural institutions have by default been saddled with the incredibly serious task of reminding us that our longstanding cultural traditions are actually still just as important as they always were, indeed moreso. They are, like it or not, responsible for reminding us that this painting, that building, that piece of music, are part of who we are - as persons, as New Yorkers (or even New Jerseyans, I guess), as Americans, and why we should care that this is so. It is to our collective benefit, as I see it, that certain things which have inherent value and help define us should simply persist; that they don't just go away and turn into something else, become virtual or get replaced with some cheapened version after dumbing down the audience so much that they barely notice the difference. This is the burden that our museums, publishing houses, orchestras, landmark commissions and other cultural institutions have to bear. To protect what is there, sometimes for no more than the simple reason that it has been there for a long time, and that the place where it is is admired partly because this or that symbol is there and carries with it the sense of place and of tradition, is a responsibility of those who are entrusted with our cultural heritage. And that includes not only museums and libraries, but universities, who merit additional calumny for pigheadedness in posing a false dichotomy between a cultural trust and the bottom line. (Ultimately you can thank Reagan and his "revolution" for this, as that is the source of the ideological migration of university boards from seeing financial accountability as serving educational goals in the broadest sense, to seeing it as a justification for stripping away tenured chairs and academic freedom, as well as abandoning cultural leadership.)
I would say this preservationist sensibility even applies to something like Yankee Stadium, which, if there weren't plenty of other reasons to question the value for the City of replacing it, ought to have been preserved for no other reason than that it is one of America's historic ballparks and has been associated with one of America's most historic baseball teams. (I didn't ask whether you like them; I'd probably say the same about Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, FYI. Squawck!) The point is, it is incumbent on every cultural institution to be a sort of levee against gratuitous change; to the extent possible, the only change should be in the direction of enrichment of what is there already, not the utilitarian swapping of art or instruments or other cultural treasures for short term gains.
Do I think that any institution that ever sold anything to pay expenses should be condemned? No. If the question is really survival in a diminished form rather than disappearance off the face of the earth, we may have to accept the smaller loss. But even that is not an absolute truth. The O'Keefe paintings were given to Fisk wth the express mandate that they may not be sold - ever. It appears that the intent here is simply that the works shall not be used as collateral, regardless of the circumstances. This is not in the least mitigated by the shool's economic plight, and O'Keefe's heirs were right to sue to recover the works. (Though the judge's decision that the university must neither sell them nor return them was, at least for the time being, the best solution.) Moreover, to say that survival is really at stake reqires being intimately familiar with the finances, fundraising history, and possible alternatives for an institution. When I was a student at the Mannes College of Music, there was an effort to merge the school with the much larger Manhattan School of Music uptown. This was supposed to be an effort to "save" the school; it's financial condition was allegedly deteriorating, and Manhattan would have the resources to support much of Mannes and its staff. To make a long story short, the Board of Directors that made this decision was sued, removed by the Court for failure to carry out their fiscal responsibilities, and replaced with a new Board that was actually committed to the school. The merger effort was a kind of deaccessioning, not just of the building, which was soon abandoned anyway, but of the musical traditions that informed the school since it was founded. Mannes has a distinctive theoretical tradition and pedagogical philosophy, and this would have been diluted at best, or in all probability swallowed whole, as it was effectively collapsed into the Manhattan School curriculum. Ultimately, a much less toxic merger with the New School allowed Mannes to maintain its independence and musical traditions while obtaining the financial resources of a major university.
So, it is far from clear that every time an institution's board jumps up and says, "Sell, sell! We are deeply in debt!" everyone must pull out their handkerchiefs and weep for the troubled institution, or look the other way while they pawn their prized possessions. The presumption should not be one of innocence, but of guilt: boards are a mixture of wealthy, well-meaning and committed individuals, and lazy, rich, obstructive, neurotic and self-interested attention-getters and status-seekers. No one can know who is winning at any given moment, but when the Board says they just can't raise enough money or hire competent enough managers to keep the institution going without deaccessioning, it's time to be suspicious.
And it is not only lack of fundraising initiative that should be looked into. In the case of the National Academy, part of the story was the temporary replacement of the museum's Director with someone who had nonprofit management and fundraising experience, but no experience in the art world. The problem only intensifies when the board is responsible to a higher entity like a university, whose primary mission is not that of the cultural institution, and whose financial goals may at times conflict with its commitment to cultural goals. For any number of reasons, our instinct should be to keep things where they are. That won't always be right, and it won't always be possible, but we should have to be thoroughly convinced before we give up the principle and accede to deaccessioning.
So, there you go: another art-and-the-public-interest post from your friendly local Parrot. If I didn't have two other blogs, three or four books to write, an album to record and a fulltime job, I could get used to this. Or maybe I could deaccession one or two of my six lives and learn to focus. It is tempting.
Whew! Plenty to be concerned about, there. The NY State Legislature has even begun to consider a bill that would legally prohibit deaccessioning to pay operating expenses. And though I personally doubt they would be able to prevent such sales, which can be executed under a variety of pretenses, there are more than enough examples to worry anyone who thinks that important collections have a life of their own and need to be preserved. In 2005 the New York Public Library sold a large number of paintings, including another Hudson River School work of inestimable cultural value to the area and the institution (Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits"). It ended up in the hands of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who also wished to denude Fisk University of half their interest in a world-class collection of Georgia O'Keefe paintings. With the full complicity of the university Board, who pleaded financial distress, she hoped to stash some of them in her Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas. If Arkansas travellers can smuggle some artworks out of the NYPL, maybe we can kidnap some backporch country fiddlers and move a couple of swamps to Queens? (What's that you say - Queens already has enough swamps?) And in what must be the Nightmare on Elm Street of deaccessioning, Brandeis University recently announced that they would close the highly regarded Rose Art Museum due to a budget shortfall, and use the money to improve "arts education" (there's plenty of art in Beantown, they reasoned, so who needs this particular collection?)
And now for something not completely different: everybody who follows the music world knows that in 2007 the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra sold its recently acquired collection of classic Cremonese instruments. All sorts of shenanigans accompanied the acquisition of the instruments in 2003, including a gross overestimate of the value of the collection by the seller, Herbert Axelrod, questions about the authenticity of some of them, and doubts about the appraisal process. What is not in question, though, is that the NJSO in one leap became an orchestra renowned for its string sound (something it took the Philadelphia Orchestra many years to achieve), and the repository of a substantial share of the greatest violins ever made. Yet in 2007 the orchestra sold the collection to pay down debt and support future operating expenses. The collection, some 30 historic string instruments including several Stradivaris and del Gesus, was purchased by hedge fund managers Seth and Brook Taube. The twin bankers, whose Columbus Nova Partners fund was allegedly closed for poor performance, helped themselves to two Strads and gave the orchestra a 5-year loan on the rest.
For this act of deaccessioning, the NJSO was not roundly criticized in the press or condemned by their peers. No professional organization said, "okay, don't lend these guys any instruments". They were not censured by critics or made the goats of music bloggers. So - double standard, or what? Think about it. A museum's "product" is the display of art. An orchestra's "product" is the performance of music. The art that a museum collects gives it a particular strength, or personality. The orchestra's strength or personality is more complex, and depends on the type of music it performs, the skills of its players, and the personalities of the conductors it has had; but the instruments it acquires and uses are definitely a part of the mix, and perhaps the main component of the tonal qualities of its sound. Many orchestras will purchase or commission instruments according to certain principles of sound or taste. So the presence of 30 of the world's greatest string instruments on one stage is not exactly a minor aspect of the orchestra's sound. Replacing them with other, more modern and less sonorous, instruments is comparable to to the Metropolitan Museum saying, "You know, we could really fix the bottom line here if we just get rid of these Rembrandts and Vermeers and pull up some of that French neo-classical stuff out of the basement".
Now let's go back to some of the arguments against deaccessioning in the museum world: (a) it suggests that the museum leadership is sitting on its duff instead of fundraising (this would see to apply equally well in the music world); (b) it sends an awful message to people who might contribute artworks with the intention of improving a particular museum's holdings (contribution of instruments may be a less typical situation in music, but the argument is equally coherent when it applies); (c) it threatens to dismantle collections that were painstakingly built up over decades to represent a particular style or school (less compelling in this case, since this particular collection was acquired all at once and deaccessioned fairly quickly) (d) since the only works worth selling for this purpose are those of great merit which bring high prices, it is a sure road to the diminution of the status of the institution (ditto for an orchestra with a collection of fine instruments); and (e) it demoralizes patrons, staff, audiences, critics, and just about anyone else the museum might count as its base of support (no question the same applies in this case, in spades).
In fact, let's be blunt, the Axelrod transaction put the NJSO on the cultural map for the first time in its history, allowing it to compete for audience with the far more famous orchestra across the Hudson, and was an important factor in their ability to lure a world class conductor, Neeme Jarvi. And let's not forget, the National Gallery sold off two major paintings, and had plans (apparently now abandoned) to sell off a few more; whereas NJSO sold off what was essentially the single most important physical component of its sound!
But there are other facts that make this decision more complicated. Bringing the sound of the rest of the orchestra in line with what amounts to one of the most resonant string sections in the world certainly would take a concerted (nyuk nyuk :-) effort. I suppose the storage, security and insurance costs must be considerable. The sale was executed only a few years after the purchase, before one could say that it was part of the NJSO tradition. And of course one can now add the standard recessionist logic, in-these-difficult-times-one-must-be-prepared-to-make-tough decisions: if they had not sold them when they did, would they be able to survive a major economic crisis?
All this, however, doesn't quite cut it as a reason to sell off the collection for operating expenses. For one thing, by the time the 5-year loan is up, the orchestra will have been using the collection for about 10 years. Those years will have been the ones in which the orchestra first drew serious attention in the music world, gained new status and audiences, and perhaps even lured a few of us across the river to check out the new sound. (I admit I have not gone to hear them yet, but it's been on my agenda. Like going to the Barnes Collection before they deaccession their original quarters. Even the Parrot can't take wing and fly to every worthwhile cultural event in this area.) Furthermore, none of these excuses would have been accepted in the art world as a reason to sell holdings in order to pay debt or operating expenses. That is considered just bad management, selling what will attract people tomorrow in order to pay what you owe today. Fool's gambit, is the thinking over in artland.
So what to make of all this? My basic instinct is that all the arguments and assumptions aren't getting to the heart of the problem, which seems to always lie a little below the surface of the institutional fracas. What it's about is that in a world where more and more people are willing to trade slot cars for video games, guitars for Guitar Hero, real life for Second Lives, real books for Kindles, real friends for Facebook "friends" and real thought for Twitters, cultural institutions have by default been saddled with the incredibly serious task of reminding us that our longstanding cultural traditions are actually still just as important as they always were, indeed moreso. They are, like it or not, responsible for reminding us that this painting, that building, that piece of music, are part of who we are - as persons, as New Yorkers (or even New Jerseyans, I guess), as Americans, and why we should care that this is so. It is to our collective benefit, as I see it, that certain things which have inherent value and help define us should simply persist; that they don't just go away and turn into something else, become virtual or get replaced with some cheapened version after dumbing down the audience so much that they barely notice the difference. This is the burden that our museums, publishing houses, orchestras, landmark commissions and other cultural institutions have to bear. To protect what is there, sometimes for no more than the simple reason that it has been there for a long time, and that the place where it is is admired partly because this or that symbol is there and carries with it the sense of place and of tradition, is a responsibility of those who are entrusted with our cultural heritage. And that includes not only museums and libraries, but universities, who merit additional calumny for pigheadedness in posing a false dichotomy between a cultural trust and the bottom line. (Ultimately you can thank Reagan and his "revolution" for this, as that is the source of the ideological migration of university boards from seeing financial accountability as serving educational goals in the broadest sense, to seeing it as a justification for stripping away tenured chairs and academic freedom, as well as abandoning cultural leadership.)
I would say this preservationist sensibility even applies to something like Yankee Stadium, which, if there weren't plenty of other reasons to question the value for the City of replacing it, ought to have been preserved for no other reason than that it is one of America's historic ballparks and has been associated with one of America's most historic baseball teams. (I didn't ask whether you like them; I'd probably say the same about Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, FYI. Squawck!) The point is, it is incumbent on every cultural institution to be a sort of levee against gratuitous change; to the extent possible, the only change should be in the direction of enrichment of what is there already, not the utilitarian swapping of art or instruments or other cultural treasures for short term gains.
Do I think that any institution that ever sold anything to pay expenses should be condemned? No. If the question is really survival in a diminished form rather than disappearance off the face of the earth, we may have to accept the smaller loss. But even that is not an absolute truth. The O'Keefe paintings were given to Fisk wth the express mandate that they may not be sold - ever. It appears that the intent here is simply that the works shall not be used as collateral, regardless of the circumstances. This is not in the least mitigated by the shool's economic plight, and O'Keefe's heirs were right to sue to recover the works. (Though the judge's decision that the university must neither sell them nor return them was, at least for the time being, the best solution.) Moreover, to say that survival is really at stake reqires being intimately familiar with the finances, fundraising history, and possible alternatives for an institution. When I was a student at the Mannes College of Music, there was an effort to merge the school with the much larger Manhattan School of Music uptown. This was supposed to be an effort to "save" the school; it's financial condition was allegedly deteriorating, and Manhattan would have the resources to support much of Mannes and its staff. To make a long story short, the Board of Directors that made this decision was sued, removed by the Court for failure to carry out their fiscal responsibilities, and replaced with a new Board that was actually committed to the school. The merger effort was a kind of deaccessioning, not just of the building, which was soon abandoned anyway, but of the musical traditions that informed the school since it was founded. Mannes has a distinctive theoretical tradition and pedagogical philosophy, and this would have been diluted at best, or in all probability swallowed whole, as it was effectively collapsed into the Manhattan School curriculum. Ultimately, a much less toxic merger with the New School allowed Mannes to maintain its independence and musical traditions while obtaining the financial resources of a major university.
So, it is far from clear that every time an institution's board jumps up and says, "Sell, sell! We are deeply in debt!" everyone must pull out their handkerchiefs and weep for the troubled institution, or look the other way while they pawn their prized possessions. The presumption should not be one of innocence, but of guilt: boards are a mixture of wealthy, well-meaning and committed individuals, and lazy, rich, obstructive, neurotic and self-interested attention-getters and status-seekers. No one can know who is winning at any given moment, but when the Board says they just can't raise enough money or hire competent enough managers to keep the institution going without deaccessioning, it's time to be suspicious.
And it is not only lack of fundraising initiative that should be looked into. In the case of the National Academy, part of the story was the temporary replacement of the museum's Director with someone who had nonprofit management and fundraising experience, but no experience in the art world. The problem only intensifies when the board is responsible to a higher entity like a university, whose primary mission is not that of the cultural institution, and whose financial goals may at times conflict with its commitment to cultural goals. For any number of reasons, our instinct should be to keep things where they are. That won't always be right, and it won't always be possible, but we should have to be thoroughly convinced before we give up the principle and accede to deaccessioning.
So, there you go: another art-and-the-public-interest post from your friendly local Parrot. If I didn't have two other blogs, three or four books to write, an album to record and a fulltime job, I could get used to this. Or maybe I could deaccession one or two of my six lives and learn to focus. It is tempting.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Parrot Catches Butterfly
Not that I haven't been out and about or anything, but my last post was 3/3, and this was supposed to be a biweekly blog at least. On 3/14 I was busy working on a review of the Met Opera's production of Die Meistersinger, which you shall have, by and by, though I realize it's tacky to retro-blog. (Hey, I started a piece on the world championship chess match before I even started this blog, and I'm still looking for an excuse to post that one!) Maybe I'll get you some notes on the Edward Scissorhands production at BAM, which stands for Brooklyn Academy of Music (not a kick in the gut from Batman).
Anyway, the interruption was mainly courtesy of the IRS, which treated me to an audit right before I had to do my 2006 taxes. FYI, if you happen by mistake not to report the sale of thousands of dollars of mutual funds which netted you roughly $7.00 in profits, the IRS will bill you for taxes on the entire amount of the sale - on the reasonable assumption that you paid less than a penny for the entire lot. Well, I sent them some documentation; let's see if they're any smarter than the NYC Department of FInance, which has so far taken a year and a half to consider the documentation I sent them showing that they are billing me for a ticket on a rental car which I had already returned. Am I just a magnet for this stuff, or does it happen to everyone?
The rest of my time was eaten by my divorce case, about which the less said the better. Then again, I'll say this at least. You may have heard about Judge Garson, the Brooklyn divorce court judge who was just convicted of taking bribes to fix cases. You might wonder, how could he get away with that for so long, wouldn't someone recognize that his decisions are totally biased and prejudicial? The answer is that none of his decisions stand out as being especially bizarre in the context of the arbitrary, demeaning and irrational nature of the entire divorce system in this country (and New York State, which has a particularly medieval set of laws, rulings and assumptions). One of my former co-workers was a victim of Judge Garson; it took him 15 years to get a divorce from a woman who (according to him) was committed to mental institutions, destroyed his software business (took a magnet to all the disks) and scratched up his new car, among other things. No matter - I've spoken to people who took six, ten, twelve years to get a divorce, and didn't have Judge Garson. He fit right in: arbitrary, unfair decisions based on fallacious reasoning. Shouldn't he get a promotion to the Court of Appeals instead of a jail sentence?
Well, I'd better segue quickly into my topic, before I write a book on how the courts deal with family relations. Luckily, segueing (ha!) ain't hard to do, as you know if you've ever seen Puccini's ever popular Madame Butterfly, as I did Friday night at the NYC Opera. The opera is based on the story of Mr. Pinkerton, an American sailor in Japan who obtains a 15-year-old Japanese bride, Cio-Cio-San, from a marriage broker, and then leaves her for three years to go to back to America, where he marries an American woman. The subtle but crucial premise of the dramatic action is that abandonment in Japan is divorce; which does the work of making it legal for the opera's antihero, Mr. Pinkerton, to marry another woman, and also puts in perspective the faithfulness of Cio-Cio-San, who refuses to take another husband or believe that her American lover has left her. Owl, who shall henceforth be referred to as Fragrance of Verbena (one of Pinkerton's pet names for his Japanese wife) had more than a little sympathy with the betrayed lover; Parrot had to convince Owl that not all Americans are Pinkertons. (Fragrance of Verbena's Mom had already warned her not to get involved with an American Monk parrot, or she would be deceived; little did I know that my potential future Chinese owl-in-law was an Italian opera buff!) Well, there are plenty of dramas which explore the theme of substituting pretense or imagination for reality; it usually doesn't work out too well, though it tends to be in the nature of who we are.
Another theme here is the fundamental lack of understanding between cultures; Pinkerton clearly thinks it is just in the nature of Japanese society that he can break a contract without consequences; and though he finds this odd, he is happy to utilize it to further his own life goals, which clearly include from the outset marrying an American woman when he gets back to the U.S. He is just thrilled that he can, for instance, break his lease on the house he rents for himself and Cio-Cio-San, as well as walk out on her when he is ready. But as it turns out, Japanese culture depends on trust, something he does not understand much about, and when he returns and finds out the damage he has done, he is mortified and suggests that his own life is ruined too. Nevertheless, one thing he tries to do is make good on his obligation to the 3-year-old son he now finds out he has. Unfortunately, his way of doing this is to take the son away from the mother who can't really support him; a gut-wrenching transition that goes quite badly here - as it does, for example, in Citizen Kane, but not in the ludicrously underplayed scene in The Pursuit of Happiness - and results in the suicide of Cio-Cio-San. For while the father acts responsibly in the limited way he can, the mother makes the much more difficult decision to assist the son's departure by removing herself from the scene, so he will not regret having to leave her. And this, it seems, is the ultimate thing that Pinkerton does not understand about Japanese culture - that it is better to die with honorable intentions than to live in dishonor, having been abandoned by a husband and failed to provide for one's son. Thus the opacity of the norms and morals of another culture leads to demise on both sides.
It is not without some irony that the cultural disparity is played out in part by Cio-Cio-San's rejection by her uncle, a Buddhist priest, who condemns and essentially excommunicates her for rejecting her own religion and culture. What a depressing lesson for our own situation today, where the sense of an irreconcilable clash between Western and Eastern (in this case Islamic) culture is upon us all. Utlimately, methinks this is overblown a bit. Fragrance of Verbena grew up in a city of moderate size some 10,000 miles away from here, in a nation that practically defines the idea of "difference" when it comes to culture and history. But Fragrance of Verbena's main difference from American women, as far as I can tell, is in the way she pronounces "Louis Vuitton", "Cartier", and "BMW" (did someone say "Maclaren"? Sshhhhhh.....) and the place where she would prefer to have her house with the two-car garage (Bay Ridge vs. Park Slope, maybe). Or to put it another (perhaps more palatable) way - fundamentally, everyone wants a life that is satisfying and social relations that involve mutual repsect. Pinkerton did not fail to understand that he was violating someone's trust by marrying under false pretenses; he was even informed of this by his friend Sharpless, the American consul. It is an idea built into Western marriage contracts and practically every other contract; the difference is only in having a legal superstructure to enforce it. For her part, Cio-Cio-San had every right by Japanese custom to take another husband, but refused to recognize the reality of her situation. Ultimately, it was not culture clash that was to blame, but the failure of the parties to make choices based on inferences that were easily available to them. Well, easily? Perhaps not. Negotiating the waters of cultural difference can be challenging, but what I am suggesting is that there is no real opacity, except the opacity of one's own stubbornness. Ideological difference is real, but for the most part it is rooted in things we all know about one another. Anyone with an inkling of the history of the Middle East should understand, for example, that the forcible overthrow of one religious power center, and its replacement by a competing one, is going to solve no problems whatsoever, but will certainly create more grist for the fundamentalist mill. From Ireland to Israel to India to Iraq, it is not some opaque and incomprehensible difference of culture that underlies the trouble we see; it is a more basic lack of respect and equality of opportunity that one side fears from the other, usually not without some justification. Madame Butterfly suggests that cultural identity is important, but it also suggests that the real problem is a lack of will to follow the system one's own culture provides for recognizing the difference between right and wrong, reality and fantasy. "Islam is a religion of peace", someone was recently quoted as saying in the Times. So be it; and I assume this applies to both the Sunni and Shi'ite interpretations. For more than four centuries, Western systems of international law have recognized the difference between just war and war of aggression, between legitimate intervention and violations of national sovereignty. So there is the basis for international peace, and cultural opacity is a flimsy excuse for not being able to achieve it.
The role of Cio-Cio-San was sung by the impressive Shu-Ying Li, who not only provided a convincing account of the vocal challenges but offered a compelling character portrait of the innocent but dignified Japanese bride. Christopher Jackson's Benjamin Pinkerton was strong enough as a carrier of melodies, but it is hard to imagine a less moving dramatic performance. One could hardly believe that this is a man in the grip of love (at the beginning) or despair (in the final act). I admit that from the front of the fourth ring, without opera glasses, it was a little difficult to make out facial expressions. But this is not a film with close-ups after all; stage acting should not depend on that. There was little difficulty in recognizing the nuanced movements of Matthew Surapine as the marriage broker Goro, or Mme Butterfly's delicate movements (even if they perhaps drew more on the Beijing Opera tradition than Japanese culture, not to mention Puccini, Giacosa or Belasco). Jackson's awkwardness with the dramatic aspects stood out to me and detracted from the overall production. Neverthteless, from a musical point of view it was superb, with some of the arias being carried off with piercing intensity. One quartet (I guess - I believe there were at least four vocal lines going on) in Act III was particularly beautiful. The orchestra received a well-deserved burst of applause when they stood at the command of the capable conductor, Atsushi Yamada.
But the real discovery, to me, in the production, was the voice of Keri Alkema, who played the devoted maid Suzuki. Though the part is relatively small, from her first note to her last I had the impression of being in the presence of a truly exceptional mezzo, with a tone rich and strong enough to practically dominate any scene in which she appeared. I hear Wagner or Strauss... almost too much for Puccinin. As far as I can tell from the program notes, she has mostly performed with the Chautauqua Opera. Any chance of a move to the Big Apple, Ms. Alkema? I mean, nothing against upstate, I know they have the oldest continuously operating opera company in the U.S. (or something like that) but I would really like to hear that voice in a lead role some time.
Well, Parrot just spied a bright red bird darting from a Brooklyn tree and is off in hot pursuit. Just a friend, Fragrance of Verbena... oh, you don't believe me? Betrayed as Mom predicted by a cynical American! Well, you can change her name but she's still as wise as an Owl. Anyway, what's a scarlet tanager doing in Brooklyn? Must have been my imagination... which I should not mistake for reality. At least while I'm awake.
Anyway, the interruption was mainly courtesy of the IRS, which treated me to an audit right before I had to do my 2006 taxes. FYI, if you happen by mistake not to report the sale of thousands of dollars of mutual funds which netted you roughly $7.00 in profits, the IRS will bill you for taxes on the entire amount of the sale - on the reasonable assumption that you paid less than a penny for the entire lot. Well, I sent them some documentation; let's see if they're any smarter than the NYC Department of FInance, which has so far taken a year and a half to consider the documentation I sent them showing that they are billing me for a ticket on a rental car which I had already returned. Am I just a magnet for this stuff, or does it happen to everyone?
The rest of my time was eaten by my divorce case, about which the less said the better. Then again, I'll say this at least. You may have heard about Judge Garson, the Brooklyn divorce court judge who was just convicted of taking bribes to fix cases. You might wonder, how could he get away with that for so long, wouldn't someone recognize that his decisions are totally biased and prejudicial? The answer is that none of his decisions stand out as being especially bizarre in the context of the arbitrary, demeaning and irrational nature of the entire divorce system in this country (and New York State, which has a particularly medieval set of laws, rulings and assumptions). One of my former co-workers was a victim of Judge Garson; it took him 15 years to get a divorce from a woman who (according to him) was committed to mental institutions, destroyed his software business (took a magnet to all the disks) and scratched up his new car, among other things. No matter - I've spoken to people who took six, ten, twelve years to get a divorce, and didn't have Judge Garson. He fit right in: arbitrary, unfair decisions based on fallacious reasoning. Shouldn't he get a promotion to the Court of Appeals instead of a jail sentence?
Well, I'd better segue quickly into my topic, before I write a book on how the courts deal with family relations. Luckily, segueing (ha!) ain't hard to do, as you know if you've ever seen Puccini's ever popular Madame Butterfly, as I did Friday night at the NYC Opera. The opera is based on the story of Mr. Pinkerton, an American sailor in Japan who obtains a 15-year-old Japanese bride, Cio-Cio-San, from a marriage broker, and then leaves her for three years to go to back to America, where he marries an American woman. The subtle but crucial premise of the dramatic action is that abandonment in Japan is divorce; which does the work of making it legal for the opera's antihero, Mr. Pinkerton, to marry another woman, and also puts in perspective the faithfulness of Cio-Cio-San, who refuses to take another husband or believe that her American lover has left her. Owl, who shall henceforth be referred to as Fragrance of Verbena (one of Pinkerton's pet names for his Japanese wife) had more than a little sympathy with the betrayed lover; Parrot had to convince Owl that not all Americans are Pinkertons. (Fragrance of Verbena's Mom had already warned her not to get involved with an American Monk parrot, or she would be deceived; little did I know that my potential future Chinese owl-in-law was an Italian opera buff!) Well, there are plenty of dramas which explore the theme of substituting pretense or imagination for reality; it usually doesn't work out too well, though it tends to be in the nature of who we are.
Another theme here is the fundamental lack of understanding between cultures; Pinkerton clearly thinks it is just in the nature of Japanese society that he can break a contract without consequences; and though he finds this odd, he is happy to utilize it to further his own life goals, which clearly include from the outset marrying an American woman when he gets back to the U.S. He is just thrilled that he can, for instance, break his lease on the house he rents for himself and Cio-Cio-San, as well as walk out on her when he is ready. But as it turns out, Japanese culture depends on trust, something he does not understand much about, and when he returns and finds out the damage he has done, he is mortified and suggests that his own life is ruined too. Nevertheless, one thing he tries to do is make good on his obligation to the 3-year-old son he now finds out he has. Unfortunately, his way of doing this is to take the son away from the mother who can't really support him; a gut-wrenching transition that goes quite badly here - as it does, for example, in Citizen Kane, but not in the ludicrously underplayed scene in The Pursuit of Happiness - and results in the suicide of Cio-Cio-San. For while the father acts responsibly in the limited way he can, the mother makes the much more difficult decision to assist the son's departure by removing herself from the scene, so he will not regret having to leave her. And this, it seems, is the ultimate thing that Pinkerton does not understand about Japanese culture - that it is better to die with honorable intentions than to live in dishonor, having been abandoned by a husband and failed to provide for one's son. Thus the opacity of the norms and morals of another culture leads to demise on both sides.
It is not without some irony that the cultural disparity is played out in part by Cio-Cio-San's rejection by her uncle, a Buddhist priest, who condemns and essentially excommunicates her for rejecting her own religion and culture. What a depressing lesson for our own situation today, where the sense of an irreconcilable clash between Western and Eastern (in this case Islamic) culture is upon us all. Utlimately, methinks this is overblown a bit. Fragrance of Verbena grew up in a city of moderate size some 10,000 miles away from here, in a nation that practically defines the idea of "difference" when it comes to culture and history. But Fragrance of Verbena's main difference from American women, as far as I can tell, is in the way she pronounces "Louis Vuitton", "Cartier", and "BMW" (did someone say "Maclaren"? Sshhhhhh.....) and the place where she would prefer to have her house with the two-car garage (Bay Ridge vs. Park Slope, maybe). Or to put it another (perhaps more palatable) way - fundamentally, everyone wants a life that is satisfying and social relations that involve mutual repsect. Pinkerton did not fail to understand that he was violating someone's trust by marrying under false pretenses; he was even informed of this by his friend Sharpless, the American consul. It is an idea built into Western marriage contracts and practically every other contract; the difference is only in having a legal superstructure to enforce it. For her part, Cio-Cio-San had every right by Japanese custom to take another husband, but refused to recognize the reality of her situation. Ultimately, it was not culture clash that was to blame, but the failure of the parties to make choices based on inferences that were easily available to them. Well, easily? Perhaps not. Negotiating the waters of cultural difference can be challenging, but what I am suggesting is that there is no real opacity, except the opacity of one's own stubbornness. Ideological difference is real, but for the most part it is rooted in things we all know about one another. Anyone with an inkling of the history of the Middle East should understand, for example, that the forcible overthrow of one religious power center, and its replacement by a competing one, is going to solve no problems whatsoever, but will certainly create more grist for the fundamentalist mill. From Ireland to Israel to India to Iraq, it is not some opaque and incomprehensible difference of culture that underlies the trouble we see; it is a more basic lack of respect and equality of opportunity that one side fears from the other, usually not without some justification. Madame Butterfly suggests that cultural identity is important, but it also suggests that the real problem is a lack of will to follow the system one's own culture provides for recognizing the difference between right and wrong, reality and fantasy. "Islam is a religion of peace", someone was recently quoted as saying in the Times. So be it; and I assume this applies to both the Sunni and Shi'ite interpretations. For more than four centuries, Western systems of international law have recognized the difference between just war and war of aggression, between legitimate intervention and violations of national sovereignty. So there is the basis for international peace, and cultural opacity is a flimsy excuse for not being able to achieve it.
The role of Cio-Cio-San was sung by the impressive Shu-Ying Li, who not only provided a convincing account of the vocal challenges but offered a compelling character portrait of the innocent but dignified Japanese bride. Christopher Jackson's Benjamin Pinkerton was strong enough as a carrier of melodies, but it is hard to imagine a less moving dramatic performance. One could hardly believe that this is a man in the grip of love (at the beginning) or despair (in the final act). I admit that from the front of the fourth ring, without opera glasses, it was a little difficult to make out facial expressions. But this is not a film with close-ups after all; stage acting should not depend on that. There was little difficulty in recognizing the nuanced movements of Matthew Surapine as the marriage broker Goro, or Mme Butterfly's delicate movements (even if they perhaps drew more on the Beijing Opera tradition than Japanese culture, not to mention Puccini, Giacosa or Belasco). Jackson's awkwardness with the dramatic aspects stood out to me and detracted from the overall production. Neverthteless, from a musical point of view it was superb, with some of the arias being carried off with piercing intensity. One quartet (I guess - I believe there were at least four vocal lines going on) in Act III was particularly beautiful. The orchestra received a well-deserved burst of applause when they stood at the command of the capable conductor, Atsushi Yamada.
But the real discovery, to me, in the production, was the voice of Keri Alkema, who played the devoted maid Suzuki. Though the part is relatively small, from her first note to her last I had the impression of being in the presence of a truly exceptional mezzo, with a tone rich and strong enough to practically dominate any scene in which she appeared. I hear Wagner or Strauss... almost too much for Puccinin. As far as I can tell from the program notes, she has mostly performed with the Chautauqua Opera. Any chance of a move to the Big Apple, Ms. Alkema? I mean, nothing against upstate, I know they have the oldest continuously operating opera company in the U.S. (or something like that) but I would really like to hear that voice in a lead role some time.
Well, Parrot just spied a bright red bird darting from a Brooklyn tree and is off in hot pursuit. Just a friend, Fragrance of Verbena... oh, you don't believe me? Betrayed as Mom predicted by a cynical American! Well, you can change her name but she's still as wise as an Owl. Anyway, what's a scarlet tanager doing in Brooklyn? Must have been my imagination... which I should not mistake for reality. At least while I'm awake.
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Playgiarism, or Pulling a Rabbit Out of a Hatto
Remember Ervin Nyiregyhazi? Of course you do, even if you can't pronounce his name. He's the child prodigy pianist of the early 20th c. who suddenly disappeared from the scene in the 1920's, and re-emerged 50 years later to be recorded and acclaimed as one of the greatest pianists of all time. Here's a typical accolade: "Nyiregyhazi possessed a bigger tone than either Hoffman or Horowitz", says Gregor Benko in his notes to Nyiregyhazi's 1977 release of Liszt performances. Big tone or not, if you listen to these recordings with more than half an ear it's hard not to notice that a five decade sabbatical takes its toll on one's technique, or at least one's memory. There are enough wrong notes to make Artur Rubinstein look like a perfectionist, and plenty of tempos, dynamics and other features that have at best a rather insecure relationship to the score. Nor is the quality of the recordings quite up to showing off the alleged tone. (I haven't heard the CD transfers; possibly they were able to recapture some of what was lost on vinyl.) But the heck with all that; the emotional power of these performances does, in the end, emerge, and one is left with the impression of having been dragged through the dirt for one's own good. For all their flaws, we are happy to have these unexpurgated recordings of the septagenarian Nyiregyhazi - even if we are thereby occasionally forced to try pronouncing his name.
"Joyce Hatto" is name that even the phonetically challenged should not have much difficulty pronouncing, and a name that will always live in quotes - scare quotes, that is. Hatto was a concert pianist who became ill with ovarian cancer in 1976, at the age of 47. The good news is that she lived another 30 years, and passed away only last year. The bad news is that she was in pain much of the time, a fact that apparently marred all her later recording efforts with grunts and groans. Marred? I can't say that Toscanini's recording of the Verdi Requiem is exactly enhanced by his shouting instructions to the orchestra at various points, but this is not going to keep it from being one of the greatest recordings of all time. Were a few grunts and groans so bad? We'll never know. For it seems that her husband and recording engineer, William Barrington-Coupe, took it upon himself to deliver to us the expurgated Hatto, and replaced first the moans and groans, then the less perfect takes, and finally entire pieces with digitized, highly edited passages from other recordings. In the no-holds-barred (or is it no-bars-held-back?) world of disco and hip-hop this is called "sampling"; in classical music it is referred to by the classical name, plagiarism.
The deception, as is so often the case with plagiarism, was originally not without some twisted justification. Mr. B-C was concerned that his wife's virtues as a pianist had not received their due, and his desire to record her in her best light was frustrated by her unfortunate health issues. His determination to slog on in the face of reality caused him to slide down the slippery slope from applying musical bandaids to lifting entire recordings without credit. Thus is the road to moral turpitude spliced with Bach inventions.
It is one of the great mysteries of nature and music that so many wonderful musicians, and particularly pianists, live on and continue to make great music well into their 70's, sometimes 80's, occasionally 90's; and then there is Mieczyslaw Horszowski, who played his last recital at 99. So when B-C offered the world a series of technically brilliant recordings of a vast portion of the piano repertoire supposedly made by Hatto in her 70's, it was not exactly like the world turned upside down. I heard Guiomar Novaes perform in her 70's, and if memory serves me correctly she played, in addition to the usual helping of Chopin and such, some incredibly difficult set of variations on the Brazilian national anthem by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The putative Hatto recordings were stunning, but B-C must have known that the classical world would not find their authenticity suspect on that basis alone.
No, what happened was that a Gramophone reviewer stuck one of the recordings on his PC, and was surprised to find that it automatically downloaded playback info for another recording of the same piece. Apparently Mr. B-C had the technical chops to edit the timing and tonality of some of the lifted material to match Hatto's original tracks, but insufficient acumen to deal with the world of Media Player or iTunes! Just as students who plagiarize papers by downloading text from the Internet are often easily caught by teachers who have learned to use the same search engines they used, this technologically knowledgeable plagiarist was caught up short by the latest media technology. Technical tests by recording engineer Andrew Rose confirmed the aural impression that the recordings were indeed plagiarized.
There have been previous instances where classical recordings were long attributed to the wrong person, the most famous being a recording of Chopin's first Piano Concerto by Halina Czerny-Stefanska, another perhaps under-recognized female pianist that was mis-attributed to Dinu Lipatti. This was apparently an error, though. At this point, the entire set of Hatto recordings is suspect, and may constitute the most extensive case of plagiarism and consumer deception in the history of classical recording.
Although B-C states that he has "closed the operation down", "had the stock completely destroyed" and that he is "not producing more" (NY Times 2/27/07 p.E3) his claims for Hatto's recorded legacy can at this moment still be found on the web site of his tiny record label Concert Artist/Fidelio Recordings. This should remind us that he stood to profit from his misadventures, and could still do so if curiosity and speculative collecting are enough to generate a few sales. To my mind this casts some doubt on the bit about helping his wife win a well-deserved place in piano history; at the very least, one would normally recognize an additional motivation in generating profits. Who knows how much stock he really had, or has; only a few days earlier he had publicly denied the plagiarism allegation, and then he has suddenly obliterated every remnant of his work of many years? We have a right to be skeptical. And while he may deserve some sympathy for his predicament, and claims he is "tired" and "not very well", my feeling is that it is a bit too soon to let this go. "Now I just want a little bit of peace", says Mr. Barrington-Coupe. "Now..."? Having endured a whole week of criticism after years of plagiarism and piracy (he was actually engaging in both at once, a relatively rare situation) he just wants a little peace?
It is not a question of legal action, which one affected party (Robert von Bahr of BIS Records) has already declined to take. There is perhaps so little in the way of profit from these recordings (or should we call them "reissues"?) that suing for compensation may be a moot point. But this just emphasizes the difference between plagiarism and piracy. The issue with piracy, as with copyright violation, is denial of just compensation to artists, publishers, and others. No one objects to the fact that digital pirates distribute works more widely than would have been the case without them; they object to not making a profit from the distribution. The issue with plagiarism, which is not in itself a punishable crime, is strictly moral: credit was taken where it was no due, credit failed to be given where it was due, some number of public or private individuals were decieved, and the deception was carried out consciously and intentionally. If we let people like this off the hook so lightly, what do we do with the undergraduate who merely downloads a few passages off the Internet and submits them unattributed in an assignment? Smile and wag a finger, tut-tut-tut? Congratulate him on a heroic effort to hide his sources? Praise his integration of texts from three different web sites? No, we can't let the sob story about Joyce Hatto and her health issues cloud our judgment about long-term, systematic, commercial plagiarism. It is just not fair to the next student who gets an F for plagiarism in a college course if we let this infinitely worse case go with a shrug and a wince about Joyce Hatto's difficulties.
The Concert Artists web site sports bios of several other little-known artists, and we should now seriously consider whether there might be plagiarism issues in any other recordings presented by Concert Artist. The site is incredibly vague about exactly which artists it claims to have original recordings by, and which it merely distributes; I could not find a page with a catalogue other than works by "Hatto". But consider the Ozan Marsh page. This is a pianist who recorded, performed and taught widely, though he has little name recognition. According the web site, "Concert Artist was indeed delighted that this considerable pianist agreed to make several recordings for the label. His unexpected death [at age 71 - H.A.M.] robbed us all of a fulfillment of these fascinating plans. However, Ozan Marsh did complete some sessions and we are preparing these for eventual release on Compact Disc." I'm sure the classical world is all ears, waiting for the release of these "sessions" by a student of Rachnmaninoff, Horowitz and Emil Sauer who was considered a notable exponent of Liszt. What treasures might lie within? (Pyrite? Squawck!)) Hey, here's a thought. I have a 1975 release on ABC Westminster Gold by a pianist named David Bean. I know of nothing else by him and can barely even find a Google reference to him. But the recording, which includes Liszt's Mephisto Waltz and Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H, is in what I consider the unbelievable class; technically, at least, it blows away most other performances I've heard of these extremely difficult pieces. (And let me tell you, he has a Big Tone.) Now, it is highly unlikely that B-C has a copy of this disk. But for a small fee and a percentage of future "royalties", I just might be moved to part with it. It could be easily digitized using one of those new turntables that automatically commits your records to digital format. I'd just like to meet the person who is going to listen to these "sessions" and say, "Hey, that's not Ozan Marsh, it's David Bean!" Right... A pair of parrots will play the Liszt B Minor Sonata by hopping up and down on a Steinway before that happens. Damn, if I just knew a recording engineer with a proper British name (has to have a dash in it) maybe I could actually get some money for my vinyl collection (hopefully before I have to move again).
But seriously folks, what is there to learn from an aging recording engineer who lost his sense of propriety and passed off other people's work as his wife's? I return to Nyiregihazi and Toscanini. And Rubinstein, and anyone else who has proudly issued a classical recording that falls short of sonic perfection but offers a memorable performance. Had B-C really believed in Hatto, had he trusted her musical gift and spirit and believed she had to offer what he claimed she did, he would not have felt compelled to take that first step and patch over imperfections and groans. You can EQ groans to the level of a minor nuisance, and the listener cannot always distinguish between a background groan and a moment of musical ecstasy anyway. The music, if it belongs in the annals of piano history, would have found its way there. It is now impossible to know what Hatto's virtues really were, at least without going to the original masters (if they exist). And that is a disservice to an artist who was probably at least worth listening to.
This suggests another point about our values: we have come to have so much faith in the technology behind modern recordings, as well as films and other media, that it is not at all shocking to find an example of someone who thought the road to great music was using technical means to perfect the end product. Art is about the intermediate product, the human performance, and technology never was or will be more than a way to make it shine.
This applies to other musical forms, including rock, folk and country music. No one with any taste would prefer to hear the latest technically perfect junk from Nashville to a scratchy old Hank Williams or Buck Owens recording. Rock guitarists and engineers can now control every harmonic and timbre emerging from a guitar, and singers are expected to be almost mechanically perfect in intonation and ensemble. But this kind of stuff will never mean as much as an old Stones record where the voices are neither in perfect tune nor perfect time, and the guitar distortion is controlled mainly by the idiosyncrasies of the pickups and the amps. Get back to the core values of creativity, expression and meaning, and we will not be tempted to head down the path of Hattoizing recordings.
"Joyce Hatto" is name that even the phonetically challenged should not have much difficulty pronouncing, and a name that will always live in quotes - scare quotes, that is. Hatto was a concert pianist who became ill with ovarian cancer in 1976, at the age of 47. The good news is that she lived another 30 years, and passed away only last year. The bad news is that she was in pain much of the time, a fact that apparently marred all her later recording efforts with grunts and groans. Marred? I can't say that Toscanini's recording of the Verdi Requiem is exactly enhanced by his shouting instructions to the orchestra at various points, but this is not going to keep it from being one of the greatest recordings of all time. Were a few grunts and groans so bad? We'll never know. For it seems that her husband and recording engineer, William Barrington-Coupe, took it upon himself to deliver to us the expurgated Hatto, and replaced first the moans and groans, then the less perfect takes, and finally entire pieces with digitized, highly edited passages from other recordings. In the no-holds-barred (or is it no-bars-held-back?) world of disco and hip-hop this is called "sampling"; in classical music it is referred to by the classical name, plagiarism.
The deception, as is so often the case with plagiarism, was originally not without some twisted justification. Mr. B-C was concerned that his wife's virtues as a pianist had not received their due, and his desire to record her in her best light was frustrated by her unfortunate health issues. His determination to slog on in the face of reality caused him to slide down the slippery slope from applying musical bandaids to lifting entire recordings without credit. Thus is the road to moral turpitude spliced with Bach inventions.
It is one of the great mysteries of nature and music that so many wonderful musicians, and particularly pianists, live on and continue to make great music well into their 70's, sometimes 80's, occasionally 90's; and then there is Mieczyslaw Horszowski, who played his last recital at 99. So when B-C offered the world a series of technically brilliant recordings of a vast portion of the piano repertoire supposedly made by Hatto in her 70's, it was not exactly like the world turned upside down. I heard Guiomar Novaes perform in her 70's, and if memory serves me correctly she played, in addition to the usual helping of Chopin and such, some incredibly difficult set of variations on the Brazilian national anthem by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The putative Hatto recordings were stunning, but B-C must have known that the classical world would not find their authenticity suspect on that basis alone.
No, what happened was that a Gramophone reviewer stuck one of the recordings on his PC, and was surprised to find that it automatically downloaded playback info for another recording of the same piece. Apparently Mr. B-C had the technical chops to edit the timing and tonality of some of the lifted material to match Hatto's original tracks, but insufficient acumen to deal with the world of Media Player or iTunes! Just as students who plagiarize papers by downloading text from the Internet are often easily caught by teachers who have learned to use the same search engines they used, this technologically knowledgeable plagiarist was caught up short by the latest media technology. Technical tests by recording engineer Andrew Rose confirmed the aural impression that the recordings were indeed plagiarized.
There have been previous instances where classical recordings were long attributed to the wrong person, the most famous being a recording of Chopin's first Piano Concerto by Halina Czerny-Stefanska, another perhaps under-recognized female pianist that was mis-attributed to Dinu Lipatti. This was apparently an error, though. At this point, the entire set of Hatto recordings is suspect, and may constitute the most extensive case of plagiarism and consumer deception in the history of classical recording.
Although B-C states that he has "closed the operation down", "had the stock completely destroyed" and that he is "not producing more" (NY Times 2/27/07 p.E3) his claims for Hatto's recorded legacy can at this moment still be found on the web site of his tiny record label Concert Artist/Fidelio Recordings. This should remind us that he stood to profit from his misadventures, and could still do so if curiosity and speculative collecting are enough to generate a few sales. To my mind this casts some doubt on the bit about helping his wife win a well-deserved place in piano history; at the very least, one would normally recognize an additional motivation in generating profits. Who knows how much stock he really had, or has; only a few days earlier he had publicly denied the plagiarism allegation, and then he has suddenly obliterated every remnant of his work of many years? We have a right to be skeptical. And while he may deserve some sympathy for his predicament, and claims he is "tired" and "not very well", my feeling is that it is a bit too soon to let this go. "Now I just want a little bit of peace", says Mr. Barrington-Coupe. "Now..."? Having endured a whole week of criticism after years of plagiarism and piracy (he was actually engaging in both at once, a relatively rare situation) he just wants a little peace?
It is not a question of legal action, which one affected party (Robert von Bahr of BIS Records) has already declined to take. There is perhaps so little in the way of profit from these recordings (or should we call them "reissues"?) that suing for compensation may be a moot point. But this just emphasizes the difference between plagiarism and piracy. The issue with piracy, as with copyright violation, is denial of just compensation to artists, publishers, and others. No one objects to the fact that digital pirates distribute works more widely than would have been the case without them; they object to not making a profit from the distribution. The issue with plagiarism, which is not in itself a punishable crime, is strictly moral: credit was taken where it was no due, credit failed to be given where it was due, some number of public or private individuals were decieved, and the deception was carried out consciously and intentionally. If we let people like this off the hook so lightly, what do we do with the undergraduate who merely downloads a few passages off the Internet and submits them unattributed in an assignment? Smile and wag a finger, tut-tut-tut? Congratulate him on a heroic effort to hide his sources? Praise his integration of texts from three different web sites? No, we can't let the sob story about Joyce Hatto and her health issues cloud our judgment about long-term, systematic, commercial plagiarism. It is just not fair to the next student who gets an F for plagiarism in a college course if we let this infinitely worse case go with a shrug and a wince about Joyce Hatto's difficulties.
The Concert Artists web site sports bios of several other little-known artists, and we should now seriously consider whether there might be plagiarism issues in any other recordings presented by Concert Artist. The site is incredibly vague about exactly which artists it claims to have original recordings by, and which it merely distributes; I could not find a page with a catalogue other than works by "Hatto". But consider the Ozan Marsh page. This is a pianist who recorded, performed and taught widely, though he has little name recognition. According the web site, "Concert Artist was indeed delighted that this considerable pianist agreed to make several recordings for the label. His unexpected death [at age 71 - H.A.M.] robbed us all of a fulfillment of these fascinating plans. However, Ozan Marsh did complete some sessions and we are preparing these for eventual release on Compact Disc." I'm sure the classical world is all ears, waiting for the release of these "sessions" by a student of Rachnmaninoff, Horowitz and Emil Sauer who was considered a notable exponent of Liszt. What treasures might lie within? (Pyrite? Squawck!)) Hey, here's a thought. I have a 1975 release on ABC Westminster Gold by a pianist named David Bean. I know of nothing else by him and can barely even find a Google reference to him. But the recording, which includes Liszt's Mephisto Waltz and Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H, is in what I consider the unbelievable class; technically, at least, it blows away most other performances I've heard of these extremely difficult pieces. (And let me tell you, he has a Big Tone.) Now, it is highly unlikely that B-C has a copy of this disk. But for a small fee and a percentage of future "royalties", I just might be moved to part with it. It could be easily digitized using one of those new turntables that automatically commits your records to digital format. I'd just like to meet the person who is going to listen to these "sessions" and say, "Hey, that's not Ozan Marsh, it's David Bean!" Right... A pair of parrots will play the Liszt B Minor Sonata by hopping up and down on a Steinway before that happens. Damn, if I just knew a recording engineer with a proper British name (has to have a dash in it) maybe I could actually get some money for my vinyl collection (hopefully before I have to move again).
But seriously folks, what is there to learn from an aging recording engineer who lost his sense of propriety and passed off other people's work as his wife's? I return to Nyiregihazi and Toscanini. And Rubinstein, and anyone else who has proudly issued a classical recording that falls short of sonic perfection but offers a memorable performance. Had B-C really believed in Hatto, had he trusted her musical gift and spirit and believed she had to offer what he claimed she did, he would not have felt compelled to take that first step and patch over imperfections and groans. You can EQ groans to the level of a minor nuisance, and the listener cannot always distinguish between a background groan and a moment of musical ecstasy anyway. The music, if it belongs in the annals of piano history, would have found its way there. It is now impossible to know what Hatto's virtues really were, at least without going to the original masters (if they exist). And that is a disservice to an artist who was probably at least worth listening to.
This suggests another point about our values: we have come to have so much faith in the technology behind modern recordings, as well as films and other media, that it is not at all shocking to find an example of someone who thought the road to great music was using technical means to perfect the end product. Art is about the intermediate product, the human performance, and technology never was or will be more than a way to make it shine.
This applies to other musical forms, including rock, folk and country music. No one with any taste would prefer to hear the latest technically perfect junk from Nashville to a scratchy old Hank Williams or Buck Owens recording. Rock guitarists and engineers can now control every harmonic and timbre emerging from a guitar, and singers are expected to be almost mechanically perfect in intonation and ensemble. But this kind of stuff will never mean as much as an old Stones record where the voices are neither in perfect tune nor perfect time, and the guitar distortion is controlled mainly by the idiosyncrasies of the pickups and the amps. Get back to the core values of creativity, expression and meaning, and we will not be tempted to head down the path of Hattoizing recordings.
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