Author: JustinDavidson

By Justin Davidson

The Broadway show Lovemusik, which opens at the Biltmore Theater next week, chronicles the agonized, fitful, tender, ugly and ultimately indispensable relationship that bound Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. In the show — which features many Weill songs, including a few that only full-time Weillologists are likely to know — the composer explains to the singer that there is really no distinction between music and love, between the sonic and the erotic. For the stage,  Alfred Uhry condensed a letter that Weill wrote to his not-yet-wife in 1926:

When I feel this longing for you, I think most of all of the sound of your voice, which I love like a very force of nature, like an element. For me all of you is contained within this sound; everything else is only a part of you; and when I envelop myself in your voice, then you are with me in every way. I know every nuance, every vibration of your voice, and I can hear exactly what you would say if you were with me right now – and how you would say it. But suddenly this sound is again entirely alien and new to me, and the it is the greatest joy to realize how affectionately this voice caresses me.

— from Speak Low (When You Speak of Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya; edited and translated by Lys Simmonette and Kim Kowalke

The Lovemusik website has a short clip of Weill singing "Speak Low" in his Freudian croon. I won’t comment on the show itself until my theater critic colleagues have reviewed it — except to say that Donna Murphy closes it with a wrenching rendition of "September Song."

By Justin Davidson

We all know that music education has essentially vanished from public schools, but Michael Schwartz, the director of the music program at Great Neck South High School on Long Island, apparently didn’t get the memo. Year 38 of the school’s live annual opera performance features "The Magic Flute," with sets, costumes, orchestra — the whole shebang. Sung in German, no less! The recitative’s been abbreviated, the spoken dialogue abridged and translated into English, and a couple of arias transposed to accommodate a teenage tenor’s range, which changes daily. Other than that, it’s all there.

Yes, of course, Great Neck is one of the country’s wealthiest suburbs. Not every school can field an orchestra  (an oversize one, for Mozart), fit the singers out with wireless body mikes, or attract teachers as tireless as Schwartz or vocal director Pamela Levy. Not every school can cast a Pamina who has been taking singing lessons since she was in first grade. But what other schools could do is help kids connect with music through having them perform it. Eleventh grader Jordan Rochelson, Great Neck South’s Papageno, is a natural stage animal, but he told me that he started out with zero interest in opera. He said: "Now I’m so happy that a love of classical music has been instilled in me . . . um, forced on me, I guess.”

More on this story here, including an impressive clip from last year’s "Carmen," as sung by Nikki Blonsky (who went on to win a starring role in the forthcoming movie version of Hairspray).

By Justin Davidson

While I was hanging out in the hallway outside the Soundcheck studio at WNYC, waiting for my moment at the mike, John Schaefer was on the air, talking by phone with the freshly minted Pulitzerian sax man Ornette Coleman. The honor apparently carries an odd assortment of privileges and responsibilities. In the first category: during the live  broadcast, Coleman put John (and all of New York City) on hold for a couple of minutes – and John did not just move on to the next caller. In the second: the reason Coleman walked away was that his building super was at the door. Something to do with taking out the garbage, it seems. Some things are more urgent than others.

But then this is the guy who managed to win a Pulitzer without first bothering to get nominated for one. John, who was on the jury, tells the story. As jurors huddled for a weekend in March to go through the hundred-plus scores and recordings, someone noticed that despite the official desire for submissions in jazz, film music and other genres, Coleman’s latest CD, "Sound Grammar," wasn’t in the pile. Another juror, ex-Timesman John Rockwell, sent someone out to scare up a copy.

This was also the year when the paper that employs both of the non-winning finalists in the criticism category, music critic Mark Swed and art critic Christopher Knight, neglected to nominate either. (They did the honors themselves.)

By Justin Davidson

On a video that was shot last summer but recently surfaced on the web, a German army training officer instructing a green recruit in the proper use of a machine gun tells him to imagine himself in the Bronx. The soldier snickers. "A black van stops in front of you. Three
Afro-Americans get out and insult your mother in the most vulgar way." (That last phrase sounds less prissy in German, though the use of the term "Afro-Amerikaner" is a surprisingly genteel touch, in this context.)

The gunner opens fire, and, obeying orders, also yells an English obscenity, one that likewise attacks the dignity of his imaginary interlocutors’ mothers.

Here’s the quiz: Officials both in the US and Germany are outraged because a) the officer is training his charge to fire indiscriminately on civilians; b) he is suggesting that soldiers should respond to verbal abuse with deadly force; c) he is eliding the difference between war and crime-fighting; d) he appears to have learned his strategy from training manuals such as "Grand Theft Auto"; e) the scenario presumably takes place in the context of a German military occupation of the US; f) none of the above.

The correct answer is f). The irrepressible Al Sharpton focused on the fact that the mother-insulters in the scenario are black, while Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión complained that the video reflected unjust assumptions about his turf. "Clearly these folks don’t know anything about African-Americans or the Bronx," he complained.

Now it should be noted that the worst thing Carrión’s imaginary constituents did in the scenario was to use foul language. I appreciate the borough president’s main point, which is that the Bronx is a peaceable part of the city and a good place to do business, but I believe that vulgar comments on the sexual practices of mothers can still occasionally be heard on the streets of New York. The most appalling thing about the scenario has nothing to do with prejudice, or with a more thorough knowledge of the Bronx, but with the idea that a soldier is being trained in techniques of wild, panicked shooting in a densely populated area.

On the bright side, perhaps Don Imus could have a second career as a cultural sensitivity consultant for the German Army.

By Justin Davidson

In the past, Frank Gehry has excelled at adapting his architectural language to other expressive needs: visual art in Bilbao, symphonic music in L.A., rock music in Seattle, science at MIT. In each case, you know you’re looking at a Gehry, but you also know you’re using a museum, or a concert hall, or an academic center. For his New York debut, he had a trickier task: finding the right form for a business as changeable and insubstantial as Barry Diller’s Interactive Corp. You know . . . they’re the ones who make websites that . . . well, you know.

In the last decade or so, big-money media, new and old, has brought the New York skyline a new cluster of stylish midtown behemoths – buildings named after Conde Nast , Reuters, Time Warner, the New York Times, Hearst and Bloomberg. Gehry’s IAC is both more modest – in that it only rises eight stories and lurks over by the Chelsea piers – and showier, in that it’s a Gehry, it’s made from curved panes of glass, and it’s the color of ermine. So how does Gehry translate Diller’s vaporous business into architectural form? By making it look like a fully rigged schooner on a southwesterly course. Huh?

This seems like a desperation gimmick, using a hobby for inspiration rather than responding thoughtfully to the function of the building itself. The result is pleasant and cool, but it seems destined to drift into curiosity status before long.

I’ve got a more extended assessment here.

By Justin Davidson

William Kentridge’s "Magic Flute"

By Justin Davidson

For better or worse, everyone is expecting Gerard Mortier, the grand poobah-designate of New York City Opera, to transform the company, which is precisely what everyone expected from his predecessor Paul Kellogg, and from his predecessor Christopher Keene. Kellogg is now the old guard – not, I suspect a role he would have cast himself in, and not one he’s particularly well suited for. When he took over a decade ago, he moved with Gelb-like efficiency to put his stamp on a company that had been slammed by the AIDS-related deaths of Keene and many other members. City Opera was demoralized, financially and artistically shaky, and on many nights the house was depressingly empty (a trend abetted by Keene’s penchant for programming operas that many people enthusiastically avoided).

Kellogg took the following steps, which almost nobody objected to: He doubled the number of new productions and started gradually replacing dated stagings of standard repertoire, most successfully with Mark Lamos’ exquisite "Madama Butterfly." He moved all weekday performances back to 7:30. He brought in several productions each year that had been developed at the other house he ran, Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, NY. He started systematically presenting Handel operas and other baroque works, including Stephen Wadsworth’s never-to-be-forgotten staging of "Xerxes" with Lorraine Hunt (no Lieberson, then) and, in his New York City stage debut, David Daniels. Besides Daniels, Kellogg also introduced Lauren Flanigan, Amy Burton, Mark Delavan and Anthony Dean Griffey to New York audiences.

Kellogg did not make City Opera much of a force in creating new operas, but he did recommit the company to American and 20th century work. And after commissioning the atrocious triptych of one-acters collectively called "Central Park," he wisely decided not to trust his own taste in contemporary opera. Instead, he imported certified crowd-pleasers: Jake Heggie’s "Dead Man Walking," Mark Adamo’s "Little Women," Rachel Portman’s "Little Prince," Tobias Picker’s "Emmeline." He inaugurated VOX, the annual full-orchestra reading of new operas, some of which have gone on to full-fledged productions.

Such a catalog of good decisions makes the eyes glaze over, I know, which is why Kellogg will likely be better remembered for two more exciting initiatives, one a failure that some applauded, the other an accomplishment that many detest. The first is his relentless and unfulfilled desire to be the company’s Moses, leading City Opera out of Lincoln Center and into a hall of its own. The second is the temporary solution to the acoustical problems of the company’s current home: electronic enhancement, which Kellogg has always insisted is not a euphemism for amplification. Tony Tommasini, for one, has never bought it. I’m agnostic about both things. The pursuit of another house turned out to have been an enormous waste of time, especially since Mortier plans to let it drop, but there was no way of knowing that ahead of time. And I’ve never had the sense that the electronics in the New York State Theater have made much audible difference at all, though I’m aware that varies a lot depending on where you’re sitting.

Here’s my wish for Mortier: that by the time he cedes to the company’s next savior, he has not only stirred up  traditionalists’ scorn, inspired some colorful headlines and presided over a couple of magnificent moments, but that he has also compiled something approaching Kellogg’s more boring but beneficent record.

By Justin Davidson

As a lowly scribe with limited financial acumen (hence my career choice), I’ve been struggling to make sense out of the news that my corporate overlords at Tribune have accepted a buyout offer from the striped-shirted, Lincoln-bearded real estate mogul Sam Zell. As a print journalist and an observer of the classical music world, I work in not one but two industries that are boldly confronting their past and gingerly backing into the future. Not even operagoers with memories of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in her salad days have a more intense sense of nostalgia than newspaper people; not even the recording industry has been more muddled about how to make a transition from a solid piece of packaging to an online product.

I firmly believe that the human need for a constant flow of good, thoughtful writing about the world around us – including the arts – is as fundamental as the craving for music. What’s mystifying is that those whose mission in life it is to satisfy the seemingly equally basic need for porn are so much more successful in translating demand into revenue.

Meanwhile, the best minds in the newspaper industry are industriously reacting to the declining number of paying customers by giving diehards less and less reason to pay for the product we’re putting out. The current strategy is bifurcated. Online, we’re saying: "You like getting news for free? Great, we’re doing what we can to give you more." And in print, we’re saying: “You think you’re not interested in today’s newspaper? Wait until you see tomorrow’s. That’ll be really dull.” If that seems as crazy to Zell as it does to me, I’ll greet him with flowers.

Meanwhile, Jack Shafer, the saturnine media critic at Slate, is bleak about the Zell deal and the promise of a Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). This was the paragraph that caught my eye:

If I worked for Tribune, I’d say forget the ESOP and begin looking for a new job. I’ll bet the company’s best journalists are already packing their keyboards. The last good journalist out won’t have to turn out the lights. The electric utility will already have shut off the power.

I sure hope he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

By Justin Davidson   

Gene Weingarten followed up his piece about Joshua Bell busking in the Washington Metro with an online chat in which he remarked that this story got "the largest and most global response of anything I have ever written" (thanks in part to the classical music blogosphere). He received more than 1,000 e-mails, many from people who declared themselves in tears at the end of the article, and even I got a few missives from readers who got there via The Rest is Noise.

Some interactors resented the obvious conclusion to the outpouring of indifference that Bell received: many of us go through our lives blinkered, hurried and ironclad, unwilling to let a chance encounter with something beautiful cause a hiccup in our routines. Others wondered whether the results would have been different in another city, another station, at another time of day. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure they would have been different in a place where people had some reasonable expectation of an artistic experience: The Mall in Washington, D.C., Washington Square in New York, the square in front of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Thoth has found such a site in Central Park, where people habitually move at a stroll rather than a scurry.

At an American Symphony Orchestra League conference in Los Angeles last year, I suggested that orchestras should take opportunities to get out of their womb-like halls, occupy a shuttered Main Street Woolworth’s, create storefront chamber music and rehearsal space, colonize a local pedestrian mall with impromptu outdoor performances. Esa-Pekka Salonen disagreed; he had once led an ensemble on a train platform for some reason, and been startled to see that the Bell phenomenon applies on a large scale, too: crowds rushing for the 7:14 don’t even notice the presence of an orchestra, let alone stop and listen. So clearly, it’s counterproductive to bring music where people don’t expect and don’t want it to be. The answer is not to retreat to the concert hall and erect a barrier of prices; it’s to take advantage of those public spaces that American urban planners have fitfully and not always competently supplied (that’s a whole other discussion) and find ways to consecrate them temporarily to music.

By Justin Davidson

Now here is an astonishing piece of music criticism conceived and written not by a music critic at all but by the Washington Post‘s resident humorist Gene Weingarten. Who but a man who makes people laugh for a living would think of talking Joshua Bell into playing for quarters during rush hour at L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, D.C.? The question at hand: How many commuters, as they plodded their weary way past the virtuoso with the multimillion dollar fiddle, would recognize that they were hearing something special? How many would notice that there was a fiddler at all?  And how much money would land in the Stradivarius’ open case? I won’t steal Weingarten’s thunder by giving away the answers, but knowing them is just the beginning in an essay that ranges from Ellsworth Kelly (what if you hung one in a restaurant?) to Immanuel Kant (what is beauty, anyway?), surveillance, The Cure and the definition of personal space. But after I got to the end of the article, the main philosophical problem that continued to haunted me was, Why didn’t I think of doing this story?