For me, Elvis Costello’s Il Sogno, which the Brooklyn Phil- harmonic played at Lincoln Center last night, was a scary blank. After half an hour, I did something I’ve never done in twelve years of reviewing concerts in New York: I got out a book and started to read. My brain needed something else to grasp on to — I felt like I was clawing the air and plummeting. It’s not that Costello is inept; the score actually showed a fair amount of skill, especially in the orchestration, which is usually the aspect of the art that newcomers master last (see Gershwin). It made a clean, lucid sound, whether in the faintly Stravinskyish neoclassical passages or in the jazzy vamps. But the content was bafflingly trite. On the radar screen of compositional authority, where Gershwin registers as a dominating blob, Costello would be lucky to show up as a blip. Portions of melodies wandered in constricted circles; sequences began unpromisingly and went nowhere. At its best, and this is not as big a compliment as it sounds, Il Sogno ranked with mediocre Sibelius — those purring interludes that the old man tossed off when he was trying to replicate the freak popularity of “Valse Triste.”
I’m all for flinging open the doors of "classical music" to pop sympathizers. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, the BBC's new composer-in-residence, is probably the most promising boundary-smasher right now; his Bodysong has wonderful Bartokian passages for string quartet. Björk could make the same transition if she wanted to. Back in the day, Ellington and Gershwin made nonsense of the distinction between "composer" and "pop musician": they weren't beyond categories so much as categories melted down. Costello, too, has an all-devouring mind, as he showed in a virtuoso Vanity Fair article about what to listen to at different hours of the day. But he has nothing urgent to say with instruments alone. He’s simply demonstrating another facet of his cleverness. More power to him, I guess, although if I were a young composer struggling to get my music heard I’d be angry at Lincoln Center for fawning over him. Now, if it were a symphony by Prince, that might be another matter…
Just a first impression. See Terry Teachout for another view.
