Why is the CEO of Boston's financially struggling Citi Performing Arts Center earning a salary that is 6.5% of his organization's budget — and receiving a $1.265 million bonus on the side? Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe tries to find out.
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Sexy snaps from the Mahler Häuschen!
Two summers ago — a time that will ever stay dear in my memory as the Summer of Schreker — I paid a visit to Mahler's composing hut, or Häuschen, in the little village of Steinbach, on the shores of the Attersee. I posted some pictures from the expedition here on the blog. As a result, I have become a sort of clearinghouse — clearing-Häuschen? — for reports on Mahler's various composing huts. The latest transmission is the most delightful yet. Tom Neenan, who teaches music at Caltech, recently dropped by the hut in sparkling sunny weather, and his pictures radiate a mood rather different from the Sturm und Drang atmosphere that prevailed in my photos (actually the work of Jeremy Eichler). The hut abuts an RV site and campground, and on the day of Neenan's visit sun-worshippers were out in force. They were apparently startled when Neenan opened the door of the Häuschen and caused the Third Symphony to blare from the speakers. If the view from inside the hut is anything like what Mahler experienced during his summers in Steinbach — and, in truth, there is so far no evidence that it is — scholars may have to reconsider their conception of the sources of Mahler's creative inspiration. A parental advisory: these images are slightly racier than the Rest Is Noise norm, so, if you have impressionable young children reading over your shoulder, cover their eyes or send them from the room.
Where's Opera Quiz?
With the help of a reminder from AC Douglas, I'm listening to Wagner's Meistersinger live from Bayreuth. When I tuned in, Sven Friedrich, director of the Richard Wagner Archive, was delivering an extended intermission talk titled "'I Will Be Happy Without Masterhood': Art in Die Meistersinger Between Anarchy, Self-Realization, and Bourgeois Identity." There's plenty of information at the Bavarian Radio site, whether you speak German or not. The images from Katharina Wagner's debut production don't look particularly scandalous, despite the fact that the Meister's great-granddaughter and possible heir has been called "the 'Bayreuth Barbie' and 'Bayreuth Hilton' by some tabloids," as George Jahn writes in the LA Times. There are also pictures of Angela Merkel arriving for the gala opening. I photo-blogged Bayreuth back in 2004.
Post mortem: To judge from what I heard of Acts II and III, this was not a Meistersinger for the ages. The intermittent sound of a typewriter in Act II — is Sachs a shoemaker turned stenographer? — proved acutely annoying. Klaus Florian Vogt sang superbly as Walther — light and Italianate, as ACD says, but strongly projected, as far as I could tell. The chorus made a mighty sound, as it always does. Other than that, I didn't get too much out of the performance. Amanda Mace, the soprano, went flat in Act III, resulting in a queasy quintet. A mixture of boos and applause erupted at the end, although I believe Bavarian Radio faded out before the production team made their bows.
According to reports by George Jahn, Agence France-Presse, and Kate Connolly, the production featured Meistersingers parading with "outsized penises," topsy-turvy scenes of Walther as conformist and Beckmesser as rebel, Richard Wagner dancing in his underwear, blah blah blah. It was apparently such a mess that even Christoph Schlingensief criticized it. German speakers can read a detailed critique by Die Welt's Manuel Brug. Let's hope Bayreuth comes to its senses and picks Eva Wagner-Pasquier as the next leader of the festival.
Schoenberg-Thalberg: The truth revealed?
One of the legendary occasions in twentieth-century music, at least for those of us who treasure unexpected juxtapositions, is the 1935 meeting between Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonality, and Irving Thalberg, the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. Salka Viertel, the émigré screenwriter and salonière, describes the encounter in amusingly rich detail in her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers; Schoenberg mentions it in a letter to Thalberg dated Dec. 6, 1935, which you can read online at the Schoenberg Center. The meeting came about, Viertel says, when Thalberg heard Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht on a New York Philharmonic Sunday-afternoon broadcast and decided that Schoenberg would be just the right man to write music for an adaptation of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. "Last Sunday when I heard the lovely music you have written...," Thalberg began. "I don't write 'lovely' music," Schoenberg snapped. Thalberg's enthusiasm dissipated as the composer proceeded to demand, among other things, that the actors deliver their lines in Sprechstimme.
During a final bout of fact-checking for my book, I decided to make certain that the Philharmonic played Schoenberg as described. It turns out that the orchestra did perform Verklärte Nacht that year, but not until late December 1935, well after the Schoenberg-Thalberg summit. (According to the Philharmonic, performances previously took place under Bruno Walter in 1924, Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1926, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch in 1932 — a slightly surprising lineup of Schoenbergians.) It's possible, of course, that the mogul heard a different broadcast of Schoenberg's piece. But I wonder whether the "lovely music" in question was in fact the Suite in G for Strings, which the Philharmonic played in mid-October 1935. (Both programs were conducted by Otto Klemperer, who led ten weeks of Philharmonic programs that fall.) If events proceeded in the usual way, the Suite would have been broadcast nationally on Oct. 20; the famous meeting seems to have happened in mid-November. Viertel might have transposed these two more-or-less-tonal string-orchestra pieces in her memory. I offer this as a minor footnote to the annals of Schoenbergiana.
News items
The pure-voiced soprano Teresa Stich-Randall has passed away at the age of seventy-nine. I have a weakness for her strangely "white," detached, almost neo-Baroque reading of the Four Last Songs, as heard on an old Westminster LP.... The Santa Fe Opera has scored a coup in signing Edo de Waart, a perennially undersung musician with keen instincts for the new, as its next chief conductor. He will lead Billy Budd there next summer. The outgoing director is, of course, Alan Gilbert, moving on to the New York Philharmonic. None other than Opera Chic happens to be reporting live from Santa Fe this week.... For Stylus Jayson Greene has written a fun piece on classical samples in hip-hop. That's Cheryl Evans singing the Queen of the Night on Kelis's "Like You." I didn't know about The Streets's manipulation of the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra. Where's The Rite of Spring in all this? If it's good enough for Charlie Parker (see ex. 11)....
Update: Nora Renka advises that the Beastie Boys' video for "Intergalactic" makes use of "Glorification of the Chosen One." It doesn't count as a hip-hop sample, and it uses only 4/11 of the 11/4 bar, but it's fun. Seeing the Beasties play this song at the 1998 Reading Festival from fifteen or twenty feet away was one of the better things I've experienced in life.
Further update: Angus Batey, at the Guardian music blog, points out that Kool Keith aka Dr. Octagon's "Blue Flowers" makes use of the Bartók Second Violin Concerto.
Yet another update: Cheryl Evans, who has been seen at the New York City Opera in Il viaggio a Reims, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and, of course, The Magic Flute, wrote in to report on her collaboration with Kelis. The sessions were recorded under somewhat top-secret conditions, she says; she didn't know what the sample was for. It was sped up on the CD, so that her high Fs ascended to A-flat. "I enjoy seeing where it pops up," she says, "like at a Louis Vuitton runway show from earlier this year."
Dancing slow and fast as the gods go down
With Götterdämmerung last night, the curtain came down on Cycle 2 of the Mariinsky Theatre's Ring of the Nibelung — which actually finished in advance of Cycle 1. Almost every aspect of the cycle was similarly convoluted, from the constant rotation of singers in and out of parts to the often profoundly befuddling action onstage. Nonetheless, the week had its vocal highpoints; three for me were the Loge of Vasily Gorshkov, the Brünnhilde (Walküre) and Waltraute of Olga Savova, and the Sieglinde of Mlada Khudoley. More observations will follow in The New Yorker, alongside reports on other Lincoln Center Festival events (Philip Glass's Book of Longing, George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill) and the first week of Mostly Mozart (looking very strong this year, with Paul Lewis playing Beethoven concertos, the St. Lawrence Quartet playing late-night late Beethoven, Mark Morris reprising his Mozart Dances, and Golijov's St. Mark Passion descending on the city once again). Above is another image of David Michalek's Slow Dancing, juxtaposed surreally with Lincoln Center's Midsummer Night Swing.
Step by step
Crowds in Lincoln Center Plaza are gawking at David Michalek's mesmerizing film installation Slow Dancing, which you can read about here. Stopping by after the Mariinsky Theater Rheingold, I heard someone say, "Well, that's what Peter Sellars wants you to think...." Another summer night in the city.
