Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

NYC Opera's latest day of reckoning

George Steel, the general manager and artistic director of New York City Opera, announced the company's 2011-12 season this afternoon in a press conference at the Guggenheim Museum. Outside, representatives of the AGMA union, orchestra players, and singers, Catherine Malfitano among them, denounced Steel's plans and declared him unfit to manage the company. You can see a few moments from the protest in this NY1 report. Brian Wise has an even-handed story for WQXR.

What is there to say? It's a grim situation. I, too, have had doubts about Steel's ability to lead; last season was discouraging, in terms of programming, ticket sales, marketing, and public relations. At the press conference, Steel often seemed to be dancing around issues rather than confronting them directly. The existence of an excoriating protest letter signed by dozens of leading opera singers, Plácido Domingo among them, should have been acknowledged at the outset and not during the question period, when a journalist brought it up. On the other hand, the 2011-12 season seems, on paper, fairly sound. I'm not one of those who believe that the company cannot exist outside Lincoln Center, and Steel might well be able to build a following in the new venues he has apparently lined up. (The marketing will require a drastic makeover.) The prospect of hearing Telemann's Orpheus at the Museo del Barrio is enticing. There's an excellent plan for free performances of Shakespeare operas in league with Shakespeare in the Park. Yet to restore its identity the company will need to have a real home. Among other things, it will need a place to rehearse. Perhaps, if the two productions at BAM next season are a success, the relationship will deepen.

All this is somewhat theoretical, given the current and seemingly worsening conflict with the union. The company is offering a drastically reduced contract, effectively making the orchestra and chorus into pick-up groups. The budget is plunging to $13 million. Those on the union side show no signs of accepting the proposal, and their rhetoric is getting more aggressive. One of Dan Wakin's recent Times stories quotes an AGMA leaflet saying that NYC Opera is fated to become “an itinerant, traveling, part-time company of subway station singers.” Will any performer who signs with the company — Rod Gilfry, say, who is slated to appear in Così fan tutte — now be subject to such name-calling? Will the city venues with whom Steel has announced partnerships still take his calls when the unions go to war? How much money can you raise when the most famous opera singer on the planet is against you? I hope there is still time for a compromise to be worked out, but today's events didn't leave me feeling wildly optimistic.

Bruckner Rock

Bruckner Week is upon us: tomorrow night the Cleveland Orchestra unfurls the Austrian giganticist's Fifth Symphony, in the first of four Lincoln Center concerts pairing Bruckner symphonies with works of John Adams. (In point of fact, the Eighth Symphony gets a concert unto itself.) While watching a YouTube video of Christian Thielemann conducting the Fifth, I noticed a forlorn comment: "i know seven nation army was inspired by this, but i dont hear the similarity." This refers to a 2003 song by the White Stripes. I'd never thought of it, but, sure enough, the main riff of the song comes straight out of Bruckner's principal thematic material in the first movement. You can hear the figure at 3:48 in the video above; I'm guessing the Whites were inspired especially by the ostinato that gets going in the coda of the movement. Hate to be blunt, but Bruckner rocks much harder. He rocks like Lewisian gneiss.

Bruckner in Santo Domingo

Susana Acra-Brache leads the final movements of Bruckner's Requiem and Te Deum in the Iglesia Regina Angelorum, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. John Berky, proprietor of an excellent Bruckner website, writes about the concert here.

Hi-yo Guillaume!

Rossini's towering William Tell, very rarely done in these parts (and absent from the Met since 1931), arrives at the Caramoor Festival tonight for the first of two performances. There are online notes by the Rossini authority Philip Gossett and by the conductor Will Crutchfield, who is a notable scholar in his own right. Crutchfield is including music seldom presented in performance – the trio and prayer from Act IV — while omitting a good chunk of the first part of Act III. "Something has to go if the opera is to finish in four hours," Crutchfield writes. The cast is led by Michael Spyres as Arnold, Julianna Di Giacomo as Mathilde, and Daniel Mobbs in the title role. No harmonicas.

Previously: Taking Liberties, Angela Meade's Norma.

Horenstein speaks

The great Jascha Horenstein — whose 1970 Proms performance of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony is presently thundering from my stereo — talks to Alan Blyth about composers he knew, including Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Eisler, Bartók, Janáček, Nielsen, and Strauss ("icy-cold, every inch the emperor of music"). The video is in two parts; the second is here.

The latest on City Opera

Dan Wakin of the New York Times reveals details of New York City Opera's 2011-12 season, which will be formally announced next week. According to his sources, the season will include a new Christopher Alden production of Così fan tutte; a revival of Jonathan Miller's Glimmerglass staging of Traviata; the expected U.S. premiere of Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna; and an unspecified opera by Telemann. Locations are said to be BAM, John Jay College, and El Museo del Barrio. Wakin's story also includes bemused reaction from Julius Rudel, the former City Opera director who has publicly criticized the current management. City Opera itself did not comment. La Cieca, doyenne of New York opera bloggers, seems skeptical. We'll see what George Steel has to say next week.

Update: Catherine Malfitano has sent out an open letter accusing City Opera management of “the dismembering of City Opera, piece by piece, person by person.” Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, Frederica von Stade, Sherrill Milnes, Samuel Ramey, Hal Prince, Phyllis Curtin, Joyce DiDonato, Regina Resnik, and Carlisle Floyd, among others, also signed the letter. “We know opera," they say, "and we want to help.”

Further update: You can read the entire letter here. The Save NYCO organization, which is now equipped with its own website, Facebook page, and Twitter account, will be protesting the press conference on Tuesday.

Marlboro at 60

Video: Allen Cohen / Marlboro Music

Marlboro Music, the storied chamber-music summit in Vermont, celebrates this month its sixtieth anniversary. In the new few days, more than two hundred alumni of the institution will be converging on Marlboro for an unprecedented reunion.  There are commemorative photo exhibits at the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library (through August 20), at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, and at the Drury Gallery on the Marlboro campus. Recent Marlboro performances can be heard on various radio outlets, including WQXR (Mondays at 9PM), WFCR in Amherst (Fridays from 2-3PM), WCRB in Boston, Vermont Public Radio, and American Public Media's Classical 24 and Performance Today. And in August Marlboro will be launching a new live-recording series: the first three releases, including a performance of Beethoven's "Archduke" with Mistuko Uchida, Soovin Kim, and the late David Soyer, will be available through ArkivMusic, in digital and CD form. I wrote about Marlboro in a 2009 essay that appears in my book Listen to This. The video above, featuring the finale of Dvořák's Serenade for winds, is the work of Allen Cohen, son of the late violinist Isidore Cohen, a longtime Marlboro mainstay.

The old, sad song

"Concert halls only rarely enjoy the crowds of yesteryear."

— report to the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1964, quoted in Eric Drott's new book Music and the Elusive Revolution.

Nightafternight playlist

— Gesualdo, Madrigals Book 6; Alan Curtis, Il Complesso Barocco (Pan Classics)
— Krenek, Symphony No. 4, Concerto grosso; Alun Francis, NDR Radiophilharmonie (cpo)
— John Adams, Son of Chamber Symphony, String Quartet; ICE, St. Lawrence Quartet (Nonesuch)
— Mozart, Divertimento in E-flat; Henning Kraggerud, Lars Anders Tomter, Christoph Richter (Naxos)
— Schumann, Humoreske, Busoni, Fantasia contrappuntistica; Jacob Greenberg (New Focus)
— Boris Papandopulo, Piano Music; Nicholas Phillips (Albany)
— Mozart, Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 27; Mitsuko Uchida, Cleveland Orchestra (Decca)
— Cavalli, Artemisia; various soloists, Claudio Cavina conducting La Venexiana (Glossa)

Atonys

Several people sent me a link to "Atonal Composers Gather for Atony Awards," an attempted satire of modern music at The Onion. Now, I love The Onion as much as any time-wasting American, but this is kind of a fail, as the kids say. I'll let go of the fact that Penderecki's name is mispronounced and the joke doesn't apply to his post-1975 music. But couldn't an intern have gone to Wikipedia and noticed that Stockhausen is dead? Or is this routine recycled from a few years ago? Either way, it doesn't hold a candle to Arnie Schoenberg and His Second Viennese School, never mind Bruno Heinz Jaja.

Books received (1)

University of California Press has put out a beautiful book containing all eleven issues of the legendary new-music magazine Source. Larry Austin edited the journal from the campus of University of California, Davis, between 1967 and 1973, eliciting crucial documents of the musical thinking of Cage, Feldman (his brilliant "Conversations without Stravinsky"), Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, Frederic Rzewski, the young Steve Reich ("Music as a Gradual Process"), and many other luminaries of the late-twentieth-century American avant-garde. Even Stockhausen puts in an appearance, in dialogue with Ashley and Austin. Douglas Kahn edited the book with Austin. A perfect holiday gift for that nephew who can't stop listening to I am sitting in a room.

4th

Did Tosca survive?

On my jazz-beflecked visit to the Castel Sant'Angelo, I had a thought that surely has occurred to countless Puccini-minded tourists before me: where did Tosca jump from exactly? If you look out across the Tiber from the upper terrace, as in the photo above, it seems as though the doomed diva would have a straight shot down. But there's a ledge in the way:

Unless Tosca had an extraordinary running jump, she would have simply landed there, and, somewhat anti-dramatically, would have needed to leap again. She might of course have gone off the side, into the courtyard below:

It's a considerable drop, but perhaps not automatically fatal, and it lacks style. The angles from the back are entirely unsuited to grandiose self-obliteration. What occurred to me is that we could be looking at a Reichenbach Falls situation. Tosca might have disappeared off the front, landed on the ledge, and then inched round the side and clambered through the little window there, even as Spoletta and the soldiers peered from above and concluded that she had plunged to her death:

I look forward to the shocking sequel, Tosca Returns.

Update: Jessica Duchen suggests some other operatic sequels. I should mention Christopher Rouse's fabulous percussion concerto Der gerettete Alberich, about the further adventures of the dwarf lord after the end of the Ring.

Credo in Us

Noise in Hebrew

 

וכל השאר רעש, aka The Rest Is Noise, is now available from Modan Publishing in Israel.