The great harpsichordist has died. I bought an album–perhaps the last LP I ever purchased–of Leonhardt playing Froberger when I was a student in the 1980s. It revealed a world of color and expression I had never heard before in the instrument. Recordings that pierce you while you’re still young enough to fall intemperately in love with music are dangerous. They never leave, their imprint of the music remains indelible and obscures almost everything that comes after it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau described education in similar terms: The teacher constructs almost violent epiphanies, which remain permanent, emotionally powerful lessons. The danger of these epiphanies is that they lock in you the past. The mind has a tenacious connection to what has been learned or discovered, but can be inflexible thereafter. It’s still hard for me to hear other players render Froberger. But hearing Leonhardt again, this morning, dissolves time.
Greetings from Buckingham Palace
Christmas, in my house, always includes some time with the Queen. Her annual Christmas message is a masterpiece of the most comforting clichés, a sweet homily on the gift of the season, family, joy and the meaning of community. You can pretty much write it yourself: Christmas is a time for family and reflection… blah blah blah. But those plumy tones, that shock of silver hair, the festive red dress and the strangely somber mood—yule-funereal—can’t be beat. I love in particular how she lets us know that Jesus was neither a general nor a philosopher, and then takes care to let the generals and philosophers know that she isn’t criticizing their particular lines of employment. The empire (sorry, the Commonwealth) will always need its generals and philosophers, and the Queen is never one to offend anyone. I think she really hit out of the park this year.
Filed under Uncategorized
Farewell Opera Boston
The impact of the economic crises seems to hit the arts in painful slow motion. The most recent sign of serious distress is the announcement that Opera Boston will shut down, largely because of “lackluster fundraising in a tough economic climate.” I’m sorry to hear this. I wrote a piece for Opera News last year about Paul Hindemith’s opera Cardillac, prompted by a rare and very welcome production of the work at Opera Boston. I didn’t make it to the performance, but I was impressed that Boston, unlike Washington, had an opera company willing to invest in rare and important 20th century works.
And now it’s gone, another company shuttered in a town that has had a strange and painful history with opera. I can still remember Opera Company of Boston, Sarah Caldwell’s long-troubled venture, during its last and rather pathetic days. I remember thinking then, as again now, how odd it is that Boston, with all its cultural resources, has never been a serious opera town. The usual explanation is that the Boston Symphony Orchestra is such a huge cultural force that there’s no room left over for opera. But that’s not the case in other cities with distinguished orchestras, such as Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit. So why is it the case in Boston?
The loss of Opera Boston is truly sad. One begins to imagine a world in which the form is so expensive, and so marginal, that only two or three serious opera companies remain in the United States. The vast majority of opera lovers will get their fix in the movie theater, watching the Met high-def broadcasts. And the majority of those who are fortunate enough to live in an opera town simply won’t be able to afford it anymore. The democratization of opera that began in the 19th century will have come full circle, as the form becomes once again an elite entertainment, teeming with oligarchs.
North Korean Tears: Real, Fake or Viral?
That is the essence of today’s brief column in the Post, about the mourning and mass hysteria in North Korea. I argue that not only is it likely that the grief feels real to those emoting over the death of Kim Jong-il, but that it is potentially troublesome for the North Korean regime. Yes, it seems to suggest a genuine sense of loss and thus some measure of devotion to the cult. But emotion can never be entirely scripted, and anything unscripted in a totalitarian society has the potential to be volatile. Read it here.
Filed under Uncategorized
Reviewing the Gehry-designed Eisenhower Memorial
I was skeptical at first, and for a long time. I still wonder about the enormous columns that will support the tapestry with which Frank Gehry memorializes the life and accomplishments of Dwight D. Eisenhower. But the more you think about it–and I suspect I over think it in this piece–the more brilliant a giant, civic tapestry in the middle of Washington seems. After a test of sample pieces of the metal fabric, many of the people who will ultimately have to approve the memorial design were wowed. And now, with the generation that remembers Ike as a war leader and president getting on in years, there is an urgency to see the memorial finished. There are many reasons to stop building memorials, full-stop, in Washington. But based on design alone, this is one that deserves to be realized.
Filed under Architecture, Culture, urban design
A minor Hitch anecdote having nothing to do with salami
Everyone is offering his Christopher Hitchens memories today. I had only one face-to-face encounter, after he gave a lecture at the Greek embassy about the Elgin Marbles (he argued passionately for their return to Greece). Some of us retired to a restaurant afterward, and the proprietors must have known him well because an enormous tumbler of Scotch, filled to the brim, arrived as if by magic, before the menus, water and the bread basket. It disappeared almost as quickly and was replaced at least once more and probably twice (I don’t remember very well). He spoke of the novels of Mary Renault, which I said I loved, and he said deserved a better reputation and wider audience. At one point he was trying to remember the name of a critical battle between Ancient Greece and Persia and I tentatively offered an answer, Salamis, which unfortunately I pronounced a bit too much like the Italian meat product. He raised his hand, and said impatiently, “No, no, no.” He thought for a moment, and then said, “sal-uh-MEES.” He was right, of course.
Filed under Culture, Feuilleton, Uncategorized
The “exploding” towers controversy
If you’re following the ginned up controversy over a proposal, by the Dutch architecture firm MVRDV, to build twin towers that appear to be “exploding,” I gave my short take on the Post’s “Arts Post” website. Here’s the crux of it:
The controversy seems part of a larger cultural effort to make the events of September 11, 2001 somehow sacred, to use the meaning of the terrorist attack for larger, more overbearing cultural control. So now it is being deployed against contemporary architecture, not because there is anything inherently offensive in this design (which may or may not be an intentional reference to 9/11), but because the emotions generated by the attack have been co-opted by one part of the political and cultural spectrum.
Architects have long been exploring ways to turn buildings inside out, to peel away their external skin, to represent them as if melting or hurtling through space. The metaphor to “explode” a building might well be used as a positive architectural value, to open up space, break down formal strictures, allow multiple points of access. So even if the Dutch design firm, MVRDV, intended a reference to 9/11, there’s no reason that reference should be read as mocking or ironic. It might easily be seen as an effort to freeze frame a traumatic event, in architectural form, and neutralize its shock and pain.
Update: On second and third thought, it’s remarkable how old-hat the idea is. A vertically uplifted edition of Habitat 67?
Filed under Architecture, Culture
Top Ten for 2011
The Washington Post critics published their top ten picks for the past year in today’s edition, including my Art and Architecture list. The online format is a slide show, which means clicking through, and the order of the selections isn’t hierarchical. But it’s nice to look at.
Filed under Architecture, Art
Gingrich the Entrepreneur
Republicans may be refining the idea of what business competence means. The party has long cherished expertise gathered in the marketplace over mere political skill or experience. But there was an interesting nuance introduced in a Washington Post article about Newt Gingrich, published today, which suggests that the ideal of the man of commerce may not be monolithic.
In an article exploring concerns about Gingrich’s leadership during his years a Speaker of the House, former Congressman Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) praised the fast-rising presidential contender for getting “a plane that hadn’t flown in 40 years to fly.” But he went on to say that the plane then flew erratically, up, down, left, right, raising questions about Gingrich’s leadership skills.
“Newt is an entrepreneur more than he’s a manager,” says Shays.
Interesting. Is there a distinction forming between the self-made man (entrepreneurial skill) and the technocratic leader (managerial expertise)? The former implies risk taking, vision and a willingness to fail; the latter suggests steadiness, competence and professionalism.
Genuine success in business no doubt requires both skill sets, and there are many cases in which the entrepreneurial founder of a corporation eventually finds himself sidelined by business-school types after the start up grows bigger than the founder’s ability to manage it.
Both skill sets are idealized by the political parties that dominate U.S. politics, but the Democratic Party, of late, has stressed managerial competence while the Republican Party idealizes the self-made man. The rise of candidates such as Herman Cain (which skill set was primary on his résumé?) and Gingrich may require more subtle thinking about just exactly what the Republican Party wants to valorize in the commercial sector. And that will give importance clues about how it conceives of the presidency.
Filed under Culture, Feuilleton
You Nero, Big Zero
Arena Stage’s new comedy, “You, Nero,” feels like an over-extended T.V. comedy sketch. After watching it last night, I went home and enjoyed a Netflix episode of the Catherine Tate show…and I think Tate’s comedy better fun and better written than Amy Freed’s attempt to write a satirical romp through the ancient Rome of crazy Nero.
It’s bracing to watch a two-hour-plus piece of theater simply fall flat, raising questions about how it got so far, with so much investment of talent (Danny Scheie as Nero is good fun) and money, without someone simply saying: There’s nothing here. The humor is derived from two unrelated premises: The play of anachronism between ancient Rome and contemporary life, and inside, meta-jokes aimed at people who care about theater. So we get a playwright struggling to please Nero with a script he pecks out on a typewriter; and Nero imagining an Ancient Roman version of “A Chorus Line.”
There are a few laughs, but lightly scattered, and most of the slapstick is comically inert. There does seem to be an attempt to say something deeper about the role theater plays in forming audiences and reforming politics. Freed suggests we get the theater we deserve. But these themes feel grafted on, a belated attempt to give the show heft. But it doesn’t quite work and you wish, in the end, that rather than strain at seriousness, the creative team had simply opted for shorter and sillier.
