Yesterday I won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. The news was announced almost simultaneously with the first alerts coming out of Boston. Many of us weren’t aware of what was going on until after the gathering around the main news desk broke up, perhaps an hour later. By the time I did a quick video interview for the Post, and a few brief conversations with journalists from the AP and The New York Times, the images flashing on every screen and monitor throughout the building made the ugliness of the bombing–the panic, the wounded, the urgency of first responders–feel almost too familiar, even as the tragedy was still unfolding.
People asked if it was strange to win on such an awful day. Yes, it was very strange, and I have family in Boston (who are all safe). But it was a thing of wonder to see the newsroom with all hands on deck, to see it do what it does best. Arts critics survive in newspapers not because we help the bottom line, but because enlightened editors and publishers see art as an essential part of the picture of the world that newspapers deliver everyday. It’s news that makes newspapers vital and relevant, and there wouldn’t be a working arts critic in America if people weren’t first hungry for the work of reporters covering breaking stories with depth, perspective and passion.
Art, on the other hand, is entirely essential to the survival of the world itself. That fact, that necessity, isn’t universally acknowledged, as the events in Boston give sad witness. Creation is the opposite of destruction.
Category Archives: Culture
Yesterday
Galina
Galina Vishnevskaya, the great Russian soprano, has died. It feels very strange to learn this today as my other half and I spent part of the weekend listening to a very fresh-voiced, and dramatically piercing Galina sing Liu from Turandot (with Nilsson and Corelli). Every time I listen to her, I rethink an old prejudice–that she suffered too much from that strident, Slavic sound–that somehow got lodged in my ear early, and mistakenly. It was a distinctive sound, and as Liu the tone was often blindingly white on top; but it was also pure and clean and wonderfully focused. Of course, it helps to see her in action, as one can in the remarkable film version she made of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth, which is one of the greatest opera films ever made, and sadly too little known in this country. Just last night, while making dinner, we were talking about her (strange coincidence) and we fell back on that easy but obvious and obviously true summation: She wasn’t just a singer, she was an artist.
Color, Race and Renaissance
The new Walters Art Museum show, Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, is worth a trip to Baltimore. It isn’t a huge exhibition, and much of what is on display offers more intellectual interest than pure aesthetic delight. But the history is fascinating, the detective work engaging, and you get the sense that there’s a more-than-ample kernel here for a major show sometime in the future. I recommend it in today’s Washington Post.
Image Courtesy the Walters Art Museum, Annibale Carracci, attrib., ca. 1580s, oil on canvas, 60 x 39 x 2 cm (fragment of a larger painting), Tomasso Brothers, Leeds, England
Filed under Art, Culture, Exhibitions, Museums
More on the Corcoran
I used a column in Sunday’s paper to examine how the Corcoran’s curatorial history, its identity as an institution, and an all-too-frequent failure to capitalize on success has led it to its current financial woes. But there’s nothing there that can’t be fixed by passionate, enlightened, dedicated leadership. The Mapplethorpe controversy of 1989 played a role:
When case studies are written about how to blow up a nonprofit institution, the Mapplethorpe controversy is key among them, a classic map that prefigured controversies such as the implosion earlier this year at the breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure (which suddenly appeared political after trying to deny funding to Planned Parenthood), the 2010 censorship of an exhibition of gay and lesbian portraiture at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and the current power struggle at the University of Virginia. In all four cases, institutional leadership seemed unaware of the basic human capital invested in the organization, unaware that the people who keep the institution alive view it in essentially familial terms, not bureaucratic or organizational ones.
But the current leadership’s willingness to throw the entire museum into limbo while they pursue the horrible idea of selling the building could well be the death knell for the institution:
Yet at a critical moment, when the Corcoran desperately needs people to rally behind it, the board of directors has indicated that it is seriously considering a move that would further alienate supporters of the museum. Board Chairman Harry Hopper, in an interview with Washington Post reporters, said he and the board “weren’t out pounding the pavement on behalf of the institution” until they have “a plan that makes sense.”
Not “pounding the pavement on behalf of the institution” at the moment? I was gobsmacked by that when I first heard our reporters recount their interview with Hopper.
At the Aspen Ideas Festival
Last week, I spent two and a half very pleasant days at the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual meeting of intellectual leaders from around the planet, with a focus this year on China. I moderated two panels, one on telling stories through film, another on re-imagining public space. I wrote up a few thoughts I brought home from my time there at the Post’s The Style Blog.
Filed under Architecture, Culture, Documentary, film, Museums, urban design
Let’s retrain our non-profit leadership…
We need to examine the parallels between what happened at the University of Virginia this past month, and what is happening at the Corcoran today. Is there perhaps an epidemic of short-sighted thinking running through the elite circles that control our academic and cultural organizations? Have two decades of fetishizing corporate-style leadership of non-profit organizations finally borne inevitable fruit: An environment in which the basic humanist purpose of academic and cultural organizations has been lost or supplanted? Is it time for some idealistic large foundation to create a program that educates potential board members of cultural organizations about the balance between fiscal responsibility and the real purpose of their institution (which will never make money, never pay for itself, never be anything but a torrent of red ink on the balance sheets)? It is astonishing to me that the Board of Visitors at UVA didn’t include one person who identified as a poet or artist or academic. Was there anyone in the room who could speak up for keeping the German program intact? For teaching the classics as the essential ground on which our society is built?
I’m on record as deeply opposed to the sale of the Corcoran’s building. I think a move would be disastrous for the organization, diminishing its stature and severing its relation to existing audiences and communities. The building is an essential part of the Corcoran’s collection, an inviolable property that may be in disrepair, yet is superbly suited to the Corcoran’s mission, which includes displaying art. I call it “cultural vandalism” in my review of the new Richard Diebenkorn exhibition—which looks so good in the Corcoran’s galleries I can’t imagine how the gallery’s leadership could ever contemplate leaving.
Of course, it’s easy for someone who isn’t on the board, who doesn’t have fiduciary responsibility for the organization, to cry foul on the proposed move. Organizations that rely on fund-raising have been suffering acutely for the past few years, and the fund-raising challenge has never been greater. But the Corcoran, though mismanaged and ill-tended for decades now, isn’t a small, fly-by-night non-profit. It has a major collection, it sits opposite the White House and it has been serving Washington and art for far longer than the National Gallery of Art. It’s too easy to think, Oh the Corcoran again, maybe we should just shut it down. But there’s too much at stake to be defeatist.
What it needs is new leadership and probably a new board, reconstructed with people passionately committed to keeping the Corcoran alive and vital in tough times. Donors will support a dynamic leader with an exciting vision for the museum. What’s on offer from the current leadership—institutional suicide—isn’t vision, it’s an unimaginative form of despair.
A Return to Castleton
Tyler Nelson and Cecelia Hall in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville”
Friday night’s big storm blew through the Castelton Festival, creating drama that evening, and a cancelled performance on Saturday. But by 2 p.m. on Sunday the festival had an enormous, truck-sized generator hooked up and the air conditioning was running in the big performance tent, an oasis of cool atop a lovely little hill in Virginia’s horse country.
It had been several years since I was last there, for a performance of Britten’s Turn of the Screw in the pint-sized home theater attached to artistic director Lorin Maazel’s house. Yesterday’s performance of Rossini’s Barber of Seville was the first time I’ve been in the big tent, and I liked it very much. The festival has the feeling of a genuine festival, a high-spirited coming together in a beautiful spot for music. The views outside the tent, of rolling hills, giant round hay bales and a sultry, shimmering horizon of green in the distance make it clear why the rich and fortunate flock to this region, despite its isolation and ferocious summer heat.
The young cast gave a good show, albeit with a few tentative moments here and there, and perhaps a little too much stage business for the chorus. Otherwise, it was everything one wants from Rossini: Absurdity, speed and occasional pauses for emotional interjection. The set was a single piece on a turntable, representing Figaro’s shop, and the inside and out of Dr. Bartolo’s elegant home. The lighting was a bit sketchy here and there (the storm cues seemed a little odd) but the costumes, meticulous period pieces, flattered the cast.
Singing Count d’Almaviva, Tyler Nelson, a tenor with a small but appealing sound, was sometimes hard to detect in ensembles. But he has great musicality, and his performance of “Se il mio nome” in Act 1 demonstrated a refined sensibility and a voice capable of haunting tenderness. Tyler Simpson, as the lecherous Bartolo, is already a fully-fledged opera singer, and he has a fine comic sensibility, creating a muscular and manipulative Bartolo rather than the usual buffoonish and ridiculous caricature. Cecelia Hall’s Rosina was suitably impish, and if the coloratura isn’t quite fluid yet, the tone quality is attractive and the voice very promising. Both Jonathan Beyer as Figaro and Evan Hughes as Don Basilio had something pleasingly subversive in their slightly fey portrayals, and Beyer’s “Largo al factotum” set a high standard early in the performance for technically accomplished singing.
It’s good to see Castleton progressing so rapidly towards serious festival status. It’s a privilege to have Maazel in the pit on a Saturday afternoon in Washington’s backyard. The operas performed this season (Barber, Boheme and Carmen) are standard fare, and one misses the novelties that were present in earlier iterations of the festival. But the whole Castleton experience is a pleasure, a drive through beautiful country, an encounter with young artists and a leisurely return on back roads to Washington… through a landscape with a few thousand fewer trees than the last time I made the trip.
Credit: Leslie Maazel, courtesy the Castelton Festival
Silence is not the problem
Another cliche-riddled story about how to fix classical music is making its rounds on Facebook. I tried to muster some sympathy for Richard Dare’s Huffington Post piece, “The Awfulness of Classical Music Explained,” but found it a long straw-man argument with no redeeming insight. Dare, a financier who is now head of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, argues the old line, that the rituals of classical music are off putting, without acknowledging any value in them. Why can’t listeners react spontaneously, shout and clap when they want to?
But this [is] classical music. And there are a great many “clap here, not there” cloak-and-dagger protocols to abide by. I found myself a bit preoccupied — as I believe are many classical concert goers — by the imposing restrictions of ritual behavior on offer: all the shushing and silence and stony faced non-expression of the audience around me, presumably enraptured, certainly deferential, possibly catatonic; a thousand dead looking eyes, flickering silently in the darkness, as if a star field were about to be swallowed by a black hole.
He then goes on to compare all these rituals to authoritarianism and North Korea.
The most common practices in classical musical venues today represent a contrite response to a totalitarian belief system no one in America buys into anymore. To participate obediently is to act as a slave. It is counter to our culture. And it is not, I am certain, what composers would have wanted: A musical North Korea. Who but a bondservant would desire such a ghastly fate? Quickly now: Rise to your feet and applaud. The Dear Leader is coming on stage to conduct. He will guide us, ever so worshipfully through the necrocracy of composers we are obliged to forever adore.
Yikes. And this guy is head of an orchestra.
In fact, there are a few good reasons for the protocol of classical music. Silence allows one to hear the music. It is a sign of respect both for the musicians and fellow audience members. Silence encourages close listening, and not clapping between movements gathers a multi-piece musical work into an organic whole, allowing its parts to be appreciated together (each movement revising the one before, subtly altering the memory of the experience) rather than as disconnected parts. The reason people sometimes shush noisy audience members is because music lovers deeply value the experience of listening, and don’t want it ruined by thoughtless and rude behavior.
And people often do shout with joy in the concert hall and opera house. A good lusty bravo after a well-sung aria is a thrill to hear. A riotous ovation gets the blood pumping.
Just wait until the music is over.
And this guy is going to save classical music?
Unfortunately, discussion of classical music has become so rote and tribal that Dare’s piece isn’t really about a problem or solutions. It’s a litmus test of how one thinks about preserving culture.
Filed under Culture, Music, Opera, Orchestral
Massenet’s “Werther” at the Washington National Opera
It’s always encouraging to find Emmanuel Villaume in the orchestra pit, especially so when the repertoire is French. Villaume conducted last night’s performance of Massenet’s Werther, and the orchestra of the Washington National Opera never sounded so good. Massenet is easily condescended to, as a cheap romantic and theatrical fluff artist. But his operas are full of surprises, evocative and innovative orchestration and dramatic idiosyncrasies. Villaume underscored the rich coloristic elements in Massenet’s score, and found almost expressionistic power in its expostulations. The brass snarled, the strings produced haunting chorale-like sounds, as if channeling Bruckner at a whisper, and the woodwinds (including the saxophone) were free to play with engaging personal freedom. The extended orchestral preludes and interludes that serve as psychological bridges between acts and scenes were some of the best things all evening.
Massenet gets hammered for his distortion of Goethe’s original, and the distortion is so profound that it’s best—if possible—to forget about the 18th-century novella when watching the 19th-century opera. In the Massenet, Albert becomes a bit of a thug and Werther and Lotte are equally in love from the beginning, forcing the latter into a classic conflict of duty and desire.
Most egregious, in the last act, while Werther lingers on from his self-inflicted gun shot wound, the two engage in an entirely superfluous final love scene. And there are absurdities in the text that reflect a hybrid of Goethe and the French team that wrote the libretto. In act three Werther reminisces about his friendship with Lotte, and the time they spent together (a vestige of the novella); but the libretto has them fall in love almost immediately, and whatever companionship they enjoyed is lost between the interstices of the First and Second acts.
No matter. Despite one of the most static first act’s in opera, Massanet’s score is often exquisite, and despite having one of the best known endings in all of literature, the denouement is still shocking. Unfortunately, while the cast can’t be faulted on purely vocal grounds, none of the singers really inhabited his or her character. Francesco Meli’s Werther seemed cobbled together from rote vocal and dramatic gestures. He has the voice, but not the dramatic sensibility for the role. Sonia Ganassi’s Charlotte wanted more vocal heft, but the mezzo rose to occasion in Act III, especially in the monologue that opens the scene.
Michael Yeargan’s set design, especially the transparent walls that fused together an 18th century drawing room with the natural world outside, was particularly well done. But Barila’s decision to costume the singers as if for a stage production of The Great Gatsby (frocks for Charlotte were particularly unflattering) was arbitrary, like so many decisions about updating opera. Charlotte’s sister Sophie (well sung by Emily Albrink) became a flapper rather than a flighty teenager. Werther looked dumpy in his striped sweater. And the basic tension between the enlightenment and the romantic sensibility explored in the original novella was lost by the updating. Why? But then there’s never any rationale for these things.
So go for the orchestra. And for Massenet. There were a distressing number of empty seats on Friday night, and it would be a shame if anyone concluded from that a lack of interest in the magnificent operas of Massenet.
Credit: Francesco Meli as Werther and Sonia Ganassi as Charlotte. Photo by Scott Suchman
