Respect

“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” So says Noah Cross in “Chinatown.“

Institutions age and get respectable too. The New York Philharmonic is 167 years old and has earned a great deal of honest respect through all those years, and the tradition to which it’s dedicated has been accumulating respect for even longer. Respect can be fleeting, however, and needs more than just reputation to develop and endure. The tradition of Western classical music endures because it is alive and expanding, with new works and ideas building on the shoulders of the giants who have come before. Classical music institutions give respect by acknowledging that tradition, and earn respect by doing so. For decades in the middle of the 20th century, the Philharmonic earned, and deserved, great respect, becoming not only one of the finest orchestras in the world but, by maintaining the old and new classical traditions under an amazing succession of music directors (including Gustav Mahler, Willem Mengelberg, Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokoswki, Dimitri Mitropolous, Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez), becoming one of the most important.

The previous twenty years have been ones where, other than age, there was little the Philharmonic was doing to earn respect. Orchestral playing fell off from the top ranks under Zubin Mehta, and while that was restored under Kurt Masur and refined under Lorin Maazel, the music the Philharmonic presented was enough to earn merely the respect of age. A seemingly endless parade of all the expected old classics offered neither surprise nor any sense that the institution recognized that the tradition which it claimed to represent was passing it by. The Board chose music directors who would be certain not to wake up the subscribers, and the orchestra was facing the possibility of its audience literally dying off, while it sunk into cultural irrelevancy. For anyone who cared about the culture legacy of the great New Yorker Leonard Bernstein, it was both sad and infuriating.

So the appointment of Alan Gilbert as the new music director has been both overdue and welcome. He has earned enormous goodwill simply by taking the stage, and he is also truly earning respect again for the Philharmonic, rapidly and dramatically. Truly, the task is not daunting, it merely requires recognition of what the tradition of classical music is. The audiences and, I believe, the orchestra have been yearning for it. Gilbert is not going to remake the Philharmonic, he’s going to restore it to the place it once deservedly held, that of an great and important orchestra.

Much has been made of the televised inaugural concert, and it was solid if not spectacular. What was spectacular was the program; a brand new work from Magnus Lindberg, 20th century music from Messiaen and the Symphonie Fantastique, an accepted classic but off the well-beaten Germanic path. Gilbert didn’t offer any extraordinary new ideas, but rather led well-played, thought-through performances of worthwhile music. Respect, in other words, and invaluable.

It is this simple acceptance of the constantly developing tradition of classical music which makes all the difference. This season’s concerts are filled with familiar material; Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, music which belongs on the program of any serious orchestra. It also features a highly anticipated Stravinsky festival led by Valery Gergiev and a concert performance of Ligeti’s “Le Grande Macabre,” two of the most important and exciting musical events for the season in New York. It is this mix of the older, the old, the recent and the new which matters and which Gilbert is making possible.

The final proof, though, is in the playing, and the qualities which make Gilbert important to the Philharmonic, and thus which make the orchestra matter, were on display in a recent concert of music from Beethoven, Bernstein and Falla. That list of names may seem odd, but they are all part of the same tradition, a fact which requires no further argument. It was a program for Gilbert, the musician, to offer the familiar in the context of this new flavor, the idea that at times the unexpected will be coming. His Beethoven, the great “Egmont” overture and the “Piano Concerto No. 3,” with Emanuel Ax, is excellent. “Egmont” was exciting and taut, kept under controlled tension until the the proper moments of power where it threatened to burst the seams, and the brought to the simple, satisfying beauty of its cadence with the dignity and poise that are essential to Beethoven. The concerto was rhythmically solid, passionate and lucid, the orchestra an intuitive partner for Ax’s precise, transparent playing and lyrical touch. Again, the balance of power, precision and dignity among conductor, soloist and musicians was superb. The music was vital, in the moment, and important for all the players and so important for the audience.

After the icy, razor sharp precision of Maazel’s sound, it’s amazing to hear how vastly and quickly Gilbert has transformed the orchestra. His sound is warm, enveloping and very big, too big at times for Avery Fisher Hall. Since I first saw the conductor nine years ago, he has stoked a powerful fire, and he conveys it through sound. He seems set on a war against the tight, flat acoustic of the hall and it doesn’t seem possible for him to win, though I do wish him well. It does add an exciting edge to the music making. His choice to perform the “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story” was extremely welcome. This is simply great music, not only a great pleasure to hear but also great American music, a cosmopolitan, gay, New York Jew writing the sounds of urban Hispanics, there’s not much that’s more patriotic. Since this is Bernstein’s music, it’s the Philharmonic’s as well, it’s part of their tradition. Not every classical musician grows up with these sounds, and they are not quite intuitive yet for Gilbert; phrases which should be sharp were slightly mushy, and the rhythmic swagger born of confidence in the idiom was missing, but the drive and rousing, invigorating sincerity were fully there. The final piece, a suite from Falla’s “Three-Cornered Hat” ballet, was full of color, vitality and a sense of pleasure in the music-making. With the promise of an expanded tradition, not every program need break new ground, but in that context a program which features excellent music-making of excellent pieces of music is a pleasure in itself and an exciting appetizer to the possibilities of this great tradition. Respect.

Music For The Masses

How new is new, how old is old? When does the new become the old, and can something be permanently new, or permanently renewed? The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble is organized to play ‘new music,’ which generally means music from after Word War II, leavened with L’Histoire du Soldat here and Appalachian Spring there. A lot of the repertoire is accepted, familiar, even institutionalized – the GVSUNME fine recording of “Music For 18 Musicians” is an interesting case of excitement in hearing a student ensemble play this powerful, collaborative music balanced with the chagrin of realizing that this touchstone revolutionary work is now a part of the academy. That’s not a bad thing, it just means it’s time to make more new music.

The GVSUNME doing just that on their second release, available digitally on the 27th and as a two-CD set on November 17th, of music which, although forty-five years old, is eternally new, and which has also been remade as part of the project, “In C Remixed.” The album is made up of eighteen remixes, by sixteen artists, of the ensembles new recording of Terry Riley’s In C, which brings up the rear as the last track on the last disk. It’s one of the most interesting releases of the year and is packed full of music; this is truly a ‘various artists’ type collection and although the original material is the same for all involved, the remixes run the gamut from the ordinary to the extraordinary, both in terms of quality and conception. There is something in the recording to recommend it to everyone.

Riley’s piece produces good music and is also one of the most important compositional works of the past fifty years or more. More than most pieces, it is a set of instructions, but while generally compositions set out a sequence of events which occur across a well-defined duration and in specific order and coordination, and that come to an end when all the musicians reach their final bar, In C allows the musicians to determine the overall duration of the piece and the point and manner in which it will start and end. The musicians also determine such factors as tempo, dynamics, overall density of sound and even the composition of the ensemble. The actual music is made up of fifty-three shorts phrases, played in order, with each musician deciding for themselves how many times to repeat each phrase. Riley also offers guidelines on how to shape the overall piece and on how the musicians should listen to each other, but that’s it. The music is not difficult, any intermediate level amateur musician could play it.

These qualities make the work important for more than just the music. The context of the piece is that this is a guide to communal music making, available to anyone – the score and instructions are available to all online – and that any interested group of people with instruments can gather together and perform, amateur and professional alike, without anything other than desire and ad hoc organization. It’s an avant-garde piece that completely ignores centuries of music-making hierarchy, including that of the academic and professional avant-garde of its era, and brings revolutionary ideas about musical form directly, simply, to the masses. It elides that line between the experimental and the accessible that musicians rarely are able even to draw. Aesthetically, it is a complex question asked in response to the wall drawings and paintings of Sol Lewitt, whose own avant-garde work was more of what a composer makes than a painter; Lewitt didn’t draw on walls himself, instead he made sets of instructions for others to execute in order to produce the work (the instructions are also the titles of the pieces) the only difference from music being that Lewitt’s results were for the eye, not the ear. Riley and Lewitt each made pieces that provided for freedom and expression within a set structure, pieces that would never be exactly alike in each performance/production, while always being identifiable, and the work of both artists is gorgeous and fun.

The GVSUNME performance of In C on the album is good (I don’t know of a bad performance, and it’s hard to imagine one) and it is a bit darker and more intense than other recordings available (Riley’s own original, thus classic, recording is still in print, and there are excellent and individual ones from the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Paul Hilliard leading an ensemble featuring voices, and an exceptionally wonderful and unique one from the Shanghai Film Orchestra. That recording has a real sense of discovery, of professional musicians finding that they can make their own music like they used to, and is full of fresh joy and excitement, as well as the fascinating timbres of Chinese instruments). It’s the remixes that the album is all about, though. All of them are skillfully made and they fall into two general categories, one more fruitful than the other. There are remixes that take the material from the recording and put it into clear song form, they aspire to dance music, funk and rock. The other remixes mine some specific aspect of the recording and use that material in an expansive way. While most of the music is well-made, and there’s enough in here to please and excite just about everyone, the former approach to the remixing works against the nature of In C, while the latter responds to it and extends that nature.

Since In C is about eliminating most structure, leaving only listening and cooperation, it’s a little odd for remixes to lay down the rigid, mechanical beats of electronic rhythms, but that’s what Jack Dangers, Mason Bates, Dennis DeSantis and a few others have done. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of such limits and as a practical approach it takes a piece which could, theoretically, be played without end and puts it into a well-defined structure and duration for practical recording and listening. The general novelty of hearing this transformation of the avant-garde into pop has a lot of charm, and most of it endures through repeated listening. Two remixes don’t offer much after the initial impression, though, those from DJ Spooky and Kleerup. Once past the intrigue of hearing In C made into rock and hip-hop, comes the realization that their rock and hip-hop are ordinary, predictable and too long. On a surprising album, they are expected quantities. The other dance-style remixes are made with great skill and inventiveness in the details. In his ‘Bints Mix,’ Michael Lowenstern uses a timbre and phrase right out of the soundtrack to Blade Runner and the meeting of Terry Riley and Vangelis in the minds’ ear, mediated through the remix project, is a pleasure. The two from Dangers are complimentary versions, the first solid and straight forward, the second featuring a horror-movie type palette, a touch of Goblin in the concept, and it sounds great. These approaches don’t just remix the recording but put Riley’s ideas together with others in a pop music context which makes it all much more interesting. It also keeps the remixes, with their strict sense of song-form and use of measure to measure time signatures (there are none in Riley’s piece), from denaturing the original material.

The non-dance approach is more imaginative, more difficult to pull off and more rewarding. There’s a startling variety of ideas, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, but they all break the original down then build it up in a completely new way. On a range of ambition and imagination, the starting point is Daniel Bernard Roumain’s ‘Zachary’s Dream,’ where the mix focuses on individual instrumental fragments, building them into a very different ensemble piece, which ultimately serves as a background for a solo turn by the violinist. The ambition is in the details, but the damper is the indulgent personality. Other remixes do similar things but with much more satisfying results. Glenn Kotche’s ‘Smooth’ emphasizes rhythm, turning the work into a live percussion ensemble piece, while the remixes from Zoe Keating, ‘Zinc,’ and Nico Muhly, ‘In C With Canons & Bass,’ isolate sounds and timbres, change the original sense of the passing of time into exactly what each musician seeks, then create entirely different pieces which still sound identifiably like the original. Each is beautiful in ways which follow the musicians’ styles; Keating adds her cello and uses layers to build a piece which is at once delicate, driving and powerful, and Muhly’s work has ravishing sounds and a contemplative, quizzical attitude.

There’s a glitchy mix from R. Luke DuBois, a weird, abstract soundscape from Michael Karlsson and Rob Stephenson, and an ominous, obsessive and intriguing one from Todd Reynolds which fascinates more with each hearing. ‘Counting in C’ from Jad Abumrad turns the work into a modernist, slightly abstract children’s composition, literally melding the audio of a mother teaching a child with a dignified pulse from the music – it’s got the best sense of humor on the album. At the most furthest end, and most successful, are two extremely creative, abstract remixes from Phil Kline and David Lang, each very different and each extraordinary. These are complete recontextualizations and transformations of the music. Kline’s ‘In Cognito’ processes the sound of the tracks into a shimmering, pulsing mass, set in the distance, then draws out particular woodwind and chiming sounds which he mixes against recorded bird song. It’s gorgeous and compelling, and even though it belongs to the same way of thinking as Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus and the extraordinary “Evan Parker With Birds (For Steve Lacy)“, it’s entirely undefinable. Lang’s concept is truly unique. In his ‘simple mix,’ he treats the original recording as a whole, physical object, bending and warping the sound into a queasy mass. It’s a culmination of two of his most intriguing techniques as a composer, the making of great masses of sound and the conception of rhythm and tempo as inconsistent, elastic quantities. It won’t please everyone, but it will be deeply fascinating to many.

Fundamentally, the eternal newness of In C meets the current newness of remixing, and remixing itself is literally a way to make something that exists into something new. Remixing is also part of the new democratization of music-making in that the tools are available to anyone with a computer, and In C is about democratic music-making among any and all who can play an instrument. Conceptually, each lies at a different end of the spectrum, and they meet in this record at a point of constructive tension, where the autocratic choices the remixer makes refashions the open-source culture of the original piece. The idea, the means and the source piece present a mass of intoxicating possibilities that set the mind to racing, and so the dance mixes eschew the most daring and iconoclastic possibilities. They conflate the mass with the common and overlook the brilliance of In C, which is that it is available to the mass yet is enduringly uncommon. Still, they a mostly well-made and a pleasure to hear. The other remixes are deeply personal and idiosyncratic, unselfconsciously uncommon and iconoclastic, and they are mostly excellent and even astoundingly brilliant. This is an important release, full of quality music-making and with the style and knowledge of contemporary culture to spread the most positive and exciting aspects of the avant-garde to a mass of new listeners. I would offer the suggestion and encourage the GVSUNME and Innova to release the tracks to everyone and let that mass of listeners try their own hands at remixing In C. There are sure to be many interesting and worthwhile takes on the music, and it would fulfill the inherent promise of the piece, that this is music and art for the masses.

Slow And Unsteady

then . . .

Break it down to its fundamental components, and music-making is a combination of two things, style and idea. The idea is the content, the style is the package. Bach, for example, wrote keyboard suites in both French and English styles which each have identifying characteristics. A contemporary example of this is the contents of The Dance Music Manual, a book which breaks downs the identifying features of a seemingly infinitely gradated array of styles.

The balance between styles and ideas is key, as style alone inevitably becomes solipsistic nihilism, and ideas without style have no means to communicate themselves. This is a balance that Tortoise, as single-handed inventors of a style, have had to navigate. They’ve done so with splendid success but also increasing difficulty. It’s a cliché that a band’s earlier work is the best, but one that is true enough in some instances, and in this case it’s descriptive and appropriate.

The new Tortoise release is “Beacons of Ancestorship,” their eighth full album (not including singles, compilations and remixes) since 1994, and it’s produced by the core group of multi-instrumentalists Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker. Musically, it’s skillful and polished, with intriguing moments and fascinating details. It’s an assured display of the style that makes Tortoise an excellent and important ensemble. Unfortunately, it’s only a display of style, a kind of demonstration what the idea of “Tortoise” without any effective musical ideas and it makes for a deeply disappointing experience. Tortoise used to play music, and now they craft it. The craftsmanship is exquisite; shapely, solid, skillful and subtle, but listening to the results is like looking at a diagram of a beautiful mechanical object, like a pocket-watch, rather than enjoying the real pleasure of feeling its weight and smoothness in the hand, watching the hands turn hypnotically to the unerringly satisfying chink of the mechanism. The watch has substance and purpose, and is a joy to see in action, while the diagram is a neatly executed set of lines and shapes, technically interesting and lifeless.

Something has happened to the band. Their mastery of styles and excellent musicianship used to be put in the service of making records that were fascinating to the ear, the head and the feet. Although their playing had identifiable elements of myriad genres and sub-genres, they were not merely dropping references to other music and bands in some kind of overly clever post-modern pastiche; they were creating fluid, complex original music, a synthesis of styles out of which burst Tortoise. Their run of records from the eponymous debut to “Standards” shows a development and expansion of ideas and great musical taste. It’s a real feat to produce instrumental pop music that sounds both familiar and unexpected, and the highest praise to say that no matter how many times one listens to these records they continually surprise, especially the great “TNT.”

Then something happened, and that’s a mystery. The 2006 collaboration with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “The Brave And The Bold,” was a failure. The strangely popular Will Oldham is a limited and expressionless musician (or perhaps he deliberately cultivates an affectless style, with the same results), and his presence is like a ball and chain strapped to an athlete’s ankle; he weighs down the album. Tortoise’s arrangements try and bring new life to the music, while Oldham, lifeless, retards any and all possibilities. There is some interesting tension between the sound of the band trying to move in a direction, any direction, while the singer refuses to go along, but listening to the record is a frustrating and unpleasant experience. In context with their previous release, “It’s All Around You,” which sounds like the record of a band creating their own version of what they think ‘Tortoise’ sounds like, it appeared something worrisome was going on, a dissipation of ideas for which the imagined cure was self-referentiality. This trend is now cemented with the weak “Beacons of Ancestorship.” Style as a means to an end has been replaced with style as the end itself, and the tunes run along as an array of samples, a self-conscious exercise in demonstrating what the musicians can do. The effect is of demonstrating the ideas they have lost. There is a lot going on in the tracks, but something vital missing from the record as a whole; most of the music sounds like music-minus-one, capably crafted backing tracks in search of an idea. The opening ‘High Class Slim Came Floatin’ In’ starts promisingly, with a strong and supple beat and heavy funk bass line, but instead of adding a coherent layer onto this vamp the tune moves promiscuously to a dub style that manages to be both stiff and weak. That’s an unfortunate feature of the record, a real lack of rhythmic imagination and vitality from a band that used to excel in that. Yes, the new bass line is a variation on the initial one, but that demonstrates only cleverness, not intelligence.

While nothing else goes as wrong as that track, nothing really goes right either. ‘Penumbra’ tosses out the kind of quasi-cheesy pop riff that the band has been so good at taking apart and transforming . . . but then one realizes that they actually mean it. ‘The Fall of The Seven Diamonds Plus One’ is post-Morricone cliché and gives the disturbing impression that Tortoise is unaware that this is also a post-”The Big Gundown” era. It’s also, frankly, dull, sluggish music, a placeholder for the finished theme for whatever Western movie the music is imagining. The closing track, ‘Charteroak Foundation,’ is a précis of the sad state that Tortoise has developed into; stiff and dull rhythm, a riff that seems both unfinished and ill-considered, and a weak, unimaginative harmonic accompaniment to . . . nothing, actually. Tortoise has become their own cover band, and that’s a musical cul-de-sac they don’t seem to deserve, but seem also to be striving to earn.

now . . .

Arts Education

Let me be a little more didactic than usual: as individuals and as a society, we can do a hell of a lot to prepare ourselves to deal with the world, other people, ideas and problems if we bothered to put a little money into arts education, especially music.  Not every child taking music lessons is going to turn out to be a creative, or even professional, musician.  But every person who applies themselves to the study of music is going to learn a sense of discipline, abstract thought, structured problem-solving and the skill and patience to listen to others, and this happens for any kid who sits in a music class and sings songs with all their friends – they don’t even have to join the choir.

And in this country, by singing songs they’ll learn a hell of a lot about what America really is and can be.  I have pointed out in the past how music expresses historical truths about America which are ignored in public/media discussions.  And this revelation, “Whose Country?“, from Andrew Sullivan offers proof of something else, that ignoring the music of America condemns one to ignorance of America itself.  Studying and writing about politics, regardless of the prestige of the degree or the accepted media position of the publication, seems in practice to depend on a theoretical notion of behavior, culture and values which has nothing to do with how Americans actual behave, what they value and especially what American culture is.  That’s how a relative late-comer like Pat Buchanan can think that America is a culture of white people and white ownership, which is as a matter of fact completely wrong.  Except in politics.  Culture is about how people live and eat and sweat and fuck and worship and dream, it’s the blues and jazz and classical and rock and murder ballads and dance tunes.  Sullivan has discovered a bit of the truth, and it seems music helped him along.  That’s great, shame it took so long.

Dancing About Architecture

The Composer Portraits concerts for this season began Saturday night at Miller Theater, with percussionist Steven Schick performing as well as conducting the International Contemporary Ensemble in music of composer Iannis Xenakis. Performances of this music are rare enough, and therefore exceptional, and this concert was exceptionally well presented.

Xenakis was a specialist’s specialist; in the rarified world of cutting-edge classical music of the post-war 20th century, he is reflexively thought of as an avant-gardist but was really a rigorous, disciplined experimentalist, working very much in the tradition of classical music while at the same time extending its possibilities. Just as much a resistance fighter and an architect as a composer, he was concerned with exact and probabilistic structures, electronic music and musical drama. The Portraits concert was an aesthetic extension of last year’s fabulous production of his opera, Oresteia, offering a dramatic vocal link to that performance along with a collection of chamber music, including one piece from his last years which so far has not been recorded.

Schick is a masterful musician, and has already produced an excellent collection of Xenakis’ important works for percussion. He opened the concert with a fluid, loping performance of Psappha for solo percussionist. The score allows the musician to choose the instruments used in each performance, and Schick favored a stark, brittle palette, which emphasized crispness of attack and a disciplined understanding of the rhythms of the piece. Music like this can seem stiff and even arbitrary, but Schick’s command and understanding of the score are deep, and his intensity of expression was yoked to an absolute comfort with the rhythms of the piece, which flowed through time with a supple, horizontal feel. There are passages which mimic antiphony, with different timbres stating an idea, to which others respond, and Schick played these so musically that the call and response seemed as natural as it would in Gabrieli. Under his hands and foot, the music swung.

After this invigorating beginning, Schick led ICE with the baton and, on the final O-Mega, played and conducted with his mallets. This is challenging music not only to hear but to play, and performances and recordings are still infrequent. The music lies at the extreme end of the repertory, so there is frequently a sense in performances that the musicians are still finding their way to the point where the music becomes intuitive. The language is transparent and clearly defined, but also so different and new that instinctive ways of approaching phrases and chords do not apply – although Xenakis does use kind of phrases that are familiar from Messiaen, ones that seem a bit awkward but on completion reveal an incontrovertible logic. ICE played this music with complete assurance and understanding, there was never once the sense that the language and sound where anything but the most natural way to make music. The experience was of hearing the composer’s expression with no intervening obstacles, and with this the ear and mind adapt quickly to the Xenakis’s ideas and means, which are fascinating and exciting.

Xenakis logically extended the accumulation of ideas and possibilities in classical music, but did so by seemingly skipping intermediate steps and presenting a futuristic idea, whole. Starting with Varése’s liberation of sound and timbre from conventional structures, Xenakis created new possibilities by working with essentially the most basic materials, placing sound in time. His music is about making objects, and the development of the pieces through the one dimension in which they exist, time, is about turning the object through the course of the piece so that all its features may be displayed. Once the display is completed, the piece ends. There is a strong ritualistic quality to this, which is consciously cultivated. His sound is solid, astringent and brittle, creating the visual impression of an ancient metallic object, colored by a patina of weathering and rust, extending varied, sharp branches from a central core.

The objects are mysterious and compelling, like all great music. The two quasi-concertos on the program, Échange for bass clarinet – Joshua Rubin – and ensemble, and Palimpsest for piano – Cory Smythe – and ensemble, express opposing arguments for the concerto idea. The former piece has the soloist and musicians literally passing tones and pitches back and forth and around the ensemble, an exercise in cooperation, while in the latter the music the piano plays is attacked and overwhelmed by imitative and mocking versions of it in the ensemble, and the antagonistic back and forth is constant with the opposing forces rewriting each other’s material. Xenakis’s means are timbrel extension, rhythmic complexity, extended experimental harmonies and dynamics; his music can be loud in an exciting way. In Échange, ICE not only played the microtonal (the musician’s playing a little bit sharp or flat) harmonies with awesome precision, but played each of the multiple repetitions with the same altered pitches, a feat that would be profoundly bravura if they hadn’t made it sound so easy. Soprano Tony Arnold was the soloist for Akanthos, another exploration of timbre vis-a-vis the ensemble, with the vocalizations, including tongue clicks and the sounds of breathing, elided with different instruments. There is an inherent dramatic theatricality to this work, as with most of Xenakis’ vocal writing, an abstract yet focussed exploration of ancient ideas of ritual, of a narrative poem being sung. With sounds replacing words, we are left to fill in the details of the structure on display.

The concert concluded with the large scale piece Thallein, an intensely fulsome work with orchestral qualities. Here Xenakis presents rich sound ideas which evolve into following ones, the material is abstract but the logical progression is clear. O-Mega, the final work, is a recent piece (1997) and is a fascinating combination of dirge and elegiac fanfare. Shick was flanked on stage by the strings, while the woodwinds and brass were arrayed at opposite sides of the theater. The music is powerful and incantatory and there is the sense of overseeing an ancient ritual, as the groups took their turns offering complimentary gestures, all directed by an assured leader wielding the most ancient of man-made instruments, sticks. It emphasized not only the exceptional quality of the performances, but also the well-made program which, in one evening, presented a clear and comprehensive portrait of one of the most unique and compelling composers of the 20th century in performances which refreshingly assumed the importance, excitement and naturalness of the music.

The Composer Portraits series continues November 7 with a program of another highly individual and exciting figure, Galina Ustvolskaya, followed by Portraits of Ralph Shapey and Kaija Saariaho on the 17th and 22nd.

Across 110th Street

The performing arts season in New York City perpetually overflows with abundance. From September through May there is not just something for almost everyone each night (early music is still thinly represented), but multiple somethings for everyone. How to choose which play, which musical, which dance performance, which jazz gig and set, which opera, which orchestra, which chamber music concert? For audiences with a love for but non-professional knowledge of genres and styles, a subscription is a welcome choice. Whether by theme, era, even night, one can buy a pre-programmed set of quality performances and skip some frustrating decision making and calendar wrangling. There are many fine subscription series to choose from, ranging from mini-festivals to explorations of toys in music, but this season the series which stands out as exceptionally fine from all the others is the Composers Portraits concerts presented by Miller Theater.

As the name indicates, these are concerts each of which is dedicated to the music of one single composer. It’s a programming concept that is actually at odds with the usual methods, which mix music of various composers and various eras into one concert. This concentrated focus is one of the draws of the series for the dedicated and the curious alike. A devotee of Iannis Xenakis, subject of the first concert in the series, this Saturday at 8PM, will be thrilled by an entire evening of the music, and a curious listener, seeking to experience more Xenakis will get a rewarding sample, without distractions from unrelated music. It’s a way of producing concerts that is attractive to non-classical audiences who are used to seeing performances of individual musicians and bands or buying CDs of the music from one particular source. It’s a draw that is simultaneously open, surprising and familiar.

Melissa Smey, the new Director of Miller Theater, sees the programming that way, and feels that it works. In a recent interview, she displays an infectious and exciting commitment to modern and contemporary classical music and a refreshing sense of optimism that the music will be attractive to a broad range of listeners. The Portraits series took shape under the previous Director, George Steele (now at City Opera), and this season’s program was mostly assembled by Steele, with Smey adding the concert and residency of Helmut Lachenmann. But the new Director is as committed to the presentation of the best music being made. She is already soliciting suggestions for Portraits concerts in coming seasons, and is seeking the right balance between audience interest and musical rigor.

Smey points out that by focussing on single composers in each concert, it’s possible to program more complex or larger-scaled works that aren’t usually heard in concert; the production resources are committed to the Portrait as a whole, the ambition is built in. “It’s about the composer, front and center” she says, “my sense is that’s a pretty unique approach.” It’s the difference between selling the soloist or the ensemble and the works themselves and the result is that rather than presenting musicians and the music they play, the concerts present composers and a sampling of their body of work. It’s a different idea of making a program and building a series, one that’s radically simple and profoundly ambitious.

This sense of ambition comes from the chosen composers, ones who have distinctive individual voices, the highest degree of technical accomplishment and are uncompromisingly aesthetically, emotionally and intellectually expressive. They have important things to say, important questions to ask. The overall programming is resolutely non-dogmatic as well and these qualities make the series as exciting and invigoratingly challenging beyond anything on the concert scene this season. Through the Composers Portraits, Miller Theater presents itself as a unique quantity, something known for a rigorous and well-judged sense of exploration and surprise, for presenting music played with complete artistic dedication, and for being able to deliver the unexpected. Those who are attracted to the stellar line-up of music by Xenakis, Lachenmann, Saariaho and Currier will be satisfied, and those who are curious, interested listeners will at least find their curiosity satisfied; whether or not they are personally attracted to the music, they will feel that they have heard the best examples of it. That is an important achievement.

SInce the programming is based around post-World War II music, there’s also tremendous variety built in. That period provided an extraordinary fragmentation of the musical tradition which is still with us today. It was a welcome development, giving audiences an astonishing breadth of variety of ideas and methods and an artistic commitment to express them to the highest degree of ability. The series has been going strong for over ten years and is still building a list of composers yet to be presented. There are surprises even for aficionados; the concert of November 7 is dedicated to the thrillingly powerful music of Galina Ustvolskaya who’s work is rarely heard, as well as an orchestrated version of Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music.” This is different than the trio version Reed has been touring with recently, it’s a version for an amplified sixteen piece ensemble created by saxophonist Ulrich Krieger. It’s a fascinating wild card, a piece of music which, originally, has enough cultural baggage to confuse the musical quality, but transformed in a way that presents the composer’s ideas, for good or ill. It fits; the concentration on a single composer, an individual and outlying work and an appeal to the committed, the curious and the puzzled alike. Smey is also interested in bring the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble to Miller, which she feels is the ideal venue for the group; experimental, improvised, cutting-edge, non-jazz and non-classical and centered around a single individual’s musical ideas, it’s the kind of concentrated, unique and surprising music that the Composers Portrait series specialized in.

This balance of the known and the unexpected is unique on the New York City performance scene. Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall present ideas about the history of the mainstream tradition of the high Western performing arts, BAM and St. Annes Warehouse offer works that are parallel to that axis, but are still within the safe confines of established traditions; they rarely surprise, and even less frequently provoke, shock or upset. They work with the necessary evils of selling more than just tickets; with their galas, gift shops and cafés, they are selling are more complex blend of experience and social status, which they have to do. Although she is interested in developing internet broadcasting and streaming audio on their website, Miller Theater itself is refreshingly no-frills; just a theater literally steps from the 116th Street subway station. One goes in, presents a ticket, sits down and prepares to be surprised.

Imaginary Cities

There are real places, imaginary places, and places where our experience of reality is enhanced by how we imagine those places to have been, or to be. We tour those invisible cities of the mind by walking their actual streets and placing a layer of knowledge and imagination on top of the sights we see. We also move to places which spark the dreams we have for our lives, hoping to make a fantasy life into something real.

If we never make it to such places, or never succeed in them, we can still read about them and hear about them. New recordings from Sondre Lerche and Joe Henry sing us tales of places which are real and imaginary at the same time, Williamsburg and New Orleans. Superficially, there may seem to be a large gap in ambition between the two records, “Heartbeat Radio” and “Blood From Stars,” but the difference is in the personal direction the two musicians take – the results are comparably grand and wonderful.

Sondre Lerche is very much a first person singular musician, not only with everything sung from an “I,” but the sense that it’s actually him, not the singer playing characters in his songs. This makes it easy to accept how incredibly unfair he is, both to his peers and himself, with the opening track ‘Good Luck,’ which is five minutes and fifteen seconds of arguably the greatest pop music made since the start of the rock era; a sweetly muscular, soaringly grand song which builds in layers from shimmering guitars, a rolling Bo Diddley beat and a brilliant string section solo extending the end. On top is Lerche’s dry, clear tenor and his immensely appealing rueful good cheer. The song has everything one could ask for in great pop music; charm, wit, energy, a great beat, a great hook, a bridge that’s out of the ordinary enough to be pleasantly surprising and a real climax. It’s worth the price of the record alone.

It’s no criticism to point out that few will be humming the melody, though. Lerche is an excellent melodist, fitting his lyrics seamlessly and naturally to his tunes, and he can do this because he is an excellent singer, with range and solid pitch. While too many contemporary pop singers are extremely limited as singers, forcing their music into predictably short, clipped phrases and tightly compressed melodic ranges, Lerche can sing wide intervals and long phrases with ease and so can make melodies with a breadth and depth which are uncommon. A good singer should have no problem with the A-B-C#-D-A octave arpeggiation he opens with, but contemporary pop music is so dreary in part because there is so little of this open, generous vocal sunshine brightening the landscape.

After this spectacular opening, “Heatbeat Radio” satisfies. Lerche is a Norwegian transplanted to Williamsburg, a neighborhood which over the last decade has drawn young people from all over the country and the world seeking the comfort and excitement of a place where art, music and fashion are happening, where they will be understood by like-minded peers and dream great things. Call them Hipsters, but they are this generation’s version of the kids who used to head to Greenwich Village, or San Francisco. Williamsburg grows in their imaginations long before they ever face the reality of living there, and Lerche’s is a Williamsburg of the mind, where the girls are lithe and pretty and the boys are charming, sweet and mature in an age-appropriate way. He captures a joie-de-vivre and sense of human capability beyond those on display in “Bored To Death,” and a fundamental optimism which, though it’s at odds with the reality of development in the neighborhood, renews this dream with each song. The album is unswervingly good-natured but not simplistically sweet. There’s a rough sense of the narrative of a charmed, youthful life, but the last third of the record takes a subtle, darker turn. In the wonderful ‘I Guess It’s Gonna Rain Today,’ an understanding and acceptance of failure creeps in, and Lerche expresses a rueful self-awareness: “Oh, the fine line/between street-smartness/and a smart-ass. Oh, the skipping beats of confidence/and the drum-roll/that you thought you could play.” Not everyone who moves to Williamsburg to be in a band can actually play music, not every girl appreciates your charm, and accepting these means seeing there is reality to enjoy along with dreams. The songs which follow, ‘Almighty Moon,’ ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘Goodnight’ have an added sense of weight, toughness and maturity in contrast to the exuberance which preceded them and from which they developed. They bring the album to a completely satisfying close, consolidating the explosive dazzle of the first track into a fully realized emotional journey. “Heartbeat Radio” is not perfect; while it is full of great songs, music and details, not all the details are great – the pedestrian bass line of the witty ‘Like Lazenby’ threatens to pin the music to the ground, and the lyrics of ‘Words & Music’ alternate between fine metaphor and weak, elementary school rhymes. It doesn’t need to be perfect, though, when it’s enduringly joyful.

Williamsburg is not for everyone though, which is just a small loss. New Orleans is not for everyone either, and that is a tragedy. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is obvious enough, a government’s complete disregard for human beings who didn’t fit into their grandiloquently posturing, self-absorbed worldview, but at the core of it is the embrace or rejection of this very country. New Orleans, more than any other single point on the map and place in the imagination, is the essence of America. From it’s very first days, this country was populated by peoples of many cultures, languages and colors, here voluntarily or otherwise. Geographically, this country was first circumscribed then bridged by the Mississippi River, and New Orleans is the fecund mouth which birthed culture and commerce through it into America, a humid polyglot stew of English, Spanish, French, Catholicism, Voodoo, Blues, Jazz, whites, blacks and every color in between, standing as a rebuke to the fetishization of homogenization which those who came later to this country – the Protestant swaths swallowed up by the great plains and selfish, frightened demagogues like Pat Buchanan – anxiously cling to, dearly wishing to keep the map of this great and broad land niggardly small. Reject New Orleans, and one rejects America, while loving the city is as patriotic a thing as one can do.

Joe Henry loves New Orleans, and loves America. He’s made a musical career of describing the America of the imagination, putting together a blend of archaic, modern, rural and urban, white and black musical styles. At his best, he’s magnificent, and he seems to seek a sense of grandeur. Musically and lyrically he strives for archetypal metaphors and unified gestures that could stand as the paragon of American-roots music. It’s ambitious, and he has succeeded, especially with the fully-realized “Scar,” but he’s most often inconsistent, mixing powerful music with songs that don’t quite sustain the weight placed on them, which sound more constructed than played. “Blood From Stars” works completely, though, not only his best record since “Scar,” but a real personal masterpiece for Henry.

It’s a New Orleans record, intentionally or not, and stands as a companion to Allen Toussaint’s “The Bright Mississippi,” which Henry produced. That record is hampered by a self-conscious sense of trying to make a musical point, while this one is completely focussed around a musical core, and flows unerringly forward, like a raft heading down the big river. It’s New Orleans in the way it puts different ingredients together into a stew which comes out being it’s own dish. In the past Henry has gone from country to funk to rock to jazz on different tracks on an album, here each song is a mix of musics together, especially blues and rural funk, with touches of gospel, marches, jazz and rock. Henry carries this off through his songs and through the band he assembles, which includes Marc Ribot, David Piltch, Jay Bellerose and Levon Henry, with a wonderful cameo from Jason Moran opening and closing the album with the gorgeous ‘Light No Lamp When The Sun Comes Down’ (Henry has great taste in sidemen, previously employing Don Byron, Brad Mehldau and Ornette Coleman). The music lives and breaths, everything works together, the rhythms, harmonies and cadences seem ideal for each song and phrase and each song seems the ideal vehicle for Henry’s richly colored, warbley singing. He uses specific details which indicate his desire to make something clearly and powerfully American, his imagined America, but the details are just that; accessories which pull the whole outfit together, not arguments to make. The lyric “Of briar and roses” in ‘This Is My Favorite Cage’ points to a specific and important American tradition, but the song is Henry’s own creation, the detail merely conveys his context. Likewise the tango blues ‘Death To The Storm,’ which lays out Henry’s response to a real New Orleans musical tradition. As on previous records, he sprinkles samples in the background, and these bits of old-time music and Paul Robeson provide a sonic background for this imagined country. The record has a full, rich bottom and an insistent, serious tone, but Henry sounds liberated and light-hearted, even on the slow ballads, as if he’s found himself in a state of complete mastery of all the music he has worked to apprehend over the years, and this made his way to his true voice. This is nowhere more clear than on the incredible ‘All Blues Hail Mary,’ which begins with the greatest rural blues riff one is likely to ever hear, and maintains the blues feel and structure while eliding in enough gospel harmonies for the music to have the delicate tang of funk and fervor needed to match the lyrics: “All blues sing of love and death/and you as chances yet to take . . . All blues and grace by God/And I will have to learn the rest.” Henry’s disposition is darker than Lerche’s, the music much funkier and bluesier, but his sense of determination allows no despair. This is music which pushes mountains, tiny bit by tiny bit, until a country moves. [Watch/listen to a performance at KCRW here]

Beethoven, My Brother

We all have our madeleines.  This morning I sat in a waiting room, and the Beethoven Violin Concerto came over the radio.  Lost time came in search of me, a mass of moments revivified and occupying me equally and simultaneously.  The sensation was familiar in one important way, it was the feeling I have each time I hear this music, which is both the sensation of the moment and the recollection of that same, wonderful feeling from each previous time.  It is the sensation of knowing that Beethoven is my brother.

In my first go-round in Brooklyn, living in Fort Greene in the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, you might have found me some early weekday evenings at the bar of the Alibi Club, which, before the sun set nightly, was a comfortable, no-frills neighborhood place where one could sit quietly, chat and win a pot of cash by putting in your own money and answer for ‘Final Jeopardy.’  I remember one conversation I had with a frequent patron named Noel, about music.  We were talking appreciatively about what we loved, avant-garde jazz for me and classic album rock for him, but when I mentioned that I had been listening obsessively to George Szell’s Beethoven cycle – and I had been – we found ourselves conjoined in a love for Beethoven.  Not everyone loves, or is even interested in him, but he’s easy to love no matter what one’s musical taste or interest may be; we love our brothers, and Beethoven is one.

Pop songs tell us about experiences that we have had our would like to have, we can relate to and identify with the stories and the feelings and the personalities of the tellers/singers, whether we kissed a girl or loved and lost like Frank has.  Sometimes the songs are so good, so complex and enduring that they leave it to us to decided what exactly we are identifying with emotionally, which changes through time as we endure life.  Usually, though, unendurable teenage heartbreak turns into adult disappointment and ennui, and so the teenage songs no longer work and must be replaced by adult songs.  Classical music is different in that it doesn’t tell us very much at all, it instead appeals to totally abstract ideas of time and form.  It asks questions rather than offers answers, and so does not appeal to all, but its appeal is enduring since it’s always an intriguing, often beautiful mystery to solve.  We never actually find the solution, but there is marvelous pleasure in the process.

Classical music does offer personalities, but often these are both abstracted and idealized.  This is especially true in the Classical era, where the music of Mozart and Haydn is guided by their personalities, i.e. their taste and choices, but presents what they think about their own ideas, not themselves directly.  This changes with Beethoven who is so exceptional because he does both simultaneously; he doesn’t need to choose between telling us about himself and about what he thinks of his own abstract ideas.  To Beethoven, that’s an irrelevancy.  In the Violin Concerto, we hear what he thinks about sonata-allegro form, and how he likes to solve the puzzle of finding his way home after a long journey, and this is appealing and satisfying to those who find spirit and beauty in those questions (and they are full of such things).  We also hear Beethoven tell us about himself, not the abstract figure represented in Classical music but his real, Romantic self.  What he tells us in all his music, literally all, is this: I have suffered, and I have struggled, but I have also found joy.

That is something we all desire to hear and to be able to say ourselves at times in our life, and so Beethoven can appeal to everyone.  For other Romantic composers, we react as we would in making or rejecting friendships; how our personalities mix with the music is the key.  If the music is appealing it is because it becomes a friend, and like real friends we think and react in a variety of ways depending on who we are with, and our moods and the companionship we require.  Schumann, Schubert, the eccentric Berwald, the simple, mystical Bruckner, the aesthete Tchiakovsky, the enigmatic Sibelius are all my friends, but I don’t wish their company at all times.  The Stravinsky of ‘The Firebird,’ ‘Petrushka’ and ‘Le Sacre du Printemps‘ is my dazzling, eternally youthful and brilliant friend, while the late-Romantic Schoenberg is an acquaintance who shares few concerns with me, and Richard Strauss is an unpleasant fellow who seeks social circles that I find repulsive.  Gustav Mahler is the exhaustingly intimate friend with whom the discursive, fascinating conversation never ends.

Those are some of my friends, and they are my friends because I like them.  Beethoven is not my friend, however, and I don’t always like him.  He can infuriate me with his scorn, his pettiness, his arrogant and cruel moods – he’s not a person who, if I did not know, I would pursue a friendship with.  That doesn’t matter, though, because I do know him, and he knows me.  He’s my brother, and so I will always love him.

Fruit of the Musical Loom

Opera is not about length, volume, sets, costumes and Sturm und Drang. It’s not always about sex and death, it’s not always serious, and it can have a cast of only one. Opera is about drama, and drama can be compressed as well as grand. The form has its short stories as well as its novels, and the Remarkable Theater Brigade provided a refreshing reminder of all this in their semi-staged Opera Shorts program at Weill Recital Hall last Thursday.

The group presented ten short operas in a program that lasted a little over two hours, and these operas varied in length, subject and style amongst themselves. A few of them weren’t quite opera, but that was no detriment, and a few didn’t work, but the program was enjoyable and the best works demonstrated how good short opera can be.

The composers on the program were Christian McLeer, Artistic Director for the organization, Seymour Barab, Anne Dinsmore Phillips, Rob Voisey, Patrick Soluri, George Brunner, Ben Bierman and Tom Cipullo, with Barab and McLeer offering two works each. McLeer’s “Adrift” and “Fire” opened and closed the program, and were two of the best works, effectively showing what is possible in the short-form, both seriously and comically. In between there was an interesting, and probably unintentional, debate going on about opera and style, with the program see-sawing between truly operatic pieces and music that was more music theater. The difference was in the goal, with the theatrical works telling one tale, not necessarily pithily, and the operas describing some sort of transformation.

Barab’s two pieces, “Gallantry” and “Safari,” were theatrical and literally musical jokes, excerpts from what the composer describes as “a set of short, raunchy musicals under the title ‘In Questionable Taste.’” The joke in the first work, involving a double-booked hotel room, was far more innocent than the description would suggest, but the punch-line was good and the music had the succinct clarity and style of a silent movie accompaniment with the voices on the screen come to life. “Safari,” involving a scorpion’s sting in an inconvenient area of a man’s body, was raunchier, more tightly composed and much funnier, even though one can see the joke coming from a mile away. That the audience still busted out in involuntary laughter indicates how well Barab handled the musical humor, perhaps the most difficult of all compositional challenges. Also on the theatrical side was Bierman’s jazzy, vibrant “The Poem That Nobody Hears,” about a poet hanging out in the same college lounge, working on the same poem for thirty years, all in the goal of meeting coeds. Bierman crafted the lyrics and music to fit into clear song form, and did so very well. Theatrical pieces of music may be about one idea, but the best of them glide through different styles as they go along, and Bierman’s crowd-pleasing work was a pleasure from beginning to end.

A couple works had a shaky hold on the balance between theater and opera, and were unsuccessful for it. “Tempo Fuori Del Tempo,” with a libretto from Marilynn Scott Murphy set by Phillips, started with a strong, bluesy riff, and set the scene and the characters – an American woman and an Italian man who meet on a plane – well, but as the drama turned towards love, the musical and lyrical material was satisfied to settle on the repetition of cliches. This was a disappointment, as the careful elision of moods became mannerism, and the charismatic singers, Laura Pederson and Jamin Flabiano, could not keep the drama aloft. “Delete,” from composer Brunner with libretto by Deena Puffer, suffered from a disagreement between the music and text; the vocal line was self-consciously operatic, full of flourish for the coloratura Monica Harte, but the words were more prose than lyric, more suitable for theater than opera, and indecisive in whether their depiction of the experience of internet dating should be rueful or sentimental.

Of the works that were firmly opera, only one didn’t work, Voisey’s “Poppetjie.” The attempted tale was ideal as an operatic subject, a young girl whose fantasy life elides with reality. Voisey didn’t produce operatic music for the piece, however, as the relentless, Prokofiev-like eighth-note patterns and the monotonous lyrical cadences offered no real musical distinction between the characters and their internal states, which is the fundamental reason to make opera. In contrast, Tom Cipullo’s “Lucy” did just that, conveying what was essentially an internal conversation between a lonely elderly woman, an excellent Elizabeth Bell, and her imaginary visitor sung by Michael Anthony McGee. The drama was in the realization and acceptance of something unexpected, and the lyrical music supported each moment superbly well. This was an ideal example of short-form opera which, like a short story, can present a focussed idea while eschewing non-essential backstory and exposition. Patrick Soluri’s “Figaro’s Last Hangover” did the same to a comical extreme; Figaro Montague and Carmen Capulet, former lovers, meet by chance in a bar just as the news that a giant asteroid will strike Earth in ten minutes is announced. They reminisce, then fight like always, and part. The music is both operatic and ‘operatic,’ effectively using various past styles to lovingly mock operatic genres and characters. The text includes lines such as “an anonymous letter through our mutual friend, Wozzeck,” and a dazzling duo where each character lists the actual opera characters the other has had affairs with. Finally, McLeer opened the evening with a dramatic bang, an intense “Adrift,” with the two characters alone on the ocean after a shipwreck, reviewing the tale of how they got there, where they are now, and what their fate will be. It’s a compact, effective powerhouse which depicts a true internal journey. Chris Trakas, hilarious in “Safari,” sang terrifically as the deck hand. And at the very end, this same composer’s “Fire” answered the musical question of how George Antheil would have sounded in the stone-age. The two male, two female quartet, dressed as Flintstone characters, conveyed a pre-verbal libretto which followed a dramatic journey through group comity, conflict, disintegration and reconciliation, conveyed musically by an adaption of the theme from Jeopardy, some modern-primitive ragtime, a twelve-bar blues, counterpoint in the style of Bach, and a final choral tribute to rocks. It was really well-made, and a real treat.

Along with the generally fine singing, McLeer and Noby Ishida handled the piano accompaniment and music direction, joined on some of the works by the youthful and confident Vox4 Quartet, with some nice hammy turns from cellist Seth Woods.

“Thank you sir, may I have another?”

“The Met made the evening news.” Indeed it did, in the only way anything in the high arts could make the evening news, by becoming juicy gossip. The story is that the audience booed the opening night production of “Tosca.” Please note, they booed the production, not the singers or musicians.

The new Met director, Peter Gelb, is on the record as wanting to bring in new audiences to the opera house, and his means for doing so seem to be a combination of creating new productions of standard works and commissioning new operas. I am in complete sympathy with his means and goals, but fundamentally the results, as Alex Ross points out, need to be good. The boos had nothing to do with the quality of the performance, however, and so I’m actually glad they came.

I have not seen the production yet, but reliable critics have weighed in on the musical shortcomings, as well as those of the stage sets and direction. The tell is that the singers got the usual ovation, and that’s the problem Gelb, hopefully, is working to solve. He will ideally save opera from its fans.

Opera is sung drama, with music which tells us about the characters and the overall story. The characters sing because they can find no other way to express themselves, and the singing and music tell us about what is going on inside them, especially the things they themselves are unaware. The use of music gives opera a dimension no other medium has, not even film, in that the drama can run on separate, parallel tracks and still be together and mutually supportive in real time. The great example of this is the quartet from “Fidelio,” Mir ist so wunderbar, where the four characters privately sing about each other, and do so in simultaneous consort. Nothing else in human culture can express something so indescribably complex in a way that is immediately transparent and apprehensible.

Too many opera fans miss this drama, though, and think of opera as a collection of arias to be followed immediately by applause, not for the character or the music, but for the star diva/divo, “Brava Angela,” rather than “Brava Violetta.” Verdi, however, did not write arias to display a star, but to allow Violetta to reveal herself to us. When the experience of this dramatic characterization is so overwhelming that the audience must respond, then by all means, allow me to join in (there is a live recording of “Fidelio” which is so overpowering that the audience overwhelms the finale with deserved, passionate shouts and applause), but attending opera just to gush over a particular star does not indicate an actual appreciation of the form or the work. Same for accepting the most literal production and nothing else. By all means, again, boo a lousy production – I have – but also boo a lousy performance – I have – even if it’s by a star whose name is up there in lights.

I’m encouraged by the booing in this sense, that if Gelb manages to drive away the type of audience that sleeps or chats through most of the production, only to perk up for the obligatory applause after Vissi d’arte, then he will have made the Met culturally relevant by replacing them with audiences interested in the drama, and in what the production says about the drama. The idea that the drama is important should be implicit, but that’s rarely the case in the greatest hits parade of decrepit warhorses like “Tosca” which burdens most opera houses. I think the future is exciting for the Met, and they have already brought in new audiences with “Satyagraha” and “Doctor Atomic.” They should be able to keep that new audience, and gain more, by making the standard repertory something that matters, and the fact that it still exists means it does indeed matter. Treating it as such means that some productions will fail, but nothing ventured nothing gain. Bring us more things to boo, please, Mr. Gelb.