Must It Be?

My colleague Brian Wise wrote an article for WQXR today on one of my favourite films for this Oscar season, The King’s Speech, noting that—if it takes Best Picture—it will be the first winner since Platoon to feature classical music as an integral part of the soundtrack. Personally, I think the actual score for the film (by cutie French composer Alexandre Desplat who also scored Girl With a Pearl Earring, The Queen, Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Twilight Saga: New Moon) sings on its own, but there’s nothing so chilling and stirring as the stuttering Colin Firth finally making his eponymous oration with the beat of the Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th making a stiff-upper-lip, dirge-like march into the heart of the film’s climax. Wise covers the controversy surrounding the use of Beethoven in the score under the pretext that the Austrian composer was much loved and used by the Nazi party (as was Mozart, whose Clarinet Concerto factors into TKS). It is, granted, ironic; but not inappropriate. Happenstance read too far into by critics programmed to find such idiosyncrasies and blow them out of proportion. Had Wagner or Richard Strauss been used, now that would be another story.

The second movement of Beethoven’s 7th is a well-played dramatic gem. My biggest criticism with the film’s use of it would be that it is borderline overdone. But the problem is, every time it’s used, I feel like it’s just used so well. Beethoven, perhaps because of his faults and shortcomings, passion and rage, cuts into the heart of the human experience and does so in a hugely cinematic way. Moreover, that beginning rhythm of quarter and eighth notes so eloquently mirrors Colin Firth’s stammer. It’s no surprise that Geoffrey Rush’s character would have chosen that slowed-down version of a speech pattern to pipe into HRH’s ears.

The symphony, as a celebration—as the Grove Dictionary puts it—of the “symphonic ideal,” covers a spectrum of emotions that, prior to the “Eroica,” would have been parceled out between four separate orchestral works. To quote Grove, the Seventh “to create the impression of a psychological journey or growth process. In the course of this, something seems to arrive or triumph or transcend.” Not only that, but the Allegretto movement is a fugal piece that builds upon the same cluster of notes and rhythmic structure while still scaling an emotional summit. Perhaps its simplicity and gravity is what makes it a popular choice in soundtracks. It’s not as flashy or popular as the Fifth or Ninth, which works in its favour. Once you hear those first notes of the Fifth or the “An die freude” of the Ninth, forget about focusing what’s going on onscreen (unless it’s a performance of either aforementioned symphony).

There is, first and foremost, the classic from the Beethoven biopic Immortal Beloved (here it starts at 3:13). I love the full crescendo as Karl van Beethoven shoots himself and Gary Oldman’s Beethoven—as if on some cosmic connection to his son—winces in pain. It’s a low point for both men and the music enhances it without overpowering:

One of my other fav films, Tarsem’s The Fall, uses it for a vivid and dream-like trailer. The film itself is a ballet and the trailer is choreographed impeccably to those pulsating eighth and quarter notes. I love the part where the little girl says “You always stop at the same part, when it’s very beautiful,” it’s almost a sly little metaphor for the breaks in the score for dialogue. In just a little over 2 minutes, The Fall’s trailer matches the horror, beauty and imagination of the Allegretto, note-for-note.

Another classic is Mr. Holland’s Opus, which I remember made me and all of the other band geeks cry in 7th grade. When you start learning about irony, this film hits home—especially in the scene (here at 1:45 in) where Richard Dreyfuss explains to his music students about Beethoven being deaf (after learning about his own son’s deafness). I haven’t watched this movie in over a decade, but in rewatching this clip just now, I forgot how misty I got when Dreyfuss chokes out: “Well, Beethoven wasn’t born deaf.” Oh, the pathos… Also: Love how it goes right from Beethoven into John Lennon. Now there’s a connection.

On a grander scale of tragedy, and for those whose tastes veer into science fiction, the recent flick Knowing pairs the Allegretto with people fleeing THE END OF THE WORLD. And Nicolas Cage driving. The quietness of the movement is a great overlay to the chaos of the impending Armageddon.

This is, of course, a small handful from what can be grabbed off YouTube. The 80s biopic Frances (starring Jessica Lange) is a famous example of use, as was the 1974 sci-fi flick Zardoz, which featured a post-Bond Sean Connery. The Seventh has had play in Wes Anderson films (The Darjeeling Limited), an episode of Seinfeld (“The Maestro”) and even a Karloff-Lugosi classic, The Black Cat which, produced in 1934, is most likely the first use of the work (heard below at 7:35). The central fugal theme of the Allegretto is even mimicked in the organ music played during the satanic ritual.

Hard to think that can be bested. But, over nearly 75 years, the competition has been fierce.

Super Size Me

I know that ads these days are targeted to my search history and the like, but in looking up the embed code for Super Size Me for this post, this contrast is all too apt. Check out that Metropolitan Opera ad next to Morgan Spurlock chomping down on Big Macs.

I went to New York City Ballet this afternoon for a late 20th- early 21st-century quadruple bill of works by Benjamin Millepied/David Lang, Christopher Wheeldon/Arvo Pärt, and Peter Martins with both Esa Pekka Salonen and John Adams. I’d actually seen all but the Millepied/Lang, which was my main impetus for going and, sadly yet thankfully it was the first piece. I’ve seen chamber works done by NYCB before, and in the State/Koch Theater—look no further than Jerome Robbins’s Goldberg Variations (which, admittedly, has a full cast dancing to solo piano). However, I don’t think the sheer size of the State/Koch has truly hit me until today as I struggled to surrender to the masterful music and movement that formed Millepied and Lang’s Plainspoken.

Photo: Paul Kolnik

True, part of it is Fourth Ring. It’s always a zoo and it’s always a mixed bag on a matinee—especially when you’re perched at the top in row M. On some days such as today, sitting up there is akin to spending a couple of hours in Target. People have conversations at normal volume, kids fidget and get up for walks, cell phones go off…one enterprising parent decided Target was too good and went full Wal Mart with some McDonald’s that she fed to her little one during Wheeldon’s After the Rain. There was just no enjoying nothing up there. I left after the first intermission.

But it’s not just the people’s fault. When your theater seats 2,586 like the Koch or 3,995 like the Met, there is going to be a reasonably high proportion of talkers, munchers and cell phonies. And chances are high that they’re going to be cashing in on the $20 cheap seats. And yes, in those rare sell-out performances (like NYCB’s well-timed run of Swan Lake this month), there is a good financial incentive to have a house as large as the Koch, but does it really balance out? How many house employees does it take for each performance? In the interest of full disclosure and a point of fact, I used to work for the Koch when it was still the New York State Theater, as an usher in fact. In the early 2000s, we averaged about $35 a performance and there were probably 30 or so ushers working each night (though fewer after the seating rush). For just the ushers that’s about $1050 a performance, or 52.5 seats in fourth ring. Now that’s sort of a pittance next to 2,586, but that’s also just the ushers—some of the lowest men and women on the theatre’s totem pole. I would be really interested to learn how a sold out performance correlates into a company’s finances. Looking on the other end of the spectrum, the average ticket at (Le) Poisson Rouge is about $15 to $20 and, while the club holds a comparatively paltry 800 people (and not, I imagine, all in the main room at once) I would imagine that they have proportionally far fewer operating costs than the Koch. And the fewer people, the more mellow a setting. Even at a place like LPR, where there’s a buzzing bar and table service for crunchy comestibles like nachos, the atmosphere is still relatively more quiet and focused on the art at hand.

You have something bigger than life, like The Nutcracker or the Ring Cycle, and you’re kind of in business with the stadium-style seatings. Kind of. Even with a perfect audience (like those I sat with in the Met’s Family Circle for Nixon in China), the sheer size, the too-big-to-fail aura, left me cold. I think even had the Koch been dead silent this afternoon, it would have taken some yogi-level concentration to feel like a part of the performance. Even at $20, what I’m looking for is a small fashion boutique as opposed to a big-box sweatpants store; otherwise I might as well go see Just Go With It. At least the concessions stand there takes credit cards and gives me something substantial for $8.

The problem is the real complication and conflict between message and reality on the part of companies like NYCB. This season, the company used photos by Henry Leutwyler for an American-Apparel–esque ad campaign aimed directly toward the casual and sexy downtown hipsters that every arts organization wants in its fold. Executive director Katherine E. Brown told the Wall Street Journal back in September that the ad campaign was an attempt to “project the personal and the human side of these really exceptional artists,” swapping tutus for rehearsal clothes. Brown added, “It was clear that making a stronger connection between the audience and the artist is something that would deeply enhance the audience experience and break down the veil between the artist and the audience.”

Personally, I love the ad campaign, but I don’t love the subsequent experience I have in the theater. I feel no connection to the artists when I have to stare down 13 rows of disengaged audience members who are treating the theater like their personal Starbucks. I feel no connection to the artists when they’re engulfed by the sheer vastness of the performance hall. I feel no connection to the artists when I feel like I’m in third class on the Titanic just because I didn’t have more than a Jackson to drop on a ticket. Critics of NYCB’s new ad campaign worried about how showing dancers without fake eyelashes and tiaras would destroy some of the magic? How about sitting near an upper-level restroom where you can hear the toilet backing up mid-performance, or having to shield your eyes from the glare of the light grid?

Photo: New York Times

I wouldn’t be getting long-winded about this had it just been an isolated incident, and I hate feeling so cranky over the idea that the arts are thriving to the point where a Saturday matinee for the City Ballet is so well sold (at least in the upper sections). But I felt the same thing at Nixon next door, and I feel the same way every time I have to qualify my argument that cheap seats to the opera and ballet exist—”but they’re up in K2.” How many friends I have brought or sent to a show only to have them leave disappointed because they felt excluded sitting up in Fourth Ring or Family Circle. How many of those same friends have been well satisfied with performances at Zankel Hall or Galapagos Art Space. Call me cranky. Call me elitist. Call me Eurotrash for saying that the houses of Germany and Austria have the upper hand for seating an average of 1500—over half of the Met’s seating capacity. But I think we’re Morgan Spurlocking ourselves at the expense of the art and the enjoyment of the average concert- opera- or ballet-goer. A 2,500-seat theater isn’t the place to showcase a pas-de-deux set to chamber music by Arvo Pärt, and a 4,000-seat theater doesn’t really suit a radically intimate opera by John Adams. It pleases the big-ticket (no pun intended) buyers on orchestra and first ring/parterre level and ignores those sitting in the rafters.

And maybe I just have a very big case of the Fuck-Its, but I say tear it down like the Berlin Wall. I realize the Koch just underwent significant renovations (I guess the Tea Party is good for something?). I realize that did a huge improvement to the theater, particularly for New York City Opera’s residency. But fuck it. Cut the theater in half and put in a restaurant that doesn’t taste like hospital cafeteria fare. Move the administrative offices up from the basement—natural light will do a hell of a lot for employee morale. Or move all of the operations to a place that isn’t such a wasteland for everything besides theater. Because the alternative, as I saw it this afternoon, is our cultural center of the city lying in a hospital bed drinking two gallons of soda per day and going in for gastric bypass surgery. In this country, that kind of an alternative is an epidemic.

Can Gogol Bordello Write an Opera?

On St. Mark’s earlier this evening, Eugene Hütz walked past me toting some street ‘za. In a flash, I said, “Are you Eugene Hütz?” He smiled and said yeah. Stupefied, I couldn’t say anything and instead let my mouth get so wide in awe that it could serve as a LIRR tunnel and flashed him the rock-on sign. He replied “rock and roll!” as he walked away. I doubt any #DWG could render me that speechless. I would so see an immigrant punk opera; though evidently I wouldn’t be able to commission it as I could scarcely remember how to form words when put face-to-face with my mustachioed hero. (For the record, when I interviewed Alec Baldwin I was comparatively blasé.)

“Why Are You So Awesome?”

The folks at the Merkin Concert Hall (part of the Kaufman Center, whose Special Music School Lucas Amory attends) interviewed the 8-year-old author behind the two Top Ten Lists sent to Anthony Tommasini and published earlier this week.

My favourite part is when he lists coconut ice cream as his fav candy, and then quickly qualifies, “or gelato.”

Why Is It…

I can take Gerald Finley as Don Giovanni…

But not as the equally-deplorable Howard Stern?

Photo via Intermezzo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Discuss.

This Is a Joke, Right?

Thanks to the trifecta of Gig Magazine, Alessio Bax and Jessica Duchen on Twitter, I’ve started my post-Denk morning with this article on Buzzle.com, which seems to be one of those AssociatedContent–type of sites. I hope it is, because I want to know what editor would let the idea of being an orchestral musician pass for a stress free job (click to enlarge):

 

 

I’d like to take this opportunity to tell all of my orchestra friends (especially those with hectic schedules, “job timings”—whatever the hell that is—a feeling of instability and one iota of stress) that you’re evidently doing it all wrong. Though the article also notes that being a physicist is a stress-free job and my uncles—both physicists—have had no hair for the past two decades. Interpret that how you will.

Jeremy Denk Is a Fox

I’m not one to cry. Not that I keep my emotions pent up until I lose my shit over a Blockbuster late fee or whole milk versus skim in my latte. But I generally keep it together. Until lately, however, as I’ve begun to feel my floodgates uncontrollably open up while  in yoga class—a perfectly normal sensation, I’m told, as it’s a sign that tension is being released. Fine, that’s cool. I’ll worry if I start releasing so much tension that I start to lose control over my bowels. Fortunately, only my upper half was excreting fluids tonight at Jeremy Denk’s Zankel Hall concert, a double-bill that paired Ligeti’s fiendish Études, Books I and II with Bach’s equally virtuosic Goldberg Variations. I wasn’t the only one, either: Going into the concert, a woman asked me three times to sell her my ticket. After a trifecta of refusals (like Peter denying Christ), she spat on my patent-leather shoe.

Earlier this afternoon, a colleague and I were discussing several comrades who are able to move fluidly from discussing Scandinavian death metal, early jazz greats, Haydn symphonies and the music of John Zorn—not without a little envy at how preternatural their myriad proclivities are. It reminded me of a brochure I got for Hobart and William Smith College years ago that demanded of high school students: “Are you a fox or a hedgehog?” It then went into Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, which states that “the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (a quote cribbed from ancient Greek poet Archilochus). There are lots of little things to pick up and love in Ligeti’s Études, starting—but not ending—with references to Satie, Scarlatti, Bill Evans, Indonesian and sub-Saharan African indigenous music, and even the visual works of M.C. Escher (not the rapping MC Escher). As disparate as the pieces are, especially given the stretch of time over which they were completed, they work together like a good hour-long yoga class. With the use of the entire keyboard and dexterous moves for a pianist’s hands, they ought to be renamed the Asanas. Denk ran the gamut, finding connections between all 13 pieces and moving through them with a true vinyasa flow. All of it led up to the final savasana of a ffffffff, or a (for serious) “Fortissississississississimo.” As Denk writes in his blog, “My initial reaction to this is: the composer is a jerk.” Jerk, maybe, but man did it sound good. As the overtones died, we all sat in a meditative state for a brief moment of harmonic convergence.

Much has been made lately of the idea of oversaturation in classical music, perhaps with one of the finest points made by Proper Discord, and one of the questions I’m often first to bring up is, “Do we need another performance/recording of TK?” If I hear of one more Winterreise released in the next couple of years, I’m going to find a means of literally freezing any further recorders of the cycle á la Han Solo in carbonite. What sets Denk’s Goldberg Variations apart, however, is what it lends to—and takes from—the Ligeti. Movements in the latter, like “Touches bloquées” and “Fanfares” highlight jazzier elements of some of the former’s final Variations. Likewise, Bach’s en pointe precision lends some structure to the more free-flowing moments of Ligeti. With so many discussions about repetition, it’s also interesting to listen to a piece built on repetition. It goes back to the yoga studio, with frequent returns to downward-facing-dog after a variety of poses like warrior, pigeon and triangle. As my yoga instructor is fond of saying as we repeat these poses, they have never been done before—for each pose is unique by virtue of the fact that it’s performed in a moment that is unlike any moment prior to (or following) the present. The mark of a true talent is the ability to make these standards sound entirely new, but Denk goes one step further and makes each individual phrase ring out as if it had never been previously played. The final reprise of the aria is an affirmation of the time we had together—or, as Jacob Cooper puts it in the program notes, it’s “not simply a restatement of the work’s opening: After all that has transpired, these same notes are a declaration of renewal.”

I’d have spat on me, too.

Another audience member, commenting on the sold out nature of Denk’s performance, said it should have gone up in Stern. I disagree. It would have still galvanized the stage, but nothing could have been so perfect as the intimacy of Zankel, with the N/Q/R trains rumbling above and that distinct, sweet and woodsy smell hanging in the air. The room glowed and hummed with a special frequency, a moment I could have lived in. It’s not entirely running the gamut from Bloodbath to Boccherini, but it’s a spread to be sure (and it’s also worth noting that the performer double-majored in music and chemistry at Oberlin). I think my tendencies lie towards the hedgehog, and I keep good company with Ibsen, Dostoevsky and Proust. But Jeremy Denk? Fox.

Westminster Gold, Part II

In flipping through the February Naxos catalogue, I saw this cover from a new Naive release by the oft-satisfying Quatuor Diotima:

How WG is that? The CD is available in the States one week from today but has been on iTunes since November. While notoriously thorny, the works of Berg, Schoenberg and Webern sing on this disc. And I love the contrast of the atonal works of the Second Viennese school with the decidedly First Viennese School pastries on the cover. Give me a twelve-layer sachertorte to go with my twelve-tone Lyric Suite.

“If I Hurt Your Feelings, I’m Sorry”

Via the New York Times earlier this morning, a response to Tommasini’s Top 10 list from 8-year-old Lucas Amory, the son of violists Misha Amory (of the Brentano String Quartet Misha Amorys) and Hsin-Yun Huang. I love his defense of Haydn and his drawing of the Schumann/Tchaikovsky show-down, not to mention his two separate lists for greatest and personal favorites (“7: You won’t believe it: Paganini”). And he was even able to distinguish “your” from “you’re,” which means he’s worlds beyond many folks three and four times his age.

After a day like February 14th, in which my husband and I watch dozens of flower-toting guys and Trojan-buying ladies flutter around the city and make a tacit promise between the two of us that we won’t fall victim to the statistic of children conceived on Valentine’s Day (or, indeed, after witnessing screaming children in Trader Joe’s, conceive at all), stuff like this sets my biological clock in motion oh-so-slightly. But my kid’s personal top ten list is going to include some non-DWGs whether s/he likes it or not.

(Kidding.)

(Kind of.)

This is Either the Greatest or Worst Idea Ever