The Invectivator

Cover Art Is Dead But These Zombies Keep Walking...

2012-02-16T07:49:00.000-05:00

James Brown: Hell

by Joe Belt

Phone Is Ringing. Ohmigod. GET IT TOGETHER...

2012-01-13T17:58:00.002-05:00

Sweet fanciful Moses the phone has been ringing off the hook here at the InvectiCave. Seems like everybody want me to hop on the InvectiCycle and zoom up to Lincoln Center to get to the bottom of Cellphonegate. I was sitting around a table of musicians at intermission a couple of days ago when the whole story broke. If for some bizarre reason, you’re the kind of person who doesn’t think a cell phone going off during a concert is a big deal, you may have missed the story. Here’s the original ArtsBeat post about it in the Times:

January 11, 2012, 3:05 PM

New York Philharmonic Interrupted by Chimes Mahler Never Intended

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

The end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony contains some of the most spiritual and peaceful music ever written. So when a cell phone began ringing – and ringing, ringing, ringing without cease – during a performance by the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday evening, Alan Gilbert did something conductors virtually never do. He stopped the performance.

And then things really got bizarre.

Mr. Gilbert, the orchestra’s music director, said he turned to the area of Avery Fisher Hall where the sound was coming from, in one of the front rows, and asked the unknown miscreant to turn off the phone. (It was an individual who apparently failed to heed the recorded announcement from the actor Alec Baldwin to silence cell phones that is played before the Philharmonic’s performances.)

“Nothing happened,” Mr. Gilbert said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “Nobody was owning up to it. It was surreal.” The phone kept ringing – the iPhone’s marimba ring-tone, according to the music blogger Paul Pelkonen, who wrote about the incident.

Mr. Gilbert said audience members pointed out two people sitting where the sound was coming from. “They were staring at me resolutely,” he said of the couple. Eventually, the man put his hand in his pocket and the ringing stopped. “It was so weird,” Mr. Gilbert said. “Did he think he could just bite his lip and soldier through?”

The conductor said he asked the man if he was sure the device was quieted. “Then he nodded his head,” Mr. Gilbert said. Guilty!

People in the hall had been shouting for the sound to stop. Mr. Pelkonen reported that they yelled: “Thousand-dollar fine!” “Kick him out!” “Get out!” Another blogger, who was present, Max Kinchen, wrote, “They wanted blood!”

Mr. Gilbert, in the interview, said: “It was so shocking what happened. You’re in this very far away spiritual place in the piece. It’s like being rudely awakened. All of us were stunned on the stage.”

The conductor then apologized to the audience for stopping, saying that usually it’s best just to ignore such a disruption, but this case was too much. The audience cheered and applauded. He then started the music again, picking a loud passage leading into the tranquil final minutes to begin.

Ringing cell phones are a common scourge of live performances, and indeed, most musicians soldier on. “Usually it’s not Mahler Nine you’re playing,” Mr. Gilbert said, “and usually it’s not the most emotionally wrought part of Mahler Nine, and usually people deal with it.”

He said he was convinced the sound was an alarm because of its continuous nature.

The policy at Avery Fisher Hall, run by Lincoln Center, where the Philharmonic is a tenant, is for ushers to approach the owners of ringing phones and ask them discreetly to turn off the devices, said Eric Latzky, the orchestra’s spokesman. “In this incident, unfortunately the policy was not followed,” he said.

Betsy Vorce, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center, said officials were talking to the ushers involved. “This is one incident where the policy wasn’t followed,” she said. “We’re investigating it. We’ll take corrective action if necessary.”

The ushers do not answer directly to orchestra management, and Mr. Gilbert said no ushers were in sight at the time of the ringing. “I heard this morning that ushers in the hall claimed they didn’t hear it, which sounds ridiculous to me,” he said. “Everybody could hear it.”

Okay. Now first of all I wasn’t there. Second of all, when the story was recounted to me I was gleefully applauding Gilbert in my mind because I was imagining him calling out a member of the violin section of the Philharmonic. I missed the beginning of the story and I made the assumption that it was a member of the section because I can think of two occasions where I have been on stage where a musician’s phone has rung, and several more anecdotal ones. Of course none of these musicians were reprimanded, and in fact there’s a famous story of a performer staring down the audience while his own cell phone was ringing in his pocket, continuing to play, passing it off as if it was an audience member’s fault as opposed to owning up to his own blunder. So I thought Gilbert was taking the opportunity to chew out his own players, which as Artistic Director, is his prerogative. Then I snapped out of it and got the full story and I was just appalled. There are so many things wrong with what he did that I don’t even know where to begin.

1) GET OVER IT. We are participating in a public performance. There are other human beings present. They might cough, they might sneeze, and they might call out “woooooo! Seriously, it's happened at a concert before. People forget to turn off their phones. They make mistakes. I have definitely heard the Philharmonic musicians make mistakes. Tolerating others is the price we pay for being tolerated.

2) IF YOU DIDN’T THINK CLASSICAL MUSICIANS WERE UPTIGHT BEFORE, YOU SURE AS HELL DO NOW. Is this going to help? Aren’t we trying to change our image? We all claim that there isn’t any “right” way to listen to a concert, but if the biggest institution in the city acts like this, it seems like we don’t mean it. In Mozart’s day, people were gambling, drinking and (gasp) doing it in the audience. Can we go back to that instead of turning it into a museum? How is our art supposed to live and breathe if the audience thinks they might get yelled at by the maestro for misbehaving?

3) LOOK AT WHAT A BIG MAN I AM. I really think this is about power, one person imagining that they are in control of a situation and coming face-to-face with the fact that they are not, none of us are in control of anything. As Dr. Denis Leary once said “Life’s hard, get a fucking helmet.”

4) YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT THE WHOLE STORY IS. Check out the follow-up:

Ringing Finally Ended, but There’s No Button to Stop Shame

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Published: January 12, 2012

They were baying for blood in the usually polite precincts of Avery Fisher Hall.

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.

After words from Mr. Gilbert, and what seemed like weeks, the cell phone owner finally silenced his device. After the audience cheered, the concert resumed. Internet vitriol ensued.

But no one, it seems, felt worse than the culprit, who agreed to an interview on Thursday on condition that he not be identified — for obvious reasons.

“You can imagine how devastating it is to know you had a hand in that,” said the man, who described himself as a business executive between 60 and 70 who runs two companies. “It’s horrible, horrible.” The man said he had not slept in two days.

The man, called Patron X by the Philharmonic, said he was a lifelong classical music lover and 20-year subscriber to the orchestra who was friendly with several of its members. He said he himself was often irked by coughs, badly timed applause — and cell phone rings. “Then God, there was I. Holy smokes,” he said.

“It was just awful to have any role in something like that, that is so disturbing and disrespectful not only to the conductor but to all the musicians and not least to the audience, which was so into this concert,” he said by telephone.

“I hope the people at that performance and members of the orchestra can certainly forgive me for this whole event. I apologize to the whole audience.”

Patron X said he received a call from an orchestra official the day after the concert. He had been identified by his front-row seat. The official politely asked him not to do it again, he said, and the man took the opportunity to ask to speak to Mr. Gilbert, to apologize in person.

The men talked by telephone (it was a land line) on Thursday afternoon. Mr. Gilbert said he told Patron X, “I’m really sorry you had to go through this,” and accepted his apology.

Before that, the disruption became the marimba ring tone heard round the world, prompting feverish commentary on blogs and comment forums about performance interruptions.

In a Twitter message, the composer Daniel Dorff said, “Changed my ringtone to play #Mahler 9 just in case.” A YouTube poster superimposed a marimba sound over a performance of the piece by Leonard Bernstein.

The episode seemed to serve as an extreme example of how one of the staples of modern life can disrupt a live performance, because of both Mr. Gilbert’s reaction and the guilty party’s long delay in shutting off the cell phone.

Actually, Patron X said he had no idea he was the culprit. He said his company replaced his BlackBerry with an iPhone the day before the concert. He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.

“I didn’t even know phones came with alarms,” the man said.

But as Mr. Gilbert was glaring in his direction, he fiddled with the phone as others around him did, just to be sure, pressing buttons. That was when the sound stopped. It was only in the car going home that his wife checked the settings on his phone and found that the alarm had been set.

Cellphones often go off during all sorts of performances, but the Mahler incident was a rarity: It happened during one of music’s most sublime moments, it did not stop after a few seconds, and it emanated from the front row, where it was impossible for Mr. Gilbert to ignore.

The Philharmonic said the ushers at Avery Fisher Hall — who work for Lincoln Center, not the orchestra — should have intervened. Lincoln Center said it was investigating.

Both Mr. Gilbert and Patron X found something positive in the episode.

“It shows how important people still feel live performance is,” Mr. Gilbert said. “This is something people either consciously or implicitly recognize as sacred.”

The patron agreed. The incident underscored “the very enduring and important bond between the audience and the performers,” he said, adding, “If it’s disturbed in any significant way, it just shows how precious this whole union is.”

I’m really grateful to Daniel Wakin for the excellent reporting on this story. My heart sank like a stone for this poor guy. I have checked and re-checked, and triple checked my phone at the beginnings of concerts because sometimes those damn things JUST GO OFF. They go off by themselves. The technology is constantly changing; you never know what the pre-sets are going to be if you have a new device, it’s scary. And I’m not trying to be ageist here but the older we get, the less tech-savvy we become. If my cell phone rang during a concert, on stage or in the audience, I would die. I would crawl into a hole forever. There’s this weird thing that’s required to be a human being and it’s essential to being a great musician: empathy. When I’m at a classical concert and someone’s cell goes off, I know that that person is jamming their hand in their pocket, frantically rummaging through their purse (where they can never find anything) and close to tears by the third ring. Alan Gilbert demonstrated absolutely zero empathy for Patron X (you gotta love that code name) in the moment, perhaps egged on by a bloodthirsty Philharmonic crowd. In the follow-up article it’s nice that he realizes what happened and was sympathetic to the guy after the fact. Not enough for me. It’s wrong. You do not turn around and call out people in the audience for an accident! You don’t do it. If someone shouted at Gilbert, threw something at the stage, screamed “fire”, there’s all sorts of moments that may require a performer’s intervention. From my perspective, and I’m surprised that I haven’t seen any comments from this angle, is that it was about a conductor’s ego. That ring tone ruined his moment. And like an overgrown child, he lashed out at the person responsible. What is great about this story is that Patron X was so eloquent about his love for music and his apology to the orchestra and audience. He shows he really gets it, and deeply regrets what happened. I really appreciate the “not least to the audience” bit. It also reveals how much damage an attack from the stage like that can do to a guy.

In an amazing coincidence the exact same thing happened to me about 13 years ago and some readers from Toronto may remember this event. I have a suspicion that it was at the exact same moment in the piece. Imagine the scene: Roy Thomson Hall. Toronto Symphony Orchestra with Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducting. Young Invectivator at the back of the viola section. Mahler 9. Near the end of the concet. Almost 80 minutes of music. Just second violins and violas playing what felt like pianississississississississimo. All of a sudden, out of this near silence, from the balcony came:

WOOF WOOF

I kid you not. A dog barked. I looked down at my part in disbelief. I was immediately lost and had no idea where we were. I don’t know how we made it to the end. Out of my peripheral vision I caught the cello section starting to lose it, shaking shoulders holding back laughter. I looked up at Jukka-Pekka. Tears were streaming down his face and he was turning purple with rage. He had put his entire self into that performance and he was livid that it had been ruined. I saw murder and frustration and disappointment in his eyes. You know what?

He kept conducting and finished the piece.

The other angle is that the back stage quips were pretty great that night (Boy, we really screwed the pooch tonight!) and my Dad who happened to be at the concert told me after the concert that he wanted to strangle the dog. Turns out it was a seeing-eye dog who was freaking out that 2000 people were all quiet at once. I wonder would Alan Gilbert have had the dog destroyed? My Dad would have agreed with him. Myself, I know that sometimes, life intrudes. That’s the chance we take every time we go to a concert. A chance that the music will be wrecked by human error and also the possibility of a magical transformation of our souls. Mostly it’s somewhere in between but we keep going, and we keep playing, hoping for the unexpected. Those that can’t deal with it should stay home and listen to a record in an isolation booth.

Wednesday Panels

2012-01-07T14:56:00.000-05:00

Fatale #1 Sean Phillips

Yes Please

2012-01-07T14:37:00.000-05:00

Busy season of eating, drinking, and playing the viola. So there hasn't been a lot of concert-going lately and therefore not enough opportunities to invectivate. But I do like to prop the computer up on my latke-turkey-pig cheek swollen belly and read the New York Times in between rounds of the new Zelda game.

Zachary Woolfe hit it square on the head with this one:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/music/a-call-for-more-new-music-from-new-york-philharmonic.html?ref=music

I really enjoy it when a critic blasts out a call-to-arms-type article. Particularly when the subject is MORE NEW MUSIC YOU COWARDS.

Happy New Year!

Wednesday Panels

2011-12-19T11:14:00.000-05:00

Tales Designed To Thrizzle #7 Michael Kupperman

Wednesday Panels

2011-11-26T14:05:00.000-05:00

Secret Avengers #19

Feeling Fancy

2011-11-19T12:43:00.000-05:00

I went to a preview of Nico Mulhy's new opera Dark Sisters a couple of months back. Boy did I feel fancy. All the cool new music people were there, all the beautiful rich and famous and in the know. I had arrived. I was a fancy lad. A young conductor was spotted with his super-model girlfriend. Alan Rickman walked by. Alan Rickman! You know, the guy from The January Man? It was all very exciting. Then before the opera started the composer and the director themselves walked on stage and told us how grateful they were that we were there and that they wanted our opinions after the show because, after all, we, the fancy people, were worth listening to. Ok, that wasn't what they really said, that's what I felt that they were inferring. The composer did ask us not to tweet or blog about an unfinished product but instead to talk to him about what could be improved. This turned out to be the best part of the show. Nico Mulhy is a very charming, articulate dude. I'll listen to him speak from the stage about his music anytime.
So. At this point I need to tell you that I have a slight contrarian streak. I'm also constantly horrified at the excesses and injustices of capitalism. Plus when you throw in my low self-esteem (which was telling me that I wasn't fancy enough to be in this crowd) you have a recipe for not being able to enjoy a night at the preview opera. I tried to get into it. I fidgeted and shifted in my chair and glanced over at the star of Galaxy Quest when I got bored. I tried to look past how wide some of the singers' vibrato was (wide enough for a subway car). But I never managed to lose myself in the music or the drama. After it was over I couldn't help but question my inability to enjoy it. For weeks afterwards I was wondering to myself "Is it me? Why didn't I like it? All those fancy people seemed to like it..."
Or worse, did I not like it because I perceived that the fancy people were enjoying it? Oy. I mean, I didn't hate it, there was lots of individual elements that I thought were cool. There was some beautiful orchestration and a spectacular video projection, for example. I just did not connect to this opera. And I felt especially resentful that I didn't have long, full, lustrous salt and pepper hair like that guy from Truly, Madly, Deeply. Luckily a month later it opened and Anthony Tommasini was there to review it. Here is the link to the full review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/arts/music/dark-sisters-by-nico-muhly-review.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=nico%20mulhy&st=cse

Like a knight in shining armor, Mr. Tommasini arrives to save myself from my social climbing paranoia and to put words to how I felt about the opera. Thanks Tony! Now I can go back to pretending that I'm an objective listener as opposed to someone who can't stop thinking about how the Hollywood MegaStar from Love Actually is sitting three rows away from me.

I do however, want to quibble with the last line of the review for a second.

"Mr. Muhly is a prolific composer. This year the English National Opera presented the premiere of his full-length “Two Boys,” with a libretto by Craig Lucas, which drew mixed reviews and is scheduled for a future production at the Metropolitan Opera.

Though there is much to admire about “Dark Sisters,” the score seems not yet finished. Mr. Muhly may be spreading himself too thin."

The review as a whole clearly articulated some of the things I was feeling as a listener. But then with this last sentence Tommasini veers dangerously close to the edge for me by assuming that what is wrong with the opera can be explained by the composer "spreading himself too thin." Can it? I don't think Tommasini presents enough evidence (another recent opera getting "mixed reviews" hardly matters) to support his claim. Why does he feel the need to wrap things up this way? Is he apologizing for everything that he just wrote by trying to be sympathetic to the composer? Or is he putting the composer down for biting off more than he can chew? Either way, if you start talking about a composer's state of mind or your perception of how busy his life is, I need more proof as a reader."Seems" and "may be" really don't cut it for me.

I didn't see Tommasini at the preview but I can report that Mr. Rickman seems to have enough free time to take in a Nico Mulhy opera and he may be taller and even better looking in person than he is in the movies.

Wednesday Panels

2011-11-05T16:01:00.003-04:00

Crack Comics #63

The Invectivator and his Mom go to Carnegie

2011-11-01T11:41:00.002-04:00

I heard a fantastic concert the other day that I probably would have missed if my friends and family weren’t around to make me leave the house. My Mom was visiting NY so because we couldn’t get tickets to the opera we decided to go to Carnegie Hall on Saturday night. I thought the program looked pretty decent even though I didn’t know too much about the ensemble performing it. But even if I didn’t have the excuse of taking my Mom to Carnegie (where she had never been before), a cellist friend of mine would have made sure I was there because he invited me out to the same show. He had been there the night before and was so pumped he wanted to go again to hear the same group in a different program. My eyebrows crawled up my forehead and I started getting excited that we might be about to hear something great. The pianist Andras Schiff has a curatorial role at Carnegie for a bunch of concerts. For two of these, he collaborated with Ivan Fischer and The Budapest Festival Orchestra performing all three Bartok Piano Concertos paired with some orchestral works of Bartok and Schubert. We had a great time. My Mom started crying as soon as she heard the first chord from the orchestra. My Mom’s a pretty big softy but being in Carnegie Hall will have that effect on you. It just sounds so good. Warm, clear, the crackle of energy passing through the mists of history. It lives up to the hype. It delivers. It makes a good orchestra sound great, and great orchestras shake your soul. We were there for the second of the two nights so we didn’t get the full impact, but I will jump at my next chance to hear Fischer and Budapest. Anthony Tommasini, chief classical music critic of The New York Times did get the full Monty and based on his review, he’ll be there for the rest of Schiff’s concerts as well. He probably doesn’t burst into tears anymore the way my Mom does when he listens to a concert at Carnegie but he is always willing to let you know when he loves something.

Here’s a link to the full review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/arts/music/budapest-festival-orchestra-at-carnegie-hall-review.html?ref=music

I enjoy Tommasini’s reviews. They’re always well written. Even when I disagree with him, he makes me consider his position. Sometimes his agenda peeks out from behind the curtain of a review, which is something I like in a critic. I mean why not? Does anyone seriously believe that critics or Supreme Court justices are impartial? Also I like the nice things he has said about my groups and me over the years. Yes, flattery even works on the Invectivator. Tommasini is a pianist, and a piano guy. So the bulk of his review focuses on Schiff’s interpretation of all three Bartok concertos over two nights. Fair enough. But something highly unusual happened that Tommasini missed.

“On Saturday night he gave an exhilarating account of the daunting Second Concerto, a performance that made the path-breaking challenges of the piano writing seem playable: oscillating clusters, scurrying runs of double thirds, fanfarelike themes in wide chords so packed with notes that many fingers must do double duty.

Bartok left the strings out of the brittle, incisive first movement. But we enter another world in the second movement, which begins with a muted, austere chorale for strings that becomes a backdrop for the piano’s questioning, eerie melodic phrases. This effect was beautifully realized by Mr. Schiff and the sensitive, mellow strings of the orchestra.”

The second movement was a particular highlight of orchestral playing. An unbelievably soft and melancholic sound came out of the strings. But in the midst of all this, Mr. Schiff turned to the audience and shushed us. That’s right, he put his fingers to his lips and let us know in no uncertain terms that we were a bunch of boors who couldn’t control our coughing and we were getting in the way of their interpretation of a masterpiece. I have never been shushed by a soloist before. It really doesn’t happen all that often. I can say that the vibe in the room completely changed after that. People got tense. Perhaps they started feeling like they didn’t know how to act at a concert. My cellist friend remarked afterwards that he thought the coughing got louder after the shushing. Listen, it was a cold night in NYC. It’s a big, resonant space. People are going to cough, and it’s going to be a little distracting. But that’s the price we pay for leaving the house. It’s the trade-off for the feeling of electricity that a large room full of people generates. If you want absolute silence you can sit on your couch and listen to it on your stereo or if you have the means, pay Schiff to come over and play for you. So for me personally, I was a little offended by Schiff’s shushing and it took me right out of the magical performance he was in the middle of. All sorts of crazy thoughts started rushing through my head “Is he an asshole? Is he so not involved in his own performance that he can take a second out to tell the audience to shut up? Are we really that loud?” Etc. I know it caused a sensation because I overheard several conversations at intermission about it. No mention from Tommasini. Not enough space? Wasn’t offended? Likes being shushed? Wishes he could shush everybody himself? I think he missed an opportunity to capture the feeling of an event, and to talk about classical concert going conventions.

"On Friday Mr. Fischer and the orchestra offered a joyous account of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, a youthful Mozartean work. Mr. Fischer chose an unusual placement of instruments, with pairs of cellos and the four basses positioned among the other strings and the woodwinds. This arrangement compelled the musicians to listen closely to one another and perform the score as if it were a big piece of chamber music.

On Saturday he led a fresh, rhythmically vivid account of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, his most ambitious symphonic work, lasting nearly an hour. The woodwinds were placed in the first row of instruments. So, as in the Fifth Symphony, this performance had the spontaneity and interplay of chamber music. One of the most attentive listeners in the audience was Mr. Schiff, who now and then could not help making conducting gestures as he watched Mr. Fischer, his longtime friend and colleague."

So in these two paragraphs Tommasini touches on what was for me the most fascinating part of the concerts. Fischer and his players did some radical things with the set-up of the orchestra. Every piece had a different set-up. Again, this is something you almost never see or ear. It’s a pain to do it. Orchestral players are generally against it. It requires an open mind and a willing stage crew, both of which are hard to find. I felt that it paid off in some ways, and detracted in others. I was happy they did it, and we couldn’t stop talking about it after. But Tommasini presents it as merely “unusual” and then he makes an assumption about how it “compelled the musicians to listen closely to one another and perform the score as if it were a big piece of chamber music”.

Sigh. Really? Do you think they don’t listen to each other closely when they don’t sit in an unusual formation? He could have written “It gave the impression that they were listening even more closely to one another than usual, as if it were a big piece of chamber music.”

Personally I think that is always the goal of an orchestral concert, to make it more intimate, more personal, to connect with other players and sections across a massive stage no matter where I’m sitting. It’s a throwaway sentence that assumes a mindset of the performers so that he can describe an aspect of the performance without taking up too much space. Instead I wish he had dug in and looked at the benefits and drawbacks of orchestral seating conventions and their impact on the audience. A typical, thoughtful review from Anthony Tommasini, but because he makes popping those out look easy, he’s got me hungering for a deeper discussion of what it means to go to a concert on a cold night in New York City in 2011.

Wednesday Panels

2011-10-27T12:53:00.002-04:00

FF #11 Barry Kitson

Bach Gets Double Teamed

2011-10-23T19:14:00.003-04:00

So I went to the Philharmonic the other day. I have a friend who plays with them sometimes and she occasionally gets me comps. The comp that was available was for a Friday concert at 11 AM. I’m a believer in concerts at anytime of day or night but 11 AM might be my least favourite time to attend a show. Let alone play one. I played an 11 AM concert once and absolutely nothing worked. Messages from my brain to my fingers were not received. So my heart was filled with sympathy as I watched the tired Philharmonic players walk out on stage, as opposed to irritated when they tromp out that way before an 8PM show. The concert had its ups and downs. Going to Avery Fisher Hall is generally an unpleasant experience. You get frisked on your way in, there’s always a mad dash to pick up your tickets and get to your seat. If you’re not there early enough you end up assaulting some poor octogenarian by trampling on their feet as you go by or receiving the sad gaze that says “you’re actually going to make me stand UP?” The acoustics give you the feeling that you’re descending into a K hole, watching this concert that you’re detached from and is somehow far away no matter how close you sit. This particular show featured the incredible violinist Frank Peter Zimmerman, whom I had just met this past summer for the first time, at a festival where unfortunately I didn’t get to play with him. One of the best violin techniques I have ever witnessed in person. The real draw for me was Berg’s exquisite violin concerto. Also on the program was Brahms’ 3^rd symphony, and seriously, a Brahms symphony pretty much legitimizes the whole crazy enterprise of symphony orchestras managing to exist. So as far as I’m concerned they can program Brahms every week if they want to. But the real treat, or gimmick, depending on how you look at it was to hear the Phil’s Artistic Director play the second solo part in Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. So. I could go on and on about my impressions of the performances and what was effective/ineffective, good/bad, etc. But this isn’t my job. I’m a professional musician. You know whose job it is? Allan Kozinn from the New York Times. You ever read a review of a concert you attended and feel like “Were they at the same concert I was?” That’s a disturbing feeling. So many times I’ve felt myself swayed by the air of authority that being published in a major newspaper brings. I’ve had listeners ask me after a review “Did I miss something?” “Does she know something I don’t?” I wish listeners would trust their own eyes and ears and not worry about what the critic says. Hey, journalism is a tough racket, and in particular classical music critics don’t have it easy. Two or three reviews a week? Write something fun to read that captures the feeling of the event and also drop a few insightful thoughts along the way? Brutal. But that’s not going to stop the Invectivator from holding their feet to the fire. I have a lot of respect for how hard it is to be a music critic. But I think someone needs to call these people out when they get it wrong. Full disclaimer: Mr. Kozinn was probably at the Wednesday night concert and I was at the Friday morning show. But with the same rep and two performances under their belts, 11 AM notwithstanding, I think we probably heard similar performances, in fact I might have heard a more confident one. Here’s the link to the whole article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/arts/music/alan-glibert-and-frank-peter-zimmermann-on-violin-review.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Zimmerman%20Philharmonic&st=cse

I feel like Kozinn captured the vibe of the Berg performance effectively, it was mesmerizing violin playing.

But at the beginning and end of his review he goes so far wrong I just can’t take it.

“For curiosity value alone Mr. Gilbert’s solid, shapely account of the work’s second violin line was probably the concert’s drawing card.”

Okay. You already know that I agree about the drawing card aspect. I was very, very curious to hear how Alan Gilbert plays. Mr. Gilbert is a respectable amateur violinist. Maybe at some point he was a stronger, more capable one. If I spent the majority of the next 20 years conducting instead of playing the viola, my playing would suffer. I would probably end up playing out of tune, with a rough sound and with very little shape as Gilbert did at the concert I attended. Standing next to one of the greatest violinists in the world only served to highlight this fact. I don’t know what Kozinn heard. Does he think that it would be a cheap shot to attack Gilbert for his violin playing because he is principally a conductor? BUT HE CHOSE TO PRESENT HIMSELF AS A VIOLINIST! He should be held accountable like anybody else who gets up there.

“In the Bach, Mr. Gilbert conducted from the fiddle, leading a reduced ensemble drawn from the Philharmonic’s strings and adopting a couple of current fashions from the early-music world: brisk tempos in the outer movements, for one, and having the violinists and violists stand.”

Conducted from the fiddle doesn’t even make sense. He led the start of the first two movements because the Second violin happens to start those movements. Zimmerman led the opening of the third. You don’t conduct from the violin, you lead. Which I have to say he did in a very awkward way. He looked very uncomfortable gesturing with his bow instead of a baton or free hands. Now I’m also really sick of Kozinn taking swipes at historical performance practice which I feel like he does all the time in print, but this sentence is problematic even without the period movement diss. How does he know that Gilbet adopted some current tempo fashions (and it’s debatable that what he’s talking about is fashionable at all)? Maybe Gilbert just thinks that’s how the music should go! Why would Kozinn assume that the tempi were borrowed from his own perception of a performance-practice movement that he dismisses as fashionable? This sentence especially bothers me because of the assumption of who made these decisions and how. Why does he write that Gilbert decided these things? Was he at the rehearsals? Or does he just stick to the outdated concept that the maestro decides everything? Wasn’t one of the best violinists in the world playing first violin? You don’t think he might have had a hand in some of the choices they made? I think it's dangerous territory when a critic starts ascribing motivations for choices which he has no concrete way of knowing.

“There were unruly moments in the opening Vivace, but elsewhere the ensemble was as tight as you could want.”

Frankly, I heard a sloppy performance by Gilbert backed up by tentative playing by the strings and continuo sections of the Phil with Zimmerman trying his best to get through the piece unscathed.

“The soloists took different, but by no means incompatible, approaches. Mr. Zimmerman’s sound is light and fluid, and he used vibrato more sparingly than Mr. Gilbert, who also has a darker, slightly heavier sound. The interplay between them was graceful in the first two movements and took on an appealing visceral quality in the speedy finale.”

This is the worst part. Is Kozinn trying to get us to read between the lines? Because from my point of view light and fluid = beautiful and dark and heavy = strident and rough. But referring to graceful interplay is fawning from the critic. This was a serious, direct performance, with almost no nuance or shape to the lines. I was sitting really close and the saddest part was that the two soloists did not smile at each other once until it was over. Their interpretation of the Bach was not to my taste. I don’t expect Kozinn or any other critic to share my tastes in style. But the way he describes it gives a completely false impression of the kind of performance it was.

Wednesday Panels

2011-10-05T18:46:00.000-04:00

Animal Man #2

1.

2011-10-05T18:41:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to do this forever. I thought long and hard about creating an online personality who would be a puppet that I could hide behind and have spout all sorts of outrageous comments. After consulting with friends, colleagues and my conscience, I decided that having an avatar is for cowards. So this blog will be a little less fun, dirty and mean-spirited but 100% braver. Here's a mission statement: To call B.S. on things (mostly pertaining to classical music but also to the arts in general...ahhhh, the hell with it, EVERYTHING is fair game) . To post images and links to things that are good. If it's taken me 3 years to get around to writing one post, who knows how long it will take to do another one. I plan on getting busier with life so I'm applying about the same expectations that I have for how soon the next issue of Optic Nerve will come out.
I promise to try and filter out some of the crap you have to read.
Max Mandel
The Invectivator