O Supernuptials

Congrats to Mr. Lou Reed and Ms. Laurie Anderson, who, according to the august authorities at Page Six, tied the knot (in secret! How very Jay-Z and Beyonce…) in Colorado a couple of weeks ago!

Please tell me she said her vows through a vocoder.  Or maybe it looked a little more like this:

Shut up, Martin Bernheimer, Shut up

And I quote from yesterday’s review of Satygraha:

Certain structures ensnare the brain by dint of repetition. There is, for instance, doodledy-doodledy-doodledy-doodledy, which, reduced to its essence, becomes doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle. Precious? Profound? Psychedelic? Who knows?

Ultimately, this sort of thing is great if you like this sort of thing. Did I like it? Minimally.

Srsly? Srsly, Martin Bernheimer? Doodledy-doodledy-doodledy? Was I not paying attention when people decided that really terrible onomatopoeias were, like, OK now in serious music criticism? (Last night, the Emerson String Quartet performed Schubert’s renowned ‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet. It begins rather loudly: DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH dah dah dah DAH!)

And then we have: “Precious? Profound? Psychedelic? Who knows?” Who knows? You. You are supposed to know. You are the critic, and you are supposed to know if something is precious, profound or psychedelic. And why is Philip Glass really so hard to “get”? He has been around for a while. As you mention earlier in your review, this opera was written in 1980. That was 28 years ago. Was 28 years not enough time to process this newfangled “Minimalism”?

And then this gem: “Ultimately, this sort of thing is great if you like this sort of thing.” Please compare to one of my favorite nuggets from Mr. Holland: “Anyone familiar with the reputations of these three singers can imagine the quality of the performances.” Here we have 2 examples of what I like to call magic sentences, because they can be used in any review of anything and still be right.

Of course he seals it all off with a real zinger! “Did I like it? Minimally.” Actually, I think we already knew that from reading the rest of the review.

Everybody who is anybody came on Friday to experience what Peter Gelb, unblushing head of the Met, labelled “a modern masterpiece”. The hopefully delirious celebrants out front included Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, four Tibetan Buddhist monks, Chuck Close, Richard Gere, Suzanne Vega, Paul Shrader, and, oh yes, the composer, Philip Glass. The official press release told us so.

(Some celebrities came. Ergo, this is intellectually bankrupt.)

Quite a few in the less glamorous part of audience gave up before the sweet-sweet-sweet end of this gift-to-be-simple endurance contest. It lasted nearly four hours. Some natives got restless. For the initiated, however, and for the instantly converted, this had to be an important night, an uplifting orgy of communal navel-gazing. Satyagraha, anno 1980, had arrived at last at the Met.

(It was long and boring. And so the real operagoers left, while the fatuous celebs sat around fatuously for the whole thing.)

In case you haven’t done your homework, this is an intellectual opera predicated on the Sanskrit musings of the young Gandhi. It quotes the Bhagavad Gita as it explores the philosophies of Tolstoy, Tagore and Martin Luther King while the protagonist contemplates the virtue of passive resistance.

(It is based on a lot of lefty bullshit, which you must have read like a good lefty before you come to the opera house.)

The “new” production, a clever abstraction introduced a year ago at the English National Opera, is dazzling in its dauntlessly pensive way.

(Tried too hard. Is boring.)

Bee tee dubs. Einstein has not seen it yet. Will give own report next week, methinks.

Wait, you can DO that?

This is not a post about music

But I figured that it would be an improvement over all of my recent posts, which were not about ANYTHING. Anyway, I just wanted to point out two terrific quotes from this weekend’s Times:

From Frank Rich’s “The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama”:

When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableau before a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.

And this less-political gem from “Where You Going With That Monet?”:

THE plots of art heist movies are about as multifarious as the canvases of the paintings pilfered by their main characters — the postmodern heroin-cool of Nick Nolte in “The Good Thief”; the playboy-billionaire boredom of Pierce Brosnan in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” But one thing art theft movies tend to have in common is that they dwell on the heist and not on the aftermath, for reasons that are probably more than cinematic: art is an exceedingly dumb thing to steal.

…

The mundane reality is that many art thieves are simply not the sharpest grappling hooks in the toolbag; the smart ones choose to steal things that can be much more easily converted into money — or just money itself.

If I had more time, I’d just like to do a search of the Times‘ archives to see how many times the word “dumb” has been used in the same sense that it is used here.

I’m Kinda in Love

With this song:

And the video is pretty amazing, too. (How about those half-dancers! And those people you can’t see until they throw paint on them!)

And although I am embarrassed to admit it, I am a sucker for the minor iv chord. Totes cliché, I know, but it still gets me every time. You usually see it preceded by Major IV, but here they jump to it right from a vi, so it’s a little more bracing. And yes, I am fully aware of the huge dorkitude involved in doing Roman Numeral Harmonic Analysis of a Popular Song. (Which, for the record, is “Ready for the Floor” by Hot Chip.)

Forster on Brahms

“Then the Four Serious Songs rang shallow in Margaret’s ears. Brahms, for all his grumbling and grizzling, had never guessed what it felt like to be suspected of stealing an umbrella.”

-E.M. Forster, Howards End

Forster on Beethoven

“Beethoven chose to make all right in the end.  He built the ramparts up.  He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered.  He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion.  But the goblins were there.  They could return.  He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.”

-E.M. Forster, Howards End

Gossip Girl

Classical in music, in some form or another, has made it into both the Post‘s and the Daily News‘ gossip columns this week!  From the Post‘s Liz Smith:

‘I can’t listen to too much Wagner, ya know? I start to get the urge to conquer Poland,” said the perspicacious Woody Allen. (Just had to use that, although it has nothing to do with what follows except it’s about music.)

Yes, the parenthetical is Liz’s.  The next is from the Daily News‘ Ben Widdicombe, and consists of a rather juicy blind item:

Which famous conductor is said to be the author of an indiscreet e-mail rocking the classical music world? The maestro told his mistress to meet him at his Beijing hotel (“Wait for me in the room. You’ll find a bath robe. I WANT TO FIND YOU NAKED when I arrive”) but copied it to everyone on his e-mail list, including his wife.

Oops!  I have heard a name through the grapevine, but maybe my vast and loyal readership can hazard their own guesses?  After reading it, I started going through a mental list of those who might qualify as “famous conductors” and thinking which of them might have done this, and I narrowed it down to: ALL OF THEM.

My One, My Own, My Precious

(Artfully arranged for intellectual snob appeal with my Steve Reich box set and Paris map…)

So, yeah, yesterday was pretty exciting. I went first to Chelsea to purchase the long-awaited tome (a few days ahead of the “official” release date), and have it signed by Mr. Ross. I was lucky enough to arrive at a rather quiet juncture which allowed me a minute or two of chitchat with the man himself. And it appears that my bloggy crush has now turned into a crush crush. The Noisy afternoon continued up in Hell’s Kitchen, with a whirlwind multimedia tour of the book, where the audience had the wonderful experience of getting to hear clips of the works being discussed in real time. (The only disappointment was a slide of Jackie O whose accompanying anecdote unfortunately had to be skipped over due to time constraints.) Upon exiting the auditorium, we found to our surprise that free copies were being handed out! My second (albeit unsigned) copy was re-gifted that very afternoon in a valiant effort to spread the Gospel of Ross far and wide. I am now but 10 pages in, but updates on my progress will be forthcoming.  So far my only complaint is a slightly smudge-prone dustjacket (see photo for evidence), but that just makes it easier to show that the book is actually being read.

On Nepotism

Let’s start off today’s post with a quote from Dewey Finn (the character played by Jack Black in one of the finer films in his oeuvre, School of Rock):

Oh yeah, I was this close to getting a chair in the Polish Philharmonic, and I nailed the audish, but I didn’t get it. Guess who did? Yo-Yo Ma….’s cousin. Little nepotiz!

It’s hard to reproduce in html the kind of expert delivery that one expects from Mr. Black, but suffice to say this line fairly slew me. (Runner Up for best line in the movie is this exchange with a student: “What was that thing you were playing earlier?” “A cello.” “Well, just turn it on its side and, Cel-lo!, you have a bass!”) But anyways, the real reason for this post was an article that ran about 2 weeks ago in The New York Times, but only caught my eye the other night when I espied it amongst the list of most e-mailed articles: Handing Off the Family Business. It begins suchly:

“Other things being equal, a firstborn son may be the worst choice to run your family business,” Dan Rottenberg writes in Family Business. McKinsey researchers working with the London School of Economics studied 700 manufacturing companies in France, Germany, Britain and the United States last year and ranked them based on various performance measures like sales growth and market valuation.

The survey found no difference between a family-run company and the typical one.

But, the researchers said, “family companies run by an outside professional C.E.O. performed on average 12 percent better than the average family business.” And, they said, “companies run by the eldest son underperformed the average by 10 percent.”

Hmmm…replace “firstborn son” with “favorite daughter” and we have some comments that are remarkably germane to certain events currently swirling around what might be the ultimate family business.

Later in the Times article, we are treated to a “multipart self-diagnostic test test the scions can take to determine if they are ready.”  I have taken the liberty to reproduce that test here:

• Is there a good fit between what I studied and the leadership role?
• Have I worked outside the family business and shown that I can succeed?
• Have I taken on jobs and projects whose results can be objectively measured?
• Am I aware of the deficiencies in my training and what I should do about them?
• Do my behavior and demeanor serve to defuse concerns about nepotism?

Let’s take these one at a time.  In response to the first question: what exactly has Katharina studied?  And what kinds of things does one need to study to run Bayreuth?

Second question: Let’s have a looks at Ms. Wagner’s short but significantly documented track record.  We have a “surprisingly irreverent, but ultimately patchy” production of Dutchman in Würzburg in 2002; a Munich staging of Albert Lortzing’s warhorse Der Waffenschmied in Munich in 2005, which was “mercilessly panned by critics;” and her Berlin opera directorial debut in 2006, Puccini’s Il Trittico, where she “was loudly booed by the glittery first-night audience, while the soloists, including Cristina Gallardo-Domas as Sister Angelica, and conductor Stefano Ranzani, received rapturous applause.”  Hmmmm…..okay.

Third Question: How does one measure the success of an opera production “objectively”?  Ticket sales figures?  mp3 sales figures?

Fourth Question: Courtesy of mostly opera…: “I do not want to be uncharming, but it is nevertheless a fact that my cousin Nike and my half sister Eva would not have the possibility of developing their own Festival profile, for reasons of age alone. Before they would have their hands free for their own planning, they would be far beyond the retirement age…” Well, she certainly seems aware of the deficiencies of her rivals.

Question 5: LOLROTFLLMAO.  But this is Bayreuth, so isn’t nepotism, like, kinda the point?