Regular readers know that I have been rolling my eyes at Music@Menlo's programming for the last ten years or so. The festival directors, Wu Han and David Finckel, work pretty much in the dead-white-European-male canon, even when there are obvious opportunities to break out of that particular line of programming.
The pair are also directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Weirdly, the one time I saw them in SF, they played a new song cycle and Amy Beach's piano quintet, the sort of thing various people wish they'd do more of.
CMS's season opener led to the following:
- Review: Chamber Music Society Returns, Unchanged, by Zachary Woolfe. Subhead: The organization opened its season with a program encapsulating a persistently conservative vision of the repertory.
- Chamber Music Society's Leaders on Balancing Old and New, by Javier Hernández. An interview that contains a ton of gobbledegook, including the ridiculous claim by Finckel: "I mean, there is more variety and diversity in a single string quartet of Haydn than you can find in about a hundred works of other composers." W the actual F. This is a willful dodge around what "diversity" means.
- Diversify the world of classical music? Some key players are digging in their heels, by Joshua Kosman, wielding a very sharp pencil.
- Catalyst Quartet shines a spotlight on the chamber music of Black composers, also by Joshua Kosman. Lack of diverse programming means omitting a lot of terrific music from our concert halls.
- The Programmatic Lightness Of Being, by Drew McManus at Adaptistration.
- There's plenty of mockery of the CMS/LC on Twitter, as well.
2 comments:
It's bizarre of Finckel to speak of a repertoire covering 500 years, given 1) how much 16th century music does he program, anyway?; 2) this was in response to the interviewer citing Woolfe's review, which was of a concert whose works were all written within about 40 years, by four composers all of whom were German-speaking. (And all male, too, though that is not required even for curating a concert of known repertoire pieces of early 19th century chamber music by German-speaking composers.)
If the Chamber Music Society had a performance archive, it would be possible to plot the distribution of composers by era. My bet is that they program 0 works from the 16th century. They program music for solo singers, but do they program any choral music?
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