Anthony Tommasini Steps Down

I was not planning to comment on a matter of note over at the NY Times, which is that Anthony Tommasini is stepping down as chief classical music critic and also retiring from the paper at the end of this year. I've said plenty about him and his opinions over the years, and I've just tagged every post that mentions him with "Tommasini." Just click that for more than you might want to read of my opinions of his opinions.

However, an interview at NPR and what I take to be his valedictory column at the Times really do need some kind of public comment. On Twitter, composer Judd Greenstein had a few things to say about the Times column, and I agree with everything he says. A number of other folks chimed in and by and large I agree with them.

I will further note that I find Tommasini's uncritical commentary on conservatories appalling. Conservatories are bastions of The Canon; they are there to school young musicians in "the core repertory"; they preserve a focus on technical ability; they are lineage-driven; they are very white and European in focus; they also train many many more musicians than there are jobs for. They're extremely problematic and conservative institutions, and yet for so many they're the only way into the classical music field as a performer.

About the NPR interview: first, you need to know that Tommasini published a book a few years ago called The Indispensable Composers. It's a brick-sized book discussing the lives and music of composers that Tommasini considers, well, indispensable. I will say that I haven't read it, because I prefer to read more specialist-oriented material about composers and music. This is most assuredly a work for general readers, for people who are just starting out with "classical music" or who are casual symphony attendees. I am not the audience.

Some years ago, Tommasini had a Times article that tried to poll people about the "greatest composers," and he imposed limitations I thought were a particular type of pandering and also bad choices from the chief classical critic of such a widely-read paper: he really did not want to consider any composers born before J.S. Bach and G. F. Handel, that is, 1685. For the book, he did let Monteverdi creep in, but he left out, well, an awful lot of important composers and their music. You can see the table of contents for the book here. (If you're guessing that it's all dead white European guys, well, you're right. And it's a very predictable group. Is Robert Schumann really more indispensable than Janacek? Is Puccini? How can you even decide?)

Anyway, here's what jumped out at me in the print version of the NPR interview. The interviewer and Tommasini are discussing his book:

Q: But then why not put two or three more modern composers?

A: In this crucial opening chapter, I said that the thing I love about contemporary music is that for a moment you hear this new piece and you don't think about where it's going to fit in the pantheon. You're just excited. Will literary historians look back and say, "What was the big deal about John Irving? We don't get it. Why were his books so popular?" But they're good reads and people love them, and he's a good writer. But, is he in the pantheon? So I'm eliminating composers of the last 50 or 70 years. We're just too close to them. And that's another book. And I'd like to write a book on the music of the last hundred years.

I cannot tell you just how bad I think this is. It's nice that he's going to get another book out of this, but what you're reading is the chief classical music critic of the NY Times refusing to take a critical stance on composers active since the end of the World War II.  This is a truly appalling act of critical timidity: our job as critics is to say what we think and why, not make excuses about why we can't render judgment.

Let me put it one way: Can you imagine a critic in 1920 being unwilling to make claims for the greatness of Johannes Brahms, who died in 1897 and had been active as a composer in the 50 to 70 years before 1920? Fortunately, the anonymous author of Brahms's obituary in the Times didn't hesitate to go out on a limb and say that he'd be taking his place among the titans of music.

And I'll put it another way, by listing some of the composers Tommasini isn't willing to place in our, or his, pantheon: Shostakovich, Britten, Cage, Boulez, Carter, Messiaen, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Kurtag, Dutilleux, Glass, Reich, Adams, Saariaho, Harrison, Walker, Berio, Feldman, Crumb, Rautavaara, Penderecki, and more.

He must have opinions about these composers. It's a real failure of critical nerve when the chief classical music critic of the Times thinks he's too close to the composers of the last 50 to 70 years to express those opinions in public.

NY Times Book Review, WHY WHY WHY.

The NY Times Book Review, celebrating its 125th birthday, decided it would be fun to try to choose the best book of the last 125 years. Now, this kind of thing is a total fool's errand, as readers of this blog surely know, especially if you saw Anthony Tommasini's quixotic effort to choose the top 25 (or something) Western classical composers. He excluded every composer before a certain period for reasons that amounted to "I know these composers and my fellow reviewers know these composers and so do musicologists but the average classical music lover has never heard of Dufay, Machaut, or Josquin so fuck everyone born before Bach except maybe Monteverdi."

Okay, I'll take a deep breath and get off that particular hobby horse, especially with Tommasini stepping down from the position of chief classical music critic of the Times. He did get a book out of it, so bully for him. Or something.

ANYWAY. The Times's methodology oh my god had readers nominating books back in October. Today they've got a list of 25 out for people to vote on. And it is just awful, in about 27 different ways. Okay, fewer than that, but bad enough.

Let's start with some statistics. Twenty-five books, of which 7 are by women. Twenty-five books, of which 6 were published before 1950 and the earliest were published in the 1920s. Twenty-five books, of which 7 were published in the last 25 years. Twenty-five books, of which 17 were written by U.S. writers. (I have omitted Nabokov from those 17 because, you know. He is a man of unclassifiable nationality.) Twenty-five books, of which 3 were written by non-white people. (I'm counting Garcia Marquez as white here.) Twenty-five books, and I think only One Hundred Years of Solitude was written in a language other than English.

Let's include a few books that just. don't. belong. on. this. list. Top of the heap, the hideously racist Gone with the Wind. Second, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which isn't a particularly good book! Third, The Catcher in the Rye. DOES ANYONE REALLY LIKE THIS BOOK? 

Let's go into a few of the missing. First, practically everyone who published in a language other than English! So, no Kawabata, no Mishima, no Tanizaki, no Mann, no Proust, Camus, Grass, Singer,....well, list out your favorites here. No Kristen Lavransdottir, which is so very much better than Gone with the fucking Wind. 

After that, my gosh, no poets, although the nomination process was open to poets and memoirists. So just put every great poet of the last 125 years on your list. Never mind giants like Yeats, Eliot, Bishop, and on and on.

And there's a serious recency issue here. Way too many of the books were written since 1980. Among the missing: James, Wharton, Cather, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Conrad, Woolfe. 

Leaving aside the recency issue, no Rushdie! No Lessing! Nothing by any number of great writers.

As I said, it's a fool's errand, and the Times shouldn't be doing this. They could have moderated the utter stupidity of the list they wound up with by, say, inserting themselves between the votes of nostalgia-ridden former teenaged boys and the final list. Or, even better, asking a whole bunch of outstanding living writers and critics to name their views of the best books of the last 125 years and publishing those as opinion pieces.

Someone's Priorities are Right.

Lincoln Center Fountain

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

No sarcasm here: Anthony Tommasini reviewed the NY Philharmonic's opening program for 2021-22, spending three paragraphs on the concert and eleven evaluating Jaap van Zweden's tenure and speculating on the future. 

He raises the important issues: was van Zweden the right conductor at the right time? He doesn't explicitly answer, but he's obviously thinking "no" or maybe the more equivocal "probably not." His evaluation is really interesting, because he found JvZ most persuasive in new music and wanting in "core repertory." I don't think that is what anyone expected when the conductor was appointed to the post.

In any event, this does bring up the question of who will be next in one of the hottest seats for a conductor.  Whoever it is has to take into account these things:

• The orchestra has a reputation for being difficult to work with. I have no specifics on this; I just know it's been their reputation for as long as I have known they existed. You have to wonder about the social culture of the group if they've managed to stay difficult to work with for forty or fifty years.
• The orchestra has been playing in a terrible hall, though this might be fixed: it's currently under renovation and should re-open in September, 2022. It's an ill wind, etc., and the lack of performances during the pandemic sped up the renovation process by eighteen months.
• The orchestra had weak management for decades before Deborah Borda's return.
• Borda has evidently been hinting that she might step down after the renovation is done. She is 72 and so one can understand that she is considering when to retire. But she's also in a position to be a genuinely transformative CEO for the organization.

So who might be willing to take this very difficult position? Tommasini more-than-hints that he'd like the orchestra to have a woman as its music director. Let's consider some possible candidates, not all of them women; I will note that there are some female candidates I'm not saying anything about because I don't know enough about their careers. Some of the possibilities are conductors suggested by friends. In all cases, you should ask yourself why the NY Phil is a good career move for the possible candidate and whether they already have any kind of working relationship or history with the orchestra.

• Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. MGT has given notice at a really great post, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The CBSO is an excellent orchestra with a long history of launching the careers of top-notch conductors: going back a ways, we have Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramu, Andres Nelsons, and MGT. Brexit might well have something to do with this; also, her two young children, also, having a partner whose job is in Germany, if I have this right. She is a huge talent who could be hired by any number of orchestras in Europe.
• Susanna Mälkki. Well, she's music director at the Helsinki Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the LA Phil. Gustavo Dudamel, that orchestra's music director, has a new job at the Paris Opera. He might not want two jobs that are five thousand miles apart, and Mälkki could very well be next in line to be music director of a well-managed, forward-looking, financially-sound orchestra that plays in one of the greatest halls in the world. If you had a choice, would you take the NY Phil over that? I sure wouldn't, although it's true that New York is closer to Helsinki than LA is.
• Marin Alsop. She'll be out of the Baltimore job at the end of this season. She's a New Yorker with deep NY roots; her parents were both professional musicians in NYC, with each having a long career with the orchestra of the New York City Ballet. The NY Phil has already tried this with Alan Gilbert....and that didn't last.
• Barbara Hannigan. She conducts, she sings, she's a fantastic musician and was amazing the one time I've seen her live. Does she want to be a full-time music director of a difficult orchestra?
• Vladimir Jurowski. He has one of the best jobs in the opera world, at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, succeeding Kirill Petrenko. Would he consider adding the NY Phil to that?
• Jeri Lynne Johnson. Music director of the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra. I have never heard her conduct and haven't read much about her; a friend who is familiar with her work said "She has cross-section of skills that fit with what the new music director is going to need in terms of background, key mentors, ability to present new music, while maintaining a schedule with older works, and ability with community outreach."
• Krzysztof Urbański. Here's another huge talent; anyway, that's my view based on the astonishing concerts he has led with the San Francisco Symphony. He's currently the music director of the Indianapolis Symphony and very likely would be available for a job at a bigger and more important orchestra. I'm counting him as a candidate because Deborah Borda already has a proven record of hiring a young talent who doesn't have a lot of music director experience.
• Gustavo Dudamel. Well, he does have this big job coming up in Paris, where there are two opera houses and a gigantic budget. Would he leave LA for NY? It's closer to Paris but a much bigger headache than LA. Of course, Deborah Borda is a great administrator, so maybe it will be less of a headache than it has been.
• Manfred Honeck. Has a great reputation, but just re-upped in Pittsburgh. Presumably not taking the CSO job (see below), maybe not available for NY.
• Osmo Vänskä. He's the outgoing music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, where he has done great work. I believe that he is generally considered to be demanding, but in adult ways: he isn't a bully, just knows what he wants and how to get it. He is probably tough enough for the NY Phil, but didn't they try this with Masur?
• Riccardo Muti. They could try again, I guess! His contract at the CSO will be up fairly soon, but he is 80, his programming at the CSO has been incredibly dull, and he's probably not the kind of transformative talent that the NY Phil needs.
• Esa-Pekka Salonen. Forget it. He made it pretty clear that he didn't want this job, and as you know, he likes California.

Levine Coverage

Lincoln Center Fountain

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

The coverage of James Levine's demise is....interesting. There are a few people trying to be "fair", meaning they are trying to be "balanced" despite Levine's alleged crimes (and everything noncriminal involved with brushing his health problems under the nearest rug). 

I realize that an obituary written by a journalist as news, running in a newspaper, is supposed to assess the whole of its subject's life, but there is such a thing as soft-pedaling and there is definitely quite a bit of that around. There is lots of room for arts-related opinion pieces that really dissect Levine's career and that work to understand how he managed to stay in one of the most powerful positions in the U.S. classical music world for decades despite the rumors that swirled around him. (And why the BSO hired him to be their music director despite the rumors and his health problems.) That's the kind of thing I'd like to see more of. 

I want to note a couple of factual items that came out after the announcement of his death:

1. Levine died of natural causes. The exact cause hasn't been released, but in addition to wondering whether he'd died as the result of injuries suffered in a fall, I also wondered whether suicide was the cause.

2. In December, 2019, he married his friend? companion? life partner? Suzanne Thompson, the oboist, with whom he lived for many years. The question marks should be read in the context of his alleged fondness for underage males.

Here's a round-of of coverage of Levine's death. Note that I have not yet read all of this, so there isn't commentary on every link yet. There will be, but not until this weekend.

• Composer, teacher, and performer Elaine Fine discusses the evolution of her thinking about musicians, in a compassionate and thoughtful way. 
• Conductor and cellist Kenneth Woods has a scorching blog post  that tells you a lot about what kind of a person that Levine was. Unusually, I suggest reading the comments, which are informative and include an extensive comment by a long-time Met orchestra member. I have elsewhere read a report to the effect that Levine would talk to singers through an intermediary, which is weird for someone whose job it is to work with singers.
• Joshua Kosman (SF Chron) tells you about what the reactions to Levine's death tell you about the people making the pronouncements.
• AZ Madonna (Boston Globe) calls for the end of genius-worship. Here is Madonna's earlier call for Peter Gelb's resignation. 
• Jeremy Eichler, Globe, obituary 
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times: obituary
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times: appraisal
• NY Times: timeline of Levine's career
• Boston Symphony, notice of Levine's passing. It is very short, and finishes with two sentences that tell the heart of the story: "The last period of his tenure as BSO music director was plagued by ill health, which resulted in his resignation in 2011. Subsequently, there emerged allegations of sexual improprieties which virtually ended his career as many musical institutions severed ties with him, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra."
• William R. Braun, Opera News, obituary
• Justin Davidson, vulture.com, obituary
• Tim Page, Washington Post, obituary
• Michael Andor Brodeur, Washington Post, appraisal
• Guardian, obituary
• Tom Jacobs, SFCV, appraisal, worse than soft-pedaling. He seems to be trying to excuse Levine somehow. Note the outraged comment from composer and violist Kurt Rohde.

Levine's Reputation

Lincoln Center Fountain

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

The various obituaries for the late James Levine are heaping praise on him, and honestly, you should be asking yourself how much of this is even deserved.

The over-inflation of James Levine's reputation comes from various sources. Back when he stepped down as Music Director, Anthony Tommasini praised his interest in modern music and expansion of the repertory, citing Pelleas et Melisande (1902) and Berg's operas (1922; 1937) as evidence. Come ON.

The Met continues this on their home page, where they state the following:

Celebrated for shaping the Met Orchestra and Chorus into the finest in the world, he was also responsible for considerably expanding the Met repertoire. Levine conducted the first-ever Met performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Verdi’s I Vespri Siciliani, I Lombardi and Stiffelio, Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Moses und Aron, Berg’s Lulu, Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, as well as the world premieres of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles and John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby.

There's plenty of bullshit in that quotation. The Met Orchestra is a terrific group, for sure, the equal of the best American and European orchestras. Saying it's the "first in the world" seems to me to be stretching things, owing to the many, many superb ensembles performing today.

The Chorus is an excellent group, though maybe not as great as, say, the amazing Bayreuth Festival chorus, not to mention this key point: the Met's chorus masters train the chorus, not the music director. The current chorus master is Donald Palumbo; his immediate predecessor was Raymond Hughes; before that was the legendary David Stivender. My recollection is that Stivender should get a lot of credit for the group's excellence and I know that Palumbo is considered to be a terrific musician and chorus master.

If those are all the Met premieres that Levine conducted, I would call that pathetic for his 45-year tenure. I count fifteen (15) operas. They weren't the only Met / world premieres between 1972 and 2017 by any means, and presumably Levine gets some credit for changes to the rep. With a schedule of 20-25 operas annually, though, a conductor who was truly dedicated to expanding the repertory would have found more works new to the Met to lead. 

It's also important to remember that Levine stated publicly and has been widely quoted as saying that there just weren't enough new operas that were good enough for the Met. This is also total bullshit, to which the only proper response was "maybe you should get out a little more, Jimmy." Under Levine, the Met managed to perform its second opera composed by a woman, more than a century since the first, and managed to not perform any operas composed by Black people, although the company did manage to commission and perform Tan Dun's The First Emperor.

But the Met was late to an awful lot: the company commissioned Philip Glass's The Voyage, then waited until 2008 for Satyagraha (premiered in 1979) and 2019 for Akhnaten (premiered in 1984). They were decades behind other groups, both production originated at the ENO, and both have been extremely popular. John Adams's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghofer had long waits, though Doctor Atomic made it to the Met stage only three years after its first performances in San Francisco.

Their Janacek record is also terrible! Except for the two 1925 performances of Jenufa, San Francisco was ahead of the Met in performing The Makropulos Case, Kat'a Kabanova, and modern performances of Jenufa. We've had The Cunning Little Vixen, but (alas) not From the House of the Dead, where the Met did perform it in 2009.

We need also to take a look at Levine's record as music director of the Boston Symphony. I did, the other day, and while his record of performing new music there was better than I thought, it was also narrowly focused. He performed works by Bolcolm, Carter, Ligeti, Wuorinen, Sessions, Harbison, Lutoslawski, Messiaen, Babbitt, Perle, Schuller, Foss, Lieberson, Dawe, Duttileux, Barber, Poulenc, Milhaud among post-war and living composers, plus a fair bit of Berg and Schoenberg.

I would have gone to most of the concerts featuring those composers, but he missed an awful lot of good composers. (You can check this yourself at the BSO's performance archive.)

Lastly, here's Peter Gelb:

“No artist in the 137-year history of the Met had as profound an impact as James Levine,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in a statement. “He raised the Met’s musical standards to new and greater heights during a tenure that spanned five decades.”

It's difficult to compare the impact and influence of artists working in very different periods, and clearly Gelb means "on the Met", but I must note that the Met's chief conductors included Arturo Toscanini, who had a profound impact on orchestral quality and was a champion of new music in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however seemingly conservative he became as he aged. And you can currently find plenty of criticism of Levine's actual conducting, from interpretive blandness to technical deterioration starting in the 1990s, to the point that for at least part of this century, the orchestra was following the concertmaster rather than Levine. Why would a big institution like the Met keep a music director who was losing the ability to conduct? (Toscanini retired from the NBC Symphony after one memory lapse that we know of.) Well, that's an interesting question, now, isn't it.

Tommasini on Pianos

Well, not exactly: Anthony Tommasini has an article in the Times called "Why Do Pianists Know So Little About Pianos?"  The URL for the article might be somewhat revealing: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/arts/music/piano-tuning.html

Of course, it's not just about piano tuning; it's about the variability of pianos and the mechanical complexity of the instrument. I would have amplified this:

Not only can violinists, clarinetists, harpists or flutists tune their instruments, and even bend pitches in performance, they also, by and large, know much more about how their instruments work.

If I were writing this article, I would explain how you tune different instruments. On violins (and other orchestral bowed string instruments), you turn the tuning pegs that that are at one end of the instrument, at the top of the neck. On wind instruments, including the flute, you can generally make small adjustments to how the head joint connects to the main body of the instrument, that is, you can pull it out a bit to lengthen the instrument and make a downward adjustment to the pitch. Harpists tighten or loosen the strings by turning a key in the tuning pins that run across the top of the instruments.

Tommasini says this, of instruments used at Carnegie Hall:

(These instruments, by the way, only last about five or six years, and in some cases 10; today’s pianists aren’t hitting the same keys Rubinstein touched.)

And....I'm curious about this one. My bet is that these pianos are taken out of service, reconditioned, and sold. Pianos generally last decades; a friend of mine owns a piano from the 1930s, if I'm remembering this correctly, and another from the 1960s. I read an article some years ago about Stephen Kovacevich buying a new piano, again, one from the 1930s. He is a pro and probably practices four hours a day. But he hasn't replaced that piano every five or six years.

Lastly:

Back at my apartment, the technician finally dropped by, tuned my piano and made mechanical tweaks to a few of the keys. Afterward it felt and sounded vastly better. I have no idea what was involved.

It's not too late to learn some details about piano maintenance, of course. Long ago, I took a weekend-long flute repair class from James Phelan, who is now an important flutemaker in Boston, the US's unofficial flute capital. At the end of the class, I could disassemble a flute, reassemble it, and make some simple repairs. 

Still, when my instruments needed repairs, back they went to the factory, or, if I was at my parents' home in NJ, to the flute technician there who worked on everyone's flutes (I wish I could remember his name...Herbert something, and he was a few towns away). I think the story is pretty much the same for other instrumentalists, especially professional string players whose instruments can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars: they go to the repair pros.

Loving Sopranos

 The NY Times has been running a series of articles called "Five Minutes to Make You Love [something]." They're little glimpses into particular repertories or instruments.

This week, they've got "Five Minutes to Make You Love Sopranos." Okay, this isn't a problem for me; I have a lot of soprano recitals and love many many sopranos. The choices are generally good, although I think that however great she was, Callas's voice qua voice is an acquired taste for lots of listeners. And for Caballé, I would have picked "O patria mia," from Aida, given her incredible ability to float high notes that go on forever. I have to applaud the two Leontyne Price selections (Tommasini, "D'amor sull'ali rosee" from Il Trovatore, and Fleming, "Zweite Brautnacht", from Die Aegyptische Helena, a fabulously exciting recording) and the variety of others.

I think a couple of common aria types are missing. One is a coloratura showcase, so I have a couple of my own favorites here for you.

First, here's Rosa Ponselle in the greatest recording of the soprano's big aria from Ernani that I've ever heard. Ponselle was a dramatic soprano, a Norma and Aida, but she could move a very big voice with incredible speed and lightness. Listen to her trills and especially the turn as she comes out of the long trill in the fast section. Also, this remains one of the most beautiful soprano voices on record, pure velvet.

Next, the wonderful Luisa Tetrazzini in "Ah, non giunge" from La Sonnambula. This  one is for the pure joy of singing.

The other is dramatic sopranos being...well, loud. Here's Dame Eva Turner's classic 1928 recording of "In questa reggia" from Turandot.

To close, here's the great Kirsten Flagstad singing Senta's ballad from The Flying Dutchman.

Doriot Anthony Dwyer

Doriot Anthony Dwyer, legendary flutist, has died at 98. Dwyer was the first woman to hold a principal chair in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a position to which she was appointed by Charles Munch in 1952. I had long assumed she was the first woman to be an orchestra principal in the U.S.; I was very surprised to see that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra appointed Helen Kotas as principal horn in 1941. The next female principal in the BSO was not appointed until 1977, so...

Dwyer was a trailblazer, very tough about how she went about negotiating the job, and held the principal flute seat until she retired in 1990. I never studied with Dwyer and never met her, but I lived in the Boston area for five years and she was a towering figure among flutists. Rest in peace, Doriot Anthony Dwyer; you were a hero to so many young women who played the flute.

• Jeremy Eichler, Boston Globe, obit
• Andrea Shea, WBUR, obit
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times, obit
• Staff, Washington Post, obit
• AP, Billboard, obit
• Kristen Elizabeth Kean, dissertation

Jessye Norman

Oh, this is a tremendous shock: the great Jessye Norman has died, age 74. The Times, which is still preparing a full obituary, uses the words "regal" and "majestic" in their headline and lede, and those are exactly right.

Her family's statement to the AP says that she died of septic shock and multiple organ failure following complications of a spinal injury she suffered in 2015.

I saw her live only once, in one of the odder American Masters concerts, singing Cage. This was a few years ago; the soprano was well into her 60s and sounded great. You could check out her Sieglinde in the videos of the Met Ring, from 1990, where she is in magnificent voice, or the Met video of Les Troyens, where she is a splendid Cassandre.

Here she is in Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs:





Obits and memorials:

• Dan Wakin and Michael Cooper, NY Times
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times
• Alex Ross, New Yorker
• Mark Swed, LA Times, appreciation
• Mesfin Fekadu, AP/Washington Post
• James Jorden, Parterre Box
• Thomas May, Memeteria
• Tim Ashley, Guardian, on her greatest performances
• NY Times writers on her greatest performances (with YouTube, Spotify, etc.)

Tommasini discusses her mannerisms and vocal decline. The WaPost obit names a sister and a brother as survivors, as does the Times. There is no discussion of marriage, children, etc., even "the soprano never married." 

Another item: she never sang staged opera at San Francisco Opera, where the archive list her in two concerts. At the Met, she sang only 80 performances, which doesn't even put her on the performer report, which starts with singers who have sung at least 100 performances there. (Nonetheless, Gelb trumpeted this as something great. Ahem.) A great career with an interesting and unusual shape.

"Job" Opening at Baltimore Sun

Well, here's a job that I'm not sure I could recommend: working a as freelance music critic for the Baltimore Sun.

Copied and pasted from the web page I linked to:

Description:

The Baltimore Sun seeks a freelance critic to review the broad array of classical performances in the Baltimore region. These can include, but are not limited to, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Shriver Hall Concert Series, Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Baltimore Concert Opera and the Peabody Institute. We are keen to reflect the diversity of the classical community in the Baltimore area. 

Responsibilities

Plan, in concert with an editor, a schedule of reviews that encompasses the variety within the Baltimore region’s classical scene Write with accuracy, knowledge, speed, flair and an accessible voiceMeet deadlinesEngage with and grow a network of followers on social media. Qualifications 

Three years of critical experience at a journalistic organizationExcellent writing skills Proven ability to build an audience via social mediaFamiliarity with and interest in Baltimore-area classical organizationsThe Baltimore Sun is committed to building a diverse correspondent network that reflects the people it covers and the audience it serves. Candidates are encouraged to highlight new perspectives they can bring to our team.

This is apparently a full-time music critic's job and requires three years of experience at a critic; however, you'll be paid as a freelancer, presumably by the article, and you'll get benefits just like a freelancer, which is to say, none. I have no idea how many freelancers there are who live close enough to Baltimore to be familiar with the scene - and who have either employment that takes care of health insurance or a spouse whose health insurance will keep them covered.

I'm also disturbed by that bit about "Proven ability to build an audience via social media." I mean, I suppose I could sorta demonstrate this, given my 1500 Twitter followers, but I'm not Alex Ross and neither is any other working critic: Alex has north of 100,000 followers, Anne Midgette of the Washington Post has 22,500, Anthony Tommasini of the NY Times has 7262, Zachary Woolfe, the most visible Times critic, has 9683, and James Jorden of Parterre Box has 3,197 (that was a shock; I figured he'd turn up in the 25,000 or higher range).

Honestly, I think that this part of the job is the job of the Sun's social media department. I certainly wouldn't make it a job requirement or expect any freelancer to have a huge following.

This is all related to something Tim Mangan, former critic of the Orange County Register, formerly in-house writer for the Pacific Sympony, wrote about last year: the hobbification of criticism, where it's something done on the side rather than a full-time profession, owing to the decline of print and on-line newspapers willing to pay for criticism. It is a real shame that the Sun is going down this path.

Compare and Contrast 36: Met Opening Night Samson and Dalila

An amusing, sort of, group of reviews:

• Anne Midgette, Washington Post
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times. He's kinda cranky, and this caught my eye in particular: "But the production weighed it down. Given Mr. Gelb’s determination to make opera relevant, one might think that this, of all works — it’s set, after all, in Gaza — would scream for an updated concept." C'mon, Tony - that's The Death of Klinghoffer, and you know what happened when the Met produced that opera.
• Justin Davidson, NY Mag / Vulture. The one I wish I'd written.
• Christopher Corwin, Parterre Box

Tearing My Hair Out: NY Times Does It Again

Do women in classical music matter to the NY Times?

What has me going this week is an article that is, exasperatingly, called "Five Minutes to Make You Love Classical Music." Exasperating because that's as clickbait as it gets; the entire proposition is dubious because so many works last longer than that, and because whether you love a piece or not is so dependent on the performance and the circumstances in which you hear it. I mean, who is going to be converted by just five minutes?

The article itself....well, the author got responses from 18 people, who are all critics for the Times or "some of our favorite artists." Here's the breakdown by sex of those who responded:

• 14 men
•   4 women

Breakdown by what they do:

One of the four women is Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, who is a Times writer. The others are composers Carolyn Shaw and Julia Wolfe, and soprano Julia Bullock.

The men are Zachary Woolfe, Anthony Tommasini, Seth Colter Walls, Joshua Barone, and Michael Cooper of the Times (four critics and one music-biz writer); Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leon Botstein, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, John Eliot Gardiner (conductors; Salonen is, of course, also a distinguished composer); composers Nico Muhly and Nicholas Britell; pianists Daniil Trifonov and Ethan Iverson; director Yuval Sharon.

Fifteen of the works chosen were by men, three by women.

So, the Times has no control over what people choose as their potential gateway classical music drugs, but they sure had some control over who they asked about this. Just to suggest a few women who could have been asked and might be among "our favorite artists:" Susanna Mälkki, Marin Alsop, MGT, Yuja Wang, Martha Argerich, Leila Josefowicz, Alisa Weilerstein, Claire Chase, Francesca Zambello, Kaija Saariaho. And as long as the Times's critics got to have their say, how about a couple of highly visible non-artists, Anne Midgette and Deborah Borda?

You Tell 'Em!

For once, reviewing the new Met Tosca, Anthony Tommasini doesn't mince any words:

Mr. Gelb eventually gave in, calling the [Luc Bondy] production “one of the blunders of my tenure.” In a recent interview he was even more abject.

“I’ve learned my lesson,” he said. “When it comes to a classic piece of repertoire, beauty counts — and that’s what the audience wants.”

But Mr. Gelb has learned the wrong lesson. The discouraging implication of the new “Tosca,” directed by David McVicar, is that when it comes to staging standard repertory works, modern is bad.

That’s simply not true. Look at the critical and popular success that has greeted the Met’s highly stylized version of “La Traviata”; or its surreal, ominous “Hansel and Gretel,” onstage through Jan. 6; or its post-apocalyptic “Parsifal,” set to return next month. Mr. Bondy’s “Tosca” was unsuccessful because it was messily conceptualized and gratuitously sordid, not because a gritty, dark take on this work is an impossibility.

More on Sexual Abuse in the Classical Music World

I woke up today to the news that three singers and an instrumentalist have accused Charles Dutoit of sexual assault. You can read all about it in this AP article, published at the Time Magazine web site. or at other outlets that have picked up the story. A tiny amount of research shows that the deceased veteran soprano who warned Paula Rasmussen about Dutoit during the run of Les Troyens in LA must have been Carol Neblett, who died only weeks ago.

In the article about Dutoit, note, particularly, people who don't want their names printed because it might affect their ability to get work. This should not happen.

A few more good articles have been published recently on the subject of sexual abuse:

• Anne Midgette minces no words, warning orchestras and opera companies everywhere about the consequences of ignoring what might be going on within their institutions: Institutions raced to dump James Levine. They should look hard at themselves.
• Anthony Tommasini minces words, as usual, saying, oh, he'll move his Levine recordings out of the living room. How's that for a decisive move? (Follow-up on January 2: who cares what Tommasini does with his Levine recordings? It is completely immaterial to what really matters, which is 1) policies that protect performers from predatory peers, conductors, administrators, etc. 2) administrators who act on those policies.)
• Ellen McSweeney sums up a few things: Advocates Have Found Five Qualities Associated With Sexual Violence. The Classical Music World Hits Four of Them. Omitted: almost all general directors of performing arts orgs are male. The very few exceptions include the NY Philharmonic (Deborah Borda), San Francisco Performances (founded by Ruth Felt, who was president for around 35 years, Melanie Smith is currently president), Washington Performing Arts (Jenny Bilfield, formerly of Stanford Lively Arts, er, Stanford Live), Kennedy Center (Deborah Rutter), and Lincoln Center (Deborah Spar). I would have mentioned concertmasters as having unusual power and prestige within an orchestra. 
• Jeremy Eicher has a few things to say. In classical music, a year of urgency and of reckoning

Girls of the Golden West, San Francisco Opera World Premiere

Davóne Tines (Ned Peters) and Julia Bullock (Dame Shirley)

Cory Weaver photo, courtesy of San Francisco Opera

AND it's December 12 and I've added John Rockwell.

It's December 9 and I've added John Masko and Patricia Wallinga to the list.

It's December 7 and I think I've got everything that will be published. If you spot someone else, let me know. Added today: Alex Ross, Hugh Canning, Batty Masetto, Michael Strickland.

• Joshua Kosman, rolling his eyes, delivers a one-two punch at music and libretto in the SF Chron. 
• Janos Gereben is also unhappy, at Opera West.
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV. Unhappy.
• Georgia Rowe, Mercury-News, calls it triumphant.
• Georgia Rowe, Opera News 
• Mark Swed, LA Times. Cautiously supportive.
• Brian Holt, Out West Arts, who really was the last to publish.
• Allan Ulrich, FT (behind a paywall)
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times
• Alex Ross, The New Yorker
• Hugh Canning,  The Sunday Times of London (behind a paywall)
• John Rockwell, Musical America (behind a paywall)
• Batty Masetto, Parterre Box
• John Masko, Parerre Box
• Matthew Gurewitsch, Pundicity
• Jeff Dunn, Theatrius. "Disappoints."
• Richard S. Ginell, Classical Voice North America
• David Karlin, Bachtrack
• Harvey Steiman, Seen and Heard International
• Jim Farber, LA Opus
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• Opera Tattler is pretty negative.
• Stephen Smoliar at the premiere and his second visit, The Rehearsal Studio
• James Ambroff-Tahan, SF Examiner
• Lois Silverstein, Opera Wire
• Clive Paget, Limelight
• Patricia Wallinga, a long Twitter thread

I'm planning to read these soon and try to respond to a few comments in various reviews.

Compare & Contrast 33: Gardiner in NY

John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir spent six months touring with the three surviving Monteverdi operas. They hit New York the other day; Justin Davidson and Anthony Tommasini were there, and wrote the following sharply different reviews; Alex Ross is less enthused than Tommasini, but still very complimentary to the performers, with none of Justin's snark and a lot of penetrating commentary about Monteverdi's greatness:

• Justin Davidson, A Triple Dose of Expert Monteverdi. "The results were predictively, even oppressively, exquisite." 
• Anthony Tommasini, An Inspiring End to a 6-Month Tour of Monteverdi’s Operas
• Alex Ross, The Shakespeare of Opera

Long ago, A.C. Douglas was incredulous that I'd rank L'incoronazione di Poppea with Le Nozze di Figaro, but after seeing four productions, I'll stick with that assessment. It is among the very greatest of operas.

Updated on Saturday, Nov. 11, to add Alex Ross's review and my closing comment, then bumped to the top of the blog again.

The Exterminating Angel, Metropolitan Opera

Thomas Adès's new opera, The Exterminating Angel, is now playing at the Met, with an HD broadcast on November 18. The reviews are...interesting. I'm going to list 2016 reviews from its Salzburg premiere and maybe its ROH run, too.

• Alex Ross, The New Yorker, August 2016
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times, August, 2016
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times, October, 2017. Note horrible clickbaity headline.
• Rebecca Schmid, CVNA, August 2016
• Justin Davidson, Vulture, October, 2017
• Eric C. Simpson, NY Classical Review
• Patrick Clement James, Parterre Box. Very much the odd review out.
• David Patrick Stearns, WQXR. Also did not like it.
• James Jorden, Observer. Did not like.

Can't find a James Jorden review, which seems odd. Thanks to MEW for providing the link!

Return of the Rubin Institue

Remember the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism?

It's an organization dedicated to training the next generation of music critics, by giving a small number of music students the chance to work with top-flight music critics for a few days. I had quite a bit to say about the organization two years ago during their last session (yes, it's an alternate-years seminar). In brief, they're trying to solve the wrong problem: the major challenge facing classical music criticism isn't a lack of good critics, it's a lack of ways to make a living as a critic.

Anyway, the Rubin Institute is in town again, October 20-24, again at the SF Conservatory of Music. The cast of char...er, critics is similar to 2014:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chron
• Anne Midgette, Washington Post
• Tim Page, USC
• John Rockwell
• Alex Ross
• Stephen Rubin
• Heidi Waleson, WSJ

No sign of Anthony Tommasini of the NY Times, Winn Delacoma, or Steven Winn; no idea why. The late Robert Commanday also participated in 2014, and all I can do is sigh over his absence.

You can read the institute schedule at the SFCM web site.: The public events include pre-concert talks by Anne Midgette (Philharmonia Baroque), John Rockwell (SFS), and Alex Ross (SFO, The Makropulos Case). In addition, there's a public panel at 2 p.m. on Friday and a presentation of prizes at 10:30 a.m. on Monday. This seems significantly reduced from 2014.

I Would Have Sworn That the NY Times Had Editors.

But maybe I'm wrong, because it's hard to see how this got past them:

The story is heavy on melodrama. After an appealing choral scene for the contented Gypsies, an old man (here the stentorian bass Kevin Thompson) tells a somber tale of a woman he once loved who ran off with a man from another camp. Aleko (the sturdy bass Stefan Szkafarowsky), who is married to the winsome young Zemfira (the dark-toned soprano Inna Dukach), says he would never put up with such a betrayal. But Zemfira has fallen for a dashing young lover (the bright tenor Jason Karn) and flaunts her affair in Aleko’s face. After an anguished aria of despair, a highlight of the score, Aleko kills the young lovers and is banished from the camp.

If I need to tell you who wrote that, you haven't been paying attention.

Dissecting the Press Coverage

The NY Times demonstrated the power of the embargoed press release by having three articles about the changing of the guard at the Met posted about 30 seconds after the official press release was mailed out. In honor of that, here's some random commentary on the Met, YNS, and how the press, okay, the Times, is talking about it all.

First off, no one is the slightest bit surprised, perhaps owing to the fact that rumors had circulated for years that YNS was the Met's, or Peter Gelb's, first choice to succeed James Levine. The speed with which the announcement was made following Levine's decision to step down means that the negotiations had very likely been going on for some time.

I personally see it as a big problem that it will be four years before YNS goes from Music Director Designate to Music Director, but Peter Gelb tries to put a nice spin on it:

Long waits are not unusual in the classical music world, where major organizations and top talents typically plan their schedules four or five years in advance. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said that he felt fortunate that Mr. Nézet-Séguin would be available by 2020. “It required some juggling for him to be able to come as early as then,” he said in an interview.

Riiiiiight. I mean, this is true, and yet it's unfortunate in the context of what the Met needs. Anthony Tommasini spells this out in detail in his analysis of the appointment. (Tommasini unfortunately continues to hallucinate fantasize about Esa-Pekka Salonen coming on board as an interim MD, a position he would share with Bernard Haitink, who is 87. Stop, already, and daydream about something realistic, like Salonen conducting regularly at the Met. Or the Met commissioning an opera from Salonen. But right you are, Tony,  about that Luisi appointment.)

There's been concern in the press / blogosphere / Twittersphere over how forward-looking YNS might be as MD of the Met. In the same article I've quoted above, there's this:

Mr. Nézet-Séguin said that he considered the Met “the standard-bearer of our art form in the world,” and that he looked forward to conducting a variety of works there, including forgotten masterpieces that he would like to revive and new works, including world premieres.

Some cautious optimism about future repertory is thus justified, though we won't know for a while what he has in mind. (At this early stage, he might not either, but let me say SCHREKER and also Symanowski's great opera King Roger, which seems to be coming into its own at long last. I will nominate Nelsons, Jurowski, or Salonen as potential conductors of all of these, although ahem King Roger might particularly appeal to YNS himself.) In any event, it would be hard to be less behind new operas than the reluctant Levine.

Color me puzzled by Tommasini's claim about Levine "making the operas of Debussy, Berg and Stravinsky central to the Met's repertory." Pelleas was performed 62 times before 1972 and has been performed about 55 more times since then. There've been 44 performances of Lulu and 69 of Wozzeck, of which 18 were before Levine. The Rake's Progress has gotten a big 26 performances, with 31 of Le Rossignol and 23 of Oedipus Rex. C'mon, it's purely blowing smoke to claim that those three composers are in any way "central."


Headlines We Didn't Use

Met Appoints First Openly Gay Music Director

YNS: Making Opera Gay Again

Press Release Confirms James Conlon's Availability for San Francisco Opera Job

Met Confirms That The Rumors Were Right