Month: January 2017

I can’t think of a more inspiring NYC institution than the New York Public Library.  It’s still rich with the unnecessary spatial trappings that are often too costly to be included in today’s buildings (with the possible exception of the new Calatrava extravaganza downtown).  I like to think that the grand staircases outside and in, elaborate lobby spaces, murals, and inevitable sense of ceremony impact even those serious folks who labor daily in the glorious Rose Reading Room or in one of the less majestic study rooms.  All those amenities may not address the NYPL’s main raison d’être, but I find them a lure even though I’m not a regular researcher any more.  And a recent visit reminded me of the various anti-institutional protest movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, which ranted not only against cultural elitism and workers rights, but also about the off-putting architecture of museums, with their classical facades and elaborately-staired approaches.  That puzzled me since, growing up near what was then Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery — with its elegant Greek revival building, designed by Edward B. Green for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition (but not opened until 1905) — I always delighted in the sense of going to a special place for a special experience; not off-putting to me!  In those days one walked up lots of stairs (not quite Rocky’s climb at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but nevertheless awesome for an impressionable child); that was before Gordon Bunshaft’s now-iconic, International Style, 1962 addition made entering more practical, if also more banal.

I remember that feeling of uplift every time I wander into the NYPL, as I did to view the strange, but fascinating current exhibition, A Curious Hand: The Prints of Henri-Charles Guérard (1846-1897).  Not on my radar screen, Guérard turns out to be a masterful printmaker both for technical prowess and for the range of his visual interests.  Working to help Manet with his own prints, and producing copies of etchings by famous predecessors such as Rembrandt, Guérard’s main interest for me is the range of bizarre, occasionally kinky (not sexual!) imagery.  He plays with Japonisme influenced by Hokusai.

He channels Poe, who had recently been translated by Mallarmé, in one of the show’s most impressive images. .

He puzzles with inexplicable, but exquisitely-executed, grotesqueries: who knows what a skull has to do with origami?  I’m not sure you come away from the exhibition with a clear understanding of what this guy was all about, but for sheer visual and technical delight, it’s worth a visit.  And you get to experience that great building to boot!

And it’s a short walk from the NYPL to the Morgan Library and Museum.  Changing its name a few years ago — presumably because being a library wasn’t sexy enough, and the Morgan folks hadn’t heard that museums are (citing a young Renzo Piano, long before he screwed up the Morgan’s architectural ensemble) “dreary, dusty and esoteric institutions” — it’s still one of the most wonderful islands of pleasure on Manhattan Island.  It’s also where one always stretches one’s concept of visual pleasure, no more so than with the current Emily Dickinson exhibition, I’m Nobody! Who are you?  You can really get sucked into the glories of her penmanship and a few (not enough!) poems in her hand.  I was relieved to find one of my childhood favorites:

“I heard a Fly buzz — when I died –”  And here one also sees Dickinson less as the famous recluse of our collective mythologies and more as someone engaged with others.

A small exhibition in the Morgan’s Thaw Gallery, Delirium: The Art of the Symbolist Book is interesting for somehow drawing together a range of imaginations that connect Guérard and Dickinson with the Symbolists here, among whom are writers and artists Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Alfred Jarry, Maurice Maeterlinck, Odilon Redon, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Fantin-Latour, Henry van de Velde, and Fernand Khnopff.  I noticed a book (Les Vierges illustrated by József Rippl-Rónai) by Belgian writer, George Rodenbach (1855-98), whose compelling short Symbolist novel, Bruges-la-Morte, I discovered after it had been featured in one of the WSJ’s weekly Masterpiece features a few years ago.  It was also fun to see Paul Verlaine’s Parallelèment (1900) “considered to be the first modern artist’s book” illustrated by Pierre Bonnard, in its deluxe edition  All these years I thought my fancy little edition of the book was deluxe; I guess not.

So what’s a library and what’s a museum?  Who the hell cares?

In 2006 I wrote an article in Curator: The Museum Journal alleging that these days everything is a museum.  I admit that the concept was generated by passing maple syrup museums in drives around New Hampshire and Vermont.  But my ‘museum’ citations ended up ranging from Judy Garland to department stores to cabaret.  However, I was especially interested in how the term was used in connection with music, and cited both NYTimes critic, Bernard Holland and conductor, Marin Alsop, respectively referring to a Mozart opera and orchestra music as “a museum.”  That thought came rushing back at Thursday morning’s New York Philharmonic open rehearsal — the first of three Tchaikovsky-centered concerts: does this sort of programming suggest that the NYPhil is turning into (God forbid!) a museum?

Let’s get the irrelevant stuff out of the way.  I realized that The Donald (do I really have to call him my President?) was correct in his comments about the difference between his and Obama’s Inauguration crowds.  Looking out at the sea of white hair in David Geffen Hall (do I really have to call it that?) — because who else can attend an open rehearsal on a weekday morning — I had a revelation: that white you saw on your TV screen was really the vast senior citizen section on the Mall, and it was packed with white haired older folks (the bald heads didn’t glisten because it wasn’t a sunny day).  So let’s stop discussing alternative facts.  You win, Sean Spicer!

Guest conductor Semyon Bychkov really manages Russian music persuasively, despite looking a bit like Harpo Marx, if we had ever gotten to see an aging Harpo.  (His curly mop is not to be confused with that of his conductor colleague, Simon Rattle,  whom I’ve nominated to play Ann Freedman,  if they ever make a movie out of the Knoedler art forgery debacle: totally different hair!)  The combo of conductor Bychkov and pianist Yefim Bronfman (I’m assuming no relation to the rum-running-turned-mogul-turned-big-time-Canadian/American Jewish philanthropy-family) definitely raised the question about whether Russians do better with Russian music than ordinary musical interpreters.  A sensitive issue in the cultural realm!  Are African-Americans best positioned to explicate African-American art?  The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian delegated the creation of its exhibition content to Native Peoples, on the assumption that only they can really tell their own stories.  Thorny issues, which perhaps I’ll address in another post sometime.  But Semyon sure does make a persuasive case!  And I should add that my late mother adored him during his time at the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (where I cut my music-listening teeth).

However, that’s not the museum issue that interests me here.  Rather, I was forcefully struck by how Tchaikovsky brought out the crowds.  I’m a regular at open rehearsals, so I can tell when the audience suggests we’re moving into blockbuster territory.  I’m relieved to know that he’s a draw even a month after Nutcracker season is over.  And I can’t help but think of museum analogies.  London’s National Portrait Gallery did a credible Picasso Portrait show (which I reviewed for the WSJ) that or may not have brought the anticipated crowds which presumably provided a rationale for this exhibition (I don’t check on numbers).  I’m not sure whether three shows invoking the sacred name of Caravaggio – in London, New York, and Milan did as well, since the lure was a bit of a stretch.  (The London and New York exhibitions, however, were each interesting and important in different ways, even if people didn’t queue up for them.)  Never underestimate the power of a lure!  It’s advice I regularly give my mouse friends.

So while listening to Tchaikovsky’s lush and dramatic 5th Symphony, I remembered [Vitaly] Komar and [Alexander] Melamid — once an artist team but now split — and their “Peoples Choice” art.  The artists commissioned polling companies in the 11 countries—including the United States, Russia, China, France, and Kenya—to conduct scientific polls to discover what they want to see in art. The use of polls was meant to mimic the American democratic process. Komar said, “Our interpretation of polls is our collaboration with various people of the world. It is a collaboration with [sic] new dictator—Majority.” (this a Wiki-citation).  I love Tchaikovsky’s 5th, but it seems to fit perfectly the ideas one might have about what kind of music would appeal to an international crowd — albeit one with the sitzfleisch to manage about 45 minutes of noisy drama.  Almost like a Rogers & Hammerstein musical: you can actually walk out humming the tunes.  Bychkov milked it beautifully for all it was worth, and the orchestra responded to him.  Because my aural sensibilities work better when visually enhanced, I tend to zoom in on certain parts of the orchestra, and today it was the double basses (8 of them!), and a new understanding of how critically they underpin much of Tchaikovsky’s drama, along with NYPhil tympanist Markus Rhoten (I often zoom in on him).  I assume someone will be taking attendance to check on whether a three concert series of Tchaikovsky gives the NYPhil the [presumably] anticipated blockbuster boost.

The rest of the program wants a somewhat more serious listener.  To call Glinka’s Valse-Fantasie ‘slight’ may be giving it more than its due.  Pleasantly melodious, it still seemed longer than the six minutes announced in the program notes.  But as an important Russian predecessor composer, Glinka (1804-57) apparently loomed large for Tchaikovsky (1840-93), so it was a fitting way to begin the program and the series.  More puzzling to me, but infinitely more rewarding, was Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (G major, Op. 44) with Yefim Bronfman soloing.  I’ve only heard it on the radio, so was excited to hear it in the real.  I’m not usually highly critical of the hall’s famously-problematic acoustics, but felt that the orchestra often drowned out the piano during the first movement, perhaps over-accentuating those many sections when the piano has brilliant solo passages, which Bronfman performed with dazzling ease.  Accustomed to concertos in which the interplay between ensemble and soloist feels more natural, this first movement is somewhat jarring.  On the other hand, the second movement is so sublime that it’s worth going to the concert just to hear it. Rich solo violin and cello parts play against the piano and the orchestra in a rich, subtle, and lush array that makes the 5th Symphony feel even more bombastic.  (This was a rehearsal, so the symphony was played first.)  My usual favorite object of zooming-in devotion, first chair Carter Brey, played beautifully, as did newish concertmaster Frank Huang, and while there were a few gorgeous moments of them as a duo, it never quite made it as a piano trio — even when I kept anticipating that, having in mind Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio (in A minor), one of my all time favorites in the gloppy music realm.  (I have long favored piano trios by practically everyone.)

The concert’s program notes include a fascinating series of anecdotes about Tchaikovsky’s April/May 1891 visit to New York for the opening of Carnegie Hall.  The NYPhil will probably return part-time to Carnegie Hall soon, as the next iteration of [Philharmonic Hall/Avery Fisher Hall/] David Geffen Hall starts next year.  What goes around comes around.  Yet another connection to this brief Tchaikovsky celebration.  Does it suggest that the NYPhil is stuck in musty museum-land?  Or is it like museum-related blockbusteritis?  Probably a bit of both.  But that shouldn’t make us dismissive of the enormous pleasures gained.  And for me the concerto’s second movement alone justified the program.  Moreover, Alan Gilbert (I’m a big fan of his programming!) has been fairly ambitious in promoting new and interesting musical experiences that actually enrich our listening to the museum pieces — most recently the extraordinary Fourth Symphony by Wynton Marsalis.  Looking at older, even much-derided and unfashionable art (e.g., the once-celebrated Lawrence Alma-Tadema,whose work is currently on view in the Netherlands), enlarges our vision and refines our sensibilities.  That’s just as true for listening to a wide range of musical experiences.  So let’s hear it for the NYPhil’s important museum role!

MoMA’s current exhibition “A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde is important and interesting (and enjoyable!) for several reasons.  The show reminds us that a great museum has rich holdings in some (not all) fields, enabling major exhibitions without loans.   This is not just about being cost-effective (when have museums ever cared about that).  It’s also about plumbing the depth of collections to display works that may have been acquired primarily for the museum’s archival role, so now the public gets to see more than just signature works.  This rich MoMA assemblage also quietly celebrates some major donors (e.g., McCrory/Riklis, Judith Rothschild Foundation), while providing an [unannounced] first NYC commemoration of the centennial of the Russian Revolution (I assume there will be others).  It’s also a show of manageable size (whew!).  And a wonderful followup to MoMA’s monumental (and exhausting!) 2013 exhibition “Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925”.

I was especially struck by set of Goncharova lino prints on the wall before entering the show; she fuses Cubist ideas with allusions to both Russian and Western iconographic ideas, and makes us especially aware of how imaginatively she cuts the linoleum (was it a newish material in 1914?) to create active spatial effects.  Then we see her 1913 (0r 1911) Rayonism, Blue-Green Forest announcing (yet again) expressionist tendencies that would soon be declared null and void (as the exhibition continues).  (Did Jack Tworkov ever see this painting?)  Nearby a small Kandinsky watercolor (Improvisation 1914) is so delicious it’s in that special category of “don’t wrap it; I’ll eat it here!”

The exhibition creates a sense of excitement as we watch these artists in their rejectionist mode, believing that they can somehow start from scratch to both re-imagine and create art anew.  Some of the works by familiar artists (Tatlin, Malevich) are almost icons of modernism, so it’s difficult to see them anew.  But the exhibition contextualizes the familiar with works I hadn’t seen before, which is one of its strengths.  Trying mightily to defy tradition, the most persuasive works still rely on conventional ideas such as space, color, form, balance (or attempts at denial of their importance).  And this valiant fight against what came before (even worthy of a kind of high-school-poster diagram) ends up feeling amazingly sterile and lacking in emotion (if we get our “icons of art history” emotions out of the way).  There’s passion here — but it’s the passion of rebellion rather than aesthetic passion.  Evidently these guys are afraid to express feeling: that’s so yesterday.

But oh, how that changes when they get excited by technology.  Passion re-enters with a vengeance for the adventure of exploring the possibilities of film.  Clearly the excitement of playing with new mediums involved a depth of feeling that overwhelms spare abstraction.  The gallery with the films (Eisenstein and more) makes this especially evident, as does the one with the Rodchenko photographs (definitely my favorite part of the show!).  Lots of passion here!  Along with subtlety in composition, focus, and printing.  Photography doesn’t get any better than this.

The “passion” question stuck with me, so that this evening, at a Zankel Hall recital, I kept asking the same question.  Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello, and Alexander Melnikov, piano, gave technically astute performances.  But I wanted more.  A new piece by Yves Chauris (b. 1980), commissioned by Carnegie Hall, explored cello techniques (use and abuse of the instrument?) beyond anything I’ve ever heard, and it was sort of interesting, but also somewhat bloodless and theoretical.  I kept thinking of Russian constructivism.  Beethoven’s A Major Sonata (one of my all-time loves) followed that and sounded a tad antiseptic, despite the competence of the playing.  But after intermission things changed (do performers tipple in the Green Room?).  Anton Webern is still a stretch for me, but “Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano” (all of 3 minutes long!) was rich and romantic (and written in 1914, when that delicious Kandinsky watercolor was done) — and without pause they seguewayed right into Chopin’s G Minor Cello Sonata with a passion that was lacking in the first half of the concert, providing richly felt sounds.  It made me think of Jerry Lee Lewis and Kris Kristofferson: “Once More With Feeling.”

If you missed this, the NYTimes ran a politically-motivated hatchet job story by Robin Pogrebin that deserves to be read as an example of a major Nothingburger!  Here’s the letter I sent to Robin.

Hi Robin: