If you doubt the importance of YouTube in how music gets heard and performed these days, consider a recent case: the Cistercian Abbey Stift Heiligenkreuz, in Austria.
This is a twelfth-century church where about 80 monks sing Gregorian chant every day; the Gothic/Romanesque/baroque church is a popular attraction that draws about 170,000 tourists a year, according to its website.
So, the story goes, this past February, the church’s press spokesman, Karl Wallner, received an e-mail with the subject line “Quick, quick Karl.” It came from a friend in London telling him that the Universal record label was conducting a competition for singers of Gregorian chant but that the deadline was the next day. Father Wallner emailed Universal a link to the Abbey website’s sound clips, then uploaded a video to YouTube, which can be viewed at the link here or after the jump (147,431 views and counting). The result is that seventeen monks from the monastery were signed by Universal to record an album, released in May, called Chant: Music For Paradise. On the U.K. pop charts, it’s been as high as number 9 and is outselling Amy Winehouse. read more
My introduction to Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Sunday, June 8, on Thirteen) came from watching Rabbit of Seville, a 1950 Looney Tunes cartoon directed by Chuck Jones, when I was a kid. Musical director Carl Stalling slightly tweaked Rossini’s overture to back up Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd’s frantic chases, and the juxtaposition couldn’t have felt more natural. It’s as if Rossini had scored the cartoon, instead of the cartoon having been set to preexisting music. Seven years later, Jones went back to the trough with What’s Opera, Doc?, in which he and arranger Milt Franklyn deconstructed the entire Wagner canon in under seven minutes. It’s hard to underestimate the influence this pair of cartoons had on at least a couple of generations of budding music lovers, as Richard Freedman wrote in an article for Andante. But this casual referencing of “high art” in a so-called low medium feels alien now, when film, TV and YouTube tend to refer other pop-cultural artifacts. Judging by its lack of pop spoofing, high art doesn’t exist anymore in America. read more
Television commercials are probably as good an indicator of a society’s cultural health as any. And anyone looking for proof of the cachet that opera once maintained in American life would do well to consider these commercials, which Rice Krispies ran in the 1960s. To a certain generation of opera goers, these hilarious vignettes probably imparted a degree of prestige and brand loyalty that companies — Texaco, for one particularly painful example — used to consider incomparably positive P.R.
I’d never seen these clips until someone passed them along as YouTube fodder a few weeks ago; but I’ve come to love the bizarre combination of high and low culture that seems plainly an anachronism compared to the current world of advertising. read more
Warning, this post is on the long side, but I promise it’ll be fun to anybody with a passing interest in the live arts. And if you follow opera, it’ll be doubleplusgood, with copious hissing and dissing, but also words that should bring hope to those who yearn for a democratic and provocative culture.
A few days ago, the New York Times ran an interview with Gérard Mortier (also previously profiled on here on SundayArts), the Belgian-born incoming manager of City Opera—the house entwined in a long-running sibling rivalry with the richer, glitzier Met, sitting across the Lincoln Center plaza. As interesting as the Times’ piece was, it either didn’t ask the right questions or Mortier opted for diplomacy. read more
On May 13, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the four recipients of its first-ever NEA Opera Honors: soprano Leontyne Price; composer Carlisle Floyd; opera administrator Richard Gaddes; and maestro James Levine. The four will receive the awards and be celebrated in Washington, D.C., on October 31 at a special awards ceremony and concert, with performances by Washington National Opera and members of that company’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program. The recipient names revealed no shockers—Price, Floyd, Gaddes, and Levine have reached the very top of their professions and have each had a huge impact on opera in this country.
I sat in at the May 13 press conference announcing the awards at Lincoln Center’s New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and I am as thrilled as any opera-lover about these awards (more on which in a moment), but … can we talk? read more
Composer David Lang, one of the co-founders of New York’s Bang on a Can, has been a prolific presence on the city’s contemporary music scene for more than twenty years. But even he admits that it came as something of a surprise when he was announced as the recipient of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music for his work The Little Match Girl Passion (click here to hear the work on Carnegie Hall’s website), a heartbreakingly humble “opera” scored for just four voices and percussion. Lang sat down for an chat about the inception of the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired piece shortly after the Pulitzer announcement.
Download the interview as a podcast here, or listen to it as streaming audio after the jump. read more
The opera stage is filled with tragic characters who have lost touch with reality—one of the best-known examples being Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, seen in Mary Zimmermann’s new Met production earlier this season with the high-flying soprano Natalie Dessay.
But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez tells it in his new book The Soloist, out from Putnam on April 17, real-life tragedies with mental illness at their center are playing out on our streets every day, and some of them involve musicians. Lopez literally stumbled on a story one day three years ago: a middle-aged, schizophrenic homeless man playing a violin in Pershing Square, who clearly had had some serious musical training in a former life.
The story of this man, Nathaniel Ayers—who once attended Juilliard—was originally the subject of a series of newspaper columns. Readers began donating musical instruments, and Lopez became more and more involved in trying to get Ayers off the streets and into treatment. The book is now being made into a movie for release later this year, directed by Joe Wright (Atonement) and starring Jamie Foxx as Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez. read more
It’s spring in New York, and Philip Glass is bursting out all over.
The biggest event is his Satyagraha, which is in the middle of its first-ever run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera. Naxos has just released a four-CD boxed set of previously recorded works called Of Beauty and Light: The Music of Philip Glass, which contains his second, third, and fourth symphonies, plus The Light, Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten, Violin Concerto, and Company, for string orchestra. At the IFC Center, they’re showing Scott Hicks’s 2007 film documentary of the composer, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. Glass even managed to get in last week’s New York magazine after he stated at an April 9 Brooklyn Academy of Music gala that he thinks the United States should pull out of the Beijing Olympics because of China’s record on human rights.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Glass is how his place in the classical-music universe has changed over time. read more
For most stage directors, enticing audiences towards an appreciation of a work has always been something of an exercise in accommodation. That is, giving recherché knowledge the appropriate context. Style, epoch, provenance, language, politics, philosophy, etc., all amount to considerations that must be grappled with and reconciled, in one way or another, before an audience might find meaning or relevance in a performance. Witness the abiding success of an opera production like the Met’s Franco Zeffirelli Bohème, which takes all the bustle and hubbub of a Parisian street-scape and plops it down on the company’s stage in an effort of exacting verisimilitude. At the same time, consider the ways in which a production like Robert Wilson’s Lohengrin — an austere and hyper-stylized staging that also happens to be one of my favorite productions in the Met’s repertoire — arguably succeeds by emphasizing the universal and archetypal over the specific.
In this case, I’m not talking about the details of singing, acting or music, but rather the onstage creation of time and place, “setting.” And I can’t help but wonder if we’re living in an era of live performance that will amount to the setting-sun of traditional scenery and stagecraft. read more
His “Nessun dorma” was the twentieth century’s definitive one—the one that launched a thousand imitators.
So it caused a bit of a flurry this week when The Guardian reported on a new book about Luciano Pavarotti that says the tenor was lip-synching a performance of that aria at the 2006 Turin Olympics. Not feeling well enough to perform live, Pavarotti reportedly recorded the aria days before the performance, and the orchestra pre-recorded its parts, too. So the performance that turned out to be the tenor’s last was canned.
“The orchestra pretended to play for the audience, I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing. The effect was wonderful,” writes conductor Leone Magiera in the book, Pavarotti Visto da Vicino. read more
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