Since January, Christian Lander has been skewering a certain subsection of the population in his wildly popular blog, “Stuff White People Like.” A few days ago, he posted Stuff White People Like #108, “Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music,” which naturally enough got my attention. He essentially writes that white people to go classical music concerts to impress others rather than to actually listen to the music.
If you’re like me and you work in the arts field specifically to hear Handel arias and Bach cantatas and five-hour operas like Les Troyens and Die Meistersinger as often as possible, the column is a big ouch—and also devastatingly funny. (One of my favorites lines is Lander’s description of symphony concerts where “white couples have paid upwards of $80 for the right to dress up and sit in a chair for hour reading every word in the program.” Yeah, we’ve all seen this countless times, and it’s one of my pet peeves.)
For Lander, 2008 has provided at least 15 minutes of fame. He wrote his first blog entry on January 18 (#1, Coffee), following up with things like non-profit organizations (#12), microbreweries (#23), the Sunday New York Times (#46), arts degrees (#47), and threatening to move to Canada (#75). Soon the site was logging millions of visitors, and he quickly got a Random House book deal, with Stuff White People Like in bookstores on July 1. read more
I just got back from Steinway Hall, down the street from Carnegie Hall, where the pianist Lang Lang made a lunchtime appearance while in town for a free Central Park concert with the New York Philharmonic.
The ever-bouncy Lang Lang arrived in jeans, black-and-white jersey, and trademarked spiky hair about 20 minutes late, straight from a Philharmonic rehearsal. People crammed into the small main rotunda, with its beautiful Italian crystal and Greek marble, built in 1925 by the Warren and Wetmore firm, the same folks who built Grand Central Station. The rotunda holds about 300 people, many of whom were holding cell phones in the air to take Lang Lang’s photo as he entered. There were young students (many of them Asian) accompanied by their parents, plus the usual New Yorkers who show up at these sorts of things, which is to say veteran arts-lovers, office workers on lunch break, and music-industry people.
By the standards of the classical-music world, Lang Lang is a superstar. read more
In April, Esquire magazine did a photo spread called “Symphony in Black,” profiling some on-the-rise musicians on today’s classical scene. All were young, talented, hip. One musician I was surprised to see didn’t make it into that piece is José Franch-Ballester, a 27-year-old clarinet whiz who is a native of Moncofa, Spain. New Yorkers take note: Franch-Ballester is giving a recital (free!) on July 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. The concert is part of the summer-long series of free events in lower Manhattan called the River to River Festival.
There’s absolutely nothing bad-boy about Franch-Ballester (pronounced FrAHnk Bai-yess-TAIR), who judging from my recent conversation with him is completely down to earth and rather endearingly modest, considering his accomplishments and talent. He only mentions in passing that at age 27 he is simultaneously on the roster of three of the most prestigious … read more
In music performance today, one of the hottest presenters around is Wordless Music . If you’re a New Yorker, they seem to be suddenly everywhere, and their concerts have been getting raves from critics from The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, and Gramophone magazine, as well as attracting audiences that represent the demographic holy grail: twenty-something hipsters. Wordless Music’s self-professed goal is “to demonstrate that the various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today—popular and classical; uptown and downtown; high art and low—are an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”
At the moment, they’re doing some of their dismantling at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where at 7 pm. on four Fridays in June, you can hang out with the other cool kids from the class at concerts that are free with pay-as-you-please museum admission. 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
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