On new experiences in the concert hall, music director drama, and genres
Something happens to your brain when you move to LA—a switch is flipped, neural pathways are rewired, a previously unknown section of your amygdala is activated—and you become a person your previous self would never have recognized. I am talking, of course, about driving in the rain.
I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area; Karl the Fog and I are best buds, and I grew up with rain never influencing my mood or plans. When the "Storm of the Century" hit I drove my usual 80+ mile round trip to studio class as I wasn't going to let an unprecedented storm affect my education, and didn't discover until a week later that the inside of my (very old, very beat-up) car had flooded so badly that the backseat floor was squishy.
LA, though, has made me soft. Now when there's a drizzle outside I think "I can't go out driving in this, it's too dangerous." Where is the girl who accidentally turned her Honda Civic into a swamp? I don't know, she's gone now.
This past weekend it rained pretty heavily the day I had tickets to an LA Phil concert, and just looking out the window set off all my this is a bad idea you are going to DIE spidey senses, so ordinarily that would be enough for me to refund my tickets, cancel my plans, and not leave the house for 48 hours. However, the program was being conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, so...yeah.
When I saw him conduct Mahler's 9th in 2023, I was fully braced for it to potentially be the last time I saw MTT, who I am intensely fond of thanks to the fact that he was the conductor of my childhood. (If you were a musical kid growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 90s and 2000s, MTT was the symphony and, heck, classical music in general, if you also watched his Keeping Score series on PBS.)
"At this point," I wrote last year, painfully cognizant of MTT's declining health, "I would buy tickets to hear MTT conduct anything: Wagner, Berlioz, a handbell choir of toddlers."
That is still the case. On Saturday I sized up the rain situation, considered that I would have regrets for the rest of my life if I passed up one of my remaining chances to see MTT, and boldly threw myself at the mercy of the elements (translation: made my husband drive).
The program was Stravinsky's Petrushka and Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, a solid program in anyone's hands, and an experience in MTT's. I'm used to a very specific sound from the LA Phil: a glossy, high-contrast richness that makes everything sound cinematic, and suffused with ambitious drive (the amount of which is dependent on who's conducting).
MTT coaxed something different out of the LA Phil, to my ears: more inner details and textures and interplay, without losing sight of the overall architecture. He conducted without a sense of hurry—when people do this it usually manifests as plodding—and seemed, every time a phrase peaked or a particularly lush moment appeared, to just be really happy to be there. I especially enjoyed this in his rendering of the Tchaikovsky 4th, which I somehow keep forgetting is one of my favorite symphonies of all time.
The last time I heard Tchaik 4, I was playing it (as a second violinist in my college orchestra) and it was a treat to experience the piece in MTT's hands—I was rapt the entire time just watching the way he calmly guided motifs and phrases from section to section. Also, that delightful third movement is an utter joy to witness as an audience member.
Most importantly, though, I experienced two things in a concert hall for the first time in my LIFE.
Thing the first: fun fact, it used to be (19th-early 20th century, approx.) common practice for orchestras to replay the audience's favorite part of a piece they'd just finished as an encore; this happened a lot with Beethoven's 7th. (The orchestra would play all four movements, the audience would go nuts, and then the orchestra would replay the second movement which is really the only movement that most people know from the 7th anyway.) This is not a thing at all on the modern concert stage, and so I was initially bewildered when, at the end of Petrushka, MTT bowed perfunctorily, gestured to the orchestra, and they replayed the Petrushka theme.
I had no idea what was happening at first, and then I went OMG IT'S HAPPENING I AM EXPERIENCING OLDEN TIMES, HOW DELIGHTFUL.
Thing the second! Picture this: the program has just concluded, the entire hall is on its feet in a rousing standing ovation, the applause is thunderous, excitement is at a fever pitch. Michael Tilson Thomas has slowly exited the stage, the audience is hooting and hollering for him to come back, and then!
MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS BROUGHT HIS DOG ONSTAGE.
I REPEAT, HE BROUGHT HIS DOG ONSTAGE.
MTT's dog—who, I believe, is named Maydela—was an extremely good girl, calmly sitting amidst the clamor of applause and adulation while MTT petted her on the conductor's podium.
I hereby motion for whoever is appointed next MD of the LA Phil to end every concert with an appearance by a Very Good Boy or Girl. [George Bluth voice] These are my demands.
Speaking of music directors
It's silly season for major American symphonies; until this week, the SF Symphony, LA Phil, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Cleveland Orchestra were all looking for their next music director. The announcement dropped this week that Klaus Mäkelä will be the next director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and, man, if you thought Esa-Pekka Salonen departing the SFS was peak drama, you do not know classical music.
Mäkelä's appointment has generated a LOT of discourse, but imho there are only two pieces you need to read, both savage and brilliant.
The first is—who else—Alex Ross with "Conductors Had One Job. Now They Have Three or Four" which is politely blistering on the distressing phenomenon that is the multi-posted celebrity conductor.
The definition of a music director has undergone a mutation in recent decades: such doubling- and tripling-up of appointments has become commonplace. Celebrity conductors, who often earn more than a million dollars a year, seem incapable of confining themselves to one job at a time. Mäkelä-mania is only the most blatant instance of a widespread and artistically dubious syndrome.
[...]
American orchestra subscribers have become resigned to a phony civic ritual: a foreign-accented maestro flies in a few times a season for two or three weeks, stays in a hotel or a furnished apartment, attends a flurry of donor dinners, and dons the appropriate cap when the local baseball team makes the playoffs. Conductors who follow that life style can’t build a real connection to the city and its cultural communities.
The second piece is Emily Hogstad's "The Ascension of Klaus Mäkelä" which raises a lot of important issues including labor disputes and the tension of a music director's obligations to their players and their board and is just...[chef's kiss].
Whether this perception is warranted or not, many commentators have noted that between this appointment, his other appointment to the Concertgebouw, and his two other orchestras in Paris and Oslo, Mäkelä’s career trajectory reads as professional box checking, a breathless race to the top sheerly for the sport of it. This is the Pete Buttigieg-ification of the American music directorship.
[...]
How should any music director be expected to react in a time of crisis? And most importantly of all, who will he choose to be an asset to?
I ask those questions like I know the answers, but I don’t. At the end of the day, here’s my concern: I don’t want audiences to lose an ally, if a day should come when they need one. I want this art form to endure, and to make people’s lives better. That’s literally all I want.
On letting artists do whatever the f they want
I have been listening to the new Beyoncé album, Cowboy Carter, and I personally find the genre discourse pointless and unnecessary. It's a solid album—not my favorite, that's Renaissance, but that's a personal preference—that gives my ears stuff to chew on, but with the hyperpolarized environment that is, uh, [gestures vaguely], it feels a little silly going "the album is fine and I like it as a person not terribly invested in the success of a person rich and powerful enough to launch her own navy if she really wanted to??" It has the elements of country music I—admittedly not a person who gravitates to country—like (storytelling, folk sounds, compelling vocals) without the elements of country I don't like (people with mediocre voices layered over aggressively engineered banjos, wailing about trucks and beers and Jesus, making me feel like I'm about to be hate crimed). As Tressie McMillan Cottom put it,
Big Country produces a stylized set of tropes that artists, producers and marketing executives slather on top of meter and rhythm. In good hands, those tropes can be signposts for a road trip through a sonic postcard. In lazy hands (and so many of the hands are lazy these days), they are paper dolls of cheap sentiment. You name your small town for legitimacy. You gesture to your family for kinship to rural America’s fictive family tree. Then you sprinkle in your proprietary mix of trucks, dogs, sunsets and beer for distinction.
I am not well-versed in...most genres that aren't classical, so reading this review by Craig Jenkins is how I learned more about all the references and homages stuffed into the album. (What is this, the quodlibet of the Goldberg Variations? [crickets]) I personally think the best track off the album is "Daughter" and I swear, I don't like it because it goes straight into "Caro mio ben," it's just that I love an arpeggiated accompaniment figure and an oblique reference to a dark crime.
But also, it doesn't hurt that it goes straight into "Caro mio ben."
Anyway, my take is this: let artists go in whatever directions they want to go, and—this is the hard part—let it be okay if it isn't commercially successful (no one is owed a smash hit or top-of-the-charts recordbreaker), or even if it's bad!
Lady Gaga did a country album which imho was a combo of hits and misses, but arguably without going there she wouldn't have gone on the journey that 1) gave us "Shallow" in A Star is Born and 2) culminated in her and Bradley Cooper making us all feel both wowed and mildly uncomfortable at the Oscars.
More wtf-ly, Renèe Fleming—yes, that Renèe Fleming, the superstar opera singer—did an indie rock album, and clearly she needed to do it to get it out of her system.
I can't make fun of Fleming for doing this. She was trying something, and it didn't work. That's just what the creative process is all about, isn't it? That being said, I dare you to find a worse cover of "Mad World."
Genres are naturally porous and trying to draw boundaries on them is a fool's errand. I straight up cannot define "classical music"—no seriously, I have thrown up my hands, because for every definition I come up with, I can name five Very Classical Pieces that contradict my own definition. Let artists experiment with whatever genres they want (while uh, being respectful to others and not committing acts of mockery or cultural appropriation, obviously, which if you can do means you're officially a better person than Debussy) and let people enjoy or not enjoy these things without getting totally weird about it!
I just want to focus on what's really important.
WHICH IS THAT MTT BROUGHT HIS DOG ON STAGE. 🎹