BY BEN WINTERS
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| Barenboim in rehearsal. |
The
leaders of America’s great musical institutions are making their
way up the aisles and to the exits. Daniel Barenboim’s (pictured
left) decision to quit as music director of Chicago Symphony Orchestra
(CSO), announced on Feb. 19, was only the latest, after Joseph Volpe announced
his upcoming resignation as general manager of New York’s Metropolitan
Opera, and Carnegie Hall executive and artistic director Robert Harth
died of a heart attack.
The
opera publication La Scena has a columnist named Norman Lebrecht, and
on Feb. 18 he bemoaned that “the two best musical jobs in America
have fallen vacant” (meaning the Met and Carnegie) and concluded
that “there is no rush of credible applicants.” The Metropolitan’s
prominence and size, says Lebrecht, ensure a complicated process. “The
Met so dwarfs the rest of American opera that its seasonal deficit can
exceed the entire budget of the next biggest house. This is not an economy
that breeds successors. There are capable opera chiefs in Chicago, Houston
and San Francisco, but they have not been tested in the Met’s unforgiving
limelight.”
The
situation is no less complicated at Carnegie Hall, nor at the CSO.
Harth
began at Carnegie in September 2001, just days before the whole city was
turned upside down, and he was widely lauded for his firm leadership through
troubled times—and credited with the creation of Zankel Hall, Carnegie’s
new music venue focused on nontraditional performances. Carnegie insiders,
according to a Robin Pogrebin piece in the New York Times, are hopeful
that his forward-looking focus will be preserved. Pogrebin quotes composer
John Adams, who “cautioned the hall against choosing someone more
conventional. “Especially in the extremely conservative and pathologically
timid world of classical music, Robert was a brave and unique soul…I
just hope that the board understands what in Robert’s philosophy
was so new and won’t fall back on the classical music industry.”
The
classical music industry?
According
to Lebrecht at La Scena, those seeking new leadership at these places
face a pervasive challenge: “a system which diffuses authority in
too many directions.” In big institutions, where there’s “an
artistic director who makes the fun decisions and a board of big givers
who double-guess everything else….initiative is stifled and financial
setbacks swiftly punished.”
Good
luck, search committees.
Innocent
Until Proven Cable-Ready
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| The Perfect Husband aired despite the fact that the case hasn't even been tried. |
And
good luck, Scott Peterson! A jury of peers has yet to hear the Peterson
case, but David Erickson has already rendered his decision. Erickson is
the screenwriter who penned The Perfect Husband, which aired on the USA
Network Feb. 13. Erickson’s previous work includes D.C. Sniper:
23 Days of Fear, also for the USA Network.
Surprisingly,
America’s cultural critics take some umbrage with these presumption-of-guilt
docudramas. USA Today, for example, in an article headlined “The
Perfect Husband: Reprehensible on Many Levels,” writes “the
guilty parties here are the people responsible for The Perfect Husband:
The Laci Peterson Story. I’d say they should be ashamed, but no
one with any sense of propriety would be involved in a project this repulsive
in the first place.”
The
New York Times took the wider view—that’s so like them, isn’t
it?—with TV critic Virginia Heffernan giving an overview of the
genre and concluding that these things “raise ethical questions
that make even the people who work on them uneasy. And they also threaten
to influence potential jurors.” More troubling is the fact that
the drama of a film like The Perfect Husband (like the sophomoric irony
of its title) turns on the assumption that Peterson indeed killed his
wife. As Heffernan notes, USA Network better hope that the jury agrees,
or they’ll be the ones in court.
“Since
these movies sometimes play like audio-visual presentations for the prosecution,
a network’s lawyers must meticulously vet them,” she writes.
“Might they constitute libel? Possibly, it turns out. But only if
they get the facts wrong…'Right’ in this context means
right about big things like the guilt or innocence of a central character.”
Most
critics judged The Perfect Husband to be offensive, or at best dumb; as
always, there was one holdout. Erickson “fashioned a believable
story made richer by actors who do more than phone their performances
in,” wrote Mike McDaniel in the Houston Chronicle, calling the film
“a fascinating and macabre melodrama.”
(The
truly cruel reviews of the news cycle were saved for tweener star Lindsey
Lohan and her newest movie. “'Hate’ is not a word I
use loosely to describe my feelings about a movie,” wrote Wesley
Morris in the Boston Globe. “But I hated every second of Confessions
of a Teenage Drama Queen. By the time its heroine Star searches her way
through bleachy versions of 'Living for the City’ and 'Changes’…I
wanted the filmmakers to issue apologies to Stevie Wonder, David Bowie,
George Bernard Shaw, and the history of the human imagination.”)
The
CD is Dead (Again)
The
iPod came on strong this past holiday season, and CDs are officially becoming
the objects of preemptive nostalgia. At least that’s the impression
one gets from James Sullivan’s recent piece in the San Francisco
Chronicle. Noting that “new studies show that young people have
little interest in owning prepackaged music when just about every recording
they want can be had as a download,” Sullivan sheds a tear or three
for the future of the holdable, feelable (huggable?) compact disc—and
its late lamented brethren, the record album. “Having lots of stuff
can be strangely reassuring, especially when it’s alphabetized,”
he says. “There’s a tactile satisfaction to be had from flipping
through old album covers, or shuffling piles of snapshots, hoping to rediscover
an old keeper.”
Fans
of the Scottish Opera (you know who you are) will get no such satisfaction
vis a vis that company’s recent production of Wagner’s Ring
cycle. According to the Scotsman newspaper, there will be no record released
of the award-winning production, because it’s just too expensive.
“The up-front costs of paying principal performers, freelance orchestra
players and its own orchestra and chorus for recording rights make the
expense of releasing a recording prohibitive… The production…will
be lost to posterity.”
Sounds like they could use a new executive director.