It had been posted yesterday, but I hadn’t found it because normally I don’t trawl through media and advertising sections: I look for music news sifting through “music” or “arts/entertainment.” Plus yesterday, I was also pretty much focused on one thing: the birthday celebration for Elliott Carter and 100 years of his music.
Laurence Vittes had e-mailed me a copy of the article he’d written for the December issue of the British magazine Gramophone, about the situation in Cleveland with the Plain Dealer’s critic, Donald Rosenberg (who also has written for the magazine in the past) and his having been “reassigned” by his editor, now no longer reviewing the Cleveland Orchestra. In his e-mail, Laurence casually mentioned “The latest, as you may know, is that Don is suing the Plain Dealer and the Orchestra!”
Actually, I hadn’t, but it would come as no surprise: from the beginning, this situation – whether it became a cause or a case – had litigation written all over it. It was close to midnight when I read his e-mail, too late for me, morning person that I have become, to go looking for news reports about it, but this morning I found these:
Here is a report from WCPN – and here is the New York Times article with more details.
For those of you who may need some back-story, you can read my earlier posts here and here, though the links to past reviews in the Plain Dealer no longer work.
As Vittes writes near the end of his article, commenting on the fact that Zachary Lewis who had now been assigned to cover the orchestra wasn’t exactly writing reviews-as-marketing-tools:
- - - - - - -
“In fact, for the first three weeks of the season, Lewis has not been playing dead at all,” Rosenberg pointed out. “He’s confirming what I said, so they didn’t have to reassign me.” If anything, the fact that Lewis has been so negative lends credence to the newspaper’s claims that they had reasons other than orchestra pressure for replacing Rosenberg.
- - - - - - - -
Regardless, it looks like Laurence may have a follow-up article for a later issue.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
UPDATE 12/14/08: Thanks to Alex Ross for posting this link over at the New Yorker Blog where you can find the entire complaint filed against the Plain Dealer & the Cleveland Orchestra...
Showing posts with label cleveland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cleveland. Show all posts
Friday, December 12, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
Critics in Cleveland: Further Thoughts
Today’s post was prompted by a recent e-mail exchange with a reader in Los Angeles, free-lance writer and critic Laurence Vittes researching an article about last month’s re-assignment of the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s chief music critic Donald Rosenberg from his long-held beat at Severance Hall where he covered the Cleveland Orchestra. I’d blogged about it before, mostly focusing on the critic newly assigned to replace Rosenberg, Zachary Lewis, who had once been a critic with the newspaper here in my home-town of Harrisburg, PA.
It’s not like enough cyberink hasn’t been wafted about already on the topic of “muzzling a critic” or however one wants to describe it. Rosenberg’s relationship with the orchestra’s conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, has been notoriously stormy, bringing up long-range questions both ethical and artistic. With the announcement of FWM’s extended contract renewal, apparently another question surfaced, as well: how long, oh Lord, can this go on?
Of course, from my standpoint as a non-critic occasionally writing what people would like to think of as reviews, I’m not sure how satisfactory it would be, going to work all the time and thinking “what’s the point? It’s never going to change, is it?” Oh wait... actually, I think many of us have asked that on a daily basis. But what I mean is, if you’ve written some pretty scathing reviews in the past, what’re the chances this night, compared to any other night, is going to be any different?
The standard formula in the arts world places the performer on one side, the critic on the other and in the middle, the listeners who may have heard the performance and the readers who may not have heard the performance or, having heard it, are curious what somebody who gets paid to write what they think about a concert might tell them what they heard or thought they heard.
How many times had I read reviews of concerts I’d attended and wondered if the critic and I were actually hearing the same performance? It’s not unusual for someone to like something and someone else to hate the same thing. We’re all wired differently.
Going back to Cleveland, it would be a problem if the critic in question was the only one with such a consistently negative opinion, though. When FWM and the orchestra toured in the States, they often received similar comments from local critics. But relentlessly, season in and season out, it begins to seem like there’s an axe to be ground.
But I was wondering if – presuming as has been stated there was no pressure from the orchestra – readers were beginning to tire of the one-sidedness of all this? Is it a bottom-line based decision, a concern for alienating the readers? As I said, at least they didn’t fire him (could they have gotten away with that?) or eliminate the position as has happened with other cities’ newspapers.
Now, I don't read the sports pages, so I don't know what a paper might do if, say, the city has a lousy team or a losing coach and the sports-writer is constantly browbeating them in the press. Do they expect their columns are going to get the coach or a player fired? Would the editor "re-assign" the writer if he continued in too negative a strain for too long a time? I don't know.
But if the team is doing well, makes it to the play-offs and the crowds are generally cheering them on, it seems the writer just doesn't like the coach or a certain player or possibly has a problem with the whole team: how long would it take for the editors to react then? Or the readers, of often irrational irasciblility, who might demand something a little more dire than mere “re-assignment” (a vat of oil near the boiling point, for starters).
Then I realized I hadn’t checked back to see what reviews Zach Lewis has written since that first concert, the one with the Bruckner 7th Symphony (a Franz Welser-Möst specialty) described as “deliberate,” “slow pace[d]”, “lopsided.” I figured he would not write an “all sweet and lovely” review, but I kept thinking what if he too keeps finding things to “criticize,” using the word in the negative sense?
In a more recent performance with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Lang Lang playing the Chopin E Minor Piano Concerto, he described the concert as “setting one important score on fire and leaving another in ashes.”
In the Chopin, Lang Lang...
- - - - - - - - -
“...proves ideal. Sure, he often breaks the musical speed limit, but he does so at his blazing version of leisure, without sacrificing clarity or devolving into a single-minded sprint.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, as rendered by the orchestra and Welser-MÖst. Here, speed limits count for little, and the music suffers greatly.”
- - - - - - - - -
In the final movement, he remarks that a slightly slower approach to the tempo “is still too brisk for the musicians to round out Beethoven's portrait of order restored. Instead, one merely senses chaos minimized.”
With the orchestra’s role in the Chopin best described as “modest” and a war-horse like Beethoven’s 5th, how much rehearsal time did they actually allot for this concert?
I don’t know if anyone at Severance Hall is having flashbacks to Rosenberg’s reviews, but mine were going back to the Old Days of Lorin Maazel and the under-rehearsed Mozart G Minor Symphony I heard them play at Carnegie Hall in the late-70s, mentioned in my earlier post.
The previous concert included the other Mozart G Minor Symphony – No. 25, the one that featured so prominently in the opening of the film “Amadeus” and still sounds amazing when you consider Mozart was 17 when he wrote it. Their performance had good chamber-music-like qualities in the middle movements, but, he concludes,
- - - - - - -
“...in the bolder first and last movements, Welser-MÖst and the orchestra tended to substitute stateliness and articulate counterpoint for fire and urgency. Polish is always a virtue in Mozart, but in the exceptionally dark 25th Symphony, a little grit isn't out of place, either.”
- - - - - - -
Of one of two works played with the soloist, pianist Emanuel Ax, Lewis wrote that in Karol Szymanowski’s rarely heard “Symphonie concertante” (his Symphony No. 4 which is really a substantial work for piano and orchestra, more concerto than symphony),
- - - - - - -
“... the pianist joined ranks with Welser-MÖst and the orchestra to cut through the thickets of a dense, prickly score and expose music of both visceral intensity and sincere emotion.”
- - - - - - -
What it’s like working in the corner of the Plain Dealer’s office where the arts folk hang out, I have no idea, but I imagine the politics must be very difficult to navigate. Rosenberg was certainly a star writer on the staff: did they move him out of an office, too? At least they didn’t escort him from the building. If he decides to move on, if he prefers reviewing orchestras to chamber music and ballet programs, how would another newspaper view his application? “What if he doesn’t like our conductor?” Could be a confidence issue...
I rather doubt Zach was told, along with what his word-limit would be for a review, that he can only spend no more than 33% of those words making negative comments. But still, it makes you think: happy to have a job? wanna keep it?
Justifiable criticism is one thing. Whether Rosenberg’s constant commentary about FWM’s interpretations was viewed as “unjustifiable,” I can only imagine. He, meanwhile, continues to cover “other concerts” like this review of the farewell appearance of the Guarneri Quartet who will be retiring at the end of this season (they’ll be playing at Market Square Concerts here in April, one of their very last concerts as one of the great legendary quartets of the past 44 years). In Cleveland, they played two of Beethoven’s most introspective Late Quartets, Op. 127 and Op. 132.
- - - - - - -
“To say that the Guarneri has come far in its view of Beethoven in the four-plus decades the music has been on the players' stands would be an understatement. The ensemble made one of the great recordings of the complete Beethoven quartets in the 1960s for RCA. Those performances are probing, taut and invigorating.
Tuesday's concert revealed a different Guarneri. The playing has become increasingly introspective in recent years, with an emphasis on utmost subtlety of interplay and dynamics. The approach takes the term "chamber music" literally: these performances would probably best be experienced in a small room.”
- - - - - - -
This also brought with it another flashback, going back some 35 years to my Eastman days when I sat in the recital hall (seating around 600) listening to the Guarneri Quartet playing Beethoven’s Third “Razumovsky” Quartet. Speaking of speed limits in Beethoven, the finale began at such a clip, I was amazed they could keep it together, it was going by so fast. It hadn’t occurred to me, at the time, this wasn’t a good thing, hot-dogging Beethoven like that. But while the Music Police didn’t show up to give them a ticket for excessive speeding in the Fugue, it was amusing that as an encore, first violinist Arnold Steinhardt announced they would play the last movement of the Razumovsky again – at the proper tempo. Yes, much better!!
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
What power does a critic actually have, these days? In some cities – New York, certainly – a bad review by an important critic can ruin a young artist’s career or close down a play. Just the other day, I was reading New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley’s review of a new production of the play, To Be or Not To Be which he describes as a “walking corpse of a comedy” and mentions that it “has the spring, color and freshness of long-refrigerated celery.” Yum – just makes you want to run right out and buy a ticket, doesn’t it?
But I’m not sure there’s the same kind of life-or-death power when the object is a long-established ensemble or a conductor with a contract, the artistic equivalent of tenure. It’s unlikely that a single critic will single-handedly deep-six a famous maestro: at worst, the maestro might invest in the psychological equivalent of a can of bug-spray, the kind of repellent (or denial) that most artists use when confronted by negative criticism. They might publicly shrug their shoulders but I rather doubt they’re hurt much by it.
It’s not likely Mr. Rosenberg would have felt himself so powerful he could bring down Franz Welser-Möst.
Still, it would not be the first time critics lined up against the conductor. The constant nagging of many of London’s critics along with the animosity of the musicians and the ambiguity of the management eventually drove him out of town six years after he became the music-director of the London Philharmonic at the age of 30. The musicians dubbed him “Frankly Worse-than-Most” – and frankly, I was surprised to see him land in Cleveland in 2002 where, one assumes by the riper age of 42, he has improved with experience. At any rate, this past June the Cleveland Orchestra management renewed his contract through 2018. I suppose critics can write whatever they want to about him, now.
This, however, is interesting: from blog-comments by people presumably on the inside of the situation. A former employee of the orchestra’s management thought Rosenberg was biased whenever he reviewed FWM (who, keep in mind, is not the only conductor in front of the orchestra: he spends 18 weeks a season there). This former employee writes
- - - - - - -
“His editors were told several years ago that his view was biased when Franz was on the podium and he was issued a stern warning that he needed to be less biased. For a short while he was writing fair reviews and then he started in on the negativity again. ...[T]hey weren’t attempting to get rid of him because he wasn’t giving them glowing reviews all the time. They were trying to get a fair review off of someone who is a well respected critic who was showing an obvious bias.”
- - - - - - -
A violinist in Cleveland (and judging from the content, a member of the orchestra) writes
- - - - - - -
“The orchestra members are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship - for a REASON. Ellie and Dan didn’t leave to pursue other musical endeavors - they (and others) left because of the cruel, uncompromising egotism of the baton-wielder.
I didn’t always concur with Don’s reviews, but the fact remains - FWM is a horrifyingly mediocre conductor who found himself trying to fill impossibly big shoes...” [referring to former music director Christoph von Dohnanyi].
- - - - - - -
This, of course, brings to mind issues between musicians and maestros, most openly in the Seattle Symphony, but that’s a whole ‘nother story... Yet perhaps Rosenberg is sensing some underlying animosity in the lack of communication between the players and the audience (or at least, himself as a member of the audience), stemming from a lack of communication (and perhaps respect?) between the conductor and the musicians.
Still, it is a rare orchestra that is free from such tension. Players in the Philadelphia Orchestra have been quite vocal about their dislike of their music director Christoph Eschenbach. A few of the concerts I'd heard with him conducting were mediocre, considering it was the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra. Eschenbach is now leaving, having served the shortest tenure of any of the orchestra's storied conductors, a mere five years. As the President of the orchestra's management told the maestro in 2006, according to Peter Dobrin of the Philadelphia Inquirer,
- - - - - - -
"- that 80 percent of the musicians did not agree with his artistic interpretations;
- that 80 percent of the musicians left concerts feeling great anger;
- and that the orchestra was a ‘ticking time bomb.’”
- - - - - - -
And just a few weeks ago, it was announced the National Symphony has named Christoph Eschenbach as its new music director, starting in 2010. Hmmmm...
So, trying to find some perspective in my assumptions, let’s say I think Rosenberg is probably not imagining things when he goes to a Cleveland Orchestra concert conducted by FWM whether he is biased or being honest. I don’t feel the Plain Dealer gave Rosenberg a fair deal when it chose to reassign him, though as an internal decision, how does one argue with modern-day American corpocracy?
But in all of this, since I have no personal stake in Cleveland, its newspaper, the career of Maestro Möst or of Daniel Rosenberg, I can only add I feel glad that, circumstances aside, someone I know and respect has landed in a position that will, hopefully, work to his benefit. After placing him between a rock and a hard place, I hope it will give him a different kind of work-out than his predecessor received. I wish him all the luck in the world.
It’s not like enough cyberink hasn’t been wafted about already on the topic of “muzzling a critic” or however one wants to describe it. Rosenberg’s relationship with the orchestra’s conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, has been notoriously stormy, bringing up long-range questions both ethical and artistic. With the announcement of FWM’s extended contract renewal, apparently another question surfaced, as well: how long, oh Lord, can this go on?
Of course, from my standpoint as a non-critic occasionally writing what people would like to think of as reviews, I’m not sure how satisfactory it would be, going to work all the time and thinking “what’s the point? It’s never going to change, is it?” Oh wait... actually, I think many of us have asked that on a daily basis. But what I mean is, if you’ve written some pretty scathing reviews in the past, what’re the chances this night, compared to any other night, is going to be any different?
The standard formula in the arts world places the performer on one side, the critic on the other and in the middle, the listeners who may have heard the performance and the readers who may not have heard the performance or, having heard it, are curious what somebody who gets paid to write what they think about a concert might tell them what they heard or thought they heard.
How many times had I read reviews of concerts I’d attended and wondered if the critic and I were actually hearing the same performance? It’s not unusual for someone to like something and someone else to hate the same thing. We’re all wired differently.
Going back to Cleveland, it would be a problem if the critic in question was the only one with such a consistently negative opinion, though. When FWM and the orchestra toured in the States, they often received similar comments from local critics. But relentlessly, season in and season out, it begins to seem like there’s an axe to be ground.
But I was wondering if – presuming as has been stated there was no pressure from the orchestra – readers were beginning to tire of the one-sidedness of all this? Is it a bottom-line based decision, a concern for alienating the readers? As I said, at least they didn’t fire him (could they have gotten away with that?) or eliminate the position as has happened with other cities’ newspapers.
Now, I don't read the sports pages, so I don't know what a paper might do if, say, the city has a lousy team or a losing coach and the sports-writer is constantly browbeating them in the press. Do they expect their columns are going to get the coach or a player fired? Would the editor "re-assign" the writer if he continued in too negative a strain for too long a time? I don't know.
But if the team is doing well, makes it to the play-offs and the crowds are generally cheering them on, it seems the writer just doesn't like the coach or a certain player or possibly has a problem with the whole team: how long would it take for the editors to react then? Or the readers, of often irrational irasciblility, who might demand something a little more dire than mere “re-assignment” (a vat of oil near the boiling point, for starters).
Then I realized I hadn’t checked back to see what reviews Zach Lewis has written since that first concert, the one with the Bruckner 7th Symphony (a Franz Welser-Möst specialty) described as “deliberate,” “slow pace[d]”, “lopsided.” I figured he would not write an “all sweet and lovely” review, but I kept thinking what if he too keeps finding things to “criticize,” using the word in the negative sense?
In a more recent performance with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Lang Lang playing the Chopin E Minor Piano Concerto, he described the concert as “setting one important score on fire and leaving another in ashes.”
In the Chopin, Lang Lang...
- - - - - - - - -
“...proves ideal. Sure, he often breaks the musical speed limit, but he does so at his blazing version of leisure, without sacrificing clarity or devolving into a single-minded sprint.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, as rendered by the orchestra and Welser-MÖst. Here, speed limits count for little, and the music suffers greatly.”
- - - - - - - - -
In the final movement, he remarks that a slightly slower approach to the tempo “is still too brisk for the musicians to round out Beethoven's portrait of order restored. Instead, one merely senses chaos minimized.”
With the orchestra’s role in the Chopin best described as “modest” and a war-horse like Beethoven’s 5th, how much rehearsal time did they actually allot for this concert?
I don’t know if anyone at Severance Hall is having flashbacks to Rosenberg’s reviews, but mine were going back to the Old Days of Lorin Maazel and the under-rehearsed Mozart G Minor Symphony I heard them play at Carnegie Hall in the late-70s, mentioned in my earlier post.
The previous concert included the other Mozart G Minor Symphony – No. 25, the one that featured so prominently in the opening of the film “Amadeus” and still sounds amazing when you consider Mozart was 17 when he wrote it. Their performance had good chamber-music-like qualities in the middle movements, but, he concludes,
- - - - - - -
“...in the bolder first and last movements, Welser-MÖst and the orchestra tended to substitute stateliness and articulate counterpoint for fire and urgency. Polish is always a virtue in Mozart, but in the exceptionally dark 25th Symphony, a little grit isn't out of place, either.”
- - - - - - -
Of one of two works played with the soloist, pianist Emanuel Ax, Lewis wrote that in Karol Szymanowski’s rarely heard “Symphonie concertante” (his Symphony No. 4 which is really a substantial work for piano and orchestra, more concerto than symphony),
- - - - - - -
“... the pianist joined ranks with Welser-MÖst and the orchestra to cut through the thickets of a dense, prickly score and expose music of both visceral intensity and sincere emotion.”
- - - - - - -
What it’s like working in the corner of the Plain Dealer’s office where the arts folk hang out, I have no idea, but I imagine the politics must be very difficult to navigate. Rosenberg was certainly a star writer on the staff: did they move him out of an office, too? At least they didn’t escort him from the building. If he decides to move on, if he prefers reviewing orchestras to chamber music and ballet programs, how would another newspaper view his application? “What if he doesn’t like our conductor?” Could be a confidence issue...
I rather doubt Zach was told, along with what his word-limit would be for a review, that he can only spend no more than 33% of those words making negative comments. But still, it makes you think: happy to have a job? wanna keep it?
Justifiable criticism is one thing. Whether Rosenberg’s constant commentary about FWM’s interpretations was viewed as “unjustifiable,” I can only imagine. He, meanwhile, continues to cover “other concerts” like this review of the farewell appearance of the Guarneri Quartet who will be retiring at the end of this season (they’ll be playing at Market Square Concerts here in April, one of their very last concerts as one of the great legendary quartets of the past 44 years). In Cleveland, they played two of Beethoven’s most introspective Late Quartets, Op. 127 and Op. 132.
- - - - - - -
“To say that the Guarneri has come far in its view of Beethoven in the four-plus decades the music has been on the players' stands would be an understatement. The ensemble made one of the great recordings of the complete Beethoven quartets in the 1960s for RCA. Those performances are probing, taut and invigorating.
Tuesday's concert revealed a different Guarneri. The playing has become increasingly introspective in recent years, with an emphasis on utmost subtlety of interplay and dynamics. The approach takes the term "chamber music" literally: these performances would probably best be experienced in a small room.”
- - - - - - -
This also brought with it another flashback, going back some 35 years to my Eastman days when I sat in the recital hall (seating around 600) listening to the Guarneri Quartet playing Beethoven’s Third “Razumovsky” Quartet. Speaking of speed limits in Beethoven, the finale began at such a clip, I was amazed they could keep it together, it was going by so fast. It hadn’t occurred to me, at the time, this wasn’t a good thing, hot-dogging Beethoven like that. But while the Music Police didn’t show up to give them a ticket for excessive speeding in the Fugue, it was amusing that as an encore, first violinist Arnold Steinhardt announced they would play the last movement of the Razumovsky again – at the proper tempo. Yes, much better!!
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
What power does a critic actually have, these days? In some cities – New York, certainly – a bad review by an important critic can ruin a young artist’s career or close down a play. Just the other day, I was reading New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley’s review of a new production of the play, To Be or Not To Be which he describes as a “walking corpse of a comedy” and mentions that it “has the spring, color and freshness of long-refrigerated celery.” Yum – just makes you want to run right out and buy a ticket, doesn’t it?
But I’m not sure there’s the same kind of life-or-death power when the object is a long-established ensemble or a conductor with a contract, the artistic equivalent of tenure. It’s unlikely that a single critic will single-handedly deep-six a famous maestro: at worst, the maestro might invest in the psychological equivalent of a can of bug-spray, the kind of repellent (or denial) that most artists use when confronted by negative criticism. They might publicly shrug their shoulders but I rather doubt they’re hurt much by it.
It’s not likely Mr. Rosenberg would have felt himself so powerful he could bring down Franz Welser-Möst.
Still, it would not be the first time critics lined up against the conductor. The constant nagging of many of London’s critics along with the animosity of the musicians and the ambiguity of the management eventually drove him out of town six years after he became the music-director of the London Philharmonic at the age of 30. The musicians dubbed him “Frankly Worse-than-Most” – and frankly, I was surprised to see him land in Cleveland in 2002 where, one assumes by the riper age of 42, he has improved with experience. At any rate, this past June the Cleveland Orchestra management renewed his contract through 2018. I suppose critics can write whatever they want to about him, now.
This, however, is interesting: from blog-comments by people presumably on the inside of the situation. A former employee of the orchestra’s management thought Rosenberg was biased whenever he reviewed FWM (who, keep in mind, is not the only conductor in front of the orchestra: he spends 18 weeks a season there). This former employee writes
- - - - - - -
“His editors were told several years ago that his view was biased when Franz was on the podium and he was issued a stern warning that he needed to be less biased. For a short while he was writing fair reviews and then he started in on the negativity again. ...[T]hey weren’t attempting to get rid of him because he wasn’t giving them glowing reviews all the time. They were trying to get a fair review off of someone who is a well respected critic who was showing an obvious bias.”
- - - - - - -
A violinist in Cleveland (and judging from the content, a member of the orchestra) writes
- - - - - - -
“The orchestra members are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship - for a REASON. Ellie and Dan didn’t leave to pursue other musical endeavors - they (and others) left because of the cruel, uncompromising egotism of the baton-wielder.
I didn’t always concur with Don’s reviews, but the fact remains - FWM is a horrifyingly mediocre conductor who found himself trying to fill impossibly big shoes...” [referring to former music director Christoph von Dohnanyi].
- - - - - - -
This, of course, brings to mind issues between musicians and maestros, most openly in the Seattle Symphony, but that’s a whole ‘nother story... Yet perhaps Rosenberg is sensing some underlying animosity in the lack of communication between the players and the audience (or at least, himself as a member of the audience), stemming from a lack of communication (and perhaps respect?) between the conductor and the musicians.
Still, it is a rare orchestra that is free from such tension. Players in the Philadelphia Orchestra have been quite vocal about their dislike of their music director Christoph Eschenbach. A few of the concerts I'd heard with him conducting were mediocre, considering it was the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra. Eschenbach is now leaving, having served the shortest tenure of any of the orchestra's storied conductors, a mere five years. As the President of the orchestra's management told the maestro in 2006, according to Peter Dobrin of the Philadelphia Inquirer,
- - - - - - -
"- that 80 percent of the musicians did not agree with his artistic interpretations;
- that 80 percent of the musicians left concerts feeling great anger;
- and that the orchestra was a ‘ticking time bomb.’”
- - - - - - -
And just a few weeks ago, it was announced the National Symphony has named Christoph Eschenbach as its new music director, starting in 2010. Hmmmm...
So, trying to find some perspective in my assumptions, let’s say I think Rosenberg is probably not imagining things when he goes to a Cleveland Orchestra concert conducted by FWM whether he is biased or being honest. I don’t feel the Plain Dealer gave Rosenberg a fair deal when it chose to reassign him, though as an internal decision, how does one argue with modern-day American corpocracy?
But in all of this, since I have no personal stake in Cleveland, its newspaper, the career of Maestro Möst or of Daniel Rosenberg, I can only add I feel glad that, circumstances aside, someone I know and respect has landed in a position that will, hopefully, work to his benefit. After placing him between a rock and a hard place, I hope it will give him a different kind of work-out than his predecessor received. I wish him all the luck in the world.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
A New Critic for the Cleveland Orchestra
As a fan of Nicholas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective which collected critical commentary from newspapers and journals from the days of Beethoven to Schoenberg (and, true to the title, all scathing), I often like to quote a review – for instance, “[it] sometimes sounds like a plague of insects in the Amazon valley, sometimes like a miniature of the Day of Judgment... and for a change goes lachrymose” – and then ask if you can identify the piece. What was it Pitts Sanborne was reviewing in the New York World Telegram in 1938?
Did you guess Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini?
Now, it’s easy to slam past critics who’ve panned great works and artists, hindsight aside. As if to avoid litigation these days, critics rarely write reviews like that any more.
When I conducted the Harrisburg Symphony in the premiere of my “Epiphanies” in 1983, Barker Howland of the Patriot-News, after quoting from my program notes describing the work, wrote “An interesting piece, it will be repeated tonight.” I often thought I should blurb that on my resume.
However, when you read frequent comments from critic Donald Rosenberg at the Cleveland Plain Dealer like “Welser-Möst never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” you begin to get an idea of the on-going relationship between critic and critiqued: since Welser-Möst became the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, Rosenberg has rarely had good things to say about his interpretations, no matter how good the orchestra plays. Since the maestro’s contract was just renewed until 2018, one wondered how long this dance could go on. Would Cleveland have to put up with ten more years of negative comments?
Still, it was a bit of a shock the other day, just as the orchestra’s new season was about to begin, to read that Rosenberg was being “re-assigned.” I know it’s better than a lot of cities, large and small, who’ve seen their newspapers drop arts critics completely: at least Mr. Rosenberg will still be covering other venues and a new critic has been up-graded to review the orchestra.
The good news is – at least for those of us in Central Pennsylvania who remember his insightful and well-written reviews – that new critic sent in to review the Cleveland Orchestra happens to be Zachary Lewis who, for too few years, covered the local classical scene for Harrisburg’s Patriot-News.
Here’s his first review, the opening night program that featured George Benjamin’s “Duet” for piano and orchestra and a Welser-Möst specialty, Bruckner’s 7th Symphony.
Zach left here around 2004, moving to Cleveland and hoping to free-lance his way into making a living. For a while, he maintained an on-line review-blog for the paper which, unfortunately, did not generate enough readers to maintain the site (or the writer). So it is great news to see that he has resurfaced in a major way. It may not be under the most enjoyable circumstances, walking in this way – politics being politics – and while Rosenberg may be thought of as one of the major classical music critics in the country (no pressure there for his successor, either), I am sure we’ll be reading many good things from Zach. I know I’m not the only one wishing him the best!
The issue of Rosenberg’s re-assignment, of course, is another matter entirely, and one verging on Freedom of Speech.
Years ago, I was never a fan of the great conductor, Eugene Ormandy, or of the great violinist Isaac Stern – many times, their recordings and performances left me cold. I can’t say I knew why, but I just wasn’t moved by them. I often wondered what I would do if I had become a critic and had to deal with those kind of personal versus professional reactions, whatever that means. I mean, if I continued to slam Ormandy, say, as being “ineffectual” and “distant,” who would take me seriously for very long?
It’s not that Rosenberg was alone. Many critics around the country said similar things when the orchestra was on tour: they often had to go to Europe to get glowing reviews from major cities.
I’d had similar misgivings about Lorin Maazel, a previous conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. My Eastman room-mate joined the orchestra during Maazel’s first season and so whenever the orchestra came to New York, I would drive down from the UConn to hear them play. It was embarrassing to tell my friend that I had trouble staying awake during the Brahms 2nd Symphony.
It’s not that the orchestra played badly, by any means. It’s that I couldn’t find anything in the conductor’s interpretation that made the work come alive for me.
Once, during intermission, Maazel had said to the orchestra back-stage he was checking his pulse to find out what the opening tempo would be for Brahms 1st, coming up next. It’s not that his blood-pressure was a little low that night, but it sounded like he’d checked himself after having watched the most boring TV show, ever.
Another concert included Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. I knew from my friend that they had not rehearsed it much, in fact had not even run through the whole piece, checking only a few spots. On the stage of Carnegie Hall, they were actually going to “sight-read” the minuet. It’s not that they didn’t know the piece, but several in the orchestra (like my former room-mate) hadn’t played it with Maazel before. It’s not that I expected the piece to fall apart – after all, it was the Cleveland Orchestra – and while I wasn’t on the edge of my seat as much as many in the orchestra may have been, if the experiment had been meant to generate on-the-spot electricity, it still bored me. It didn’t help that I knew Maazel had told the orchestra during the sound-check that it wouldn’t make much difference: the critics would still hate it (and he was right).
So I didn’t feel too badly about my reactions: after all, I wasn’t alone. At least I didn’t have put my feelings about it in writing.
Many years and many bad reviews later, lo and behold Lorin Maazel is chosen as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic! There was much soul-searching going on as a few New York critics wondered how they would deal with him on a regular week-to-week basis. Fortunately, some things had somehow changed, certain strengths came to the surface with familiarity and, on the whole, while he hasn’t been getting unanimously rave reviews, they’re not the spiteful attacks they’d been. It’s unlikely the critics mellowed – and certainly the papers’ editors didn’t come down and say “write nice reviews or else!” Or at least, I rather doubt it.
(I have to chuckle, reading Allan Kozzin’s New York Times review of Maazel’s Mahler with the New York Philharmonic: “...though the playing was often strikingly beautiful, his interpretation was flat and emotionless: it might as well have been an ice sculpture.”)
Which makes the whole issue at the Plain Dealer a little more of a surprise: no one admits to pressuring anyone or to being pressured and it’s unlikely the paper’s integrity would be impugned just for the sake of appeasing the orchestra’s management.
But it probably does send chills down the spines of many critics across the land: it’s bad enough, now, a critic might be sued for a bad review, as happened in England this past summer. True, it was unlikely in another ten years Mr. Rosenberg would have any kind of epiphany about Mr. Welser-Möst’s interpretive abilities and suddenly become a euphoric cheer-leader, so perhaps the editor made the internal decision on the grounds that it was the best way to alleviate the situation. It was still better than eliminating the position, firing the critic and not replacing him at all which, frankly, has been known to happen elsewhere often enough.
When I worked for the Harrisburg Symphony back in the ‘80s, we often complained among ourselves about the reviews the orchestra received in the Patriot-News. Not that they were bad: usually, they were just badly written or not really reviews at all. Sending someone who likes music out to review a concert does not make them a “critic,” however one views the term.
Reading a complete plot-synopsis of Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman does not help someone who’d not heard the concert find out how the orchestra played the Overture, especially when you don’t say anything about how it was performed. The many grammatical howlers aside, telling us Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ Poeme for Flute & Orchestra was “a compendium of every style you could hear in the 20th Century” is an odd thing to say about such a mild and pretty piece composed before 1919, though it led some of us to say “yeah, I particularly liked that aleatoric section near the end.” How exciting it must have been for the two young singers who came from New York to sing in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, hoping no doubt to add to their resume reviews for their performance at the Forum, only to be mentioned in terms of what they wore, not how they sang!
Then there is the never-ending argument, “who are you writing for?” If you’d gone to the concert, you shouldn’t need to read a critic’s reaction to find out how it went. If you didn’t go, how is reading a review going to make up for not having been there? If you don’t know much about the music, does it matter how well the pianist brought out the triplets in the left-hand during the transition to the second theme? If you know anything about music, is it going to matter to you if the conductor “rode the tiger” during The Rite of Spring?
When there’s a concert weekend, is a review that shows up in Sunday morning’s paper going to motivate anyone to drop afternoon plans and get there by 3:00? What about a review for a concert series in a big city where, even if you decide to go at the last minute, are there going to be tickets available? Well, maybe it will happen, and maybe even getting a few more people in those seats makes it worthwhile. What is the point, some ask, of reviewing a one-night-stand of a concert if there are no further performances to attract new attendance? More than likely it may convince readers to try out the next concert. Or at least to know that the orchestra or the concert series even exists.
Ultimately, I guess, reviews are a kind of public relations venture which is why something that focuses on a negative aspect – even a small one at the expense of the over-all positive impression – can be viewed by certain vested interests as “bad publicity.” Yet movie critics who pan the latest block-buster don’t appear to have much of an impact on theater-attendance.
Perhaps the idea of knowing in advance a review will be negative – did people read Rosenberg’s reviews because they wanted to check out his latest zingers? – was having a negative impact on the paper’s readership. But the paper hired an intelligent man who is paid to have an opinion to write intelligently about his opinion. Maybe it’s the result of a certain level of political correctness combined with the old Bambi-era philosophy (as Thumper’s mother imparted, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”), not that many politicians have ever taken this to heart.
At the moment, I’m trying to read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled which is about (insomuch as it’s about something) a concert pianist who arrives in a Central European city for a very important concert. Every time he turns around there’s something surreal happening to him (I haven’t read enough to make sense out of it if sense is to be found), but one thing that intrigues me is Ishiguro’s depiction of the city’s arts scene.
Apparently this pianist, known only as Mr. Ryder, has come to town to support an aging, over-the-hill conductor named Mr. Brodsky who has been chosen as the city’s new “music champion,” despite their misgivings over his age and whatever talent he may have left. He replaces the acclaimed cellist Christoff who had been reluctantly thrust into this role-in-society almost 18 years earlier. But recently, one of the city leaders admitted to another one that he found Christoff’s last recital “functional,” to which another hesitated, “yes, I tend to agree with you. There was a certain dryness to it all,” and the first man added he thought the word was “cold.”
And so began the sudden disgrace of the man who for almost 18 years had been their shining beacon in the arts. Mr. Ryder is being told this, incidentally, against a backdrop of the movie he was trying to watch at the local cinema, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” particularly during the scene when the astronauts were beginning to suspect the motives of the computer HAL.
Did you guess Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini?
Now, it’s easy to slam past critics who’ve panned great works and artists, hindsight aside. As if to avoid litigation these days, critics rarely write reviews like that any more.
When I conducted the Harrisburg Symphony in the premiere of my “Epiphanies” in 1983, Barker Howland of the Patriot-News, after quoting from my program notes describing the work, wrote “An interesting piece, it will be repeated tonight.” I often thought I should blurb that on my resume.
However, when you read frequent comments from critic Donald Rosenberg at the Cleveland Plain Dealer like “Welser-Möst never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” you begin to get an idea of the on-going relationship between critic and critiqued: since Welser-Möst became the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, Rosenberg has rarely had good things to say about his interpretations, no matter how good the orchestra plays. Since the maestro’s contract was just renewed until 2018, one wondered how long this dance could go on. Would Cleveland have to put up with ten more years of negative comments?
Still, it was a bit of a shock the other day, just as the orchestra’s new season was about to begin, to read that Rosenberg was being “re-assigned.” I know it’s better than a lot of cities, large and small, who’ve seen their newspapers drop arts critics completely: at least Mr. Rosenberg will still be covering other venues and a new critic has been up-graded to review the orchestra.
The good news is – at least for those of us in Central Pennsylvania who remember his insightful and well-written reviews – that new critic sent in to review the Cleveland Orchestra happens to be Zachary Lewis who, for too few years, covered the local classical scene for Harrisburg’s Patriot-News.Here’s his first review, the opening night program that featured George Benjamin’s “Duet” for piano and orchestra and a Welser-Möst specialty, Bruckner’s 7th Symphony.
Zach left here around 2004, moving to Cleveland and hoping to free-lance his way into making a living. For a while, he maintained an on-line review-blog for the paper which, unfortunately, did not generate enough readers to maintain the site (or the writer). So it is great news to see that he has resurfaced in a major way. It may not be under the most enjoyable circumstances, walking in this way – politics being politics – and while Rosenberg may be thought of as one of the major classical music critics in the country (no pressure there for his successor, either), I am sure we’ll be reading many good things from Zach. I know I’m not the only one wishing him the best!
The issue of Rosenberg’s re-assignment, of course, is another matter entirely, and one verging on Freedom of Speech.
Years ago, I was never a fan of the great conductor, Eugene Ormandy, or of the great violinist Isaac Stern – many times, their recordings and performances left me cold. I can’t say I knew why, but I just wasn’t moved by them. I often wondered what I would do if I had become a critic and had to deal with those kind of personal versus professional reactions, whatever that means. I mean, if I continued to slam Ormandy, say, as being “ineffectual” and “distant,” who would take me seriously for very long?
It’s not that Rosenberg was alone. Many critics around the country said similar things when the orchestra was on tour: they often had to go to Europe to get glowing reviews from major cities.
I’d had similar misgivings about Lorin Maazel, a previous conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. My Eastman room-mate joined the orchestra during Maazel’s first season and so whenever the orchestra came to New York, I would drive down from the UConn to hear them play. It was embarrassing to tell my friend that I had trouble staying awake during the Brahms 2nd Symphony.
It’s not that the orchestra played badly, by any means. It’s that I couldn’t find anything in the conductor’s interpretation that made the work come alive for me.
Once, during intermission, Maazel had said to the orchestra back-stage he was checking his pulse to find out what the opening tempo would be for Brahms 1st, coming up next. It’s not that his blood-pressure was a little low that night, but it sounded like he’d checked himself after having watched the most boring TV show, ever.
Another concert included Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. I knew from my friend that they had not rehearsed it much, in fact had not even run through the whole piece, checking only a few spots. On the stage of Carnegie Hall, they were actually going to “sight-read” the minuet. It’s not that they didn’t know the piece, but several in the orchestra (like my former room-mate) hadn’t played it with Maazel before. It’s not that I expected the piece to fall apart – after all, it was the Cleveland Orchestra – and while I wasn’t on the edge of my seat as much as many in the orchestra may have been, if the experiment had been meant to generate on-the-spot electricity, it still bored me. It didn’t help that I knew Maazel had told the orchestra during the sound-check that it wouldn’t make much difference: the critics would still hate it (and he was right).
So I didn’t feel too badly about my reactions: after all, I wasn’t alone. At least I didn’t have put my feelings about it in writing.
Many years and many bad reviews later, lo and behold Lorin Maazel is chosen as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic! There was much soul-searching going on as a few New York critics wondered how they would deal with him on a regular week-to-week basis. Fortunately, some things had somehow changed, certain strengths came to the surface with familiarity and, on the whole, while he hasn’t been getting unanimously rave reviews, they’re not the spiteful attacks they’d been. It’s unlikely the critics mellowed – and certainly the papers’ editors didn’t come down and say “write nice reviews or else!” Or at least, I rather doubt it.
(I have to chuckle, reading Allan Kozzin’s New York Times review of Maazel’s Mahler with the New York Philharmonic: “...though the playing was often strikingly beautiful, his interpretation was flat and emotionless: it might as well have been an ice sculpture.”)
Which makes the whole issue at the Plain Dealer a little more of a surprise: no one admits to pressuring anyone or to being pressured and it’s unlikely the paper’s integrity would be impugned just for the sake of appeasing the orchestra’s management.
But it probably does send chills down the spines of many critics across the land: it’s bad enough, now, a critic might be sued for a bad review, as happened in England this past summer. True, it was unlikely in another ten years Mr. Rosenberg would have any kind of epiphany about Mr. Welser-Möst’s interpretive abilities and suddenly become a euphoric cheer-leader, so perhaps the editor made the internal decision on the grounds that it was the best way to alleviate the situation. It was still better than eliminating the position, firing the critic and not replacing him at all which, frankly, has been known to happen elsewhere often enough.
When I worked for the Harrisburg Symphony back in the ‘80s, we often complained among ourselves about the reviews the orchestra received in the Patriot-News. Not that they were bad: usually, they were just badly written or not really reviews at all. Sending someone who likes music out to review a concert does not make them a “critic,” however one views the term.
Reading a complete plot-synopsis of Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman does not help someone who’d not heard the concert find out how the orchestra played the Overture, especially when you don’t say anything about how it was performed. The many grammatical howlers aside, telling us Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ Poeme for Flute & Orchestra was “a compendium of every style you could hear in the 20th Century” is an odd thing to say about such a mild and pretty piece composed before 1919, though it led some of us to say “yeah, I particularly liked that aleatoric section near the end.” How exciting it must have been for the two young singers who came from New York to sing in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, hoping no doubt to add to their resume reviews for their performance at the Forum, only to be mentioned in terms of what they wore, not how they sang!
Then there is the never-ending argument, “who are you writing for?” If you’d gone to the concert, you shouldn’t need to read a critic’s reaction to find out how it went. If you didn’t go, how is reading a review going to make up for not having been there? If you don’t know much about the music, does it matter how well the pianist brought out the triplets in the left-hand during the transition to the second theme? If you know anything about music, is it going to matter to you if the conductor “rode the tiger” during The Rite of Spring?
When there’s a concert weekend, is a review that shows up in Sunday morning’s paper going to motivate anyone to drop afternoon plans and get there by 3:00? What about a review for a concert series in a big city where, even if you decide to go at the last minute, are there going to be tickets available? Well, maybe it will happen, and maybe even getting a few more people in those seats makes it worthwhile. What is the point, some ask, of reviewing a one-night-stand of a concert if there are no further performances to attract new attendance? More than likely it may convince readers to try out the next concert. Or at least to know that the orchestra or the concert series even exists.
Ultimately, I guess, reviews are a kind of public relations venture which is why something that focuses on a negative aspect – even a small one at the expense of the over-all positive impression – can be viewed by certain vested interests as “bad publicity.” Yet movie critics who pan the latest block-buster don’t appear to have much of an impact on theater-attendance.
Perhaps the idea of knowing in advance a review will be negative – did people read Rosenberg’s reviews because they wanted to check out his latest zingers? – was having a negative impact on the paper’s readership. But the paper hired an intelligent man who is paid to have an opinion to write intelligently about his opinion. Maybe it’s the result of a certain level of political correctness combined with the old Bambi-era philosophy (as Thumper’s mother imparted, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”), not that many politicians have ever taken this to heart.
At the moment, I’m trying to read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled which is about (insomuch as it’s about something) a concert pianist who arrives in a Central European city for a very important concert. Every time he turns around there’s something surreal happening to him (I haven’t read enough to make sense out of it if sense is to be found), but one thing that intrigues me is Ishiguro’s depiction of the city’s arts scene.
Apparently this pianist, known only as Mr. Ryder, has come to town to support an aging, over-the-hill conductor named Mr. Brodsky who has been chosen as the city’s new “music champion,” despite their misgivings over his age and whatever talent he may have left. He replaces the acclaimed cellist Christoff who had been reluctantly thrust into this role-in-society almost 18 years earlier. But recently, one of the city leaders admitted to another one that he found Christoff’s last recital “functional,” to which another hesitated, “yes, I tend to agree with you. There was a certain dryness to it all,” and the first man added he thought the word was “cold.”
And so began the sudden disgrace of the man who for almost 18 years had been their shining beacon in the arts. Mr. Ryder is being told this, incidentally, against a backdrop of the movie he was trying to watch at the local cinema, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” particularly during the scene when the astronauts were beginning to suspect the motives of the computer HAL.
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