Over at the Washington Post, Anne Midgette says that the White House could help classical music by having fun with it.
Among her suggestions is friend of Wolf Trap and champion of all great songs everywhere, Steve Blier. Take a trip over to washingtonpost.com to vote early and often for Steve in the poll!
There are advantages to working next door to a National Park.
To celebrate Earth Day and National Park Week, our staff meeting was held on the move, at the park. (This works particularly well with a staff of two.)
A beautiful 3-mile hike in sunny 70-degree weather was just the ticket to make all operatic trials and tribulations feel manageable.
“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” (John Muir)
If you aren’t already following Adaptistration’s annual Take a Friend to the Orchestra blog series, you should check it out. I contributed a few years ago, and every year Drew taps a terrific range of writers to talk about their experiences with and advice on introducing people to our world.
If you have just a minute, start with Scott Spielberg’s recent post on taking a friend to The Marriage of Figaro – twice in one weekend! Here’s the summary,
There is value in repetition. The context has changed, because we are different people when we cross that stream the second time. There is too much pressure put on inexperienced listeners to understand everything in a musical work in the first hearing. Mostly this pressure is self-inflicted, but we aficionados can also cause damage by smirking at ignorant questions or showing off with a bunch of technical jargon. What we need to communicate is that the best classical music has such a wealth of information that it requires and rewards repeated hearings and study. The more we emphasize that to new listeners, the more they will get out of their classical music experiences. There is value in repetition.
Amen, brother.
Are we just too impatient to buy into this? The faster our world gets (and from where I sit, we’re hitting warp speed pretty soon…), are most of us unwilling to do anything for which the rewards aren’t immediately noticeable? (I’m not lecturing. Really. I include myself in this incrimination.)
Taking a Friend to the WTOC
I’ve answered this question a lot in recent weeks: “Which one of your performances this summer would be the best one for a new operagoer?” I haven’t answered it very cleanly, but perhaps that’s for the best. Just as I wouldn’t recommend any particular restaurant for all palates or any fashion for all bodies, it seems foolhardily (is that a word?) simple to dispense a one-size-fits-all recommendation.
Here are my answers. Know your new operagoer and choose the best fit!
Got that? Can’t choose? Come to one of each – they’re conveniently spread out in June, July and August! 
“I sang Norma better than anyone had in years and I interpolated a high F at the end of the first act… you had better have a couple of high F’s you can interpolate into your life.”
I treated myself to a trip to the Kennedy Center on Wednesday to see the current run of Terrence McNally’s Master Class starring Tyne Daly. An amazing tour de force.
True confessions: I have avoided this play up till now. I read it about ten years ago, acknowledging that I needed to be familiar with this piece whose entire identity is so bound up with the cult of opera. But the idea of actually sitting in the theatre for two hours and watching it was enough to make me blanch, and I never followed through.
It’s not that I’m not a Callas fan. It’s that my own response to the phenomenon of the star-turn/student-abuse that often masquerades as a Master Class is no secret. My last foray into this jungle was in 2005, and it stirred up more than a bit of controversy. (Here, here and here.) I’m not sure I have the stomach for doing it all over again, but I will say that even though I was in awe of McNally’s insight and Daly’s prowess, sitting through it made me physically sick.
It also gave me plenty of time to ruminate. I won’t bore you with all of it, but here’s the distillation.
In my perfect world, no one, no matter how gifted and famous, would treat another human being with anything less than the respect that we all deserve. It’s a worldview that is both naive and non-negotiable. I want to rail at people who can’t see beyond themselves – no matter who they are. Unfortunately, this is not the case in any business where egos are pumped up then polished diamond-hard.
The reality of it is that in the high-risk/high-reward worlds of professional theatre, music, sports, etc, we want our stars to be larger than life. We want them to take chances we never would dare, and we want them to suffer so we can do so vicariously. We offer them up, chew them up and spit them out. And the outsize egos and difficult dynamics that come from these people are simply the other side of the coin. We want them to be big and bad, but only onstage – in the rehearsal hall and the master classroom we wish them to be collegial, flexible, open and warm. And that’s just not going to happen.
This doesn’t mean that some salt-of-the-earth people aren’t also riveting performing artists. I know some of them. And God bless them for staying humane while they live this crazy performer’s life. They do seem to be rare, though, among the ranks of supernaturally gifted artists.
The rest of them are interpolating high F’s into their lives – onstage and off. We depend on them to open up our own emotional lives to a place where our trials seem trivial, and we need to remind ourselves that sometimes this comes at a cost.
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