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The art world considers him to be their loss. But he is a loss to music, too. I always considered it a sort of interdisciplinary imprimatur on musical events — events of the most diverse natures — to see him and the radiant Rosamund Bernier in the audience. And, ratifying their importance for music, both Copland and Bernstein adorned their effulgent wedding at Philip Johnson’s Glass House.

The New York Times said of his writings:

“Mr. Russell was an appreciator who liked to share his enthusiasms; as a consequence some readers and fellow critics found him too genteel.”

“I do not see my role as primarily punitive,” he wrote in Reading Russell. “There are artists whose work I dread to see yet again, dance-dramas that in my view have set back the American psyche several hundred years, composers whose names drive me from the concert hall, authors whose books I shall never willingly reopen. But it has never seemed to me much of an ambition to go though life snarling and spewing.”

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It is announced today that George Steel, executive director of Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, long a darling of the New York press, and aforementioned here and here, is going to Dallas. He’ll be the new general director of the Dallas Opera — a company eminent in the history of the lyric art.
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I had not previously found his performances so inspiring.

UPDATE: Spencer Tunick cultivates an art that, while utterly pacific, partakes of elements of what made the Nuremberg rallies so effective. Comparison of the two could be contributions to the question of what is art and what is mere promotion — exploring disputed boundaries familiar to the commercial artist or the connoisseur of the decorative arts.

The American humorist Joe Queenan has stirred up a tempest about the performance of contemporary music, and for that, at least, we should thank him. He has published a Guardian essay, “Admit it, you’re as bored as I am,” that grows out of what he tells us is attendance at 1,500 concerts in the past 40 years. In those concerts he has been caused to listen to a fair amount of new music, to which his response might be summed up in the immortal words of E.B. White: “I say it’s spinach and to hell with it.”
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We’ve now lost a great singer of the vintage of Magda Olivero. Though their métiers have been cultivated in very different atmospheres and circumstances, the timeless values of communication through song are displayed by both. Abounding obituaries testify to the force of Jo Stafford’s art, as does this performance, which now seems valedictory:

As someone has said before, poetry makes us think its words, music makes us feel its tones, but song makes us feel its words.

It’s a theme fit for Kafka: a person gets lost in the maze of YouTube, never to return. For music-lovers the daily-expanding selection of videos online is astounding — and gratifying. The very young are exploiting the medium with an abandon that acts out a democracy beyond the dreams of Jefferson. I recently met an exorbitantly gifted 18-year-old pianist who has publicly documented much of his repertory on YouTube, beginning with a performance when he was only 3 years old.

Last evening I enjoyed one of those online feasts in front of the screen and want to point to a couple of particularly valuable videos. The first is a talk given by Gérard Mortier recently in Denver. I won’t characterize it or prejudice other potential viewers, except to make one observation: the man’s love, yea passion, for opera is manifest and to me, at least, inspiring. Here is the video link, courtesy of Opera America.

From illuminating talk about opera to an incandescent example of the singer’s art at its highest level. Here is the great Magda Olivero singing an aria from one of her celebrated rôles. She was 83 years old at the time of this performance:

In 1996 I had the great privilege of meeting Magda Olivero, backstage at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, after a brilliant recital by Marilyn Horne. A colleague wrote to me today, saying that she had also been at that recital and was thrilled to meet Olivero. She naturally esteemed this a once-in-a-lifetime experience. A few days later, she was in Milan and

Imagine my surprise when I took a bus tour to Cremona and, as I got onto the bus, there was Magda!

Magda Olivero may well give us all hope through her demonstrations that it is possible still to keep doing fine things at an advanced age. Perhaps one reason Olivero has aged so gracefully and sung so well for so long is that she has been a true diva onstage but was not above taking ordinary bus tours.

To say that someone lives on after his or her earthly journey is ended is a cliché that is easily tossed off. But I was struck again at a concert last night with how profoundly right this worn image can be in the case of Leonard Bernstein.
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