August 2009 Archives

Mrs. Silva and I arrived at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts about a half hour before my appointed reading time as part of A Marathon Metamorphoses. We were welcomed by the helpful and gracious Pulitzer personnel, who gave me my instructions: here's the book, here's where we are now (Sarah Bryan Miller was reading when I arrived), sit here now, move to the hot seat when you're next in line, stand when the producer tells you it's time, change places with the previous reader, sit down and read until you see the next reader standing and end at the next stanza break.

Scenes of violent, dramatic change evoked through the spoken word are on store for you in A Marathon Metamorphoses, a reading of Ovid's great poem by more than 70 St. Louisans at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts this weekend. To find out more click here. Among the esteemed list of readers are William Gass, Bob Duffy, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, K. Curtis Lyle, Mary Jo Bang, Sarah Bryan Miller, Chris King, Tom Schlafly, and, representing the SLSO, David Halen and me. David Robertson would have participated but he has a couple of gigs at the BBC Proms in London this week: Friday night with Stephen Hough and Steven Isserlis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Wednesday night with Colin Currie and the BBCSO. David R. probably would have shown us all up by reading it in Latin anyway.

For those of you new to this blog, the stagehands of the SLSO are referred to as Mike Lynch and the Henchmen (Mike's the stage manager). The Henchmen have been away for a while, taking a much-needed post-season break. But they've been back at the Hall the last few days: men with tools on a mission. Blue prints have been taken out of files and examined; a new table saw has been buzzing. I'm really not sure what all they've been up to--by late afternoon today, they were gone like the wind.

I've been hesitant to make any comments about the possible sale of KFUO-Classic 99, St. Louis' one-and-only radio station devoted to classical music and the arts. Where I, where the musicians and staff of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, where SLSO fans stand on this is obvious, but I will add that this stance is not entirely self-serving.

I just finished reading Pictures of Nothing, the late curator and art historian Kirk Varnedoe's final lectures, which were presented at the National Gallery in 2003 as part of the Mellon Lecture Series only a few months before he passed away from cancer. It's a remarkable last testament, Varnedoe choosing to devote some of his last hours to giving inspiring praise to abstract art.

Brian Owens was the guy I asked to learn about the a cappella jazz ensemble Take 6, who perform as the featured guest artists in the Gospel Christmas concert this season. Brian works in the SLSO Education and Community Partnership department, and he is also a terrific singer.

My colleague Dale, who among his numerous other duties makes the SLSO website very, very keen, asked me this afternoon about audio clips for Mahler 5. He had located a recording of the SLSO playing Mahler's big, soulful symphony from the Slatkin Years compilation. But it is indeed a great big symphony, so how do you choose an appealing one-minute soundbyte out of all that beauty?

Not long after her evening newsbyte, Cally Banham returned to Powell Hall to talk to me about the Fiala English Horn Concerto in E-flat major, which she will be performing with guest conductor Nic McGegan and the orchestra on October 10 and 11. The interview will be part of a Playbill article in the October issue.

Tonight, that would be Wednesday, August 18, Channel 2's Charles Jaco is reporting on the possible sale of KFUO-Classic99 on the 10 o'clock news. I just returned from Jaco's interview with our own English horn phenom Cally Banham on the steps to the second-floor landing in the Powell Hall foyer. Cally came in on late notice and was eloquent and impassioned. Hooray! Does St. Louis need a classical music station? Hear what Cally and others say tonight on Channel 2.

I was writing some promotional copy for the upcoming Symphony A to Z adult-education series at Maryville University. I believe this is season No. 3 for Symphony A2Z, which is hosted by Peter Henderson (MU music professor and frequent SLSO keyboardist and frequent SLSO PreConcert Perspectives speaker and SLSO Associate Principal Second Violin Kristin Ahlstrom's husband).

The SLSO's Doctor Atomic Symphony CD is No. 2 on Billboard's "Top Traditional Classical Albums" chart. I'm not even going to bother with trying to explain the "traditional classical" designation. Nobody really has come up with an appropriate name for the music that orchestras and chamber ensembles and solo musicians play that generally comes under the designation: classical music. If you haven't read Alex Ross' "Listen to This," which begins "I hate classical music...," please do. 

Was it last summer that Carolyn White, Associate Principal Double Bass of the SLSO, was toiling near the double bass room, repairing and reupholstering the double bass trunks, making them so much more secure and hardy and aesthetically pleasing? I think it was.

In any given orchestral concert at Powell Hall the audience is made up of people who are there for many different reasons, whose likes and dislikes are different, whose tastes are different, whose expectations are different.

Celine Dion does not have these problems.

If you go to a Celine Dion concert you pretty much know what you want from the experience and you know you're going to get it. Celine delivers.

In Robert Altman's delightfully cynical take on the film industry, The Player, Tim Robbins lists the necessary elements for a successful movie: "Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings."

Whether we think music is good or bad is based on a whole host of variables that are far from purely aesthetic grounds--as if there were such a thing as purely aesthetic grounds. Carl Wilson observes in Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste that music functions in all sorts of ways that give pleasure. We cook to music, clean house to music (Tom Petty is the housecleaning music in the Silva household), make love to music, drive to music, dine to music, work to music, workout to music, and so on. As I mentioned in a previous post, Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony is not ideal for easing the tensions of dental work. Wilson notes that certain bands become critical darlings (Sonic Youth, for example) because their music lends itself to the kind of listening that critics do. Celine Dion's music is not rewarded by such listening. Many people who listen to classical music say they do so because it's relaxing. Many of us shudder at that thought.

Somehow, I was a teenager in a small, dusty, isolated town in north central Montana and I was listening to Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, Chicago, Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Bob Dylan, The Band, the Beatles, Elton John , Judy Collins. A friend was listening to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and so I was listening too. I was reading Naked Lunch, The Great Gatsby, Time, Life, Catcher in the Rye, Trout Fishing in America, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." Amazing movies came to that small town, and many times I went to shows in which my friends and I were the only ones in the theater: Z, Badlands, Thieves Like Us, The Last Picture Show (at the drive-in), Last Tango in Paris (with my dad). I was mesmerized by Willem DeKooning paintings in a Time magazine article, probably written by Robert Hughes.

I was in grade school when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and all those two-minute jewel-like pop songs were being played on the AM radio constantly. The Beatles seemed to be everywhere and everything. I had a Beatles cap. I had Beatles cards (these were something like baseball cards--and I had those too). There was a Beatle cartoon show on Saturday morning TV. Everybody had their favorite Beatle.

While I was enjoying a week of leisure I re-read Carl Wilson's illuminating little book Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Those of you who frequent Alex Ross' Rest Is Noise blog already know about Wilson's exploration of all things Celine Dion. Wilson, Toronto-based music critic for Canada's Globe and Mail, comes to the middle of his critical-life's journey and wonders why do people hate Celine Dion's music, which immediately begs the other side of that question, why do even more people love Celine Dion's music.