"In a Word or Two"

METRONOMICALITY

Like the lie detector, metronomes are inadmissible in court.

CATS are emissaries from a world we have yet to discover.

"LOVECRAFT, bard of ghastliness

Your fetid tomes my dreams caress."

ON AUTHENTICITY:

“The Early Music Movement drove me into the arms of Leopold Stokowski where I have luxuriated ever since.”

ON GENEROSITY:

“Vladimir Horowitz once offered to give me his cat. Having two already I declined.”

CHOPIN AND POLAND

Chopin never really came from anywhere. The mazurkas wave the flag and local modes spice up major and minor keys. But I suggest that Chopin gave Poland as much national identity as it gave him.

ON MUSIC COMPETITIONS

The musician’s purpose is to call attention to the music being played. In competitions performers use music to call attention to themselves.

ZEFFIRELLI’S “TURANDOT” AT THE MET.

1) The set: “If the gods eat dim sum it is certainly in a place like this.” 

        2) Puccini’s music: “It is a home designed for the comfort of the beautiful vocal sound.”

CRITIC’S CREDENTIALS

The day I put “music critic” after my name people started asking me about music. Before that no one asked my opinion about anything.

ON GLENN GOULD’S “WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER.”

He is the most interesting Bach player in memory, but when taken as a model of how Bach should sound, he is a catastrophe. People who blow up buildings get our attention, and sometimes their messages clean out our heads, but we don’t let them be architects.

ON THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ORCHESTRAS

They will no more grow than Mother Nature will take the liver spots off my hands. We have grown old together.

SYMPHONIC BLACKNESS

There's a more relevant question behind the one that asks why so few black musicians go into classical music, and that is: Why should they want to?

ON EARLY MUSIC

If the early music movement taught us anything it is that all music is contemporary.

TANGO

The tango is sublimated warfare. It rarely smiles. Elegance, ritual and a deep dignity win out over darker impulses. In a single Argentine dance form the universal paradoxes of romance between two human beings seem to gather.

ON AMERICAN MUSIC 

I would trade some Strauss, most of Hindemith and even a little Brahms for the first eight bars of “April in Paris.”

ON ELLIOTT CARTER AND HAYDN

One wonders what kind of music Carter would have written had he, like Haydn, lived his teenage years in frightening poverty.

SCHOENBERG ON HIS  CRITICS.

“My music isn’t modern. It’s just played badly.”

FARRAKHAN AND HIS VIOLIN

In the green hills of North Carolina on Saturday night, the lion lay down with the lamb. A reputed sower of discord communed with a maker of harmony. Louis Farrakhan, meet Felix Mendelssohn.

ON CASTING BAYREUTH’S “RING.”

Gabriele Schnaut's Brünnhilde bore down on the helpless listener like a sopranic freight train threatening derailment at any moment. Her Siegfried (Wolfgang Schmidt)  could offer only strangled desperation. When we were lucky, Mr. Schmidt landed on no pitch at all, creating a kind of 19th-century German Romantic rap.

HENRY BRANT INDOORS

The Brant aesthetic, when brought under a roof, shrinks to a form of encirclement. Here the audience, Custer-like, receives incoming fire from every direction.

RING FOLLOWERS

Wagner lovers are besotted people, like the sharers of some extraterrestrial visitation who are compelled to gather in cities like Seattle, Vienna, New York, San Francisco and, of course, Bayreuth to trade sightings.

RING FOLLOWERS II

When doom is announced on Monday but does not arrive until Saturday, the "Ring" and its audiences are captives in time, forming a kind of space capsule in which listeners are as much crew members as the performers.

PETER SELLARS AND EL NINO

Mr. Sellars takes his usual role as honorary member and emotional spokesman for the oppressed and the slighted. It must gall him at times to be so showered with attention and success.

OUTIS AT LA SCALA

The brothel scene steams with bare skin, gyrating pudenda and simulated (I think) copulation.

ON THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER

The sorrows of this story's title lie in togetherness and loneliness made to stand side by

side.

GIACINTO  SCELSI AND HIS BLACK HOLE

 A Beethoven sonata begins at the front door, takes a trip, meets new friends, goes home. A Scelsi piece closes the front door and digs in the basement.

CASTING WOES AT THE MET

Gorgeous to look at but virtually uninhabited, the Metropolitan Opera's new ''Traviata'' seems to have been the victim of a neutron bomb.

ON AVERY FISHER HALL

This building is cursed and should be leveled. It doesn’t need an architect. It .needs an exorcist.

ON HIGH PAY AND THE THREE TENORS

Perhaps a more apt title for these events would be "Three Tenors, One Conductor and Four Accountants."

ON BRUCKNER  AND CLASSICAL STYLE

Bruckner is a Mozart sonata that ate too much.

ON BLOGGING

All of us should go home, find a dark room, sit down and be silent.

ON MUSIC APPRECIATION

That leap from ''understand'' to ''appreciate'' is long and blind.

ON CONDUCTING MAHLER

You do not keep “Das Liêd von der Erde” together by snapping your fingers like Harry James.

ON ACOUSTICS AND LISTENING

Good acoustics, like a good haircut, go unnoticed.

Acoustics are to music what bookbinding and typeface are to Faulkner. If our minds are doing their work, Faulkner's voice will sound the same in the roughest, smallest and most unwelcoming old paperback as it does in the most luxurious special edition.

MYSTERIES OF CONDUCTING

Look no farther thanLeopold Stokowski who managed to pack his dessert-like sound into a suitcase and carry it from city to city.

RELUCTANT CRITICISM

The critic’s duty is to report that Mr. Bocelli is not a very good singer.

MOZART FROM MINOR TO MAJOR

Just as we put up our umbrellas, the sun comes out. We don't know whether to be happy or sad, and so we are both.

ON CRITICISM

Critics may speak German or English but they can’t speak music. Music is sublimely illiterate

ON RELIGION

Messiaen invented a Christianity with no missionaries and a congregation of one.