After many visits to Avery Fisher Hall, I’ve decided that the real problem with the New York Philharmonic lies neither with the orchestra nor with the performance space, but with the audience. (There may be a secondary problem involving the conductor, but I won’t go into that here: suffice to say that you would do well to look out for occasions when a guest-conductor is visiting.) Under the excellent Riccardo Muti, who led the Philharmonic in a concert of Cherubini, Beethoven, and Hindemith on June 12th, the orchestra was at its brightest and clearest: precise without being rigid, delicate yet full-toned, and able to cover a range of musical styles competently and gratifyingly. The Cherubini was a mere aperitif, but it did its appetite-whetting job perfectly well. The Beethoven—the Emperor Piano Concerto, with Lang Lang as the soloist—was obviously intended as a crowd-pleaser, and please it did, to excess, with Lang Lang strutting his stuff up and down the keyboard. As a performer, he seems under the delusion that his strength lies in the fast, loud, showy passages, whereas his real ability comes through in the softer, slower, quieter moments, which he is able to fill with tension and feeling. No matter; the audience loved him equally well in the piano-pounding bits—in fact, I think they loved him better in those bits—and he earned at least four rounds of thunderous applause, complete with the standard (for Avery Fisher) standing ovation. Usually I interpret this move as advance preparation for the mass stampede to the subway, but in this case, since it was only the intermission, I guess they really meant it.
I wouldn’t have found this annoying if the audience hadn’t then responded to the program’s second half—a rare performance of Hindemith’s one-act opera, Sancta Susanna—with such churlish resistance. Granted, the Hindemith is a weird piece, with a heroine who, like a Freudian hysteric, tears off her clothing to offer herself to an apparition who may be either Christ or Satan, depending on whose observations you believe. At least, so I gathered from my intermittent glances at the supertitles; I was too gripped by the sight of Riccardo Muti going wild with the orchestra to follow the plot very closely. Hindemith’s score is both passionate and unsettling, with novel sound effects (a single piercing tone, for instance, that the characters hear and comment on) and frighteningly loud interludes that purposely overpower the singers. The New York Philharmonic entirely lived up to Muti’s ambitious aim in programming this unusual piece, and a Berlin or Brooklyn audience would have roared with excitement at the end.
The Avery Fisher audience acted, instead, as if it had been sold a spoiled piece of meat. As the opera stormed to its sudden close, there was a brief, surprised silence and then the kind of feeble applause that this crowd sometimes produces between movements. This time, though, it was not a mistake, but a willful rejection. About two-thirds of the house leapt to its feet without clapping at all, and the rush toward the exit was lemming-like. We outnumbered appreciators stood clapping our hearts out, but we couldn’t make a dent against the sound of mass disapproval. “You call this music?” is what their hastening footsteps conveyed.
The reason I blame this specifically on the Avery Fisher audience is that, at approximately the same time, I witnessed a vastly different response to equally difficult music in two other New York venues. At Carnegie Hallon June 14th, the Emerson Quartet played (among other things) Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Quartet, which the composer had instructed his original musicians to play so slowly “that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” In fact, two or three people did leave their seats during the long first Adagio, but rather than irking me, as such behavior usually would, this seemed merely to confirm Shostakovich’s intentions. The rest of us remained rapt and silent (no program-rustling, no coughing, no chattering to seatmates) for the full thirty-six minutes of the all-Adagio piece. The Emersons are fond of saying about the Shostakovich quartets that they fully come to life only in front of an audience, and this seems to me to be true. Much as I love the Emersons’ own recording of this piece, it’s just not as great the two live performances I’ve heard them give—this year at Carnegie Hall, and last year at Alice Tully. In both cases, the hush that greeted the achingly sad ending—the way the final notes trailed off into a silence that the musicians and the audience held together—added something to the music that went beyond anything a CD could ever provide. And at Carnegie, in particular, the brilliant placing of the Shostakovich between Bach’s final fugue and Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue made all three pieces sound new again, as the audience (to judge by its hearty ovation) evidently appreciated.
The other good audience I encountered in recent weeks was the small crowd assembled to hear the last Movado Hour concert of the season. I’ve already raved about this series of free one-hour concerts, staged (with the accompaniment of drinks, snacks, and nightclub tables) in the fourth-floor studio of the Baryshnikov Art Center; but nothing I say can really do the experience justice. The June 5th concert, featuring the pianist Pedja Muzijevic, the soprano Lucy Shelton, and the Brentano String Quartet, started with George Crumb’s Apparition and moved on to Brahms’s Piano Quintet. The performers were as good in the haunting, fragmented, new-music mode as they were in the gorgeous classic, and the youngish, unstodgy audience—in stark contrast to their Avery Fisher counterparts —loved both pieces equally and showed it with smiling, vigorous, entirely un-self-congratulatory applause. The Movado Hour is, admittedly, one of a kind. Writers, dancers, and musicians, lawyers and businesspeople, the retired and the over-employed, all mingle in this setting to get one hour of pure pleasure that costs them nothing. Perhaps the free admission has something to do with the casual, knowledgeable enthusiasm with which this audience greets excellent music—not gracelessly, not unthinkingly, but as if they deserve to hear the best. And so they do.
— June 17, 2007