Salon.com > Douglas McLennan

The arts funding war the left will always lose

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:11:00 +0000

Mitt Romney said last week he’ll kick funding for the arts and public broadcasting to the curb if he gets to be president.

“We’re not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird is going to have advertisements,” Romney said, while speaking at Homer’s Deli in Clinton, Iowa.

Like virtually every other conservative candidate, Romney has had it — had it! — with government expenditures like public broadcasting, and he wants to save taxpayers money by cutting federal funding to programs like PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts.

There are many good arguments – aesthetic to social to economic – for using public money to fund the arts. There are also arguments – philosophical and practical – for not using public money this way.

Sharps and Flats: Tenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition: Jon Nakamatsu, gold metalist

Mon, 10 Nov 1997 20:00:00 +0000

Writing about last summer's Van Cliburn Competition, Time dubbed it the "Gong Show" of classical music. So much for the world's top international piano contest, the once-every-four-years gathering of young virtuosos sometimes referred to as the Olympics of classical music.

Such scorn is probably an accurate reflection of the esteem piano contests are held in these days. The rap against competitions is that they produce bland, offend-no-one performers who have leeched out the personality from their playing. In the past, big techniques have won out over style, and individualized artistry has seldom been rewarded.

So imagine the shock in classical music circles last summer when the last contestant left onstage was a young American who had never been to music school, had studied with only one teacher in his life, was a German major in college and made his living as a schoolteacher.

Really. There are supposed to be rules.

Hans Pfitzner's “Palestrina”

Wed, 30 Jul 1997 19:00:00 +0000

Hans Pfitzner's music can usually be found on the programs of summer chamber music festivals, ones that have been around a good long while and are on the hunt for something fresh.
Pfitzner is an ideal relief pitcher -- his music is sweeping and tuneful and
sounds like something you might have heard before but can't really place. It is
skillfully, professionally crafted, with strong hints of German Romanticism that wash through the ear on familiar pathways.

If Pfitzner never became a major composer, it's because so much of his music
sounds derivative and not terribly distinguishable from any number of faceless
German Romantic efforts that followed the main currents of Wagner, Mahler and
others. Not only was he derivative, but Pfitzner was still gnawing away on
this well-chewed bone in the 1930s and '40s, decades after the music world had
moved on to other adventures.

But at this year's Lincoln Center Festival, which concluded last weekend, Pfitzner was the main attraction. This 2-year-old festival not only offered a generous exploration of the
composer's chamber music, it imported London's Royal Opera Company for three
performances of his masterpiece, the five-hour-long opera
"Palestrina." Although the opera has had passionate fans in Germany, it has never been performed in the United States before now, and as such has been the subject of considerable hype.

Byron Janis Plays Chopin

Thu, 03 Jul 1997 19:00:00 +0000

in a time when many lament the passing of a great era of pianists, along comes Byron Janis to remind us of them. Janis is one of yesterday's pianists. He had a brilliant career beginning in the 1950s, and the recordings he made for Mercury in that period are legendary, especially a dynamic performance of Rachmaninoff's First Piano Concerto with Fritz Reiner. In the mid-'70s, he developed arthritis in his hands, and rather than stop performing, struggled on for a decade before increasingly vicious reviews and creeping immobility convinced him to stop.

In retirement Janis served a brief stint as director of the Waterloo Festival and, improbably, wrote a musical theater version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," that played briefly on Broadway. In the summer of 1995, Janis discovered drugs that eased his arthritis, allowing him to go into the studio and make this disc of Chopin mazurkas, nocturnes and waltzes, his first recording in 34 years. The disc confirms Janis' former glory.

Michael Tilson Thomas

Wed, 02 Jul 1997 15:54:00 +0000

There is no such thing as a truly spontaneous legend. Leonard Bernstein might have had a spectacularly dramatic start, but the Bernstein promotion machine was (and still is) the Maserati of the music world.

But Michael Tilson Thomas, aka "MTT," is pushing hard in the passing lane. The marketing of MTT as a brand name is to classical music what Madonna is to musicals about wives of South American dictators -- the star is understood to be at least as important as the project. A photo of a windswept San Francisco Symphony conductor dominates the cover of his Copland album, images of a matinee-idol MTT adorn his Mahler and Prokofiev discs, and he dons shades and holds a parrot in front of some potted plants for an album of Villa-Lobos. Press releases exhort about "one of the most exciting and innovative American conductor/orchestra partnerships in years." And at the MTT Web page you can join something called "Club MTT." At every opportunity there are attempts to link MTT with the musical legacies of such American greats as Bernstein and Copland. The promotional baggage that accompanies the release of a new MTT recording is as slick as anything in the classical music world.

SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Tue, 18 Mar 1997 20:00:00 +0000

classical music has a new star. "Shine," the Australian movie about pianist David Helfgott's triumph over abuse and mental illness, has been nominated for an armful of Academy Awards. Helfgott's recording of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto has surged to the top of the classical charts and cracked the pop charts in Britain. Tickets for his hastily arranged American tour, which began two weeks ago in Boston, sold out in hours. Helfgott is the biggest thing to hit classical music since the Three Tenors.

You'd think music critics would be happy. These are, after all, the same critics who have been complaining that their art form is dying with the public. But they are about as excited as they were over the spectacle of Domingo, Pavarotti and Carreras cavorting in fan-filled baseball stadiums.

One critic called Helfgott-mania a "new low" and "a significant new step in the dumbing of America." Another declined even to see the film, declaring that any movie making an icon out of something so unworthy as a Rachmaninoff concerto is not worth his time. Most reviews of Helfgott's recording have been dismissive, if not scornful, and there has been speculation about whether the mentally ill celebrity is being exploited by those eager to cash in on the success of "Shine."