NY Phil, Carnegie Lincoln Center

From Adante.com

Band on the Run By Justin Davidson

Merger mania has come to the music world and with it, a seismic change in the cultural topography of New York City. As the 2002–2003 season edged to a close, the announcement arrived that the New York Philharmonic would not only move back to Carnegie Hall, ending its 40-year-exile in the desert of Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, but also that the two institutions would fuse. The result may be a forward-looking cultural juggernaut at Carnegie and a depleted Lincoln Center — or it may be a cautious and hamstrung Carnegie Philharmonic and a reinvigorated, more purposeful Lincoln Center. The tea leaves are murky still, but the implications are immense. This change is, in any case, more than a reshuffling of boards and a change of address.

Like all mergers, this one arises out of mixture of expediency, economics, shared hopes and common history. The story begins nearly 50 years ago, when the New York Philharmonic was in the throes of divorce from a dilapidated and unfriendly Carnegie Hall and John D. Rockefeller III dreamed up the idea of creating a campus for the arts on the equally bedraggled West Side of Manhattan.

Erecting a sleek new arts enclave and inserting it into the teeming slum where Leonard Bernstein set his Story would solve a barrage of problems at once. It would provide a home for the orchestra; it would allow the Metropolitan Opera, which was outgrowing its 35th Street home, to modernize and expand; it would gather the city's major performing arts institutions in one monumental space, appropriate to the cultural capital of a growing American empire. (It would also eliminate an entire neighborhood's social problems by simply eliminating the neighborhood, never mind that the problems would simply crop up somewhere else.)

A decade and a thousand compromises later, Lincoln Center was finally built, and in 1962, Leonard Bernstein led his flock into the glittering, ultra-modern precincts of what was then called Philharmonic Hall (which had been recently hard-wired ... for black-and-white television). After less than 40 years, the complex was already obsolete and falling apart — travertine stairs had cracked, buckets were collecting leaks, dressing rooms were cramped, lobbies were jammed and drafty and the air conditioning sounded like a snoring dragon. The center's junta of managers began the process of assessing its physical needs and came up with a grand, billion-dollar plan. (This was back in the flush late 1990s, when a billion didn't seem like quite as big a number as it does now.)

Lincoln Center is not so much an organization as a federation of a dozen more or less independent entities, each with its own culture and priorities. The fighting among the different groups and within the byzantine bureaucracy began almost as soon as the planning did, and was gleefully reported in the press. Tempers rose as the economy sagged. The Met's pugilistic general manager, Joseph Volpe, got the credit for quashing a proposal to build a new on-campus facility for New York City Opera, which then promptly announced that it would abandon Lincoln Center as soon as it could.

It now looks as though the conflicts set in motion by the redevelopment process might be tearing the place apart. Jazz at Lincoln Center, the youngest constituent organization, stood mildly apart from the fracas and went ahead with plans for a new auditorium a few blocks away (in the bosom of another troubled culture conglomerate, AOL-Time Warner). That makes it Jazz Not-Quite-at Lincoln Center, but at least it will be nearby. City Opera, on the other hand, has been wooing the planners involved in the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in the hopes of getting a new house there, four miles away. The company's flight would potentially leave the New York State Theater, on the south side of the Lincoln Center plaza, vacant for much of the year. With the departure of the Philharmonic — tentatively planned for in 2006 — Avery Fisher Hall, across the plaza from the State Theater, could also be begging for tenants. The Metropolitan Opera could find itself a beacon of glamour flanked by two empty houses.

So why is the New York Philharmonic walking away? Because it has spent the last 40 years in a hall widely — but certainly not unanimously — held to be an acoustical failure, one that has undergone more than its share of tweaks and massive renovations. The prospect of fixing up Avery Fisher Hall again, launching yet another capital campaign to fund yet another overhaul with uncertain results, seemed daunting and horribly expensive. What if — after getting and spending enough hundreds of millions of dollars to do the job, after vacating Avery Fisher and scrounging dates at other places for the years of construction, trying to patch together residencies, extended tours and temporary locations — after all that, the new auditorium still appalled?

The Philharmonic was also engaged in a certain amount of arm-wrestling with other Lincoln Center executives over the shape and characteristics of the planned hall. There were those who would have preferred to knock down the white travertine cage completely and start again, and others who hoped it might be designated as an untouchable landmark. Some wanted the new hall to make an architectural statement; others who wanted the improvements invisible. A few floated the idea of developing the new hall into an 18-hour-a-day musical hang-out space, complete with audiovisual installations, a research center, cafes and lounge chairs. Traditionalists believed that the best-appointed corners of the building should be set aside for donors. How simple, then, for the Philharmonic just to escape to one of the world's great halls, which has the advantage of already existing and therefore offering none of those options.

If, for the New York Philharmonic, the merger represents both a grand return to its historic home and a refuge from financial and institutional turbulence, the advantages for Carnegie Hall are rather more difficult to parse. It is welcoming back a far different orchestra, one that spends 34 weeks in New York City, performing virtually every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Tuesday nights — a total of about 130 concerts in its home hall each year. Carnegie currently uses its largest venue, Isaac Stern Auditorium, for about 100 concerts a year, spaced out over a season that runs from early October to mid-December and January to late May. So the hall's executive director, Robert Harth, is left with a few unappealing options, or some combination of them: fit all visiting orchestra, chamber groups and recitalists early in the week or on Sunday afternoon; make the hall far less available to outside renters such as pop groups, local choirs, wind bands and benefit events; extend the season into the summer and early fall; keep presenting the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics but send less exalted ensembles, such as the Minnesota Orchestra, elsewhere — to Lincoln Center, for instance.

But the real issue has less to do with scheduling than with vision. The current Carnegie Hall is a daily vindication of preservationists, without whom the 1892 building would have been razed in the late 1950s and replaced with a scarlet office tower. Rescued, preserved and multiply restored, Carnegie Hall became a pillar of prestige and a nexus of innovation. One executive director, the late Judith Arron, came up with the idea of turning over large chunks of programming real estate to individual artists to curate as they saw fit; the resulting 'Perspectives' series have become a trademark of the hall's relationship with thinking musicians. Arron also decided to reclaim the basement-level recital hall that was serving temporary duty as a movie theater. Her ideas were good enough to survive her death in 1998: two subsequent administrations have expanded on them, and the September 2003 opening of the 640-seat Zankel Hall, with a two-week festival curated by John Adams, in many ways represents the institution she imagined Carnegie Hall could be.

It remains to be seen whether the Carnegie-Philharmonic behemoth, with its multiple agendas and new corporate structure, will have the same respect for individual vision — that of both administrators and artists. Ideally, softer institutional boundaries could make festivals and residencies richer — a pianist might appear with the orchestra one night, give a recital the next and play chamber music with friends on the third day, all under the same roof. But while the executives at Carnegie Hall have been bravely retooling a 19th-century building for the 21st century, the vision-averse New York Philharmonic has generally seemed intent on sticking to what it learned in the 20th: formulaic programs, a grudging approach to new music and an institutional credo of caution. Perhaps the orchestra will learn something from its new housemate.

Meanwhile, Lincoln Center has a problem and an opportunity. The center's president, Reynold Levy, insists that Avery Fisher Hall will be rebuilt with or without the New York Philharmonic, but with the orchestra's departure a big fund-raising challenge becomes a Herculean labor. There's also the question of those 130 evenings to fill.

Lincoln Center has two functions: as landlord and unifying entity for a fractious community of tenants, and as a presenting organization. Lincoln Center, Inc. already puts on a lot of shows, including the Mostly Mozart Festival and the Great Performers series. Levy could do worse than turn over the vacant Avery Fisher Hall — renovated, rebuilt or as-is — to Jane Moss, the executive in charge of programming for Lincoln Center's presentations. An intrepid administrator whose ideas always outnumber the available dates, Moss could now be in a position to herd the sprawling, unwieldy institution she works for in a direction she has always wanted

I'm reminded of Eugene Ormandy's reply when he was asked how the sound at Northrop Auditorium (then home to the Minneapolis Symphony, of which he had been music director) could be improved. He is said to have replied, 'That I can tell you in one word: dynamite!'

something cultural perhaps? East coast/ west coast... Hillary Clinton / Arnold Schwarzenegger

The answer is simple. Classical music is not a significant part of the west coast culture. People in LA are incapable of being sentimental because they embrace everything new regardless of much sense it makes. In fact, most of the people have no roots there. It's hard to be sentimental for anything you haven't grown up with or known for long. While a great deal of fine music has been made in California, it has never had any musical form to call it's own. Every bit of it has been imported from somewhere else. Jazz: southeast, midwest, northeast. Blues: Southeast and midwest. Rock: Northeast and midwest. Country: South. Latino styles: latin american nations. All forms of classical music: Western Europe and the northeast. Also the californians I have known personally, except for latino's of recent foreign extraction, are the most apathetic people I have met.

PLONK geographical bigot.

I beg to differ. I have been there twice for both the Philharmonic and the Opera (by the way, don't they use amplification for the Opera ? It sounded like they do), and acoustics is defitively very poor. Maybe not as bad as in San Diego, but almost. I am rather curious to hear how the new hall is going to sound.

Indeed the upper balcony has the best acoustics of the hall (and in- cidently these are the chepaest seats), but I would hardly call it excellent. It's merely acceptable. The rest of the hall is dreadful.

The OCPAC in Orange County is so much better that I still wonder why they are building a new one next to it.

letters to be typed in

You'd think they have enough halls there already!

By the way, are you at all fond of Berlioz' 'L'enfance du Christ'?

For one thing, the Disney hall was news several years ago, but is now well-known. The situation here is probably more similar to other orchestras moving into newly-built halls (Philadelphia, most recently, but also Seattle, Dallas, and many others). Also, while local audiences are no doubt familiar with the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the rest of the country probably only knows of its existence from years of Acadamy Awards telecasts. Avery Fisher Hall, on the other hand, has long been well-known from 'Live From Lincoln Center' etc. For another thing, the DCP was more of a multi-purpose auditorium than a purpose-built symphony hall., and it has been common for orchestras to move from such facilities to their own symphony halls over the years, but not so common for orchestras to move from concert halls that were built specifically for them and intended solely for live, unamplified musical performance (like AFH)

Yes, at first I wondered that myself. It seems the new hall will be a more conventional narrow 'shoebox' hall without a multipurpose stagehouse, so it could have acoustics that are even more intimate and exciting for classical music than the larger existing Segerstrom Hall

Segerstrom Hall in OCPAC is a multi-purpose hall, and though it's leagues ahead of Chandler Pavillion acoustically, isn't really optimized for classical music concerts. As a dance venue, however, it's superb with its attached rehearsal studios, a stage that's only smaller than the Bolshoi's, and excellent sightlines all around.

Well, if you believe whatever everybody is saying, we will have *two* world- class halls in the region (Disney and the new one in Costa Mesa). Not bad if you consider that there is only one 1st tier orchestra. And since it appears that the good old days of big tours for major orchestras are behind us (al- though we will have Amsterdam next year), it makes indeed one wonder.

Only the the first part of it ('la fuite en Egypte' although there are too many modulations for my taste.