New York

But now it’s time for me to summon all the crows in New York City, and eat them, one by one. Because I was wrong about Ms. Norman, wrong about the collaboration, and wronger still about Lincoln Center’s smarts in bringing this odd African-American pair together in a series called "New Visions," which is meant to wake classical music up, by bouncing it against the more sharply contemporary fervor of other kinds of art.
And something like that really did happen here, though it was Ms. Norman, a classical musician, who got stretched, rather than classical music itself. For a start, she did move. In fact, she and Mr. Jones (old friends, it turns out, who’ve wanted to do something like this for quite a while) moved together in the cool abstract space of the set they’d had designed. That was brave of her. When Mr. Jones makes any gesture -- when he takes a step, stretches out his arm or turns his head -- he inhabits it, making it speak. Next to him, Ms. Norman looked hesitant. But then most of us would, and Ms. Norman -- blessedly unselfconscious -- was worth watching simply for her apparent delight at the chance to try something new.
The evening was a disjointed anthology, one thing after another, including song, dance, and also Frank O’Hara’s poetry, which Mr. Jones and Ms. Norman spoke as a charmingly bewildering dialogue. What this all was supposed to add up to is beyond me, and maybe beside the point, since every moment was at least interesting. Ms. Norman’s classical singing -- starting with a strained, and out-of-tune performance of Berlioz’s "Spectre de Ia Rose" (from his cycle of songs with orchestra, ‘Les Nuits d’été") -- wasn’t pleasant But since her classical performance hasn’t been reliable for a while now, one key question was what other kind of singing she could do. She answered that triumphantly with "Les mots d’amour" (one of Edith Piaf’s trademark cabaret songs); with some regal gospel howls, which were as far from classical music as anyone can get; and finally with two songs by Duke Ellington. In one of them, "Don’t Get Around Much Anymore," she strolled elegantly in formal dress with Mr. Jones, sounding like the queen of Tin Pan Alley pop. Who knew she could do that?

Which left just one thread dangling. Could any of Ms. Norman’s impressive new energy revitalize her classical work? Since her last selection, Schubert’s "Gretchen am Spinnrade," was classical, I’d hoped it would provide an answer, but due to a staging miscalculation, it didn’t. Ms. Norman sang it at the back of the stage, behind a scrim, moving slowly from right to left as if she’d been possessed by Robert Wilson (whose trademark as a theatrical creator is long, slow movement). Meanwhile her piano accompaniment thundered from an orchestra pit. I could barely hear her, and so, for my purposes, at least, the evening ended inconclusively.
The rest of the Lincoln Center "New Visions" experiment spread throughout the past season seemed equally inconclusive (even if Mr. Jones and Ms. Norman brought it to a happy close). One earlier installment, Benjamin Bagby’s recitation of "Beowuif" in the original Old English, was fun -- "Hrrrufff!" (or something like that) Mr. Bagby roared, and we were his for as long as the novelty lasted -- but had nothing to do with classical music.
"Moondrunk," which opened the series, featured Schoenberg’s "Pierrot Lunaire," a clutch of delicate and frenzied half-moaned songs with chamber-ensemble accompaniment, and suffered because the music was paired with uncentered choreography by John Kelly. Mr. Kelly, says piamst Sarah Rothenberg (who conceived the evening and co-produced it with her Da Camera group in Houston) was the perfect partner, because he’d done a dance-theater piece based on the expressionist art of Egon Schiele, whose dark erotic pictures. come out of much the same artistic world as "Pierrot." The problem, though, was that Mr. Kelly didn’t seem to notice Schoenberg’s precision. "Pierrot Lunaire" has countless centers, a new one every second or so, and Mr. Kelly’s dances, unfoldmg with casual stylized abandon, distracted me from listening.
Weakest of all was "Kindertotenlieder," a play built around Mahier’s song cycle about the death of children. Here was an evening inept in nearly every way, despite the fame of its Canadian director, Robert Lepage. We’re shown a woman who lost a child, and is rehearsing Mahler’s songs. The dialogue was scanty mundane, but even if it hadn’t been, the concept wouldn’t work unless the musical performance was devastating. And in the hands (or throat) of Rebecca Blankenship it was anything but that; nor could she act her spoken lines.

Still, I’m hopeful. These productions were experiments. They’re allowed to fail. But they should at least happen. One part of the series -- Bach cantatas staged and sung by the incendiary team of director Peter Sellars and mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt -- had to be cancelled, and surely would have raised the level of the whole.
And the concept itself is welcome. "What’s important is that this is totally new territory," says Jane Moss, vice president for programming at Lincoln Center, who has produced theater at Center Stage in Baltimore, and at Playwrights Horizons in New York. "You need to get it out there and look at it, and then you can see how to proceed." There are some tricky elements, obviously -- casting has to be exactly right, and it’s hard to get both theater and dance people, whose schedules are relatively simple, on the same program as classical musicians, who tend to be booked years in advance.
But one success of "New Visions," Ms. Moss says, was that "you did get audiences that don’t usually listen to classical music." I saw that myself. Critics at the "Moondrunk" opening came from a cross-section of the arts, and the crowd at "How! Do! We! Do!" helped the show earn its exclamation points. It was an excited meld of black people and white, spilling into the street, needing only searchlights to make the evening seem like a Hollywood premiere.
Classical music, which so rarely makes any impact outside its own constricted world, needs that kind of excitement -- based, let me stress, on artistic interest, not mere celebrity. And it was because of artistry that "How! Do! We! Do!" succeeded -- it woke up a classical music superstar, taking her somewhere she’d never been.
"Moondrunk," by comparison, would only have been mildly interesting even if it worked, because all it could have done (from a classical musk perspective, anyway) was teach us things about Schoenberg. For that, we could read a book. To interest people outside the classical music world -- and to take hardened insiders somewhere really new -- we need events that feel different, events that transform the musicians themselves.

[One thing I didn't know when I wrote this -- that Jessye Norman worked with Robert Wilson, and feels that she learned a lot about movement from him.]

Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1999