Carnegie plus one

The Spectator, World Edition, March 2022

Carnegie plus one

“A cable channel… but for classical music! It could be called ‘The Carnegie Hall Channel.’”

I was on a beam reach to Eatons Neck about a quarter-century ago when a young man named Lawrence Perelman made this blustery pronouncement. We were Bill Buckley’s guests for an overnight sail across Long Island Sound. My first thought was: good luck with that. My second thought was no one wants to watch classical music on television. PBS’s Great Performances? More like lesser performances. With pixels the size of Cheez-Its and tin-can soundtracks, the experience was nothing like the real thing.

But Perelman, an impresario who became an advisor to classical artists and institutions, as well as a friend, kept waving his baton long after we returned to Stamford. Cable became apps and Apple TV. After 130 years, Carnegie Hall, Andrew Carnegie’s pitch-perfect concert house on Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, decided it could use a virtual stage.

Carnegie Hall+, announced in early January, is touted as the “first premium subscription on-demand channel of its kind established by an American performing arts institution.” Co-founded by Carnegie Hall’s Clive Gillinson, it’s a subscription service from Apple TV.

“This is my life’s work,” Perelman called me up to say. “I came to Clive in 2007 and found a kindred spirit. We never stopped talking about it. And for this to happen now is amazing.”

“Would I be getting a free subscription?” I inquired. I would not. But there’s a free one-week trial for the $7.99-a-month service. I signed up.

“The reality of the pandemic led to something like this,” Perelman explained. “We are spending more time with screens than ever before. So we need better virtual experiences. Sports have been doing it forever. For the arts it’s even more important. Now they have finally caught up. This is the world’s stage at home.”

The channel comes out of a partnership between Carnegie and Unitel, a production company founded in Munich some fifty years ago by Leo Kirch and Herbert von Karajan. To make this work, Perelman had to bring Carnegie Hall and Unitel together — since Carnegie Hall has few videos of its own. That may change, but American venues in general have been slow to create high-definition classical recordings. “Live in HD,” the Metropolitan Opera’s satellite broadcasts, only began in 2006, with an app following in 2012. Meanwhile, in Europe, Unitel had been recording performances in thirty-five-millimeter film since its inception. These archival recordings, now transferred to digital HD, are some of the surprise highlights on Carnegie Hall+.

Take Rossini’s William Tell Overture, with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by von Karajan in 1974. Or Leonard Bernstein conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, with the soprano Sheila Armstrong and mezzo-soprano Janet Baker, in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” in 1972. These stunning recordings are true resurrections — goose-bump inducing — as Bernstein and von Karajan take up the baton in films that are as good as anything recorded today.

The lineup has been selected by Carnegie’s artistic staff. There’s Arthur Rubinstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, a young André Previn and an even younger Maurizio Pollini — all in remarkable fidelity. A von Karajan concert performance from 1966 of Verdi’s Requiem at La Scala, featuring Leontyne Price and a baby-faced Luciano Pavarotti, is also worth the price of admission.

Many of the newer productions here come out of Berlin, Vienna and the Salzburg Festival, which Perelman advises and where Unitel has developed a deep bench of recordings, not only of concerts but also of opera productions and ballet.

Certainly there are some stinkers in the mix. For the kids there’s a steampunk version of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. There’s also Mozart’s Magic Flute as performed in tracksuits on what looks like a fire-engulfed Skull Island — the lake stage of the Bregenz Festival. The Germanic peoples have never been known for their lighthearted children’s programming.

But back to Mahler, and Bernstein, who until now seemed confined to a Trinitron purgatory of Betamax television recordings. “Was du geschlagen/ zu Gott wird es dich tragen!” the Edinburgh Festival Chorus sings out from Ely Cathedral in Mahler’s fifth and final movement. You can just about feel the sweat flying off Bernstein’s enraptured face. And there, performing in the cello section, facing Bernstein, is none other than a young Clive Gillinson answering his call. “What you have beaten, to God it will raise you.” Amen.

Tale of Two Cities

THE SPECTATOR USA

Tale of Two Cities

A split-screen vision of Seventies childhood returns

For people who, like me, were born in the troubled times of the Seventies, Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were an educational crossroads. As we gazed into the cathode-ray tube for direction, each program led to a very different future. Sesame Street, now in its 50th season, remains unavoidable and familiar. Yet we’re captivated by the return of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the unpolished creation of Fred Rogers that aired from 1968 to 2001.

Last year, the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? became a surprise hit. This month sees the opening of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a movie starring Tom Hanks as Rogers. Hanks has inherited Jimmy Stewart’s job as the ambassador of American nostalgia: who better for a feel-good triumph of simple truths over cynical sophistication? But the real Rogers was anything but simple. His lessons remain surprisingly tough — and might even have gotten tougher with time.

Back then, New York’s Channel Thirteen aired the two programs back to back as a tale of two cities. Sesame Street was a block party for the Great Society. ‘Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?’ went the infectious chorus. How could we avoid it? The progressive phantasmagoria of Sesame Street emerged from Carnegie and Ford Foundation grants. The most workshopped program in television history was designed as a childhood primer for Head Start, the youth corps of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The best and the brightest minds in children’s entertainment deployed the cartoon characters and frenetic pace of commercial television for political ends.

While Sixties idealism was failing the American city, Jim Henson’s Muppets sold us the upside of urban decay: Big Bird nesting in the alley, Mr Snuffleupagus hiding in the garage, the mentally unstable Oscar the Grouch living in the trash can. Defeated by reality, Sesame Street became a lucrative global brand in a culture of diminishing expectations. In 1981, I appeared in two episodes as one of its neighborhood kids. My transition from the mean streets of the Upper West Side to the Sesame Street set in Astoria, Queens seemed perfectly natural. I was surprised only when I looked up and found that this ‘street’, unlike the Great Society’s budgets, had a ceiling.

Today, we all live on Sesame Street: Sesame Street progressivism is the default ideology of an achingly liberal society. The scripts may not be the best, but the visuals are still the brightest — especially now that HBO has gentrified the street. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is the world we have lost: grandparents, honest jobs and Sunday school teachers. Sesame Street opens with a Muppet parade,

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with a flyover shot of a model town. Sesame Street was invented by a ‘government of all the talents’, but Fred Rogers wrote the scripts and songs and operated all the puppets himself. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Rogers turned his Pittsburgh ‘neighborhood’ into his church in disguise, and ‘love thy neighbor’ and the doctrine of good works into encoded evangelism.

The opening sequence remains iconic. Walking from work to the modest home where we are waiting to meet him, Rogers opens his front door and proclaims, ‘It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.’ As he implores, ‘Won’t you be my neighbor?’ he changes into his sneakers, zips up his sweater and feeds his fish. Then Mr McFeely the delivery man brings the package that starts the episode’s discussion — a three-legged stool to assemble, or a video of a visit to a factory. A toy trolley arrives to take us to the ‘Neighborhood of Make-Believe’, its monarch King Friday XIII a ‘benevolent despot’ who ruled through chivalry and honor. When it returns, Rogers interprets what we saw. ‘It’s such a good feeling/ To know you’re alive’, he sings as he changes back into his work clothes and waves goodbye.

Eddie Murphy and Jim Carrey mocked Rogers’s earnest persona and square routine, but routine itself captivates in irregular times. Rogers takes us to the Pittsburgh Athletic Association and shows us how he swims a mile a day: ‘I made a promise to myself. And I keep my promises.’ His interactions with Officer Clemmons, who is black, and Jeff Erlanger, who is handicapped, became television landmarks for their common decency. His factory visits demonstrated the dignity of hard work; one of them made me decide to become a crayon maker. When deadlines loom, his expectations still rattle me: ‘You’ve got to do it/ Every little bit, you’ve got to do it, do it, do it, do it.’

Rogers’s ordinariness made him extraordinary, even compared to the ancien régime of Friday XIII. Rogers spoke up for manners over mayhem, diligence over distraction. He was ‘Mister’ to us, never ‘Fred’.

Over on Sesame Street, there was always some new sensation, like Stevie Wonder performing ‘Superstition’ while children gyrated on the fire escape. Elevating the mundane to the magisterial, Rogers offered no such illusions. His ideas have, like his local factories, been abandoned by contemporary America. His gospel of respect for neighbor and self was a tough love that now seems tougher than ever.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is released on 22 November.

Who will take the noise out of sport?

SPECTATOR USA, September 7, 2018

Who will take the noise out of sport?

I can’t hear myself watch

The US Open Tennis Championships concludes this week. ‘Let’s make some noise!’ Or better yet, let’s not.

Sport is losing its appeal to me: I can’t take the noise. Endless chatter obscures what we see on the courts and fields of play. A set of earplugs should not be required equipment of the game.

Like much else, the first mention of earplugs appears in The Odyssey. As Odysseus is lashed to the mast, his crew packs their own ears with beeswax to save them from the Siren’s Song. Whenever I attend an amplified event, I’m reminded that Homer was on to something about epic wax. As we do battle against the sirens of the street and the Siren Song of the culture, earplugs and other noise-cancelling devices have become a booming industry, worth half a billion dollars a year.

Good sound is essential to great sports. What is skiing without the schuss of the snow, or sailing without the snap of the wind? The martial crunch of football is underscored by the military precision of the halftime show. At its best, baseball is an organ recital — or, in humbler settings, nature’s symphony of summer — punctuated by the crack of a bat.

Contemporary sport gets lost in the noise. Good games are ruined by bad sounds. The 2010 World Cup was drowned out by the mind-numbing buzz of tens of thousands of vuvuzelas. These horns, emitting a deafening 113 decibels at a distance of six feet, were originally used to send signals between towns. Likewise the atonal timpani of indoor basketball, that acid jazz of squeaky sneakers, pealing whistles and pneumatic rubber, is increasingly lost amid the roars of the court and the brays of the announcers. Broadcasters now rely on spy-like microphones and electronic filters to isolate the true sounds of the game, but those in the stadium, and the players in particular, enjoy no such relief.

Tennis has always understood the importance of quiet play. That’s one reason for its continued appeal. Two years ago, the United States Tennis Association heard an earful when this code of silence was broken. The problem was the acoustics of the US Open’s reengineered centre court. When the Arthur Ashe Stadium opened in 1997 at the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens, it became the largest-capacity tennis stadium in the world.

Unfortunately, it was built on the swampy ground of a former salt-water marsh, the dump site that was the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Valley of Ashes’. The ground did not lend itself to building a fully enclosed stadium. The new stadium had no roof, and the storms of late summer had a nasty habit of disrupting play. In 2016, the USTA covered its centre court with a $150 million retractable canopy made of lightweight, translucent material. The new roof kept out the rain, but it also kept in the noise.

‘Fans inside Arthur Ashe Stadium no longer need umbrellas,’ read a report in the New York Times. ‘They might, however, need earplugs.’ The new roof was projecting the noise of spectators seated in the upper decks back onto the court. The pitter-patter of rain bouncing the roof’s diaphanous shell was also sending down cascading waves of sound, drowning out important sonic information in the game’s play — the timing of a bounce, the nature of the thwack of an opponent’s racket against the ball, the ever-informative grunts of the players.

The noise flummoxed the players, as well as the US Tennis Center, which had to bring in acousticians to study the problem. The situation also raised the alarm over the role of sound both for professional players and those of us who hope to enjoy the game. ‘We use our ears when we play,’ said the player Andy Murray. ‘If we played with our ears covered or with headphones on, it would be a big advantage if your opponent wasn’t wearing them.’

This year’s US Open is having a better encore performance. The culprit was indeed noisy fans — the fans inside the stadium’s air conditioning system. Along with some buzzing cellular transmitters, this humming rooftop equipment, bouncing off the new roof, was found to be the underlying cause of much of the additional courtside sound. Still, the US Open sounds a lot louder than it once did, even on TV.

Tennis plays out in a Cartesian space set apart from the chaos of life. Wimbledon is a classical concert performed in a stadium of near total silence; a word midpoint may get you ejected from the stands. Played among some 20,000 Americans, not to mention opinionated New Yorkers just a stone’s throw from LaGuardia Airport, the US Open has never quite sounded like Wimbledon’s contrapuntal fugue, but here the crowd’s abated potential can make the points all the more thrilling. ‘There’s that tension that everybody feels,’ says Venus Williams. ‘The more important the moment, that silence says it all.’

Williams has it right. Sport is a concert, and great sport needs its silence too. The noise-making of today’s games only adds to the din of modern life. But who can still the sounds of mass entertainment? New balls, please.