by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was another episode in the PBS “Fall
Arts Festival,” a Great Performances
show of pianist Lang Lang (whose name is posted in big letters at the back of
the stage which I presume could be lit up at a climactic point in the
performance, though that wasn’t done last night) in a concert from May 3, 2016
called New York Rhapsody. I was
attracted to this program by the promos for it, which showed Lang Lang playing
George Gershwin’s famous “Rhapsody in Blue.” On the 2015 “Capitol Fourth”
concert on the Washington National Mall Lang Lang had been featured playing
what I called at the time “a wretchedly truncated version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody
in Blue that seemed to have been chopped up
in a meat grinder. It’s true, as Leonard Bernstein once said, that Rhapsody
in Blue is so sloppily structured a
composition that you can take out just about any piece of it and not affect it
much except to make it shorter, but the edits were infuriating — especially
since the performance was compelling enough (with [conductor Jack] Everly
playing the original jazz-band orchestration instead of the later symphonic
one, but at the same time playing it more slowly and lyrically than Paul Whiteman
did) I’d have wanted to hear it complete.” So I had my hopes up that this concert would present Lang Lang with a top-flight
orchestra doing a complete Rhapsody in Blue — only my hopes were dashed early on; though longer
than the 2015 Capitol Fourth version (about nine minutes instead of four), it
is still not the complete
Gershwin score.
What made this program even more infuriating was that for the
first time in the history of Great Performances it was presented in pledge-break style, with long
intermissions that took almost as much time as the actual program in which
local announcers declaimed about the incredible need of PBS for money, money,
money, and made the insulting comment to the effect that what we were watching
on the air was merely a loss leader for an incredibly expensive ($170) DVD that
would contain the entire concert — essentially the same marketing strategy as
Trump University, where if you showed up for their “free” seminar on real
estate you’d get a pitch to sign up for a $100 seminar, where you would get a
pitch for a $1,000 seminar, where you’d get a pitch for a $3,500 one. Now that
Donald Trump is going to be President and the entire government in Washington,
D.C. is being run by Republicans — and the GOP in general has not exactly made
it a secret that they’d like to see the federal funding for public broadcasting
ended — we’ll probably be subjected to even more of these insane pledge breaks
as well as out-and-out commercials (which run on PBS between the programs now,
though in PBS Newspeak they’re called “enhanced underwriting opportunities”).
The New York Rhapsody, with a
pick-up orchestra conducted by one Jason Michael Webb (who seems to have got
the job because he’s young, cute and “urban” — i.e., Black), was organized from
the get-go as a “crossover” event, the sort of thing that symphony orchestras
are turning to more and more because they’ve noticed that their audience is
aging and they figure they can stay in business by giving the younger public
what they seem to want — which is celebrities they’ve actually heard of,
whether what they’re doing has much to do with classical music at all. I’m not
against all crossovers — I remember not long ago hearing a download from a BBC
“Proms” concert at which the Pet Shop Boys presented Chrissie Hynde singing
four of their songs and also offered an original cantata, A Man from
the Future, about the Gay British computer
inventor Alan Turing, which at least aspired to some of the same ambitions as genuine classical
music — but this one was a bit too
crossed over for me.
Of the nine selections we got to see on TV (as opposed to
whatever the live audience got and we’d have to buy the $170 DVD to obtain),
only four — the Rhapsody in Blue,
a “New York Medley” performed by Lang against a backdrop of outdoor movie
footage of the city, a version of “Tonight” from the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen
Sondheim score for West Side Story,
and Danny Elfman’s Spider-Man
theme (with Lindsey Stirling delivering some absolutely scorching
electric-violin playing — it didn’t have much to do with classical music but it
was still fun) — were instrumentals. The others were a wide variety of songs,
and the concert’s organizers at least deserve credit for picking an assemblage
of pieces about New York City and including ones with a relatively negative
view of the place (notably Don Henley’s “New York Minute” and especially Lou
Reed’s “Dirty Boulevard”) as well as the upbeat ones that generally crop up in
a tribute like this. After the woefully truncated Gershwin Rhapsody — which Lang Lang played rather well, though he
couldn’t resist adding a few octave doublings and other touches not in the
score, or slowing down for one passage only to speed up for the next — the next
song was Don Henley’s “New York Minute,” performed in a voice that was neither
fish nor fowl — neither Broadway nor rock, but a bastard mix of the two from
someone named Kurt Elling. By chance Charles and I had just been playing
through a couple of compilations he made for Thanksgiving, including Scott
Walker’s song “Thanks for Chicago, Mr. James” (Charles had looked around my
iTunes files for songs with the word “Thanks” in their titles), so I had in the
back of my head the sort of voice Elling would have needed to pull off what he
was trying to do, and from which he fell far short. It made me want to bring
out my copy of Henley’s original just to remind myself what a good song this
really was!
After that came an
interminable pledge break and then Rufus Wainwright doing an original of his
called “Who Are You, New York?,” and doing it well enough except that he was
too much the jumping-bean on stage (for someone who’s so often professed his
admiration for Judy Garland it’s odd, to say the least, that he hasn’t adopted
her stock-still stance on stage) and a richer voice like the 1970’s Scott
Walker could have done more justice to Wainwright’s song than he did himself.
Then came an intriguing medley of Lou Reed’s “Dirty Boulevard” with the song
“Somewhere” from West Side Story,
composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (whose own work
as a composer should have been
represented and wasn’t — Sondheim’s song “The Ladies Who Lunch” had been the
high point of a previous PBS arts show, Alan Cumming Sings Sappy
Songs), with the Reed sung by Suzanne Vega
(quite movingly even though she has too good a voice to be quite comfortable in
a song by Reed, who wrote his stuff for his own monotone) and the
Bernstein/Sondheim by heavy-set Black soul singer Lisa Fischer. I can see why
the producers of this concert did these as a medley — after several stanzas
describing urban degradation Reed ends “Dirty Boulevard” with a peroration from
a boy named Pedro who wants to “fly, fly away from this dirty boulevard,” while
“Somewhere” is the lament of a racially mixed couple torn apart by their
families and gang members who wish that “there’s a place for us/Somewhere a
place for us.” And though the concert took place on May 3, six months before
the Presidential election, the verse in “Dirty Boulevard” about immigration —
“Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor I'll piss on ’em/That’s what the
Statue of Bigotry says/Your poor huddled masses/Let's club ’em to death/And get
it over with and just dump ’em on the boulevard” — seemed all too appropriate
in the age of TrumpAmerica. But the two songs didn’t really fit that well
together musically, even though both were superbly sung and Vega’s “take” on
Reed makes the song seem richer even if also less heartbreaking than the
original.
After that came the Spider-Man theme, and then another interminable pledge break,
and then Lang Lang sitting in front of a series of images of New York out of
doors as he played his medley — which began and ended with the “Theme from New
York, New York” by John Kander and Fred
Ebb, and in between offered Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” Joe
Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” (a great song but one that doesn’t sound especially
“New Yorky”), Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and the Leonard Bernstein
“New York, New York” from the musical On the Town he wrote in 1944 with Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
(This show definitely deserves points for representing artists who were Gay or
Bisexual, including Bernstein, Sondheim, Strayhorn, Reed, and Wainwright.) Then
there was a quirky rendition of “Moon River” from the film Breakfast
at Tiffany’s, which squeezed in yet another
Gay artist at least by reference (the film was based on a story by Truman
Capote) and which was sung by Regina Spektor, who said in an interview that out
of all the versions of this song that have been performed — including the
original hits by Jerry Butler and Andy Williams, both of whom had real voices — her favorite was the one Audrey Hepburn sings in
the movie. This probably explains why she “dumbed down” her voice to sound as
much like Hepburn as she could — anyone who sees Breakfast at
Tiffany’s will wonder why anyone in
Hollywood had the idea that Audrey Hepburn could handle the role of Eliza
Doolittle in My Fair Lady, yet
when she signed for the role she assumed she’d do her own singing and was quite
upset when they pre-recorded two songs with her (“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and
“Show Me”) but then brought in Marni Nixon as her voice double. I’m not
familiar with Spektor as a singer but I’m pretty sure she’s generally better
than she was last night, when she all too faithfully imitated Hepburn’s nasal
tones and flat intonations. The song also included a dobro part by Jerry
Douglas, who I believe is actually a descendant of the Douglas Brothers who
invented this lap-held slide guitar with a metal resonator and named it after
the first syllables of “Douglas” and “Brothers.”
After “Moon River” the show
brought on Black trumpeter Sean Jones for “Tonight,” done as an instrumental —
Jones isn’t that great a trumpet
player, and the arrangement kept him all too close to the melody so it was hard
to tell from the concert whether he could actually improvise — and then came
the finale, a committee-written song identified as “Empire State of Mind” but
really its follow-up, “Empire State of Mind (Part II): Broken Down.” It began
as a song by rapper Jay-Z, written by Angela Hunte and Jane’t Sewell-Ulepic.
Hunte was supposed to sing a vocal part to counterpoint Jay-Z’s raps, but at
the last minute they decided they needed a stronger singer, considered Mary J.
Blige, but finally hired Alicia Keys. Because the song “sampled” another piece
called “Love on a Two-Way Street” by Sylvia Robinson (the “Sylvia” in Mickey
and Sylvia, a 1950’s R&B duo two of whose songs, “Love Is Strange” and
“Dearest,” were covered by Buddy Holly, who also ripped off Mickey’s guitar
lick from “Love Is Strange” for a number of his originals, and later the
producer and label owner for the first true rap record, the Sugarhill Gang’s
“Rapper’s Delight”) and Burt Keyes, their names ended up on the songwriting
credits, as did Alicia Keys, her writing partner Alexander Shuckburgh, and
Shawn Carter. (Songwriting credits are getting as convoluted as screenwriting
credits!) After the song — released as a duet but with Jay-Z getting billing
over Keys — Alicia Keys decided to record her own version “because she wanted
to express her own personal feelings about New York” (according to the
Wikipedia page on the Jay-Z original), and so she created “Empire State of Mind
(Part II): Broken Down,” which has the same set of seven songwriting credits as
Jay-Z’s and was pretty obviously what guest star Audra Day was singing (quite
powerfully) on the Lang Lang New York Rhapsody concert. But Day’s great singing couldn’t conceal
that the song appeared to be pasted together from bits of scrap paper (which,
knowing how rap productions sometimes go, could well be the truth) and didn’t
really seem to go anywhere.
The basic problem with New York Rhapsody was that the music, except for the Rhapsody
in Blue and the Spider-Man theme, didn’t really challenge Lang Lang: through
all too much of the running time he seemed to be an extra in his own show,
handling the piano parts of the arrangements well enough but looking uninvolved
and bored. Though he didn’t put a candelabrum on top of his piano (the only
thing that was there was a tablet
computer with copies of the scores he was playing from so he could access his
music instantaneously and not have to fumble through pieces of paper), dressed
in a normal suit instead of sequins or feathers, and didn’t talk to the
audience between songs (one tradition of classical concerts it was nice to see
preserved here), his whole schtick
here seemed uncomfortably close to Liberace’s, as he tried to dumb down his
musicianship and skill to lower himself to the material he was playing. New
York Rhapsody actually had some good
moments, but for the most part the show was one of those not too digestible
cultural mixes that wasn’t especially good as a showcase for Lang Lang and
didn’t really explore the wealth of music that has been written on, about or
for New Yorkers, either in the classical or pop vein. The main piece of music
I’d have liked to see included is Gershwin’s Rhapsody No. 2 for Orchestra and
Piano — that’s how he billed them — of which he wrote the first version for the
1931 Fox musical Delicious to
accompany a scene of Janet Gaynor, an undocumented immigrant from Scotland,
rambling through the New York streets and avoiding the immigration agent who’s
after her to deport her. In this initial form it was actually called New
York Rhapsody, and having Lang Lang and the
orchestra perform it “live” while the film footage was shown would have been an
interesting addition to this concert!
