New Year
I wasn't going to write anything here at all today, because the continuously unfolding tragedy in Southeast Asia (more than 150,000 dead) makes everything I do seem irrelevant.
But I witnessed some mild, irrelevant, continuously unfolding misery tonight and I've decided to talk about it anyway.
It happened to this guy:
He wasn't even around to defend himself.
Things started out fine. It is a mild evening here in NYC, and the huge crowd in this beautiful place was content and calm:
That's St. Bartholomew Church, at 51st and Park. Fine place. But a disaster happened here tonight.
Very kind and very skilled musicians played all six Brandenburg concerti, led by a virtuouso harpsichordist named Anthony Newman. Newman's personal web site says he's the “High Priest of Bach.”
He may be the High Priest, but from the audience's perspective he was a maniacal, driving, clanging half a measure ahead of the group the entire time. Look, I'm sure this was no one's fault, and I'm sure the people up in front of all of us thought they were playing together. And they probably were at some point long ago, before the church's sound system took over. I think what happened is that the harpsichord was separately miked (that's the kind of treatment High Priests get) but no one accounted for the fact that everyone else's sound would take a looong time to get to us through the hugeness of the church. People actually started to walk out, like it was the Rite of Spring or something.
Not only was High Priest perceived to be (by us, the audience, and don't we matter?) way ahead of everyone else, but the mike was also powerfully responsive to one particular note the harpsichord played. So there was a big resonant WHOMP every time this note showed up — any old time, in some big-deal flurry of passage work, or at the end of a run, you name it — WHOMP.
Between movements, the High Priest said some things that no one could hear. The people around me waved their arms and said “WE CAN'T HEAR YOU.” And then he would talk louder for a few moments before completely fading out again. After the last inaudible announcement, the woman next to me (a continuous candy-unwrapping type) said, exasperatedly, “What-EVUH!”
Six complete, entire, whole concerti, six of everyone's all-time favorite pieces, and almost every moment was anguish, mud, WHOMP, and despair. That maniac at the keyboard was off, anticipating everything, and nothing fit. It was like a frighteningly crowded intersection with six VW Bugs trying to fit into one lane, jockeying and buzzing and WHOMPing. Every once in a while the sky would clear when the harpsichord shut up for a while, and there were moments of real beauty — we all felt that. In the slow movements there was enough time for unanimity to happen now and again.
But otherwise — a continuously unfolding, minor, irrelevant disaster, right there on Park Avenue. Someone get St. Bart's a sound guy.
Happy new year to you, too.