A recent rant by clas­si­cal music gos­sip Nor­man Lebrecht makes me won­der just what all his fuss is about. A com­plaint that the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera does not pro­duce the most cut­ting edge work is both absolutely cor­rect and absolutely mean­ing­less. The Met is ded­i­cated to the entire tra­di­tion of opera and is already demon­strat­ing that under Peter Gelb’s direc­tion they under­stand that tra­di­tion includes con­tem­po­rary works as well (an arti­cle of mine in the upcom­ing issue of The Brook­lyn Rail will dis­cuss this). They are not an exper­i­men­tal house, they never have been and they never will be, and that’s per­fectly fine. If they can, and should, be crit­i­cized it is for fail­ing to under­stand the scope and mean­ing of the his­tory of opera and again they are prov­ing this aware­ness. Other houses may and do decide to ques­tion that tra­di­tion, the Met chooses to present it. Good for them.

In this, in New York City, they are like the New York Phil­har­monic and Carnegie Hall, which are each like the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum. These are insti­tu­tions that are about pre­serv­ing and pre­sent­ing a his­tory and tra­di­tion to the pub­lic, and striv­ing to widen that audi­ence. Their roles are impor­tant, just as the roles of avant-garde ensem­bles and cut­ting edge art and per­for­mance spaces are impor­tant. Alto­gether, they are com­pli­men­tary. And on a per­sonal level, the Met Opera, the Phil and Carnegie Hall have shown their open­ness to the inter­ested pub­lic. I am an inde­pen­dent writer in every way, hope­fully in that my ideas and val­ues are the prod­uct of think­ing for myself, but espe­cially in the sense that I am com­pletely on my own, work­ing for no one but myself. There are ben­e­fits in that I am my own Assign­ment Edi­tor and the blog for­mat allows me to go on at some length (hope­fully not too great). The draw­backs are that I have no insti­tu­tional resources or con­nec­tions. I am sent music to review, and I am occa­sion­ally offered tick­ets, but a great deal of what I write about comes from my own deci­sion to spend what is a very lim­ited amount of money. That means there is some bias involved in that I’ve already made the deci­sion that some­thing is worth­while, but I am con­fi­dent that my crit­i­cism is com­pletely honest.

Because I’m seri­ous about this work, I have pre­sented myself to a vari­ety of New York City per­form­ing insti­tu­tions, offer­ing my work and request­ing access to per­for­mances so I can write about them and share them with my read­ers.  Miller The­ater has already been a wel­come part­ner in the dis­cus­sion of great music.  The insti­tu­tions that at first thought would seem to be stuffy and thus dis­mis­sive of some­one with­out an insti­tu­tional domain in my email address have proven to be acces­si­ble, open and gen­er­ous, putting effort into mak­ing it pos­si­ble for me to see and review their per­for­mances, while the insti­tu­tions that would seem to be cutting-edge, hip, look­ing for alter­na­tive audi­ences have been silent, rudely unre­spon­sive. So in the com­ing months my read­ers will see my thoughts on the wide vari­ety of musi­cal art being pre­sented at the Met Opera, at the NY Phil, at Carnegie Hall, while unfor­tu­nately there will be no news from the Brook­lyn Acad­emy of Music. Sur­pris­ing and dis­ap­point­ing, per­haps, but there it is.

As a post­script, I would like to qui­etly announce a gen­eral fundraiser for my work here at The Big City. I do this work out of some­thing more than love, some­thing more like the idea that this is impor­tant for the world around me, but it is work. Any dona­tions (via the Pay­Pal but­ton upper right) obvi­ously would go directly to sup­port­ing my work gen­er­ally and make it pos­si­ble to do some addi­tional things on the blog, such as add more media, includ­ing exam­ples of my own work. The same is true for the items on this blog’s Ama­zon Wish List, which is a mix of things that I would write about specif­i­cally, things that would give me con­text for other reviews and projects, and things that would fur­ther my own music pro­duc­tion for the long term. If you find value for your­self here, even the small­est dona­tion would be help­ful and deeply appre­ci­ated. Thank you all, and keep reading.