Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: New Milestones: Electronic Chamber Music in a New Form

MUSIC
THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 2020
7:30 PM

Stanley H. Kaplan Playhouse, Juilliard School
165 East 65th Street, Upper West Side, Manhattan

$35
https://www.chambermusicsociety.org/nyc/events/upcoming/new-milestones-january-16-2020/

This looks like a very good recital.  So perhaps it's churlish of me to use it as an occasion to fulminate about the programming practices of mainstream classical musical institutions.  I used to hate it that such institutions would create New Music ghettos like this recital, blocking off programing of such music into separate series rather than mixing it up on their main programs.  But I'm no longer so sure.  The main alternative — and even such famously a progressive institution as the LA Phil does this (you have to navigate back from the links to the main calendar page to see it) — seems to be to bury New Music on mixed programs, so you get a world premiere of a major new work, yet the concert is listed on the institution's schedule as something like "Bronfman Plays Beethoven".  Unless you otherwise knew the new piece was being played, you couldn't easily find out about it (BLATANT PLUG:  that's why you need this List!).  After all, the mainstream classical music institutions don't want to scare away their subscribers!  Then, if you actually find out about the concert and rouse yourself to schlep uptown for it, you have to endure hearing everyone sitting around you deride the new piece, since after all they're all there to hear a World Famous Soloist play a Pre-Certified Masterpiece that their brain-dead selves can pretend is sonic wallpaper rather than the challenging, engaging music that much of the standard rep actually is.  The conventional wisdom has been that putting new music next to old music invigorates the old music — but is that what's really happening, when the mainstream classical music institution's primary audience doesn't want to listen hard to either, but only to take a Bourdieuan milk bath in Pre-Certified empty "beauty"?  It makes me think that the mainstream classical music institutions would do better to stick to the warhorses, so I can go when I'm in the mood for that kind of thing — and on the more usual nights when I want to engage with something current, something that actually speaks to my own concerns and esthetic disposition, I can go to some warehouse in Brooklyn where the audience is attuned to, and eager to engage with, the music (and, when the concert is over, I'm in a neighborhood I actually want to hang in, rather than one I can't wait to get out of).  So, tonight, on this admirable program of electro-acoustic music, the "New Form" promised in the title is a (truly great) piece by Stockhausen from the late 1950s.  Can you imagine if someone referred to pop music from that time, however good, as "New"?!  Also on the program, to be sure, is a genuinely newish piece by Thomas Meadowcroft — and Kaija Saariaho's gorgeous (mid-'90s) Trois Rivières:  a piece that would convince the Chamber Music Society's mainstream audience that they don't have to be afraid of New Music, if only they would listen to it.   So I guess I'm back on the fence about mixed programming.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT:  I continue to think Lincoln Ristorante under its second chef, Shea Gallante (who can do much better), is anodyne and rote (kind of the culinary equivalent of mainstream classical music programing).  But I also think it's right across the street from the venue.