Chamber Music Ensemble Leaders in Balancing Old and New


Inside the offices of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society hangs an old letter from an alarmed listener.

“The accordion is not a chamber instrument,” whispers the letter, written after the letter. concert It has a Bach sonata for cello and accordion. “Please don’t impose this again on your loyal audience.”

Sensitivity gives an idea of ​​the great passions aroused by even the smallest touches on society’s programming. The husband-and-wife team of David Finckel and Wu Han have faced these passions since they became the organization’s artistic directors in 2004, fueling an often heated debate about the future of classical music.

Giving more than 100 concerts a year in New York and beyond, the ensemble is some quail when it gets a little away from the traditional crowd-pleasers, including works by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Others said the organization should be more adventurous and do more to highlight works by living composers who are rarely on the main stage at Alice Tully Hall. (Two of the nearly 100 works in the Tully series this season are by living composers; neither were written in the 21st century.)

Reviewing the association’s opening night in The New York Times last month, Zachary Woolfe scolds the organization for “extreme conservatism, even by the low standards of classical music.”

In an interview, cellist Finckel and pianist Wu talked about this criticism, as well as the impact of the pandemic and the return of live concerts. These are edited excerpts from the speech.

While some of your concerts in New York this season will be crowded, it’s unclear whether audiences will come for the culture as they did before the coronavirus. Are you worried about the future of arts organizations?

WU INN The future of art is actually brighter than before. Your appreciation for music has increased tenfold because you realize how important it is in your life. Walking on stage right now is still incredibly emotional for me. I don’t know how it will be the same after this epidemic.

How has the pandemic changed you and your institution?

WU People know that we have each other’s backs in difficult times. We support each other. Musicians know this. There is an incredible bond.

DAVID FINCKEL In Soviet Russia, in Communist China, people were literally prevented from hearing music not by a disease but by government laws and censorship. This is the way I feel, as a privileged American, an even deeper kinship with people who lived in Germany in the 1930s or China in the 1940s and 1950s, and certainly not in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

The pandemic has turned all art branches upside down and forced dozens of your concerts to be cancelled. You decide to pay artists 50 percent of their promised wages and add 75 percent more when those dates are rescheduled. How did you approach forward planning?

FINCKEL Now we have several hybrid seasons that the programs carry over. It never occurred to us to say, “Oh, because we couldn’t, it’s not good, it’s old, like the food you threw in the fridge.” These programs never get old. They are still there, waiting for a new life.

You’ve been criticized for not doing more to highlight new music, especially at concerts at your main stage, Tully Hall. Can you explain your programming approach?

FINCKEL We don’t want to force people to listen to music they never want to listen to because we think it’s good for them. We’ll make educated guesses about what we think they might like and what they might hold onto. And in these cases we stretch our necks.

There are plenty of adventurous programs on the stage of Alice Tully Hall; It is necessary to examine the brochure a little more carefully. But there are certainly programs for people who don’t want anything to do with the 20th century, and there are programs for those who don’t want anything to do with the 18th century. So it’s all there.

Is the Chamber Music Ensemble doing enough to support new music, which is almost all played in venues much smaller than Tully?

WU You have to have old music, new music, top musicians playing, then shoot for as many locations as possible.

I don’t really care about the premiere. The main idea is to have as much new music playing as possible.. New music must evolve, live forever and be played as much as possible.

In a recent review in The Times, Zachary Woolfe praised your performances as “overall impeccable quality”, saying that your opening night’s show last month showed a “winking musical outlook” that “summarized what society had to offer”. sometimes.” What is your answer?

FINCKEL I just feel so sorry for this point of view. The person misses out on too many opportunities to enjoy. So there is more variety and variety in Haydn’s single string quartet than you can find in nearly a hundred works by other composers. Our repertoire covers 500 years of music. Do you know how much diversity there was in those 500 years?

How do you evaluate the success of your concerts?

FINCKEL We use it to judge ourselves because when we hear a concert, we know whether it lived up to our expectations and hopes as a good show. We know whether we are playing well or not. We know if our artists are playing well. We see ourselves as experienced enough to be the final judge of this and build on this experience and move the organization forward. We take the blame.

WU When the hall is completely empty, nobody wants to come and listen to our show, when we’re done playing and there’s no applause, when people hate it so much and don’t want to see the CMS – then we have a problem. . We are very far from there.

What do you see as the main challenge in the coming years?

FINCKEL People have a hard time sitting still. Their attention span is shortened. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the length of a Schubert trio. You can’t make it shorter and you can’t play faster. You cannot cut partitions. Art is what it is.

We have this religious belief in the strength and quality of the art form – that it will grow on concrete as grass grows. It doesn’t matter how much concrete you pour; the grass will always go up.



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