ArtsWatch

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is often cited as one of the city's great examples of potential unrealized. It has history, a landmark Frank Furness building, vast and bright new gallery space, and a deep reserve of talented faculty.
And now it has new leadership. Despite the fact that cocktail-party speeches are usually a time for self-congratulatory jargon, new president Edward T. Lewis (pictured on left) let a lot of substance slip out at a Nov. 1 welcoming reception talk.
Among the goals he outlined:
"Under the proven leadership of David Brigham [new museum director, pictured on right], I envision a museum that will continue to strengthen its collection—with particular emphasis given to contemporary art.
"I envision a museum that will consistently offer exhibitions of national importance, and host – starting next year – annual symposia, by which the Academy will assume its historical role in shaping and participating in the dialogue on the history and state of American art.
"With 2-3 years, I expect the Museum will begin to host a series of national invitational shows – inspired, in part, by the Museum’s annual shows that came to a halt in the 1960s.
"In these next few years, I envision the School – with its new BFA program becoming, for the first time in its history, a school of the fine arts fully granting undergraduate and graduate degrees. And given that this talented faculty is at the heart of these efforts, we’ll secure the funds to more properly remunerate and support them.
"In 3-5 years, I envision that the Academy will have raised another $25 million dollars to continue its development of the campus.
"I expect that the Academy will begin its drive – and its urgent need – to double its endowment."
Okay, so Lewis is a little vague on timelines, and his comments raise a host of questions. But it's wonderful to see someone come out of the gate who clearly yearns for the return of a Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts of ambition.

Inquirer photo by Michael Bryant

M.I.T. is suing Frank Gehry, architect of the Stata Center (left). Seems the place leaks, which reminds us of another big new building, the Kimmel Center, which also extracted after-the-fact money from its architect.
Rain continues to fall in the Kimmel. A couple of weeks ago, for a Philadelphia Orchestra concert, the center's south staircase flooded. Getting people in Verizon Hall was no problem since listeners used the north staircase, trickling in over a half hour or more. But at the end of the concert, with well over a thousand people leaving the upper tiers at once, that only passable staircase at the north end became a treacherous jam of bodies.
Well before opening day, skeptics questioned the probability of rain beneath the center's great glass dome. Now that the Kimmel has settled with its architect out of court, we're looking forward to seeing the arts center come up with ways to keep the place dry - not to mention safe.
And by the way, when will architects turn the tables and start filing lawsuits against bad clients? There's no shortage of them out there.

I stopped by Verizon Hall last night (Tuesday) for the last bit of Jiri Belohlavek's visit to the podium of the Philadelphia Orchestra. I only heard the Brahms Symphony No. 2, but it seems to me with that one piece he's now out of the running in the orchestra's music-director search. There was nothing bad about his Brahms, unless you count lack of an interpretive point of view. He somehow rendered the piece nearly characterless, and gave the Philadelphians a generic sound.
Strange thing, since this chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (pictured left) has made wonderful recordings of Dvorak, and since he made such a strong impression here last time. One hates to count anyone out so early in the process, but it's hard to imagine his name staying on the list of music-director possibilities.
Speaking of that search, with the orchestra soon to say something more about its process, I hope they'll consider adding someone to the search committee: a retiree. Think about it. An orchestra veteran has decades of perspective and wisdom playing for dozens of conductors. And not having played under most of the candidates means he or she can be objective in a way current players can't since a retiree does not have a dog in this fight, so to speak.
Someone like former concertmaster Norman Carol comes to mind

Matthew Neenan has been named Pennsylvania Ballet's choreographer-in-residence. Neenan, who has mounted eight ballets for the troupe, was a dancer in the company starting in 1994, and retired following the opening program of the ballet’s 44th season. His ninth commission with the Pennsylvania Ballet is slated for June 2008 (on a program with the local premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Carnival of the Animals).

If you bring your 7-year-old son to see the Salzburg Marionettes, he’s likely to lean over and say, “After a few minutes I forgot they were puppets.”
The good news is that the puppets themselves seem to have forgotten, too. So deftly and intricately did they move Saturday night at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater that when 10 puppeteers came out to accept applause at the end of The Magic Flute you almost wondered what they had to do with it all.
The conceit, though, takes some getting used to. Puppets doing opera. Actually, puppets lip-syncing opera. Well, okay, they weren't moving their lips. But they were moving every other part of their bodies, which is more than you can say for a lot of flesh-and-blood opera singers.
That ability to move – and glide and float – made the Queen of the Night’s first aria memorable in an otherworldly way. In a dark, elaborate sequined gown that would have made Priscilla Queen of the Desert mad with envy, she floated down onto stage against a deep bed of stars. It’s not that the idea was revolutionary. It’s just that it was so alarmingly well done. Other scenes created the illusion that the stage receded several yards back.
Those scary frozen-smile marionettes with rouged cheeks and jerky movements singing against flat painted backdrops? That’s kitsch compared to the Salzburgers (whose show was imported to Philadelphia by the Kimmel’s presenting arm).
One aspect of the concept that took me aback was the music. It was not live, but a recording, which when you think about it is understandable. How could any traveling troupe come with an orchestra and a cast of singers (including chorus)? But there is something disturbing about going to the opera and sitting in a room with 600 other people to hear a recording. It was a wonderful one, though, with Rita Streich singing the Queen of the Night, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Papageno, and Ernst Häfliger as Tamino. Cuts in the Mozart’s score were chosen so well they came across only as minor artistic violations.
The bigger point is that this sort of treatment is best thought of as its own thing, a distinct genre that, although tracing its beginnings to 1913, seems especially well suited to our time. For one thing, it’s a friendly entry point to an art-form that needs all the entry points it can get. For another, if a 7-year-old can become engrossed watching big movies on the tiny screen of an iPod, Mozart staged by three-foot-high wooden figures doesn’t seem so absurd.

From Allendale, Michigan comes a wonderful new recording of Steve Reich's landmark Music for 18 Musicians performed by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble. Reich's cool, meditative work from 1976, in addition to having been widely adored by composers, is one of those pieces the rest of us just can't stop listening to. There's a fun video out there in youtubeland, though the sound is inferior to the CD. Reich's piece to me has always sounded like a kind of pixilated Enigma Variations in that the theme is there, but is scrambled to the point of being inscrutable.

Simon Rattle, probably the most recorded conductor of our time, told me this recently about the future of the recording industry.
"My own theory is that the time when people made money out of recordings is over and now it’s going to be way of evangelizing and sharing the good news. I have this feeling that music will probably be in our lives and in our houses in the way that water is. It will be considered a utility. We don’t even know what we pay for water. It’s interesting because in a way it’s a really wonderful thing. More and more people will be open to more and more music."

Friday and Sunday are your last two chances to see the Opera Company of Philadelphia's production of Maurice Sendak's sweet take on Hänsel und Gretel at the Academy of Music. As I wrote recently, it's the production you wish you had seen as a kid. And yet there's a very grown-up score that's an endless source of marvel.
The photo here is a shot of the painted screen that comes down on stage at the opera's intermission, and this feast scene (no doubt Sendak's rendering of the food our starving hero and heroine sing about in the opera's opening) is my way of saying that unless there's startling news in the next few days ArtsWatch will go on intermission until Monday.
In the meantime, if you've missed Sendak's cheery, storybook Hänsel und Gretel, you might look forward to the Met production opening Dec. 24 and being broadcast to movie theaters nationally Jan 1.
Or maybe the August Everding film from 1980 is more your speed. For me, the witch-at-oven scene at the end is a little too close for comfort, looking like architectural salvage from Germany c. 1945. But what you do get that's wonderful is a truly moving Hermann Prey in the role of the father, Sena Jurinac as the witch, Georg Solti conducting, and the Vienna Philharmonic.
The Philharmonic by the way is the orchestra on what's still the best recording out there, the 1964 EMI re-release with André Cluytens conducting.

Longtime Philadelphia Orchestra violinist Stephane Dalschaert, 77, has died. He joined the orchestra in 1967 - after seven years with the Cleveland Orchestra - and retired at the end of last season. A native of Brussels, Belgium, Mr. Dalschaert graduated from the Brussels Royal Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Alfred Dubois and the great Arthur Grumiaux.
Four decades in the job, he was part of an already endangered group: those senior enough to have played under Eugene Ormandy. Though the Philadelphia Orchestra retains an old world sound, most of its membership has turned over since Ormandy retired in 1980.
Of course there's still Jerry Wigler. The violinist joined in 1951, which means the Philadelphia Orchestra, for the length of its existence, has had Wigler as a member for more years than not.

Rose Bampton, the soprano who died in August, would have hit the century mark today. Seems an appropriate way to note the day is to listen to Parsifal. Or at least Gurrelieder.