ArtsWatch

The Mann Center in its recent season announcement, apparently having developed a weather-forecasting subsidiary, is predicting a "sizzling, sultry and sensational summer." Oy, let's hope not, at least on the former two conditions. I prefer the Mann when you can sit on the lawn and catch the kind of 72-degree breezes not generally available downtown. Make it a free ticket, and it feels even better. Speaking of those free lawn tickets, they are available starting right this minute - 10 a.m., May 1 - on the Mann's website. Get 'em while they're, er - well, let's steer clear of the forecasting.

Alec Baldwin apparently approves of Charles Dutoit at the helm of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In a recent interview in which the actor bemoans his lack of leisure time, he has this to say:
"...You're sitting in your trailer and you get your mail shipped to you from New York. I open it and I learn that Charles Dutoit and the Philadelphia Orchestra are performing at the Carnegie Hall and I'm not there. I don't want to miss that anymore. I want to go and do what I want to do.
"I'll never forget one day. There was an Andrew Wyeth exhibition in Philadelphia and the last day was a Saturday or a Sunday. I was working in LA and the only way I could go was to take a red eye that night to Philly, and in the morning, go to a Starbucks, sit for two hours reading the New York Times and wait for the museum to open. I did it only to prove a point to myself that I was so sick of missing everything as a result of this business. They don't pay me to act. They pay me to help alleviate the pain of missing on all the other things when I'm on the set all day."
I've had this feeling a lot, too, and have decided to turn down some lucrative movie roles so I can be closer to Philadelphia culture.

The latest round of grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts will help fund a James Castle Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a Peter Saul show at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
This package of grants from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative totals $1,166,231 —the largest amount awarded in the program’s 11-year history - and will support eight groups and two teams of independent curators.
Peter Saul (whose Dali Advises the President is pictured) will be represented at PAFA in October with 60 works, including a new parody of Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic.
The Castle show, the Art Museum says, is "the first major scholarly consideration by a leading museum of Castle’s work." It also opens in fall.
The Mural Arts Program and ICA came away with substantial Pew money.

Riccardo Muti in 1989 standing in front of a newly unveiled billboard for the Venturi-designed Philadelphia Orchestra concert hall at Broad and Spruce that was never built. (Gerald S. Williams/Inquirer)

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A few days ago in this space I wrote that "for Muti, having his name on the schedule and actually showing up to conduct are independent concepts."
Unfair? Riccardo Muti has now agreed to have his name on the schedule at the Chicago Symphony 10 weeks a year, plus tours. To read the coverage you'd think he's turned over a new leaf and will be where he says he'll be.
Regarding Chicago, Muti is speaking of getting out into the community, has apparently agreed to do fund-raising, and seems generally agreeable to the playing the part of the American music director - a scope of services he never exactly embraced when he was music director in Philadelphia (1980-1992).
Turning to music for a moment, one might reasonable expect great things from this partnership. Muti has an almost peerless stick technique - exacting, evocative and sophisticated. He likes a lean sound, which suits Chicago better than it did Philadelphia. He has a talent for choosing charismatic soloists.
Two things to look for in the Muti-Chicago relationship. First, he's not been there much. He led the orchestra for two weeks at home in September, and on one tour. That leaves a lot of composers unexplored. How does the Chicago Symphony feel about Martucci? How many times is it willing to program Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy and Ravel's Bolero?
But the other red flag in Muti's past behavior is this. He canceled in Philadelphia a lot after he stepped down as music director. He never fulfilled his laureate title here.
And even in his new relationships, he can be a no-show. After much trumpeting that they were creating an older-man-younger-man model of leadership, the New York Philharmonic now finds itself short an older man. Muti was to lead the Philharmonic for multiple weeks a year plus tours - close to his number of weeks in Chicago. But now, Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic’s president, said Muti "would not be back as a guest conductor once he took over the Chicago job," the Times reports.
The Times puts this aspect the Muti saga pretty far down in the article that started online Monday morning before evolving into Tuesday's piece:
Mr. Muti turned down the music director’s job at the New York Philharmonic in 2000. Last year he agreed to take on the position of principal guest conductor, in which he was expected to spend six to eight weeks a season with the orchestra and lead it on tours, beginning in 2009 (although he now says that he did not agree to a specific number of weeks).
Is the reversal Muti's doing? Mehta's? Or do both just understand implicitly that when a new podium presence in being established in one big city, to guest conduct in another is to blur the public message?
Mehta on Tuesday told me that Muti was never given a title with the Philharmonic.
"He was never principal guest. What we had agreed on was that he would appear multiple weeks in each season and the occasional international tour. That's the way we've been working. Now of course there is a change, and we'll have to sit down together and decide what the future is."
Will Muti in fact not conduct the Philharmonic once he becomes music director in Chicago?
Mehta continued: "This is a decision that he and the Chicago Symphony and we have to make. It's too early to tell how that will work out."
And what about Muti's four weeks already scheduled with the Philharmonic for next season?
Mehta says he does not "see any reason why not. Until I sit down and talk to him about what his obligations we have no reason to make any change for next season."
In any case, it appears Muti will not have a big Philharmonic presence - even before he's had a chance to start the job, title or no. That last appearance with the Philharmonic? He canceled.

Critics in New York didn't hear Tuesday night's Philadelphia Orchestra Mahler 8 at Carnegie Hall quite the same way.
One loved it, the other didn't.
Those critics are such a confounding lot. Why can't they just be like the rest of us and agree about everything?
(The graffiti comes from Toronto.)

You have a little more time to see Song (pictured), Jennifer Bartlett's series of enameled metal plates, at the Locks Gallery on Washington Square. It's an enormous work - 97 feet long - using "a basic black dot as a springboard to explore various compositional themes, employing the dot like notes in a melody." On view through May 24.
Bartlett is represented at an exhibition closing after this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art, "Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today."
Also closing soon: The Frida Kahlo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which runs through May 18.

Pennsylvania Ballet steps south to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts June 10 and 11 as part of the center's Ballet Across America series. Nine companies will perform in three mixed repertory programs. PA Ballet, in D.C. for the first time since 2000, brings In the Night, the Jerome Robbins (pictured) work set to a score of Chopin. Pennsylvania Ballet is joined by Salt Lake City’s Ballet West with Balanchine’s Serenade and Houston Ballet with Artistic Director Stanton Welch’s Velocity.
In you want your Pennsylvanians locally, see Christopher Wheeldon's Carnival of the Animals June 6-14 at the Academy of Music. Be careful about the dates if you want to hear John Lithgow in the narration. He's only gracing us with his presence for three performances on June 6 and 7.

Robert Rauschenberg, 82, the American artist whose philosophy had an enormous impact on his generation and every one that succeeded him, died Monday night, the New York Times reports.
Here is what Inquirer art critic Edward Sozanski has to say about the artist.

Yes, this is Philadelphia. Downtown. Urban. Can't you tell?
If this is not the Philadelphia you see on that burning-rowhome, courthouse-drama, traffic-jammed TV news show you're always watching, you might want to get out and see the real city. Sylvan City. Sparkling, bird-call-filled, grass-cut-smell city.
It's here. Waiting for you.
Tuesday morning this is what downtown's Dock Creek looked like. It's not a creek today, of course, but it is the site of the now-dry waterway that once wended its way through this patch near Walnut and 4th Streets. Local artist Winifred Lutz has taken it upon herself, with the help of the American Philosophical Society, to map out where the creek once flowed.

Lutz, you can see, has shown in chalk Dock Creek's path where it is now covered by brick or concrete.

Where the former creek path veers onto what is now lawn, Lutz has marked out the area so the grass within the markings isn't cut. Recent rains have helped the grass grow higher. But chalk gets washed away, so Lutz refreshes her work from time to time.
She's planning something involving bright blue plastic wrap late in the summer. Christo may be invoked.
Here's more about the installation.

Measuring art in money for a moment, we're startled to pass on word that Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping has set a new record price for a work by a living artist. The 1995 portrait sold for $33.6 million at Christie's in New York, the BBC reports.
"When we were painting it we didn't sit there going: 'I bet this'll be the biggest selling painting in the world'. It was just like one of his other pictures," Sue Tilley, the painting's ample subject, told the BBC.

Looks like the Pew-Rendell-compelled march of the Barnes Foundation downtown will continue. Judge Stanley Ott has declined to reconsider his 2004 decision approving the move, AP reports. A group of activists and Montgomery County pressed for keeping the foundation in Lower Merion, but Ott said the county and the Friends of the Barnes did not have the legal standing in the case.
(Image: Giorgio de Chirico's Dr. Albert C. Barnes)

The Franklin Institute has received two $1 million gifts - one from the Hamilton Family Foundation and the other from the Sunoco Foundation - to help fund its “Changing Earth” exhibit slated to open in fall of 2009...The Philadelphia Boys Choir and Chorale 40th anniversary concert, June 1 at 2:00 p.m., will be streamed live from Irvine Auditorium on 6abc.com...The North Penn Symphony Orchestra has changed its name to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Symphony Orchestra...Christoph Eschenbach's last concert in Philadelphia while music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra is Sunday at 3 p.m. in Verizon Hall. Mezzo Susan Graham was to have appeared, accompanied by Eschenbach in various songs, but is ill. Mezzo Rinat Shaham (pictured) replaces her. The program also includes the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony No. 1. Eschenbach and the orchestra leave Tuesday for a three-week tour of China, Japan and Korea.

Leslie Greene Bowman, director of the Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, is stepping down to become president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates the Jefferson home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va.
Bowman, 51, will succeed Daniel P. Jordan, Monticello’s chief executive since 1985. She starts her new post Nov. 1
Prior to Winterthur, Bowman was director of the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and before that was head curator of decorative arts and assistant director of exhibitions for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Miami University in Ohio and a master's in early American culture from the Winterthur Museum Program at the University of Delaware.
David P. Roselle, president emeritus of the University of Delaware and a member of the Winterthur board, will become the museum’s interim director starting June 1.
The Jefferson Foundation owns and operates Monticello, as well as the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Jefferson Library and the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants.

From the Philadelphia Orchestra, percussionist Christopher Deviney, tuba player Carol Jantsch and clarinetist Ricardo Morales have new faculty positions at the Curtis Institute of Music. Morales, who has been a Curtis visiting artist, will be woodwind chamber music coach. Proving the existence of orchestral life beyond Broad and Spruce, Curtis has also hired New York Philharmonic principal cellist Carter Brey (left) and marimba contemporary-music god Robert Van Sice. Stalwart Curtis pianist Meng-Chieh Liu (he has been resident pianist and chamber music coach for 15 years) joins Leon Fleisher, Claude Frank, Gary Graffman, Seymour Lipkin, Robert McDonald, Eleanor Sokoloff and Ignat Solzhenitsyn on the performance faculty.

"An article in the People's Daily accused the Philadelphia Orchestra, which had visited Beijing, of playing counterrevolutionary Western music, especially Beethoven's Sixth Symphony."
- Mao and Nixon, by Margaret MacMillan

No telling yet whether the Philadelphia Orchestra's upcoming week-long presence in China starting June 1 will set off the political rumbles Beethoven 6 did in 1973. It's doubtful. The ensemble has been back since becoming the first American orchestra to play in China, and not since 1973 has anyone detected dark shadows overlaying musical scores. Still, it should be more than a little interesting to see what kind of impact the orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach can achieve while they are there this time. Beethoven's 6 is once again on the schedule, along with the considerably more political Shostakovich Symphony No. 5. But as for impact, everyone it seems is playing China these days.
In fact, the Philadelphians will be playing hopscotch with Juilliard's orchestra, which tours China at the same time. New York Philharmonic associate conductor Zhang Xian, a graduate of the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music, leads the students in Beijing, Suzhou and Shanghai.
Curiously, Juilliard and Philadelphia are even overlapping in some repertoire: the Yellow River Concerto, and Bernstein's Overture to Candide.
Look for Inquirer coverage of the Philadelphia Orchestra in China from the paper's Jennifer Lin, its former Beijing correspondent. Right now the orchestra is in Tokyo, with concerts there, Hyogo and Seoul to come.

(Photo: Eugene Ormandy introducing a new piece to the repertoire of China's Central Philharmonic Society - Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 - September 1973, from the University of Pennsylvania Library.)

La Salle University Art Museum has received 150 photographs by Andy Warhol from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has 151 new Warhol Polaroids and prints on the way, including portraits of Pia Zadora, Martha Graham, Wayne Gretzky and Keith Haring. Other gifts went to Dickinson, Lafayette, Saint Joseph's University and Penn State - all together, 11 Pennsylvania school galleries now have new Warhols to study and display.
The Warhol foundation, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, announced the donation several months ago of 28,543 original Warhol photographs to 183 U.S. college and university art museums, and those gifts are now reaching their recipients.
The entire gifted collection, the foundation says, is valued at more than $28 million.
The La Salle Warhols are original Polaroid and silver gelatin prints taken by the pop artist between 1971 and 1985, including this catch of Sylvester Stallone, portraits of Carolina Herrera and Cheryl Tiegs, cityscapes, landscapes and other figural compositions. PAFA is still awaiting its acquisition.
Among the other institutional beneficiaries of the Warhol Foundation's largess are the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran, Cranbrook Art Museum, Harvard, Princeton and Williams College.
Like so much else Warhol produced, the photos have a frank, voyeuristic quality to them. You can get a good taste of the entire collection in the Warhol Foundation's report on the project, but anyone uncomfortable with a little nudity (not to mention kitsch) probably won't want to click on this link.

Friday morning from 11 to noon on WHYY's Radio Times, I'll have the pleasure of chatting with my Inquirer colleague David Patrick Stearns and host Marty Moss-Coane about the musical future of the Philadelphia Orchestra conductor-wise.
Even if you missed it, you can still listen.

Delaware Symphony Orchestra music director David Amado has inked a two-year contract extension, keeping him on the podium through the 2010-11 season...Awarded an honorary posthumous doctorate from the University of the Arts last week was Edna Andrade, the artist who taught at the school for more than 30 years. Also handed honorary doctorates were university trustee Ira Brind and former UArts president Miguel Angel Corzo...If you see a "Curious?" sign in a storefront or shaved from the scalp of a man walking around town, it's all part of the Franklin Institute's new branding campaign. Which reminds me, they're just calling the place the "Franklin" now....G.O.P. money man and arts guy David Girard-diCarlo, chairman of the Blank Rome law firm, has been nominated U.S. Ambassador to Austria. We wish him many happy moments in the Demel pastry shop in Vienna (whose Marmorguglhupf klein is pictured)...Newspapers are shedding staff again, and among those taking buy-outs at the Washington Post are music critic Tim Page. At the New York Times, Bernard Holland has left after 27 years on staff.

The Philadelphia Orchestra and organist Peter Richard Conte will perform, in the old Wanamaker department store, a work slated to have its world premiere there eight decades ago.
Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie concertante was commissioned in 1926 by Rodman Wanamaker, son of the store’s founder, to be performed by the orchestra with the Wanamaker Organ. After delays in the organ’s expansion and various deaths, the premiere took place in Brussels. The work has since become standard repertoire - everywhere except in Wanamaker's.
But this September, the space’s current retail occupant, Macy’s, and the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ will present the Jongen in its long-delayed premiere in the venue for which it was written, plus the world premiere of Howard Shore’s Fanfare. Also on the Sept. 27 concert are the Stokowski transcription of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, and Dupré’s Cortege and Litany, Op. 19, No. 2. Rossen Milanov will conduct.
The Wanamaker Organ, installed in the space in 1911 after its debut at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, is a National Historic Landmark. It has nearly 28,500 pipes, ranging in size from thirty-two feet to a quarter inch.
It is still played in daily concerts by Conte — the fourth person since 1911 to hold the title of “Grand Court Organist.”
Tickets for “A Grand 150th Anniversary Concert,” celebrating Macy’s 150th anniversary, benefit the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, and range from $100 to $5,000. The concert is scheduled for Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m. at Macy’s, 1300 Market St. Information: 215-893-1999.

Universal is getting into the management business. Universal Classics and Jazz, the very big label, announced the creation of Universal Music Classical Artists Management and Productions, the Times reports today.
Smart business decision, no doubt. But will Universal pressure its recording artists to sign with its management company? Will artists who haven't signed feel that their recordings aren't getting the kind of promotion as those who have signed with the management arm? Will CAMI respond by starting up a recording company?
Universal gets operating efficiencies and moves one step closer to monopoly - they already own a third of the classical recording market. But what's in it for artists such as Lang Lang and Hilary Hahn?
The story in The Times today doesn't raise these questions, but I'm sure all classical artists and their handlers are wondering that the implications will be.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is playing Seoul, and the South Korean publication Chosun has taken the occasion to note the large number of Asian musicians in the ensemble.
You have to applaud the paper for asking why this is the case, but I think it's fair to say that the question still awaits anything approaching revelation.
C.J. Chang, the orchestra's principal violist, is quoted as saying that Asian children practice "far more" than Westerners. Doubtful.
Concertmaster David Kim apparently tells the paper that Asians in general "traditionally treat higher ranking or senior colleagues with deference, good manners and loyalty."
That doesn't explain how they got there in the first place.
Maybe it has something to do with casting the net as wide as possible for talent when children are very young? Or governments that build schools and concert halls? Or raising children in an environment that places a high value on culture and history?