ArtsWatch

Ann Temkin - once a big wheel at the Philadelphia Museum of Art - is the Museum of Modern Art's new chief curator of painting and sculpture, the New York Times reports.

Alec Baldwin strikes again. In the current New Yorker, the actor once again bemoans his career choices and glances longingly to classical music. The piece says Baldwin loves Mahler but "can't quite see the point of Mozart."
In one of his career fantasies, Baldwin is a radio announcer for a classical public radio show.
"To sit there in the studio and just say, 'And now Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6, with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.' Click. Hit a button, and then you sit back and listen, and they pay you for that. And I can't imagine they pay you as much as the movies, but to me it's getting to the point where there's just something else I want to do."
Any takers? WRTI - what are you waiting for? And who is going to break the news to him about public radio salaries?
Baldwin apparently has a thing for Dutoit. We can relate to that. And we can help. Come to Philadelphia this season, Alec; Dutoit is ours for the next few years. (No Mahler, though.)
And while Baldwin's got some issues to work out with Mozart, I've got to say that it feels pretty strange in a nice way having a pop culture figure looking at classical and wanting in. No?

Local artist Winifred Lutz has put the final stroke on her summer-long project in Independence National Historical Park. Evoking the creek that once ran through this part of town, Lutz and a group of assistants have installed something like 17,000 feet of blue plastic cord over the grassy swale (now there's a word we urbanites don't get to use much).
I'm no art critic, but I have a couple of observations about this surprising piece of environmental art.
First, Lutz has arranged the bands so that they form a kind of large-scale lenticular. If you look at the installation from the side, or if the light is particularly bright, you can clearly see the grass underneath and the bands of synthetic material over them. But viewed from the front (that is, looking east) on in less bright light the individual bands merge and form a surface that looks very much like water.
Second, in a way, what Lutz has done is an act of the anti-Christo. Rather than imposing conspicuously man-made materials and colors (shocking pink hugging islands!) on a natural setting, Lutz has used man-made materials to make something seem more natural. Before this project no one might have guessed this was once a creek in the middle of a city.
The installation is up through Sept. 27. Materials explaining the project and the history of Dock Creek are available at the American Philosophical Society, which commissioned the piece.
(Photo: Frank Margeson)

Thomas P. Campbell, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been named the museum's chief, the Times reports.
(Photo, New York Times, workers bringing in "Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor," a Met show curated by Campbell.)

One of the things I admired most about Sunday's Academy of Music memorial for Anne d'Harnoncourt was the music - the choices themselves, yes, but also the confidence it placed in attendees by including stretches of music considerably longer than you often find at such events.
I'm thinking of the second movement of Schubert's String Quintet in C Major, D. 956. It's a full 15 minutes and made me want more. Anyone who shares that feeling might want to acquire the Alban Berg Quartett + Heinrich Schiff recording of the piece, or the Marlboro performance with Felix Galimir and Pam Frank.
I try not to overthink these things, but I have to say that this piece, written a couple of months before Schubert's death, was a wonderful choice for doing that thing Schubert does so well - that is, bring ecstasy and catastrophe in such close proximity that it makes each seem all the more powerful. Not an inappropriate sensation considering it would have been d'Harnoncourt's 65th birthday.
(Inquirer photo by Ed Hille)

Apparently choosing to spend more time on music and less on lawsuits, Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz announced today that he's leaving the orchestra after 2010-11. The Schwarz era - which began in 1985 - will probably be best known for the building of Benaroya Hall and for the 125 recording projects he and the ensemble worked on together.

Tenor Plácido Domingo makes a rare Philadelphia appearance Feb. 16 in a Verizon Hall concert with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. No program has been announced yet for the event, which is a fund-raiser for the Chamber Orchestra.
Tickets - ranging from $55 to $1,000 (which includes a dinner) - go on sale Oct. 3 to the general public, but subscribers to the Chamber Orchestra may order tickets now.

He's out of Philadelphia, sort of, but the Eschenbach style is having reverberations elsewhere. Here's a London Times review of the conductor with his Paris orchestra at the Proms. You'll see what I mean when you read the review, but the Orchestra de Paris is not a youth orchestra.
Here is another, quite different opinion.

With only two years under his belt, Philadelphia Orchestra president James Undercofler told colleagues Tuesday that he is resigning. He will stay on through the end of his contract, which expires in July 2009.
More here.
I'll be sorry to see Undercofler go. Everyone I've spoken to about him in the last two years has been impressed with his integrity, warmth, his courage to be upfront but kind about certain matters, and his great intelligence.
The entire orchestra now will enter a period of transition - artistic, administrative, on the board level - and I think it's a safe bet that Undercofler will spend the next year working energetically to make those transitions happen as smoothly as possible.
Would be nice, too, if that small matter of finding a new music director were settled before he left. A tall order, that.

Philly Pops artistic director Peter Nero has agreed to a five-year contract extension, keeping him here to tease tunes from the orchestra, Broadway singers and his keyboard through 2014. That would mean 35 years in the post for Nero.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's annual meeting Thursday was a snapshot of a cultural organization in a state of enormous change - at the artistic, board and staff levels all at once. Board chairman Hal Sorgenti says "decisive leadership" is what's needed. Can't argue there.
BTW, take a look at this.
The Philadelphia Orchestra this season has an unusually busy schedule in the ten or so days before official opening night of the 2008-09 season.
-Tuesday, Sept. 23d at 7 p.m. at City Hall the orchestra plays a free neighborhood concert.
-Wednesday the 24th at 6 p.m., the newly restored chandelier in the Academy of Music is unveiled.
-Thursday the 25th at 7 p.m. in Verizon Hall it performs a free concert for college students. Also on this night, at 9 p.m., WHYY (Channel 12) airs Maestro, a one-hour documentary about former music director Wolfgang Sawallisch.
- Friday the 26th at 2 p.m. is the first subscription concert of the season (repeated Sept. 30).
- Saturday the 27 at 7:30 p.m. the orchestra plays with the Wanamaker Organ in Macy’s Center City for a special concert to benefit ongoing organ restoration.
- Incoming chief conductor and artistic adviser Charles Dutoit arrives Oct. 2 in a concert with pianist Martha Argerich. The concert is repeated Oct. 3, and in a slightly abbreviated format Oct. 4 for what the orchestra calls, finally, “Opening Night.”
Information: 215-893-1999 and www.philorch.org.

The New York Times has a review today of In Conflict, the Temple University production now Off Broadway.

It's official. Months ago in this space, Christoph Eschenbach was rumored to be the new music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. Eschenbach denied it, then he denied it while sort of confirming it. And today in the Washington Post he confirms it without denying it.
The job, which starts in the 2010-11 season, also makes him music director of the Kennedy Center.