Friday, July 28, 2006
Toscanini - the exhibit, part 1
I thought I'd add something different to this blog whose original intention I envisioned as being mostly reviews. I'm terribly far behind with reviews - I still want to write about LENNON which I saw in the summer of 2005, and most recently, GRENDEL. But since I work in a cultural institution, I thought I could write a bit about my work.
I'm charged with co-curating an exhibit on Arturo Toscanini (AT), scheduled to observe the 50th anniversary of his death. It is to open February 20, 2007. The other curator is Seth B. Winner, the ace sound engineer, who will work on the audio portion of the exhibit. I'm hoping he'll have a lot of rehearsals, and give people a chance to hear some of the lesser known works in the audio archive (e.g. Bruckner's 7th symphony, and interview recordings of people who knew him).
The theme for the exhibit is to focus on Toscanini interacting with others, whether in a creative work relationship, or more personal. There is such a vast amount of material that it is difficult to know how to manage it all. So currently I'm doing two things to locate visually arresting items:
* I'm going through all of AT's marked scores, looking for particularly dramatic ones; and
* I'm looking at lists of his correspondence, to see which would likely be interesting items that could possibly reflect his relationships.
Why this theme? Part of the idea was to counteract Joseph Horowitz's idea (promulgated in his "Understanding Toscanini" book - unfairly, I believe) that AT was just a pawn within the music marketing industry. To be sure, there is an element of truth there, but Horowitz is purely interested in proving his point, and not at all at trying to show a nuanced or balanced view of how a human being functions within society. Frankly, I think even without Horowitz, most people don't really listen to AT's musicality. So it is hoped that this exhibit will remind people that AT was really human, and that he was a pretty good musician, too.
It seems that everyone under the sun wrote to Toscanini with birthday greetings (his secretarial staff must have been several people working full time, just to deal with each one of this birthdays. It almost suggests that people exploited him to voice their own feelings. As my cynical father used to say, "A birthday party is for everyone else."
In any case, I've already found a couple of nicely-marked scores, some with a bright red pen -- Beethoven 9th, Brahms's Liebeslieder Waltzes, and other marked up scores, such as Gershwin's Concerto in F, and a particularly virulent emendation in Bernard Wagenaar's Sinfonietta.
And I've made a list of potential correspondents. Now the task at hand is to look at the actual material and find items that will be interesting and can tell a story (with supplementary notes).
My deadline for having all this material assembled, and labels written: December 1. Not much time at all. So I'm off and running. Think of the 4th movement of Haydn Symphony no. 88 as my current theme music.
I'm charged with co-curating an exhibit on Arturo Toscanini (AT), scheduled to observe the 50th anniversary of his death. It is to open February 20, 2007. The other curator is Seth B. Winner, the ace sound engineer, who will work on the audio portion of the exhibit. I'm hoping he'll have a lot of rehearsals, and give people a chance to hear some of the lesser known works in the audio archive (e.g. Bruckner's 7th symphony, and interview recordings of people who knew him).
The theme for the exhibit is to focus on Toscanini interacting with others, whether in a creative work relationship, or more personal. There is such a vast amount of material that it is difficult to know how to manage it all. So currently I'm doing two things to locate visually arresting items:
* I'm going through all of AT's marked scores, looking for particularly dramatic ones; and
* I'm looking at lists of his correspondence, to see which would likely be interesting items that could possibly reflect his relationships.
Why this theme? Part of the idea was to counteract Joseph Horowitz's idea (promulgated in his "Understanding Toscanini" book - unfairly, I believe) that AT was just a pawn within the music marketing industry. To be sure, there is an element of truth there, but Horowitz is purely interested in proving his point, and not at all at trying to show a nuanced or balanced view of how a human being functions within society. Frankly, I think even without Horowitz, most people don't really listen to AT's musicality. So it is hoped that this exhibit will remind people that AT was really human, and that he was a pretty good musician, too.
It seems that everyone under the sun wrote to Toscanini with birthday greetings (his secretarial staff must have been several people working full time, just to deal with each one of this birthdays. It almost suggests that people exploited him to voice their own feelings. As my cynical father used to say, "A birthday party is for everyone else."
In any case, I've already found a couple of nicely-marked scores, some with a bright red pen -- Beethoven 9th, Brahms's Liebeslieder Waltzes, and other marked up scores, such as Gershwin's Concerto in F, and a particularly virulent emendation in Bernard Wagenaar's Sinfonietta.
And I've made a list of potential correspondents. Now the task at hand is to look at the actual material and find items that will be interesting and can tell a story (with supplementary notes).
My deadline for having all this material assembled, and labels written: December 1. Not much time at all. So I'm off and running. Think of the 4th movement of Haydn Symphony no. 88 as my current theme music.
