Copious Notes

Norton Center for the Arts director George Foreman presents New York Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel with his Kentucky Colonel certificate. You can see video of the presentation at the New York Philharmonic website. This photo by Colin Misbach | Centre College.

As the New York Philharmonic has made its way through the Eastern United States, fans have been kept up to date with a photo and video tour diary on the orchestra’s website. The Danville edition posted late Monday with some great photos by NY Phil photographer Chris Lee and a video of Maestro Lorin Maazel receiving his Kentucky Colonel Award from Norton Center for the Arts impresario George Foreman. The photos take viewers from the tarmac at Bluegrass Airport to backstage at the Norton Center and after the show.

Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic accept applause from the sold-out crowd in the Norton Center for the Arts' Newlin Hall on March 5, 2009. Photos by Chris Lee | New York Philharmonic.

There are two presumptions you could have made about Thursday night’s New York Philharmonic concert at Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts in Danville.

This being a farewell tour for Maestro Lorin Maazel, 79-years-old today, you could assume this would be one of the last gasps of a tired old partnership, especially considering the Obamaesque press coming out of New York for Maazel’s successor, Alan Gilbert.

Lorin Maazel conducts in Danville.

Second, and somewhat contrary to the first presumption, Maazel being such a marquee name in classical music, you might assume he’d dominate the evening, and we’d be preoccupied watching the podium for the legendary maestro.

As often happens with presumptions, neither came true, this time in the best way possible.

The New York Philharmonic came to a sold-out Norton Center billed as one of the best orchestras in the United States, and it sounded like one of the best orchestras in the world. This was the orchestra of Mahler and Bernstein.

We often talk about the vast sonic difference between hearing music performed live and on recordings, and lord knows, we hear a lot of recordings and broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic. Thursday night, as much any time I’ve experienced in Central Kentucky, you really heard that difference. When the orchestra needed to turn on a dime, it turned on a pinhead. Crescendos lifted the Norton Center’s Newlin Hall and pastoral passages were as sublime as the Boyle County countryside.

The orchestra impressed from the beginning, Hector Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture springing off the stage, highlighted by Thomas Stacy’s English horn solo.

The Philharmonic played emotional pieces with the zeal they warrented, including Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor and Maurice Ravel’s arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. From the crystalline opening trumpets, Pictures was the evening’s starkest example of live vs. Memorex, and it came across as stunning as newly restored print of a Technicolor classic.

Looking over the roster, it is striking how many of the Philharmonic’s musicians are well-known names in their own rights: concertmaster Glenn Dicterow, cellist Carter Brey, clarinetists Stanley Drucker and Mark Nuccio, trumpeter Philip Smith, horn player Philip Myers and several others, all of whom were playing up to their reputations Thursday. Oboist Liang Wang seems to think he has the best job in the world, based on the zeal with which he played.

Notice, we’ve been talking about the orchestra.

Far from the podium showboat, Maazel was a modest presence who helped his orchestra shine. He had a subtle stick, seeming to elicit the sharpest passages with the most casual waves of his baton. At least on this night of a colorful program and two encores, Maazel looked like a hard act to follow.

A note, lest it seems like the big band has come to the provinces and easily impressed the country folk: The last time I saw the New York Philharmonic was at Lincoln Center in 2007, and it was far from impressive: some indifferent Beethoven followed by a hesitant concert version of an Alexander Zemlinsky opera under James Conlon’s baton. Maybe it was simply an off night, because this sounded like a much different group onstage in Danville.

Norton Center director George Foreman presents Lorin Maazel a certificate that makes him a Kentucky Colonel. Photo by Colin Misbach | Centre College.

Norton Center director George Foreman has made it an unofficial mission to bring the Top 5 orchestras in America to his stage. Bringing the New York Philharmonic to this town of just over 15,000 was quite an achievement.

Note: While in the Bluegrass State, Maazel was made a Kentucky Colonel. He didn’t don the white suit and string tie, but he did get a very nice piece of paper to take back to New York.

Outgoing New York Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel will conduct the orchestra in Danville Thursday night. Photo by Chris Lee | New York Philharmonic.

It didn’t start as a grand plan, although it is an ambitious idea.

Early in his career as director of the ­Norton Center for the Arts at Centre ­College in Danville, George Foreman brought in the Cleveland Orchestra for a concert. The 1983 performance of music by Franz Schubert, Dmitri Shostakovich and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, under the baton of Eduardo Mata, was undoubtedly a coup for the still-young arts center, which has since presented a veritable who’s who of classical and pop artists.

And Foreman wondered: What if he could bring the top five American orchestras to Danville during his career?

Cleveland was a start on the list, which at the time appeared to include the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

“It was such a preposterous idea to bring all the great orchestras to Central ­Kentucky,” Foreman says.

It has been slow going, too.

It was 20 years before the next group, the Philadelphia Orchestra, played the ­Norton Center in 2003. But Foreman’s unofficial series seems to be picking up speed with Thursday’s appearance by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by outgoing music director Lorin Maazel. It took only six years to book Foreman’s third major.

The New York Philharmonic’s appearance will be its first Kentucky concert in more than 35 years. The orchestra’s last appearance in the ­commonwealth was at the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum in September 1973.

“What fills Memorial Coliseum other than winning Wildcats?” the Lexington Leader review asked, “Obviously the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with Pierre Boulez.”

That concert attracted 9,000-11,000 patrons. It will be a considerably smaller crowd in the Norton Center’s 1,430-seat Newlin Hall on Thursday, but there is still a lot of excitement surrounding the concert by one of the majors.

The infrequency of major orchestra concerts helps explain that buzz, in part. But there is the reason you don’t see major orchestras on the Norton Center or anyone else’s schedule every season.

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For the day-after-New Year’s Weekender, Scott the editor asked me and the other Herald-Leader critics to weigh in on what we are looking forward to in 2009. Here’s my list of local arts events.

Gil Shaham performs Valentines Day at the Singletary Center.

Violin virtuosos: Early in the year, we will receive visits from two of the hottest ­violinists on the planet: Joshua Bell in recital with pianist Jeremy Denk on Jan. 26 at the Norton Center for the Arts in Danville; and Gil Shaham performing with the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra, on Feb. 14 at the Singletary Center for the Arts. Either one of the guys coming to town would be a big deal. To get both violin ­virtuosos less than a month from each other is huge.

Silas House’s new play: In 2005, the Kentucky author made his debut as a playwright with The Hurting Part, a play with the familiarity of characters close to our homes, sketched with great drama and wonderful language. In April, Actors Guild of Lexington is scheduled to present House’s second stage effort, and it will be interesting to see whether a new Kentucky playwright is indeed emerging.

TBA’s first season: In April, we will learn who is going to take the baton for the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra and lead the orchestra into the future. After 37 years of George Zack on the podium and two years of a search for a music director, it will be fascinating to see how this person settles in, what he or she will program, and what sort of public face he or she will bring to the Philharmonic.

River of Time: In 1999, University of Kentucky music composition professor Joseph Baber wrote An American Requiem, a powerful choral and orchestral work that seemed a bit like putting Ken Burns’ The Civil War into a classical composition. River of Time, Baber’s opera set to be premiered by UK Opera Theatre in the fall, will mine the same period, telling the tale of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood in Kentucky and the impact of his presidency.

The economy: Do I look ahead to this with anticipation or dread? It all depends on whether the country’s financial status continues to deteriorate or starts to turn around. Either way, it will dictate what arts groups do in 2009-10, and a severe financial downturn could irrevocably alter the arts landscape in Central Kentucky and across the nation.

Here are a few other things I’m looking forward to on the national stage:

New movies from Kentucky’s A-listers: Johnny Depp and George Clooney are notably absent from the awards race this year, but 2009 sees both with fresh, intriguing projects. Depp’s highest profile film has him playing gangster John Dilinger in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, due in July. Clooney is starring in Men Who Stare at Goats, the feature film directoral debut for his Good Night, and Good Luck co-writer Grant Heslov, a film about a U.S. military unit that uses the paranormal against its enemies. Depp and Clooney have other projects coming as well.

Other movies: We’re back with that old saw that Hollywood can’t make anything but sequels these days, and there are plenty this year, including a new Transformers and Harry Potter. A few reach farther into the past, and I am intrigued to see how Star Trek (sans Shatner) and Terminator (sans the Governator) fare with new visions.

Alan Gilbert taking over the New York Philharmonic: Like here in Lexington, New York’s leading band will get a new conductor starting in the fall. Unlike the recent line of venerable old conductors that have conducted the NY Phil, Gilbert promises to bring a new profile to what should be, but often is not, one of America’s leading orchestras. BTW, the NY Phil comes to Danville with outgoing conductor Lorin Maazel March 5.

Sean Watkins and Jon Foreman are Fiction Family.

Jon Foreman’s new project: The Switchfoot frontman’s solo EP’s were some of last year’s best music. He starts 2009 in collaboration with Nickle Creek’s Sean Watkins for Fiction Family. Speaking of Christian rock, I am also looking forward to new music — finally! — from Rebecca St. James.

The Obama administration: We haven’t heard a Presidential candidate or President-elect talk about the arts nearly as much as Barack Obama. His campaign included an arts platform, and both his campaign and transition team featured arts policy advisors, so it will be very interesting to see what kind of action this translates into. We’re talking about this more this weekend at le blog and in Sunday’s Herald-Leader Arts+Life section.

New York Philharmonic music director-designate Alan Gilbert in action. Photo by Mats Lundquist | IMG Artists.

While the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra’s conductor search has us contemplating what a changing of the baton in the Bluegrass might mean, we can check out how the same sort of change might impact a bigger band.

Anyone up for a drive?

Next weekend, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra will perform with conductor Alan Gilbert, the conductor-designate of the New York Philharmonic. Then in March, you can travel to Danville and see the New York Phil with its outgoing conductor, Lorin Maazel, the man Gilbert is to succeed.

If you want to do a little projecting, you can watch the Philharmonic in March and contemplate how it might look and sound under the guy you saw lead the Cincinnati Symphony in December.

Either way, the changing of conductors is something we have not seen much of here with George Zack having served as the Lexington Philharmonic’s music director for 38 years. For New York, it hasn’t been nearly that long. Maazel took the podium in 2002. Four conductors have actually passed through the New York Phil since Zack came to Lexington.

But Gilbert comes to the New York orchestra with Obama-esque expectations for change in many circles, including critics.

“I’ve heard Gilbert give several powerful performances of late,” The New Yorker’s critic Alex Ross wrote on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, when Gilbert was announced in July 2007. “He is a man with an inquisitive, contemporary mind. If all goes well, the Philharmonic will be a markedly different, more vibrant organization in a few years’ time.”

Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote, “The Philharmonic’s administrators, in what seemed like trial balloons, had been dropping the name of this excellent 40-year-old conductor (he is now 42) and New York native for some months. But like many other longtime Philharmonic watchers who have fretted over the future of this great but artistically staid orchestra, I thought that they would never have the courage do it. I am glad to be proved wrong.

“Mr. Gilbert is an unpretentious musician with no whiff of the formidable maestro about him. And that is just what makes him such a refreshing choice for the Philharmonic.”

New York is a town with a large, extremely opinionated music community, so it is not surprising that the announcement of a new conductor comes with a lot of expectations for what he will do with the institution.

So what do we expect?

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