Carnegie Hall is “trying to turn left and turn right simultaneously. It wants to bring in a downtown-ish clientele while acquiring a stable base of Philharmonic subscribers. This urge to absorb everything typifies the modus operandi of Sanford Weill, the chairman of the Carnegie board, who is also the outgoing chief executive of Citigroup. Weill made his name in the financial world by engineering a series of spectacular mergers; he ingeniously erased the distinction between brokering and banking by combining Salomon, Smith Barney and Citibank under one roof. He now wishes to apply the philosophy of synergy to New York’s artistic life. The sort of logic that brought us AOL Time Warner is creating Philharmonic Carnegie Zankel.”