Category: AJBlogs

Reunion 7Tet (Rob Bargad and others), A Field Of You (Barnette)
Once a year, a band of musicians who go back a long way together gather for a two-night gig at a Manhattan jazz club. Last time around, they made a side trip to a recording studio.

Really, Metropolitan Opera and New York Phil, is this your updated classical music marketing?

As an admirer of the late Jack Whitten’s paintings, I welcomed the chance to see his little-known, previously unexhibited wood sculptures and mixed-media assemblages now on view in the Met Breuer. But the considerable pleasures to be derived from this admirable show were partly undermined by its subtle but substantive commercial overtones.

No, not that handkerchief, the one that convinces Othello that his wife has been unfaithful.

You’d think I might love it when the Met Opera and the New York Philharmonic hyped their new seasons with these posters, done in the most up to date corporate marketing style. But I don’t love it. To me these posters don’t, simply as advertising, do much to make their case. And they promise things that aren’t going to happen.

To be sustainable, community engagement must benefit the arts organization in tangible ways. To be supported institutionally, the path to ticket sales, funding, and public policy must be articulated and tracked. A principal difficulty in this is that in order to accomplish these gains we must do work in marketing, funding, and advocacy that we’ve almost never done before.

Opera singers aren’t brought up to be as enterprising as Anthony Roth Costanzo. But few have his resume: He’s a child Broadway star-turned Princeton student-turned countertenor. Was Stephen Sondheim’s great networking song, “Putting it Together,” playing in the background when David Patrick Stearns met up with Costanzo a few weeks ago? No, but it should’ve been.

Rembrandt: Painter as Printmaker, which opened Sept. 16 at the Denver Art Museum, showcases the known glories of his work—but with an eye-opening twist.