New World Symphony (Page 3)

As we advance more toward the present, Horowitz's concentration on institutions gets entangled with his own biases in an unsettling way: Lincoln Center bad, Brooklyn Academy of Music good. This is tendentious on its face. BAM was once a trailblazer, but as Brooklyn has become an interior suburb of Manhattan, BAM has cherished its own conservative tradition: the music of Glass, Reich and Laurie Anderson. Horowitz is of course correct that orchestral performance standards at the Met had sharply declined by the 1960s, and that the synergy promised by grouping the Met, City Opera, the Philharmonic and other companies all on West 65th Street has never been truly fulfilled. But did the new Met look "cheap"? Does James Levine lack "a public personality" and a "highly delineated institutional vision"? Horowitz rightly lauds the work of Valery Gergiev (whom he and Lichtenstein brought to BAM long before the Met grabbed him) but neglects to mention the Russian conductor's shallow technique and lack of discipline. (And did Marian Anderson really make her Met debut in La forza del destino?) The innovative programming that Jane Moss has brought to Lincoln Center--and the similar work of the late Judith Arron at Carnegie Hall--goes uncredited.

Horowitz diligently lays out the considerable problems that face American classical music today, and his warnings cannot go unheeded. Yet his verdict that "it would be naïve to deny the greater freshness of the entire enterprise before 1950" is dismal and counterproductive. It may not even be true. He whines that an "average Carnegie Hall season of the 1920's might list recitals by (among many others) Backhaus, Casals, Cortot, Flesch, Gieseking, Hofmann, Hubermann, Landowska, [Vladimir] Horowitz, Szigeti, and Thibaud." It doesn't get much better than that. But if the author picked up his 2004-'05 Carnegie Hall calendar, he could note appearances by Renée Fleming, Ian Bostridge, Richard Goode, Dawn Upshaw, Christian Tetzlaff, Daniel Barenboim, Mitsuko Uchida and a whole series of concerts with Leif Ove Andsnes--not to mention a parade of magnificent orchestras and chamber groups. The pianist Gary Graffman has recalled that when he was growing up during the so-called "golden age," Carnegie never sold out unless a Horowitz, a Heifetz or a Rubinstein was onstage.

Imprisoned in a marketing culture, we all expect too much. Horowitz wants to point the way to a vital future, and he is right to instill in us a proper sense of shame. But his visions are haunted by ghosts.

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