May 12, 2011

What Good Is Sitting Alone in Your Room? Cabaret Is a Steal By ERIK PIEPENBURG

Fans of the American Songbook can get their fix of torch songs and 11 o’clock numbers on almost any night in New York. This weekend alone brings the husband-and-wife duo of Jason Danieley and Marin Mazzie to the Café Carlyle; K T Sullivan saluting Dorothy Fields at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel; and Nnenna Freelon covering songs made popular by Lena Horne at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency.

But in tough economic times a night at one of those venerable Manhattan rooms can cost a small fortune. Seats at the Carlyle, for example, are $40 to $135; add cocktails and dinner, and a night out for two requires a few hundred dollars. Luckily, for thrifty lovers of standards there are several night spots in New York where the repertory is being sung for a song.

At the 70-seat cabaret theater at the Duplex in the West Village, the cover charge is never more than $20 and a moderately priced two-drink minimum.  On a recent night the singer Colleen McHugh and a jazz trio — the pianist Chuck Larkin, the guitarist Sean Harkness and the bassist Steve Doyle — performed an intimate show that included Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” Cole Porter’s “I’m in Love Again” and Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern’s “April Fooled Me.”

At the Laurie Beechman Theater, a 100-seat space in Clinton, the actress Emily Bergl began a recent evening by asking the audience, “Do you ever feel you were born in the wrong era?”

 “Yes!” shouted the crowd. And with that Ms. Bergl and her pianist, G. Scott Lacy, jump-kicked into a 90-minute set that included Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy” and the Fats Waller classic “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

Bob Bokor, who was in the front row, said afterward: “I’m a dance music and ’70s rock guy. This isn’t normally my style. But I wanted a change. I enjoyed it.”

Sidney Myer, the booking manager at Don’t Tell Mama, a cabaret space on West 46th Street in the theater district, described the Duplex and the Beechman — as well as the Metropolitan Room, Le Poisson Rouge, Joe’s Pub and Cast Party at Birdland — as proving grounds for performers who come to New York with nothing more than a voice and a dream.

“Traditionally, cabaret in New York is the first and only door that’s open to people when they come here,” Mr. Myer said. “Before anyone knows anyone to put them in a show, they put themselves in their own show.”

That’s a bonus for audiences with limited funds. A show at Don’t Tell Mama, Mr. Myer said, “costs less than parking your car.” Ms. McHugh said that her show was “less than a soda and movie tickets.” And both the Duplex and Don’t Tell Mama offer separate piano bars with no cover.

For Ms. McHugh, 43, cabaret lets her indulge in music she’s come to feel passionate about. “I’d always been a Top 40 girl growing up as a child of the ’80s,” she said.  “But this is always the soundtrack that was on in the background.”

The American Songbook is an umbrella term for popular music from the ’20s through the ’60s, whether from Broadway, Tin Pan Alley or Hollywood. Its songwriters include the likes of Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, with Fields being one of the few women in the overwhelmingly male bunch.

“ ‘The American Songbook’ sounds like this thing that your mom liked or you were supposed to study in college,” said Ms. McHugh, who works by day as a writer and producer at WNET-TV.  “But then people say, oh, ‘Stormy Weather’? I love that. That’s Harold Arlen? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Harold Arlen.’  Then I do a Harold Arlen show, and my friends that I force to come love every song.”

During Ms. Bergl’s show, perhaps as a nod to the younger people there who knew her from appearances on “Desperate Housewives,” she stripped from a full-length gown into a leg-baring beaded unitard and delivered a torch-song version of Madonna’s “Material Girl.” The performance cost $20, with a $15 food-and-drink minimum.

“At one point in time it was cheaper to see a Broadway show than it was to see a movie,” Ms. Bergl, 36, said before her performance.  “I want to do a show where you can spend $20 or $25 to get in, maybe you have to buy a couple of drinks, but you have an evening of live entertainment.”

For many singers the downtown cabaret scene is a good fit, though performing in a more gilded room remains an aspiration. “I have my dreams-slash-delusions of grandeur of moving my way uptown, like the Jeffersons,” Ms. McHugh said.  “But being downtown and having this opportunity to be at an accessible and affordable place that lets me try out new material every month is exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Not that cheap comes at the expense of quality.

“There are so many people working in these clubs that have Broadway credits,” Mr. Myer said.  “When you walk into a piano bar you’re hearing talent that you’d hear in another setting for more money.  But the economy has prevented people from having their own showcase.”

He continued: “Remember, you don’t start out as an oak at the Oak Room.  You were an acorn somewhere first.”

CAST PARTY AT BIRDLAND 315 West 44th Street, Clinton; (212) 581-3080, castpartynyc.com.

DON’T TELL MAMA 343 West 46th Street, Clinton; (212) 757-0788, donttellmamanyc.com.

THE DUPLEX 61 Christopher Street, at Seventh Avenue South, West Village; (212) 255-5438, theduplex.com.

JOE’S PUB 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; (212) 967-7555, joespub.com.

LAURIE BEECHMAN THEATER 407 West 42nd Street, Clinton; (212) 695-6909, westbankcafe.com.

LE POISSON ROUGE 158 Bleecker Street, near Thompson Street, Greenwich Village; (212) 505-3474, lepoissonrouge.com.

METROPOLITAN ROOM 34 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; (212) 206-0440, metropolitanroom.com.

A Director of Classics, Focused on Conscience By ROBERT BERKVIST

A Director of Classics, Focused on Conscience By ROBERT BERKVIST

Sidney Lumet, a director who preferred the streets of New York to the back lots of Hollywood and whose stories of conscience — “12 Angry Men,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Verdict,” “Network” — became modern American film classics, died Saturday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

His stepdaughter, Leslie Gimbel, said the cause was lymphoma.

“While the goal of all movies is to entertain,” Mr. Lumet once wrote, “the kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. It stimulates thought and sets the mental juices flowing.”

Social issues set his own mental juices flowing, and his best films not only probed the consequences of prejudice, corruption and betrayal, but also celebrated individual acts of courage.

In his first film, “12 Angry Men” (1957), he took his cameras into a jury room where the pressure mounted as one tenacious and courageous juror, played by Henry Fonda, slowly convinced the others that the defendant on trial for murder was, in fact, innocent. (Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court said the film had an important influence on her law career.)

Almost two decades later, Mr. Lumet’s moral sense remained acute when he ventured into satire with “Network” (1976), perhaps his most acclaimed film. Based on Paddy Chayefsky’s biting script, the film portrays a television anchorman who briefly resuscitates his fading career by launching on-air tirades against what he perceives as the hypocrisies of American society.

The film starred William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch as the commentator turned attack dog whose proclamation to the world at large — “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” — became part of the American vernacular.

“Network” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best film and best director, and won four: best actor (Mr. Finch), best actress (Ms. Dunaway), best original screenplay (Mr. Chayefsky) and best supporting actress (Beatrice Straight).

Honorary Oscar

Yet for all the critical success of his films and despite the more than 40 Academy Award nominations they drew, Mr. Lumet (pronounced loo-MET) never won an Oscar for directing, though he was nominated four times. (The other nominations were for “12 Angry Men,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “The Verdict.”)

Only in 2005 did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences present him with an honorary Academy Award. Manohla Dargis, writing in The New York Times, called it a “consolation prize for a lifetime of neglect.”

In 2007, in an interview that was videotaped to accompany this obituary online, Mr. Lumet was asked how it felt to receive an Academy Award at long last. He replied, “I wanted one, damn it, and I felt I deserved one.”

That he was more a creature of New York than of Hollywood may have had something to do with his Oscar night disappointments. For Mr. Lumet, location mattered deeply, and New York mattered most of all. He was the quintessential New York director.

“Locations are characters in my movies,” he wrote. “The city is capable of portraying the mood a scene requires.”

He explored New York early on in “The Pawnbroker” (1964), the story of a Holocaust survivor, played by Rod Steiger, numbed and hardened against humanity by the horrors he has endured, who deals with racketeers in his Harlem pawnshop until his conscience is reawakened by a vicious crime on his doorstep.

‘Serpico’

The city loomed large in Mr. Lumet’s several examinations of the criminal justice system. Police corruption particularly fascinated him, beginning with “Serpico” (1973). The film, based on a book by Peter Maas, was drawn from a real-life drama involving two New York City police officers, David Durk and Frank Serpico, who told David Burnham, a reporter for The New York Times, that they had ample evidence of police graft and corruption.

Publication of their story led to the mayoral appointment of a commission to investigate the charges and ultimately to major reforms. Both the book and the film concentrated on Detective Serpico, played by Al Pacino, and his efforts to change the system. Mr. Pacino’s performance brought him an Oscar nomination.

Mr. Lumet returned to the theme in 1981 with “Prince of the City,” for which he shared screenwriting credit with Jay Presson Allen. Based on the book by Robert Daley, the film dealt with an ambitious detective, portrayed byTreat Williams, who goes undercover to gather evidence for an investigative commission and who winds up alienated and alone after being manipulated into destroying the lives and careers of many of those around him.

Mr. Lumet focused on criminals, rather than the police, in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), telling the story (again, based on fact) of a botched attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank. Mr. Pacino again starred, this time as Sonny, the leader of an amateurish gang of bank robbers whose plans go awry and who winds up taking hostages and demanding jet transport to a foreign country. It turns out that Sonny, although he has a wife at home, had planned the robbery to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. In 2009, the film was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

New York, or at least a fantasy version of it, was even the backdrop for Mr. Lumet’s most uncharacteristic film, “The Wiz,” his 1978 musical version of the “The Wizard of Oz” starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. Roundly panned, it was also a box-office failure.

By the time he finished shooting “Night Falls on Manhattan” in 1996, Mr. Lumet had made 38 films, 29 of them on location in New York City. That film, written by Mr. Lumet and based on another Daley novel, “Tainted Evidence,” once again looked at the justice system as it moved from a shootout with drug dealers into a revealing courtroom trial.

The courthouse was one of Mr. Lumet’s favorite arenas for drama, beginning with “12 Angry Men.” He returned to it again in “The Verdict” (1982), with a screenplay by David Mamet and a cast led by Paul Newman as a down-at-the-heels lawyer who redeems himself and his career when he represents a malpractice victim in a legal battle with a hospital.

But Mr. Lumet’s concerns could also range more broadly, to issues of national survival itself. One of the most sobering films of the cold war era was his 1964 adaptation of Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s novel, “Fail-Safe,” a taut examination of the threat of accidental nuclear war, with Henry Fonda as the president of the United States and a young Larry Hagman as his Russian-speaking interpreter. The film concluded with a harrowing suggestion of an atomic blast on American soil, rendered as a series of glimpses of ordinary life — children playing, pigeons taking wing — simply stopping. The scenes were from the streets of New York.

Sidney Lumet was born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia to Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Wermus, both actors in Yiddish theater. His father was born in Poland and moved his family to New York when Sidney was a baby and joined the Yiddish Art Theater. By the time he was 4, Sidney was appearing onstage with his father, and he went on to make his Broadway debut in 1935 as a street kid in Sidney Kingsley’s “Dead End.” He appeared in several more Broadway shows, including Maxwell Anderson’s “Journey to Jerusalem” in 1940, in which he played the young Jesus.

After wartime service as a radar technician in the Far East, Mr. Lumet returned to New York and started directing Off Broadway and in summer stock. His big break came in 1950, when he was hired by CBS and became a director on the television suspense series “Danger.” Other shows followed, including the history series “You Are There.”

His career soared in 1953, when he began directing original plays for dramatic series on CBS and NBC, including “Studio One,” “Playhouse 90” and “Kraft Television Theater,” eventually adding some 200 productions to his credits. He returned to the theater to direct Albert Camus’s “Caligula,” with Kenneth Haigh as the Roman emperor, and George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman,” among other plays.

Among the highlights of Mr. Lumet’s television years were a full-length production of Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Iceman Cometh,” with Jason Robards as the salesman Hickey, and “12 Angry Men,” which he directed for television before turning it into his first film.

Some of Mr. Lumet’s early films had their origin in the theater. He directed Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando in “The Fugitive Kind” (1960), an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play “Orpheus Descending”; he traveled abroad to film part of Arthur Miller’s “View From the Bridge” (1962) in Paris, with Raf Vallone, Maureen Stapleton and Carol Lawrence, completing the film on the Brooklyn waterfront; and he returned to the world of O’Neill to film “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962), with Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson as the tormented Tyrones. His 1968 adaptation of Chekhov’s “Sea Gull,” however, was generally deemed uneven despite a stellar cast that included James Mason, Simone Signoret and Vanessa Redgrave.

A trainload of stars turned out for Mr. Lumet’s 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” a project that took him abroad again, this time to Britain, France and Turkey, to film the famous whodunit in which the detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) must single out a murderer from a crowd of suspects that included Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery and John Gielgud.

There was a run of less-than-successful films, including “Running on Empty” (1988), with Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti as ’60s radicals still in hiding from the F.B.I. 20 years after participating in a bombing; the police drama “Q & A” (1990), with a screenplay by Mr. Lumet, about a racist New York detective (played by Nick Nolte); and “Critical Care” (1997), a satiric jab at the American health care system.

Return to Television

In 1995, Mr. Lumet published a well-received memoir, “Making Movies,” in which he summed up his view of directorial style: “Good style, to me, is unseen style. It is style that is felt.”

He returned to television in 2001 as executive producer, principal director and one of the writers of a new courtroom drama for cable television, “100 Centre Street” (the title was the address of the Criminal Court Building in Lower Manhattan). The series, which ran for two seasons on A&E, had an ensemble cast, with Alan Arkin as an all-too-forgiving judge known as Let-’Em-Go Joe.

The director seemed immune to advancing age. Before long, he was behind the camera again. “Find Me Guilty” (2006), which starred Vin Diesel, was a freewheeling account of the events surrounding the federal prosecution of a notorious New Jersey crime family.

And he marked his 83rd year with the 2007 release of his last feature film, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” the bleakly riveting story of two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) propelled by greed into a relentless cycle of mayhem. The film drew raves.

Mr. Lumet’s first three marriages — to the actress Rita Gam, Gloria Vanderbilt and Gail Jones, the daughter of Lena Horne — ended in divorce. He married Mary Gimbel in 1980. She survives him. Besides his stepdaughter, Ms. Gimbel, he is also survived by two daughters he had with Ms. Jones, Amy Lumet and Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter; a stepson, Bailey Gimbel; nine grandchildren and a great-grandson. Mr. Lumet also had a home in East Hampton, on Long Island.

Ms. Dargis called Mr. Lumet “one of the last of the great movie moralists” and “a leading purveyor of the social-issue movie.” Yet Mr. Lumet said he was never a crusader for social change. “I don’t think art changes anything,” he said in The Times interview. So why make movies? he was asked.

“I do it because I like it,” he replied, “and it’s a wonderful way to spend your life.”

The Showboats Must Go On (Even on Their Nights Off) By ERIK PIEPENBURG

uly 5, 2010
The Showboats Must Go On (Even on Their Nights Off) By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Bites from the Broadway bug can be deep, incurable and — for both actors and fans — easy to scratch, even on nights when not much is playing onstage.

Instead of resting on their nights off or going home after the curtain falls, many Broadway performers head to places across the city where no show tune or pop song is wasted. Watching them are Facebook-generated micro-fan clubs, fellow actors, Broadway hangers-on and, if kismet allows, producers, casting agents or other theatrical dream makers.

The options are plentiful on Monday nights, when most Broadway theaters are dark. One of the newest is at Bar-Tini Ultra Lounge, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen, and is presided over by the heavily mascaraed drag performer Paige Turner. On a recent Monday, Russell Fischer, who plays Joey and understudies the role of Frankie Valli in “Jersey Boys,” hopped on the small stage around 11 p.m. and performed two very non-Broadway songs (by Maroon 5 and Gnarls Barkley). He also auctioned off signed “Jersey Boys” posters to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

“This is a great way to express myself,” Mr. Fischer said. “It’s so much more fun than staying home on my night off.”

The crowds at these events know their stuff. On that same evening a group of young men sang along to Paige Turner’s lip-synched performance of “The Spark of Creation” from the musical “Children of Eden.” And during a round of Name That Tune it took the crowd only five notes to shout out the identity of “The Trolley Song” from the film “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

In the audience was Joe Aaron Reid, enjoying a night out with friends before leaving for the Williamstown Theater Festival to appear in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Mr. Reid, who recently appeared in the Broadway revival of “Finian’s Rainbow,” said deciding whether to stay at home on his nights off was determined by how well his Broadway work week had gone.

“Everything depended on how good I was that week,” he said. “If I was good, I’d go out. If not, it was better to stay home.”

At the long-running Musical Mondays night at Splash, a gay nightclub in Chelsea, chorus boys (and their female friends) sing along to videos of Broadway musical numbers, movie clips and excerpts from Tony Award ceremonies past. (“And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” and “Defying Gravity” are favorites.) Around midnight the club turns into Curtain Call, a song-and-dance show hosted by Emily McNamara at which Broadway stars can sometimes be spotted performing.

Actors and other theater creatures are familiar to Jim Caruso, the host of Cast Party, a Monday night open-mike show at Birdland in the theater district, now in its seventh year. Mr. Caruso said off-night events like his, in which actors fresh off the bus have been known to mingle with the likes of Liza Minnelli and Idina Menzel, remain popular because they allow members of the Broadway world to pull a Jerome Kern and showboat.

“We’re all showoffs to a certain extent,” said Mr. Caruso, who appeared in “Liza’s at the Palace” on Broadway. “If you’re in a show, especially if you’re in the ensemble, maybe you’re not showing off what you do brilliantly. At Cast Party you can blow it out.” (Monday night at Birdland Mr. Caruso is to present a special benefit for Nashville flooding relief efforts called Singin’ in the Shower.)

Performing on nights off may also help actors find work. Mr. Caruso said Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist of “Wicked,” had once appeared at Cast Party and “talked to people about auditioning” for his show. “People have made some incredible contacts in that room,” Mr. Caruso said.

Broadway performers also use off-night and after-hours events as a way to catch up with friends who work more traditional 9-to-5 schedules. Performers “want to feel like they get a night out as well,” said Brandon Cutrell, who hosts After Party on Friday nights at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Hell’s Kitchen. “Even though they have a two-show day the next day.”

A recent guest at After Party was the comic actress Jackie Hoffman, now playing Grandma in “The Addams Family” on Broadway. Ms. Hoffman said her main reason for performing was to promote her CD of original songs. But she acknowledged that playing in front of a small crowd was intimate in a way the large Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where “The Addams Family” is playing, was not.

“In the show I’m in now I’m not a star,” she said. “But if I go to some low-end cabaret night, I can be the star.”

Not to mention that typical audience members for Ms. Hoffman’s solo shows, with their jokes about terrorism and cancer, probably aren’t lining up for “Addams Family” tchotchkes.

Ms. Hoffman said the audiences at “The Addams Family” were mostly families. “But these kinds of places are my crowd,” she added, “gays and bitter people.”

Blame the “Glee”-ification of the theater world, but at many of these musical evenings the set lists go beyond show tunes. A Pat Benatar anthem or a Christina Aguilera ballad can be a welcome respite after singing “Circle of Life” eight times a week.

“The people who come to my show just want to hear belting,” said Ben Cameron, the host of Broadway Sessions, Tuesday nights at Therapy, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen. “This is not the place to try out your new Weill song.”

Fatigue, either physical or vocal, doesn’t seem to stop many performers. Cheering on Mr. Fischer at Bar-Tini was Nova Thomas, who gave him voice lessons at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. Ms. Thomas said that while she, an opera singer, would normally rest her voice on a night off, she encouraged Mr. Fisher to perform on his.

“I reminded him to embrace the joy of singing and making music,” she said. “This is reminding him of why he sings.”

The Ten Best Cultural Events of 2009 Posted by Claudia Roth Pierpont

December 7, 2009
The Ten Best Cultural Events of 2009 Posted by Claudia Roth Pierpont

The ten best cultural events (that I managed to see, hear, or read) of 2009:

1. Alice Munro, "Too Much Happiness": It is wonderful to live in a moment when Alice Munro publishes a new story collection; I wonder if this isn't the way kids felt about getting their hands on the next volume of Harry Potter. As ever, Munro's stories have the density, the complication, the sheer substantial reality (and surprise) of life, never mind of most novels. There is a teasing reference in one of these stories to a character's disappointment at finding that a book she has just purchased is a collection of short stories, rather than a novel: "It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside." Munro has thrown those gates wide open; the air is exhilarating out here.

2. Maile Meloy, "Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It": Another bliss-making collection of short stories. Lighter than Munro, Meloy has a marvelous ear, characters who gain depth in just a few pages, and a haunting way with the American landscape.

3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy": An apparently modest and little-heralded show, by Met standards. One walked through rooms of majolica plates and cassone panels, fascinating if minor works that were carefully chosen to suggest a social ambience. And then, in the last room, one was confronted with two magnificent visiting Titians—"Venus with Cupid" from the Borghese and "Venus with An Organ Player" from the Prado—that formed a major exhibition in themselves. The Met, in its bounty, felt no need to hang a banner or otherwise advertise their presence. In the surprise and the quiet, it was possible to experience these overwhelming works as a kind of private discovery.

4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition "Beyond Babylon": A perfect demonstration of the Met's extraordinary match of intelligence and wealth, a borrowing of mostly unknown pieces from all over the world that filled out an educational master plan and made for intense historical excitement.

5. Sara Mearns in the first movement ("Tales of the Vienna Woods") of Balanchine's "Vienna Waltzes," with New York City Ballet: Joyous, exalted, flushed with youth and beauty and a thoroughly absorbing moment-by-moment care for detail.

6. Jeanette Delgado in Balanchine's "Square Dance," with Miami City Ballet, visiting at New York's City Center: A new vision of a beloved role, with ample technique fuelled by sheer delight.

7. Alexei Ratmansky's "On the Dnieper," at American Ballet Theater: In some ways a very literal ballet, with a libretto (set to Prokofiev's music) about a returning soldier, this new work was nonetheless remarkable for the way that Ratmansky brings metaphor to movement, a rare gift that allows his dances to touch deep imaginative chords and live on in the mind.

8. Ted van Griethuysen as Malvolio in the Washington-based Shakespeare Theater Company's "Twelfth Night," at Princeton's McCarter Theater: The capstone in an exceptional production (directed by Rebecca Taichman and far superior to Central Park's summer production). Van Griethuysen is the consummate character actor, and his Malvolio was both hysterically funny and genuinely sad.

9. Goldoni's "Trilogia della Villeggiatura" by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, performed at the Lincoln Center Festival: This visiting company, performing in Italian with English surtitles, gave a subtly bravura performance of a playwright—Venetian, eighteenth century—who is seldom (never?) performed in this country. Goldoni's play turned out to be both brilliantly comic and shockingly cynical, exposing a world both distant and very close. How one wishes for more!

10. The Metropolitan Opera's late-summer HD broadcast projections on the Met's façade at Lincoln Center: Populist heaven. In the dog days, with little else going on, the crowds gathered with their babies and their dogs and fell under the spell of one great opera after another. At the end of the evening, just after the big screen went dark, the Met's lights were switched on: the Chagalls and the chandeliers were suddenly, dazzlingly bright, and one had to marvel at how such a fundamentally ugly building can inspire so much love.
The Ten Best Cultural Events of 2009: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/the-ten-best-cultural-events-of-2009.html
http://snipurl.com/tv79m

Five Best Ten Best Posted by Ben Greenman

December 4, 2009
Five Best Ten Best Posted by Ben Greenman

First, I'm going to list all the lists that I drafted and discarded: Ten Best Albums of the Year, Ten Best Songs of the Year, Ten Best Album Covers of the Year, Ten Best Albums of the Decade, Ten Best Artists Who Passed Away Within the Last Decade. I discarded them because the desire to make lists was being exhausted by having to read other lists. Everywhere I went, I saw them—on blogs, in newspapers, on the tips of people's tongues. They were everywhere I turned and some places I didn't turn. Taken individually, they were proof of fandom, of a writer's interest in surveying the scene of pop music and applying some landscaping skills. Taken cumulatively, they were something more confusing and sinister: an attempt at expertise in a world where opinion is increasingly democratized.

But I am a scientist, and, as a result, to make sense (and nonsense) of those various issues, I decided to link to a handful of other lists, summarize their findings, and react to their top picks. I figured that visiting the blogs I sometimes visit would reflect, however imperfectly, on my own tastes, although that only turned out to be partly true (some of my favorite sites haven't made their lists yet, and some of the kinds of music I depend upon—hip-hop, say, or new records from artists who started back in the nineteen-fifties) are hardly represented. I also didn't want to go to the biggest sites and leave out smaller blogs; that would have been like doing a top-ten album list and only mentioning Beyonce and Rihanna. Without any further delay, here is my list of lists.

* Music Induced Euphoria

I don't know much about this blog other than that it's written by a music fan from the Bay Area, and that I like to read it now and again. Her profile note includes the somewhat presumptuous remark that "I spend all of my money on music and think you should do the same." Here, the top-ten list leans heavily on indie rock, with an emphasis on rock: Them Crooked Vultures made it, along with Julian Casablancas' solo début, Black Lips, and Phoenix. Her top pick was Telekinesis, a group that is, on album, basically the solo work of a Seattle musician named Michael Benjamin Lerner. When the self-titled record came out in April, I remember listening to it and thinking that it was a winsome, unassuming, but very emotionally solid group of pop songs. Evidently, Music Induced Euphoria agreed.

* Random Thoughts From the Revolution

Chris Queen, the proprietor of this blog, is a Georgia native who works as director of communications at Eastridge Community Church in Covington. His list is a mix of country (Pat Green), Beatle-derived (he talks about the Beatles remasters in his intro, and includes Peter Mayer's "Goodbye Hello"), and Christian (David Crowder Band, Hillsong United, Future of Forestry). His top pick is Gomez's "A New Tide," which I was surprised to find, since it is neither country, Beatles-derived, nor Christian; I also must respectfully disagree, since I found the record deeply uninteresting, and the fact that there was a song called "Win Park Slope" (the Brooklyn neighborhood where I live, and where some of the band members now live) irked me. On the other hand, Queen admits that even his favorites are flawed, which keeps his list from simple boosterism.

* Criticism as Inspiration

One of this blog's contributors posted a best-of list at the end of summer, which made things harder for the contributor who wanted to round up his year-end favorites. But he soldiered on, noting his disappointment that several of his favorite artists delivered subpar records this year (Morrissey, Pete Yorn, the Doves) and that some of the biggest releases had to be left off for other reasons ("I intentionally neglected to include U2's album, as I am unable to evaluate their work in isolation from their status/body of work"). What remains is a songwriter-heavy list that includes David Bazan's "Curse These Branches," Neko Case's "Middle Cyclone," The Mountain Goats' "The Life of the World To Come," Hayden's "The Place Where We Lived," and Regina Spector's "Far." It sounds like the list of a musically aware twentysomething until the remark that Passion Pit's "Manners" is "my kid's number one choice off my iPod."

* Stereogum

One of the problems with best-of-the-year lists is that the year's not over yet. What if Charlotte Gainsbourg's "IRM" or Mary J. Blige's "Stronger With Each Tear," which are coming out in late December, are career-defining masterpieces? For that reason, I went back to a different kind of list: the end-of-2008 lists that looked forward to releases slated for 2009. Stereogum's list basically covered only the first third of the year, and included albums from Dirty Projectors (Bitte Orca), M. Ward (Hold Time), and Neko Case (Middle Cyclone) that turned out to be some of the most decorated releases. On the other hand, there are mentions of groups like Blikk Fang (Kevin Barnes + MGMT) that turned out to be nothing more than a rumor.

* Sound Opinions Message Board

The Internet is all about processing a welter of voices, right? Your neighbor has a different sensibility than you, so how do you ensure that both his favorite record (some weird glitch-hop exercise that sounds like a sputtering appliance) and yours (pained country singer-songwriter) get counted? Well, one way is to start a thread on a well-attended message board like Sound Opinions. Since the first post calling for year-end lists, back on November 29th, there have been more than five hundred posts that nominate candidates, criticize nominations, suggest revisions in criteria, and so forth. There's no such thing as a clear winner here, which is part of the point; run through the jungle of posts and see what sticks. If there is consensus, it seems to point to the critically acclaimed alternative rock and songwriter albums that get most of the ink: Dirty Projectors, Neko Case, Lily Allen, Grizzly Bear, Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I heartily agree/disagree with these conclusions.
Five Best Ten Best: Goings On : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/goingson/2009/12/five-best-ten-best.html
http://snipurl.com/tv7eh

Saviors of the American Songbook By STEPHEN HOLDEN

October 26, 2008
Music
Saviors of the American Songbook
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

WHEN the 19th annual Cabaret Convention begins with the first of four concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Wednesday evening, a genre that has struggled for years below the mass-media radar will lift its collective voice in an annual appeal for attention and respect.

“Please listen,” that voice politely implores. “I am in danger of dying of neglect, and I have valuable knowledge gleaned from the American songbook and from show business history about love, memory, art and time. The magic I can conjure in a romantic cubbyhole where the lights are low, the wine flows and loved ones are at hand is like no other kind.”

The Rose Theater, the modern auditorium inside Jazz at Lincoln Center where the convention — part entertainment gala, part trade show for nightclub bookers — takes place, isn’t a candlelit nook, but it must suffice. Each evening, starting at 6, roughly a dozen performers (the roster changes nightly) will sing two songs each. Karen Akers, Paula West, Marilyn Maye, Mary Cleere Haran, Julie Wilson, Barbara Carroll, K T Sullivan, Tommy Tune and Barb Jungr are among this year’s most eagerly anticipated guests.

Most of the genre’s important male stars — Michael Feinstein, Tom Wopat, Jack Jones, Steve Tyrell and Brian Stokes Mitchell, to name five — are absent from the roster. But one of its most promising young male performers, Tony DeSare, a Sinatra acolyte in his early 30s who sings Prince as well as Johnny Mercer, will appear on Friday.

Cabaret venerates maturity more fervently than any other form of entertainment. Ms. Maye, Ms. Wilson and Ms. Carroll are all in their 80s, as are three of the genre’s other godmothers, Barbara Cook, Eartha Kitt and Elaine Stritch, and its unofficial godfather, Tony Bennett. All might be described as sages who take the long view. All are old enough to remember and have participated in the golden age of live entertainment that faded with the incursions of rock ’n’ roll and television. From the late 1940s through the mid-’60s there were several tiers of live entertainment in New York: glamorous hotel supper clubs like the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel and the Empire Room at the Waldorf-Astoria, high-end nightclubs like the Blue Angel, smaller hole-in-the-wall Midtown jazz clubs , and smaller boîtes and piano bars scattered through Manhattan where one could drop in for the price of a drink.

As the nightclub world has shrunk, that kind of informality is largely a thing of the past. The question also continually nags as to whether there is a young generation to carry on the tradition. The few younger stars, like Harry Connick Jr., Diana Krall and Michael Bublé, who have passed through cabaret and jazz clubs on their way to the national spotlight rarely look back.

Besides Mr. DeSare, the genre’s other most promising younger performers include the sultry Long Island pop-jazz singer Jane Monheit and Maude Maggart, a protégée of Andrea Marcovicci and Michael Feinstein. Ms. Maggart, who comes from a Hollywood show-business family (she is the older sister of Fiona Apple), sings Judy Collins and Joan Baez as well as Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.

The Cabaret Convention is produced by Donald Smith, executive director of the Mabel Mercer Foundation, an organization named after the great British-born chanteuse who died in 1984. It reflects the refined taste of Mr. Smith,a die-hard champion of the urbane nightclub ethos in which the spirits of Porter, Coward, the Gershwin brothers, Ms. Mercer and Bobby Short hover over concerts that summon fantasies of a long-vanished cafe society.

For all the obstacles Mr. Smith faces, his attitude toward the tradition he nurtures is philosophical and surprisingly upbeat. He said recently that he was encouraged by an increase in the number of cabarets outside New York, which with its proximity to Broadway remains the genre’s unchallenged hub.

But while cabaret has high-profile champions in the media, the dwindling coverage of cabaret in New York’s local newspapers is a bad omen.

“We’ve never had any corporate sponsorship,” Mr. Smith lamented. “And we haven’t gotten a nickel from any government arts program.”

Mr. Smith’s concept of cabaret is only one of many in a genre that also shades into Broadway, traditional jazz, rock and even world music. Because a cabaret is the best place for a theatrically trained Broadway performer to step out of a role, it is a natural adjunct to the musical theater. Where else but in a nightclub could Betty Buckley put aside her signature theater hits and bring her probing Method-style interpretations to jazz, rock and country material?

When the convention vacated its original home at Town Hall for Jazz at Lincoln Center, a new series, the Broadway Cabaret Festival, jumped into the breach. Created by Scott Siegel, who also produces the New York Nightlife Awards (the nightclub world’s equivalent of the Tonys), the festival, which completed its fourth season on Oct. 19, has become a primary showcase for ambitious young Broadway stars to test their wings as soloists.

The long-running Lyrics and Lyricists series at the 92nd St. Y and Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series also dip heavily into the cabaret world.

Some stars, like Mr. Connick, Ms. Krall, John Pizzarelli and Dianne Reeves, blur the lines between cabaret and jazz until they are virtually the same. But most don’t. Performers in Manhattan supper clubs are expected to create conceptually unified shows that follow an arc and include witty patter. Jazz musicians merely have to play sets that can be made up on the spot; talking is not required. The overlap between Manhattan’s high-end jazz clubs and its three major hotel-associated supper clubs, the Café Carlyle, Feinstein’s at Loews Regency and the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, is infrequent. And instrumental jazz has established almost no footing in cabaret, where a charismatic personality matters as much as musical talent.

Race has something to do with it. Even in multicultural New York, unspoken divisions persist to this day. Ashford and Simpson have triumphed at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency for three years running. But other African-American performers, like the great singing actress Lillias White, have fared disappointingly in the same club. At the Oak Room, Ms. West, an African-American pop-jazz singer, is the only performer of color to have established a loyal following.

The only truly multicultural venue in New York, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, has a high turnover of acts from every corner of music. It might more accurately be described as a hip musical clearinghouse than as a cabaret.

Many complain about the prices at Manhattan’s supper clubs, of which the Café Carlyle is the most expensive. There the cost for two tickets plus dinner for two (usually required) can run upwards of $500. Comparatively speaking, however, that is not much more than the price of dinner for two and good seats at a Broadway musical. Although hotel spokesmen, when pressed for details, are vague about the profitability of their cabarets, it is generally acknowledged that their profits are marginal at best.

The peak cabaret experience is a three-way relationship among singer, song (often a standard) and audience in which performers pour their life experiences in thematic shows using the American songbook as a platform; songs are stations in an autobiographical journey shared with the listener.

Cabaret connoisseurs know that a great nightclub show delivers a richer artistic experience than that offered by almost any Broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim’s excepted. A great example is Jessica Molaskey’s version of Billy Joel’s “Summer, Highland Falls.” Her rendition transforms lyrics that sounded peevish and awkwardly verbose on Mr. Joel’s 1976 album, “Turnstiles,” into an acute psychoanalytic dissection of a turbulent relationship that has reached an impasse.

Reinvented as a wistful bossa nova in which Ms. Molaskey’s husband, the scintillating jazz guitarist and crooner John Pizzarelli, inserts quotations from Antonio Carlos Jobím, “Summer, Highland Falls” makes you gasp at its truthfulness about the intractability of clashing personalities in a dissolving partnership. The Pizzarelli-Molasky duo, whose extended engagement at the Café Carlyle ends this Saturday, are as good as it gets in any entertainment medium.

Equally compelling is Ms. Jungr, a 54-year-old Briton with a gregarious music-hall personality and formidable acting skills whose interpretations of Jacques Brel, Nina Simone and Bob Dylan songs (her live version of “Just Like a Woman” can be seen on YouTube) make you hear them as though for the first time.

To coincide with the convention, Ms. Jungr, who is there on Saturday, and Ms. Maye, who appears on Wednesday, are playing return dates (Nov. 3 for Ms. Junger, Nov. 1 and 2 for Ms. Maye) at the Metropolitan Room, a small club in Chelsea where each recently enjoyed a sold-out engagement with cheering audiences.

The two-and-a-half-year-old Metropolitan Room — a former comedy club that seats 110, is reasonably priced and doesn’t serve dinner — has quickly ascended into New York’s leading showcase for talent ready to make the leap into uptown supper clubs or the stage. It is at New York’s lower-echelon clubs where professionalism gives way to vanity shows in which aspiring stars are expected to bring their friends to justify their booking.

But even the most acclaimed cabaret performers must wrestle with the hard economic realities of a field in which doing it for love is often the only reason to do it. After expenses, a midlevel performer who is paid $10,000 a week barely breaks even. The typical cabaret contract requires a performer to be exclusive to that club for at least six months.

For most performers, the usual avenues of publicity and promotion are closed. Morning television shows routinely turn down cabaret singers. If a performer comes from television there is a built-in audience, but with a caveat. Dixie Carter appeared regularly at the Café Carlyle, but when her television show “Designing Women” finished its run, her cabaret audience evaporated.

Most performers rely on reviews and word of mouth. Radio is of limited help. In New York City the disc jockey and author Jonathan Schwartz is the only influential champion of traditional popular music. Erudite and passionate, he has single-handedly boosted the careers of the Los Angeles pop-jazz singer Tierney Sutton, who appears regularly at Birdland, and kept alive the memory of Nancy LaMott, a gifted balladeer who died in 1995.

In the shouting, brawling world of mainstream pop, the essential qualities of a cabaret performance — intimacy, emotional vulnerability and interpretive subtlety — have little place. In many ways cabaret embodies artistic values that are the antithesis of those promoted by that monstrous star-making machine, “American Idol.” In Simon Cowell’s critical lexicon, the words “too cabaret” are a damning indictment.

“American Idol” treats singing as an Olympic-style competitive sport in which songs, edited into fragments, no longer tell stories. Their remains become heavily amplified exhibitions of stamina and ego by performers for whom youth, beauty and novelty matter as much as talent.

For the majority of Americans, live music is now an arena-ready event that exalts raw physical energy and the kind of prowess measurable in athletic terms. The typical concert is an orgiastic rite of communion between the public and celebrity. Demolished to make room for coliseums where blood sports rule, the romantic cubbyhole has become as anachronistic as the notion of privacy itself.

525,600 Minutes to Preserve By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

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September 21, 2008
525,600 Minutes to Preserve By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

“RENT” closed with the usual celebratory brouhaha. Hours before its final curtain on Sept. 7, the sidewalk in front of the Nederlander Theater, where the musical had played for more than a dozen years, was strewn with barricades signaling the potential presence of celebrity — or at least the expensively self-important. Gawkers piled up three or four deep behind the barriers, cellphones in picture-taking mode.

Sure enough, a freshly minted young tabloid star stepped out of a car and splashed into the glare of television cameras, looking at home in the spotlight, her long tresses curling picturesquely across her shoulders, beautiful accessory boyfriend huddled protectively (if a little shortly) at her elbow.

She was Blake Lively, a star of “Gossip Girl.” Or so I was told by the daughter of a colleague. And that Abercrombie boy was no mere human bangle but a star in his own right, Penn Badgley, of the same television series.

“Oh, my God, I’m such a teenager,” my informant added sheepishly, and charmingly, embarrassed by her excitement. She needn’t have been. In the presence of celebrities who cause paparazzi stampedes — even celebrities you’ve only vaguely heard of — most of us regress to jittery teendom just a little. She at least had the excuse of actually being a teenager.

Blake and Penn soon moved onto the red carpet, into the theater and presumably out of my life. (But by the way, when did soap actors begin acquiring the names of soap characters?) Yet as I watched “Rent,” I wondered what these two glittery young stars would make of the world conjured onstage by Jonathan Larson, an urban landscape in which hope and promise were shadowed by disease and despair. It is a milieu far removed from the New York of today — and thank goodness. While rents may be even more dizzyingly out of reach for struggling artists in new-millennium New York, a plague no longer casts a pall over the city’s creative community.

Today’s Blakes and Penns, born in the late 1980s, had not hit puberty when “Rent” opened on Broadway in 1996, after it scorched its way into history at its Off Broadway premiere at the New York Theater Workshop. Would they be perplexed by the frequent allusions to AZT, a problematic if promising early therapy for H.I.V.? Would they have any understanding of the grimmer details of what the characters go through?

For what struck me on my return to the show — which I had not seen on Broadway since shortly after it opened — was how deeply it is saturated in the anxious, dark, embattled mood of the moment in which it was created, when AIDS was ravaging the bohemian enclaves of New York and every other major city.

The passing of time can transform your perceptions of art. When I first saw “Rent,” I found some of its characters flimsy and stereotyped. (I admit I still cringe at the cheesy outfits of the drag-queen character, Angel; drag queens of my acquaintance were and are far more stylish.) At the time I was roughly the age of the East Villagers in the musical, and while I lived in Los Angeles for most of my 20s, I visited New York regularly and certainly moved among people a lot like them: recent college grads with more attitude and artistic aspirations than money.

Perhaps because I lived in a milieu similar to the one depicted onstage, in which the specter of early death seemed to cast its shadow everywhere, the immediacy of the show did not seem particularly remarkable. Maybe because the surface details of the characters’ experience were familiar to me, they seemed shallowly drawn onstage, sketched in shorthand. I suspect I overlooked the depth of feeling with which Larson wrapped a generation of young, ambitious and threatened characters in a musical embrace.

What impressed me most forcibly at the final performance was the empathetic reach of the writing, the generosity of spirit driving both words and music. Larson lived among and loved the people he was writing about, ached for their losses, expressed their fears, dreams and everyday indignities in sharp lyrics and evocative melodies that drew on both Broadway forms and pop and rock sounds.

One of the weaknesses that bothered me a dozen years ago — the ending that finds the doomed Mimi springing back to life after appearing to expire — strikes me today as a flaw that Larson may have recognized but could not bring himself to correct. The integrity of art must have seemed a less urgent priority than the dissemination of hope. The awkward affixing of a happy ending to a fundamentally tragic story was a form of prayer, a plea that life might imitate art. I probably rolled my eyes at this absurd resurrection in 1996; this time I fought back tears.

Larson’s book and lyrics are steeped in references to the physical and psychological struggles faced by people with AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s, before the drug cocktails that have made the disease more manageable. Four of the play’s main characters — the heroin-addicted Mimi; her ex-heroin-addict boyfriend, Roger; the black activist, Tom Collins; and his lover, Angel — are H.I.V.-positive. The musical also includes a sequence set at a support group for people with H.I.V. or AIDS. One of the show’s most moving songs — “Will I?” — consists of just three questions set to a simple, mournful, gently shaped melody, sung not by the principal characters but by the more anonymous members of the support group:

Will I lose my dignity?
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?

You probably need to have lived among gay men coming of age during the years when AIDS became a global calamity to recognize just how much bone-deep knowledge of the specific terrors of the time is packed into those three little lines.

They conjure the afflictions of the opportunistic infections that made the disease such a dreadful one; the stigma that was attached to it; the fear of dying lonely and abandoned; and the vague, oppressive, almost unbearable anxieties that young people — with the disease or living in terror of contracting it — had to live with every day. The epidemic left a psychic mark on a generation of artists as surely as the Vietnam War did; the difference is that many of the artists responding to AIDS ultimately succumbed to the condition, their mature responses to it never to be shown on gallery walls or in theaters.

Larson himself, of course, did not live to enjoy the global success of “Rent” or to see how, in just a few years, the fates of characters like Mimi, Roger and Angel would have been altered by advances in the treatment of AIDS. In one of the saddest circumstances in theater history he died at 35 of an aortic aneurysm after the final dress rehearsal of the Off Broadway run. (I should add that AIDS continues to claim lives today, in New York and across the globe, and the medical advances have inadvertently led to a disturbing ignorance about the realities of living with H.I.V.)

“Rent” has been a phenomenal success in New York and around the world, and the story does not stop with the end of its first Broadway run. The final performance, filmed in high-definition digital video, will be screened this week at some 500 movie theaters in the United States and Canada. (Details are at thehotticket.net/rent.) A new tour, featuring Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp from the original cast, begins in Cleveland in January.

And while you might expect that a musical grounded so specifically in a historical moment would have a date stamp on its endurance, the surprising resurgence of “Hair” this summer in Central Park provides proof to the contrary. Diane Paulus’s frisky production of that frolicking-hippie musical from 1967 will move to Broadway next year.

Nostalgia for the flower-power era is surely behind much of the enthusiasm for the show, which remains a sweet but rather scattered and shallow exploration of a complex time. But wait a minute — I once thought that was the rap on “Rent.” Whether either musical is perfect seems beside the point. Just a dozen years after its premiere “Rent” has become a vital, even precious document of a tumultuous era — much like “Hair,” in truth.

On the way home from the theater I remained under the spell of the musical’s powerful evocation of a time that is not very distant chronologically but seems eons ago spiritually. “How did we get through it?” I found myself asking, recalling the years of grim statistics and rumored advances in treatment that didn’t pan out, the burdensome sadness, the fear and sense of futility as yet more news came about the illness of a friend or acquaintance or luminary.

Instantly I caught myself. How did we get through it? Too many of us didn’t.

Performance of His Life: He Composed Himself By MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

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September 21, 2008
Music
Performance of His Life: He Composed Himself By MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

LEONARD BERNSTEIN didn’t sleep much. That was just as well, since so many nights were show nights. The show — much more than a concert — was an intricate evening-long routine that had developed over his lifetime. By the last decade it went something like this.

As he awoke from a nap and performed his ablutions, you could hear the splashing, singing and kvetching over the whole apartment. It was a ritual for shaking off fatigue and the dread of having to push everything uphill all over again. The washing helped him reconnect with the “spotless servant of music” persona, one of his most treasured. A light supper followed, some light conversation and maybe a glance at the score as he quietly gathered strength. In the limo he was starting to feel the zone of his performance, testing it with snatches of old songs or punch lines.

By the time he hit the stage door, he was full of cheery greetings for everyone in sight. When he got his call, he would stand just offstage, saying his mantra, kissing his Koussevitzky cufflinks, taking the final drags of his cigarette. At the last possible second he handed it to a stagehand or cup bearer, and he was on.

He presented himself to the audience, welcoming it, blessing it and preparing it for the music’s first sounds. He turned toward the players, acknowledging them as old comrades, looking each right in the eyes. He waited for the audience to settle down, then gave his upbeat.

Those near him onstage might hear his upbeat as well as see it. He was quite vocal. He hummed, moaned, grunted, ground his teeth and breathed heavily. He used to say, “You should conduct exactly as you would play the piano.” It was a physical thing. He immersed himself in the stream of the work, pulling all the instruments under his fingers.

If it was a first night, the piece, though painstakingly rehearsed, might never have been played through completely. The players, unsure exactly what he was going to do or how it all fitted together, had to watch him every second. He liked that. He knew that musicians could get buried in their parts, looking fixedly at the same notes they had played thousands of times. He wanted the whole band to be out there with him in an experience that felt more like improvisation. He liked fun and a whiff of danger.

He thought that a performance should reveal the emotional states the composer had experienced while creating the work. For him that meant being totally involved emotionally and physically. He felt he wasn’t really doing his best unless he was swaying on the precipice of his endurance. Whether he was conducting Mahler or playing a Haydn trio, it was the same: oceans of sweat, fluttering eyes, hyper-reactive athleticism.

It’s what everyone expected. But none of it was put on. It was his authentic essential experience of music and of life. Whatever he had to do to achieve it, maintain it, he did. The public loved it, understanding that it was all part of the supreme sacrifice of himself that he was making for them.

After the final number the stagehand and cup bearer handed him a lighted cigarette and a silver tumbler filled with Scotch the second he got off the stage. A few puffs, a few gulps, and he bounded or staggered on again. When the ovation finally died down, another performance began.

Legions of autograph seekers thronged to him backstage. He would size up his supplicants with a deftness Lord Chesterfield might have admired, shifting his roles among counselor, classmate, rake. It took a long time, and there were usually still receptions and suppers ahead. As the hour grew late, sponsors and staffers might look for an opportunity to sneak out, but he would always spot them and bellow, “Sit down and shut up!” His attitude seemed to be, “After all I’ve given, I deserve anything I can get.”

It was all a part of an essential rite in which his sharing of himself could make his demons go away, at least for a while. He knew that what he most desired to do he could only do alone. But being alone was, well, lonely, and scary, and it was in the lonely moments that he realized how much it was costing him to be himself: that more than anything, by his standard, he wasn’t composing enough.

He knew that his own music was his greatest gift and message. There was a time when composing was easy for him, but it got harder as the years went on. To write the kind of music he dreamed of required time, and there was never enough time.

He knew how much his music mattered to people. He knew that it charmed them. But what he was yearning for was reverence. After all, Copland, his immediate mentor and model, had managed it. Copland’s much-beloved populist pieces like “Rodeo” were balanced by thorny ones like the Piano Variations and the Short Symphony. Their message was hard, uncompromising.

But for Bernstein the composer, compromise and collaboration seemed essential, inescapable. He thrived and suffered in his artistic partnerships: Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim. Robbins, especially, could get under his defenses and make him doubt that anything he had done was worthy. He put so much of himself into his writing, and when nothing came of it, it was an unbearable torture.

He also put a lot of other composers into his writing. But however much he may have borrowed, the whole was much more than the sum of its parts. It all added up to an instantly recognizable and authentic him. The references came completely ingenuously, and they didn’t bother him. In fact they amused him. He would grin, shrug and say, “Everybody steals, but you’ve got to steal classy.”

His music has a right-guy, right-place, right-time quality that says even tough things with a breezy confidence. He was that guy. He became the presiding maestro of the free world’s victory parties. After World War II it was Bernstein in Prague, Paris, Vienna, performing Copland’s Third Symphony. After the Six-Day War, it was Bernstein in Israel doing Mahler on Mount Scopus. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic mopped up in South America after Vice President Nixon’s disastrous motorcade. And during the cold war Bernstein hugged Shostakovich in Moscow and performed Beethoven at the Berlin Wall.

He took American music to Europe; he brought European music here. And talk about confidence; he took European music back to the Europeans. His festivals of Mahler and Nielsen caused their music to be more highly valued in their own lands. I can still hear him announcing, “I’m going to Budapest to teach the Hungarians how to play Bartok.” And he did.

It was thrilling, but it fed on itself. He stood at the center of a cultural empire with everyone looking to him as the arbiter of taste and acceptance. For a while he felt he could do anything: conduct, compose, make videos, bridge the generation gap, champion justice for radical political causes, no matter what the cost. Then, like the nation whose spirit he epitomized, he began to flinch. He feared he was being subsumed by the trappings of his fame, by the agendas of the organizations he served.

By the early ’70s he realized the danger. That is what “Mass” was really about. He carried on, the bravest of old campaigners, never losing his faith in the ideals of his youth and thrilled to see them reborn in new generations. But of himself, amid the relentless fetes, he would say, “I’m at the very peak of my decline.”

These were the years of the tours from hell. Where was he? Vienna, Rome, Tel Aviv, Paris, Tanglewood, Sapporo? Why was he there? Old friendships, new projects, bigger deals, concern for a young artist or cultural organization, because white asparagus was in season, because his loden coat had worn out, because his wife and his boyfriend were dead? And he wasn’t composing enough.

His music took a darker cast. The major pieces of the last years, like “A Quiet Place,” “Dybbuk” and “Arias and Barcarolles” largely avoided heart-on-sleeve confessions and flirted with the hermetic procedures of the 12-tone system. He treated a tone row as a game. His anagram skills made lattices of notes that yielded quartets, twisted torch songs, anything he desired. They sound like him, but their prevailing mood is turgid, despairing, even desperate.

There is a relentless search in these works for emotional honesty and intellectual rigor, and at the same time for reconciliation, simplicity and, as in the title of his last opera, “a quiet place,” where he could be generous, vulnerable, simple.

It was hard for him to let himself be simple. He usually felt that he needed to put himself and everyone else through some major test before he could relax. Composition had become another test, an agon. But writing a piece for someone he loved was a different story. Seeing him possessed by the perfect vision for a birthday or anniversary song was like witnessing a minor miracle.

It was always about people. He wrote his music for them, gave his performances for them. He wanted to teach them, touch them, include them. He wanted them to be a part of the family. He adored his own family, relishing its complex mythology, accepting the brickbats of his siblings, the challenges of his children and the love and counsel of his wife, Felicia, whose warmth and easy elegance made so much of his world possible. She set the standard of what was fitting. When she told him “Pull up your socks,” he did.

There was easy banter and brilliance at their table, and silliness and lots of love. The atmosphere was Yiddishkeit showbiz competitive, but the feeling was above all warm and inclusive. From the moment you pulled up a chair, you felt you were at home. I think he wanted you to feel the same way in the first bars of his music.

Sometimes the pileup of responsibilities was too much to bear. When that happened, he would turn night into day: stay up all night, go to sleep at 6 in the morning, have breakfast in the late afternoon. This way he could avoid people and stay in his own space without giving too much offense.

But put him back in front of an audience, and he was back on again, in search of new friends. Some of his greatest performances were given at postconcert parties for audiences of a few dozen. He would settle himself at the piano and begin a sequence of killer numbers: movie production spectacles, Victorian tear-jerkers, understated supper club rarities or operatic coloratura showstoppers sung in a subvocal rumble that Dietrich would have envied.

He knew he had everyone in his power and relished it. Never more so than the night in Washington when an esteemed critic came forward to say a wobbly good night and collapsed at his feet. “Look,” Bernstein said, “there he is, one of America’s most distinguished journalists, passed out, helpless before me. Why couldn’t you be Harold Schonberg?”

Even in the midst of the whirlwind of his life he found time to be with young artists. Mostly he had to be a kind of hit-and-run mentor, dispensing maxims and anecdotes in brief master classes in the back seats of limos. So much of his own experience had been thinking and learning on his feet in front of a hundred or a few thousand people that he knew the drill.

After one of my early performances of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony the conversation went like this. M. T. T.: “What do you think about the Adagietto?” L. B.: “What do I think? I think that when you’ve made up your mind about what it really means to you, it won’t matter what I or anyone else thinks. You’ll just know.”

So what can you say about a guy like this? So nurturing, so confrontational. He gave so much. He cared so much. I once asked him, “Did anyone ever get so much done and have so much fun as you have?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Mozart, maybe.” But he always needed more.

In the last years he was playing a game of chicken with his spirit and his health. The time ran out, and — as he had feared — he hadn’t composed enough. But in what he did compose he left us a real tracing of the places his spirit had been. Even if you never met him or saw him, his music tells you how life tasted to him, and that’s what he really wanted.

There was never any question of what he believed, what he championed. It was the joy of music. He lived it.

Michael Tilson Thomas will conduct the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday evening to kick off the citywide festival Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds. This article is adapted from a larger one that appears on his Web site, MichaelTilsonThomas.com.