Music review: The potential of the New World Center in Miami Beach

MIAMI BEACH -- The New World Center, the Frank Gehry-designed home for the New World Symphony, had its first test Wednesday as classical music game-changer. But that test wasn’t the one most of us expected it would be.

The evening’s opening concert was the first full program in the concert hall, a proper tryout of the acoustical design by Yasuhisa Toyota in an auditorium laid out like a little Walt Disney Concert Hall (Toyota’s masterpiece). The program included the world premiere of Thomas Adès' “Polaris,” for which Tal Rosner made a film to be projected on five asymmetrical “sails” overhead that serve as sound reflectors and as screens. They help make this room not only shockingly immediate sonically but also the most sophisticated auditorium yet for assimilating video or film into a live musical experience.

Images look gorgeous, and the wrap-around effect of the sails is exciting. Here, at last, is projection bright enough that the light on musicians’ stands no longer bleaches the picture. But this is less a rejuvenation of an art form or, as some early reports have proclaimed, the savior of classical music (from what, you might ask?) than an enhancement of a process that has deep roots and a long history.

The New World Symphony is a training orchestra in South Beach that Michael Tilson Thomas founded 23 years ago and that had been playing in a nearby renovated Art Deco movie theater on the seedier end of the popular Lincoln Road promenade. Along with the concert hall, the center incorporates a lavishly media-friendly academy, with Internet2, enough Wi-Fi options to overwhelm an iPhone and the necessary gigabytes per second to permit remote instruction on a global scale. Gehry and Toyota gave the students such nice practice rooms that the architect also had to provide tempting communal spaces to facilitate interaction.

Everything here, no doubt, will contribute toward making highly accomplished young players better rounded and more sophisticated musicians (about 3% of all applicants, many of whom are the cream of the crop of conservatory graduates, are accepted). This too is more refinement than reinvention.

But Wednesday morning as I walked up to the New World Center from Lincoln Road, with its come-hither restaurants and tourist clip joints, I encountered something new. I heard mysteriously alluring but unidentifiable music, a siren call. Strolling through the center’s adjoining new palm-tree-studded park, Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman” Overture came into focus. Tilson Thomas was rehearsing it for the evening’s program and sound designers were trying out their outdoor 167-loud-speaker array, which will make its debut Friday night for the first "wallcast."

Gehry designed a façade for high-definition projections of the concerts inside. The sound system is the work of Fred Vogler (who is the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s sound designer for Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl), and it produces a magnificently lifelike, multidimensional effect. For several moments, I couldn’t pull myself away to go inside the hall to hear the rehearsal. 

These outdoor wallcasts of the concerts happening indoors clearly will work. They will be free to the public and communal events, little resembling the L.A. Phil's high-priced new simulcasts of concerts in movie theaters, with their inferior sound systems.

Still, nothing can match the experience of unamplified music close up and loud, which is what the concert hall of the New World Center offers in spades. Some have already complained it is too close and loud for comfort. I sat near the rear of the hall Wednesday, and the orchestra sounded clear, impressively forceful and just short of overpowering.

Tilson Thomas led a sweeping, rousing “Dutchman” and then oversaw a tactile, iridescent premiere of Adès' “Polaris,” which the composer will conduct during the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Aspects of Adès” festival at Disney in April. It begins with sparkling piano, sounding almost Indonesian. Winds and brass begin long melodies that are repeated canonically by higher instruments as complexity and temperature rise.

It is an intricate, fascinating, hard-to-pin-down 12½-minute score, full of effects that perk the ear, especially with the brass effectively spread out around the hall. Rosner’s accompanying film –- of sea and rocks, of two serious ladies on the rocks seeming to have something important in mind, of abstract circles -- proved a heedless distraction. But it was beautifully shot and with images imaginatively designed to roam the sails.

The concert ended with Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony. This is a symphony that represented America at the end of World War II, the music of a nation ready for a new generation, newly confident. It is almost, but not quite, the great American symphony, and it came as close to greatness as it's going to get, what with Tilson Thomas digging out every implication of every phrase.

Copland reused his “Fanfare for the Common Man” for an overblown Finale, and the fanfare rang thunderous and true, a new generation of young players, newly confident that their New World Center was the center of a new world -- and gearing to play, Friday, for a new invention built to bring concerts to the common man.

RELATED

Dispatch from Miami: New World Symphony Center preview

Architecture review: Frank Gehry's New World Center in Miami Beach

-- Mark Swed

Photo: The New World Symphony performs in its new hall Wednesday night. Credit:  Rui Dias-Adios

 

Comments

[Wolfy]

Has anyone noticed the auditorium is a knockoff of the Disney Hall?

[Wolfy]

"Aspects of Ades"...? No one I know care about new classical music. They all go to concerts to hear the old favorites, and merely put up with 'new' offerings as 'necessary evil' in the name of progress and futile proof that classical music isn't dead.

[Donald Frazell]

Love alot, but certainly not all, European based musics, but it is and never can be Modern. You can dress a pig in a evening gown, but it is still a ham in heels.

Love alot of jazz, but certainly not all, and it most certainly Is Modern music. For the not so common man, but of all ethnicities, classes, and backgrounds, it is the first and only art world music.

Stop trying to dig up Ludwig and put him in a beret, Johann had a better feel for the street and rhythm anyway. You cant take an art form based on certain techniques and force it into a new form. Or make silly sounds and pretend it is classy because the players wear penguin suites. A man has got to know his limitations. It you dont want them, change your job and tools, not just your wardrobe. And adapt, improvisation with life is everything, it is what a creative artist is. European musics have been trained to be interpreters, not creatives.

It means like Picasso, throw out everything you had been taught, and begin anew with fresh and worldly data and ideas built upon the old, not reliant on it. You cant paint modern with a sable brush, nor sing with only a bowed instrumentation. A few gadgets and gimmicks can make a pig fly. Stick with the Honey glazed and roasting. Still a delicious treat in the hands of a great chef. Maybe just a few updated side dishes, but the main course is what it is, and tasty. Not hatin, but Euro is ethnic music. Gotta know where you came from to feel where you are going.

[From Red Gulch]

@Donald Frazell needs a primer on classical music in our fair city. LA Philharmonic @ Disney Hall ticket sales are currently running at 95% capacity for all concerts, according to Deborah Borda interview in The Times last November. This during a biting national recession, no less. Moreover, the LA Philharmonic has the largest budget of any orchestra in the Western Hemisphere, and a highest-profile conductor this Nation has seen since Bernstein. Hmmm...something tells me that the Phil is, at minimum, doing something /right/. Meanwhile, jazz is dead and the Bakery is homeless. And I love jazz, Mr. Frazell would no doubt turn green with envy upon rifling through my record colleciton -- yes, LP's, yes Blue Notes, yes Rudy Van Gelder, yes Orrin Keepnews, yes Miles Trane Bird Evans Pepper McLean Rollins E. Jones Coleman and so on and so forth..........

[kram]

"A man has got to know his limitations." Very well said, Donald. Heed your own words and stop putting your foot in your mouth when commenting on subjects you know nothing about. And to Wolfy: you simply don't know the right kind of people. They are in a minority, for sure, but that does not make them wrong.

[Donald Frazell]

Of course they are full, European musics(classical but one subgroup with baroque,romantic up to Schoenberg, the rest just vain self delusions) are about control and power, what else could teh rich possibly want tout watch dozens of trained men in penguin sutis do their bidding? Great parties too. How many actually go to this new music stuff? I read those who say they have to buy tickets as part of a package to see what they want, and complain on this blog all the time.

But it is legit music unlike contempt art, just dead, deader than jazz. Which has NEVER been appreciated in the US, just as Matisse and Gauguin were collected by Russians, Germans and Americans, creative art is never appreciated by its home audience because it disrupts and puts older academics out of work. Jazz musicians have always gone to summer festivals in Europe and Japan fto make a lviing, the jazz clubs in NYC simply at home and get one through the year, not much money there, but the source of creativity in music.

Ruth has found a new home, jazz has never gotten government support like European musics. No tax exemptions or funding, Ruth has done a great job getting foundations, cant think of anyone else who ever did. Howard Rumsey at Concerts by the Sea never did, nor the Lighthouse before it went all KCRW artsy fartsy, nor the Parisian Room, nor Marla's. Jazz went against the powers that be, Euro musics brownose for support, that is who the music was created for, except the early guys like Bach and Mozart and Chopin did what they wanted as Michelangelo did because they were just too good. And really didnt need a full orchestra, they could create for smaller. Which is often better.

Jazz IS modern music, and like Euorpean musics and dance are foundations from which to build upon. Unfortunately those fields as dead as visual arts now, because of the academic throttling of anything that isnt of them, controlled by their patrons to satisfy their limited yet ravenous desires. Creative art ALWAYS comes form the outside, no great artist has ever graduated from an academy, music as well as visual. Cant learn from mediocrities. Even if a high level, for that is what standrads are for, creatives learn them and make them fundamentals on which to build off of, not limited to.

And that realy doesn take long. Neither Miles nor Wynton bothered to finish with Julliard, they were done before the proscribed finish, they got what they needed because they got it quickly, true learning is out in life, on the road, not in sterilized wimpy egghead academies of the limited. Creativity adn career are often at odds, so those who choose career are jealous, and deny truth. Its not in thier self interest. Creativty is of the people of life, of mind body and soul, not training in techniques frozen in time. Slight variations are still the same thing, and Euro music still swine. Even when tasty.

a sallam malaikum, dont get to eat any at home.
art e musica academia delenda est

[kram]

Your verbal diarrhea, Donald, may sound convincing for those who are ignorant about classical music, but for those of us who know what we are talking about, your pronouncements are simply ridiculous.

[Donald Frazell]

LOL!Glad i have met the god of music, let me humble myself before your mighty mouth! Obviously struck a nerve. Ouch!

next you will be calling me a brown shirt or nazi or some other emotionally disturbed dream of righteouness. And yes, European musics aRe ethinic musics, as much as you LOVE to put down everything that is not nof you. It is of US tahtn counts, from everyone everywhere, but the highest Common denominator, not the lowest of entertainment, or fashion of the self styled "elite". Things that seperate into classes and categories.

As Miles said and Wynton reiterated, it is all just music. But taht of the sheltred Acadmies is about that group and its patrons, not humanity. Life cannot develop in a vacuum.

Carne asada is wonderful too, but there is a huge world outside that of the pig. Which really can't fly.

Save the spiritual and truly miusical Watts Towers(Nuestro Pueblo) tear down the isolationist and control freak Ivories.

[An American]

To Donald Frazell

"not in sterilized wimpy egghead academies of the limited"

Please explain.

[Donald Frazell]

Simple, all artists have learned from those who preceded by being apprentices, like Michelangelo, Cezanne did with Pissaro, Miles did from Bird, many did under loose guiding from Moreau, but never in Academies, where teachers are but official hacks. Music and visual arts. The bet one can hope to achieve by wasting monies on the bought pieces of paper(MFAs and such) are the same official posts of taught mediocrity. No great artist has ever graduated from an Academy. Some took art while getting real degrees, Diebenkorn and such, but most who went at all soon quit. Waste of time and effort and monies, trains one to be lemmings and thinks a certain way.

"Classical" musicians are interpretive types, not creative. And as such learning and fin tuning techniques is fine, but not creative. Takes one away from experimentation and exploration to milking the most one can from a finite set of skills. Fine in acting, professional music, decorators and such. but again, far from creative. Artists, just of a certain kind. No problem, that starts when these types pretend to BE creative, and take over the meaning for their own egos and careers. That destroys creativity. Which is of living, not just book learning. One must do so on ones own, free of obligation and dependency.

Weakness is not an option, as dependency on others for money limits ones mind, body and soul. Sorry about the carne asada crack, it has been so long since i have tasted of the pig that I forgot it is carnitas, mmmm. Happens when you marry one who is observant as a jew or muslim, or even lots of Christians like my sons godmother who is AME. Of course, carne asada is wonderful too, so much better than over processed and bland American tastebuds can handle.

art collegiai delenda est
Fine art colleges must be destroyed

[An American]

Frazell

Gee thanks.

[kram]

Projecting your own attitudes, Donald. The nerve being struck is all yours. Besides, putting down everything that does not meet with your omniscient approval is your specialty, definitely not mine.

[Donald Frazell]

You are welcome. And who is putting down everything? I love a far greater variety of arts than most, including you it seems. But because of that, the bar is high. The Highest common denominator, not what is cool and trendy to a small subset of fanatics. Frontin, wanting to appear cutting edge and so eliminating all else, when truly about ones own desire is not for those who feel with the eyes and ears utilizing all the brain, not jsut the small frontal lobe section of the pseudo intellectual. Mind, body and soul.

Love alot of European music, but again, it is an ethnic music, of a certain time and place, and among the best in its day. But attempting to be the living dead doesnt work. It sbeen over for a long time. Still a major influence, but just that. An influence. i got my aunt in law, a major pianist and harpsicordist in Sweden who used to put down the jazz of her sister, the Oscar Peterson fan club president, to love modern jazz by taking her to the old Jazz Bakery and hearing Terence Blanchard, holding her ears while bent over, and sitting up and saying, "I get It!" Became a huge educator of jazz in Sweden after that.

just more music. Some good, some not, some really damn good. Art is everywehre, certainly not confined to the Ivory halls of Academia, the Pharasee's of art, not the creators.

Have a nice day!

[An American]

Don't hear anyone putting down jazz. In fact I don't hear anyone denigrating any music except........hmmmmm?

Is proper spelling just a load of elitist crap? And no I can't figure out what the hell some of the writing here means because ya can't spell.

[Donald Frazell]

Sorry, at work and typos, plus missing a finger these days, thanks to an artiste.
Not putting any one music down at all, the good the bad and the ugly exist everywhere. Just that some forms get played out after awhile, why play or draw or paint exactly the same as something from a previous world? That would be discounting all that has happened since then and the rest of the world, to be exclusively ethnic and so historically insular and reactionary, not creative and explorative of Our own. Defining humanity, exploring nature, and searching for what we call God. that is the creative artists roll in human culture. Neither more nor less important than any other. Discovering the order in the perceived chaos that each generation lives in and contributes to.

Speaking of rest, putting all the printers to sleep, and time for my own time to commence. Again apologies for syntax and punctuation, time flies. And it is just a blog. And few of the entries have much relationship to our world at all.

art collegia e critica delenda est

[kram]

Even Donald sometimes makes sense inadvertently, like that proverbial broken clock: "why play or draw or paint exactly the same as something from a previous world?". Why, indeed?
In any music, no two performances are identical, regardless of whether notes were changed or not. Many listeners can hear such differences and react to them viscerally but it takes more than average musical sophistication to realize what those differences are when they are subtle. And creativity is not limited to the act of originally putting the notes together, but continues interpretatively every time the piece is being performed.
Improvisation is a major part of jazz. It is present in classical music too but appears far less frequently. That is just one of the differences between the two and does not in any way mean superiority of one over the other. There is plenty of crap in both and there are some wonderful creations as well. Both need to built on past achievements and keep evolving together with the humanity if they are to survive and flourish. Time, not Donald, will show which kind of music will do that better. My wish is for both to continue making our lives richer for many more generations.

[Donald Frazell]

Unfortunately, I dont see much future for either. There may be artists from time to time who come along and extend that tradition into the present day, as Goya did for Spain building off of the Rococo into a truly Spanish based universality. Artists must reflect who they are, what they know and understand completely, not express themselves which is for children. But must use what is of life around them to understand its essence, while still open to all the world. Anselm Kiefer has done the same with his Germanic roots, yet finding what is truly human in us all.

There are outbursts when culture calls for it, huge changes in how we perceive the world, art reflects the changes around us, and things have been calm for decades, all veneer, and bells and whistles. In jazz Jaco Pastorius epononymous album may be the last great work of "genius" i have heard, as Herbie Hancock ascertains in the liner notes. As when talking with Branford Marsalis, my ex brother in law went to Berklee with him, he said no matter how hard he tried or took his skill, he couldnt be John Coltrane. He was a creation of the time, it is truly not just up to the artist. Excellent music is still created, but in mixing different genres as Cassandra Wilson did in two albums in the 90s, Blue Light Before Dawn and New Moon Daughter, or my girl Tricia Tahara in her album produced and played on by Wallace Roney, the only trumpereter ever mentored by Miles, Secrets.

The problem is the strangled hold of the Academies. No great work of art can grow in such a sterile environment, none ever has. Clever theroies mean nothing, they must be tested and improvised in life, the only place it can truly happen, improvisation overrated as is being "new" in visual arts. It simply means being free to build upon the past, using theories as starting points, not destinations to illustrate. To evolve in contact with the earth, with humanity, with God as we explore who we are and where we are going, by understanding where we came from. Gauguins famous cry as much as Coltrane's and Mahler's.

Creative art is always from outisde the mainstream, of that controlled by society to tame it, to not harness but muzzle and castrate. Even rock had some great music, very little but Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Bros live album are what James Brown said jazz is, advanced forms of the Blues. It reflected the turmoil and rebuilding around them, but not ignoring the past as other "artsy" types did like Genesis and Bowie, who were simply adolescent whining and using perversions to appear adult, when truly just contemptuous of humanity and glorifyng themselves, the roots of entertainment. They were worse, they were fashion for the effette. Some like Traffic tried, but simply weren't skilled enough in their languages to rise to Mile's, In a Silent Way as they tried in Low Sparks of High Heeled Boys and others. I would rather listen to Kurt Cobain than most academic art, at least it is honest and of more than just himeslf and his buddies, though damning with faint praise.

Society has been Using arts for its own desires forever, the artist must be free of their clutches. Not for himself, which is therapy, but dissolving his own personality as Van Gogh did into the all. This cannot be taught nor come early in life. Most artists have short bursts then become characatures of themselves, Van Gogh's fate may well have been that of Stevie Wonder and Elton John, whose first three albums were classic, or a Delaunay or all the Futurists and American and abstract artists so far, from Pollock to Rauschenberg. Only Rufino Tamayo continued to grow in the America's, as Cezanne did onto his early death at 67, Monet, Gauguin, Degas, Bonnard, Braque and even Diebenkorn to a degree.

Instead, we now rely on bells and whistles, Duchamp the god of clever mediocrity, Cage as much his disciple as fools like Hirst, Koons,( like his puppies though they are not art), and all "conceptualists" of the academies like LeWitt, Baldessarri, Nauman and Yoko Ono. Theories are meaningless self exhibtionism if not tested and evolved in contact with nature, humanity and seeking more, purpose, meaning, which is what we call God. Music is as shallow and meaningless as the visual arts now, we get pop whores dressed up as virgins like Beyonce then marketed to preteens, producers rule the entertainment world. The sheltered academies cannot produce artists who are of their time and world, they must be hardened and in the flow of the world, it cannot be controlled as they wish in Academia. As the not so great but amusing Pink Floyd "sang", Leave them kids alone.

Adults are coming back to the arts, they have been busy over the last 50 years building a world that has topped out, and now fracturing. It must be revealed as whole and one by artists, it is sought. But not there, yet. A new foundation must be laid, built upon the old, but not controlled by it. The Pharisee's of the arts are its curators, not its creators. They stiffle growth to uplift their own. The money changers are at work everywhere. Times are changing, how, we will see. But the old ways must be learned, then set aside to let the world as it is now come in.

Creative Artists are not ahead of their time, others are simply behind it. We simply reveal it, and allow others to feel with their eyes and ears. Words of theories are deceptions, lies, for our mental games are not real. Words are but symbols, without definitions they have no meaning and so play into the hands of the academies. It is time to create not new words, but images and sounds that evoke life, god, and binding us together as a common humanity, not fracture it for the market share the patrons of the arts so desires to profit from. Humanity cannot be told what to do with words and mans limited ideas, but free to take what they can, and feel to be true. Using all the brain and body and soul. They exist, time to use them. People now crave it, yet stay away from these Ivory ideas as sterile and contemptuous. True creative art unites.

And so
art e musica collegia delenda est

[kram]

Funny how it works sometimes, but Donald's latest piece of wordy and self-admiring drivel above, by showing clearer than ever how little he knows about the subject of our disagreement, made me actually more optimistic than ever about the present state as well as the immediate future of what we call "classical" music.

[Donald Frazell]

It wasn't for you, and your 37 effette's in your isolated igloo. Global warming is coming, time you started paying attention to it.
Have a nice day?

art e musica collegia delenda est
my manly little anonymouses.

[kram]

When words lose any connection to reality, as vividly demonstrated in most of Donald's comments above, cleverly putting them together can no longer be considered witty, in which case - as in many others - brevity is definitely a virtue. On the issue of anonymity, its effectiveness is greatly exaggerated and i have never put much effort into it anyway; so, as a result those of you with functioning brains have probably guessed my true identity long ago. As for the rest, self-promotion is obviously not my thing, and i don't find it either necessary or appealing to keep tooting one's own horn left and right, especially when it is totally irrelevant to the subject. However, speaking of real high-class trumpeting, it may be the right moment to mention that our good friend Wynton Marsalis is coming right into my "isolated igloo" for a few days next week and i do look forward to making music together with him again. Come listen - if we are lucky the creative synergy may actually work reasonably well.