‘American Idol’: The Triumph of Soft Rock
By JON CARAMANICA

Kris Allen began the final sing-off on “American Idol” on Tuesday night driven by what appeared to be a combination of fear and good sense. He won the coin toss, and opted to let Adam Lambert perform first in each of the battle’s three rounds, knowing perfectly well that should the otherworldly Mr. Lambert follow him, all traces of the genial and flat Mr. Allen would be erased from the planet — and voters’ memories.

At the end of the second hour, after all the performances were complete, the judges were already writing Mr. Allen’s eulogy. “You should be very proud of what you’ve done in this competition,” Randy Jackson told him. “You’ve done an amazing job to end up where you are right now,” Paula Abdul said. Compare that faint-praise damnation with how the constitutionally fussy Simon Cowell celebrated Mr. Lambert’s season. “Doing a show like this,” he said, “you hope that you can find a worldwide star. I genuinely believe with all my heart that we have found that with you.”

And so, whether because of natural bearing or awareness of his surroundings, Mr. Allen was modest down to the very end of the Wednesday night results show, when he was crowned the winner. Perceived by many as an upset, it was actually an apt finish for a season, the show’s eighth, that privileged strenuous competence above all.

At best Mr. Allen is a harmless singer: he makes Kenny Loggins look tough. At worst he’s indefensible, utterly lacking in texture and range and interpretive imagination. His aw-shucks demeanor spills over to his performances, in which his chin jerks violently to the right every time he aims for a big note, as if his mouth were struggling to deliver what his brain is asking for.

Last week, in the episode that determined who would compete in the final showdown, Mr. Allen evoked two of the dullest successful bands in recent memory: OneRepublic (on “Apologize”) and the Fray (whose cover of Kanye West’s “Heartless” he conceptually pilfered). “Heartless” was effective, but was merely a brief flicker of flair after several weeks of airbrushing the life out of songs by Michael Jackson, the Beatles and others.

And yet Mr. Allen’s innocuousness proved no liability; he was never in the bottom two of the voting results, a feat matched only by Danny Gokey, the last singer eliminated before the final battle. (And as church-worship-leader contestants go, Mr. Gokey is far superior to Mr. Allen; Mr. Gokey’s bravura reading of Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus, Take the Wheel” was one of this season’s best performances.)

This year, more than any other, there was frequent discussion of the contestants’ post-“Idol” careers, both because of a newly added fourth judge, Kara DioGuardi, with significant recent music industry experience, and because, as many nonwinners have made plain, you don’t need to win to capitalize on “Idol” exposure. The show, everyone now realizes, is in no small part an engaging advertisement for what might come next.

By that measure Mr. Allen had the obvious advantage: it is completely clear what sort of record he’ll make. His anti-style is the stuff of adult-contemporary radio and VH1 playlists: in addition to OneRepublic and the Fray, artists like Jason Mraz, Parachute, Ingrid Michaelson, Matt Nathanson, Mat Kearney, Colbie Caillat. In other words, the new soft rock, a post-Coldplay movement that eludes taste-maker taste but is embraced by broad swaths of listeners. The pairing of Mr. Allen with Keith Urban on Wednesday night didn’t make sense from a genre perspective, but their attitudes were in alignment: neither one’s singing could hurt a fly.

Mr. Allen’s denuded R&B was a comfortable fit on this season of “Idol,” which was largely driven by black music, never mind that only two African-American contestants made it to the Top 13. One, Lil Rounds, never evolved beyond a sound-alike retro snooze; the other, Jasmine Murray, was the most contemporary finalist, though she was undone by nerves.

The charming Anoop Desai fancied himself a new jack swing revivalist; too bad no one else did. Mr. Gokey sang muscular, inspirational, church-informed soul, something another contestant, Michael Sarver, attempted with far less success. Matt Giraud had a lovely falsetto and little sense of how to apply it. Blues-rock shaped the sound of Allison Iraheta and Alexis Grace. And Megan Joy Corkrey delivered wacky jazz riffs.

Almost none of this season’s eccentricity, though, made its way into Tuesday’s battle. After the ho-hum Jordin Sparks-Blake Lewis pairing in Season 6, this was the most anemic final competition in the show’s history — a new viewer tuning in would have been hard pressed to guess that it was the final showdown — and also the lowest rated.

In the first round Mr. Lambert’s “Mad World” was dutifully restrained, only a faint tracing of his impressive rendition of the song earlier in the season. Mr. Allen’s “Ain’t No Sunshine” was a slight improvement on his initial version, but still fundamentally limp, without an ounce of the original’s pathos.

The songs in the second round were selected by the creator of “Idol,” Simon Fuller, who burdened the contestants with politics they couldn’t carry. Mr. Allen drew Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” a protest song that he sapped of its anguish. Worse, he didn’t bother with an interpretation; the original has always felt definitive but has ample room for melodic improvisation, which Mr. Allen didn’t use. Mr. Lambert tried harder with his assignment, Sam Cooke’s civil-rights anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come.” In his fashion he transformed it into ecstatic theater, while suffocating its existential heft.

Finally both contestants sparred fruitlessly with “No Boundaries,” a genuinely unpleasant spatter of treacle written by Cathy Dennis, Mitch Allan and Ms. DioGuardi. A studio recording of it is Mr. Allen’s first cash-in single, already available on iTunes.

Losing spared Mr. Lambert this particular indignity and probably did no damage to his future prospects as a recording artist. Mr. Jackson once suggested that Mr. Lambert could make a record like one by the operatic emo band My Chemical Romance, but that presumes an emotional depth that he never displayed. Performative fireworks aside, Mr. Lambert does not seem to be a deep thinker, and his best appearances this season were also his most straightforward, his exceptional voice notwithstanding. (There’s no way, and little reason, to cover up an instrument so fascinating and dexterous.)

Instead the theatrically trained Mr. Lambert was often saddled by muddled, conflicting signifiers. His reference points came in flurries: David Bowie and Freddie Mercury and ]]> http://lebkhanh.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/america-you-have-chosen-your-idol-the-harmless-kris-allen/feed/ 0 lebkhanh http://lebkhanh.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/a-penned-in-winslet-may-win-but-shes-best-when-free-to-fly/ http://lebkhanh.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/a-penned-in-winslet-may-win-but-shes-best-when-free-to-fly/#comments Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:55:12 +0000 lebkhanh http://lebkhanh.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/a-penned-in-winslet-may-win-but-shes-best-when-free-to-fly ]]>

By Wesley Morris, Boston Globe | February 22, 2009

If you accept the idea that the Oscars are a measure of actorly greatness, Kate Winslet might be Hollywood’s next Great Actor. At 33, she’s been nominated for six Academy Awards (a record for someone her age), and, tonight, is the presumptive favorite to win her first for “The Reader.” At this pace, she would surpass Katharine Hepburn (12), Jack Nicholson (12), and eventually Meryl Streep (15). But does Winslet need an Oscar to prove she’s great?

Any actor who immediately follows a world-dominating phenomenon like “Titanic” with one movie about the search for spiritual enlightenment (“Hideous Kinky”) and another in which she undergoes spiritual detox (“Holy Smoke”) is great to me. Those were two vital pieces of acting that almost nobody saw. But they were all 10 years ago. A career needs an arc, and for most stars that trajectory tends to peak right about the time your name is read and the orchestra tries not to interrupt your acceptance speech. Julia Roberts, Helen Hunt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Hilary Swank, and Reese Witherspoon are recent best actress winners, and they haven’t been quite right since.

But pursuing a high point for that arc inevitably leads to movies like “The Reader” and “Revolutionary Road,” the two films that have made Winslet an awards magnet this season. These are referred to as prestige films because they’ve been concocted for maximum importance, fortified with seriousness, literary source material, decency, artiness, and other vitamins. They’re the farm-raised salmon of movies. To enhance their attractiveness to the Academy, both were released at the end of last year, and seeing Winslet so mannered in both is dispiriting, since, for my money, she’s always been a wild-caught kind of woman.

Directed by Winslet’s husband Sam Mendes and co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio, “Revolutionary Road” is a marriage-on-the-rocks drama that, unofficially and prematurely, was billed as a “Titanic” reunion. Set in Germany after the Holocaust, “The Reader” was made by the people who brought us “The Hours,” and casts Winslet as a lusty former Nazi.

It’s ridiculous casting to everyone but the filmmakers. Imagine a movie about the KKK in which one of the Klansmen rips off his hood and turns out to be Sophia Loren. Winslet does nothing wrong. But the movie doesn’t ask her to risk anything. It’s as though playing a former Nazi guard who seduces a teenage boy is risk enough. This, of course, misses the point of Kate Winslet. At her best, she personifies risk.

In “The Reader,” that risk is mostly sexual. Still, I’m worried. How much longer until Winslet has too many Oscar nominations to have movie sex? That would be a travesty, since she is the most casually carnal woman in the movies.

The world met her in 1994 as an adolescent in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures.” Winslet plays one of two misfit friends who wind up committing a murder. From the start, we knew she would be appealing to a lower power (one a few organs down from our heads). What we didn’t know was how well Winslet could do this while maintaining her integrity.

“Heavenly Creatures” is still a remarkable movie, an unusual conflation of enchantment, horror, and hormones. Winslet plays a sort of mean girl, but there’s a tinge of madness about her. (That laugh, for one thing.) She seduces the soul and imagination of Melanie Lynskey, who, career-wise, still doesn’t seem to have recovered from the relationship. These two had a stronger psychic and emotional bond than Winslet has had with any man. With all due respect to DiCaprio, if she should be reuniting with anyone, it’s Lynskey.

From there it was onto Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility,” a cerebral approach to Jane Austen that Winslet stole with breathless, almost coltish yearning. It was a star-making performance. (She lost the supporting-actress Oscar that year to Mira Sorvino. So things have a way of working out.)

A few years later came “Titanic,” and it was the first time I’d heard her try an American accent. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last. Winslet’s natural British speaking voice has a great range that a fake American accent tends to choke away and flatten. While she and DiCaprio were fine together, and roughly the same age, she seemed older and more confident in both her topless modeling scene and their big, windshield-steaming love session. Of course, he became the megastar. He was safely boyish. She, by comparison, was comfortably sexual – womanly – in a way movie stars never are anymore.

A quick survey of Winslet’s peers reveals how few of them can fold in sexuality with craft. Angelina Jolie is sexy yet too intimidating to be appreciably sexual – outside of certain S&M scenarios, anyway. Witherspoon began her career as an aggressor and turned into a sweetheart. And Swank still seems to be trying to defend her very femininity.

Winslet’s body – fleshy, curvaceous, ostensibly real – sets her apart from less full-figured stars. She’s done her share of boring costume dramas (“Finding Neverland” comes to mind), but her kindred spirit isn’t a dame like Vanessa Redgrave or Judi Dench. It’s a dynamo like Beyonc��, a woman who can use her entire bodacious being as an empowering life force. In Jane Campion’s gender battle “Holy Smoke,” and Todd Field’s suburban drama “Little Children,” Winslet tries to strike back at a world that’s boxed her in.

Maybe her brick-house build makes her more relatable, but it also gives the camera something real to watch. Nudity comes naturally to Winslet, but, until “The Reader,” it never came cheaply. In “Holy Smoke,” she plays a woman forced to leave an alleged religious cult. When she confronts Harvey Keitel without her clothes, she does so as both a sexual and political provocation: the woman has nothing to hide. Practically speaking, Winslet doesn’t strike me as the sort of actor who ends a sex scene with a sheet pulled up to her chin. That’s not what normally happens after sex. And, sometimes, like in “Little Children,” there’s just no sheet.

The words “neurotically heartsick Brooklyn hipster” don’t naturally produce an image of Winslet’s face. But chasing after Jim Carrey in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2005), she was manic and strange. The character was too much of a cipher to be totally human. Yet Winslet seemed to have fun exploring the feelings and tics that keep a cipher going. She turned what could have been a deadening assignment into an adventure.

In John Turturro’s bonkers 2005 musical, “Romance & Cigarettes,” the emotion was despair, and it so inflamed Winslet – who played a red-headed Scottish hooker infatuated with James Gandolfini – that you ache because of her ache. It’s not the lingerie you remember about her production number, or the fact that she can’t really sing. It’s that the song (a Connie Francis number) explodes out of her. Jolie can do a lot. But she can’t do that.

Interestingly, Winslet’s bodily brilliance isn’t purely a matter of sex. Her physicality has a lot to do with how much space there is around her. The more she has the better she is. As Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s underrated, unabridged “Hamlet” (1996), she had an entire empty ballroom in which to go mad. Her tearful, babbling Ophelia might be the best thing in the movie. In “Sense and Sensibility,” she had knolls and hillsides; in “Holy Smoke,” the Australian desert. In “Eternal Sunshine,” it was Jim Carrey’s warped memories and director Michel Gondry’s surrealist sets. She makes the vastness of these real and constructed spaces seem intimately hers. She runs, tumbles, drags herself on the floor, humps the air, dances, wails. She’s free to be as big as these locations, as weird and as complex as they are, too. She’s free to be free.

In both “Revolutionary Road” and “The Reader,” she is penned in – marriage in one film, prison in the other. With her wings clipped, th
ere’s just no place for her to fly.

Winslet tends to play a certain kind of woman. She is obviously sensual – maternal, too. The men she has sex with are unlikely – a much younger boy, a stuttering bookworm, a cousin, James Gandolfini. At some point, she might lose her mind but never her nerve. This character is prone to adultery, but she is not promiscuous (often a mother never a whore). She’s simply restless, in pursuit of an ideal – spiritual enlightenment or maybe a man better than the one she married. (Perhaps that man is you.)

Part of the trouble with “Revolutionary Road” and “The Reader” is that they push the typical Winslet character to the verge of parody.

What’s missing is the sense of adventure she often needs to thrive. It doesn’t help that neither director – Mendes or Stephen Daldry – has the gonzo sensibility to bring out her best. Jackson, Campion, Turturro, and Gondry pushed Winslet to new, exciting places. Mendes and Daldry are making her into Meryl Streep – Streep the technician, not the newly sensualist Streep of “Mamma Mia!” – which, when you think about it, is really just the old Winslet.

With “The Reader,” it’s as though someone in Winslet’s camp watched her previous films and asked, “Now how can we do this and win her an Oscar?”

A few years ago, Winslet hilariously predicted the answer. On the HBO comedy “Extras” she played herself playing a nun in a WWII drama and corrects the two actors who laud her bravery for taking the part. “I don’t think we need another film about the Holocaust, do we?” she says. “It’s like, how many can there be? We get it: It was grim. Let’s move on.” She goes on to confess that she took the part hoping to win that elusive Oscar.

It’s surreal that tonight her lampooning joke might come to pass. If it does, congratulations, Kate. Now let’s move on.

Biết em năm ngóng, tháng chờ
Cứ chiều chiều ra sông gánh nước
Nên ngày ngày cùng bạn bè lên chốt
Anh lại xuống sông Hồng cho thoả nỗi em mong

Đài báo gió mùa, em thương ở đầu sông
Đỉnh đồi cao chiến hào anh gặp rét
Biết màu màng đồng quê chưa cấy hết
Tay em ngập dưới bùn, lúa có thẳng hàng không?

Giá chúng mình còn cái thuở dung dăng…
Anh thả lá thuyền xuôi về dưới ấy
Em ra sông chắc em sẽ thấy
Chỉ nỗi nhớ chúng mình đủ ấm mọi mùa đông.

Nhưng thơ ngây đâu còn ở chúng mình
Khi Tổ quốc trao anh lên tuyến đầu chặn giặc
Khi biên cương trong anh đã trở thành máu thịt
Đạn lên nòng anh giữ trọn nguồn sông

Nỗi nhớ cho em chưa viết được đôi dòng
Đạn quân thù bỗng cuồng điên vào thị xã
Xe tăng thù nghiến mặt sông êm ả
Nhịp cầu thù chặt đứt chờ mong

Bão lửa này mang sức mạnh hờn căm
Phá cầu thù, xé vụn xe tăng giặc
Giữa dòng sông nghìn xác thù ngã gục
Máu giặc loang ố cả một vùng

Thì hỡi em yêu ở cuối sông Hồng
Nếu gặp dòng sông ngàu lên sắc đỏ
Là niềm thương anh gửi về em đó
Qua màu nước sông Hồng, em hiểu chiến công anh

Lào Cai, 1979

In 2007, before There Will Be Blood had been released, I talked a great deal about how I felt Daniel Day-Lewis was the greatest living actor and that there really wasn’t any competition. When the film was eventually released, I felt vindicated because he had gone one step further, cementing his status as the actor who stands above all others by making difficult choices, off-beat choices in his mannerisms and cadences in his speech. Sean Penn is terrific, Philip Seymour Hoffman is wonderful, but Daniel Day-Lewis is just on a completely different level.

For actresses, the top actresses are very close together in terms of skill; I’m talking about women like Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and Rachel Weisz. But from the second I saw her in Heavenly Creatures, I felt that Kate Winslet was just a smidgen ahead of all the others. She doesn’t tower over the other actresses the way I feel Daniel Day-Lewis does with his peers, but she definitely has a combination of fearlessness and intelligence that combines with her physical beauty to make her into something a bit different than anything we’ve ever really seen before. She has been the best actress working for about a decade now and it’s great that people are finally realizing that with the arrival of her sixth Academy Award nomination.

But, that doesn’t mean she should win an Oscar for The Reader. But bear with me for a moment here.

The Academy has a strange history of rewarding the right actors for the wrong films and frankly, it’s annoying. Jack Lemmon won a Best Actor Oscar, but not for Some Like it Hot or The Apartment or Days of Wine and Roses; nope, he won for Save the Tiger in 1974. It’s a fine performance and the film is utterly forgettable, but the Academy wasn’t rewarding him for that film, they were rewarding him for an excellent body of work. Because of that, he beat out Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, two remarkable performances. But my favorite performance of that year was Al Pacino in Serpico.

So, to give Jack Lemmon an award, they snub a slew of young actors – Robert Redford was also nominated that year for The Sting and has never won an acting Oscar – including the great Al Pacino. Now, they could not have known at the time that Al Pacino would go on to become one of the greatest actors of his generation, but still his performance in Serpico was definitely better than Lemmon’s in Save the Tiger. Nonetheless, Pacino got snubbed repeatedly – much like Lemmon – over the next two decades and finally the Academy decided to give Pacino an Oscar. But he didn’t get an Oscar for The Godfather films or Dog Day Afternoon or Glengarry Glen Ross or even Scarface; nope, he got it for Scent of a Woman in 1993.

So Pacino won that year and beat out young Robert Downey, Jr. in Chaplin, Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, but most importantly Denzel Washington in the captivating Malcolm X. There is nobody in the world who thinks that Pacino’s performance in Scent of a Woman is equal to Washington’s in Spike Lee’s masterpiece. But because the Academy felt the need to give an award to a great performer, they wind up snubbing somebody else and the dominoes continue to fall.

Denzel Washington won an Oscar for Training Day, for giving a performance that isn’t nearly half as good as his portrayal in Malcolm X and because of that, Sean Penn, Tom Wilkinson (who should have won for In the Bedroom) and Will Smith had to wait. And this particular thread all stems from the Academy deciding to give Jack Lemmon an Oscar for Save the Tiger, in an effort to rectify past mistakes. Don’t get me started on Paul Newman winning for The Color of Money or Julia Roberts winning for Erin Brockovich.

The Academy must behave like a shark, moving forward constantly without looking back. Each award should be given on merit, on the basis of that particular film and that particular performance, not on past success in past films. And that brings us back to Kate Winslet.

In my estimation, Kate Winslet should have four more nominations (which would bring her total to ten) and at least two wins for films she actually has been nominated for (which would put her on a par, in the Academy’s mind, with Hilary Swank). The three extra nominations would have been for her devastating performance in Quills, her tragic Ophelia in Hamlet, her insane turn in Holy Smoke and one of her best performances yet in this past year’s Revolutionary Road.

Her first win should have come for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which she inexplicably lost to Hilary Swank’s paragon of blue-collar heroism in Million Dollar Baby. Her Clementine lights up the screen in Michel Gondry’s film and not just because of her bright orange hair; within a fantastical world where memories can be erased, she crafts a character that is so true and so real that it grounds the entire film in a similar reality. She breathes life into an off-kilter character, making her odd behavior not only reasonable but also endearing. We fall in love with her spirit in the same way that Jim Carrey’s character does.

And her second win should have come for her absolutely astounding and heartbreaking turn in Todd Field’s Little Children. That is a role that so easily could have been turned into something villainous with the wrong expressions, but Winslet makes her character of Sarah Pierce someone that scares us for a different reason: we’ve seen her before, in our lives, walking across the street and never knew what she was thinking and now we do and it makes perfect sense. She is a person with hopes and dreams who has to take solace in the small victories in her life, like being the smartest housewife on the block and we feel empathy for her, even as we sense that she is making some mistakes.

So the Academy screwed up like it always does and didn’t properly award this amazing actress for two of her finest roles – they also wouldn’t have been wrong to give her an award for Iris­ – but now what? Is the Academy just supposed to give her an award because she’s always great?

If Kate Winslet had been nominated for Revolutionary Road, I would be 100 percent behind it and I’d be screaming to anyone that would listen that she should just be handed the damn award already. But she didn’t get nominated for the complex performance in the difficult film, she got nominated for the accessible film and the decent performance (the woman is incapable of being bad in anything). It reminds me of a couple years ago when Leonardo DiCaprio got nominated for Blood Diamond instead of The Departed – if it had been the latter, I would have rooted for him to win, but it was the former.

There is the argument that if Winslet wins for The Reader, it’s really a win for both films, but that’s not true. She would be winning for a specific performance in a specific film and since that film is The Reader, it would be inappropriate when the other four performances are all better than Winslet performance in that particular film.

The role of Hanna Schmitz is simply not a good role because the film doesn’t know what to make of her. She’s an illiterate ex-Nazi who doesn’t make any excuses for her role in the Holocaust, which is definitely interesting in theory. But in execution, the film wants me to have sympathy for her because she’s illiterate – as if being illiterate makes someone unable to know that killing is wrong. And Winslet’s performance is okay, as I said earlier, but I don’t really know what other way she could have played the role. I appreciate that she doesn’t resort to histrionics in any of the scenes, but that’s not the way the character is written anyway. She is understated and confounding and she does her job well enough.

But it’s not on the same level as Meryl Streep’s distressing turn in Doubt or Anne Hathaway’s ball of emotion in Rachel Getting Married or Melissa Leo’s soul-crushing portrayal in Frozen River or Angelina Jolie’s quiet strength in Changeling. I’m sorry, but of these five performances, Winslet’s is the least worthy of an award. It actually pains me to say that because I think she’s so wonderful and I desperately want to give her an award too, but it would mean snubbing somebody more deserving. It would mean that in future years, we would look back at this as a make-up Oscar rather than something won on merit alone. It’s possible that some voters will put a check next to her name because they loved her in The Reader, but I’m guessing more than a few will vote for her because of how great she’s always been.

So I implore the Academy to not give Kate Winslet the award this year. I’m confident that she will give us a performance within the next five years that will be worthy of such an award, so there will be plenty of other chances. If she wins, then I’ll definitely be pleased that the best living actress finally has an Oscar, but I’ll be disappointed because I’ll know it’s for the wrong movie.

- Noah Forrest
February 9, 2009

Before conducting the New Year’s Day concert in Vienna recently, I had often performed some of the works included on the program as encores while on tour with the Vienna Philharmonic, but I had never before conducted a whole program of waltzes and polkas. It occurred to me as I was learning the program how lucky I was to have played so many short pieces as a pianist, because a conductor’s repertoire is generally limited to big symphonies with the occasional symphonic poem or overture. Having played Chopin Nocturnes and Waltzes, Schubert Impromptus, Schumann Novelettes, and Brahms Intermezzi, I felt I could draw from a whole world of music that condenses the wealth of musical creation into the form of a short piece. Playing these pieces as a pianist, you learn to adapt the musical line to a shorter form.

There are so many repeats in these Strauss pieces: whole sections and half sections, both in the polkas and the waltzes. This fascinates me, because I have always believed since my childhood that one of the greatest contributions music makes to human existence is precisely that it is unrepeatable. It was extremely interesting to me to think about and dwell on the different possibilities of giving each repeated section a slightly different character or angle by sometimes changing the balance in the orchestra and allowing subsidiary voices to acquire greater importance when a section was repeated for the second or third time. This especially applied to the polkas. It was also very important to find the connection between the different waltzes in each set with very slight, almost imperceptible changes of tempo between the waltzes, thus making a unity of similar elements rather than a monotony of independent, repeated sections.

Music like this is often frowned upon as being superficial, as if accessibility were equivalent to superficiality. On the contrary, there is plenty of music that is difficult to access and not very deep, and plenty of music that is immediately accessible yet musically rich. The music of the Strauss family has benefited over the years from its extraordinary degree of accessibility and the immediate acceptance of the works as they were written, but with time the pieces became victims of their very popularity. This music very often has a popular feeling but nevertheless always maintains a certain aristocratic quality which I find very appealing: it is popular but not proletarian, especially in the great waltzes. The slow polkas, on the other hand, like the Annen-Polka and the Alexandrinen-Polka have a tremendous amount of charm as only slow dances can have. The fast polkas, like Unter Donner und Blitz and the Zampa Galopp, have a quality of exhilaration and energy that are in great contrast to the slow polkas.

It is very difficult to make a program exclusively of this music. There are 19 pieces on the program, and it is very easy to let them just become a collection of encores. This is why the Vienna Philharmonic and I tried to develop an inner construction. Each half of the program began with an overture to an operetta: in the first half it was the overture to “Eine Nacht in Venedig,” (A Night in Venice) and in the second half it was the overture to the “Zigeunerbaron” (the Gypsy Baron). There were two great waltzes in the first half, Märchen aus dem Orient (Tales from the Orient) and Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses From the South). They were interspersed by the Annen-Polka, one of the most perfect examples of the slow polka, in order to provide contrast between two great waltzes. After Rosen aus dem Süden, we played Freikugeln, a very fast polka, to end the first half.

In the second half we played what I would call a small symphony made up of three pieces from the Zigeunerbaron: the Overture, Einzugsmarsch (opening march), and Schatz-Waltzer. Then there was the Valse Espagnole of Hellmesberger, which was like the sorbet served in classical haute cuisine dinners in order to refresh the palate between courses, followed by one unit of three polkas with the slow one, the Alexandrinen-Polka, in the middle.

The second part of the concert was in itself conceived in two parts, and the first part ended with these three polkas. The second part of the second half began with what I believe is one of the most beautiful musical works ever written, Sphärenklänge, which opens with this wonderful, almost Wagnerian introduction. I fell in love with this piece the first time I heard Karajan conduct it on the New Year’s Day concert in 1987, and it was partly for this reason that I asked to conduct this waltz this year. To contrast it, it was followed by yet another fast polka, Éljen a Magyár! The formal program then ended with Haydn’s Farewell Symphony to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of his death. Because we “staged” the Farewell Symphony so that the musicians left the stage, leaving me unattended, the first encore was the polka: “Wir sind nicht aengstlich” (We are not Afraid). The second encore was the ubiquitous Blauer Donau (The Blue Danube), which as tradition dictates was interrupted by applause so that the conductor can wish the listeners in the Musikverein and the people watching the concert on television a Happy New Year. I took this opportunity to deliver a message of hope for peace 2009 and for human justice in the Middle East.

The Vienna Philharmonic owns this music, spiritually speaking, and not just for geographical reasons. In geographical terms, they own a very high percentage of the classical masterpieces: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Schönberg, and so on, but their relationship with the music of the Strauss family is closer than that of any other orchestra. This is due in part but not exclusively to the tradition of the New Year’s Day concert, which is now in its 70th year. I have enjoyed a very long relationship with the orchestra for many years both as pianist and conductor, but to play this Strauss program with them was a very special occasion for me not only because millions of people watched it on television but because of the attitude of the musicians. One could have expected, and almost excused, an attitude of: “We know it all,” but I was heartened and inspired by their curiosity and openness to rethink with me the different styles in this highly varied music. Questions of tempo, rubato, and dynamics were looked upon as if for the first time, and this coming from such a great orchestra. It was a perfectly balanced combination of attitude and aptitude.

It was wonderful to feel the orchestra refusing to let itself fall into the routine of what they already knew to be “successful.” They had a freshness of discovery in their approach which is so important; after all, you cannot expect the listener to be surprised by a sudden modulation in the music unless the players are able to give the feeling of inventing it on the spur of the moment. A clear understanding of the form and structure of the music allows the players to create the impression that they are inventing it at that moment. Rehearsing intelligently sometimes means deciding what must not happen rather than what should. I think it is erroneous to claim that what I call strategic thinking in music (which one could term “telehearing” as opposed to television) is in contradiction with the freshness of spontaneity. The better the musical preparation is structured, the more the intuition can be given free reign. Before one plays the first note of a piece one must be able to imagine the sound of the last note of the piece, which implies an understanding of the structure. This is what I mean by “telehearing.” However, because music takes place in time, the structure in music is also flowing. It is not set in stone; rather, it flows like water. Even the structure of music has a fluidity which is one of the reasons why music can touch people so much. The fluidity of music reminds t
hem of the fluidity of life, and this is as much in evidence in a small polka or set of waltzes as it is in a large-scale symphony.

She casually touches his knee in mid-conversation.

He’s exceedingly polite, likes to fortify himself with caffeine and wears Nikes.

She’ll drop the occasional F-word, rolls her own smokes and prefers spike-heeled boots.

Oh, those rosy-cheeked Titanic kids, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Shipmates for life. How ironic that, as children, they began acting in commercials for products that naturally go together — he for milk, she for cereal. Now they are all grown up and ready to confront perilous waters of the marital kind in Revolutionary Road, opening Friday.

It seems destined that they would reunite on the big screen. Survivors of history-altering events do tend to remain emotionally tethered. Especially if an over-budget cinematic disaster in the making manages to instead shatter box-office records (still king of the world at $1.8 billion), tie for the most Academy Award wins with 11 and catapult its stars to privacy-depleting fame.

The pair have squeezed in a lot of living into the decade or so since their careers exploded. Winslet, 33, has had two children (Mia, 8, and Joe, who turned 5 Monday), one divorce and a model marriage of five years to director and fellow Brit Sam Mendes. DiCaprio, 34, continues to enjoy his bachelorhood with regular upgrades in supermodel girlfriends and has grown into an avid eco-activist.

They have remained best-friend close, both following paths away from Titanic-sized blockbusters and toward challenging if not necessarily commercial fare with esteemed directors.

DiCaprio was once considered for pal Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man role but has ended up hitching his professional wagon to a guy named Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed) while raising his Oscar-nomination ante to three.

Winslet turned down both Anna and the King (a flop for Jodie Foster) and Shakespeare in Love (a winner for Gwyneth Paltrow) to do Hideous Kinky and hasn’t flinched from veering off the beaten path since, racking up five Oscar nominations in the bargain.

“To be honest, I think that’s kind of who we always were,” DiCaprio says about their uncompromising natures. “If anything, doing Titanic was very much a departure for both of us. It was an attempt to do something different from the string of very independent films that we had done up until that point.”

Winslet says they regularly solicit each other’s opinions on work choices. “In fact, I don’t really talk to anybody apart from Leo about what I am thinking of doing. Including Sam sometimes, actually.”

In the meantime, both had been seeking the right vehicle for a second collaboration. Main requirement: something that did not involve an iceberg and a seagoing vessel.

“We were very aware that if we were to work together again, it would have to be a specific type of project,” DiCaprio says. “And it couldn’t tread whatsoever on any similar territory.”

Winslet was given the script for Revolutionary Road by her agent about four years ago. It was based on a 1961 cult novel about a “golden” couple known as the Wheelers, disillusioned Frank and desperate April, adrift in ’50s suburbia. Hailed as a masterpiece among literary types, the book would set the standard for all the savagery of post-war domesticity that would follow.

The actress clung greedily to the emotional powder keg of a screenplay until Mendes, slightly gun-shy after having covered similar ground with his 1999 Oscar winner American Beauty, signed on and DiCaprio came aboard. The Golden Globe-nominated result, dubbed “blistering” and “brutally unnerving” by critics, features shouting matches of such intense fury, it will likely leave stunned Titanic fans pining for the days of spitting tutorials.

As the interview continues, the two gently steer inquiries away from the doomed cruise liner of their youth and toward the sinking lifeboat of a relationship drama sailing into theaters now.

An admittedly not-very-original observation is proffered that if Titanic was the ultimate romantic tragedy, Revolutionary Road is the ultimate anti-romantic tragedy.

Winslet, anticipating the worst, decides to stop such nonsense from escalating by revealing how she and DiCaprio would entertain themselves on the set of their current movie.

“Leo and I would play this silly game of ‘Guess the press questions,’ ” she says, knowing that awkward comparisons between their two films are inevitable. “We would do versions of the questions and versions of the answers between ourselves.”

She would rather not strain to pit the escapist fantasy of Titanic against the devastating reality of Revolutionary Road. “They are two completely different stories and, in our minds, they are totally separate. The relationships between Jack and Rose and Frank and April literally bear no comparison whatsoever.”

Too bad. We really did want them to rate the comfort level of Revolutionary Road‘s lusty kitchen-counter quickie vs. Titanic‘s steamy grappling in the vintage Renault. But when it comes to praising the quality of each other’s work, neither has any qualms.

Winslet, given to passionate monologues, starts right in. “The thing that I felt that Leo did absolutely brilliantly and was able to embrace, because he’s such a (expletive) incredible actor …”

“Thank you, honey,” DiCaprio interrupts with a whisper.

“It’s true,” she insists, before continuing. “I remember Leo turning to me and saying, ‘You know what I love about this guy? He is so weak.’ A lot of actors would have said, ‘Well, he seems a little bit of a (wimp) here, can we take a little bit of that edge off?’ Leo really relished the fact that this man expressed every single side of himself and he was unafraid to do that.”

It’s his turn to gush. “I can’t name another actress who would have been able to convey the complexity of April. You go too far to one extreme and the woman seems like an absolutely insane housewife, and not somebody who feels trapped within her own surroundings and feels unsatisfied. Who is actually a heroic character because she is willing to sacrifice everything to live the life she wants to live. Kate brilliantly navigated her way through all that.”

That it is these particular actors playing these often disagreeable characters does make it easier for the audience to give a hoot about the Wheelers, especially those once-teen girls who repeatedly went to Titanic for a Leo fix.

As DiCaprio notes: “I think there could be a certain disjointedness for the younger generation. They might not understand the confines of the time period. Here we are, white people in the suburbs, talking about our problems.”

Prettier people do make for prettier problems, though. There are several stunning shots, especially during the opening scenes when they first meet, in which DiCaprio and Winslet seem to have stepped out of one of the era’s Douglas Sirk melodramas, flush with Technicolor allure.

Dark and dashing. Blond and sleek. They are the very essence of masculine and feminine. If Frank and April aren’t quite as special as those in their idolizing circle would believe, the actors who play them certainly don’t disappoint.

Kathy Bates, Titanic‘s Unsinkable Molly Brown who once more is entangled in the pair’s affairs, this time as a nosy real
estate agent, acknowledges the impact of seeing Leo and Kate together again: “It was just a thrill. It was sort of like the animal wrangler brought these two rare white tigers on the set. You were fascinated and wanted to watch them every minute, but you weren’t allowed to pet them. It just raised every element of the working experience.”

Winslet, never one to indulge any vanity onscreen, cares not a whit about all that. She prefers their haggard looks when everything starts going to hell.

“It was important to Sam that the story would largely be told in close-up,” she says. “So you could see every single scar, every single mark, every wrinkle on everyone’s face. Particularly, Frank and April. So you don’t feel as an audience alienated by that sort of ’50s glossy image.”

Still, they can’t help but exude old-fashioned movie-star glamour even under the most harrowing of circumstances.

“I would have to be clinically insane not to want to direct these two people in these two roles,” Mendes says. “I’m on record as saying that I love the fact that an American audience brings an existing relationship to bear on an actor’s performance. I like that when you see Paul Newman in a movie, you’re not just seeing Paul Newman, but you are seeing Hud, Butch Cassidy, Fast Eddie and Cool Hand Luke. Actors are the sum of everything they bring to the screen.”

He sensed their pasts resonating as they inhabited Frank and April. “That is what is so exciting about Leo. You remember that boy. He still has the vulnerability and beauty of that child in This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Kate has that same thing. She somehow retains that little girl, that innocence and naïveté. And that sense of play, no matter however serious she gets.”

Once they stop doing their sell job on Revolutionary Road, the Kate and Leo show can be quite amusing. When asked to name his favorite movie of hers, DiCaprio instead fears he has been asked to relate an anecdote.

“Please don’t make me give an anecdote,” he protests. “I’m terrible at those. ‘Tell me something that happened on the set.’ My mind just goes —” (He makes a noise that sounds like an appliance on the fritz.)

“I remember everything,” Winslet brags. “You do,” DiCaprio confirms.

“You know I do,” she adds for emphasis. “I remember (expletive) everything. So many Titanic stories I won’t tell.”

Once assured that only a movie title is required, he says, “I really love her in —” (he imitates a drum roll) “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s a different side of Kate in that movie. That element of you nobody really knows about.”

For her pick, she considers What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and The Basketball Diaries, but then she decides to go with something recent: “You were incredible in The Departed. So laser-like focused. You seriously delivered every single moment. It was bloody difficult to play, and I was blown away by it.”

Now that they have No. 2 under their belts, will they consider teaming up a third time?

DiCaprio: “I don’t know, dahling. Shall we?”

Winslet: “Maybe we should just do something when we are really old and disgusting. Total has-beens. You know, ‘Oh, there they are again. Bless them.’ “

In the Hollywood-as-high-school fantasy of our minds, Katherine Heigl and Kate Hudson giggle in the back of RomCom 101; Anne Hathaway rocks an independent study with Julia Roberts; Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman breeze in and out of “Prosthetics and Your Oscar.”

And tucked away somewhere is a permission-only course team-taught by Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Vanessa Redgrave, with occasional guest lectures by Maggie Smith. The class is called “Dame Training: How to Join the Greats.” And because Cate Blanchett and a few other pupils are absent today, the only student – taking furious notes and rapid-firing questions – is Kate Winslet.

Kate Winslet? Lovely. Lovely in “Sense and Sensibility,” lovely even when speaking vulgarities with that British accent. Lovely in her fleshiness, which has nothing to do with the curves everyone’s always talking about and everything to do with how real she is, and the fact that when she cries onscreen she looks genuinely awful. She commits.

Oscar voters like her

She has no Academy Awards, though she’s been nominated repeatedly. At 22 (Remember “Titanic”?) she was the youngest person ever to have been nominated twice, then at 26 (“Iris”) the youngest for three, then at 29 (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) the youngest for four, then at 31 (“Little Children”) …

Next are two more Oscar-bait roles, “The Reader” and “Revolutionary Road.”

She may not see it (“HA HA HA HA HA,” she explodes when the Dame thing is suggested), but after a decade of being the Not-It girl, eschewing “hot” for “interesting,” one gets the sense that she’s going to be one icon of a woman.

“I didn’t try to make her sympathetic. I knew that would be a mistake – I knew it would be wrong to demand the sympathy of an audience. I’m playing a woman who is an SS guard. We’re not supposed to sympathize with SS guards. … But I knew that I had to understand her. I had to really understand her, to come to her in very profound and complicated ways and develop my own relationship with her.”

A Park Avenue hotel suite. Winslet, 33, has been here all day for interviews. Her feet are bare, the rest of her is va-va-voom in a sleeveless black dress. Hair: blond and Vargas Girl-y. Skin: creamy enough to be spread on something. Topic: “The Reader.”

It’s set in the decades after the war, exploring the ramifications of an affair between a German teen and the older woman he discovers was a guard at Auschwitz. Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz is at once stony and fragile, a monster but, perhaps, because of a secret revealed midway through the film, also a victim. The sex scenes – with barely legal David Kross – are plentiful and naked. The film prompts ambivalence.

“I was very aware that if an audience member felt any degree of sympathy for Hanna Schmitz, at the same time they would feel compromised for feeling that way,” Winslet says, which is exactly why she thought the role was so delicious. “What you’re given at face value is extremely limited, but you knooooow beneath the surface there’s so much stuff for you to rummage through.”

“Revolutionary Road,” directed by her husband, Sam Mendes, is about marital carnage. A 1950s couple rages against the suburban machine because they’d expected their lives to be more interesting than barbecues and community theater. It reunites Winslet with Leonardo DiCaprio, whom Winslet’s 8- and 5-year-old children call “Uncle Leo,” and it so thoroughly disabuses any notions of young love that it makes one wonder if Jack slipping into the ocean at the end of “Titanic” wasn’t the best thing for the couple after all. Winslet’s April Wheeler is miserable, passionate, desperate and resigned.

Dingy postwar Germany versus bland Connecticut burbs, but deep down both movies are about the same thing: how limited options and wrong choices can completely and ruthlessly destroy a life.

She’s got good instincts

The right choices, inversely, have made Kate Winslet.

Turning down the blockbuster offers after “Titanic” seemed an odd choice at the time. “But that was a very, very strategic life choice I had to make,” Winslet says. “I was suddenly really famous, and I didn’t know how to cope.”

She did “Hideous Kinky” instead, which was neither hideous nor memorable but opened her up for a series of funky, corseted roles.

“Kate has extraordinary emotional range,” says Stephen Daldry, who directed “The Reader.” “She’s very rare amongst her contemporaries in that. She loves complication. She doesn’t make easy choices. She’s a natural successor to an actress the caliber of Meryl Streep.”

Of course, how could we forget Streep, the mother superior of the Dame school?

But when it comes to career paths or life goals, “I don’t have a radar for agenda or strategy,” Winslet says.

What you keep coming back to despite Winslet’s shocked – shocked! – protestations otherwise, is that she is in Dame Training.

Judi Dench didn’t win an Oscar until 1999, after all; Helen Mirren, 2006. They were great all along, of course, but it took decades for us to realize that they were, quite simply, grand.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/27/DD7O14USM4.DTL

This article appeared on page E – 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Monica Hesse, Washington Post

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Berlin

REHEARSING the Berlin Staatskapelle the other afternoon, Daniel Barenboim froze for an instant, baton absently pointed skyward. He shook his head. “More mysterious,” he said to the clarinets, returning from his brief trance. Then he drew a yellow towel briskly over his flushed face and in the same motion glanced discreetly at a clock on the wall. The Staatskapelle, the orchestra of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, resumed. Mr. Barenboim scanned the room as if to locate the sound he wanted, mouth slightly ajar, expression rapt and intense. Finally he nodded, content with the passage. “Wunderbar, wunderbar,” he muttered, a man in a hurry.

Mr. Barenboim, an Argentine-born Israeli who has made his life here, arrives in New York this week for a variety of performances that coincide with the publication of “Music Quickens Time” (Verso Books), a collection of his essays and occasional pieces on music, Israel, himself and other musicians. In America it’s a typical Barenboim whirlwind schedule. He will make his debut at the Metropolitan Opera conducting “Tristan und Isolde,” play the first piano recital there since Vladimir Horowitz’s during the 1970s and join several young musicians and James Levine in a chamber concert at Weill Recital Hall.

He will also perform with members of the West-Eastern Divan — the much-lauded orchestra of young Arabs and Israelis that he established in 1999 with Edward Said, the Palestinian-born literary scholar — in another chamber concert at the United Nations. There are trips to Philadelphia and Chicago.

Oh yes, and he plays the premiere of “Interventions,” a new piano concerto by Elliott Carter, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Mr. Levine at Carnegie Hall on the occasion of Mr. Carter’s centenary. Asked recently whether, like so much of Mr. Carter’s work, this one was difficult to learn, the sort of music most pianists want months to prepare, Mr. Barenboim paused. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I haven’t had much time to look yet.”

There is no one quite like him today in the music world. General music director of the Staatsoper here; principal guest conductor at the Teatro Alla Scala in Milan; former music director of the Chicago Symphony and the Orchestre de Paris; for years a conductor at the Bayreuth festival; a champion of new music since the 1950s; a chamber musician who has performed with every great singer and instrumentalist in half a century — from Gregor Piatigorsky and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to his wife, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who died in 1987, and the bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff — he was a child prodigy who remains, despite a full-time conducting career, among the premiere pianists.

His fellow pianist Emanuel Ax, when the subject of Mr. Barenboim came up in a recent e-mail exchange, volunteered that he had looked up to Mr. Barenboim since the age of 16, notwithstanding that Mr. Barenboim is only seven years older. “I thought then and still do that he is one of the great players of our time,” Mr. Ax wrote, “and when he is in shape I would rather hear him, with Beethoven especially, than almost anyone. Obviously, he is a major conductor — in short, life is unfair!”

It’s true, that slight remark about being “in shape.” Mr. Barenboim, his seemingly effortless virtuosity aside, drops a few notes sometimes, having always so many of them to keep in mind at once. That said, as a player in the Berlin Philharmonic commented the other day, shaking his head, even the notes Mr. Barenboim makes up or fudges end up being interesting.

Critics fishing for complaints also occasionally say that he conducts at extreme tempos. Leading the Divan in the West bank town of Ramallah a few years ago, a special triumph for the orchestra because it brought young Israelis into the Occupied Territories alongside Palestinians to make music (Arte television recorded it), Mr. Barenboim rushed hellbent through the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at a tempo the players couldn’t quite dash off. But the effort brought down the house. His “Tristan” at La Scala last season was sublimely, ethereally slow. What really matters in the end, he is forever making old works sound new.

He performed Schubert’s song cycle “Die Schöne Müllerin” with Mr. Quasthoff on a recent Sunday to a packed Staatsoper, and in the prolonged silence before nearly 2,000 people erupted into applause, there were only the muffled hints of weeping throughout the hall. Mr. Quasthoff ended the curtain calls by pointing out that Mr. Barenboim had to conduct Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” in the same hall a couple of hours later.

Afterward Mr. Quasthoff reported in conversation that Mr. Barenboim hadn’t wished to rehearse. He said he knew what Mr. Quasthoff wanted. Still, “every song he played had four or five notes that were like a complete revelation to me, that made me hear the music as if for the first time,” Mr. Quasthoff said, “and this is always how it is with him.” A musician can hardly pay a bigger compliment to a colleague.

At 66 Mr. Barenboim has been performing for 58 years, nearly since the days of the first commercially successful LPs. Barrel-chested, quick-witted, a headstrong live wire and easy raconteur with a big ego and a small, stocky pair of hands, he recalls, as if he were from another era, how Wilhelm Furtwängler recommended him to George Szell and Karl Böhm; how Horowitz invited him to dish dirt about Arthur Rubinstein (Mr. Barenboim, who revered Rubinstein, instead tormented Horowitz by saying wonderful things about Rubinstein’s playing); how the pianist Edwin Fischer, conducting Mozart from the keyboard in the early 1950s, inspired Mr. Barenboim to think of picking up a baton (he wasn’t yet a teenager); how Rubinstein and Furtwängler both established a model to which he aspired as an artist.

“Those two still represent for me what a musician should be, meaning not just someone musically accomplished but cultured and well read,” Mr. Barenboim said late one evening at home, puffing on a big Cuban cigar. He was ensconced in an easy chair in his living room in the leafy Berlin neighborhood of Zehlendorf, seated before a pair of immense Steinways, one fitted with the narrower keys that he likes to use in recitals these days. The bookshelves behind him bulged with volumes in French, Spanish, German, English and Hebrew.

“Rubinstein read Cervantes in Spanish, Dostoyevsky in Russian, Voltaire in French,” Mr. Barenboim said. “Music has become specialized today. There used to be a different notion of musical culture. I believe that Furtwängler genuinely felt — maybe he was naïve, but he felt that he personally could save German culture from the Nazis. He wrote about the introduction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in relation to the Greek idea of chaos and catharsis. How many musicians think that way today?

“A century ago the same people who knew Schoenberg’s music knew Kandinsky’s art. There was no separation. Rubinstein used to say that at the turn of the century 25 percent of the audience played the music he was playing, and 70 years later 25 people in the audience owned his records. The responsibility is ours. It’s not the fault of technology. The person who wants to listen actively will get more out of the music than the person who just sits there waiting to be inspired.”

Along these same lines he includes a tribute to the composer Pierre Boulez in the new book, recalling how Mr. Boulez dismissed Bruckner’s music during the 1970s, then a decade later, showing “his greatness and intelligence,” embraced Bruckner. That “is a wonderful lesson for us,” Mr. Barenboim concluded, “because often there are people who have very clear ideas and causes to fight for, and they hold on to them and are immovable. And that is very courageous and very laudable, actually. But there’s one step higher than that.”

The metaphor is plain: in this, as in his references to Furtwängler and Rubinstein having a sense of the larger world beyond music, Mr. Barenboim is talking about himself and his efforts, from the bully pulpit of the concert stage, to help assuage at least a little of the hatred between many Israelis and Palestinians and move toward a state of peace.

“The idea was to give each person a forum to articulate his or her thoughts and beliefs in front of the other,” he recounted about the origins of the West-Eastern Divan. “I grew up in Israel in the ’50s, when it was not an occupying power. With CNN and Al-Jazeera today, it’s easy to forget that we could be totally unaware then of the story of the Palestinians. We told ourselves that either the Palestinians had left because they wanted to leave, or they were encouraged to leave by other Arabs. I don’t think I met a Palestinian growing up. I was a patriot. Then I remember in September 1970, when King Hussein killed a lot of Palestinians, Golda Meir saying: ‘Who are these Palestinian people? We are the people of Palestine.’ And for the first time I thought to myself, that can’t be right.”

Gradually he began to hear from Arab acquaintances and others what he calls “the Palestinian narrative.” The creation of the Divan, bringing together young Jews and Arabs with conflicting narratives, and not a little distrust of each other, promised harmony if only on the common ground of music. Needless to say, Mr. Barenboim made enemies back home.

“I don’t think I only have detractors in Israel,” he insisted. “When I play a recital, the place is packed. But I simply think we must ask how we got in this situation of hopelessness. We are a powerful, sovereign nation since 1948. I’m not naïve. I know most Arabs don’t see a reason for Israel to exist as a Jewish state. But in the last 20 years many have come to the conclusion that they need to make some accommodation. Meanwhile this is not the Israel I grew up with.”

He repeated what he often says: “The Divan is deeply nonpolitical in the end. In other words, it’s not in any way linked to the situation in Israel and the occupied territories. If we all end up killing each other in the Middle East, then we at the Divan would have had 10 years of a beautiful experience. Or else this is 10 years of preparing for a beautiful situation. Either way, it’s worthwhile.”

The other evening, after his recital with Mr. Quasthoff and the “Onegin” performance, over leftovers at the kitchen table, having just finished coaching Karim Said, a young Palestinian protégé, Mr. Barenboim looked not the slightest fatigued. He shrugged.

“I don’t feel I have an abnormal schedule,” he said. “What would I have done without the recital yesterday? I would have gotten up at 10 instead of 9:30. I would have played the piano here at home instead of there. I have a card in my favor, which is the ability to concentrate. The act of mental preparation didn’t ever exist for me. As a child I used to play soccer, shower, then play a concert.”

A couple of mornings later he was walking briskly through the backstage canteen at the Philharmonie. He greeted the kitchen staff members like old friends and joked with the tuba player of the Berlin Philharmonic, who at that moment was at the counter contemplating a sweet pastry; and at 11 on the dot he arrived, through a maze of hallways, at the door of the borrowed studio of the Philharmonic’s music director, Simon Rattle. Inside, a string quartet and a page turner waited. Mr. Barenboim tore into the Shostakovich Piano Quintet without so much as touching the keyboard to warm up first, and for the next hour or so focused as if otherwise lost to the world.

In his book he writes, “When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique state of peace, partly due to the fact that one can control, through sound, the relationship between life and death.” He adds, “Since every note produced by a human being has a human quality, there is a feeling of death with the end of each one, and through that experience there is a transcendence of all the emotions that these notes can have in their short lives;
in a way, one is in direct contact with timelessness.”

During the Shostakovich rehearsal he bantered with the quartet; offered the first violinist a tip on bowing, the cellist a suggestion about delaying a crescendo; assented to a turn of phrase that a couple of the string players proposed. At one point the same expression of frozen concentration, the one he had standing before the orchestra, flashed across his face. So it became clear. That’s what it was.

A state of peace.

A dream, like the act of love, has its own time frame and can be all the sweeter for delayed fulfilment. This week, after quarter of a century, I saw a man achieve his fantasy.

In 1981 rumour reached me of a wealthy American who was hiring one of the London orchestras to rehearse Mahler’s second symphony, known as the Resurrection. He did so not with any avowed intent of giving a concert so much as to fathom the secrets of one of the most daunting peaks of symphonic literature.

Not long after, I heard via the ex-prime minister Edward Heath that the American, a financial publisher called Gilbert E Kaplan, had conducted a strictly private, invitation-only account of the work at New York’s Lincoln Center for the benefit of world leaders returning from an International Monetary Summit. Since the Resurrection requires an orchestra of more than 100 and a chorus twice that size, and there were 2,700 garrulous politicians and bankers in the audience, the feat was not going to remain under wraps for very long. After talking to musicians and hearing an audiotape, I flew to New York to meet Kaplan, and found a man with an impossible dream.

The story he told was this: as a cub economist on Wall Street in 1965, he had been dragged by a pal to a Leopold Stokowski rehearsal and, that night, was unable to sleep. The music had affected him in some organic fashion, dissolving him in tears during the next day’s concert.

He was not, I could tell, one of your typical arts softies. At 27, Kaplan had the idea of starting a magazine that would speak to the disparate professionals who manage vast sums of money for banks, pension funds, industries and governments. He named his monthly Institutional Investor and defined his readership with such magnetic precision that, within a couple of years, he was a millionaire in his own right, earning awards for a number-crunching blend of arcane fiscal mechanisms, political profiles and high-powered gossip.

But the Mahler epiphany had awoken a side of his character, which threatened to get out of hand. He took his future wife, Lena, on their first date to hear the symphony at the Royal Festival Hall and she, seeing him grapple with obsession, told him to get a grip: either master the work or drop it. With no more musical knowledge than piano lessons from a New Jersey boyhood, he hired a conducting teacher and, over 18 months, worked his way round every performance on earth, buying dinner for top conductors, who are often in search of financial advice.

In September 1982 he put his life on the line by conducting the symphony for the monetary elite and brought off an astonishing feat. Among many firsts that night, he had cracked one problem that eluded the professionals – how to communicate with the offstage brass band which, unseen and ‘in the far distance’, heralds the Resurrection. Most conductors give cues to an assistant at a half-open door. Kaplan, reviewing Mahler’s original notes, decided to run television cables up to the the band in an upper corridor. Audience members craned their necks to see where the ethereal sound was coming from. No performance of the Resurrection would ever sound the same again.

Kaplan’s dream began to acquire dimensions of destiny. Mahler’s manuscript, owned by a Dutch foundation in financial distress, was put up discreetly for sale. Kaplan not only bought the score; he published it in a facsimile that is now indispensable to serious performers. Elsewhere, he acquired the ring that Mahler gave to his wife, Alma, and placed it on Lena’s finger as a token of gratitude.

In 1986 he staged a ground-breaking Mahler symposium at the Royal Festival Hall and the following year he came to Cardiff to record the symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra. I heard a player summoning his wife to ‘get down here fast, something extraordinary is happening.’ Hard-bitten musicians could not believe that a rank amateur with rather jerky gestures could tell them something new about Mahler but Kaplan, by this time, knew every note that Mahler had erased and replaced in 14 versions of the score, every word he had ever uttered about a symphony that was his very essence – a work that questions the purpose of life on earth.

Kaplan’s recording went on to outsell any Mahler record ever made – 180,000 and rising. He gave the symphony its first performance in China in 1995 and opened the Salzburg Festival with the Philharmonia. His compulsive knowledge obliged Universal Edition to reprint the score with 400 corrections; and when he recorded the new edition with the Vienna Philharmonic I watched in amazement as the trumpets, after ten takes, insisted on playing a passage for an eleventh lip-splitting time to make sure they got it exactly right.

Over the past quarter of a century, hardly a week has gone by without Kaplan and I chewing over some Mahler theory or discovery, some clue that might take us closer to the composer’s mission. Kaplan has, I believe, changed the way we hear this work and, more importantly, demystified the art of conducting to a point where no-one will ever again dismiss the performance of a determined amateur. He had, in a verb, democratised the maestro myth.

When I ask him to assess what his contribution to music might be he ducks the question,but when I want to know how it affected his own life he easily pinpoints the gulf between two halves. ‘What you must understand, Norman,’ he smiles, ‘is that most people I used to know get up every morning and ask themselves, how much am I gonna make today? That was their only motivation. Mine became something else.’

At 67, he is a director of Carnegie Hall, after a decade as a governor of London’s South Bank. Having made his point, you’d think that this might be a time to bask, but from our earliest conversations there always was one red-letter date in his diary that he told me to keep open.

This Monday night at eight pm, 100 years to the moment after Mahler conducted its US premiere on December 8 1908, Gilbert E Kaplan stood in front of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Westminster Chorus at the Lincoln Center and gave the centenary performance. Tickets had sold out a month in advance as a city in the throatlock of recession suspended tough reality and sank into the glow of a very American dream.

Stacking the odds to breaking point, Kaplan delivered an hour-long power-point lecture before changing into conductor’s tails and coming out in front of the orchestra. The effort may have made the opening of the symphony sound a shade deliberate, but everything Kaplan does now has reason in the score and, as the performance unfolded, tensions and contrasts built. The two choral entrances announcing the resurrection – the first as soft as any in the whole of classical music and the second eruptive and explosive – were as close to overwhelming as I have ever heard. A packed house leaped to its feet. The work was complete. Its second century could begin.

There is no universal moral to this story, but one or two lessons abide. What I learned on Monday night is that every human life needs a secondary purpose, and that in art no obsession can ever be considered unhealthy. Resurrection? We all need one.

Essential Mahler Seconds on Record Rattle’s award winner is marred by patchy singing, Klemperer’s by rough sound and Abbado’s by over-silkiness. The ones to have are:

Kaplan (Conifer, 1987)

Stokowski (BMG,1974)

Chailly (Decca, 2002)