Miami's New World Center
It was a great big gay-in at Miami’s New World Center last night. Gay maestro Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the New World Symphony academy orchestra in a new work by openly gay British composer Thomas Adès, accompanied by a film by Israeli/British filmmaker Tal Rosner, who entered into a civil partnership with Adès in 2006. But wait, it still wasn’t gay enough! The closing piece was Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, which quotes his “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Copland, for those of you who don’t know, was a closeted gay musician, but one of the few composers of his stature to live openly and travel with his lovers, most of whom were talented, much younger men. The concert began with Richard Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman” overture. Wagner was straight, but the über-gay King Ludwig of Bavaria worshiped at his feet, using funds from the royal treasury to build him an opera house and a lavish villa in Bayreuth. Wagner made a career of stringing him along. The only thing missing was a procession of rainbow flags across the stage. But there was another bond. Copland was Jewish, architect Frank Gehry is Jewish, and Michael Tilson Thomas is the grandson of Yiddish theater stars. Just to toss water onto the flames, it must be noted that Wagner was notoriously antisemitic.
The stunning concert hall interior is surprisingly small, seating about 750. I had a back row seat but was only 13 rows from the stage. The seating is stadium style, steeply terraced, so all seats have excellent sight lines. The stage is also terraced in a curved shape, with various heights controlled by hydraulic lifts. The seats are upholstered in a blue fabric woven with white puffy clouds (I'm not making this up). The seats are in two shades of blue, so there is a certain snaggle-toothed appearance when they are not occupied -- two or three together are turquoise, then another two or three in a darker blue -- a bit like the Disney Concert Hall in L.A.
There is a rooftop terrace with boffo views of the skyline, ocean and Biscayne Bay. I like this building better than the Disney Hall, also designed by Gehry, who turns 83 next week. Here the building is conventionally shoe-box shaped on the outside, with startling free-form boxes, swoops and curves inside. In LA the exterior is metal clad and free form, much like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, but the interior is more traditional. I'm sure the Miami plan was the result of budget constraints; the whole shebang cost only $165 million, including 30 rehearsal spaces, the parking garage and 2.5 acre park along Washington St. The concert hall ceiling is angled and boasts giant convex curved panels that resemble sails. The second piece on the program, “Polaris,” by Thomas Adès, used these to stunning effect when moving images of clouds, waves, women walking along a beach, bubbles and the like appeared. The music sounded like a not unpleasant exercise of short snatches of musical fragments repeated over and over -- it never really went anywhere, but that's the trend in modern serious music (I blame John Adams). One thing for sure, it was LOUD! For this 12-minute commission, brass players were placed on railed platforms at the back of the stage and up in the balconies to great stereophonic advantage. The effect was unlike any concert experience of my life, and a likely harbinger of the future of serious music concerts.
Friday will be the first use of the 80-foot tall simulcast Hi-Def screen covering the north-east side of the exterior, to the accompaniment of nearly 200 speakers that spread the sound to the audience outside. If anything will get younger butts into the seats of a concert hall, it will be Maestro Thomas and his high-tech New World Center.
But I digress.
