We went to hear a concert at MOMA, staged in association with the exhibit "Inventing Abstraction" and curated by David Lang of Bang On a Can. I went because I wanted to hear a very rare Schoenberg piece "Herzgewächse" which I have never heard performed. The piece is scored for soprano, harmonium, celesta, and harp. Unfortunately, Lang's idea of an interesting concert to connect with this exhibit was to perform the 4 minute Schoenberg piece and a 50 minute Morton Feldman piece for solo voice and pre-recorded voice. What a ridiculous choice! (A piece by someone like Webern would have been far more appropriate.) I like Feldman (see elsewhere in this blog..), but I don't have the patience to sit through a solo vocal piece of that length. Since the concert was at MOMA, I went to the galleries, and popped into the concert to hear the Schoenberg, and then left. The Schoenberg was a huge disappointment, because all the instruments and voice were AMPLIFIED! This ruined all the delicate balances, as the harmonium was overamplified. I was really annoyed. In addition, Lang's long spoken introduction was idiotic. Institutions such as MOMA should learn to treat music with a little more respect.
Update: Be sure to read David Lang's comment. I do regret calling his talk idiotic, what I should have said was that the talk was pitched more at the level of a high school audience than at what one would presume to be an artistically oriented and sophisticated New York audience.
