Strong Passions, New Visions

 

AFTER AT LEAST a century of what some have criticized as snoozy, business-as-usual concert hall fare, performing arts programmers - some of them, anyway - have begun to bring to their work the same kind of creativity and imagination that performing artists bring to theirs. Chief among these is Lincoln Center’s Vice-President of Programming Jane Moss, who over the last decade-and-a-half has created and/or directed now-iconic cultural events like the Mostly Mozart Festival, the Great Performers series, and the Lincoln Out of Doors and American Songbook Series. These have been hits on both critical and popular fronts, but they have also been some of the most successful cultural events ever, from a business point of view.

 

Talk about bang for buck! The cultural experiences that Moss creates dependably attract existing as well as new audiences, while deepening our understanding of great artists and works, and bolstering the institutional bottom line. In other words, they represent the kind of smart arts presenting that goes beyond mere programming, to address the mission of protecting and augmenting civilization.

 

And the winter season saw a new pinnacle of Moss’s success in this mission: Lincoln Center’s “New Visions” series, designed to link the worlds of the theater and classical music. Included were four events that surged with Moss’s trademark intelligence and passion:

 

• Pictures Reframed, a thrilling re-imagining of Mussorgsky’s monumental Pictures at an Exhibition, with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and projected visuals by video artist Robin Rhode

 

• The Donmar Warehouse production of Four Quartets, in which British actor Stephen Dillane gives stirring rendition of the T.S. Eliot poems, followed by the Mirò Quartet in a performance of the late Beethoven quartet that is said to have inspired the poems, Op. 132 in A minor

 

• One Evening, in which tenor Mark Padmore performs Schubert’s deeply probing Winterreise song cycle, in combination with British actor Stephen Dillane's readings of Samuel Beckett’s poetry and prose

 

• Stifter’s Dinge, a music-theater performance installation (in the cavernous Park Avenue Armory!) by German composer and director Heiner Goebbels, inspired by the work of nineteenth-century author Adalbert Stifter, who, according to program notes, “predicted many of the ecological challenges that face us today.”

 

(For more on these programs, visit the Lincoln Center events page.)

 

After having been blown away by the first of these programs, Pictures Reframed, and intrigued by descriptions of the others, I asked to sit down with Moss and hear more about her approach to programming. Moss has been at Lincoln Center since 1992, having come from director stints at Meet the Composer, Playwrights Horizons and the Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York. We spoke in Moss’s quiet office in Lincoln Center’s Rose Building - part of the Center’s expansive campus that itself is undergoing a burst of creativity, in a multi-phase physical renovation designed to supersede the more inert aspects of the nineteenth-century imagination that were encased by the Center’s founders in travertine.

 

 

STEPHEN GRECO: Jane, shall we start with your saying a little about the vision behind New Visions? I’m interested in how creativity and business, if you will, amalgamate into great programming.

 

JANE MOSS: Sure. New Visions is a good example of the kind of relationship that can exist between new ideas and practicalities like audiences. I came into this field not as a traditional music presenter but from the theater. I have an enormous love and passion for music, and a great regard for the usual way that we present music, but it was also apparent to me that there are theatrical elements inherent within almost any musical experience. One of the things that so extraordinary to me about classical musicians is that their performances actually are a kind of theatrical event - even a solo recital -yet they don't necessarily view themselves that way. I thought, what would happen if you start bringing these worlds together artistically?

 

There is also in the musical community a depth of repertoire and high level of performance achievement that is not remotely comparable to that in any other field. Frequently when you go to the theater the first thing you ask your friend is, “Is it going to be any good?” You just never know. There just isn't necessarily the consistency of achievement there that one sees in the classical music world. So what the theater offers is a more up-to-date take on presentation and what it means to be at a public event.

 

SG: That was your starting point - this insight?

 

JM: Where I did not start, and where I never start - though for some people it would be an obvious place to start - was with the thought, “Oh, we need new audiences...” That’s never a consideration, ever.

 

SG: Because programming starts with your own taste, an intelligence, a personal hunger to see certain things?

 

JM: Yes. I think art leads. The only way you get an audience for anything is if you’re leading with the art. And the minute it isn't about creating something special… [shakes her head]. We’re only interested in what happens artistically - and when it attracts a different audience, people coming in with different cultural interests, that’s a fantastic by-product.

 

The most gratifying part of New Visions has been the revelations that the artists say they have had. We did a project in 2000 with [director] Simon McBurney, The Noise of Time, based on Shostakovich’s last string quartet, which involved the Emerson quartet and four actors. The actors were so knocked out by the quartet, and the quartet were knocked out by the actors. You will see tonight [in Four Quartets]: Stephen Dillane is totally knocked out by the Mirò quartet and vice versa. And Katie [Mitchell, the director] has the quartet - it seems like the simplest thing in the world -sitting in a square, facing each other, as opposed to the traditional half-moon, facing the audience. I cannot tell you how it totally changes the experience. Acoustically it’s unbelievable. And next week you have a real integration of a deconstructed Winterreise with text from Beckett, and - well, that may be more controversial…

 

SG: [laughs]

 

JM: These projects have been, without question, among the most rewarding things I have ever done - strictly on an artistic basis and because of what these artists get from each other. For the classical musicians, the approach is revelatory. They see that there’s an entirely other kind of performance world out there.

 

SG: Is that because there’s a certain kind of sanctimony - if you’ll let me use that word - that has gelled around standard classical performance?

 

JM: Totally.

 

SG: Which often keeps us from unlocking the full power of some of these works?

 

JM: When we starting doing these projects some people said, “Oh, we’re never going to be able to hear a straight lieder recital.” But what is important is that one approach is different from the other, not better than the other. They produce radically different experiences, and I think both are necessary. And remember, we [at Lincoln Center] represent the spectrum of musical experiences. What we’re really after is listening. Though it may look [in New Visions] like we’re manipulating the visual experience that an audience member has, what we are actually doing is bringing in a theatrical experience that makes you listen differently.

 

SG: Great point. I remember talking with Eliot Goldenthal about one of his amazing film scores. He said that when people are watching a movie they’re open. If you played that same score in a concert hall they might not bring the same openness. And, of course, in a concert hall it might not even be the same people.

 

JM: We’re really working with the ear. It’s beneath everything we do, not just New Visions. With composers and performers, all you have to do is listen to them and you’re home free. It’s curious - and this is a little philosophical - but we live at a time with a rampant distraction problem. Ninety-nine percent of communication is done by computer and text messaging - we’re never listening. We’re certainly not listening to each other.

 

You tell a taxi driver you’re going to 23^rd and Fifth Avenue, and 20 seconds later he asks where you’re going again. The ear is much slower than the eye, so the trick with some people is just getting them into a state of really listening. [pause] You really have to pay attention to the ear, I think, because the eye leads you outside, but the ear leads you inside.

 

SG: Very interesting.

 

JM: The ear leads to our souls. I feel that really passionately. And therefore what everybody views as a scary time [for performing arts institutions], I think is an extraordinary time. And what I find so exciting about the New Visions part of what we do is that it really does get people’s ears to a really different place, as well as unleashing hidden aspects to works.

 

SG: Very exciting. So can you say how New Visions fits into the bigger mission of Lincoln Center?

 

JM: I take pride in the fact that Lincoln Center and its leadership, as in president Reynold Levy, is very committed to innovation. From the moment I walked in the door we were looking at things in a different way, and we did not encounter any kind of institutional resistance to that. We exist, of course, in a very crowded marketplace, but have been committed to exploring what role can we uniquely play. We take as our mission, Let’s figure out what take we can we can have on this - which obviously dovetails neatly with the spirit of innovation.

 

SG: It’s inspiring to hear you speak, Jane. Which makes me wonder where your passion comes from. Have you always had it? Did you have it as a child?

 JM: I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on a farm - though my parents were not farmers. It was a gentleman’s farm, I guess is how you’d describe it. And I was one of six children - the fifth out of six, so finding one’s way was a bit of a challenge. Now, these are relevant facts, in various ways. Without exception, the most significant moment I recollect from my childhood was the moment I learned how to read. It was at the normal age - it wasn’t as if I was three - but reading was a solution, to angst, to pain. I can’t tell you how the world changed for me. It put in my hands the ability to construct my own world, in some fashion.

 

SG: That sounds powerful.

 

JM: It was - very powerful. And my interest expanded into music. I would say that art saved me in a certain way, at a very young age. It was where I went. We were a big, noisy family, and it was a beautiful, beautiful farm - the great outdoors! - but there was a lot of inner life for me, too.

 

And this is why the T.S. Eliot project is [one of] the most personal I‘ve ever [worked on]. I think the first time I read the Four Quartets was when I was 14. It’s been a huge part of my inner landscape, as have the late Beethoven quartets. We weren’t originally scheduled to do this program - and we never add things to the schedule-- but I felt we had to do it. From the very beginning, all these artists were my voices, in a way. So supporting them gives me great joy and delight. These voices tell me who I am.

 

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