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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
Some call Montreal-born Yannick Nezet-Seguin, musical director of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 2013, and New York’s Metropolitan Opera since the 2018-19 season, the Sam Smith of classical music.
Smith, in case you don’t know, is an odd duck in the pop music world. The UK-born-and-bred star is popular among young girls despite the fact that he makes a showcase of his sexuality—gyrating on stage in glitter and polish of all sorts, partial nudity and topped off with low rent drag queen antics. It’s mostly shock value stuff, although many stick by the claim that he has true musical talent.
Madonna, a fan of Smith’s, has given her imprimatur: would a pop star of her rank dare team up with a talentless bloke much less record a song with him– “Vulgar”– if she thought he was without talent?
That 2023 Madonna song sums up what motivates legacy media entertainment audiences and people who watch George Stephanopoulos interviews:
Vulgar is beautiful
Filthy and gorgeous
Vulgar will make you dance
Don’t need a chorus
Say we’re ridiculous
We’ll just go harder
Mad and meticulous
Sam and Madonna
What Sam Smith and Yannick Nezet-Seguin have in common is their allegiance to leftist lgbtq groupthink. This groupthink mentality also tends to celebrate the most extreme forms of theatrical narcissism that Smith and Yannick have become famous for.
Check the Web for images of Yannick, and you’ll get some surprising stuff: Yannick posing shirtless; Yannick lifting weights in his bare feet; Yannick showing off his tattoos; a barefoot Yannick stretched out on a bed or hammock; Yannick posing with his partner in a bathing suit at the beach.
Imagine similar celebratory articles and risqué images featuring a barefoot Eugene Ormandy, a past director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, or Leonard Bernstein getting a tattoo or showing off his muscles.
What is it with Yannick and the media obsession with his supposed hunkiness? This disease, which is largely self-generated, is one that Yannick shares with Sam Smith despite Howard Stern’s once calling Smith “Fat and ugly.”
The delusion that universally recognized talent somehow translates into physical appeal is a phenomenon with roots in the fat shaming (woke) movement. Because you can conduct a Wagner opera in New York doesn’t mean that your protruding mid section—despite your having a personal trainer—is now somehow “beautiful.”
Sexuality sells, as does “power.” Jill Biden’s photo on the cover of Vogue is a prime example of how “the will to power” in her case—she doesn’t want her husband to resign the presidency because she loves the limelight—is seen as being on a par with the truly beautiful.
In 2018, the Metropolitan Opera had this to say about Yannick when he was made director:
“The east coast is in the midst of an epic August heat wave, and two movements into this morning rehearsal, Nézet-Séguin’s peach-colored T-shirt (paired with striped shorts and gold-and-white Alexander McQueen sneakers) is starting to stick to him.
His mop of hair shakes as he wields the baton with a vigor that’s startling in a kid who can’t be more than nine, but who already seems the spitting image of the Yannick you can see on the podium today.”
There have been much better mops of hair — Bernstein’s for one. This accent on superficiality and sexuality has even seeped into Google searches when you type in Yannick’s name.
“As he stepped off the podium after the rehearsal, he was in a buoyant mood, and happy to talk about his life in music. Although not a physically commanding figure – he stands about halfway between five and six feet tall – he has a fit, athletic build,” Google informs us.
When did you ever read commentary like this about Bernstein’s body, Arturo Toscanini’s body, Zubin Mehta’s, Lorin Maazel’s or James Levine’s?
A recent Philadelphia Inquirer piece on Yannick celebrating the inaugural concert in the Kimmel Center’s newly renamed Marian Anderson Hall, began like this:
“The tie-ups’ sequined heels and red soles — Nézet-Séguin wears only Christian Louboutins onstage — flashed the audience, shimmering under loose-fitting black trousers. A shadowy dragonfly print danced along the back of his McQueen double-breasted dinner jacket as Nézet-Séguin twisted and turned, bringing the orchestra to crescendo.”
Flamboyance is nothing new on stage. Liberace is a case in point. But mixing flamboyance with political ideology, as Yannick often does–he wears Ukraine flag nail polish and has been upfront about “dethroning” classical music from its white Western European ancestry—and then using flamboyance as a deflection—donning a sports jackets over a bare chest or conducting the Metropolitan Opera in a bathrobe—tend to take the focus off what he’s actually doing with the music.
If the audience is distracted by gimmicks—the sight of Yannick’s navel or the sculpted contours of his male bosom—then we won’t notice the music so much.
It’s what Liberace did with the candelabra.
One of Yannick’s first acts as director of the Philadelphia Orchestra was to eliminate the dress code for the orchestra—tuxedos—for an ensemble of all black: shirts, trousers and tie, which makes the members look like thugs who have been recruited from the street.
But the Yannick revolution goes far beyond dress.
A recent Philadelphia Orchestra program featured a short interview with Matias Tarnopolsky, President and CEO of The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center, formerly the Executive and Artistic Director of CAL Performances at the University of California, Berkeley:
“Americans were jolted to attention in May 2020 when George Floyd was murdered just as the COVID pandemic was getting underway. We looked at ourselves and asked, ‘Is the classical music world doing enough?’ said Tarnopolsky. ‘And the answer was, not nearly enough. So we redoubled our efforts to make sure that we were representative, in both the music and the musicians who perform on our stages.’”
The title of the piece, “When Innovation Becomes de Rigueur,” makes it clear that the orchestral repertoire “does not stand on an immovable bedrock of tradition,” but is “built on fertile soil that is continually being renewed by organic growth…”
One might argue that this has always been the case with classical music. While the Philadelphia Orchestra in years past has often erred on the side of caution when it came to showcasing more avant garde composers like George Crumb, Erik Satie, or Lou Harrison, Tarnopolsky isn’t talking about that kind of “organic.”
Tarnopolsky states that going forward the Orchestra will include new works by living composers, “half of whom are women….Perhaps more important, half of the living composers represented on the season are BIPOC artists (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).”
Recently, New York Times music critic, Anthony Tommasini, stated that “blind auditions” should be replaced by quotas.
Sucking up to the notion that orchestras should be affirmative action programs—in much the same way that Kamala Harris was a diversity hire– The National Philharmonic committed to achieving a 40 percent quota for soloists and living composers of color. And in Oxford, England, the Faculty of Music there announced that they will be “decolonizing the syllabus” in which composers like Beethoven and Mozart will be pushed aside to make room for African Diaspora Music.
After Floyd’s death, the students at the Juilliard School of music in New York circulated a petition calling for an end to the “almost completely Eurocentric” school and demanded a “complete in-person season of works by BIPOC artists.”
Tarnopolsky’s praise for Yannick is nothing less than hagiographic.
“We celebrate his dedication to community engagement, recognize his important role as an advocate for human rights, and applaud his commitment to IDEAS (inclusion, diversity, equity, and access strategies) which has dramatically changed how we see the role of the orchestra in society.”
But inclusion, diversity and equity are not ideas but propaganda that has no place in classical music.
Violent Lyrics from Ice-T and Snoop Dog and one called Party Music which shows the bands leader pressing a Button and the WTC Exploding some years before 9-11-01 which seems to me what the whole place would fall over Airplanes hitting the mid sections and not the Base which all Building Implosions are done
please, if you weren’t there that day, kindly STFU.
Jets at high speed filled with fuel do a lot of damage. So, watch it happen first, breathe it, smell it, before you pontificate like a savage leftist playing a conspiracy theory game with others lives.
Just what is your incoherent rant trying to accomplish? It is incomprehensible.
Sam Smith is awful, he sounds like a whining moaning child. He probably became famous by sleeping with the industry elite.
Highly probable.
Nevertheless, his rendition of “writing on the wall” from the James Bond movie is very good. Have it on my phone.
Oh c’mon. ~
Everyone loves the sugar plum fairy. ~
He helps to bring the moniker “philythydelphia” to life…
A culture in demise, not simply decline…
Well, we are way beyond the Eugene Ormandy Era in Philadelphia and real classical music. I guess the avergae woke orchestra wants to lose money bigtime. The effort to “decolonise” will be the end of well attended concerts. I hear this crap music occasionally on my local classical music station.
For decades the modern Orchestra has relied on grants, public and private, and ticket sales. The average attendee is generally a snotty liberal, but the best attended programs have been traditional music i.e. Beethoven and Mozart festivals Baroque festivals and European opera.
Bottom line, if you want to struggle financially, by all means push aside the great composers and focus on “complete in-person season of works by BIPOC artists,” “40 percent quota for soloists and living composers of color,” and “African Diaspora Music.”
It’s true. Todays woke liberal is simply beyond stupid.
Thank you for this Thom. The Met gig shoulda gone to Fabio Luisi. I know for a fact the musicians there can’t stand his conducting and after seeing 3 of his performances there cancelled our subscription. He is a bad conductor. A diversity hire. I grew up with Ormandy,Muti,Sawallisch and this one clown freak show is wrecking this once great orchestra and he is just another excuse to stay outta Philly🤡🤡🤡
This is how it’s done in the sane world:
Gustavo Dudamel with LA Philharmonic is a very good conductor. But generally one must go back many decades to hear the great conductors, Furtwängler, Toscanini, Walter, Barbirolli, Weingartner, Coates, Reiner, many others. It is especially instructive to hear artists who performed in the nineteenth century and who lived to record into the 1930s or later. One can hear vocalists, violinists and pianists who studied with Brahms and Liszt or with teachers who were not far removed from Chopin or Beethoven. All these artists go right to the heart of the music; one is not conscious of the notes but of the spirit animating the notes. The recorded sound obviously is not modern but it is eminently listenable. These artists didn’t require modern sound (much less contemporary gimmicks) because they put more music into the recording.. For them this was new music. Hearing their genius, one learns a great deal has been lost in our literalist, increasingly woke, culture.
Our St. Louis Symphony must perform crappy pop shows like ‘Music of Star Wars’ etc. etc. to get customers. Of all the great composers Mozart, Bach, Beethoven etc. only about 5% of their compositions get performed
AT ALL and as for ‘modern classical composers’ – no one can empty a hall faster.
I lived in St Lous in the 90s when it was still highly regarded. Unfortunately, it’s a national trend
Well that’s it then. We’re gonna drag Mozart and Haydn through the mud, is it? No “Music” of the “popular” late 19th and 20th Centuries has one millionth of the genius and art that is in true “Classical” music. The “Left”, with the help of “Islam”, will wipe it out if they could. Classical composers are White European of Western Judeo-Christian culture – Haydn annotated each of his compositions with an acknowledgement to his creator. Blast away with that Rap Crap, and rot your mind. What a pity – it seems the eras of conductors who knew what they were doing is over. Ormandy, Furtwängler, Ozawa, Karajan, Solti, Klemperer.. The destruction of everything good is upon us. What, turning the nations philharmonic orchestras into “Clown Shows” because the music isn’t enough??
The real thing is far from dull:
Ayn Rand’s favorite concerto, thank you.
Therefore it must be your favorite piano concerto because you have no mind of your own and you have to have the same taste as Randy.
I thought Ayn Rand loved elevator music above all other sorts.
Who is to say what belongs in classical music? (Or any other kind of music for that matter.) Do we simply throw out whatever offends us? Tipper Gore tried it in 1985, and it didn’t go well. The bottom line remains the ultimate judge. If you like the music, you attend the concerts and buy the records. If you don’t, why should anyone care? Unless you write record reviews for Rolling Stone, I suppose.
Frank Zappa notwithstanding. Say what you want about Tipper Gore. That labeling on CD’s made the decision easy. I didn’t have to listen to that c-rap to prevent its entry into my home and my kids minds.
There was an excellent made for TV movie called Warning Parental Advisory (2002) that covered the PMRC Senate hearings. I think it’s still out there somwhere in video streaming land.
“Who is to say what belongs in classical music? (Or any other kind of music for that matter.) Do we simply throw out whatever offends us?”
Not who, but what. Objective reality will tell what is music and what is noise. Will you concede that there is at least a fundamental and objective difference between music and noise?
“Since art satisfies a need of man’s cognitive faculty, IT MUST CONFORM TO THE REQUIREMENTS OF THAT FACULTY. These requirements are precisely what is identified by epistemology, and they are not malleable to anyone’s desires. A writer, for example, must obey the rules of using concepts; if he does so, his work, however otherwise flawed, is at least intelligible. If, however, a writer decides to dispense with the rules—if he jettisons definition, logic, and grammar in order to offer neologisms, contradictions, and word salads—then he objectifies, concretizes, and communicates nothing. The same principle applies to every art form, whatever the nature of its medium.
The above is the answer to “nonobjective art.” The latter deliberately flouts the rules of the human mind, perceptual and conceptual; it is addressed to man as he DOES NOT perceive and CANNOT think. Such a product is not open to human cognition; it is defiantly senseless. One errs if one sanctions these manifestations by the effort of interpretation; they can be given “meaning” only by devotees of the arbitrary who purport to decode “symbolism” hidden from the normal (nonmystical) mind.
Stuff of this sort is not “art with a new viewpoint” or even “bad art”; it is to art what the arbitrary is to cognition; it is ANTI-ART. Metaphysically, it is the attempt not to re-create, but to annihilate reality. Epistemologically, it is the attempt not to integrate, but to disintegrate man’s consciousness—in Ayn Rand’s words, to “reduce it to a pre-perceptual level by breaking up percepts into mere sensations.” This, she writes, “is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to ‘moods,’ of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”
We don’t have to throw out whatever offends us. The market place will take care of that. Obviously the market place has resoundingly rejected Objectivism.
No doubt we will see you at the “complete in-person season of works by BIPOC artists” followed by an encore of Rand’s Tiddley-Wink “music”
As for that 4 paragraph pile of unreadable gibberish by Lenny, the marketplace spoke long ago.
The bottom line of the paying customer (money) remains the ultimate judge?
Except that, when a culture’s rationality erodes or collapses altogether, music itself can be and will be restricted, or banned.
The Christian theocracy of the Dark and Middle Ages did it. Compositions had to be approved by the Pope or the Pope’s representatives during the Christian Dark and Middle Ages. Islam does it today.
Money doesn’t rule the world, philosophy does, and religion is an early and primitive form of philosophy.
Actually, money does rule the world, you pompous idiot. If there are no customers there is no business. No butts in the seats, no concerts. No paying customers for woke films, those films get pulled for films that do attract people.
And we don’t live in the Middle Ages. But you seem to think we do. And that’s where your moribund philosophy would put us, with you as the Objectivist Pope.
I tossed the Met’s 24-25 season program in the recycling bin without looking at it given last year’s lamentable offerings. The vulgarisation of opera at the Met has been ongoing for several years now, making Yannick a perfect match for its conductor.
Agree. But, don’t get me started….. Its woke and its broke. Years ago they started with the sets…. modern era costumes and stark modernistic sets. Online at intermission, I heard people saying “Yes, I just close my eyes and imagine the old sets.”
Then, no black face for Otello was allowed. The tenor was Caucasian. But the titles read in English “Maybe it’s my black face.”
I haven’t been going for other reasons. I may go again. I dont mind the rehash of traditional operas. As I am easy to please. I do mind everything woke.
I heard a symphony performance of a classical standard with a jazz spin. Horrible. Like we always say, liberalism destroys everything it touches. Now my local classical station has joined the religion of homosexuality and is non stop proselytizing on air.
Imagine Leopold Stokowski Act like this clown.
Or William Steinberg!
WHo cares? Program a significant amount of living composers and you won’t be able to give tickets away. So get on with it.