Players Gather Round to Kiss a Music Hall Good Night
Good Night Alice, starring a range of performers from Alice Tully Hall’s history, will be broadcast on “Live From Lincoln Center” on PBS on May 3.
For those of us born in the 1960s, it is a little unnerving to watch Lincoln Center, another child of the ’60s, being treated for the manifestations of advanced age. As part of the complex’s continuing reconstructive surgery, Alice Tully Hall — the penultimate Lincoln Center edifice to be completed when it opened in 1969 — is getting a complete overhaul in the next 18 months. To send it off into its Brünnhilde-like slumber, a gala concert called “Good Night Alice” was held on Monday night, showcasing most of the hall’s major functions and tenants over the last 38 years. It struck the perfect tone: half festive, half somnolent.
Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, played Ray Noble’s “Cherokee” with the Juilliard Orchestra at “Good Night Alice.”
The audience filed out of Alice Tully Hall after the last performance there for the next 18 months.
A televised gala of musical snippets hardly makes an artistic statement, and its point is totouch all the familiar bases and evoke warm, fuzzy memories in the audience primed by the open bar. Drinks were allowed into the auditorium — since there was no worry about cleanup — and the proceedings were punctuated by the clink of glasses. Following the model of the Academy Awards, this presentation was embellished with video montages, one documenting the construction of the hall, one with excerpts from films shown by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, one with a video animation of the renovated campus. The Juilliard Orchestra, led by David Robertson, accompanied the first two with music from “West Side Story” and Bernard Herrmann’s “Fahrenheit 451.” The animation was underlined with a piano solo by a slightly lethargic Philip Glass.
Mr. Robertson tried to take a stand for the new with Messiaen’s “Oiseaux Exotiques,” using the orchestra’s wind and percussion players and showcasing Eric Huebner, who has not been a Juilliard student for some time but who did a fine job with the intricate piano part. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which inaugurated the hall in 1969 with its very first performances, got only a movement here, the opening of the Mendelssohn Octet, sounding rather bottom-heavy, since Ida Kavafian’s first violin was not penetrating enough to dominate the strong ensemble.
The program succeeded in highlighting new talent, presenting a Juilliard student named Saeka Matsuyama as a lyrical soloist in the last movement of Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto. Jazz was, of course, represented by Wynton Marsalis, lively as ever, playing Ray Noble’s “Cherokee.” Standing in for the originally scheduled Audra McDonald (absent because of the death of her father in an aviation accident), but by no means replacing her, Kelli O’Hara gave a rather pale account of AdamGuettel’s “Migratory V” and Bernstein’s “Somewhere.”
The most vivid segment in the evening’s long lullaby was the strident wake-up of Laurie Anderson, a rapid-fire sing-song screed called “Only an Expert” that skewered those who refuse to recognize problems like global warming or the Iraq war — an interesting choice for a roomful of patrons who had paid upward of $1,500 a ticket, and a national television audience.
Her tone and brightness were matched by the whistling, hissing showers of fireworks that erupted from the roof of Avery Fisher Hall after the concert was over.
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