Getting to Carnegie Hall

By PHILLIP LOPATE, New York Times, Published: December 2, 2011

To celebrate the 120th birthday of Carnegie Hall, whose very name is synonymous with musical excellence, its overseers have put together a lavishly illustrated volume and accompanying trove of memorabilia. CARNEGIE HALL TREASURES (Harper Design/HarperCollins, $75), by Tim Page and the Carnegie Hall staff, is a sort of glorified publicity kit — the kind of thing you might give donors as a souvenir or sell to members of the public who wish they had been there. Do not look for complexity, skepticism or critical analysis, much less sober institutional history. What we have here is an orgy of self-congratulation that is both awkward and touching.

Illustration from “Carnegie Hall Treasures”

The book opens with no less than three prefaces: one by Carnegie Hall’s chairman, Sanford I. Weill, and its executive and artistic director, Clive Gillinson; another by the music critic Tim Page, who also writes the introduction; and a third (officially a “foreword”) by the pianist Emanuel Ax. Page, normally an astute critic, is here playing the role of corporate cheerleader and puffmeister: “ ‘Carnegie Hall Treasures’ is not a traditional history. No attempt has been made to be all-inclusive, and many significant artists who have appeared at Carnegie Hall cannot be commemorated here. Instead, consider this volume a keepsake of a beautiful and noble place in the midst of America’s largest city — a place to which generations have come for celebration and solace, in times of joy and trouble, with new loves and fondly remembered elders.”     Full review.