Limor Tomer Metropolitan Museum of Art New York Times

Limor Tomer, general manager of concerts and lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, NY, poses for a portrait in The Velez Blanco Patio of the museum on October 06, 2015. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)

In 2011, Limor Tomer,a curator and producer of advanced musical events in New York, took over the Concerts and Lectures serial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For 41 seasons nether her predecessor, Hilde Limondjian, the Met's music offerings had focused on well-regarded soloists and bedchamber ensembles. Tomer came in with different ideas, gleaned from a career spent curating events everywhere from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Whitney to WNYC radio to experimental spaces in Lower Manhattan — not to mention a caste from Juilliard and a ten-yr career equally a solo pianist.

Working with an almanac budget of about $3.9 1000000, Tomer, 53, produces 45 to lx performances a twelvemonth plus thirty to 60 lectures and talks. Much of the work she presents is original. "What I've found works for me equally a curator is to offset with the artists," she says. At the Met, this means spending hours walking through the galleries and collections with a variety of performers and creators. This may issue in a piece played on an instrument from the musical instruments collection, such equally the piece of work Glenn Kotche, the drummer for the band Wilco, wrote for a 19th-century stone harmonicon. Or information technology may yield the video opera "La Celestina," which the collaborative Erratica developed over more than iii years for the Vélez Blanco Patio, engaging the sculptures as characters in a sophisticated sound-and-light show.

I coming large-scale collaboration with the group Vision into Fine art is "The Colorado River Projection," a film with live accompaniment, with music by John Luther Adams, Glenn Kotche, William Brittelle and Shara Worden, featuring performances by Kotche, the cellist Jeffrey Ziegler and the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, exploring the environmental and history of the Colorado River Basin. The show will come up to the Met in May 2016, afterwards a Houston premiere.

"My entire career was on the margin of the margin," Tomer says. "Now I'm in a position to open the door. Only not everyone's ready to walk through."

The Velez Blanco Patio at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art in Manhattan, NY, seen on October 06, 2015. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)

Tomer's comments, from a chat at the Met final month, have been condensed and edited for print.

My starting time question when I got hither was, "Why does the Met demand a concert series?" My decision was there is an opportunity here, and the only affair nosotros accept to exist is the Met. And then I started to endeavour to figure out what that meant.

I don't have a series that I take to make full, like boxes to check. I don't accept to fill this serial of eight sleeping accommodation music concerts and one new-music concert. More and more, nosotros piece of work with artists to put performances into galleries that behave like exhibitions, non like concerts. It's not even well-nigh "You lot accept to let people know that it's going to exist at viii o'clock on Tuesday, and y'all have to give them enough fourth dimension to buy the ticket." It's just going to be upwards, and y'all will come during this six-week menstruum.

In the summer, with "The Return" [by the director and designer Reid Farrington], we did a theater slice that was in 26 episodes, each episode was 4 to 6 minutes, and it would run during museum hours all day. Nosotros had three pairs of performers. At any given moment, one pair was performing, the female was the docent and the male person was playing Adam; one pair was running the technology for the pair that was performing; and 1 pair was resting. ["The Render" centered on Tullio Lombardo's sculpture of Adam, which shattered in a freak blow in 2002 and has since been restored; in the work, the statue comes to life on a calculator screen and talks to the docent and the audience.]

The mode this is different from performance fine art is more tactical than philosophical. It's about production values and the level of the actors and the direction and the dramaturgy and the lighting and the sound, which is where a lot of museums, as they get into performance, but don't accept the built-in expertise.

[As an artist,] if yous're not flexible, it'due south not going to work. The unmarried biggest contributing cistron to the success of ["The Return,"] which was unbelievably complex and fraught, is that [Farrington] knew when to put upwards a fuss and when not to. We needed to drill a hole in the floor of a Met gallery, to run cable to the backstage, and nosotros actually got the Met to agree. [But] he had a vision of the six-foot screens existence oriented a certain manner, and they had to exist oriented a dissimilar style. For 2^ane/₂ years, we thought it was going to wait like this, and suddenly it's not going to look like that. And he just got it, and he adapted to what information technology was going to have to be. On the other hand, there were a couple of points when he dug his heels in, and now in retrospect I come across how right he was. My advice to artists, if they always ask, I say be nice and know when to dig in and when not to.

We're still doing a off-white amount of what I would call straight classical music. It'southward just in a completely different, specific Met context. Even when I'm working with the Chiara String Quartet [this year'southward ensemble in residence], every program was belabored: Does it tie in with [annihilation], and if it ties in with goose egg, how is it going to be different from the concert you lot're going to requite next season at [Alice] Tully [Hall]?

When I came, one of the spaces that was challenging was the balcony bar, which traditionally had sort of groundwork classical music. And so I installed the Ethel string quartet , [a group specializing in gimmicky music and un­or­tho­dox performance]. Ethel is the quartet in residence for the balcony bar. And when they're on tour, they curate, they bring people in. It's every Friday and Sabbatum, v to 8, in the balustrade bar, 52 weeks a year. And information technology is a plan space. It's not a restaurant with background music. This is not a concert hall, but it does not have to be degraded. Information technology tin can have integrity.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/the-producer-limor-tomer/2015/10/15/3fa42c80-6d16-11e5-aa5b-f78a98956699_story.html

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