Cagey and cryptic, my furtive friend David Schoffman almost never opens his Los Angeles studio to visitors. Curators, collectors and critics all clamor for an audience but to no avail. Schoffman's irrational and self-defeating petulance hold a staunch vigil to his caprice. Those who do manage to pierce the rampart are a priesthood of strange and select dissenters.
So to whom does this bald head belong?
Stopping in Los Angeles while touring with the Royal Bismark-Bialystok Radio Orchestra, Irish tenor Briac Scott Bertelsen (a mutual friend of both David and I) and his son Deverell were granted a short visit. Known for his discerning eye, wayward wit and irrepressible rendering of Ponchielli's Cielo e Mar, Bri's enviable access to Schoffman's Sanctum Sanctorum is seen by many as a provocation.
Bertelsen, whose very public profile inspires the type of speculation worthy of a Kremlinologist, is a pawn in Schoffman's perverse assault on the connoisseur class. When his recent visit was reported in the press (the anonymous source being Schoffman himself), embers of antagonism were rekindled from California to Irkutsk. The banished and the blackballed were irate at what was seen as the tenor's unwarranted access.
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| Deverell Bertelsen, Schoffman and Briac Scott Bertelsen, Los Angeles, 2011 |
When asked later about the state of Schoffman's work, the cunning crooner crowed with rapacious delight, "... not at all bad ... menacing though inconclusive... a bit strange, yes ... perhaps even revolutionary ... perhaps not."
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