[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.