Thomasina’s last waltz

A 19th-century gala

First (private) performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Mendelssohn’s music, Potsdam, 14 October 1843. Ferdinand Hiller recalls…

“It is characteristic of Mendelssohn’s views that he should have been very much excited after the performance, and this from a twofold cause. It had been arranged, according to his wish, that the whole thing, with the entr’actes, should be played without any pause whatsoever*, as in his opinion this was indispensable for the proper effect.

“Nevertheless, not only was a long pause introduced, but it was made use of to offer all kinds of refreshments to the people in the front rows belonging to the Court, so that a full half-hour was taken up with loud talking and moving about, whilst the rest of the audience, who were quite as much invited, though perhaps only tolerated, were sitting in discomfort, and had to beguile the time as best they could. This disregard of artistic considerations, as well as common civility, so enraged Mendelssohn that he hardly took any notice of all the fine things that we had to say to him.”

from Mendelssohn Remembered, edited by Roger Nichols

*Thomasina would have you remember that M hated applause between movements and deliberately wrote his Scottish Symphony with segues between the movements so that applause would be impossible.

Thomasina also observes that Mendelssohn’s preference would be one way of eliminating overtime.

Puck at the piano

“From our youth on we were entwined in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Felix particularly made it his own. He identified with all the characters. He recreated them, so to speak – every one of those whom Shakespeare produced in the immensity of his genius.”
—Fanny Mendelssohn

A long time ago, before Apple invented the iPod, one of the hottest categories in the music shop would have been transcriptions of orchestral music for piano duet. This was often the only means you’d have of hearing orchestral works. Sometimes these became concert pieces in their own right. Liszt, for example, played Beethoven symphonies in recital (two hands). Mere mortals needed four hands for the same effect.

Rachmaninoff gave the virtuoso treatment to the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music; Horowitz came up with a set of variations on the Wedding March; Liszt joined the Wedding March with the Dance of the Elves. But Mendelssohn got there first with his own transcriptions – three movements that I know of for piano solo, and all the best-known numbers for piano duet.

Piano transcriptions offer a more direct and tangible way of getting to know orchestral music than mere listening or score reading. Playing the music, in other words. If you’re fortunate, like the Mendelssohns, you’ll have an actual orchestra to hand every second Sunday, in which case it’s the intrepid flute player who tests stamina and technique in the Scherzo. But if you don’t there can be nothing more revealing than studying a score at the piano.

And in pre-concert talks for orchestral concerts – as long as the point being made isn’t to do with instrumental colour – piano transcriptions can be a very handy way of providing a musical illustration without spoiling the ears for the real thing in the concert.

Note to self: really must get a piano.

Fairytales

It’s funny how everything’s connected. On the weekend I went to the local park to take photos of a statue of Mary Poppins that guards the children’s playground there. Sadly, I was a little late – a vandal had removed both her trademark umbrella and her famous carpet bag since the last time I’d paid attention.

This was the first time I’d looked at the statue up close and the plaque informed me that it was there in honour of P.L. Travers, who’d lived down the road with her family between 1918 and 1924. She would have been just out of boarding school and already making her way as an actor and dancer, prior to her departure for England and the land of the Banks family.

I went a-googling to find out where else she’d lived (e.g. Bowral) and what should I find on the unreliable-but-oh-so-convenient Wikipedia but a photograph of the young Pamela Travers as… Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Neat.

Meanwhile, Alex Ross has saved me the trouble of fretting over embedded music by posting the beginning of Mendelssohn’s overture.

Four magical chords. Listen and read…

HIPPOLYTA
Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

Enter fairies on cue.

Dreaming

“Today or tomorrow,” as Mendelssohn wrote 183 years ago, “I am going to dream A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I won’t necessarily go to Mendelssohnian extremes by doing this in the garden (I suspect Felix’s garden was much nicer than Thomasina’s) but I will need to hole myself up between now and Wednesday and take inspiration from Mendelssohn, from Shakespeare, and from some wonderful plans that have been set in motion by director Tim Carroll. All this in preparation for what may be one of the trickiest pre-concert talks I ever have to give.

How so? Large parts of this production (“concert” is inadequate as a description) fall under an uncharacteristic blanket of secrecy. And even at the actual performances – where absolute secrecy will be increasingly less of an issue, especially once the reviews begin to appear – I’ll be carefully weighing every word, each revelation, to ensure that exquisite surprises are not spoilt and that the gestalt (oh, wonderful thing that it is) is not disclosed prematurely.

But I am looking forward to it. If someone had told me I could attend only one SSO concert this year, this is the program I would have picked. That’s the result of a whole bunch of personal biases. I love the theatre in all its forms (it’s an older love than my love for concert music). I’ve loved Shakespeare’s plays ever since my mother deposited me – sans unhelpful “preparation” or “caveats” – in front of Macbeth at the age of ten. And I love Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music.

Above all, I’m looking forward to it because – and here I utter a heresy – I believe that concerts can and should be entertaining. I believe that we should, at every turn, be seeking ways to present the music we love in performances that are engaging, richly imagined, lively and sophisticated. (I’m not talking about pasting on a compère, either, but about the ways in which we conceive the concert’s program and performance as a whole.) I believe that classical music performances need to contain as much stagecraft and attention to presentation and “display” as you would find if you went to a play, a ballet, a musical or an opera.

Occasionally orchestras get close to that. There are the little things that can inform every performance. When I was in Perth, audiences frequently commented on little differences in stage presentation between the WASO and the ACO – people notice when musicians walk on together, seem animated, acknowledge applause graciously, or finish a piece with a coordinated flourish of bows. These things (even more than concert dress) matter.

Then there are bigger things. The Shock of the New concerts that Sydney audiences experienced over several years weren’t exactly an unqualified success, but they were remarkable (and for me highly enjoyable) in that they embodied an almost theatrical conception of how a program of music could be “put across”. Those programs had a message, a message that was realised and communicated at a number of different levels, not just in the absolute performance but in the use of lighting, the placement of performers in the hall, the crafty segues between pieces, even the withholding of information until the end. Like them or not, there was imagination in their presentation. They represented an attempt to nudge (shock?) us out of the straight and narrow of conventional concert-going and to make us all listen with fresh ears. 

So these concerts coming up this week are, from that perspective, an exciting example of how music can be presented in a way that embraces the various art forms and which offers us in the audience what can only be described as a compleat entertainment.

It won’t be the first time that an Australian orchestra has done something along these lines with this music. (That honour, I’m pretty certain, goes to the performance that Howard Shelley devised and conducted for the TSO’s “S&M Festival” in 1997, and which I had the privilege of working on.) Since then WASO, MSO and QSO (as it was) have all done much the same thing, with one or two actors. But this will be on a much grander and more ambitious scale, as befits a gala week celebrating the opening of the concert season and the arrival of the Principal Conductor who has signed us up for all this “Madness, Mayhem and Music”.

The first two words? No marketing puff these. Without spoiling the fun, I can say we’re in for a fair share of both. As for the third word: Music? I like that we’re celebrating music, with a Musician (as his T-shirt says), and in a way that shows how intrinsic music is to imagination, life, love and all its dramas.

Oh, and it will be refreshing not to open the season with a requiem.

Now. Structured procrastination over. Back to work…

What I did on my busman's weekend

Last weekend I went to Melbourne to check out the new recital hall there (but not the Licensed Desserts). Losing the two days I’d normally devote to mundane weekend-y things has put me even further off my blogging stride, but here’s a belated report.

Eamonn Kelly attended all the concerts of the Melbourne Recital Centre’s opening weekend (7–8 Feb) and festival for his report in The Australian. It’s ambitious and he comes across as if he’s saying too much on too little exposure, but it’s still a thoughtful first impression.

I heard only two concerts: string orchestra in the form of Kremerata Baltica, presented by Musica Viva, and the amplified Theatre of Voices in Stimmung, both in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall. I won’t attempt to say much about the acoustics on so brief an introduction – just some observations about the venue generally. What I will say is that my first impressions of the Melbourne Recital Centre were, overall, much more positive than my first impressions of Sydney’s City Recital Hall. I felt (yes, felt) an intensity in the sound that I liked a lot and it seems to have the kind of clarity that doesn’t compromise on warmth of sound or genuine brilliance. But to be fair to CRH, you do get used to all sorts of performance spaces and learn to appreciate them for what they are and compensate for what they are not.

So, the building…

I fear the building exterior is going to look tired very quickly. Already the lower (white) portions of its honeycomb exterior seem grimy when viewed close up. On the other hand, the expanse of (also honeycombed) glass that opens the relatively narrow foyers onto the streetscape has a lovely informal appeal.

On a practical note, the MRC is similar to CRH in that its foyers are confined and narrow, and it’s difficult to move around them and navigate the different levels when they’re full. (It’s telling that the architect’s renders for these spaces show just a handful of people in them. Perhaps if they imagined and tried to render the foyers filled with several hundred people they’d design them differently.) But they’re redeemed by the openness provided by the glass wall. And on a really practical note: the toilets are a thing of beauty. Instead of having to negotiate traditional “airlock” style double doors, you enter the space through a cunning labyrinthine approach that allows privacy and discretion without the need for doors at all. No queuing patrons propping open doors with their bodies. (No queues at all, actually.)

I arrived early for the Kremerata Baltica concert to check out the pre-concert talk (more about that perhaps in a separate post). And my heart sank. On the trip down I’d listened to the CEO of the venue talking to Andrew Ford about how the MRC would be a place of discovery, with all sorts of extra-musical events and things to support the music-making and the programming. I was encouraged and expected all sorts of enlightened provisions for such activity.

No such luck. The space allocated for Musica Viva’s talk was even smaller than the reception room where talks are held at CRH. The latter seats about 90 comfortably, I would say, and can squeeze in another 10 to 20 more standing latecomers. The MRC’s narrow space would accommodate 60 at most. (Worse, it was tucked away behind two sets of doors.) Now perhaps the planners believed this is all that is needed – it’s true there were only 45 people at the talk I attended.

But it seems extremely short-sighted. Look around Australia… the cities where the talks programs are strongest are those where the talk venue is generous, non-confined and truly open to all comers, including casual listeners. In the Perth Concert Hall the talks take place in the corner of the first foyer level, with seating for about 180 people. Those seats are usually full before the talk begins and by the end the “standing audience” – including those listening in from the staircase and the upper balcony – has easily doubled the attendance. That’s more than 350 people who hear some if not all of the introduction to the concert. (The capacity of the hall itself is about 1800.) Better still, newcomers can literally stumble across the talks and either hang around to hear more or move away to another part of the foyer if they find they’re not interested after a few minutes. That casual accessibility, that ability to “taste” a talk, is hugely important. 

The Sydney Opera House is much the same as Perth, in many ways even better: the talks are held in what is effectively an amphitheatre space at the top of the foyers. The immediate space will hold about 200 people (a mix of chairs and carpeted stairs), but is also open to the wider area of that part of the foyer, with stairs and balconies that can accommodate more listeners.

Now both Sydney and Perth have a downside: being open to the general foyer space means that you sometimes compete with ambient noise: glass at the bar, chatting, functions on the lower level, ships leaving port, etc. But this is a small price to pay in order to have talks achieve their true aim: of communicating, to anyone who wants to hear, about the program, its context and its reason for being.

So it made me really sad to see a brand new venue, a venue with “discovery” high on its agenda, isolate the pre-concert talk in a secluded, closed space – a small space that can’t be casually entered or “joined” and one where a premature exit will be marked by both audience and speaker. It sends the message that the talks are something formal, specialised and esoteric for a tiny dedicated group of followers. It discourages those who may just want to listen briefly or see what it’s all about. I could cry.

I was especially disappointed because my visit to the MRC website had led me to think that the talk might be in what they call the Salon: “a beautiful, flexible space that is perfect for intimate concerts, recordings, talks, receptions and dining up to maximum capacity of 130 people.” The Salon would have shared the disadvantage of being closed and secluded, but at least it’s a decent size. Then again, I don’t know the talk culture in Melbourne. The MSO’s talks (held inside Hamer Hall itself) were reasonably well attended last time I looked, but I hadn’t been to a Musica Viva concert in Melbourne before. So perhaps a space seating 60 people is adequate. That makes me cry too.

And the auditorium…

1.    It smells divine. Given that I was already aware of what it looked like from photographs, this was the thing that struck me most on entering the hall. I fear it won’t last, but right now there’s the faintest, most delicious whiff of wood (Australian hoop pine is the timber used). For me, the smell evokes very personal memories of comfort, creativity and, above all, craftsmanship.

2.    The silence is palpable. The whole space sits on huge springs, isolated from the main shell of the building. There is no external noise. Fireworks could go off, ships could blow their horns – you wouldn’t know. But there seems to be more to it than the simple removal of external noise. Inside the space itself, the acoustic is so “intense” that you can actually feel the silence. (And, of course, you can feel any sounds.) And I think it has an almost psychological effect.

An example in contrasts: Last year, at a concert in Angel Place, I heard a minute’s silence “in memoriam”. It was anything but silent; I was conscious of shuffling, of restlessness, of various tiny, soft sounds in the space. Last weekend, at the top of the Musica Viva concert there was a minute’s silence for the victims of the Victorian bushfires. It was intensely silent. It’s as if the feeling (not merely aural sensation) of the acoustic was such that we were, all of us, more quiet and still than we would have been otherwise. Having experienced that, I was attuned to it during the performance itself. Maybe the thousand of us in attendance were all more focussed on the act of listening in this new space, but we were a quieter audience than I have heard in a very long time, if ever.

3. It brought out the inner mapmaker in me. In high school Geography there was nothing I liked more than working with contour maps and drawing cross-sections. Before the concert began I wanted to map that entire space (even thought it’s quite misleading – giving the impression of more “contour” than in fact those beautiful panelled walls possess).

4. I really have only one complaint. The stalls are a little better, but the gallery seating is clearly intended for the agile, the slight and the short of limb. In most venues I can usually get away with sitting well back in my seat and tucking my feet under when someone needs to pass me in a row, but we all quickly learned that we’d need to stand. And after interval those of us sitting towards the ends of rows were hovering at the sides in order to avoid the inconvenience. I can imagine that seating-by-zones might work very well at the MRC: “Would those concert-goers sitting in seats 15 to 25 please board now; would those concert-goers sitting in seats 10 to 30…”

Intoxicating

 

Spotted near Spencer Street Station, Melbourne.

Shooting from the hip

Literally.

What the composer wrote

Last month I mentioned a young composer who’d knocked my proverbial socks off with an intelligent, engaging program note. My reaction was subsequently confirmed by three separate proofreaders. “If only all composers would write like that,” was the common sentiment.

But now you can read it for yourself [PDF]. And come hear the piece, of course.

Phil Jameson’s piece is called Pebbles and Stuff, which for some inexplicable reason I kept typing as “Pebbles and Things”. [Bad keyboard!]  Even at the eleventh hour, as the presses were about to roll, I spotted an errant “Things” in the fine print. Fingers crossed I found them all…

My favourite essay question

I’m reminded this morning, for reasons I won’t go into, of my favourite essay question of all time:

Why is Beethoven’s bad music so much more incredibly worse than his good music?

This was thrown at us in, I think, second year uni. If I’ve kept my essay, which is possible, it will be buried in a box somewhere, so I can’t quote from my undergraduate insights. I do recall thinking it would be a fun essay (true) and therefore easy to write (wrong conclusion). As a result I left it till very late and ended up focussing on the shortcomings of the Choral Fantasy and the truly dreadful [but I like you] Wellington’s Victory battle symphony. I think I wrote about genre pieces, function and intent, the changing role of the composer and the nature of ambition in shaping musical works, and a relative lack of sketches (for Beethoven). The good Dr R’s comments suggested that I, too, had suffered from a lack of sketches.

I don’t think I’ve ever found a satisfactory answer to the conundrum: why is it that when Beethoven is “bad” (ordinary, uninspired, dull even) he really is “bad” in a way that, say, Mozart never is?

A few of my favourite blogs 2

Today’s selection represents practising musicians who blog.

First up the Bass Blog, written by Michael Hovnanian. He never identifies his mid-western orchestra by name but, well, you only have to look at the URL… Bass Blog has an appealing dry wit and plenty of entertaining insider anecdotes. Better still, there’s no bitterness or cynicism.

Thirteen Ways, the blog of Eighth Blackbird, could probably count as an orchestra/ensemble blog. But this Chicago-based contemporary music group is small and the tone closer to a bunch of musicians blogging than anything remotely institutional. Tim Munro never fails to make me laugh (but of course, he’s Australian, and a flutist).

I have a friend who jokes about “organ bores”: organ enthusiasts (invariably organists themselves) who can recite specifications of various instruments for hours on end and who, when they go missing on tour, will invariably be found checking out the local church organ. This might be amusing but it’s dreadfully unfair. If you share this view of organists then This Blog Will Change the World will change your mind.

In her own words, composer and performer Elaine Fine has had a “rich and varied life”. Some people might just say that because it sounds fine. Fine says it and it’s absolutely true. What’s also nice is that she thinks about music deeply and experiences it keenly. As a result, Musical Assumptions makes for interesting and often thought-provoking reading.

A few of my favourite blogs

I’m beginning an occasional series – the category tag will be “favourite things”. First up, blogs.

Classical Convert: A beginner’s guide to classical music, by someone who switched at 23

I just love it when really bright, intelligent people get into classical music as adults and begin exploring it in their own ways. That the Classical Convert (Ben) chooses to share his journey and discoveries with others is wonderful.

I’m reminded of concert intervals spent in the corporate lounge of a former orchestra. One of the regulars, the spouse of a staff member, had no formal musical training, but he was as observant as they come and possessed a very discerning ear. He often didn’t have the conventional vocabulary for articulating what he’d noticed, but he sure as anything could zero in on what was working or not in the performance. I often wondered whether he heard and noticed more because he wasn’t encumbered with the theoretical training that most classical musicians receive. Just a thought.

Ben’s pieces on nerds and switching are a special treat.

The next two blogs form a pair in my mind: two lawyers, two musicians, two concertgoers, two insightful writers with wide-ranging interests. There’s nothing better than when MK of Tonic Blotter and Marcellous of Stumbling on Melons go to concerts. MK, from Chicago, also captures birds with his camera; Marcellous has the advantage of attending concerts in Sydney.

Then there’s Inside the Classics from the Minnesota Orchestra. This is, so far, the very best “official” orchestra blog I’ve come across. I love its candour – the two contributors are very open about the process of making music and preparing concerts and their thoughts about the music world; I love that it’s really well written and the tone is just right. I don’t live in Minneapolis (sometimes I wish I did – their music director is one of my favourite conductors and the weather’s colder there right now) and I’ll never attend one of their concerts, but it’s still compelling reading and that says it all.

In case you think all I care about is music, here are some other blogs that have earned a place high on my feed list:

A Dress a Day – lexicographer Erin McKean wears and makes dresses [see her redefine the dictionary in one of said dresses on TED]. I do neither of these things at present, but she’s a super-engaging writer with a great sense of humour so I follow her blog. She also tweets words of the day and naturally I stole the idea.

I Love Typography – indeed I do!

And Ampersands – if there’s a character I like more than the ampersand it’s a well-formed capital Q.

Swiss Miss is a Swiss designer in New York. Her discoveries make me smile.

Futility Closet is my refuge from productivity, ’cause every girl needs one of those.

Indexed is a simple concept cleverly and diligently executed. A model to us all.

And Andrea Joseph posts exquisitely detailed drawings on her sketchblog. Never again will I sneer at the humble biro.

This is barely scratching the surface. And especially in the area of music and the music business there are many more blogs that I follow assiduously and admire greatly – I really need to get my blogroll assembled!

Who signed off on this?

Since Sarah has raised the stakes, it’s time for a reprise of this doozy from a major Scottish festival, which I came across in 2007 via Alex Ross’s blog.

They began well with Copland, but after that it should read Crawford Seeger, Adams, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky.