Thomasina’s last waltz

Send in the live-twitterers

Previously on Thomasina…
“This isn’t to say that someone who undertakes to live-tweet a performance might not have a role to play. But it is a role.”

Assuming it could be done with courtesy, why would you set out to tweet a performance in real time?

As a form of personal note-taking? – Pen and paper is actually much quicker and less disruptive to all, including the note-taker.

As a way of sharing an experience and discussing it with others? – Sure, but then why not at interval or afterwards, which is when we normally gather our ideas and share them with others.

As a form of citizen reportage? – Well… there just might be something in that.

The other day, @DarrynKing (real name, Darryn King; profession, entertainment journalist) live-tweeted the Sydney production of West Side Story (hashtag #wss). If you go look at these tweets – which is easier said than done since it was on 15 July and twitter is the most ephemeral of media – you don’t get the sense of them coming from an average Joe in the audience. At one point Darryn was talking of wearing all black and lurking in the wings, or even tweeting from the pit. (Sometimes these things boil down to where you can get decent reception.)

He was very well-prepared. And over the two-and-a-half hours the #wss feed included backstage insights, commentary on the performance, slang definitions, pop quizzes drawn from the lyrics, wry plot summaries, musical observations, witty expressions of enthusiasm, meta moments (“If Tony had Twitter he’d be like ‘Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria Maria’”) and even some good advice (“Don’t do it, Maria. Let this endless cycle of violence and great dance numbers come to an end”).

For someone to live-tweet a show and come up with something worth following, a few things are needed: access (not everyone gets to sit in on the general rehearsal, or find a corner in an orchestra pit, or watch the performers warm up before the show); some fairly thorough knowledge and preparation; and skill in rapidly formulating an entertaining commentary that will make sense to someone who isn’t there.

You could be describing the requirements of a traditional arts critic. Or a radio sports commentator.

And what does anyone get out of it? Right now it’s novel, so there’s a public relations benefit. When (if?) live-tweeting becomes commonplace – in the way that arts criticism or cricket on the radio is commonplace – then it will simply become another way of sharing a performance beyond the doors of the auditorium and giving a taste of the event in real time to those who can’t or won’t be there. Time will tell whether twitter is a good medium for this, and whether the effort will be worth it.

What does the live-twitterer get out of it? Potentially a great deal: knowledge, awareness, access, insight, and all the benefits that come from choosing to focus on a performance with the specific purpose of communicating its details and flavour to others.

But the exercise also represents a lot of work – it’s far more than a few idle tweets from a good night out. As I said, you could be describing the experience of a critic, or the broadcast presenter, or the operator of the camera for a webstream, or the surtitle operator. The live-twitterer will, by necessity, be deeply involved in what’s going on, but they won’t necessarily be sharing in the experience the creators intend for the audience.

They’re not free to simply put down their mobile device, forget about reporting, and weep or laugh or listen in awe. They’re playing a role.

Postscript…

Darryn has posted his own reactions to the experience, which I chose not to read before writing my own post.  This was interesting: “That’s the thing. The live tweet itself turned into performance, and arguably my performance, for much of it, was more important than the performance taking place onstage. Heck, I could have written much of what I did listening to the cast recording at home (somewhat more comfortably). But that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun, would it? If it worked, it was the idea, of the illusion, of shared experience that made it work.”

Four things Twitter does for the performing arts

There’s a bigger question behind the #tweetseats discussion: What are the benefits of bringing twitter into performance venues?

At the moment we’re playing around, experimenting, finding our feet. (By “we” I mean presenters and tweeting audiences equally.) Right now, I think perhaps too much excited emphasis is being placed on the particular medium du jour and not enough on the value of what is actually taking place…

1. Connection
One thing at which twitter excels is enabling the connection of like-minded nerds fans. Through twitter we can share impressions with someone who might be attending on a different night or perhaps still be deciding whether to buy a ticket. But unlike a chat with friends, a tweet reaches many more people and it also allows a tweeter to get to know more fans whom they might not otherwise have met.

So you can imagine presenters being very interested in the word-of-mouth potential of that, as well as the community-building potential. And those of us who tweet just love it.

2. Broadcasting

Another thing that twitter does, although not very precisely, is provide a simple mechanism for broadcasting grabs of information to an audience of followers. The equivalent of the opera surtitle, but sent to your phone. The problem is, there’s not much control over exactly when a tweet will appear to a follower. So it would be pretty bad for actual surtitles, and not much good for music alerts of the “listen to the oboe’s entry” variety. But it’s ok for sending generic pieces of background information or pointing out things to listen/look for that are likely to hang around (“see those sheep…”).

Orchestras around the world have been trying this sort of thing, mostly at outdoor concerts. I’ve followed some of the program-notey feeds and found them either prosaic or a bit twee. But there’s scope for a really imaginative use of this strategy.

3. Open conversations
Twitter is also pretty good for opening up conversations and sharing information. Traditionally, performing arts presenters have communicated in very controlled ways: we “broadcast” information through program books, websites, marketing materials, and print and broadcast media (that is, one-to-many), and we allow people to talk to us by phone or in writing, responding in a closed dialogue (one-to-one). But active and flourishing online forums are relatively rare and don’t necessarily include presenters and performers as participants. In any case, the old-school forum environment doesn’t always seem to generate as generous a conversation as twitter does.

Presenters in the 21st century need to be bold enough to participate in many-to-many conversations, engaging the intelligence and passions of the smart people who make up the audience – and a medium like twitter allows a presenter to talk to people, respond to them, answer questions, solve problems and bask in compliments (twitter nurtures an extraordinarily positive atmosphere).

Somewhere between open conversations and spontaneous response is the use of twitter by performers and audience together as part of the creative and performance act. That’s too specific a scenario to cover here.

4. Spontaneous response

Twitter encourages spontaneity and a real-time response to the world. It’s worth remembering that twitter reached its tipping point in 2007 when a bunch of nerds South by Southwest conference attendees used it to keep in touch and to let each other know which were the good sessions and events. If that’s not real-time critiquing, then nothing is.

So it’s the most natural thing in the world to contemplate adopting that approach for a concert or an opera or ballet or in the theatre or at any other traditional performance event. Except it turns out that live-tweeting from the audience in those contexts can be difficult and unrewarding, and it compromises the experience.

In fact I’m going to come right out and say that live-tweeting (as opposed to foyer tweeting) is not going to help you engage more fully with a performance. It’s not going to enhance your appreciation, increase your understanding or blow your mind.

This isn’t to say that someone who undertakes to live-tweet a performance might not have a role to play. But it is a role.

#tweetseats, or #foyertweets – that is the question

On Saturday night, Opera Australia used the power of comp tickets to harness the energy of some opera-mad tweeters (Mad Sceners, to be precise), endorsing a posse of nine or so to do what they usually do at the opera: tweet their impressions before and after, and during the interval.

It’s kind of unfortunate that it went under the tag #tweetseats, since no actual tweeting was taking place from their seats. I would have loved to see them sacrifice the rhyme and an extra character and opt for #foyertweets instead

Not because I’m a pedant or anything, but because, despite the Opera Australia event being accurately described in the media, the whole #tweetseats thing seems to have stirred unnecessary outrage in some quarters, with many assuming the tweeting was going on during the performance itself.

But for many of us, the last thing we want to do is tweet during [traditional] performances. The best summing up came from @primalamusica, who managed to condense the sentiment of my post from the other day into a mere 55 characters: “if it’s tweetworthy, it’s worthy of undivided attention”


But I don’t want to get bogged down in matters of etiquette. It’s pretty obvious to any remotely considerate person that there are times and places for everything. What’s outrageous in a hushed and darkened auditorium might be absolutely fine on a picnic blanket at a concert under the stars. Use your good judgement.

Archer and the ACO: A compliment misses its mark

On Tuesday the people at Bell Shakespeare sent me off to The Australian with a provocative quote: “I personally probably don’t need to see another Shakespeare.” This turned out to be from an interview with Robyn Archer. She said something else too (I’ll include the journalist’s intro for context):

Archer qualifies this by saying that enlivening the classics and preserving heritage is important: “If a great piece of Haydn or Mozart in the hands of Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra drums into you in a way that is so fresh you feel like you have never heard it before, go for it, but never at the expense of fresh ideas, because in the end, that is the heart of the creative country.”

And my instinctive reaction to that was: How I wish she’d said: “If a Haydn symphony in the hands of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the SSO drums into you in a way that is so fresh you feel like you’ve never heard it before…”’

I saw the comment as a genuine compliment, and as the expression of an unimpeachable piece of advice: go for the classics when you can find them in vital performances but don’t turn your back on new ideas.

My only gripe was the way the ACO has become the cited-orchestra-of-choice whenever it comes to summoning up an image of fresh, vital performances of the classical canon. This is not all that surprising. But the cliché skews things, as clichés do, because the ACO does not in fact have this particular corner of activity completely sewn up in a bag.

It turns out, though, that the ACO, or rather one writer responding for the ACO, doesn’t see it as a compliment at all. Archer’s comment has been held up as some kind of negative alongside a glowing concert review from Vincent Plush that appeared the day before.

First the link. http://www.aco.com.au/Default.aspx?url=/blog

And the date, which you’ll need to find the post: 14 July 2010. It’s called “Response to The Australian”.

Now I sympathise with the frustration around this newly fashionable (and indeed pernicious) idea of “heritage” art. I wholeheartedly agree that there is absolutely no justification, in principle, for setting it up as the polar opposite to anything new and fresh as if they are mutually exclusive. And it’s true the interview as reported doesn’t make the point that the ACO programs old repertoire alongside new music in admirable ways.

But I challenge anyone reading the interview to interpret Archer’s comment as lambasting preservers of heritage. She’s saying that – although she personally never needs to see another Shakespeare – the classics are important, and she then singles out the ACO, not as “guardians of the old” but as an exemplar of an ensemble that interprets those classics in ways that make you feel like you’ve never heard them before.

And in my book that’s a serious compliment.

Postscript…

Previously the ACO used the blogger service. Just this week they’ve moved their posts onto their website at the address given above. At this new location there isn’t a feed that you can subscribe to or follow; it’s no longer possible to link to a specific post url; and it’s no longer possible to comment on posts. Whatever you want to call it, the ACO is no longer blogging.

Vale Michael Steinberg

I’ve waited five days to write about the death of Michael Steinberg, because this isn’t something you just dash off. Not when it’s someone who approaches hero status in your eyes.

I met Michael Steinberg only once, at a strategic management course run by the American Symphony Orchestra League in New York. He wasn’t actually teaching my course – he’d been brought in to teach a session in an introductory program for people just moving into orchestral administration. The teachers at these things have always been leading lights in the industry – experienced, accomplished and inspiring – but Michael seemed like an especially enlightened choice to speak to such a group.

Later, when I’d just begun working in the States, we corresponded and he kindly and helpfully gave me guidance on matters of American orchestral performance history. In our conversations he showed a genuine interest in the Australian orchestral scene. He had been to Australia. He’d given a Stuart Challender Lecture for the SSO and – in this I recognised a kindred spirit – had not only attended concerts at the time but the accompanying pre-concert talks, which he recalled with sufficient clarity to offer some perceptive assessments. 

But really, I “met” Michael Steinberg when I first came across his program notes in the mid-1990s, which was also about the same time I began pursuing a career in orchestras.

Some might say that, in aspects of structure and style, his notes were slightly old-fashioned. But this is no worse a criticism than saying someone acts or dresses their age. And they are old-fashioned in the very best sense. You can imagine George Grove, the effective father of program annotations in the English-speaking world, looking on with approval at the way Michael wove together insight and information, reflection and response. He never lost sight of the central goal of a concert program note, which is to help the listener. (Not to inform the casual reader, although he does that too, but to guide the person who is at the concert, listening.)

There is so much to praise and to emulate in Michael Steinberg’s writing. Not simply the lucid expression and the musical insight, but the deft analogies and metaphors, so aptly chosen, so vivid and so original. But one of the things that inspired me the most was the way he injected his sheer love of music into everything he wrote.

The other thing which inspired me from the outset was the way his notes were written from the perspective of someone who had been there. He didn’t just know the music he wrote about, he hadn’t merely researched it – he’d helped plan performances of it, heard it in rehearsal, discussed it with conductors and soloists, experienced it in concert. And he wrote this way.

It’s no coincidence that when Michael Steinberg was hired by the San Francisco Symphony it was as Program Annotator, Lecturer and Artistic Advisor. Someone (Peter Pastreich, whose tribute ran in the subscription-only Musical America) was smart enough to see that programming concerts and then talking and writing about them for your audience are two functions that are best when they sit together, and not simply because the knowledge and skill-sets required involve a nearly complete overlap. It’s no secret that the best program annotators and pre-concert speakers are those who are or have been directly engaged with programming and putting on concerts. I’d also say that the best programmers are those who can really write (even if they don’t always have time to) and really talk. Michael was such a person.

Hearing of his death was incredibly sad. It was also surprising, as I seem to have entertained the irrational idea in the back of my mind that Michael Steinberg would live forever. Well, he does in a sense: as a writer he leaves a legacy that will continue to help listeners and inspire writers, and to remind us all of how and why we love music so much.

The sadness has been softened slightly by the obituaries, which in their different ways build on the Michael Steinberg I knew from a distance. Everyone, it seems, has their loving memory and, more important, everyone has their favourite quotation, from his writing or their interactions with him. All of these confirm him as lively, imaginative, thoughtful, astute, amazingly intelligent but never smug, and always good-humoured. The personality who emerged in the writing was the personality indeed.

I’ll leave you with the links…

Tim Smith of The Baltimore Sun  | Marc Swed for the LA Times  | Keith Powers in the Boston Herald  | Joshua Kosman for the San Francisco Chronicle

Jeremy Eichler writing for the Boston Globe, with more on Michael Steinberg’s time there as critic and a fabulous photo of him from 1968.

In particular this: “If Mr. Steinberg’s criticism had a fierce bite, it also hewed to certain core values. He insisted that musical programs be curated with intelligence and insight and not slapped together willy-nilly, that Baroque performances reflect up-to-date research about how the music sounded in its time, and that contemporary music had an important, salutary place in concert life.”

David Hawley on MinnPost.com  | Anthony Tommasini wrote the New York Times obituary

Tom Huizenga publishes a short appreciation to accompany a repeat of a radio feature that Michael Steinberg gave on “The Symphony” (14 minutes).

Ronen Givony of the Wordless Music series, writes at length about working with Michael Steinberg on one of his last projects.

His publisher, Oxford University Press, has posted a short excerpt from his final book, For the Love of Music

Sam Bergman of the Minnesota Orchestra wrote a really lovely and heartfelt tribute for Inside the Classics, which includes an unforgettable description of an especially fine Scotch: “I don’t know whether you've sampled it yourselves, but the feeling of it is as if the Virgin Mary were sliding down your throat wearing velvet pantaloons.”

An older piece: Peter Jacobi interviews Michael Steinberg in a profile piece for WFIU Public Radio. (audio)

Another older piece from the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune about Michael Steinberg and his wife Jorja Fleezanis, who was about to retire as concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra.

Finally, Peter Pastreich, former executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, has a tribute on MusicalAmerica.com. Since it’s subscription-only, I’ll offer a couple of excerpts:

“But Michael was much more than a writer and lecturer on music for us. Michael was for ten years the artistic conscience of the San Francisco Symphony – and he continued in that role after he left for Minneapolis – not only through his continuing lectures and notes, and the advice he gave to me and to three music directors – Edo De Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, and Michael Tilson Thomas – but by what I would call his looming spirit. For more than 20 years, no important decision on musical policy was made without our asking ourselves – what will Michael Steinberg think about this?”

And quoting Michael’s own words: “…That in the end the only study of music is music, that program notes and pre-concert lectures…can…be helpful ways of showing you the door in the wall and of turning on some extra lights, but that the only thing that matters is what happens privately between you and the music. That, as with any other form of falling in love, no one can do it for you… That listening to music is not like getting a haircut or a manicure, that it is something for you to do. That music, like any worthwhile partner in love, is demanding, sometimes exasperatingly, exhaustingly demanding…That its capacity to give is as near to infinite as anything in this world, and that what it offers us is always and inescapably in exact proportion to what we ourselves give.”

***

Speaking of giving, a characteristic invitation…

In Michael Steinberg's memory, donations may be sent to:
The Michael Steinberg & Jorja Fleezanis Fund to
Spur Curiosity and Growth through the Performing Arts and the Written Word,
Attn. Shelli Chase, Chase Financial, 7900 Xerxes Avenue South, Suite 910, Minneapolis MN 55431, USA.

It's a miracle

I don’t read Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. The sensationalist approach would probably be quite amusing, but the writing is usually so bad that I simply can’t watch. That said, when the compulsive reader is grabbing a slice of raisin toast in the office kitchen and sees a tabloid newspaper sitting on the counter, chances are she’s going to look.

And so I can report that in its edition for Friday 10 July 2009, on the front page no less, The Daily Telegraph used the word “decimated” correctly.

I suspect they didn’t mean to, the headline “Flu Wipeout” suggests quite the opposite intention. But that is what happened.

“The NSW workforce is being decimated by swine flu with predictions it could wipe out more than half of all workers.”

“Health experts predict every worker will be sick with the flu at least twice over the next three months, with 10 per cent of the state’s work force currently off sick.”

Ye gods! Ten per cent off sick. The workforce (or work force, the subbies seem to be hedging their bets on that one) is indeed decimated.

[I’m not so keen on the health experts’ prediction though. I’ve had the flu only once in my life and it was terrifying. Twice in three months is more than I want to contemplate.]

From memory…

Toscanini and Furtwängler were known for conducting from memory, but K always used a score. He was asked, “Maestro, why do you use the score when these conductors do not?” To which K replied: “Because I can read music.”
[This story is told about both Knappertsbusch and Klemperer.]

I was taught piano in a way that gave me tremendous sight-reading skills (thank you, Bransby). To paraphrase Ratty, there’s nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about at the piano, sight-reading one’s way through all kinds of music, suitable and otherwise.

There’s a downside to being a “reader”, though. You never come by a memory of a piece through slow dogged study and sheer repetition. And I hated memorising music; loathed it. It wasn’t until I was at uni and discovered Walter Gieseking’s little book, Piano Technique, that I learned a much more powerful strategy for memorisation that didn’t rely on physical repetition. But by then it was kind of late: I was already a flute major, and there’s no particular expectation that flutists perform from memory.

Here’s an excerpt from the AMEB’s syllabus for the Fellowship in Music Australia diploma:

“For pianists the entire program must be presented from memory with the exception of contemporary works. For string players the entire program must be presented from memory except sonatas and contemporary works. For other instrumentalists presentation from memory is encouraged but is not obligatory. For singers, presentation from memory is required except in Oratorio.”

That says it all. If you’re a pianist or a violinist etc. memorisation is pretty much de rigeur. If you play some other instrument it’s more or less up to you. [Given the AMEB’s exceptions, I always found it ironic that I memorised contemporary works most easily.] If you’re a singer memorisation is expected, except for the quaint matter of oratorio, since there the aim is to make what is essentially opera seem less theatrical.

The double-standard on the instrumental front has always intrigued me, and seemed a bit unfair. But it’s the way things are, at all levels of music-making. Such is the power of expectation that when a concert pianist or string player uses sheet music, other than for the newest or most obscure of repertoire, it attracts attention and comment.

One pianist I know makes a point of performing with sheet music always. It’s been a while since he explained his rationale to me, so I hope I’m not misrepresenting him, but Geoffrey Lancaster’s view is that memorisation is a kind of arrogance, an assumption on the part of the performer that he or she knows how the music will go. Playing from memory, seen in this light, diminishes the spontaneity of the performer’s interaction with the composer’s text.

Of course, that’s the view of a performer who thinks deeply about things. And, in any case, no one would ever call Geoffrey unprepared or say that the presence of sheet music got “in the way” of his musical communication. But these do tend to be the suspicions levelled at most performers who appear on stage with sheet music.

There’s the pianist who plays from his part for the Grieg Piano Concerto. Unprepared? He may well be, and the presence of the music could be a symptom of that. The violinist whose head is buried in a music stand. Is he failing to project across the footlights as a result? Does the concert fee, whatever that might be, justify the expectation of a memorised performance in the way we expect actors to have memorised their lines?

Historically, performing concertos and recitals from memory is a fairly recent practice. And there’s no musically justifiable reason for it being compulsory. Let’s say you’ve played a piece into your muscle memory – that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll know it more intimately or have greater insights into its interpretation. On the contrary, you may be more caught up in the mechanics of the performance. If you’ve memorised it a la Gieseking, you probably have a very sound analytical conception of the piece but you aren’t necessarily going to give a freer or more spontaneous rendition simply by virtue of this. And if you happen to be blessed with some form of eidetic [photographic] memory as some musicians are, well, you’re not really playing from memory at all, but reading the music from your mind’s eye instead of the music desk. The only difference is it looks better (aesthetics do play a part in all this, I’ll admit) and you don’t have to worry about page turns. 

All this comes to mind because recently Sydney audiences heard another violin concerto performed with sheet music (phenomenally, I should say) and so the subject has come up for what is perhaps the third time this season. As I’m sure I’ve established with my preamble, I’m not especially wedded to performance from memory and I’m more than ready to think positively of those with courage enough to fly in the face of convention.

As with some other concert conventions, performing from memory is often held up to be a greater virtue than it really is, perhaps to our loss. We’ve created a scene that favours the pianist or string player with an easy memory and discriminates (yes, discriminates) at the early stages against the musician without. To that end the performers of “Other Instruments” have a better deal.  Because, even though performing from memory does have aesthetic and practical virtues…

1. The benefits of memorisation as a study technique don’t transfer as a matter of course to performance from memory. [And a performer’s use of sheet music doesn’t mean that he or she doesn’t know the piece inside out.]

2. Performing from memory doesn’t really guarantee anything except that the musician has memorised the piece. [Oh, and that there’s a greater risk of error during performance.] It doesn’t assure a deeper musical insight or superior interpretation. It doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with performing a piece many times.

To which end, I’ll leave you with another conductor story:

I heard Mark Wigglesworth conduct Brahms 4 in Cardiff years ago. In the post-concert discussion afterwards a man in the audience asked him how many times he’d conducted the symphony in order to be able to “do it from memory”. The response: this was the first time Wigglesworth had conducted it in a concert. Ever.

In which news of Michael Jackson's death reminds Thomasina of how she came to own the Thriller album

I don’t listen to radio news and I don’t own a television. So I first heard about the death of Michael Jackson via this post from The Guardian music blog, while checking my Google reader feed on the way to work. I was thrown by the Glastonbury festival angle, and I couldn’t decide whether it was some elaborate in-joke of which I’d missed a crucial part or reporting around genuine news. I discovered later: this wasn’t a joke.

It’s a pity, really, that in recent years the only time Michael Jackson caught my attention (which means, in effect, the mainstream media’s attention) was when a story emerged about some new craziness or weird behaviour, rather than for any musical achievement. In fact, the only songs of his that I could bring to mind are those on the Thriller album. And therein lies my Michael Jackson story.

It was 1984. I was a self-proclaimed Culture Club fan (and my consciously cultivated high school foray into pop culture and resulting choice of allegiances is a post in itself). Boy George and his band were huge, they were making their first Australian tour, and I wanted to go to the concert. Very badly.

But my mother said, No.

I was devastated.

One of my big sisters took pity on me. Consolation surprise gift: a copy of the Thriller LP.

I doubt it consoled me one bit, if anything I was perplexed. But I was still very pleased to receive it, and the biggest-selling album of all time played its own important role in the aforementioned foray into pop culture.

It’s been observed elsewhere: Thriller was the last album on which Michael Jackson appeared looking like who he was: a young African-American male. That was 27 years ago. And it’s sad that at only 50 years of age he’d come to look like a shadow of his former self. Never has a cliché been so apposite.

[Happy ending: my wonderful wonderful sister, who would have been in her 20s at this point, was able to persuade my mother that she would be a responsible chaperone for a pop concert and I saw Culture Club after all. This has always been the advantage of having significantly older sisters: it’s like having a couple of really cool aunts. I do recall the usher at the Entertainment Centre apologetically explaining that he’d have to check our bags for cameras. My sister, who’d just been to Europe, said “Oh, that’s ok. In London they check for bombs…”]

Concert reviews online

I haven’t written about this at length, but I know from my reading around the traps that I’m not alone in my long-held frustration. Why, oh why, won’t the Sydney Morning Herald post all of its classical music concert reviews online as well as publishing them in print?

It makes absolutely no sense. I could understand the reverse tactic – something online not appearing in the paper – but where’s the value in not running already printed reviews on the website? Totally bizarre. Worse: totally unhelpful.

The SMH is currently running a survey regarding its online entertainment offerings on smh.com.au.

So, if you’ve yet to make your voice heard – or even if you have – I urge you to complete this survey. You have to wade through the usual stuff, but it’s not too long, and at the end is a free-form opportunity to tell them which single change they could make that would make you visit the site more frequently.

The hall was dark

On Friday the Sutherland Shire had a blackout (50,000 homes); on Saturday we all, well some of us, turned our lights off voluntarily for Earth Hour; then today in Sydney’s CBD and inner suburbs another blackout (70,000 homes).

My suburb was not quite “inner” enough to have been affected and so I was oblivious to the latest mishap. Unfortunately, in my case, the trains kept running, which meant I arrived in the city for the talk before a 7pm concert to find it without power. No power, no concerts. The Sydney Opera House cancelled its performances, as eventually did the City Recital Hall, where I was headed to hear Miriam Allan/Ironwood.

It made for an unnecessary trip, but the experience wasn’t unpleasant. It was an early evening concert and still light. So the early arrivals – the talk goers and the pre-concert diners – gathered about chatting. CRH staff brought out chairs, and more than a few people suggested an alfresco performance, which might have been nice but for the traffic noise. Then Mary-Jo Capps demonstrated her proficiency at the piercing whistle (something I envy, since I can “only” whistle tunes), and invited us to come back next week.

I was reminded of the really serious blackout that cut across several states on the eastern United States/Canadian border in the summer of 2003. New York ground to a halt, Detroit, Toronto…Cleveland, where I was living and which was blamed for it all. Despite the inconveniences, it was a blissful two days. It was wonderfully quiet and at night it was wonderfully dark. Families went out walking in the evening to look at the stars. I finally got around to defrosting my fridge and was able to spend a lot of time playing the piano. And oh yes, there was the pleasure of an unexpected holiday.

Before and after: the dance makeover

Imagine saying to Fred Astaire “No one could teach you to dance in a million years”?!

But it was true – it took rather less time than that:

Thank you to the new President of the United States for reminding me about Swing Time!

A "drab" year for centenaries?

In the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine today, David Marr writes that the prospects for this year were “rather drab”.

“Nor did 2008 offer much by way of centenaries to celebrate. Little was discovered or invented in 1908. No great composers or writers came or went.”

Despite enthusiastic musical celebrations and acknowledgements all over the world, all year, I guess Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen don’t count then…

And never mind that Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908, whichever calendar you go by. [Although to be fair, no one’s been making much of that one. And I don’t mind – celebrating the anniversary of someone’s death, while a handy pretext for performing the music, has always seemed a bit macabre to me.]

Jørn Utzon (1918–2008)

I’ve learned via Arts & Letters Daily that Jørn Utzon, the architect of the Sydney Opera House, has passed away, aged 90. Unlike other sad passings of the fortnight gone, this was much less of a shock but still very sad news.

It could be argued that his vision for the Sydney Opera House was imperfectly realised, but realised it was, and it gave Sydney an architectural wonder, a landmark, a focal point for creative endeavour, a point of pride and a source of inspiration.

Just yesterday I expressed the throwaway desire that Severance Hall be moved to Bennelong Point. I didn’t really mean it. Oh no I didn’t.

I love the Opera House. It has been a part of my world ever since I was little girl. The first live ballet I saw was Giselle in the long-gone Regent Theatre, but after that the Opera Theatre saw me about six times a year for the family-friendly sunset series. Nothing could match the excitement of dressing up in my mother’s latest creation (and she did “good clothes” extremely well) and dance-student “character shoes”, catching the train into Circular Quay and taking one of those vibrantly upholstered seats for an evening of magic. The ballet seasons provided my first exposure to orchestral music – no wonder that the soft spot in my heart is for the French and the Russians.

One year, when I was about 9 or 10, we took out a mini-subscription to the opera. I remember we opted for the cheapest seats and then received an apologetic notice from the Australian Opera explaining that this reserve was sold out and asking would we be willing to accept seats in A reserve for the same price… I saw Rigoletto and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette from a prime spot in the stalls; I can’t recall what the third opera was. I do remember pestering my Italian-speaking friend at school for a translation of “La donna e mobile”. “Fickle” wasn’t in her vocabulary and so we puzzled over what “The lady is moved” might actually mean. I decided that all was forgiven in the face of a seriously good tune.

An essential preliminary to every Opera Theatre performance was John Coburn’s wonderful “Curtain of the Sun”. The corresponding “Curtain of the Moon” was in the Drama Theatre. The first play I recall seeing there was Macbeth, around the same time as that opera season. This formed a very strong impression on me and instilled an immediate enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Out in the foyer was the “optical illusion” of the shark, formed from many individual panels – a source of much pleasure but now gone.

I discovered the illusions of the theatre at the Dennis Wollanski Library of the Performing Arts, once buried somewhere in the podium of the Opera House, but now dispersed. A costume for one of Joan Sutherland’s roles impressed me not only for its enormous size (I was very young) but the huge “gems” that adorned the neckline. I had seen opera; the costumes had looked more or less “real”. What my ballet and drama teacher had been saying about needing something larger than life to project beyond the footlights began to make sense.

The back-stage tour with all the mysterious mechanical devices, the labyrinth of passages and working artists moving around the place provided more excitement. The fascination of the drab behind the glitter. Maybe this was one of the things that eventually triggered a desire to be inside all this, and not merely watching from the audience.

Serious concert attendance came much later, in high school, and my earliest impressions of hearing the SSO all seem to involve the Town Hall. Perhaps I was taken to one of those Christmas at the Opera House events with the singing Christmas tree. My memory is hazy on that front.

On the performance front, when I was 11 I sang in Vivaldi’s Gloria in the Concert Hall – a massed high school performance that no doubt broke all the rules of historical performance but which was pure exhilaration. Despite being a pianist and flutist, viola was the first instrument that I played on the stage there. (In an ensemble – I was entirely self-taught, right down to the system of multi-coloured tablature that I invented to enable instant mastery of alto clef.) Flute came later; then the piccolo in Mahler’s Second Symphony (more combined high schools concerts); and what was probably my last “appearance”, a Berlioz mega-extravaganza with tertiary students from all over Sydney joining the University of California Davis orchestra, conducted by D Kern Holoman, who has mellowed considerably but back then, with dark hair and goatee, looked for all the world like Mephistopheles himself.

One way or another, the Sydney Opera House has been a centre of my life. It’s so much more than a “venue”.  I may whinge about the Concert Hall’s acoustics and lament the tiny orchestra pit in the Opera Theatre. I may, now that I’m no longer 7 years old, marvel at how small and cramped the Opera Theatre foyers seem. I may – quite seriously – express a wish to see opera and ballet move to the Capitol Theatre. I may complain about the more recent setts on the forecourt. But there will always be a magic about the Opera House as a building and as a destination. I’m there every week, usually working; my attitude should be jaded. But that hasn’t happened.  Approaching it on foot and admiring, yet again, the curve of the sails and the chevron pattern of the tiles, puts me in the mood for something special, something marvellous, something beyond the mundane routines of life.

Many courageous and long-sighted people contributed to the existence of the Sydney Opera House, but ultimately the credit goes to Jørn Utzon, who gave Sydney his vision and whose spirit will live on in it.

Thank you, Mr Utzon.

I leave you with a program book from the opening season. If the perforated silver cover doesn’t say 1973, nothing does!

Poetrie

Free word associations of Monday evening: death, heart, opera, ‘Batter my heart’, John Donne…

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee     

Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,    

For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,     

Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.    

From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,

Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,     

And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,     

Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.    

Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,     

And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,

And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,    

And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;    

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,     

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

The news that rumoured around the office in hushed and unbelieving tones on Monday afternoon has turned out to be true. Others are better placed to comment and pay tribute. For my part, I am sorrier than ever to have missed OA’s recent Billy Budd and this program gives me pause to think. I see some of the Australian papers are vainly going for the “hard news” angle instead of the respectful vale.

A postscript link. The Overgrown Path highlights the recorded path cut through some “overgrown” and often unjustly neglected repertoire.

November 4, 2008: A Joyous Day

‘Dennis’, commenting on one of my favourite music blogs, complained today: ‘Oh no. Is this yet another arts/music/culture blog that falls from what used to be a welcome respite from the incessant political din?’

I know where Dennis is coming from, but this wasn’t simply another election. This one was important. The result was momentous, empowering, inspiring. Here in Australia, when Obama claimed victory (early afternoon on Wednesday for us) the excitement in the office where I work was palpable. The few who were American or who’d worked in the States were beaming and proclaiming it a great day for America. The rest were smiling just as much, because it’s a great day for the world.

In a sense, Dennis is right, and my “arts/music/culture blog” isn’t going to offer any special insight into the US election, for all that I’ve been following it with interest and hope. Perhaps I too should be offering respite from the din.

But it’s one of those days where I feel I can’t possibly write about anything else. There’s simply no appropriate response other than to say again, it’s a joyous day.

PS. Many thanks to the chained bear for this link.

Whither the plain dealing?

Breaking news from Cleveland via Baltimore (well may you ask). Apparently Don Rosenberg, one of America's most discerning and experienced classical music critics, has been "reassigned" from the Cleveland Orchestra beat. There's a suggestion (or suspicion) that this move is the result of the Musical Arts Association bringing pressure to bear on the local broadsheet, The Plain Dealer – the orchestra's more powerful supporters unable to stomach Don's willingness to bring clear-headed criticism to the performances and to hold the orchestra to the high standards that it undoubtedly deserves.

My view: The Plain Dealer would be better off reassigning the sub-editors who (at least in the period 2003–05) seem to have delighted in forming selectively sensational headlines from Don's negative observations, undermining the balance and objectivity of what he had to say.