Thomasina’s last waltz

Amadeus: playing with music

An edited version of a short talk I once gave to an audience of theatre and music patrons on the subject of Peter Shaffer’s (and Milos Forman’s) Amadeus.

A few years ago I was carrying on a long-standing argument with a playwright friend about which is better: Amadeus the film, or Amadeus the play. My friend always comes down the side of Amadeus the film. Which is fair enough: the film is a glorious thing, and from a musical point of view the film is completely satisfying. The one thing you can’t do in a play is run the risk of turning it into a concert, whereas in a movie you can include much more music and in a really direct way. But all that aside, the movie just doesn’t “do it” for me the way the play does.

There’s something about the play – about the way it’s structured, the way it’s so very stylised and “theatrical” – that mirrors the music. Or to put it another way, Amadeus the play has a lot in common with 18th-century opera and that’s very attractive.

The other thing I respond to in Amadeus is the way it brings the audience into the play. And Peter Shaffer achieves that with a couple of devices that work brilliantly on stage but would never have transferred to film.

The first of these comes right at the beginning, with two gentleman called the Venticelli, or “Little Winds”. I first saw this play when I was about eleven and the Venticelli won my heart.

They are “purveyors of information, gossip and rumour” and their job is to keep Salieri in the loop, to let him know what Vienna is thinking and doing. It’s a way of telling us about things that are happening off stage, and they do all this with a wonderful musical virtuosity – they spend the whole play speaking in concert and in unison, just as if they were singing in an opera. They are very stylised, very theatrical, which works in opera and in the theatre. But the Venticelli would just seem silly in the realism of a movie.

I guess one of the reasons I fell in love with the Venticelli is not simply that they’re very clever and very impressive, but that they invite us in – we get to share in the gossip, and who can resist that?

The other way that Peter Shaffer invites us in to this play is through the character of Salieri, who is forever talking to us, the audience. And that’s the main reason why my friend prefers the film. He’s always moaning about the way Shaffer has Salieri addressing the audience for minutes at a stretch. He sees it as endless exposition, and therefore bad, on the grounds that a good play will “show” rather than “tell”.

He’s right, but there is a point to it. When Salieri talks to us he’s not taking the usual approach to breaking the Fourth Wall. Normally a character doing that is asking us to step back and acknowledge that none of this is real; it’s all a fiction. But Salieri treats us as another character. He invites us to be his confessors. He even gives us a name: we’re the Ghosts of the Future. Which is absolutely right. We – all of us – represent Posterity. We’re complicit in the fame that the historical Mozart enjoys today, and in the infamy of the historical Salieri. And Shaffer’s Salieri knows this.

It’s all part of a rhetoric and a sense of music and ritual that’s typical of Peter Shaffer’s work, but which seems especially apt in this play. And when I started to think about the parallels between Amadeus and 18th-century opera I didn’t have to look particularly hard. Some of them jump off the page.

Salieri’s opening speech, for example. He summons us: Ghosts of the Future. It’s an invocation – and he calls it that. And for Salieri that’s what opera was all about: “the raising of Gods and Ghosts”. It wasn’t meant to be about the escapades of chambermaids and hairdressers. (Mozart thought the exact opposite.)

Then there’s the way Shaffer uses masks. He says he was inspired by Mozart’s operas, and the way they all seem so dependent on masks and disguises. So we have the mysterious masked visitor who commissions Mozart to write his Requiem mass. (Which also happens to be historical fact.) And Shaffer has Salieri dressing up as the masked visitor in order to scare Mozart – the “wickedest” thing he’d ever done. (Which happens to be historical fiction.)

Now at this point I’m meant to wade into the whole fact or fiction argument. Be a good musical scholar and point out all the historical flaws. But I won’t do it. We all know Shaffer took dramatic license in this play. To be honest, it would have been a rotten play if he hadn’t.

The things you really need to know are these:

First, Salieri was one of the most famous and respected musicians of his day, and his operas were smash hits.

Second, Mozart really did have an anal fixation and he wrote the most gloriously dirty letters to just about everyone except his father.

Third, Salieri didn’t poison Mozart; he had no part in Mozart’s early death.

Fourth, there were rumours in Salieri’s lifetime that linked him to Mozart’s death, and when he was in his seventies he suffered a breakdown and did accuse himself of murdering Mozart. But – and here’s the important thing – even then, no one believed him.

The big musical magazine of the day even published the following notice:

“Our worthy Salieri simply will not die…In his unbalanced imagination he apparently at times claims to have been responsible for Mozart’s early death, a delusion that no one except the poor bewildered old man really believes.”

And in any case, Salieri recovered his senses and denied everything on his deathbed. 

Ultimately, Amadeus isn’t about history at all. The historical characters and the historical rumours just give the foundation for a play that’s about the conflict of opposites.

There’s mediocrity versus genius – that’s the real driving force. At a theological level we have a God of bargains pitted against a God of grace. We have moderation and duty versus passion and creativity.
In mythological terms there’s the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus.

This is what makes Amadeus tick.

If you look at what makes classical music tick – at least the music of Mozart’s time – it’s the same thing: the conflict of opposites. If you listen to a symphony or a sonata it’s all about contrasts: contrasts of mood, contrasts of key, and the way these things are developed to some kind of resolution.

That’s what’s going on in Amadeus.

I don’t know whether Shaffer deliberately set out to give a musical quality to the structure and substance of Amadeus. It’s possible he’d simply immersed himself in so much the music of the period that these strategies appealed to his instincts – his sense of authenticity. Somehow he captures the rhetoric of 18th-century music, and that means artifice and theatre. (And yes, it’s big on exposition.) Which is where the play really comes into its own. The musical content of the film is sublime, but the play is more like a piece of music in itself.

(Originally published 19 November 2008)

Oxford dons from the ’70s

So English pianist James Rhodes is in Australia with a recital scheduled for Sydney, and if no one invites me to be their date for the opening night of The Love of the Nightingale, I just may go.

He has the kind of life story and unconventional career path that publicists and journalists must love, at least for a debut visit. But so far I’ve been more interested in the often provocative things he has to say about concert presentation, some of which have already sent me to my soap box. And he’s at it again, with this interview for The Sydney Morning Herald.

As before, I ended up wholeheartedly agreeing with him and tearing my hair in frustration.

1. James Rhodes says he doesn’t want people reading the program notes while he’s playing. That makes perfect sense; I’d feel the same if I were performing. 

But I’d also add that if a performance is sufficiently compelling, well… you won’t even feel like reading the program, will you? (After all, one of the many valuable services a program book offers is distraction during a dull concert. And I say that in the same spirit as Mr Rhodes himself, when he writes that Beethoven “even had to play viola as a child in order to make money”.) 

2. Then he spoils it with a careless generalisation that simply panders to prejudice: 

“And [the program note’s] always written by some Oxford don from the ’70s about sonata form in Beethoven’s Vienna.* That’s f---ing boring. I’d rather talk about the fact that Bach was like a baroque Keith Richards and had 20 children and got arrested for drinking and f---ing.”†

Seriously James, I suspect that even in London, concert-goers aren’t seeing too many program notes from Oxford dons of the ’70s. And you’d be hard-pressed to find the donnish program note here in Australia. (Well, maybe from one presenter, but I’m not publishing directions.) 

As I’ve said before, some program notes – and they can be old or recent – are poorly written, stuffy and generally unhelpful. It happens, and if an artist is lumbered with notes like this by a presenter he or she has every right to complain. (Better still, the artist who cares about such things has every right to show an interest well beforehand. Just sayin’.) But what really bugs me is when artists or commentators suggest that the badly written and unhelpful note is the status quo. Because it’s simply not.

I get that James Rhodes would prefer his audiences not be reading. Ok, so don’t give us anything to read. A well-edited and comprehensive program listing is fine by me. (Since he’s being presented by the same venue, it’s likely that his program will contain about as much reading material as that one for Stephen Kovacevich.)

And I totally get that he would prefer to share his ideas with the audience by talking to us. (Although his written comments aren’t bad at all – thoughtful and sincere  – and I’m impressed that he’s one of the minority who’ve bucked the iTunes prejudice against providing digital booklets with albums. Go James!) 

But I wish he’d get off the bandwagon about program notes ‘always’ being boring. That’s just unhelpful. And unfair.

Because the good writing about music is out there. Notes that are illuminating; notes that communicate affection for the music; notes that reveal an appreciation for how the listener is going to be experiencing it in a live concert; notes that are elegantly and generously written; notes that reflect and support the artistic vision of the programmer/performer; notes that don’t take themselves too seriously but also don’t fall into the trap of cheesy joviality and cheap shots; notes that are conceived with imagination; notes that help the readers focus their ears on the music and perhaps notice things they wouldn’t have otherwise; notes that give insightful context for the music… I could go on. 

Footnotes…

* This kind of statement is just as bad as Rupert Murdoch’s recent throwaway line about American classrooms: “Most American classrooms haven’t changed much since the days of Grover Cleveland. You have a teacher, a piece of chalk, a blackboard – and a room full of kids.” (And why exactly is Murdoch suddenly interested in American education?) 

† It always pains me to temper a good story with the truth, but Bach wasn’t jailed for drinking and f---king, unless perhaps you use that last word in a loose, figurative sense. In 1717, while trying to arrange an early dismissal from his Weimar post so he could take up a more lucrative and satisfying one in Cöthen, Bach lost his temper with (probably) his noble employer. Thus “…on November 6, the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge’s place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from his arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge.” Actually, you could argue that this is a far more interesting reason to be arrested than mere drunkenness, and more revealing of Bach’s personality. At least I think so.

Frequently Asked Questions

I don’t normally publish my program notes here, but this one has already been seen online and is about to get an Australian reprise. I’m quite fond of it, because it’s one of those occasions where I’ve been able to craft a piece of writing that in its structure and rhetoric mirrors some aspect of the music itself.

The work is Charles Ives' Unanswered Question, and the note goes like this:

FAQs

 Q. Who was Charles Ives?

A. Ives came from a well-off New England family with its fair share of eccentricity (‘…odd, but in a nice way,’ said his wife). He studied music at Yale then became a successful life insurance salesman who composed for the love of it. This freed him to be completely original without needing to court publishers and concert presenters. He didn’t belong to a particular stylistic school but he was hugely influential as the father of modern American music. When his Third Symphony won the Pulitzer prize he said ‘Prizes are for boys – I’m grown up!’ (He was 72.)

Q. What were his musical influences?

A. When Charles was a boy his father, a leading bandmaster, made him sing songs in one key while he accompanied him on the piano in a different key, which seems to have given him a healthy disdain for conventional harmony. Similarly, he was fascinated by things that we would call ‘wrong’: a mis-harmonised hymn tune, or the competing sounds of town bands marching in different directions, each playing their own music.

Q. What kind of music did he write?

A. Ives wrote in nearly every genre, including symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas, organ music and songs. He often quotes hymns and popular tunes, and the influence of folk music is strong. But the risk of sentimentality is countered by playful experiments with harmony and rhythm.

Q. How did he come to write The Unanswered Question?

A. The Unanswered Question was one of a pair of pieces, first performed as interludes in a New York theatre (the other was Central Park in the Dark) and together known as Two Contemplations. The flexibility of the theatre-orchestra tradition is reflected in the instrumentation: trumpet (which can be replaced by English horn, oboe or clarinet), flute quartet (third and fourth flutes replaceable by oboe and clarinet) and string orchestra or string quartet. Another theatrical aspect of the piece emerges in the staging instructions, which include placing instruments offstage.

Around this time, 1906, Ives was busy experimenting with new musical ideas. He revised The Unanswered Question in the 1930s and composer Elliott Carter arranged for its formal premiere in 1946.

Q. What does the title mean?

A. The original title was ‘A Contemplation of a Serious Matter’ or ‘The Unanswered Perennial Question’. (Central Park in the Dark was ‘A Contemplation of Nothing Serious’.) Ives’ own comments suggest metaphysical themes behind the music:

The quiet strings…represent the conventional life. We get up, and go to the office, and come home again, have dinner with the family, sit around in the evening…But sometimes there comes a Question: Is this all my life is good for? Shouldn’t I be doing something courageous for the good of humanity? This question crosses the conventional life, doesn’t fit with it. The flutes and other people try to answer, more and more intensely, but can’t seem to get through. Meanwhile the conventional life goes on, and when the Question is asked for the last time, it is still not answered.

Q. What will it sound like?

 

Yvonne Frindle ©2008

Where, oh where is Proper Discord?

Some time between 9 and 13 June 2011 Proper Discord disappeared. The blog was deleted; the twitter feed was protected then deleted altogether; the remarkable, hilarious Xtranormal videos were taken down from the YouTube channel.

I’m utterly devastated. Others’ reactions here. How will we now keep up with the Podunk Symphony Orchestra, not to mention the doings of principal oboe Puffy Sphincter? Who will make us simultaneously laugh and wince?

As one follower said, “I hope we’re not losing our voice of reason.” But I fear we have. The signs point to a sudden and comprehensive retreat from the internet; not abandonment or hiatus. One tiny consolation: the 364 of us who were subscribing via Google Reader still have the astutely witty and uncompromisingly logical assessments of the state of music marketing to consult in private.

Trolls

Since I’m immersed in all things Peer Gynt…

The first is a trick for Mac users.
1. In System Preferences > Speech > Text to Speech, set the System Voice to Cellos.
2. In TextEdit, type the following:

We are nasty little trolls, little trolls, little trolls,
We are nasty little trolls and we are after you!

3. Select the text then choose: Edit > Speech > Start Speaking

Don’t own a Mac? It sounds like Steve Jobs should be paying Grieg royalties…

Nasty Little Trolls

This next item from a quartet of Sibelius Academy-trained cellists is suitably savage (adjust volume to taste):

 

Dear Commentator…

To: The blogosphere
From: Thomasina, who edits program books
Re: When you write about concert program notes

Don’t take the most arcane, technical descriptive phrase you can find, quote it out of context, and suggest this style represents the entire genre. I know, it’s amusing to make fun of this way of writing about music. (Shakespeare…announces his subject at once in the infinitive, anyone?) Just remember, it’s increasingly atypical. That’s why we can laugh at it.

While we’re on this point, if you’re going to make up the most arcane, technical descriptive phrase you can muster, admit to this. Don’t imply that you actually read it somewhere. (Although usually truth is more embarrassing than fiction.)

Be clear about your context and points of reference. Avoid extrapolating unfairly.

Which means, don’t tell your readers that all program notes suck and that they’re the source of classical music’s ills. This doesn’t help the cause, when many in this field are working their butts off for stylistic and technological change.

Some program notes, both new and old, can be poorly written, stuffy or unhelpful — you’re welcome to call us on it — but don’t suggest this is necessarily the status quo throughout the concert-presenting world today.

Better still, set yourself a challenge: for every weak or unhelpful example you give, find and cite an example that’s admirable, or which is heading in the right direction. Believe me, those examples are there to be found.

Along the same lines, before proposing your brilliant new idea, take a poke around the internet and check there aren’t concert presenters doing this already, perhaps for years. You’ll make a more positive contribution to the discussion by saying “The XSO’s scratch-and-sniff program notes are really great and I wish more people would try it” than by suggesting no one has ever thought of it before.

Postscript…

In case you’re thinking Thomasina is a tad humourless, she laughed her head off at this.

And thanks to David Carkeet, whose meme she nicked.

The pre-concert talk you have when you’re not offering pre-concert talks

Tonight, this event took place at the time and in the location where there used to be free pre-concert talks, open to all comers, including those who serendipitously encountered them. (These last being precisely the kind of people who are unlikely to consider signing up for a formal course of study but who are most likely to benefit from hearing even some of an imaginative talk addressing the program as a whole.)

I won’t criticise the replacement event – it’s just one part of a larger program of study offered by the concert presenter in collaboration with a local educational institution – but I fear this sends some of the wrong messages. It says “private and closed”, that an enriching pre-concert event “isn’t for you”, and – most troubling of all at this point in history – that classical music is all about formal study instead of enriching entertainment. That worries me a lot.

Florestan’s Follies: the Bob Schumann Show

Since I’m technically on holidays, I’ve decided to post a piece of pure whimsy that I unearthed while tidying my hard drive (well, what do you do when you’re on holidays?). It dates from my days working for a period instrument orchestra in Cleveland and it was intended for a subscriber newsletter, hence the “in” character of some of the jokes, especially those referring to mythology and matters celestial.

Florestan’s Follies

On arrival in heaven, Robert Schumann was granted one wish. Since he had always longed to be a late-night celebrity chat show host, “Florestan’s Follies” became a weekly highlight on celestial television. One memorable program featured Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert as guests. Through grave diligence and sheer imagination we have obtained a rare and valuable transcript of the conversation.

RS: My guests tonight are two of the profoundest and most inspiring composers I know: Beethoven the German genius, godlike and intimidating, and Schubert, a shy Austrian better known to his friends as Little Mushroom [Schwammerl]. They lived in the same city for three decades, and never met!

Well, tonight we bring them together in anticipation of the groundbreaking performances of their music that will be taking place in Cleveland, Ohio.

Franz – welcome! I’ve admired your work ever since I heard the Erlkönig song. I played it over and over again when I was at law school.

FS: Thank you! I’m proud of that one.

RS: And Ludwig – you’re looking well! I notice you haven’t brought your ear trumpet?

LvB: That’s the nice thing about being in heaven – I have my hearing back. What’s not so good is discovering that the mercury treatments probably caused more harm than good. You know, the best thing my doctor ever did for me was to send a crate of good wine when I was on my deathbed.

RS: Well, I have to say that one of the best things about heaven for me is that I’ve been able to hear all of Franz’s music that was completely unknown in my time. Perfect, poetic works that simply never saw the light of day, didn’t even get a private performance. Whole symphonies! And unwhole symphonies too. Take the Eighth Symphony…buried away for years before it was performed. And it’s sublime!

Now I’ve always firmly believed that where the rest of us use a diary to set down our momentary feelings, you, Franz, use a piece of manuscript paper. Your music is your diary. So tell me, what’s the story behind this particular Unfinished Symphony?

FS: Well, you know Bob, a rather clever musicologist working in the 1930s found a semi-autobiographical dream that I wrote down and speculated that this symphony follows the events of the dream. In which case it’s not “unfinished” at all, but quite complete in two movements.

RS: Fascinating. But that theory doesn’t account for the fact that you made a draft of a scherzo movement.

FS: Exactly! And the finale too. But the musicologists haven’t found that yet. So, for now, some people are compromising with an Entr’acte from my Rosamunde music. It really doesn’t work. Better to stick with the two movements I did finish.

LvB: And why didn’t you finish it? I didn’t finish my Tenth, of course, but death has this habit of getting in the way of works in progress. You can’t claim that as an excuse; at least not with this symphony.

FS: To be honest, Herr Beethoven…

LvB: Ludwig, please!

FS: To be honest, it was your fault. We were all left in your shadow, you know. All of us. Me; Robert here; Mendelssohn; Berlioz; even Wagner, though he was in denial. You know what Grillparzer said at your funeral? Well, of course you do, but the audience doesn’t. He said: “He was an artist…Who can stand beside him?’ After that, my friends and I went to the “Castle of Eisenstadt” and drank till one in the morning [got sloshed]. I mean, how do you write a symphony after “Beethoven Nine”? We all struggled with that. And I had only gotten so far in the Eighth Symphony. The Ninth – the Great C Major – was better in that respect.

RS: Was it ever! That is one amazing symphony – heavenly length, like a novel in four volumes by Jean Paul!

Now Ludwig, I’ve been meaning to ask you about your Pastoral Symphony, the Sixth. Franz was just talking about how his Unfinished could be heard in terms of a program, a narrative. That’s not so uncommon, of course, but what makes your symphony different? Can we really call it “program music”.

LvB: The first important thing is there on the title page, Bob: “More the expression of feeling than painting.” And the second important thing is that I wasn’t thinking of myself as a tone artist [Tonkünstler, the usual word for a musician], I was a tone poet [Tondichter]. That’s the crux of it. 

FS: But what about the thunderstorm? And the peasants dancing? And the bird calls? You even labeled them in the music: quail, cuckoo, and… what was the other one?

RS: Nightingale.

FS: That’s all program music: painting not poetry. How can you say that thundering timpani and a shrieking piccolo is “feelings in tones” when it’s blindingly obvious that it’s a thunderstorm?

LvB: [Ludwig looks uncomfortable and begins to scowl.]

RS: Well, we have to wrap before the next ad break. You know that Apollo’s Fire will be performing your symphonies in Cleveland next month?

LvB: Don’t we ever! Apollo talks about nothing else!

RS: And they’re beginning the program with your Leonore Overture No.3, Ludwig – one of the four overtures you wrote for your only opera, Fidelio. Now Franz, you were telling me how you first came to hear this opera…

FS: That’s right. The final version of Fidelio premiered when I was about seventeen. I had to sell my schoolbooks to get a ticket. But it was worth it.

RS: It certainly must have been. But that’s all we have time for now. It’s been great to have you both on the show.

LvB: Perhaps we should catch up again for those concerts? I hear they’re using all the right instruments.

RS: Absolutely. Concerts in Akron, Severance Hall and Oberlin. We’ll be there! Or at least, you two will; and I’ll be there in spirit!

Yvonne Frindle takes responsibility for whatever may have been lost in the translation of this curious artifact. All flights of fancy have at least tenuous connections to musical scholarship.

In Defence of the Harpsichord, Which Finds Itself in Mortal Peril

There’s one thing everyone knows about Beethoven – he was deaf. And there’s one thing everyone knows about the harpsichord – it sounds like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.

Exactly when Sir Thomas Beecham got to hear skeletons doing anything on a tin roof, I don’t know. Nowadays you’d be able to do some kind of CSI reconstruction: anatomically correct bones bouncing about on a suitable surface with groovy animated trajectories.

My science and my animation skills aren’t up to the task, but it doesn’t take much to imagination to realise that Sir Thomas got it completely wrong. Everyone knows that skeletons – on a tin roof – sound like this:

Skeletons on a tin roof

Postscript…

This post was inspired by a certain person’s effrontery in calling his blog “To Kill a Harpsichord”. Nonetheless, my best wishes go with him in what sounds like a really fabulous opportunity. If you’re feeling benevolent, head over and sign the petition.

Live-tweeting and getting into the gig

My corner of the twittersphere has been abuzz this morning. The topics fleeting by: the lamentable editorial omission of any musical representatives from the weekend’s article on twitter in the arts, the state of arts journalism generally and its apparent promotional/PR focus, and tweeting during performances.

It would take me hours to compress my thoughts on tweeting during performances into 140 characters (or even 280) and I don’t have the time. So…

First, this isn’t about the arts using twitter outside the performance time/space or using it as part of the performance – that’s another story, and at times quite an entertaining one. (#operaplot anybody?)

It’s about the matter of audience members tweeting during theatrical and concert performances.

And I’ll be honest. I actually can’t do it. Not while the performance is going on.

I do tweet during interval as well as immediately before/after performances. At concerts I’m often doing that in a vaguely official capacity as @sso_notes. Very occasionally (mostly during long stage moves) I’ve tweeted between pieces.

Here’s my rationale: I only tweet at those points in the performance where it would be undistracting, and natural, to talk.

But it’s not really good manners that motivates me so much as pure selfishness. I simply don’t want to miss anything. And if what I’m doing is likely to mildly distract someone nearby, then it’s absolutely certain that I am, myself, being distracted to be the point that I will have missed a minute or two of the performance – a minute or two that can’t be reclaimed.

As everyone is finally beginning to realise, multitasking is a furphy. Even for girls. In a concert there’s usually so much to pay attention to and to hold in memory that I’m lucky if I can scribble an illegible word on my program in the darkness. Plays/operas/ballets are much the same. If someone tells me they can look at a screen, formulate and type a concise idea for public consumption and remain fully aware of what’s going on during those 50 to 120 seconds, I will happily tell them they’re deluded. Of course, if the performance is really boring…but let’s not go there. 

Actually, let’s do go there. Because my ideal performance in the concert hall or theatre is one that's so compelling and engrossing, so riveting, that it doesn’t even occur to me to tweet while it’s taking place. If my mind is wandering in the direction of epigrammatic things to tweet about the performance then that’s a very bad sign for the performance.

I’ve also tried tweeting during verbal presentations (e.g. during TEDxSydney and during my orchestra’s pre-concert talks). This is slightly easier. Perhaps all those years of taking notes during university lectures taught me something, and a well-constructed verbal presentation usually incorporates sufficient repetition, exploration and summary of ideas that there are opportunities to “take notes” in one way or another.

But I think there’s another difference: when I tweet from a talk I’m mostly tweeting content, an idea I’ve just heard, a pithy quote. It’s more like transcription. If I were to attempt to tweet during a musical/theatrical performance I’d be tweeting my own response/reactions/assessments. That’s a more distracting activity which, in some ways, takes you out of the receptive mode that a performance demands of you and into a critical one. Criticism is a marvellous thing, but if you’re not really receiving because you’re trying to write and publish a critique in the moment then…?

In any case, it’s been my experience that people have far more interesting things to say about a performance when it’s had even a short while to sink in. For example, for (too) many years my ballet subscription placed me immediately in front of a trio of ladies who insisted on verbalising their reactions during the performances. “Hasn’t she got lovely arms,” was a typical comment. Or, my favourite, “He’s very manly looking, isn’t he?” They drove me to distraction and were the targets of more than a few glares in the darkness. But if you happened to eavesdrop on them between acts it was a different story: the level of the observations immediately jumped.

Anyhow, I’m going to leave this post with the wise words of youth. Just recently my nephew went to hear Karnivool in concert, and he wrote about it afterwards. Nice pictures too. Here’s the telling line:

I feel like I probably spent too much time taking photos and not enough time getting into the gig (you live and learn I guess), but regardless I still enjoyed myself a hell of a lot.

Substitute “live-tweeting” for “taking photos” and I think you’ve got it. You won’t enjoy yourself less, but there’s a good possibility that you won’t be “getting into the gig” to the extent you would’ve liked.

Offline insights

On Saturday afternoon one of Australia’s more prominent composers was booed at a concert. Not as a composer but as a representative of the world’s largest presenter of chamber music.

Why? Said presenter has stopped offering pre-concert talks. There were people in the audience who were pissed off by that and I think I sympathise.

Of course, I’ll say straight off that I can sympathise with the presenter too, because they tour their ensembles to cities around the country. Where I can hire one speaker to talk about a program three or four times, they’ve been hiring five or so different speakers to talk about the same program once each. The standard has been variable, they say.

[But you know, I’m not so sure that admitting the variable standard in public is good form. It’s tantamount to announcing from the stage that some of your speakers aren’t any good. I’m sorry, but if your speakers are good enough for you to have hired them, the least you can do is not implicitly defame them. And as the rationale for an unpopular decision it doesn’t hold much weight with those audiences who’ve been enjoying the excellent talks. Anyway, moving right along…]

I also sympathise with the fact that some venues can’t accommodate the audience numbers that a strong talks program deserves. A talk venue might be packed to standing room, but if the capacity is 80 or so people then the audience reach is curtailed right there.

And I’m hugely sympathetic to the desire to reach a wider audience in flexible ways by doing stuff online – enthusiastic, actually. This is excellent: it extends what you do to audiences with different expectations, different lifestyles, and different ways of seeking information.

But mostly I’m sympathising with the audience in this instance, and here’s why:

The loss of the pre-concert talks hasn’t really been compensated for. I don’t mean that many who would have attended the live talks can’t access the online alternative (although that’s true), or that the video format isn’t very conducive to being enjoyed as close to the concert as possible (i.e. while travelling), I’m referring to the fact that nothing’s been offered that fulfils the same all-important function.

A suite of videos (Online Concert Talks they’re called) is the designated replacement. The official claim is that they offer “a deeper dimension to the concert experience”, but in fact they don’t have much to do with the concert experience at all, being brief compartmentalised expositions of individual works. Such things can be useful, but if you enjoy pre-concert talks, you’ll know that’s not what you rock up half an hour early to hear.

A good talk is part of the evening’s, or afternoon’s, entertainment [heresy alert]. As well as aspiring to the same level of imagination and flair as the art form it introduces, it provides a transition from daily flurry into the kind of concentration that music demands, and an aural prelude that sets your mind on trains of thought that really can enhance your experience of the concert. Videos that you must watch ahead of time at your PC can’t do this; a downloadable audio format that you can listen to in your car might come closer.

A good talk isn’t a set of verbal program notes; it encourages you to use your ears, to make comparisons, to listen for relationships in places you weren’t expecting them, and to really pay attention to the music you’re about to hear.

And above all, a good pre-concert talk is about the concert, that is, it helps you get a handle on the program as a whole and appreciate the programmers’ vision. After all, anyone can swot up on the individual pieces and the lives of composers with the help of Professor Google, iTunes and the public library. (Furthermore, plenty of concert-goers do exactly that. And they purchase recordings in advance, as a Fish insider has told me.) But one of the reasons people go to concerts, apart from the immediacy of live performance, is because we want to enjoy the results of the artists’ and programmers’ curatorial efforts – because we hope that their selection of repertoire with its contrasts and balances, internal links, alignments and unexpected insights will be part of the pleasure. And only the concert presenter – via its published materials and its speakers – can explain and justify and illuminate that. That’s where the insights (as opposed to information) come from.

All of which is why the Online Concert Talks in their current format aren’t going to satisfy those talk-goers, even were they to be sent to them on DVD or screened in a room before the concert. I didn’t boo, but my heart went out to those who did.

Outsourcing and the common program note

Responding to my Mahler antidote post, Alex of the View from C Reserve offered to get me started on my postscript. As it turns out, not a postscript but a fresh post.

Alex asks why an Australian orchestra would outsource their program notes to an overseas writer

“…when Australia is practically bursting at the seams with unemployed musicologists (and other writers-about-music) who would jump at the chance to write their notes for them.”

In my own corner of the scene there are two main instances when I would publish the work of an overseas writer, “outsource” in other words:

The first is when the writer is an acknowledged expert in a particular composer or area of repertoire and I want to draw on that scholarship. To give a hypothetical example, Henry-Louis de la Grange on Mahler, and a real one, Peter Laki on Bartók. By doing this, I’m bringing to my readers an international level of expertise.

I’m doing the exact same thing, incidentally, when I commission writing from a local writer who is an internationally acknowledged expert, say, Larry Sitsky on Scriabin, or Richard Charteris on Gabrieli. [By the way, SYO, that’s the “genius of Gabrieli” you want on your postcard, not Gabrielli.] The writer’s location is immaterial, it’s the specialist expertise that counts. Going the other way, you could imagine an overseas presenter wanting to commission an Australian like Graeme Skinner to write on Sculthorpe, or Charteris on Gabrieli for that matter.

The second reason applies to certain obscure and rarely performed works, where it might be difficult to justify commissioning an original program note for what could be one publication. If there’s an existing note (in a CD booklet or from another presenter’s program) that’s in a suitable style, then sometimes it makes sense to seek a reprint from the writer, regardless of where they live. That’s fairly rare for me, though.

But there’s one scenario, by far the most common one, where I couldn’t even imagine looking overseas for an annotator. That’s the “standard” program or work requiring the treatment of a generalist. There are so many fine writers about music in Australia (and covering pretty much any style or approach you might be seeking) that there’s really no need to look further afield. Especially not if you’re a presenter that receives funding from Australian taxpayers and which therefore carries a responsibility to nurture the talent (performing, composing, administrative, etc.) that exists here.

But before you accuse me of being parochial, here are some other reasons why local writers are better (wherever your “local” might be):

• A local writer, especially if they attend the presenter’s concerts, will be more attuned to that audience and the presenter’s personality as a public organisation, and should be able to fine-tune their approach accordingly. (For example, I always aim make points of connection that are distinctive to the audience I know will be reading the notes and their likely experience of the concert in question.) It’s a good sign when you receive a note that would have to be edited before any other presenter could use it.
• A local writer is more likely to be familiar with your programming over the long haul, and with other concert activity in your city, and therefore able to make helpful links with repertoire or experiences your audience might have encountered before.
• If that local writer is also an employee (by which I mean an administrator or a performer, or a freelancer who is very closely involved with the organisation), then you acquire the benefits of a writer who’s truly connected with the programming and the artistic vision of their own organisation. They’ll have been involved at some level in bringing to fruition the concert they’re writing about, or at least witnessed the process, which gives the potential for communicating insights and adopting an approach that the reader will never get from a reference book.

That last point is why I’m glad Alex made the aside: “and other writers-about-music”. I’m not so sure that it’s always musicologists, unemployed or otherwise, who make the very best writers of concert program notes, but rather those who have experience with putting on concerts. It’s the Australian writers-about-music – who often do have a musicological education, for sure – who do us proud and whom Australian presenters should be cultivating.

Concord, or The Good, the Great and the Ugly

I go to the ballet alone. This, combined with the strange state of affairs that gives me mobile reception in the SOH Opera Theatre but not the Concert Hall, meant that I could tweet some of my immediate reactions to the Australian Ballet’s Concord triple bill as the evening progressed.

The one thing I didn’t tweet (and perhaps I should’ve) was the question that’s been bugging me all year: why is Concord called “Concord”, and how does the idea of agreement or harmony relate to what’s meant to be “a journey to the centre of modern ballet”? Is it too nerdy of me to want a satisfying explanation? (I’ve read the season brochure and the program book, and scanned the blog, which for all its excellent coverage of the development of the new works doesn’t seem to have stopped to ask this question…) But I’ll let the matter drop; glass houses and all that. In any case, this was a triple bill of three disparate pieces – there’s probably little point in forcing them together under some common theme.

Although the program book suggested the original plan had been otherwise, the evening began with Por vos muero (For thee I die) by Nacho Duato. I had seen this before (in 1998), but it was only the Australian Ballet’s repertoire list that reminded me of this. The Duato ballet that I did remember seeing was Jardi Tancat, from three years before that.

Part of me thinks that Por vos muero should have been left last on the program, because it was by far the most successful and satisfying piece of the evening. And that’s not just because it allowed me to spend 40 minutes or so listening to Jordi Savall and the Spanish repertoire he does so well. This dance work was intrinsically about dance itself. The refreshingly clear-headed summary of the ballet says it all:

“In the 15th and 16th centuries, dance formed part of the cultural expression of all people, including all social hierarchies. Por vos muero pays a tribute to the pivotal role that dance played in every social event during the Spanish Renaissance.”

This is a very simple but strong conceptual foundation. No surprise, then, that it works incredibly well. The dances and canzonas of the period provide a logical and grateful musical fabric – and much as I might lament that the music wasn’t live, I wasn’t exactly complaining. [The score incorporated poetry too; unfortunately the program didn’t include any translations, so I have no idea what this contributed to the overall work.] The choreography was marvellously musical, with just a hint of period gestures, more often in the patterns made on the floor than in the movements themselves. The costumes took us to realms of emerald green, violet and midnight blue within an overall darkness suggestive of old Spanish paintings. Again, there were discreet period touches. The women’s skirts, in particular, seemed almost formless, so unlike the highly structured garments of the Renaissance, but ­the magic was in the way they took shape when in motion. The props were similarly abstracted (masks for example) until real censers made an appearance with what, from stalls row J, smelled like real incense.

Scuola di ballo, which followed, was the opposite in every respect. Where Por vos muero was subtle, richly sensuous and beautiful, Scuola was highly coloured and heavy-handed. Even high camp needs a light touch if it’s to yield frothy comedy.

I’ve not seen the original (footage resides in the National Film and Sound Archive), so I’m not sure whether to point the finger at Alexei Ratmansky or Léonide Massine, who created the ballet in 1933. What I am sure of is that I like Boccherini, I like Françaix, I like Goldoni, and my impressions of Massine’s works in the past (Les Présages, Symphonie fantastique) have been very favourable. But I simply couldn’t find it in my heart to like Scuola di ballo.

Valerie Lawson’s fascinating program article about the “studio ballet” did Scuola no favours by bringing to mind far superior (Bournonville’s Conservatoire, Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun) or much, much funnier (Béjart’s The Competition) examples of the genre.

There was one very beautiful, admirable thing in Scuola – something for which I’m sure we can thank Massine. When the talented Rosine arrives in the class it is necessary for her to demonstrate her superior natural gifts. What’s telling (and lovely) is that she does this not with technical fireworks but with an expressive and musical adagio. I was very glad to see the message being given that razzle-dazzle does not equate with artistry, however much the former may make an audience erupt in squealing applause.

Por vos muero I could not fault; Scuola di ballo left me cringing a little. The final piece, Dyad 1929, prompted a mixed response. The music was the recent Pulitzer prize-winning piece by Steve Reich, Double Sextet. This work can be played by 12 musicians or by six with a pre-recorded tape. The program didn’t credit the 12 (or six) musicians, nor did it mention this rather interesting aspect of the musical score. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was six-plus-tape for this performance (although it may simply have been amplified sound that I was hearing), but I didn’t think to investigate the pit during interval and so can’t say for sure.

I’m going to be nice about the music, since it was commissioned by an ensemble for which I have a lot of admiration. Actually, I don’t need a pretext to be nice about it; this is a strong piece that deserves its accolades. But Reich’s pieces do have this one problem (for me). I like to close my eyes when I listen to them. Not because they’re soporific (as the unkind might say), but because I like to trace in my mind’s eye the subtle transitions of textures and harmony and to let the hypnotic aspects of the music take full effect.

So several times during the performance my eyelids drifted shut until some small voice reminded me that there was dancing to be watched! So take this with a grain of salt if you like: the choreography was very pleasing in its form and balance – let’s say its geometry – and impressive in its virtuosity.

My gripe with Dyad 1929 is with its stated concept, which is either half-baked or poorly explained. Where the inspiration and intent of Por vos mueros could be summed up in a few sentences, Dyad 1929 still didn’t really make sense after four paragraphs. Apparently aviation and the first flight over the South Pole was a key inspiration for choreographer Wayne McGregor, but you’d be hard pressed to see how that manifested itself in the final creative work. (Kate Scott’s blog post on the ballet admits that the other half of the diptych, Dyad 1909, was a much more literal realisation of McGregor’s interests.) Given that the ballet, in itself, had all the potential to be very satisfying, I’m wondering whether it wouldn’t have been better to ditch the supposed inspiration, tribute to the influence of Diaghilev, yadda yadda, and simply offer it as the abstract work that it seemed to be.

Ultimately this is a matter not of choreography or of dancing, but of how the art form is presented to its audience. Yes, we in this modern age love words about art – we’ve inherited that tendency from the 19th century – but sometimes less is more and sometimes being more straightforward (vide Por vos mueros) and less clever or contrived (Dyad 1929) pays off. They say, for writing, that if you can’t express your ideas in a clear, simple way, then your ideas are probably faulty. Allowing for the fact that a choreographer’s mode of expression is movement rather than words, I do wonder whether the success and power of Nacho Duato’s ballets is related (cause? effect?) to the fact that his themes and concepts can be communicated, in words, so convincingly.

A piano recital and some unnecessary minimalism

On Friday the 13th I had the good luck to hear a piano recital presented by City Recital Hall. Curiously, the only publicity I’d noticed for it was an e-newsletter I received, which sent me diving for my credit card. Advertising via the conventional outlets was either incredibly discreet or simply non-existent. But maybe the people at Angel Place know what they’re doing: when you’re presenting the kind of artist who impresses not through glamour and hype but through commanding pianism and profound musicality, perhaps the word will simply get around. In any case, although the upper gallery wasn’t opened, the rest of the hall was respectably full, and not just on the keyboard side.

The artist in question was Stephen Kovacevich – and I confess to being a fan. In recent years I’ve been known to put my hand up for interstate pre-concert talks on the grounds that he will be the soloist. Which points, among other things, to the fact that a Sydney appearance was long overdue. (I think his last visit here was for the concert in 2005 when Yannick Nézet-Séguin jumped for Maazel.)

He was playing Bach, Schumann and Beethoven, with the Diabelli Variations as the program culmination and highlight. From where I sat the recital got better and better as it went along, by the time I’d heard the tenderly shaped Schumann and the muscular conception of the Beethoven I was even more a fan than I was when it began. But in saying that I’m also admitting that I found the Bach strangely disappointing.

Who am I to fault a great musician and pianist like Stephen Kovacevich? Well perhaps I can’t when, as a colleague said, his Bach convinced on its own terms. It was intensely musical – true – but it didn’t quite convince me on Bach’s terms. A French ouverture in D major: this alone calls for a more dashing interpretation, one that calls to mind harpsichord flourishes and dancing articulations even as it exploits the singing potential of the piano. What we heard was more ruminative, almost too private in view of the rhetorical clues offered by key and musical gestures. 

But ultimately this is a quibble: I’d happily rock up to hear the program all over again.

And that would be?

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
Partita IV in D, BWV828
Ouverture
Allemande
Courante
Aria
Sarabande
Menuet
Gigue

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), Op.15
Von fremden Ländern und Menschen (Of Foreign Lands and People)

Kuriose Geschichte (A Curious Story)

Hasche-Mann (Blind Man’s Bluff)

Bittendes Kind (Pleading Child)

Glückes genug (Happy Enough)

Wichtige Begebenheit (An Important Event)

Träumerei (Dreaming)

Am Kamin (At the Fireside)

Ritter vom Steckenpferd (Knight of the Hobbyhorse)

Fast zu ernst (Almost too serious)

Fürchtenmachen (Frightening)

Kind im Einschlummern (Child Falling Asleep)

Der Dichter spricht (The Poet Speaks)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op.120
[And here you can imagine, if you will, 33 lines of tempo indications, which I’m not going to type out here.]

I’ve taken the trouble to list the program in detail because the presenter didn’t. The program sheet, such as it was, looked like this.

Now, believe it or not, I have no problem with a simple program sheet, listing the pieces, sans notes. But when that sheet contains minimalist publicity titles and nothing more about the music I get cross: that a major venue in a major city presenting a major artist should so neglect its audience is embarrassing as well one mammoth missed opportunity.

When there are no program notes it’s even more essential that the program listing contain all the necessary details. So much can be gleaned from these: the key gives advance orientation of mode (and in baroque music, character); composer dates help place the work historically; opus numbers suggest when in the composer’s career the work was written; a formal title will convey useful facts such as the kind of theme and the number of variations; translations are a courtesy; and, above all, movement headings aid navigation as the music progresses and, in the case of a piece like Kinderszenen, are absolutely essential to appreciating what the composer is doing and following the emotional journey.

Perhaps it was thought that the audience would be almost entirely piano connoisseurs, familiar with these three works from the standard repertoire and so not needing that kind of detail in their “order of service”. But I disagree. I’ve studied the Bach as a piano student, I’ve played the Schumann for pleasure and I’ve written (at length) about the Beethoven, and still I would have appreciated having a detailed program listing. No one’s memory is perfect, and in the Schumann I could put names to only three of the miniatures. Meanwhile, what about the poor soul who might not be familiar the music?!

In any case, piano recital audiences in Sydney are more inclined to buy program books than nearly any other kind of concert audience – clearly they seek more information, not less. So if there’s one kind of concert where it’s worth going to the trouble of publishing a “proper” program it’s the kind that took place on Friday night.

Terminology and jargon

Over at Standpoint magazine, the new home of Jessica Duchen’s blog, another conversation has started up on the perennial subject of program notes. My initial comment was on the long side, so I’m bringing a tangential thought over here rather than trespass further.

It’s this: when it comes to talking about writing in program books, we need to make a clearer distinction between technical terms (which can often be helpful) and jargon (which generally is not). [Disclaimer: jargon isn’t quite the right word, but it will have to do for now.]

Jessica’s piece was prompted by a column by David Lister in The Independent. It’s called “You need a PhD for a night at the opera” and going by the examples he gives from the Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde, he’s right. There are breezy references to Lacan, without the benefit of a wikipedia link, and beginnings like this: “Love is an act of radical transgression that suspends all sociosymbolic links and, as such, has to culminate in the ecstatic self-obliteration of death. The corollary to this axiom is that love and marriage are incompatible; within the universe of sociosymbolic obligations, true love can occur only in the guise of adultery.” As Thomasina would say, Eurghhh!

David Lister is right to complain about over-intellectualised writing that cloaks everything in abstractions. There’s a place for thinking and writing of this type, but perhaps not in the Royal Opera’s program book.

But it’s not right to conflate that particular flaw with a quite different one. Jessica conveys it with an analogy: “…can you imagine if the notes on the ballet set out a blow-by-blow account of the choreography, tracing every landmark grande pirouette, grand jeté and port de bras with in-the-know terminology spread as thick as marmalade?”

Bernard Shaw made his own analogy by analysing Hamlet’s soliloquy:

“Shakespeare, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognise the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop.”

Personally I find technical terms – in any art form – far less offensive than the abstract jargon that’s sometimes trotted out, especially in the visual arts and in certain kinds of theatre.

After all, a word like “pizzicato” or “tremolo” or “chord” or even “recapitulation” ultimately refers to something real and tangible: you can see/hear it, you can attach a real experience to the technical word. That’s why kiddies have no trouble learning all this and more when they’re studying practical music.

Yes, technical terms can be over-used, or used inconsiderately. Some technical terms are simply too advanced for a diverse readership. But ultimately they lend themselves to being helpful because they are  precise and tangible and, once known, they focus attention on specifics.

What is never helpful is the jargon, as I’m calling it, the loading of writing with abstractions (“where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings” anyone?). Instead of focusing the reader’s attention on things that can be seen and heard, this kind of writing fosters thinking that is both muddled and disengaged. Once you’ve deciphered it, you’re not necessarily any closer to noticing and appreciating the magical things that are happening on stage in front of you.

But it’s fair to say that the kind of obfuscation in program books that David Lister highlights is a trap that goes hand in hand with opera’s current obsession with the director and the “concept”. Fortunately, concert music (ironically a much more abstract art form) doesn’t lend itself to this approach. With the possible exception of a few old-guard new music circles – you’re unlikely encounter corollaries to axioms or suspensions of sociosymbolic links in concert program books.

At least not in the Antipodes…

Maintaining appearances

There’s an interesting syndrome going around right now: it seems to be a circulatory problem as it results in cold feet, which in turn leads to the late changing of concert promotional titles. So tonight I heard “The Girl with the Golden Flute”, according to the subs brochure and the program book, or “Tchaikovsky Serenade”, going by the posters and recent advertising (not to mention the tumultuous applause this work received).

Alternatively, it could have been called The Girl with the Purple Frock, the said frock being a simple but elegantly shaped number in a lovely shade of royal purple. More’s the pity then that its wearer felt the need to keep tugging at the top of the bodice as if she feared it would fall down. I’m sure Chanel said something about how you should be able to put on your clothes, look in the mirror and then forget all about them. Goes double for stage wear.

While I’m on a clothing theme, the orchestra was decked out in new outfits which threaten to be selectively rather than universally flattering. I’m unconvinced about the capri pants for the women (exposed ankles work only on long and slender limbs), and there’s no agreement on exactly where on the leg the hem of the overdress should hit: it seems a bit too short on the taller women, oddly long on the shorter women. The men’s overshirts haven’t changed much that I could see, but are possibly more tailored – a good thing.

This program had always included an element of uncertainty: the idea was that in each concert you’d hear either the Vine flute concerto or one by Serebrier, together with another concerto by Izarra. Somewhere along the way Izarra was dropped from the concerts altogether and so we got both Vine and Serebrier. Or so it seemed.

A flute-playing friend who knows the Vine told me at interval that we hadn’t heard the whole piece, only (I think this was it) the third movement preceded by a portion of the second. The reference to structure in the SMH review suggested that the whole concerto had been performed on the Saturday at least. So maybe there was growing concern about the program being too long because, as so often happens with commissions, the new work by Peteris Vasks had turned out to be 25 minutes instead of the expected 10. Not that I was complaining on that point, Vasks being a favourite of mine and the music being really effective. (Now his is a flute concerto I’d like to play.)

When, after interval, the soloist came on with just her golden flute in hand, I began to have doubts about the Serebrier, which apparently features the alto flute in its fourth movement tango. It’s even called “Flute Concerto with Tango”; I’m guessing what we heard was just the Flute Concerto. And as the program annotator pointed out to me later, this made a nonsense of at least some of what had been published about the piece.

Left unexplained, discrepancies between program book and performance always bother me. And that’s not just a personal aversion to “mistakes”. If someone is genuinely trying to use the program as a navigational guide then they are either going to be misled or left confused if what they read doesn’t match what they’re hearing. I don’t think it’s too much for performers to announce from the stage (especially when they’re good at it) where changes have been made, perhaps even why, but at least what.

There was a little encore for solo flute. Apparently it was from Sweden. The composer’s name (spoken over laughter) sounded a little like Alfvén, the music not so much. In its modal qualities it reminded me more of those recorder variations that Jakob van Eyck wrote to entertain people strolling in the Utrecht cemetery (a popular pastime in the 16th century), only a whole lot more showy. The applause only confirmed that we’ve lost none of the pleasure we instinctively feel in admiring a virtuoso performance. Faster, Higher, Louder – it works for music too.

But no surprises for guessing that everyone was going to love the Tchaikovsky Serenade for strings best of all. It’s gorgeous, adorable music – made to be loved. The performance itself had an uncommon vigour that was instantly appealing. You could see (literally) some of the things that make a standing chamber orchestra so very attractive to an audience: that moment in the Elegie when four first violins angled their bodies in towards each other for a perfect, muted unison giving a visual complement to the aural effect; or when individual musicians leant across the ensemble, sharing melodies with counterparts in other sections. This stuff isn’t just for show, but it’s part of what makes a performance one. And when that happens you don’t really mind what name they give it.

Encores

There are critics who’ve been known to scurry out of a concert hall before the encores, lest this – and the audience response – somehow influence their assessment. Or the rationale might be that only the formal, planned portion of the concert is worthy of review. Others stick around, but might choose to make no mention of the encores.

That’s wrong, I think. Like them or not, encores are a part of the performance and invariably they are a planned element in the concert, even if they’re not publicised as such.

More important: encores can be terribly revealing – in choice and interpretation.

Orchestral encores are a rare treat in Sydney, and usually they are a treat. But last week I heard a couple that were no treat at all, despite being well chosen. In both cases, if I’d been assigning “points”, the concert’s score would have been lowered considerably by the encores, much in the way that a perfect 10 on the beam is squandered when the gymnast fails to stick her landing at the end. Or perhaps a better analogy would be to imagine the gymnast sticking her landing but then sticking her tongue out at the judges.

Which is kind of what happened. It almost made me wonder whether there mightn’t be a fundamental antipathy to encores behind it all (and later I heard that this is more or less the case). To which all I can say is, if you dislike them that much, stick to your guns and don’t play them; if you are going to play them, honour the music and the audience.

I’ll have to admit right now to being in a minority. Whether through genuine pleasure or misguided politeness, there were close on 2,500 people heaping up the applause while I and a handful of others sat numb. But what for?

On the first night it was a Brahms Hungarian dance so distorted, so grotesque, you’d swear Dali had gotten at it. Through the centuries – CPE Bach, Chopin, Debussy – we’ve had clear instructions and beautiful models for how a stylish and musical rubato works. You play with tempo on the surface, sure, but without ever losing sight of the underlying pulse; the rhythmic logic is always apparent, the integrity of the music assured. But this performance began with the beat pulled around like taffy, to the point of smearing the pulse altogether. (The score calls for none of this, by the way – there is a pause in the first bar, and shortly after that a three-bar slowing followed by a return to the initial lively(!) tempo, but that’s pretty much the extent of the liberties Brahms expects.)

It’s concert music, I know, but you couldn’t even have imagined dancing to this. It sounded like simple showing off: a demonstration of how far a phenomenal technique and an ensemble of fine musicians will allow you to stretch and contract the beat. Alas, the result had nothing with the composer’s intentions to do. Give me a less impressive technique and the humility of true musicianship any day. And I wish the review had mentioned it, because observations such as this one about the beautiful performance of the opening work – “an overriding strategy to carefully realise the composer’s precisely notated intentions” – were completely contradicted by what went unreported at the end.

Later in the week the pain was short and swift. Perhaps a little too swift: I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard the Trépak from Nutcracker skated quite so quickly. But on arriving home I was reminded that Gergiev’s recording takes it nearly as fast, only he understands that you have to give men (a) time to make those magnificent Cossack jumps, and (b) some downbeats to propel them into the air. This is a Russian dance after all, and it needs some virility. Again, it was all the more disappointing given that the opening work (Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead) had been given a performance that was not only impressively shaped but filled with obvious affection and respect.

Perhaps reviewers should pay more attention to encores and hold them to the same artistic standard as the main program, then presenters, performers (and audiences too) might be less inclined to regard them merely as essential crowd-pleasing fluff.  

Busman's holiday

Eight horns a-standing… four trumpets blazing… two timps a-thumping… and a bass solo in a minor key!

Everyone, it seems, was in Perth for Mahler 1 last week. Well, not everyone, but several Sydneysiders to differing degrees of my surprise. Two of us were on a busman’s holiday: one of the SSO horns was augmenting the WASO’s regular forces, making, according to one of them, a “Titan” horn section; I was out in the foyer explaining, among other things, how Mahler had rejected the “Titan” nickname for his First Symphony.

I love visiting Perth. The hall might look severe and unappealing from the outside, but the acoustics are so good that I wish I could bring them home in my suitcase. There is much to be said for a shoebox with masonry walls and a capacity under 2000.

The Perth Concert Hall has another advantage, rivalled only by the Sydney Opera House, and that is an ideal location for pre-concert talks. Where some venues – even quite new ones that should have known better – choose or are obliged to tuck their talks away in rooms, Perth and the Opera House have open spaces in their foyers that are large enough for the couple of hundred who attend and which also allow for the casual listener to “stumble” on a talk and so catch something of it by chance.

I won’t go on about it. I’ve already said my piece in response to another busman’s holiday earlier in the year, where I found a talk for a major concert presenter relegated to this tiny space:

Back to the concerts… Ruth Killius was performing the Bartók Viola Concerto, as she will in Sydney this week. She uses the Serly completion but enjoys the best of both worlds by lifting an idea from the more recent version by Bartók’s son Peter and Nelson Dellamaggiore. The newer version follows one of Bartók’s orchestration instructions that Tibor Serly seems to have either missed or misunderstood. It’s a nice touch: with timpani in conversation with the soloist at the very beginning, instead of Serly’s pizzicato cellos and double bass.

The matter of Mahler removing the charming Blumine movement from his First Symphony was solved by presenting it as a prelude to the concert. It’s an effective programming strategy, even if just about everybody’s doing it nowadays. Meanwhile, the uncanny parallel between the Blumine trumpet tune and the beginning of the big tune from the finale of Brahms 1 goes some way to explaining why Mahler didn’t even want this movement published.

I should admit that I’ve not been especially looking forward to the prospect of two years of Mahler on home territory. I like my Mahler in very occasional doses – since it’s impossible to have him in small doses. So preparing this talk for the WASO did me good by reminding me how astonishing the music can be. In particular, the opening of the symphony is absolute magic. It’s the kind of writing that puts the listener on the conductor’s podium; it’s like hearing a slow-motion replay in which all the precious details of the musical thinking are crystal clear. They say Mahler is a conductor’s composer; it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This year’s visit was shorter than usual, so I didn’t get a chance to see the Perth Theatre Company production of Equus, a play that I studied in high school but have yet to see. Even more of a pity, since the reports are that this production is extremely good. But I was able to catch The Soloist, a sobering movie which, thankfully, didn’t turn on the Hollywood Happy Ending, although its (limited) depiction of professional musicians left me frowning and cringing in turn. 

Anyhow, the busman’s part of the holiday is over and I’m back, attending to that chicken elbow.

Chicken Elbow

I don’t know what you call it, but I call it “chicken elbow” – the roughened scaliness that crops up on the elbow of your non-dominant arm when you’ve been spending too much time sitting at a desk with books and proofs. (I don’t think you acquire it from leaning on the arms of seats in concert halls; if that’s a culprit it’s a lesser one.)

Anyway, I have it. And the source of my chicken elbow is also the reason I posted only twice last month and just six times the month before. Too much work and not enough play makes Thomasina a dull blogger, but she’s going to work harder at playing and see what comes of it.

Meanwhile, a dash through the past 36 days.

I had the pleasure of interviewing some of the participants in a concert being given by another orchestra, one an old colleague from Cleveland and the other a visiting director. The visiting director, in particular, was an absolute joy to talk to. He has a wonderful way of putting musical matters into words and of characterising sound. There was too much to use, but some of the results turn up in a program book and in a short audio feature that you can find here. 

Yet another orchestra needed program notes for a “Night in Vienna” style concert. I love and thoroughly approve of these sorts of concerts, believing Johann Strauss II to be, in many ways, the superior article to Richard. (What’s the saying? “If Strauss then Johann, if Richard then Wagner.” Must have driven the composer of Der Rosenkavalier wild to hear that bandied about.) Except this particular concert kept changing. I finished the essay only to discover that some Mozart had crept into the program when I wasn’t looking and bits of Kalman had sidled out. Nothing for it but to cook up a new lead and write a new essay… I will add, for those who might find themselves writing on a similar theme, that the Marco Polo recordings of the complete works of the “right” Strauss are a mighty useful resource. The performances are ordinary, but the liner notes are extraordinarily thorough. Even I can’t imagine getting that nerdy over four-minute polkas, but one man’s obsession is this girl’s lifesaver, so I can’t complain.

There were concerts every week, sometimes more than one. The highlights were Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who brought Haydn fully alive as I’d expected him to and gave me the illusion that I really like Bruckner (also as expected). Actually, I don’t dislike Bruckner, but he falls into the same category as opera: I don’t want to hear his music on recordings, but I’m always game for a live performance. All the same, I came away confirmed in my view that Haydn is the more satisfying composer. The following week Yannick was back, again, to conduct Shostakovich’s first cello concerto and Saint-Saëns’ symphony-with-organ. By the way, I can assure the speculating reviewer [alas, I can no longer link to the piece, SMH having removed it] that Han-Na Chang’s sound easily projected to where I was sitting – rear circle, on account of the popularity of the program.

[On a side note, at least for now, bloggers planning to post reference links to my orchestra’s event pages from the past (where the past can include yesterday) should take a copy of the url before the concert takes place. The beautiful new website no longer allows you to navigate to past concerts in the way you might expect, although the past program books continue to live here.]

A tricky bit of scheduling saw me catch a reverse half show in the form of an Australia Ensemble concert, beginning with Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro. This is a favourite piece, despite the fact that as a student I turned the main flute tune into a kind of tone-colour exercise that I would play in every key down the chromatic scale. A year of this did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm, and may have even improved my tonal range.

My orchestra “launched” its season on 21 August, not with a small function for VIPs as it has in recent years, nor with an event for its audience as some other orchestras do, but with the release of thousands of orange-hued booklets into the wild and some press articles, which kindly paid attention to the highlights and didn’t chastise us for any neglectfulness. (Whether such kindliness is a good thing for the art form in the long run is a whole ’nother post. Not going there.) From my perspective the most distinctive thing about the 2010 brochure, which on the surface looks much like the 2009 brochure, was that we stopped trying to be all things to all people. By which I mean, forgive the marketing speak, it no longer had to be an “acquisitions” brochure for non-subscribers as well as a brochure for renewing subscribers and the most avid of our single-ticket buyers. So I had some fun describing concerts in ways that occasionally stepped outside the box or which took a wry sideways glance at the conventions of concert brochure copy. And it took me most of June and July, but generally I was successful in sidestepping the most unhelpful and boring of the clichés.

There was the week-from-hell in which two interlopers joined the regular program book schedule: elaborate designed-from-the-ground-up programs for Kiri Te Kanawa and Star Trek. Two more different productions playing on alternating evenings you cannot imagine, but at least some of my colleagues had fun dressing up for Star Trek. I liked the idea a lot, but not enough to buy a ticket. Perhaps the 20 minutes I’d had to spend on the phone with a typesetter, changing every reference to a Star Trek ship from USS to U.S.S. and ensuring that each ship’s name was also italicised put me off. (Official trademark requirement, apparently, and I thought I was pedantic.)

A challenging month was lightened by the presence of the 2009 AYO Music Presentation Fellow, who was spending four weeks discovering first-hand how words and music and orchestras interact as well as how program books make it into print. This particular training program is very close to my heart, since it was the inaugural fellowship, back in 1995, that gave me an all-important foot in the door to orchestras, concert programming and the whole words about music thing. Back then AYO (or Youth Music Australia as it was) had money to burn: my fellowship lasted three months and took me to three cities and various parts of the ABC and several orchestras. Nowadays, four to six weeks is the norm, but it’s still a hugely valuable program as well as an important avenue for talent-spotting. Sadly, too many of the young talents seem more interested in burrowing further into academia than in getting their hands dirty with real music-making, the putting on of concerts and writing for real people. The most pragmatic advice I was ever given – once, in Wales, when I let slip that I was toying with the idea of postgraduate research – was this: “That’s all very well, but an orchestra needs you to know which Sibelius symphonies go down well with audiences and why, and how many harps and timpani are needed for the Symphonie fantastique.” (At that stage I was up on the instrumentation for Berlioz but had been avoiding Sibelius.)

The end of the month saw a fascinating program marred by a confusion somewhere along the line (the paper trail suggests where) as to which Haydn sonata in A flat the pianist was going to play. The link in the previous sentence suggests one thing, but the reality was quite different. No sprightly minuet but a rather soulful slow movement and every sign – to anyone reading the newly written program note – that we’d been advised of the wrong piece. (It was in fact Landon 31, Hob.XVI:46.) Some noticed, but not as many as you’d hope for in an alert and observant audience. This was depressing but not all that surprising. It’s disturbing how easy it is to be reading one thing and listening to another while happily entertaining the most startling of disconnects. And I was reminded of this in more ways than one.

This month, CityMusic Cleveland presents the premiere of a piece for string quartet and chamber orchestra by Christos Hatzis, a Canadian composer, and my orchestra premieres its sole major commission for the year in the form of a horn concerto. Also this week, it sounds like there will be some very interesting things to see and hear in the SOH Concert Hall as the next stage of acoustic trials comes into play. More important, though, Thomasina has a spring holiday planned. And she will get rid of the chicken elbow.

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.]

Typos I have known and loved

Back in the old days – well, 13 years ago – the Australian orchestras’ program notes were often scanned from the previous published use, treated to an optical character recognition process, and re-typeset.

Proofreading was much more entertaining in those days.

Foreign words and characters proved especially interesting, and OCR misinterpretation of these is the source of my favourite madeupical: Die Schopfling [a shopping spree], from Haydn’s long-lost retail therapy oratorio.

But the very best was this one – not so much for the error itself, but the correction applied to it by a colleague in one of the orchestras:

The overture, it was claimed, “begins with an orchestral tutu” [tutti].

P couldn’t resist an insertion:
“…and ends in a strapless evening frock.”

Sub-editors

About March last year, someone who should know explained to me how the Sydney Morning Herald was assigning stories to sub-editors. With the exception of the sports pages, she said, there were no section specialists. In a system that sounded a bit like taking a ticket at the David Jones delicatessen counter, sub-editors would work on whichever story popped up next in the electronic queue. My source, I thought, would have been very well placed to function as an arts specialist, but it evidently hadn’t occurred to anyone at the paper that they might exploit her superior knowledge. 

Perhaps if they had, the SMH could have avoided the embarrassing review that came out last week in response to the SSO’s Romantic Perfection concert.

I have every sympathy for reviewers: for each concert they need to write something pithy and insightful and they have to do it fast. If typographical errors, or perhaps Freudian slips, turn up in the mix it’s really quite understandable. And in the case of a major daily broadsheet like the SMH, a reviewer should – I would have thought – be able to rely on the sub-editors and proofreaders.

Apparently this is not so. We got Hugo instead of Hugh, at one point Wood instead Wolff (or Wolf!), the wrong date for the performance, and, to add insult to injury, a particularly ungainly and meaningless headline that doesn't bear repeating. (Prima la musica theorised to me that this headline was devised by the same soul responsible for “A Domingo stole our ladies”. That seems entirely plausible.)

But the really puzzling stories are the ones where the sub-editor takes it into his or her head to change something that was correct in the reviewer’s original text, as when composer Georges Lentz turned up as “George Lenz” in the SMH last year. [Needless to say, it’s equally perplexing how these spelling errors are allowed to remain in the online versions.]

Or, about 10 years ago, when a sub-editor at the Melbourne Age decided, in a review of cellist Lyn Harrell, to switch all the reviewer’s masculine pronouns to feminine ones.

I can only echo Professor Diggory Kirk and mutter: What do they teach them in sub-editor school?

Lectures and conversations

Marcellous’s long-awaited return to the melon patch began with his annual report of the Stuart Challender “lecture” – this year an interview with pianist Stephen Hough. Perhaps we should stop calling it a lecture – it seems to adopt an interview format at least half the time, it being true that a solo lecture takes a lot more preparation for the guest.

In any case, this year’s Challender event quite restored my faith in the conversation format following the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival. Alex Ross of The Rest is Noise fame was a festival guest, with two spots on the program: an “in conversation” at the Sydney Theatre and a lecture at the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre. I had decided to attend just the lecture, but the late offer of a ticket to the interview saw me attending both. My original instincts were entirely justified.

The SWF conversation was, in a word, hugely disappointing. (Yes, that’s two words – that’s how disappointing it was.) Ross’s interviewer appeared to have given his book only a very cursory reading and didn’t seem to have much grasp of the subject matter generally. The result was a lame set of questions and a dull and disjointed presentation. I spent most of the evening wishing that Andrew Ford were doing the interviewing. Then we could have witnessed a real conversation between two thoughtful, musical minds. It was only towards the end that I recalled that Andy had a competing engagement on Bennelong Point and wouldn’t have been available anyway. A great pity.

By contrast, the Challender event saw a conversation between an artist and someone who had worked with him in programming and who shares many of his musical and other interests. I’d agree that most of Stephen Hough’s views and ideas had already been raised on his blog, which is lively, frequently updated and impressive in the extent to which he engages with his commenters. But I’m not sure that this would have been any different if he had prepared a formal lecture. Experiencing the artist away from the piano was, in all fairness, the true theme of the evening, although Stephen and David Garrett didn’t shy away from the advertised topic of “music and spirituality”. 

Back to Alex Ross. The beginning of his lecture was delayed by an unfortunate accident – a woman fell and injured herself on the auditorium stairs – but once it got underway it was clearly in a different league to the earlier conversation. Even before considering the content, there was a remarkable change to the character of his vocal delivery. Where, in the conversation, he’d come across as a bit subdued and unvaried in colour and pacing (perhaps jet lag? perhaps the uninspiring questions?), the lecture saw him delivering a script of his own structuring and with that came a more animated style, and deftly injected drama and humour. This is not really surprising: he’s a writer rather than a raconteur and I imagine that being in control of his own material allows his performing instincts to emerge.

If I were to summarise Ross’s theme of Classical Music in Popular Culture – admittedly several weeks later, not having taken notes – I would say that it was “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”. He used Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed as a starting point. Like a society, he said, the classical music world could choose to succeed, through adaptation and change, or it could choose failure (read, extinction) by deciding not to adapt or change.

Throughout history, societies faced by competition or threat have had to decide what is an intrinsic, essential value, which must be retained for identity and integrity, and what is superficial or extraneous. Similarly, with classical music, we need to sort out what are the values – the things that if lost will cause the irredeemable damage to the art form – and what things can be safely discarded or changed, perhaps even for the better. You might, and these are my examples, believe it’s crucial, given its nature and intent, for orchestral music to be performed and heard in an appropriate acoustic space with a more or less attentive audience – that would then be a value. You might not be so wedded to rigid social conventions such as the one that currently surrounds applause between movements – such things have changed in the past and must surely change again. 

I observed at both SWF events that precisely three audience questions were taken. A letter to the editor in the SMH implied that this was some kind of policy. The Challender lecture was a little more flexible, and the questions covered more ground, although there were the inevitable few that veered in the direction of being a pretext to air a view or tell a story.

One of the Challender questions had me quite excited as it began, asking Stephen about his relationships with composers. Aha, I thought, we will get to hear whether he works with any living composers, if he’s commissioned things, perhaps he’ll talk about being a composer himself (the one topic that was neglected in the interview). Then the question continued: it was Stephen’s “relationships” with dead composers that was being asked after. Sigh. Not that the answer wasn’t a thoughtful one.

This and some of the other questions offered a reminder of the perceptions and beliefs that many non-performers hold about musical artists, sometimes quite endearingly misguided. No doubt romantic fictional accounts, and even some performers themselves, have helped nurture these: the idea of the performer channelling a dead composer or literally entering into the emotions being conveyed in the music. Stephen’s sane response to the matter of emotions during performance reminded me of the words of Tchaikovsky in relation to his Pathétique Symphony:

‘Anyone who believes that the creative person is capable of expressing what he feels out of a momentary effect aided by the means of art is mistaken. Melancholy as well as joyous feelings can always be expressive only out of the Retrospective.’

As a footnote I’ll mention that the indefatiguable Stephen Hough has also been making guest appearances in the pre-concert talks for his concerts with the SSO this week. (The last performance is on Monday night, talk at 6.15pm for a 7pm concert.) He was moved to recite a chunk of text from Walton’s Façade on Wednesday evening and pressured (I confess to adding to the vocal audience encouragement) into repeating it on Friday despite the loss of spontaneity. I suspect he won’t be enticed again. But perhaps he’ll continue to share his impressions of the Walton First Symphony, so delightfully and astutely summed up as “Sibelius in spats”. Meanwhile, as if all this hasn’t been talk enough, I’m planning to tune in to his interval feature during the live broadcast on ABC Classic FM this evening.

Making up your own mind

The other day on twitter the person behind @BBCMusicMag began a discussion (#prognotes) about program notes and their benefits or otherwise. One comment in the mix expressed a view I’ve encountered before:

“I try not to read programme notes for concerts, preferring to decide for myself about the music as heard.”

I have two responses.

First, the really beautiful thing about program notes – as opposed to, say, presentation from the stage – is that they are entirely optional. You can read exactly what and as much as you like, and you can read when you like, whether that’s before, during, or after the performance. So the program book, as a medium, is ideally suited to the kind of concert-goer who feels this way.

But my main response is one of mild disbelief. The people who say things like this are generally thoughtful and intelligent. Do they really feel incapable of reading a program note and then deciding for themselves about the music and its performance? Really??

It reminds me a little of the misguided attitude I saw when I was studying music at uni. Students were regularly offered all sorts of great opportunities to hear performances around town: free or very cheap tickets, for example, from the leading concert presenters. Good programs with good artists in most cases. And yet we all too rarely took advantage of these. (From what I hear in marketing circles, tertiary music students haven’t changed much.)

One reason was a kind of jadedness: attending concerts seemed like more study, more work. And sometimes we simply had the fiercely treasured prejudices of youth – refusing to hear certain composers or works for example, because we’d decided against them. But another frequent reason went along the lines of: “Oh I don’t want to go and hear so-and-so play such-and-such – it might influence my interpretation.” To which the proper response should have been: Puh-lease! (At least, that’s what I would say to my younger self if I could time travel, before dragging myself by the collar to every concert on offer.)

How arrogantly insecure we were to think that hearing a professional performance of a great piece of music would in any way damage our ability to make our own interpretative decisions. I won’t call the program note non-readers arrogant, but I do wonder why they seem to have so little faith in their ears and their own good judgement and imagination that a humble program note would be so influential.

Vision of the pianist in a multimedia age

Imogen Cooper’s recital earlier this week has prompted me to dig something out of the archives from 1997. It was based on an interview with Imogen and written up as one of those thought-provoking ‘interludes’ for the program book, although the presenting organisation didn’t end up publishing it – I may write about that some other time.

The piece is showing its age, both in style and content. Its subject – the use of the ‘keyboard cam’ in selected SSO piano recitals – turned out to be short-lived, perhaps because more often than not the pianists in the series didn’t agree to its use. (One response: “I would resist such a thing until my feet were in the grave.”) But the general theme – music presentation, extra-musical additions to concerts, communication – lives on.

Last year [1996] Jon Kimura Parker gave a piano recital here in the Sydney Town Hall. If you were there you would have noticed a large screen above the stage and a tiny video camera focused on the piano keyboard. Regardless of your seat, you would have been treated to an ‘A-reserve’ view of Kimura Parker’s hands, courtesy of ‘keyboard cam’.

We’ve been accustomed to surtitles at the opera for a while now. Patrons of Opera in the Park are no strangers to the use of large screens. And, as was pointed out in the daily press a few weeks after Kimura Parker’s recital, sports and pop concert audiences now take videos and big screens for granted.

Did we like it? One listener thanked the Sydney Symphony for ‘de-fossilising the piano recital’. She will be disappointed, but not petrified, to find no screen this evening [a recital by Imogen Cooper]. The same listener guessed – probably rightly – that ‘most of the audience at piano recitals are piano students and lapsed pianists’ who ‘want to see The Hands’. (You can recognise them: they all sit on the left-hand side of the hall.)

A screen might allow those students and lapsed pianists to observe the minutiae of a performer’s technique – if such things are to be gleaned from a split-second glimpse. But a screen could also be a distraction; the sight of disembodied hands carrying out their pianistic wizardry might just tear us away from the performer, even the performance.

‘It’s difficult for me to imagine,’ says this evening’s soloist Imogen Cooper, ‘quite what one gathers from being able to see a pianist’s hands. I imagine there may be some very good amateur pianists who want to suss out a few fingerings and things like that.’

‘Or maybe it’s part of the body language.’ she says, ‘But to me the carriage of the shoulders, the head, and the expression on the face – which you can see just as well from the other side of the hall – speaks just as much.’

Certainly all of us, as listeners, hear with our eyes as well as out ears. And from the early 19th century – when pianists such as Liszt turned the piano side on to the audience and seating began to be set out in rows facing the stage – pianists have been using body language to help listeners understand the message of the music. But early recitals were often sprinkled with chamber music and vocal items; concerts nowadays are increasingly more specialised, our programs more focused. ‘When there is only the pianist for the whole evening,’ says Cooper, ‘the visual aspect does in fact matter a great deal. But I think the artist should be able to carry that themselves. I don’t think projecting the hands on a screen actually helps that.’

Even so, giant screens seem to be moving from the stadium to the concert hall. ‘Dare I say,’ ventures Cooper, ‘it’s this slightly American concept that one medium is never enough. You have to have two at the same time and, if possible, three. And if there could have been flashing lights too, no doubt that will come up one of these days.’

Perhaps it’s a symptom of the multimedia age; perhaps it’s more basic than that. ‘It’s as if,’ says Cooper, ‘we haven’t got the concentration span – which I suppose for some people is true – to focus on one thing without being amused by something else at the same time. Probably the youngest generation coming up, for the most part, don’t have a very good attention span and have not had a very good introduction to classical music. They are simply bored if they have to sit and listen to something.’

But let’s return to Kimura Parker. He had performed with a keyboard cam in concerts elsewhere and he took the time to explain his thoughts on the new gadgetry. He also took the time to introduce the music he played. The question could be asked: which was it that really helped us to listen more carefully? The keyboard cam? Or the spoken introductions?

For Cooper communication wins out over gadgetry every time. ‘Not only are you introducing the works from your own experience,’ says Cooper, ‘but anybody in the audience can see that you’re not only a wonderful disembodied being that can play, but that you can talk and laugh, and in some ways you use the same language as them – literally.’

Slonimsky: plot master

Ok, so it’s more than 140 characters, but it is in one sentence. A masterly Rosenkavalier “operaplot” from the inimitable and ageless Nicolas Slonimsky:

26 January 1911
Der Rosenkavalier, “Komodie für Musik” in three acts by Richard Strauss…full of sophisticated waltzes and ironically sentimental arias, to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s tale placed in 18th-century Vienna, in which a conniving dowager designates her young lover as the bearer of a symbolic silver rose sent from her aging cousin to a young coquette in proposing marriage, with a characteristic reversal of roles as the cavalier of the rose woos and wins her after many a transvestiture (in the third act the Rosenkavalier, a mezzo-soprano, is disguised as a maid thus reverting to her natural sex), the score containing 118 identifiable leitmotivs, according to officious exegetes, is produced at the Dresden Opera, Ernst Schuch conducting.

Love those “officious exegetes”.

And another priceless gem for an opera rather less well known:

17 February 1900
Anton, opera in three acts by the 27-year-old Italian composer Cesare Galeotti, wherein a young Libyan, whose pagan mistress slays his early Christian concubine known as the “Flower of the Catacombs”, flees to the Egyptian desert, suppresses his sensuous memories, resists a series of diabolically contrived temptations and becomes sanctified as Saint Anthony, to a musical score gushing out crimson floods of curvilinear melos, is produced at La Scala, Milan. [italics mine]

Source: Nicolas Slonimsky – The First Hundred Years (1994)

The Talk Commandments?

The Artful Manager has posted the TED Commandments: ground rules that are circulated – on a stone tablet – to presenters at the TED Conference. I can see these working for pre-concert talks as well:

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
   This is especially pertinent for anyone whose principal day job involves lecturing on music. In places where academics/musicologists seem to be the first port of call as speakers (and where talks are more often than not referred to as “lectures”) there is all too often a nagging sense that what the audience is hearing is simply a variant of material prepared for the classroom.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
   This is more difficult to achieve outside a conference, but for pre-concert speakers, referring to or commenting upon the program book – even disagreeing with it – can be a good thing. And connecting the current concert with previous and future programs as well as other events in the city does make for blessed connection. (Talking about Shostakovich? Lady Macbeth playing in the theatre next door? Draw the link. Talking about Stravinsky’s ballet music? The national ballet company planning productions? Ditto.)
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
   Fortunately, this is extremely rare. But once in a blue moon I hear a speaker indulge in self-promotion and/or touting for audience feedback during the talk itself. Cringe!
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
   But thou must also remember that some audiences will get thy humour more readily than others and there’s no helping this. (I’ve a sneaking suspicion it has to do with the night of the week more so than the subscription series but have yet to formulate a proper theory on the matter.)
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
   I’d clarify this for pre-concert talks by saying that working from a script is fine – and in fact it’s desirable when the talk involves many tightly integrated audio examples. What is not fine is preparing a script that is “writerly” and doesn’t reflect how you’d naturally speak. (No one wants to hear you read an essay. Begone, ye long subsidiary clauses and convoluted constructions!)
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.
    That would be the concert. People need time to get to the loo… On the other hand, don’t finish too early. We’ve made the effort to arrive 45 minutes or an hour early to hear about the program – don’t sell us short.
    

I may yet develop my own set of ground rules to include the things that relate specifically to talks about music. (First among these will be: “Thou shalt not talk blithely over the top of music as if it were merely a soundtrack.”) Until I do, TED’s commandments make a lot of sense.

Nutcracker: printed matter

Being a program book junkie, I naturally bought one for Nutcracker. Australian Ballet programs are $15 more expensive than your typical free concert program ($12 if you buy vouchers up front) but well worth it, since they are loaded with beautiful photography and usually contain a number of thoughtful articles by a variety of writers.

One of the Nutcracker articles was an interview between conductor Nicolette Fraillon and choreographer Graeme Murphy – “Universal Genius: How Tchaikovsky became Australian”. Is that sounding a little familiar?

I was actually a bit shocked. Not because the AB had made double use of its editorial content but because they weren’t transparent about it (which they should have been, despite both blog and program “belonging” to the same company). Evidently the program book was published first; the blog version appeared online on Tuesday. How difficult would it have been to append a brief notice at the end of the blog saying that the interview had been published in the program book for the production?

There’s more to this than transparency, of course. In fact, even though that was what raised my eyebrows initially, it’s the least important issue here. What’s more important is that the failure to credit the program book as the published source results in a lost opportunity.

Bearing in mind that the AB sells its programs, it would be smart, surely, to tell blog readers when something they’ve just enjoyed has come from the program. (They could even tag program articles as such.) Who knows, some readers just might be inclined to buy a program next time when they see how interesting and connected to the performance and its creators the content can be. 

On a more positive note, although it’s risky putting too much program content online (why would you buy a program if you could read everything in it for free?), one of the great things about online publication is the potential for links, explanations and multi-media generally. So if you click through to the article in question you get a few things that you’d never find in the handsome printed books.

First up there’s a link from a mention of Murphy’s Swan Lake (2008) to an archived review quotes page on the AB’s website. (And 12 points to Gryffindor for keeping such available on the website! Even better would have been the original information page about the production.)

Then there’s a link to the wikipedia entry on E.T.A. Hoffmann at the point when he is mentioned as the source for the original Nutcracker. I’m wary of linking to wikipedia as a source, but the idea is right: providing an easy way to fill in knowledge gaps on the fly.

And finally there’s a link to a YouTube video of a traditional version of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy when Nicolette mentions it. After this the link-goodness peters out – it can be quite time-consuming to research and set up such things, a task akin to indexing or building glossaries, so I’m not entirely surprised. But it’s a move in the right direction – here’s hoping there’ll be more of it.

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.

A winning streak

I’d better follow my gripe of the other day with something cheerier. But what? There’s an embarrassment of riches to report. In the past three weeks I’ve heard three orchestral programs, each one vastly different and each one immensely and deeply satisfying. I fear the “winning streak” won’t last, but I’m revelling in it for now.

This week was the Thomanerchor, as it’s lyrically named in German, or the St Thomas Boys’ Choir as they’re billed for English speakers, singing J.S. Bach, Mendelssohn and a smattering of Telemann. It was amazing to consider a choir where the membership is so young and yet the tradition they carry is nearly 800 years old. And boy could they sing. More important, it was an exquisitely thought-out program. I understand that the current Thomaskantor (although I’m sure his predecessors were like this too) gives much consideration to the liturgical context/shape of the music even when he’s planning a secular concert. Add to that what’s clearly a fine instinct for flow and pacing and the result is wonderful indeed. Wearing my concertgoer’s hat: it was a glorious evening. 

On stage for the keen of eye and even keener of ear to spot was a cornetto or Zink, doubling the soprano line of the chorale in the Bach/Telemann piece. (I hadn’t been told, so sadly it didn’t get a mention in the program book.) These are rare enough instruments at the best of times and certainly not something you’d expect to see popping up in a symphony orchestra, even when the music is baroque. It was the concert equivalent of an Easter egg.

I always admire Andrew Ford’s introductions for this series (Meet the Music) – on top of his substantial musical knowledge and imagination, he has a real gift for knowing how to present an idea in such a way that it doesn’t go over the head of a novice and yet it remains interesting for the musical expert. I might know all the facts and ideas that he’s sharing, but it’s still a pleasure to listen to him and there’s always something illuminating to be found in either what he says or the way he says it. On-stage concert presentation is one of those things that many argue isn’t strictly necessary. Which means if it’s to be done at all it needs to be done very well indeed. Andy does that.

On Wednesday night his summing up of motet versus cantata – word versus song – and the significance of that was just beautiful. Then introducing the distinctions between the pieces doubled by the orchestra and those accompanied by the orchestra by saying “The orchestra’s on stage, but you haven’t really heard them yet…” And I loved the way he put us in Bach’s shoes: what would he have thought of this thing called a concert hall, let alone hearing church music in it, let alone hearing applause for sacred music even at the ends of pieces…? Then picking up on Mendelssohn’s contribution to this thing called a concert hall and the canon of classical music, and still managing to bring it around to the implications for new music today. (“Sing to the Lord a new song” was a running theme in the program.) We, says Thomasina in her concertgoer hat again, are so very lucky to have presentations of this calibre.

The other riches of concerts past? A performance on Friday night of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. Yes, I know there was a violin concerto (and played by a soloist whose Tchaikovsky I much admire), but this was all about Shostakovich. Despite living in fearful adoration of his piccolo parts, I don’t always warm to Shostakovich – I think Prokofiev, for example, is a much more interesting and imaginative composer who writes better tunes. So for the most part I would rather sit in the middle of an orchestra playing Shostakovich (and the Tenth Symphony is a staple of youth orchestras everywhere!) than sit in a concert hall listening to him. But this was an interpretation and a performance that really worked for me. It had an authentic quality that I liked and I was less conscious than usual of the aspects of the music that I tend to hear as crude and overblown. Heck, I should come right out and say I found it moving.

This concert was preceded by a talk by Scott Davie, pianist and Russian music scholar. He said many interesting things, but there was one image in particular that absolutely stuck for me. Having introduced the idea of Shostakovich’s “signature tune” DSCH (D, E flat, C, B), he then referred to the conclusion of the symphony, where the timpani is left belting out this ominous sounding motif under an apparently (it’s always apparently with Shostakovich) cheery ending. It was as if, he said, Shostakovich had taken a can of spray-paint and was graffiti-ing the symphony with his name. Literally “tagging” it, you could say.

The beginning of this winning streak was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, about which I’ve already had a lot to say, although none of it in retrospect. I ended up experiencing it three-and-a-half times and it deserves a post or two of its own. I’m not necessarily promising those posts, but we’ll see.

So who would you rather work for?

Few things depress me more than seeing an artistic, creative organisation issue badly written, uninspiring job descriptions, poorly conceived and packed with weasel words.

Take this one, spotted recently around the traps. (Details omitted in the interests of prudence, even though I’ve no intention of applying.)

Taking the nouns and verbs, this role’s first responsibility – according to the description – is “to facilitate an approach through the management and coordination of input from the stakeholders”. Right.

After that there’s “managing the process, including the framework…” and so it continues. The core of the role – which happens to be concert programming, would you have guessed? – sneaks in as “allocation of repertoire for all activities”. That’s right, apparently they don’t want someone to create imaginative and exciting programs on a foundation of smart artist choices, just someone to “allocate” repertoire to activities. Sigh.

Oh, and the “purpose” of the position – I kid you not – is to report to the managing director role.

It’s especially depressing given that the role in question is an artistic one. Of course, people in this line of work will overlook the obfuscations – they know what these kinds of jobs really involve and may well rewrite the description in sensible English* on appointment.  All the same, descriptions such as these send a sorry message about the employer, suggesting that either someone doesn’t really understand the heart of the business or – more likely – that there are many more “stakeholders” to be satisfied by the weasel words than is exactly comfortable.

To be fair, I should add that the selection criteria in my unfortunate model are more sensibly expressed than the description of the role itself. There’s hope yet.

*Historical example, showing how it can be done using tangible verbs and nouns: “Program all concerts and recordings in consultation with the music director and managing director. Engage all outside conductors and soloists.…”

Nothing new under the sun

Ecclesiastes. But Shakespeare would have said – did say:

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d,
Which labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child?
Sonnet LIX

In my recent journal reading I came across a tidbit, a morsel, that I decided not to use in my talk. It was a description of Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production in 1900 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which featured, among other things, fairies wearing battery-operated lighting. In America too: in 1888 Augustin Daly put battery-powered lights in the fairies’ hair and on their wands. There were electric fireflies as well.

No one seems to have introduced vacuum cleaners though.

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.

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…