Part of the point of the short story by William Golding about a young boy taking piano lessons years ago in a small village was that his teacher thought that she was the standard by which good piano playing was to be measured, but already her young pupil was listening to world masters of the instrument on the radio. Appreciation and expectation had moved on. And keeps on moving on.
That is part of a real problem with concerts. You get to know a piece of music played by world class musicians and sung by the greatest the musical universe has to offer. Wherever you are, no matter how small and remote the community in which you are living, if you have a radio or a CD player you have instant access to the masters of classical music. And you can listen again and again to a note perfect, well balanced rendition with an ideal acoustic not interrupted by the hacking cough of some semi invalid who has forgotten to bring his muffling handerchief.
Then you go to a live concert with all the expectations of your CD collection and almost always are disappointed.
When Edward Heath (life-long hater of That Woman – his only positive feature) started conducting live orchestras the music got slower and slower. This was because he was used to conducting his record collection and following the beat of the orchestra. In real life, as the orchestra is usually behind the conductor’s beat, if you follow the living orchestra in front of you, they must get slower and slower as they assume that you are ahead of them. A nice Catch-22 scenario! Another danger of thinking recorded music is the same as live concerts.
Expectation and reality.
The concert I attended yesterday in the Palau de la Música in Barcelona had a programme which was, in many ways, a hostage to fortune: Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, Pachelbel's ‘Canon’, the Adagio by Albinoni and you can guess the Bach they had! This is music that everyone knows in version after version; it is a musical vocabulary which is the equivalent of everyday speech. People will tolerate different accents in the music, but not different words! We know it and expect it to be a close equivalent of what we know.
The orchestra I heard last night (for the second and last time) were woefully inadequate to honour the expectations of the audience.
It seems irrelevant to separate the items that they played as all of them suffered from the same inadequacies. The ensemble playing was approximate; there were clear instances when some players were simply out of tune; the style of playing was more suited to Tchaikovsky than Vivaldi or Bach.
The Adagio by Albinoni was give a presentation which was positively funereal – a ponderous, deadly rhythm that robbed the music of its power and put you in mind of the cry of the composer who said of one performance of ‘Pavanne for a dead princess’ that it was the princess who was dead and not the music!
The ‘Four Seasons’ was little short of torture with a battle between the cello and the ‘soloist’ which made for rough listening.
At the end of the first half of the concert a man stood up and applauded. I hope, for the sake of his musical appreciation, that he was directly related to one of the players, because I can see no other justification.
I had other comments to make on this concert but they seem out of place: the concert was awful, the playing insensitive; the programme clichéd; the approach amateur – my money wasted.
Instead I will expiate on the qualities of the meal I had in the completely deserted restaurant of the Palau de la Música.
I had about 50 minutes to eat a meal which appeared to be more complex in reality than I had expected. Firstly, the menu that I had thought that I was going to have was not available at that time of night and the menu that I chose instead had five courses.
I have to say that I didn’t really understand all of the courses and some were better than others but it was an interesting experience.
The Palau has been renovated and the as part of the renovation the façade of the concert hall has been given a glass front which effectively encloses that part of the building. A building incidentally which comprises a World Heritage Site and therefore has to be protected. I wonder if this is the way forward and those designated buildings are going to find themselves encase in a protective sheath of another building to help them survive. I think that I am with the Italian Futurists who wanted to pull down the buildings of each generation to give the next a chance to express itself, unhindered by the baggage of the past!
Because of the construction of the restaurant I was able to look through the glass roof at the façade of the Palau and admire its many eccentricities and enjoy the warm glow of the light passing through the stained glass window. From time to time, a member of the audience would come up the steps to the restaurant and then disappear back into the darkness.
My food was presented immaculately and with service that was faultless. It was cooked to bring out the flavour – something which other restaurants seem unable to do without the help of monosodium glutamate! The meat and mushroom risotto and the steak were particularly to be commended: it is so rare to find a restaurant actually take one at one’s word when one asks for a very rare piece of meat!
I finished my meal with three minutes to spare before the start of the concert which only left me a brief time to be amazed, yet again, by the sheer amount of fantastic (and I mean that word in its literal sense) imagination that has informed its construction.
Orchestras playing in such surroundings have to make something of a statement in their playing if they are to rise above their heightened artistic environment. This orchestra did not manage to do that.
Perhaps I should give them another chance: they are playing American composers on Sunday.
Or I could put up the tree and decorations.
That is part of a real problem with concerts. You get to know a piece of music played by world class musicians and sung by the greatest the musical universe has to offer. Wherever you are, no matter how small and remote the community in which you are living, if you have a radio or a CD player you have instant access to the masters of classical music. And you can listen again and again to a note perfect, well balanced rendition with an ideal acoustic not interrupted by the hacking cough of some semi invalid who has forgotten to bring his muffling handerchief.
Then you go to a live concert with all the expectations of your CD collection and almost always are disappointed.
When Edward Heath (life-long hater of That Woman – his only positive feature) started conducting live orchestras the music got slower and slower. This was because he was used to conducting his record collection and following the beat of the orchestra. In real life, as the orchestra is usually behind the conductor’s beat, if you follow the living orchestra in front of you, they must get slower and slower as they assume that you are ahead of them. A nice Catch-22 scenario! Another danger of thinking recorded music is the same as live concerts.
Expectation and reality.
The concert I attended yesterday in the Palau de la Música in Barcelona had a programme which was, in many ways, a hostage to fortune: Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, Pachelbel's ‘Canon’, the Adagio by Albinoni and you can guess the Bach they had! This is music that everyone knows in version after version; it is a musical vocabulary which is the equivalent of everyday speech. People will tolerate different accents in the music, but not different words! We know it and expect it to be a close equivalent of what we know.
The orchestra I heard last night (for the second and last time) were woefully inadequate to honour the expectations of the audience.
It seems irrelevant to separate the items that they played as all of them suffered from the same inadequacies. The ensemble playing was approximate; there were clear instances when some players were simply out of tune; the style of playing was more suited to Tchaikovsky than Vivaldi or Bach.
The Adagio by Albinoni was give a presentation which was positively funereal – a ponderous, deadly rhythm that robbed the music of its power and put you in mind of the cry of the composer who said of one performance of ‘Pavanne for a dead princess’ that it was the princess who was dead and not the music!
The ‘Four Seasons’ was little short of torture with a battle between the cello and the ‘soloist’ which made for rough listening.
At the end of the first half of the concert a man stood up and applauded. I hope, for the sake of his musical appreciation, that he was directly related to one of the players, because I can see no other justification.
I had other comments to make on this concert but they seem out of place: the concert was awful, the playing insensitive; the programme clichéd; the approach amateur – my money wasted.
Instead I will expiate on the qualities of the meal I had in the completely deserted restaurant of the Palau de la Música.
I had about 50 minutes to eat a meal which appeared to be more complex in reality than I had expected. Firstly, the menu that I had thought that I was going to have was not available at that time of night and the menu that I chose instead had five courses.I have to say that I didn’t really understand all of the courses and some were better than others but it was an interesting experience.
The Palau has been renovated and the as part of the renovation the façade of the concert hall has been given a glass front which effectively encloses that part of the building. A building incidentally which comprises a World Heritage Site and therefore has to be protected. I wonder if this is the way forward and those designated buildings are going to find themselves encase in a protective sheath of another building to help them survive. I think that I am with the Italian Futurists who wanted to pull down the buildings of each generation to give the next a chance to express itself, unhindered by the baggage of the past!
Because of the construction of the restaurant I was able to look through the glass roof at the façade of the Palau and admire its many eccentricities and enjoy the warm glow of the light passing through the stained glass window. From time to time, a member of the audience would come up the steps to the restaurant and then disappear back into the darkness.
My food was presented immaculately and with service that was faultless. It was cooked to bring out the flavour – something which other restaurants seem unable to do without the help of monosodium glutamate! The meat and mushroom risotto and the steak were particularly to be commended: it is so rare to find a restaurant actually take one at one’s word when one asks for a very rare piece of meat!
I finished my meal with three minutes to spare before the start of the concert which only left me a brief time to be amazed, yet again, by the sheer amount of fantastic (and I mean that word in its literal sense) imagination that has informed its construction.
Orchestras playing in such surroundings have to make something of a statement in their playing if they are to rise above their heightened artistic environment. This orchestra did not manage to do that.
Perhaps I should give them another chance: they are playing American composers on Sunday.
Or I could put up the tree and decorations.
Choices, choices.
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