Nothing lasts!

 

The new cultural season has started with the first in my series of Orchestral Concerts in the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona.

     My first challenge is thinking about exactly when to leave.  Traffic in Barcelona is usually something of a nightmare and the approach roads to the centre are usually traffic jammed so, although the journey is a relatively short one (with clear roads the trip to the city takes about twenty minutes, or thirty minutes tops the actual centre) normality is much longer.  I tell myself that I will leave about an hour and a half for the 19 km journey and that I can fill in the time to the start of the concert if I arrived early by having a snack and a cup of tea.

     Parking is not usually a problem.  There is a car park within a few minutes’ walk of the Palau and even the parking under the cathedral is not that far away, and I have never had to look elsewhere for a parking space, except of course when there are demonstrations and all bets are off, as I venture further and further into Barcelona Unknown in an increasingly desperate search for a space outside my normal ken.

    And parking spaces come at a hefty cost as I find that a normal concert length stay usually works out at about 15 euros for the privilege.

     Yesterday was generally clear, with the only holdups being the traffic lights and drivers who are obviously in the centre of Barcelona for the first time and attempt manoeuvres that do not meet with the wholehearted approval of habitual Barcelona drivers.

     There are always roadworks that throw logistical spanners into the car’s progress.  And nowadays roadworks seem to last for months if not years before things get back to normality c.f. St Boi!

     Anyway, I got to my final destination, or at least a near parking space, with plenty of time to spare and so I was able to pop into the café I use if I get a place in my car park of choice.

     I had a wrap of some sort with a mixture of things, most of which I could identify, and a cup of Earl Grey tea of such insipidity that I was ashamed to drink it.  I must remember to have an emergency tea bag to add to the pap they expect customers to drink so that I can fortify it with a bag of real Yorkshire Tea from my compendious stash at home.

 

I did make an abortive attempt to change my ticket for a concert on United Nations Day (when I have plans other than an evening concert) for a performance of Brahms Requiem tonight, but the seats available were not ones that I felt would give me a true appreciation of the work and so I decided to find something else to swap with my unusable ticket.  I should discover something before next Saturday, because that is my next scheduled concert and that would be the perfect time to change things around.

    

The Concert itself was excellent, with a theme of Emperors and Empire.  It started with Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music from The Last Emperor – the Bertolucci film – and the music trod a path between a soft lilting beauty and an echo of the martial music of majesty conveying the uneasy progression from decadent tradition and the new regime of Communism.

     In my view this was the weakest piece in the evening’s concert, but it was a rousing and melodic introduction.

 

     Beethoven 5^th piano concerto, usually called The Emperor was a different experience entirely.  The orchestra, that I felt was a touch uneasy at the start of the evening had become much more assured and the playing of Alba Ventura spurred them to greater heights.

     Her playing was precise and clear, there was a purity and a crystalline quality to her sound that almost made one believe that one was listening to the music for the first time!

     Her hand movements before putting her fingers on the keys ware histrionic, but with playing such as hers she can wave about as much as she likes.

     Her reception by the audience at the end of the piece was tumultuous, and rightly so, with her encore piece of Debussy’s Claire de lune showing that she was capable of a lightness of touch and a lyrical flow that was in stark contrast with the bombastic nature of the concerto!

     The second part of the concert opened with Lera Auerbach’s Icarus (1973) a piece I was particularly looking forward to because of its use of the Ondes Martenot.  This is one time that I actually did some homework for this piece that I did not know and listened to the performance on the artist’s website, so I was expecting the Ondes Martenot to occupy a firmer place in the soundscape that it did in performance.

     The music was modern, but approachable and there were clear harmonic lines of development as well as the usual pyrotechnics that one expects from the percussion section of an orchestra performing modern music!  A jolly piece.

     The evening ended with The 1812 Overture, where the overriding point of interest is “How are they going to do the cannon shots?”  It was fairly obvious that a big bass drum had been sited to the far left of the orchestra well away from the other members of the percussion section and, when we got to the moment of the first shot, a spotlight illuminated the enthusiastic drummer who thumped his way through the exhilarating ending. 

     The roar of acclimation that the piece received and I have to admit that my eyes were moist with the response to the sheer exultation of the music.  And gratitude to the conductor Andrés Salado a true favourite with the audience!

     Reality came back with the trip home and the usual lunatic driving of those tired of life!

 

Open Your Ears!

 

 

 

 

 

 

In anticipation of the first in the concert series located in the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona this Saturday, I have been trying to remember the last purely orchestral concert rather than an opera, that I have been to, and it is depressingly long ago.

     I do of course listen to music via CDs (yes, I am still old fashioned enough to use them) and mostly on line.  The on-line music is tricky.  I refuse to pay for a streaming service, because I (painstakingly) added most of my CDs to my music library and I was more than content to meander through versions of the music that I knew than make do with some un-provenanced rendition of a famous symphony or so.

     Some on-line offerings of music are somewhat like the web sites of information that may look professional but are actually made by some 14-year-old student in the rural Mid West for a school project and are heavily reliant on Wikipedia and other questionable sources.  So, you might want to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth, and find yourself listening to something that sounds as if it has been recorded in the studio equivalent of a shoe box, or a version of the symphony which sounds as though it has been transcribed from wax cylinders!

     Opera is particularly prone to musical mischief as you settle down to watch a YouTube ‘full’ performance and rapidly realize that you are watching something that is only a step above a poor school production with sound quality to match!

     Which is not to say that a live performance is always the gold standard of listening.  I have any number of performances in my experience when I would have been much better off listening to a recording.

    When a student I vividly remember going to an orchestral concert in the Glyn Hall in Neath, in South Wales and sitting in the cheaper (student discount) seats and being horrified during the first piece because it was as if there was a sonic barrier between our impoverished selves and the noise that the orchestra was apparently making – I mean we could actually see the musician moving hands and mouths, but it really wasn’t getting through to us.  I solved that problem by marching down the length of the hall for the second piece of music and sitting in a vacant more expensive seat, and considered myself totally justified because, after all, I had paid to listen to the music, not watch a musicians’ dumb show!

     Another time I was given a seat next to the double basses and the whole of the musical experience of the concert was filtered through the deep thrum of those instruments.  Not something that I would recommend unless you are a double bass player yourself, and perhaps not even then!

     The number of times that the people at the side or in front or behind my seat has shown the consideration of louts, by eating or talking or going on their mobile phone are many – and don’t get me started on the noisy breathers!  One performance of two of Nielsen’s symphonies was almost destroyed for me by the gasping difficulty of one man’s breathing that seemed to require emergency pulmonary treatment rather than live music.

     Of course there were other times when the experience has been magical: string quartets played on a Greek island with windows and doors open so that the breeze wafted the full length diaphanous curtains in a gentle material ballet to accompany the music; a London Prom where you really felt that the people standing with you cared about the music being played; The Swansea Brangwen Hall organ blaring out in my first hearing of The Manfred Symphony; a lunchtime concert in Cardiff City Hall and The Firebird Suite; the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra playing The Turangalila Symphony in St David’s Hall; a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony when I was seated directly behind the percussion and felt like an assaulted, but excited part of the performance!  Many more positive experiences than negative.

     With some pieces of music, my attitude is more like the attitude I have to the performance of Shakespeare plays.  I have seen some Shakespeare plays so many times (including three difference productions of Twelfth Night in a few months) that I look at them hoping that there will be something original thought provoking in the production that I can take away, and add to my appreciation of the play.  Sometimes just a moment, or piece of staging or phrasing of a particular line or lines can be enough to justify my being a member of the audience and my spending time there.

     With some music I have my preferences as far as weighting of instruments and tempi are concerned, but I have found in many compelling performances that a conductor can persuade me to a new way of listening.

     The main piece in the concert that I am going to on Saturday is Dvorak’s New World Symphony, a piece of music whose ‘tune’ is so famous that like the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech in Macbeth you can almost (and sometimes quite literally) hear the audience performing it too!  There is also a sigh of happy recognition of 'something we know' that you only get in a live performance.

     The real problem of live performances is that we members of the audience are spoiled, in so far as we have probably got to know the individual pieces of music through recordings – and those recordings are the results of numerous ‘takes’ and of electronic tweaking after the event, so that what we hear as the final result never happened in real time.  How can a perfectly balanced and engineered performance complete with a listeners not sitting in the ‘ideal’ spot, on a chair that is not very comfortable and next to people who noisily exist at the same time as the music!

     I suppose that the point is that each live performance is unique for everyone.  What I am hearing is not what you, five rows back and to the side are hearing.  It is a perspective that I value and sometimes it is a revelation.

     Many times I have gone to a concert at the end of a working day because I had already bought the ticket as part of my subscription.  I went almost with a sense of duty, and the thought that I couldn’t waste the cost of the ticket.  And I have been blown away by what I have heard.  All tiredness gone in the delight of music heard afresh.

     It is always worth hoping for revelation, and when it does happen, well, it justifies one or two duff performances that one can put down to experience!

     For this concert, my hopes are high!