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!
