Bully pulpit

The Louisville Courier-Journal just ran a commentary/critique that reminded me of how far we've come in our expectations of an optimal concert experience.

The gist of the article: the Louisville Symphony presented a concert with Beethoven - Prometheus, Strauss - Metamorphosen, Beethoven - Symphony No. 3, a program in which the first two pieces connect thematically to the Symphony. The critic's complaint? That there was passing mention of this fact in the program notes, but nothing more was made of it. As he writes:

Still, consider how much more could have been accomplished. What if Mester had asked the orchestra to play a snippet from the "Prometheus" incidental music in which the "Eroica" tune appears? Then the orchestra might have followed up by playing the excerpt from Strauss's "Metamorphosen" that also alludes to the symphony?

It's lovely to have pre-performance comments by orchestra CEO Brad Broecker and a board representative, but that's no substitute for having the music director inform their listeners. All it takes is a little planning and, yes, imagination.


Which, to me, points out to the tremendous sea change that has been going on in our business. The implication is that it's not enough to entertain; the point is to educate and enlighten. This is particularly important in the context of current cultural norms; whereas 50 year ago, we may have been able to assume a certain level of knowledge about orchestral music and standard repertoire, these days, with the push to expand and diversify audiences, we can no longer make those assumptions.

What was even more fascinating to me was the direct plea to the music director to do some pre-concert explanations - certainly many organizations have pre-concert lectures (including the Minnesota Orchestra - the "Music Up Close" program), often led by a musician or musicologist or sometimes the conductor of the concert. More to the point, the suggestion in the Courier-Journal was for the explanation to involve the orchestra, to essentially be an integral part of the concert experience for the entire audience, not just an added extra for people who bothered to show up early.

Speaking from the podium is a topic that I've frequently
addressed, and it's a major feature of my work. After all, conducting is the ultimate bully pulpit, why not use the opportunity to enlighten? As I keep saying, the concert experience will undergo further (and maybe radical) changes within my career lifetime, and it behooves us all to think about what keeps audiences engaged and enthralled.

How To Generate Interest: Be Interesting

The fallout from the Boston/Rozhdestvensky debacle last week is continuing, in the press and the blogosphere, at least, and Boston Globe critic Jeremy Eichler advanced the conversation in what I thought was an interesting way in Sunday's paper:

The incident also shed light on a deeper problem of the orchestra condescending to a potential audience. If the BSO had the artistic vision to bring Rozhdestvensky to its stage, it should have had the marketing courage to stand behind its reasons for doing so.

Now, if I'm running the Boston Symphony, I have an easy rebuttal to that: artistic courage is all well and good, but are we really serving the public if we intentionally market ourselves in a manner that we know from past experience will either confuse people or put them off the music we're offering? How can we introduce people to an extraordinary conductor if they're not in the concert hall to begin with, and why should they come if our advertising implies that they're morons for not already having heard of one of the performers, especially if there's another performer on the program who they do know?

But Eichler fleshes out his argument in compelling fashion...

The plight of classical music in a free-market economy has never been an easy one, especially in this country... Yet the ace in the pocket of orchestras and performing arts groups is that they are selling an experience that is simply not interchangeable with anything else. But it is easy for that message to get lost as marketing strategies increasingly come to mimic the techniques of the entertainment industry at large. Is there really no other way?

Well, there might be. And I like Eichler's focus on the singular experience of live music in a great concert hall as the product we ought really to be promoting, rather than semi-famous guest conductors and soloists. All of this, of course, goes back to a problem we've discussed here in the past: programs that marketers believe will sell poorly if marketed honestly (regardless of their artistic merit) are increasingly being sold to the public as something other than what they are. (Exhibit A would be that Mahler 8/Schubert Unfinished incident from last spring that upset a number of you Mahler fans. It happened again this fall with Sarah's subscription concert debut, when a program of Lutoslawski and Shchedrin concertos for orchestra was advertised as "Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante," which was clearly not the centerpiece of the evening, and wasn't the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante most music fans would have assumed it was, in any case.)

Eichler sums it all up better than I could:

When the BSO chooses to present innovative programs, that approach should be trumpeted, not seen as a reason for apology... Ultimately, the easiest way to market classical music is to have something genuinely exciting to sell.

Harold In The Balcony

It's been an interesting week at Orchestra Hall, in part because we're working with one of my favorite guest conductors, in part because there was a 46-hour turkey-related gap between our first and second concerts of the week (always dangerous, since professional orchestras work by creating extremely fast muscle memory for each week's program, then discarding and starting again the next week,) but mostly because we're playing Berlioz's Harold in Italy, the world's strangest viola concerto.

In truth, Harold isn't a concerto at all. It's more of a symphonic tone poem which happens to feature a particular solo instrument. (Not unlike Strauss's Don Quixote, which features the cello and viola as the title character and his trusty sidekick.) For the bulk of the first movement of the piece, the viola is front and center, playing more or less as a soloist with the orchestra chiming in on several extended tutti passages. But in the second movement, the solo viola doesn't play a lot, and what he does play is mainly accompanying the melodic progression of the orchestra. In the third movement, the orchestra keeps playing the melodies, while the viola chimes in occasionally with a bit of an obligato over the top of things. And finally, the finale barely features the soloist at all, other than a few flourishes at the beginning that hearken back to earlier movements. In fact, some violists choose to either melt back into the orchestra at this point, or at least start playing the orchestral viola parts from the soloist's position, just to avoid having to spend ten minutes standing there looking like a dweeb while the orchestra finishes your concerto for you.

So while Harold is a very fun piece to play and listen to, it's a bit awkward to watch if you're used to the traditional interplay between orchestra and soloist. Our principal viola, Tom Turner, actually called a number of colleagues around the world before the week began to ask how they handle the odd semi-soloist role. He got a number of opinions, but nothing that really dealt with the problem. But on the second day of rehearsals, Tom and conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier hit on a bizarre but surprisingly effective solution.

(Spoiler Alert: I've waited to write about this until the end of the week, in case a bunch of you were planning to come to the concerts. But we've still got the Saturday night concert to come, so if you're holding tickets for tonight, or think you might want to stop by, you'll be wanting to wait to read the rest of this post. Trust me - the whole effect is much more fun if you don't know what's coming ahead of time...)

So, what happens in the Tortelier/Turner version of Harold is that, towards the end of the first movement, when the viola has played its last solo and the orchestra is crashing through our last tutti, Tom takes his instrument off his shoulder, turns a few pages in his score, and then walks briskly down a set of stairs attached to the front of the stage, and walks straight out one of the doors on the main floor to the right of the stage. He's gone before we finish the movement, as the audience stares and tries to figure out what's gone wrong. (Our audiences thus far have seemed about evenly divided between those who are utterly baffled by this, and those who figure out almost immediately what's going on.)

As we begin the second movement, a pilgrim's march led by the strings, Tom is nowhere to be seen. And it isn't until a minute or so later that he reappears, standing in the corner of the first balcony overhanging stage right. From that position, he plays nearly the entire second movement, which creates the effect of the accompanying viola hovering over the orchestra sonically - it's more clear to the audience that he is no longer in a traditional solo role than it would be were he still standing at the front of the stage playing arpeggios. As the movement ends, Tom again turns and leaves the concert hall, stopping outside the balcony door long enough to play his final phrase from out in the hallway, with the door held open by one of our crew.

The third movement begins with a sort of sea shanty in the violas and piccolo, after which a lyrical motion takes over. This time, Tom pops up in the opposite balcony, again overhanging the orchestra and using his position to sing his obligato lines over the top of the ensemble. Again, he leaves before the end of the movement, and this time, as he plays his closing cadence from outside the door, the crew actually lets the door swing slowly shut, creating a real-life fadeout.

At this point, while the orchestra and conductor catch our breath and the audience begins looking around for where else the soloist might materialize, Tom essentially has to run out the balcony door, down a flight of stairs, up a sloping hallway, and into the very back of the hall on the main floor. We give him roughly an extra 20 seconds to accomplish this, but he has no chance to reach his position before we start the finale, and the conductor would ruin the effect by looking back to see if he's there before giving our cue, so there's a fair amount of trust involved. Were Tom to trip and fall on the way down the stairs, things could get interesting.

As it is, we start the last movement, and almost immediately, Tom is singing out from behind everyone. As his first phrase finishes, and the orchestra takes over, he stalks down the aisle and takes up a new position about two-thirds of the way to the stage, where he plays his next solo entrance (while, it should be said, mugging for the crowd around him a bit.) Following that, he walks to a third position nearly right in front of the stairs he came down at the end of the first movement, and plays one more solo line, before bolting up the stairs, striking a bit of a pose, and launching into the last real solo passage he'll play before the orchestra takes us the rest of the way. By this time, a good percentage of the audience seems to be grinning back at Tom, and he's been tossing a few smirks the way of the viola section as he swashbuckles through this last bit.

For the remainder of the performance, Tom essentially becomes our principal viola again, albeit a principal standing apart from us. He plays most of the orchestral passages, and finishes the piece as part of the larger ensemble. But since he's already played so many different roles over the course of the performance, it doesn't seem in the least odd, and the ovation he's been getting would seem to indicate that the crowd approves of the theatrics. It's always dicey to add a non-traditional element to an orchestra concert (Will the critics approve? Will our more traditional-minded concertgoers tolerate it? Will anyone understand what we're trying to do?), but in this case, it's definitely been worth the effort. I'm now firmly of the belief that Harold should always be played this way.

(A funny moment happened following the first performance of the week, as the violas crowded backstage to congratulate Tom. As we all marveled at his calmness in such an unusual situation, and his smooth transitions between the movements, the most veteran member of our section, Tokyo-born Eiji Ikeda, came up to shake Tom's hand, but then shook his head and admonished our principal. "Tom," said Eiji, "why you no make costume changes between movements?")

So, if any of you were at the concerts, I'm curious to hear how you reacted. Were you shocked? Amused? Bemused? Let us know in the comments, and enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend...