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Recently, The Guardian published an article by Leo Benedictus on the subject of badly behaved audiences at theatre, film, concerts, and similar events. The article included a sort of ‘manifesto’ for audiences, with tips and advice on how not to behave. It is both amusing and true. I ran an informal poll amongst Twitter and Facebook followers, asking for people to submit their particular “audience irritations”. The best ones follow below:
People who sit behind and scratch their knees… An odd one I know, but sat in a tiered theatre their knees are at ear level!
Flash photography when one is performing – very distracting!
People talking through overtures is my worst bugbear. I was at South Pacific in Cardiff recently and it was so noisy throughout the overture, and the chap behind me constantly was singing and humming along to most of the songs and making comments….
At a Proms concert once, I saw a Prommer reading a John Grisham novel while Abbado conducting the Bruckner’s 9th symphony provided some no doubt pleasant background music.
Child unwrapping sweets during a Bach Suite… grrrrrr!
People who go to a concert with a cold! Sniffling every other minute. So distracting, inconsiderate and unhygienic!
Re. hummers, I remember childhood carol services at church where every year, without fail, one old man who couldn’t sing in tune to save his life would persist in joining in with the solo first verse of Once in Royal. Pity whichever poor child had been given that dubious privilege…
I was at a Chopin recital where the man next to me hummed tunelessly throughout Chopin’s last Piano Sonata (indeed, throughout the entire concert!). It reminded me of a sketch from ‘Alas Smith & Jones’ in which a certain concert-goer (Smith) hums throughout the performance. Another (Jones) becomes very irritated by this and starts shushing the hummer, only to be told by others around him: “Would you please be quiet? We have come here tonight specifically to hear Mr Smith humming!”
Because of the average age of its audience (very elderly), the Wigmore auditorium is often a cacophony of whistling hearing aids, snuffling, stentorian snoring, and – particularly at lunchtime recitals – satisfied, fruity farting (the sign of a good lunch in the Wigmore restaurant!)
My father’s first visit to Carnegie Hall was marred by a man in front of him who conducted, from his seat, with full score, throughout a Beethoven Symphony.
Please feel free to share your own particular “audience irritations” via the comments box!
Read Leo Benedictus’ article in The Guardian here
This afternoon is my annual student concert. On one level, this is simply a happy gathering of children, parents, family and friends, and an opportunity for my students to share and show off the music they have been studying recently. The programme, as always, is selected by my students, resulting in an eclectic mix of music, and an indication of the wide variety of repertoire we study. Each performer has chosen pieces which reflect his or her particular tastes and skills – surely the basis for any musician’s selection of repertoire?
On another level, the concert is about sharing music. A professional pianist, who I interviewed some years ago, described performing as “a cultural gift”: a gift to oneself and a gift to those who love to hear the piano and its literature, a sharing of the music between soloist and audience. As a performer, one enjoys a huge responsibility, and privilege, rather like a conservator or curator, in presenting this wonderful music to others.
Performing is a very special experience, and one which I have come to relatively late in my musical career. As a pianist at school I was sidelined, encouraged to learn an orchestral instrument, and to recede into the relative anonymity of first desk clarinet. My then piano teacher never organised concerts for her students, and I only played one festival in my teens (an excruciatingly awful experience). At the last school concert before I left to go to university, I was allowed to play the first movement of a Mozart piano sonata. Apart from that, ‘performing’ was limited to taking piano exams. My current teacher gave me the confidence and self-belief to perform, starting with the informal concerts which she hosts at the end of her twice-yearly piano courses. While not as nerve-wracking as playing in a ‘proper’ concert hall, these concerts have their own special atmosphere and attendant anxieties, but the nicest part is the sense that the audience is there because they love to hear piano music, and at every concert I’ve played at Penelope’s house, I’ve felt this important communication between performer and audience.
Of course, performing is not just about playing pretty pieces to other people. To be a performer, one needs to hone a stage personality which is different from the personality which encourages disciplined, focused practising day in, day out, to prepare repertoire for the performance (pianist and teacher Graham Fitch has blogged about this in detail – read his post here). While one’s onstage personality should never obscure the music, one should be able to present oneself convincingly to the audience – and not just through the medium of the music.
There are all sorts of ‘rituals’ involved in performing: travelling to the venue – by car, train or taxi; the clothes one wears; waiting in the green room (whether an elegant space such as at Wigmore Hall, or a dreary municipal cubicle); then waiting to go on stage, behind a door, or a plush velvet curtain, just offstage, pulse racing, real fear now passed, only excited anticipation, and enough adrenaline coursing through the veins to propel one onto the stage. Then the door opens, the curtain swings back, and the adventure of the performance has already begun as one crosses the stage. Applause: the audience’s way of greeting one, and, in return, a bow, one’s way of acknowledging the audience. And now, isolated at the keyboard, the full nine feet of concert grand stretched before one, ready to begin, the brief moment before starting a work resembles nothing else. One has a sense of the awesome formality of the occasion, the responsibility, the knowledge that, once begun, the performance cannot be withdrawn. It identifies the music, singles it out for scrutiny: it is irrevocable. All these things combined are the ‘adventure’ of performing.
Whether my students will have a sense of this ‘adventure’ this afternoon I am not sure. I know some are very nervous: one of my students has never performed in one of my concerts before, and to help with her anxiety, I have placed her near the start in the running order, so she can play her piece and then sit back and enjoy the rest of the occasion. Others, who have been learning with me almost as long as I’ve been teaching, betray no nerves and seem to actively enjoy the chance to ‘show off’ to family and friends. Some play with real chutzpah and flair, others prefer to simply play the notes, but each and every performance will be unique, special and memorable. I should probably remember to take some tissues!
Normansfield Theatre, Teddington, where I hold my student concerts
Here are the ten posts which received the most traffic on this blog in 2011. Enjoy – and Happy New Year!
Describing music – in words and sound
Guest post: FLOW – Transforming Your Practice
Playing the Beethoven Piano Sonatas
Should You be Practising Right Now?
Music Apps for iPhone and iPad
Maurizio Pollini plays Beethoven’s Last Sonatas
The Top 10 Classical Music Composers
Review: Mahan Esfahani Plays the Goldberg Variations
I’d love more guests posts in 2012. If you are interested in contributing to this blog, please contact me via the comments box on this post, or Facebook or Twitter (@crosseyedpiano).
Many thanks to all my readers.
A brief review of the great, the good and the fair-to-middling concerts I have attended this year. As regular readers of this blog will know, since April of this year, I have been reviewing for online listings site Bachtrack. This has given me the opportunity to enjoy even more live music, and combines two of my great passions: music and writing. I have included links to my reviews, where appropriate, in this post.
Outstanding
Ian Bostridge at Wigmore Hall. I have been a fan of tenor Ian Bostridge for some years now, after hearing him as the Evangelist in Bach’s St John Passion. A striking concert of songs of love, loss and longing by Purcell, Bach, Haydn, Britten and Weill.
Maurizio Pollini at the Royal Festival Hall. Grand elder statesman of the piano, Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini demonstrated his great range in an extraordinary concert of music by Chopin, Debussy and Boulez.
Prom 54: Marc-André Hamelin. My first ever late-night Prom, and a superb recital of music by Franz Liszt in this his bicentenary year.
Watch this space
Two young performers greatly impressed me this season: the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani (who I discovered via Norman Lebrecht’s blog), and cellist Joy Lisney. Esfahani, a fiercely intellectual musician, brought the Goldberg Variations to life in new and wonderful ways in his Prom at Cadogan Hall, while Joy, in her London debut at St John’s Smith Square, demonstrated a musical maturity far beyond her years, as well as a commanding yet modest stage presence, and beautiful playing.
Other highlights
Leon McCawley at King’s Place. The final concert in McCawley’s four-recital survey of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas, my first review for Bachtrack, and my first visit to King’s Place.
Charles Rosen all-Chopin concert. How wonderful to see the 85 year old Rosen still performing, touring and enjoying it. A concert which divided critics – there was some uneven playing and several scary memory lapses – I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Prom 68: Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra with Hélène Grimaud. A concert which definitely falls into the category of “a great night out”. The Pittsburgh SO impressed me with their fine brass and woodwind, and convinced me that I should start going to orchestral concerts again.
Penelope Roskell at Sutton House. Despite a 2-hour trek across London to get to Hackney, it was a pleasure to hear my piano teacher in a concert juxtaposing Bach with Schumann. And Sutton House is a charming venue which deserves our support. (Sutton House Music Society)
Disappointing
Di Xiao at Wigmore Hall. Despite her glamorous photographs, Miss Xiao failed to impress me in her debut at the Wigmore Hall. I think part of the problem for me was the appallingly badly written programme notes and the rather saccharine title of the concert ‘Moonlight Reflections’. However, she gave convincing performances of Ravel and Messiaen, and I would hear her again when she has matured a little.
No review of my concert year would be complete without a mention of my students’ summer concert, a very enjoyable occasion featuring a wide range of repertoire, selected by the children.
Looking ahead to 2012, I have tickets for Peter Donohoe and Mitsuko Uchida (in Schubert’s last three sonatas) at the Southbank, and hope to review Jonathan Biss and Peter Jablonski in January. I am also embarking on a new ‘career’ as an arts reviewer for Bachtrack’s new sister site, OneStopArts, thus adding yet another string to my already rather busy bow!
My reviewing job for Bachtrack.com has enabled me to attend many more concerts than I used to, and I am at the Southbank at least as frequently as I am at the Wigmore Hall these days.
Each venue has its own audience, with its own quirks and foibles. The Wigmore audience is famously high-brow – or at least would like to be regarded as high-brow – elderly and “north London” (the hall is often nicknamed ‘The North London Concert Hall’). Members of the audience are expected to sit in reverential silence, to know when to clap, and to generally behave impeccably. I have twice been asked to remove my watch at the Wigmore because “the tick is too loud”. Sometimes, if a member of the audience coughs too much, or fidgets, or – Heaven forfend! – rustles a programme, they will be met with fierce looks and angry, hissed “shusshings”. It is therefore always interesting to see who has turned out for a more unusual or adventurous concert programme, or a young performer debuting at the Wigmore (“doing a Wigmore” as it is known in the trade). At Di Xiao’s recent debut, the audience were younger, many were fellow Chinese, and my friend and I also spotted quite a few musical “slebs” including cellist Julian Lloyd-Weber. The presence of such “slebs” may suggest that these people know something we don’t, or that the soloist is “one to watch”. Last summer, at a charming and touching Chopin concert with readings, organised by pianist Lucy Parham, one couldn’t move for theatrical lovies: both the Fox’s, Martin Jarvis, Timothy West and Prunella Scales, to drop but a few names. Stephen Hough tends to attract young, mostly gay, acolytes, and if Till Fellner is performing, you can almost guarantee to see his teacher, Alfred Brendel in the front bar. As a member of the ‘press pack’ now, I often arrive at a concert to find the venue has put all the journos together (excellent seats at RFH and QEH, right at the back at the Wigmore), and we all scribble away trying not to read what our neighbour has written, just like being back at school!
The audience at Cadogan Hall is different. Stepping into the champagne bar there’s always a great buzz of chat and shouts of laughter, enough to suggest that this audience is likely to be younger, more awake and maybe more receptive to what they are about to hear. Audiences on the Southbank are generally younger, more trendy, more relaxed, while the Proms audience is different again – a real mixture of music afficionados, groupies, students, curious tourists, old timers who go year after year and people who are just beginning to explore the great annual music festival. The enthusiasm of the Proms audience is really infectious and undoubtedly contributed to my enjoyment of the Proms this summer.
Sometimes the soloist or musicians themselves can affect the way the audience responds and behaves during a concert. At Maria Joao Pires’s wonderful Schubert series at the Wigmore a few years ago, the musicians (the Brodsky Quartet and singer Rufus Muller) remained on the stage while Pires played her solo pieces (a selection of Schubert’s Impromptus) and the audience was asked not to applaud until the end of the first half. This created a wonderful sense of an intimate, shared event, and we might have been in Schubert’s salon, enjoying an evening of music making amongst friends, for friends.
But if we, the audience, are too much in awe of the soloist, we can put up invisible barriers which can affect the atmosphere in the concert hall. This was very apparent when I heard Daniel Barenboim perform as part of his Beethoven Piano Sonatas series some years ago.
Recently, I’ve attended and performed in informal concerts in other people’s homes. My husband likes these kinds of concerts, with wine and friends and chat between pieces. As he rightly points out, this is a much more natural way of enjoying music that was written before c1850 (when Liszt, almost single-handedly, made the concert into the event as we know it today), and reminds us that music is, above all, for sharing. With the increasing popularity of presenting music in more unusual and intimate venues like The Red Hedgehog or Sutton House (London), or in the beautiful library of the cloisters in Wittem (Belgium), musicians are able to bring music much closer to the audience, literally and metaphorically, while events such as Speed Dating with the OAE (Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) offer audiences the chance to meet the musicians after the performance.
Some other small venues:
Woodhouse Copse, near Dorking, Surrey
Riverhouse Barn Arts Centre, Walton, Surrey
Guildford Guildhall, Surrey
The Forge, Camden, London
Rook Lane Arts Centre, Frome, Somerset
Normansfield Theatre
On Sunday, I hosted my students’ summer concert, at the lovely and unusual venue of Normansfield Theatre at Langdon Down Centre, one of south-west London’s “hidden gems”. The theatre, a grade 2 listed building, boasts a good acoustic and a very nice baby grand piano. I have always encouraged my students to perform in concerts: when I first started teaching, I hosted informal concerts in my home, and in the summer, the parents would sit in the garden (my piano is in the conservatory extension at the back of my house), and afterwards, the children could all run around the mews where I live, and let off steam, before the obligatory tea party. When I was learning piano as a child, I almost never played in concerts – and certainly not concerts organised by my piano teacher. At school, pianists were sidelined, while ensemble playing was actively encouraged (the endless need, at school, to be a “team player”). Thus, without performance practice, I grew to fear it and, until quite recently, regarded performing for others as a terrifying experience, akin to being asked to remove all my clothing and played naked.
The value of performing for others should not be underestimated, and the ability to get up and do it represents an important life skill, something from which I hope my students will benefit when they enter adulthood (even if they are no longer playing the piano). It breeds confidence and self-reliance.
As pianists, we spend an inordinate, almost unhealthy amount of time alone with our instrument, with only dead composers for companions, while other musicians belong to ensembles and orchestras, and have the opportunity to strike ideas off one another and have a laugh together. The life of the pianist has always been rather rarefied: even the way we perform is different. While other instrumentalists face the audience, the pianist does not, thus adding to the mystique. Pianists are also the only ones who are expected to memorise the music, and the amount of notes one is required to process is far, far greater than, say, a ‘cellist, or a clarinet player. The pressure is on, before we have even sat down and played a single note!
In the preamble to my concerts, I always emphasise that music is for sharing, and that between audience and performer and composer a wonderful continuous circle exists. Performing endorses what we do alone, for hours and hours, and days and days. It puts the music “out there”, validates it and singles it out for scrutiny, and as a performer, one has a sense of the awesome responsibility of the occasion, and the knowledge that, once begun, a performance cannot be withdrawn. Unexpected things can happen during a performance – and this is one of the aspects of live music that make it exciting. The most wonderful frisson can occur when one feels one’s performance has actually melded with the composer’s original idea, and that the audience have sensed this too. Performing is also a “cultural gift”, to oneself, and to those who love to listen to the piano.
Performing is an adventure, and a heroic act, not least because of the amount of preparation that is required. It is the natural extension of our love of the instrument and its literature, and it is a huge privilege to share this with others. Nervousness is the price one pays for this privilege, and enduring it and turning it around into a positive experience, is an act of self-mastery, another fundamental life skill, which encourages self-dependence, and a total reliance on our inner resources.
Performing also adds to one’s credibility. Whether a professional or an amateur, it is important to prove that you can actually do it, and, for the amateur pianist, the benefits of performing are immeasurable: you never really demonstrate your technique properly until you can demonstrate it in a performance. Music and technique are inseparable, and if you perform successfully, it proves you have practised correctly and thoughtfully, instead of simply note-bashing. This works conversely too, for if you are properly prepared, you should have nothing to fear when you perform. The benefits for younger students are even greater: preparing music for performance teaches them to complete a real task and to understand what is meant by “music making”. It encourages students to “play through”, glossing over errors rather than being bothered by them, instead of stop-start playing which prevents proper flow. It also teaches students to communicate a sense of the music, to “tell the story”, and to understand what the composer is trying to say. And if you haven’t performed a piece, how can you say it is truly “finished”?
In the hours after a performance, a special kind of depression can set in, compounded by a profound tiredness. A vast amount of energy has been expended in the experience of the performance, and the exhilaration of the concert floods every moment in the hours leading up to it. Suddenly, it is all over. It is at this low point that we must let the music take charge: the inexhaustible repertoire can only revive the spirit. As Seymour Bernstein says, in his excellent book ‘With Your Own Two Hands’, “for true musicians, depression is temporary because their music is permanent”. The only cure is to keep working, and to look forward to the next performance.
I’ve set my students what I hope will be an interesting and educational task for the forthcoming half-term break: they are going to write their own programme notes for the Summer Concert in July. I’m not expecting exhaustive analytical notes, nor extended composer biographies, but a few facts about the pieces they have chosen to play isn’t a lot to ask, surely?
Whenever I introduce a new piece to a student, whatever genre it is, we spend some time considering what the piece is about, the “story” it is telling, the pictures it paints. I get students to do very basic musical analysis – look for repeating motifs or patterns, identify articulation, dynamic and tempo markings, translate musical terms – and I try to give them some basic contextual information. For example, if learning a piece by Bach or even Mozart, it’s important to remember that neither composer was writing for anything like a modern piano. Or that Schubert was a composer of song. That Bartok was greatly influenced by the folk music of his native Hungary. I admit I was very surprised when the student who came to me for some extra exam tuition from another teacher had not been given any contextual or background information to the pieces she is learning. By asking my students to think a little more closely about the pieces they have chosen to play in the concert, I hope they may gain some new insights about them.
For me, setting the music in the context in which it was created is crucial to understanding the composer’s intentions and is a key to learning how to interpret all the composer’s markings and directions correctly to produce, eventually, a reading that is both musical and accurate. When I embark on a new piece, I do a great deal of background reading, and make extensive notes, both contextual and analytical.
At a professional concert, the best programme notes are often those which give one some historical background to the works, a brief composer biography and an overview of what is going on in the music (i.e. a list of movements or sections). Not everyone needs to know that a piece which opens in A minor may resolve itself in C, though an explanation of a Picardy Third can be enlightening. Facts about how the music came to be, such as the Quartet for the End of Time, which Messiaen composed while a prisoner of war, are interesting, but surmising on whether Chopin’s fondness for ‘miniatures’ suggests he may have been gay, are not. I think some writers of programme notes forget that many concert-goers are not expert musicologists or specialists, and all they require is a list of what they are going to hear with a brief description. At Charles Rosen’s Chopin recital last Sunday, one of my friends expressed a wish for a glossary of musical terms, a translation of all those curious Italian words. I told him that one of my students had recently interpreted Allegro ma non troppo as “fast but not trotting”, and that I always translate Allegro amabile as “smile as you quickly play”!
A number of musicians who I hear regularly like to introduce the music themselves. This serves several purposes: first, it breaks down that awful “them and us” barrier that can exist at concert venues; secondly, it allows the performer to explain the music as he or she sees it, and to offer some personal insights into what makes the music particularly interesting or special, both compositionally and in terms of what it is like, physically and emotionally, to play the work. At a lunchtime concert I attended last Friday, there were no programme notes, beyond a list of each work’s movements, and biographies of the performers. Instead, the musicians themselves introduced the music (Schubert’s Sonatina in A minor for Piano & Violin, Op. Posth. 137 and Strauss’s Violin Sonata in E Flat Op. 18). I knew very little about the Schubert Sonatina, and even less about the Strauss: both pieces were introduced engagingly, piquing my interest before a single note had been played. A couple of nuggets, such as the witty nod to Schubert’s Erlkönig and Beethoven’s Pathètique Sonata in the Strauss sonata, were flagged up in advance of the performance, though there were no prizes for spotting them (as I did)!
When my students come back after half-term with some facts about their pieces, and a brief biography, I will collate all the information into a main programme for the concert (including my own programme notes, of course!). This may be an amateur event, but I feel it is important to do it “properly” to create a sense of occasion for my students, who have, by and large, worked very hard this year. The concert is, as always, a celebration of that hard work, and a chance to share music with family and friends.
Strauss, Richard : Violin Sonata in E flat major Op.18 : I Allegro, ma non troppo
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A message on Twitter today, and blogs by Betty Herbert and Gretchens Pianos have prompted me to invite “guests posts” for this blog. Articles should be piano or at least music-related, and might be on an aspect of piano teaching or technique, a concert review, an amusing or interesting anecdote from the pianist’s bench, for example. You can submit under your own name or a nom de plume, if you prefer.
Please send your contributions to me by email at franwilson66@googlemail.com. Submissions will be subject to a degree of moderation, and text should, ideally, require little editing. Do include a photo or picture if you want to. Oh, and by the way, if you’re interested in cooking and food, check out my other blog Demon Cook I’m inviting guests posts for that too….. I look forward to hearing from you, and to reading your articles!
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