The Theatre of Music

Music performance practice is a far wider field than just where to use inégale in French Baroque music or how to handle cadential trills. It should actually include the whole theatre of performance as we find in opera: lighting, movement on stage, entrances and exits and a host of other details. I am moved to these thoughts by two recent orchestral performances. First, the gala opening night of the San Francisco Symphony with its new music director Esa-Pekka Salonen. I just mentioned this in yesterday's Miscellanea:

The programming for the evening, dubbed “Re-Opening Night,” was fierce and dynamic, without a note of music from the standard repertoire. At the heart of the evening was an expansive stylistic hybrid by Wayne Shorter, melding jazz and orchestral strains and featuring the inimitable Grammy-winning bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding. There were dancers from Alonzo King Lines Ballet, performing on a large thrust stage.

I wish I had been there for that! Read the whole thing. The other concert was in Salzburg in August and I wrote about it here: Currentzis Rocks Rameau.

But what was really remarkable last night was the basic conception of the music, what I have characterized as Currentzis rocks Rameau. Currentzis is of the wiggly-finger school of conducting (à la Gergiev) and one of the delights was watching him wiggle his fingers as he conducted his soprano in extended trills. He leaps in the air, stamps his feet and occasionally wanders among the orchestra, sometimes with a drum. Oh, and so does the orchestra: leap in the air, stamp their feet and occasionally wander around. Everything is done to de-formalize and re-energize the approach to the music and while I am usually skeptical of this kind of thing, last night it was done superbly well.

A lot of the performance was done in semi-darkness with just stand lights and the first half ended with the whole orchestra trooping offstage in darkness as they continued to play the last refrain of a contredanse from Les Boréades.

I think that both Salonen and Currentzis have a handle on what is going to really work for contemporary audiences as witnessed by the audience responses. The standard orchestral performance with the formality and the restraint and the hushed silence is really a response to the 19th century mode of music expression where what was sought was the "romantic trance" in which both the players and the audience go deep inside in a kind of meditative transformation. But there are other modes of performance! Currentzis is harkening back to a more 18th century style in which there is a kind of boisterous theatricality. Salzburg has a slightly conservative reputation, but one could imagine, during the blacked out parts of the performance, some of the audience members, in the private boxes at least, might have engaged in the kind of erotic encounters that were typical in the 18th century!

Salonen, on the other hand, appears to be channeling the "happening" kind of event that came about in the 1960s, but with better musical substance. A wild, multimedia event that is, when well done, irresistable. Looking back on my own career, I think the most memorable concert I can recall participating in was the Canadian premiere of El Cimarrón by Hans Werner Henze, a chamber opera for baritone, flute, guitar and percussion in which all the performers play a lot of percussion instruments in addition to their usual one. We also used lighting to enhance the performance and there was a wild concatenation of musical styles from aleatory to declamatory recitative to Cuban folk idioms.

What I find most interesting here is that a really good solution to the problem of audience apathy is not pandering to their tastes or filleting in pop music, but by making creative musical decisions with real substance behind them.

Love to hear your thoughts...

For an envoi here is a tiny taste of Correntzis' Rameau without any theatre:

And here is the first half of El Cimarrón, sung in English: