Yesterday, I have been going through my music bookshelves, digging for a piano concerto. I was looking for something really specific as it has to be something fitting the requirements of an emerging community orchestra and my practice schedule. My friend the conductor Jaemi Loeb initiated the project and created the Houston Heights Orchestra and I immediately offered her my help.

In the first part of Is it necessary to give Classical Music a facelift?, we talked about dress at concerts. Today, I would like to share with you my thoughts on concert programming. A good programming is indeed essential. However, isn’t it tiring to hear the same works every year, everywhere in the world? “It’s the law of the market!”, organizers and agents say, “you must play what the audience wants to listen to”. But if we do not introduce anything new to the audience, they won’t ever want anything else. And, as the audience cannot know all the repertoire, one always finds the same works in most programs.

… And along with him, a good part of Spanish classical music. This brings me back to a time long ago, some 17 years. At this time, I used to listen to radio a lot and at the same time, I was discovering Ravel’s works for piano. Until one day I chanced upon a public radio broadcast of a concert, which took place some months before at the La Roque d’Anthéron Festival. There, Spanish pianist Rafael Orozco was performing Albéniz’s complete Iberia.

At the end of his career, Sviatoslav Richter liked to play in the dark with just a little lighting so he could see the keyboard. He disappeared thus in the concert hall’s shadow. But why concerts in the dark? Playing in the dark increases the concentration of the audience and allows to focus on the essential: music.

For some weeks now, we hear a lot about the financial crisis. A bank goes bankrupt, another one loses hundreds of millions, some big companies considered solid falter. The media go on and on about the consequences on the world economy, but we hear almost nothing about the effects on the art scene. Yet its consequences promise to be disastrous.

This topic has already been discussed extensively: classical music is a thing of the past and is thus doomed to extinction. Don’t you see all those “white hairs” in concert halls? Thanks to a post in muse affiliée, I’ve recently discovered an article by conductor Leon Bolstein, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

Some time ago, the famous ice cream brand Häagen-Dazs organized a two days event called “Dolce Heavenly Concert” in Tokyo. The “revolutionary” idea was to replace the hall seats with beds. The guests were therefore stretched out on luxury beds and had as much ice cream as they desired…

Today let’s speak about what occurs in the public during a concert. If certain halls are extraordinary quiet, others are absolutely not. The main problem of a concert hall: it is built to diffuse the sound, ALL sounds, so the noises too.