Sometimes finding the right concerto for an event can be challenging, and Jaemi made me think a lot this time (in fact Jaemi makes me think a lot in general, see here!). I initially planned to play Ravel’s G major but some copyright issues and rental fee seemed to make our lives a little more complicated : it meant extra fundraising and extra work. I was not really aware of these problems, and in my opinion that’s not problems you want to struggle with for your first season. So I decided to look for an other solution.

I played a little Saint-Saens’ 5th concerto, a little Brahms’ 2nd concerto and checked instrumentation. Wonderful piano concerti, but the instrumentation required a lot of players and I wasn’t feeling like playing them anytime soon. And then I had an idea. Why not Rachmaninoff d minor ? Instrumentation OK. Copyright OK. What about me? Ok or not?

Rachmaninoff concerto in d minor op. 30

In fact I was really surprised : I had not played this for years, and but the concerto was still feeling fresh in my mind and a lot of joyful memories emerged. I practiced this concerto as a student a decade ago, and I could remember how proud I was in those times : I was the one playing Rach 3. Yes, this concerto has a particular connotation for pianists as it is supposed to be the most difficult piano concerto in the standard repertoire. I found out later when practicing his second concerto that Prokofieff wrote terrible things too, even more challenging than Rachmaninoff.

At first there was the challenge, of course, like other pianists I guess. But When I started practicing it, I discovered the real beauty of this work, how wonderful was this music. From the performer point of view, I really enjoy playing it and I feel like the orchestra is enjoying it : it is not only a brilliant work for the piano but also for the whole orchestra. Anyway, this concerto was thus my offer to Jaemi and the HHO, and I would be thrilled to play this with them!

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I would like to begin with a quote from Maurizio Pollini: “People who go to concerts are occupied during the day with completely different things than music. It is therefore not for them to decide what one plays or not”.

Is it necessary to play what the audience wants to hear? No, it is not. Building a program is an art and a science. A program, by letting the “law of the market” operate, looks more like a medley of classical music endless hits than a program which has been coherently drawn up.

To attract a new audience, nowadays, there are crossover concerts, combining different styles within the same concert. Let’s take, for example, a great singer and make her/him sing Haendel, Fauré with some arrangements of Norah Jones or The Beatles in between. This is quite simply stupid: you might as well be asking your plumber to fix the roof. As classical musicians, we are not trained for this and are only able to give ridiculous or pompous versions of these music genres.

Instead of making us perform what we are not able to do, or lobotomize our programs, it would be interesting to notice that the programming of contemporary works is always a success with audiences which are not much or not at all used to classical concerts.

Could “broadening the audience” and “updating the programming” rhyme? Should we not, at last, for the greatest pleasure of all, commonly and durably combine Chopin with Boulez, Beethoven with Murail? The music of our times has often proved that it could attract young audiences!

There is a French idiom saying “One is only old in one’s mind”. Programming does not need a facelift, but it is necessary to stop making it voluntarily old. Classical music is alive and its forces are intact, but as a result of living too much in the past, it now seems old and moribund. It’s up to us, interpreters, to follow our artistic path and to refuse to be confined, without trying to make programming a tool to reach an ephemeral glory.

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Thanks to him, I fell in love with this music, so lilting, so colorful, by its wild and subtle rhythms. A pianist of great class was needed for such a work. Orozco wonderfully filled this role. From then on, I listened to many other versions by other pianists, but I have never experienced the same sensation again.

I would have loved to see him play, but Rafael Orozco left us too soon, in April 1996 at only 50 years old. Today, the little tape cassette on which I had recorded this concert is not readable anymore. Only the imperishable memory of a wonderful concert remains. However I would love to listen to this concert again and I’m hoping there might be somewhere (perhaps at France Musique, which broadcasted it) where to find this concert tape. Or maybe did someone record it?

The concert took place on Tuesday, August 4th, 1992 at 9:30 p.m, Parc du Château de Florans, during the La Roque d’Anthéron Festival: if someone knows where I could get this unpublished recording, please leave me a message.

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Richter used to say that there is nothing to see when a pianist is playing, nothing except work, and the spectator doesn’t need to see it. I totally agree with his thinking: a concert is above all for the ears, too often however, the pianist’s “show” prevails. We go to concerts to hear music not to see it. The problem would be perhaps that more and more people hear with their eyes…

Having tried the method on several occasions, a concert in the dark gives excellent results: a more quiet concert hall and less parasite noises. I could also feel from the public a very concentrated listening attention, and in return, I was more concentrated myself and played much better. During these experiences, the public always reacted very positively and found the experience much more pleasant.

For my part, I think that some works should be heard only in the half-light, especially for contemporary music. In this case, I do everything I can to play with the less light possible.

And you, have you ever attended this kind of concert? Did you like it? Would you attend it?

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More recently, announcements are succeeding one another: Yamaha has reduced its piano production and suppressed jobs, two big monthly magazines on culture merged to face up to the crisis, General Motors withdrawed as the lead sponsor of the Montreal International Jazz Festival… The examples are numerous, showing that the crisis is affecting the arts.

The fact is that classical music is essentially subsidized by private sponsoring and/or state funds. States are now drawing huge sums to bail out banks and companies in difficulty, leading to savings in less “visible” budgets (culture, for example), and the private sponsoring to tick over, the said companies having less liquid assets for sponsoring.

Now a question which concerns me: who will then subsidize festivals, which are necessary for musicians to make a living? Who will fund municipal or national cultural policies? Will we have to radically change our work habits in order to still be able to make a living from our art? To go in for something new?

Not that easy to see through this mess, and even less easy to know what’s going to be cooked up for us!

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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.

Against all expectation, this article was published in the Wall Street Journal and confirmed what I was thinking: no, classical music isn’t dead, but quite the opposite, concerts are going well. The number of concerts has exponentially increased during the last forty years, the number of professional orchestras too. More and more young people learn to play an instrument. “An ageing public” you’d say? Classical music has never been a young people’s affair until now, and efforts made to rejuvenate the image of classical music and get new audience have just begun to bear fruit.

Would the sound reproduction be an impediment to the live concert? Would the multimedia change the culture consumer’s behavior by allowing him to do his own home-concert? Though conceivable, this trend won’t grow and won’t be harmful to the concert, but quite the opposite. No hi-fi system will replace the unique experience of the live performance. On the contrary, discs and mp3s can make a new audience go to concerts.

These days, live performance is going well, even if we’d have to find a more flexible concept of concert allowing an audience less accustomed to the concert ritual to swell the ranks of classical music lovers. Hard to please a potential audience without dissatisfying the existing one, but with time we will make it.

And now a question for you, dear readers: how should we improve classical music concerts?

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“We should relax when we listen to music” commented a young woman, admitting she was deeply sleeping during the concert. Many guests woke up when they heard applause. The organizers’ spokesperson explained the initiative: “One tend to think people should sit down and listen somberly to a classical concert. We think it would be better if people could relax, lying down on a bed and having a tasty ice cream“.

If, of course, these concerts had essentially a commercial purpose for Häagen-Dazs (the promotion of “de-stressing” new flavours) I’m beginning to wonder about the validity of such a concept, which could (unfortunately?) multiply.

After the reading of this news item, I asked myself many questions. Naturally, the first was: what was then the purpose to play music in front of a sleeping audience? I’m still trying to find… Wouldn’t it be to create a sound background enabling people to nod off? I dare to hope I’m wrong, this would be an insult to classical music and treat it as a mere lift music.

But is classical music relaxing? I don’t think so neither. Based on the tension/resolution system (at least in tonal music, ie. the one listened to “relax”), I difficultly see how a series of tensions and resolutions could become relaxing.

On the other hand, where is the respect for the musician, who worked for weeks or months?, when in front of him, a slouch audience, sleeping or eating ice cream, is listening with one ear and is not concentrated on the sound result…

As you’ve understood, I’m not for this kind of initiative. And you, what do you think about it?

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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, including noises too.

Among sound pollution of our concert halls, you can of course find the same type of noises as in the everyday life. The noisiest pollution is undoubtedly the cellular phone. It appears all the same unthinkable to me that the owners of these small diabolic machines can let them on during a representation. We saw flowering, a long time ago, (it is now a part of the ritual) the announcements at the beginning of each concert. I can understand that certain jobs require to be reachable 24H a day but there is also the vibrate mode, much more silent. Finally some artists stopped concerts and left stage after hearing a ringing cellular, so now people are paying attention to this and this plague almost disappeared.

Another noise very common: the coughing fit. If it is less controllable than the telephone, you can at least limit its effects. A website advises “to try to control your cough or your sneezes. If someone is prone to cough, to take cough syrup before going to the concert can help to solve the problem. A good way to reduce the noise of a sneeze consists in putting the mouth in the elbow; you can also try to wait till the sound volume is particularly loud”. Without working up to swallow a complete pharmacy before going to a concert, certain English halls lavish illustrated advices in their programs: to cough in a pocket-handkerchief. Sometimes even the handkerchiefs are distributed at the entry of the hall. Indeed, to cough in a handkerchief makes it possible to reduce considerably the sound impact of cough. Yet, certain diabolic music lovers keep on coughing as if they were at home, which led Pierre-Laurent Aimard to stop a concert at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées and to address to public in those words: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to remind you that a concert hall is made to play music and not to cough”. Perhaps soon an announcement similar to those used for phone, and a film entitled “how to cough in a handkerchief?” will help us to solve the problem?

Another type of spectators poison the halls: candy eaters. Coughing drops eaters? It is the same for me, they had to anticipate! Who hasn’t been confronted to these cruel beings who unfold their candy papers cautiously? Let’s say it once for all: unfold quickly or, it’s even better: do not eat candies! And afterwards, what to do with the paper? To fold up and put it into your bag? You want to make noise again? Throw it rather on the ground and wait for the interval! If you must absolutely take coughing drops, unpack them before the concert and put them in a box or a handkerchief, for godsake! I won’t speak about zips, velcros, and so on… it’s all the same: do it quickly.

There are plenty of pollutions to quote like the applause at an inappropriate time, crackings of broken armchairs… the list is long! Very often, people attribute to younger these misdeeds, whereas from the stage or room, I noticed that it is seldom them who are involved. I was often very surprised of the extreme attention of young people contrary to other spectators known as “adult” obviously accustomed concert, but not respecting anyone. Of course, I also saw parents sitting their children stirring up and noisy at the first rank, but I would rather show to finger in this case the parents. Could we think that the parents paying the most expensive seats, acquire at the same time the right to sit there their children without any shame for the inconvenience?

In a concert hall, there is in my opinion for the spectator only one rule: attention. Silence is a corollary of attention as well as a mark of respect towards the other spectators and the musicians, and is necessary to a concert. Only one rule, then let us respect it!

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