Post-Concert Receptions

I attended an orchestral concert last night. We are in the process of developing an orchestra and, as I missed the last concert they did due to my heart attack, I wanted to attend this one. The good news is they are coming along nicely. More precision and I noted more fine players than last time, especially in the winds. One of the pieces on the program was Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade which is quite a challenging piece for both conductor and orchestra.

Both last weekend and this weekend I attended post-concert receptions and dinners. Sometimes this is great fun, if you know enough people or get into interesting conversations. In the latter case, it helps if you have a particular role to play as this helps people start a conversation. Last weekend I had my songs premiered, so my role was 'composer' and some interesting conversations ensued. This weekend I was really at the concert to evaluate the orchestra's progress, something that is part of my duties as board member. But this is something of an incognito role.

So at the reception afterwards I was just floating around saying very little. Usually I have lots of opinions, but not this time. The reason was that I kept hearing things like "you gotta have a harp, it's essential in Rimsky-Korsakov and Beethoven!" True of the former, not true of the latter. I don't believe Beethoven ever wrote a note for the harp. But it would have been impolite to contradict the speaker and resulted in a pointless argument. I kept running into the same problem, so mostly I just kept my mouth shut and nodded politely while getting more and more bored. I'm not very good playing a regular schlub, I find!

You can find just about anything on YouTube. Here is our orchestra from a couple of seasons ago with the middle movement from the Haydn trumpet concerto. There are now almost twice as many musicians in the orchestra. Last night they did the Tchaikovsky violin concerto in a much bigger hall and did quite a good job of it.

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Lip-Synching: Everybody's Doing It!

For some reason there is a big fuss about the news that Beyoncé lip-synched her performance of the "Star-Spangled Banner" at the Presidential Inauguration on Monday. The New York Post is in high dudgeon. But classical musicians Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero and Anthony McGill did the very same thing four years ago at the 2008 Inauguration as discussed here. UPDATE: I should have said 2009 Inauguration!

What is lip-synching? Typically, a musical performance is recorded in a studio specifically designed for sound recording. This is so the best quality sound is recorded. Then, at a later event, which might be outside or in some other context where good sound or a precise performance is difficult, the performer mimes the performance to a playback of the recording. Here, let's let Beyoncé show us how it's done:

The reasons for lip-synching an outdoor performance in January in Washington, DC are obvious. As Yo-Yo Ma said, it is standard procedure when you can't afford a mishap. Cold outdoor weather is not kind to delicate musical instruments and even less so to delicate vocal cords!

But if the authenticity of the performance is more important than the perfection of the performance, sometimes you might see performers playing outside, on a windy roof, in January:

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Hacks, Artistes, Dullards and Con-Men

Or perhaps that should be "con-persons"? From an aesthetic point of view there are four different kinds of performer: hacks, artistes, dullards and con-men. The really interesting thing is that nearly all performers have these qualities to different degrees at different times. But first, some definitions:

• Hack: a hack is someone who, either through inability, laziness or just disinterest, doesn't take the proper care to learn a technique or a piece or an aspect of performance. He (or she) just hacks through it, willy-nilly. For some players, this is the norm.
• Artiste: someone who has refined sensibilities. It is often used ironically, but I'm using it sincerely.
• Dullard: uninspired, dutiful playing with no special sensitivities. Quite a few dullards find a place in the orchestra where they deliver a consistent, if not inspired, performance.
• Con-men: these folks prefer to fool you rather than put in the effort to really deliver a powerful and expressive performance.

Some composers can also be categorized in this way. Debussy, for example, is an artiste, while Hindemith is a dullard.

I'm sure that we could find an example of a performer in each category. The instrument I know best is the guitar so it is easier for me to pick guitarists as examples. Manuel Barrueco is an artiste:

Liona Boyd is a bit of a hack:

and this performance is a bit dull, but that's partly because of the piece:

And this is all smoke and mirrors (and by that I mean all soulful expressions and tossing of hair and glissandi and tricky little scales and all that stuff that distracts you from the musical content--which is meagre):

As I said, these different aspects can show up in most performers at one time or another. Speaking for myself, in any piece there might be that troublesome little passage that you never quite spent enough time on, so you just hack your way through it. The audience likely won't even notice. Then there is that other passage that always brings out the sensitive artiste in you. Perhaps there is that other couple of phrases that never quite made sense, so you just dutifully play through them. And perhaps you have a tendency to spice up the ending (which might have been a bit weak) by tossing your head or throwing up your arm in a decorative way!

Like I said, most of us have a mix of these tendencies. Some of it we can blame on the composer, but a lot of it is just because we are human and sometimes we just are not at the top of our form.

But of course there are some performers that seem so gifted, so conscientious, that they don't ever seem to fall prey to the three negative tendencies. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the extraordinary singer who passed away this year; Gustav Leonhardt, the amazing harpsichordist and organist who also passed away; John Williams on guitar; Mstislav Rostropovich on cello and Grigory Sokolov on piano. They seem to be just superb all the time...

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