The Gazette (Montreal), Canada
May 31 2008
Too much music? Perhaps not enough
Audiences, unlike critics, can’t seem to get their fill
ARTHUR KAPTAINIS, The Gazette
"Not enough audience," concluded the headline last week, this being
the natural and inevitable corollary of the first clause: "Too much
classical music." Maybe there are too many concerts for cantankerous
critics to review. But paying customers are, in fact, abundant. The
Gazette regrets the error.
Take, for example, last Monday. We shall call it Big Monday. The
Montreal Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano and featuring
the Austrian pianist Till Fellner, filled 2,880 seats in Salle Wilfrid
Pelletier. Meanwhile, across the Place des Arts concourse in Thétre
Maisonneuve, the Montreal International Music Competition enjoyed a
gate of 969 (including about 150 freebies for host families, but not
including a live national radio and Internet audience in five or six
figures).
Up at Pollack Hall, the McGill Chamber Orchestra under Boris Brott
sold all 500 seats for a concert featuring the Vancouver-based
American pianist Sara Davis Buechner. That makes about 4,200 paid
admissions on the same night for three concerts, each involving piano
and orchestra.
Nor was Big Monday a sudden oasis amid a Sahara of inactivity. Nagano
sold out the first performance of the Beethoven-Shostakovich program
on Sunday afternoon and the third the evening after. The Montreal
International Musical Competition packed in 1,121 on Tuesday, when the
Armenian teenager Nareh Arghamanyan handily won the Grand Prize.
This night could almost be said to be oversold, since people started
to invade the corbeille level, which was reserved for judges and other
elite types. And bear in mind that the competition had been fielding
quarterfinal and semifinal recitals the previous week, afternoons and
evenings. Attendance in Salle Pierre Mercure was robust.
All this while the Montreal Chamber Music Festival was winding down in
St. James United Church (the organizers claim a month-long attendance
of 5,000) and while the Opéra de Montréal was busy selling out its
entire six-performance run of Madama Butterfly.
Now take a deep breath and think about it. Twice as many people –
17,400 – will see Puccini’s opera than will hear Leonard Cohen at the
Montreal International Jazz Festival. Oops. Check that. At least three
times as many will do the Puccini thing, if we factor in the free
outdoor projection of June 7. Eric Clapton at the Bell Centre on
Wednesday? A mere 14,200 tickets. Mr. Clapton is cordially invited to
eat Puccini’s dust.
The wonder is that all this happens at the end of a long season, when
one might suppose classical fans to be financially drained and
musically saturated. Opera tickets, while not quite so stratospheric
as Leonard Cohen tickets, peak at about $140. The onset of Nagano has
also inflated some MSO tickets to the three-figure plateau. But people
keep coming.
Not enough audience? Not likely.
Judges and journalists gathered on Wednesday for a postfinal scrum on
the Montreal International Musical Competition. Some interesting
points emerged.
Why was the piano concerto repertoire so limited? Tchaikovsky 1,
Rachmaninoff 3, Prokofiev 2 or 3 are the faves. Beethoven, Chopin,
Brahms, Ravel get honourable mention. What about Schumann,
Mendelssohn, Liszt and Grieg? To say nothing of offbeat choices like
the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.
The Belgian judge André de Groote, well known himself for his unusual
repertoire, disputed the viability of Tchaikovsky 2 (ever heard of
it?) as a choice because of textual problems and the need of an
orchestra (in this case, the Orchestre Métropolitain) to be familiar
with the music.
As for Schumann’s Piano Concerto, it is widely regarded on the
competition circuit as a "death trap" – a piece with which you cannot
win first prize. (Montreal judge Marc Durand, however, recalled one
exception to this rule.) What do judges listen for? Piotr Paleczny of
Poland had an interesting answer: Nothing. "The most exciting moment
is when I am lost. I only listen." He could think of only a few
occasions when this happened in Montreal.
Memory slips? They are less important than the way a pianist handles
them. The case of Elizabeth Schumann, an American with a lyrical touch
but a memory problem, was much bandied about. She should have
improvised in the preliminary rounds rather than fitfully restarting a
passage when she ran into trouble.
Arnoldo Cohen, a Brazilian judge, revealed that Schumann (no relation
to the composer!) was upset because conductor Jean-Marie Zeitouni
dragged the tempo in her Tuesday performance of Chopin’s Piano
Concerto No. 1.
"He slowed down the tempo because you allowed him to do so," was
Cohen’s ruthless response. All the judges look for professionalism,
for assurance under pressure. Thus the inexperience of the OM as a
concerto ensemble (these musicians are more into opera) could be taken
as a positive thing. A great orchestra can hide weakness in a soloist.
A few judges identified Arghamanyan’s semifinal performance of
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 2 as the highlight of the entire
event. On the question of what a competition win can or cannot do for
such a player, Cohen had this to say: "This is not a passport to a
great career. This is a passport to a chance."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
