How strange a little piece of music can be. How very, very strange. One of the strangest ways to hear music, for instance, is at a pre-concert talk. (I say ‘strange’ not in the sense that it defies the laws of logic – like a black hole in a soft serve ice cream – but rather in the sense that, in such a situation, the way the music is being played and heard is more than unusually far from how it was originally intended to be played and heard.)
You might be sitting on the Northern Foyer steps of the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House, and be listening to one of the Sydney Symphony’s fine variety of speakers extolling the virtues and qualities of what it is that you are about to, upon having entered the Concert Hall proper, hear. You may be sitting on one of the seats in the Function Room of the City Recital Hall – or hovering at the back with the rest of the latecomers, too shy to barge your way down to those few spare spots at the front – and find yourself listening to multiple excerpts while the speaker impresses the profundity of what you’re hearing on your consciousness.
Usually, the technology fails at some point – most often it is the CD player, with the speaker apologising (‘if you’ll bear with me for a moment’), then, if it can’t be fixed, and after a very specific amount of time (although it varies from person to person) a threshold will be reached, and the speaker will once again apologise, and then move on with their talk, leaving the music behind.
Nevertheless, interesting as the talks are, the music played is often less so – there’s something rather static, I find, about listening to a recording while simultaneously watching a speaker do nothing for the duration but stand there. When one listens to music alone via headphones or your home stereo, even though it’s not live there is still a connection of sorts that makes the process a worthwhile one, especially as there’s no one to cough throughout it, and your own bronchial aberrations, coming from you, therefore can’t distract you. But the purpose of a pre-concert talk is explanation, rather than immersion, so one can’t complain.
The live experience is the ultimate way to hear music, of course. The Sydney Symphony’s Discovery series – this time around focusing on Haydn’s Miracle Symphony – however, makes for a curious hybrid. Richard Gill, charismatic as always, gives his own pre-concert talk, but places it in the concert, rather than before it. And he, too, samples parts of the music to give his own explanations. But whereas a traditional pre-concert talk, with its recordings, does very little to immerse oneself, here we find that the immersion is surprisingly strong.
We learn, for instance, that the Miracle Symphony was so named because a chandelier fell on the crowd at the premiere but no one was hurt. (It turns out that the anecdote was mistakenly attributed to the 96th symphony, when it actually happened at the 102nd, but the name has stuck.) And then we hear a few bars and we are entranced, ready to continue listening, disappointed when Gill lowers his hands and the members of the orchestra cease playing.
This happens at all of the Discover concerts – there is a constant tantalising. The problem, sometimes, is that, when the end is reached, and the piece, after having been explained, is then played in full, it sometimes doesn’t live up to its own hype, or one has grown slightly tired of it during all the preamble. Such was the case with the first concert in the series this year – delving into Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – but thankfully, and most gloriously, the same cannot be said for Haydn’s Miracle, where expectations were raised and then confidently met. We were educated, we were entertained, we were immersed – and what more can one ask for?
Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5
Discover Haydn’s Miracle
Sydney Symphony
Sydney Symphony Sinfonia
Conductor: Richard Gill
Joseph Haydn – Symphony No.96 in D major (Miracle)
City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney
9 April
