Music Blogs

Last Saturday night my wife and I thought we'd go musically off-road and take in a classical concert. As luck would have it, at the Royal Festival Hall--our nearest international-standard concert space--the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Christoph Eschenbach were performing the best-hung warhorse in the entire symphonic canon, Beethoven's Ninth, and there were still tickets available at £32 apiece. For a musico-cultural experience encompassing not merely the profoundest feelings of nobility that made it a shoo-in to soundtrack the dismantling of the Berlin Wall but also the visceral rollercoaster that inspired A Clockwork Orange's Alex to horrorshow tolchocking on an epic scale, and not forgetting the utmost peak of auditory ecstasy which determined the original designers of the CD to ensure the new format should have the capacity to fit the symphony entire onto a single disc, that £32 apiece looked good value. My wife and I paid up and braced ourselves.

And our whispered conclusion an hour and a quarter later as the audience rose to a standing ovation? Too bloody quiet by half. Too much, in fact, like a municipally approved evening at the local library.

So what was the problem?

First, though it was scored for the greatest number of musicians and singers for any symphony to that date (1824) and pinned back every ear on its debut performance at Vienna's mid-sized Kärntnertortheater, the Ninth was never orchestrated for such state-subsidised arts hangars as the Festival Hall or Barbican. These caverns are typical of post-war prestige kultur palasten: simply too big to frame Ludwig Van at his meaty, beaty, big and bouncy best. Sadly, we're stuck with them.

Second, Beethoven had been stone-deaf for a decade by the time he finished his Ninth--at its first performance he couldn't even hear the storm of applause and, when he was turned around to face the rapturous audience, burst into tears--so could hardly be blamed if he underestimated the forces it needed to give it maximum stürm und drang.

But third and last, could it be us? Could over 30 years of sticking my head in bass bins have spoiled my hearing for even the Ludwig Van Zeppelins of the acoustic era? Could be--but the wife can hear me picking my nose two rooms away, and she was as unthunderstruck as I was.

We can't be alone--rockers who occasionally fancy a bit of the other but crave sound levels even the classical big boys can't deliver.

So what to do? Here's my solution: mike up those bassoons and stick orchestra and choir in front of a phalanx of Marshall stacks so that when that fugato finale kicks in, your trousers vibrate and fillings work loose, just like God intended them to.

And while we're about it, playing with the houselights on as they did on Saturday night is a passion-killer--your eyes wander round the backs of the next row's heads, then the ‘50s blond wood décor, and the next thing you know your attention strays and you've missed 15 bars of variations in B flat major.

So fibre-optically illuminate the scores, train a spot on the conductor on the podium and introduce torch or candle-powered mood lighting to sex up the symphony rather than pretend, as has long been the practice in grant-funded venues, that orchestral performance, rather than a staged and theatrical assault on the ears, guts, brain and heart, is an exam-condition academic exercise.

Unhistorical nonsense, of course. Western classical music has its roots in the church, as theatrical a sensorium as you can imagine; and why play in a penguin suit or evening dress anyway if the form is intrinsically shy of special effects?

Surely there is a classical orchestra or promoter with the vision, verve and vulgarity to amplify the classics for the rock generation. Rock me, Amadeus, I say, pump up the Poulenc, crank the Handel and bang up the Bach. Let's have Scriabin shreddin', Chopin smokin', Telemann at 11 and Buxtehude one louder. Let Brahms bring the noise, Beethoven roll over us...

And yell Tchaikovsky the news.

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