CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Change of venue is music to their ears
By Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff | December 7, 2006
On Tuesday night, I attended two richly satisfying concerts
without stepping foot in a concert hall. The first was a new
music program presented by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project
at the Moonshine Room of the popular Club Cafe in the South End;
the second was a performance by the up-and-coming Parker String
Quartet in the Lizard Lounge, a low-slung basement club space
in Cambridge. Next month, the Firebird Ensemble will perform in
a local barbecue joint.
What is classical music doing in these spaces? It may sound
quirky or even perverse, but it is in fact an excellent idea and
a growing trend. Of course Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall are
in no risk of losing their core constituencies, but they may
well stand to gain some listeners if this practice continues.
The logic is clear. In recent years, it has been dawning on
classical music presenters that the eternal quest for new audiences
is being stymied by an image problem. Especially for young or
otherwise uninitiated listeners, a major barrier to entry is not
the music itself but the packaging. Concert halls are too often
seen as solemn temples of high art governed by a formal, rigid,
and altogether foreign code of etiquette. For many it is more
than just a fear of clapping in the wrong place; it is a larger
sense that a new subculture must be learned before they will be
able to enjoy a live performance.
What would h appen if you simply brought the music to the places
where these listeners were already comfortable and familiar? The
cellist Matt Haimovitz was the first player I know of to put
this question to a sustained and rigorous test. In the age-old
folk-tradition, he packed up his cello and drove around the
country playing Bach Suites as well as bracing contemporary music
in cafes, bars, and clubs.
I once heard him play in a country music venue in Nashville
and in a pizza parlor in Jackson, Miss. It was surreal to watch
baseball-capped frat boys, innocently out for a slice of pizza,
wander into a passionate performance of microtonal music. But
by and large, audiences seemed to love it and responded viscerally
to such direct contact with a top-flight performer. It was not
about finding a new performance gimmick, but about stripping
away the packaging to unleash the music's natural expressive
power.
Tapping into some of the same logic, the Boston Modern Orchestra
Project (or BMOP) is in its third season of presenting concerts
at Club Cafe. On Tuesday night, the space was packed with a
lively audience. The atmosphere was bustling, with waitresses
taking orders for beer and chardonnay as the players were setting
up onstage.
This year, the Club Concerts are being curated and hosted by
Lisa Bielawa, BMOP's new composer in residence. This is good
news for fans of the series, as Bielawa not only has an inviting
stage presence as emcee but also a rich network of composer
connections through her experience as artistic director of the
MATA Festival of contemporary music in New York City.
Tuesday's program was packed with music written in the last
decade by Keeril Makan, Gordon Beeferman, Jocelyn Morlock,
Roshanne Etezady, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Aaron Trant. The styles
ran the gamut from the rippling, post-impressionist textures of
Morlock's "QUOI???" to the highly structured freedom of Trant's
"Dictit," which combined elements of 12-tone music with
improvisation.
One highlight of the program was the introduction of Bielawa's
own "Synopsis Project" in which she will write short studies for
about 20 BMOP players over the course of her residency. The first
two in the series were highly engaging, and it will be interesting
to see how this project unfolds . Bielawa herself is also a
vocalist, and she performed an alluring excerpt from Beeferman's
"West of Winter," singing in a vocal quartet for which she had
pre-recorded the other three parts. Pianist Sarah Bob, violinist
Gabriela Diaz, and percussionist Aaron Trant were the other brave
performers of the evening .
Programs like this one seem to breathe more comfortably in
unconventional spaces, where the freshly minted music can stand
free of the mammoth shadow cast by the standard repertoire. The
presentation format also seemed just about right. In a small but
telling detail, the two Bielawa pieces on the program were being
given their first performances but there was no mention anywhere
of that weighty phrase: "world premiere." The concert was more
akin to dropping by a gallery where one could casually sample
an invigorating swath of music from our time.
At 10 p.m., about an hour after the BMOP program ended, I was
being handed a wristband at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, and
the Parker Quartet, an ensemble of graduate students at New
England Conservatory who have already gained impressive notice,
were setting up beneath a pink disco ball suspended from the
ceiling. First violinist Daniel Chong grabbed a mike and welcomed
the crowd, admitting this was the largest young audience they
had ever had at a concert.
Indeed, the players in this impressively talented quartet are
in their early to mid-20s. It is a sad fact that students choosing
a career in classical music today by and large do not get to
perform for members of their own generation. Friends might show
up to support you at a concert, but they are generally more
likely to be found at places, well, like the Lizard Lounge.
It was refreshing to see the Parkers play through some of their
repertoire -- movements of works by Schumann, Mozart, Ligeti,
Shostakovich, Ravel -- in this setting. After the quartet blazed
through a Scherzo from Schumann's A-minor quartet, a guy in the
corner with a beer offered a spontaneous shout of "Awesome!" The
cellist Kee-Hyun Kim later drew some laughs from the crowd when
he introduced the final Haydn work by announcing they were going
to "kick it old school."
But beyond the alternative space and the banter with the audience,
what distinguished the Parkers' set was their fiercely committed
performances. They conveyed an appealing sense of urgency in
Ravel's Quartet, and brought out the rugged extraterrestrial
beauty of Ligeti's First Quartet. These qualities come through
all the more strongly in such an intimate venue. If you had
closed your eyes during many parts of the set, the biggest
difference from what you might hear in a concert hall was the
rapt silence. There were no coughs, no cellphones.
Alternative spaces are not a panacea -- there can be obvious
logistical problems, bad PA systems, obnoxious or indifferent
crowds, and myriad other challenges -- but they are spicing up
the scene while allowing, at times, for a rare directness of
connection with both new audiences and traditional ones. Ultimately,
the battle for the next generation of listeners should be won
or lost based on the quality of the music being offered and the
persuasiveness of the performances. Sometimes this requires
slicing through the traditional packaging that, when viewed from
the outside, can too often be mistaken for the concert experience
itself.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at [log in to unmask]
"Stephen Bacher" <[log in to unmask]>
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