Performers should help audiences to experience music from the inside
One great moment at last summer’s BBC Proms came in the concert where the Aurora Orchestra gave its astonishing presentation from memory of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The dramatic deconstruction of the work was stunning enough, the performance that followed awe-inspiring. But what then happened was even more remarkable. As an encore the musicians spread themselves through the audience in the Albert Hall, then delivered some of the work’s most hair-raising passages right next to their spellbound listeners.
So, it felt as if we were experiencing the music as the musicians did: from the inside. And, more than that, we enjoyed the visceral thrill of being ‘up close and personal’ to these brilliant players operating at the very limits of their powers. You could almost see their sinews straining and feel the concentration and energy pulsing through them as they negotiated those shifting time-signatures and primordial sounds at breakneck speed. In my imagination I felt as if I was following a tightrope walker along a high wire – except, of course, that if something went wrong nobody was likely to die.
I have had similar experiences in the past. The much missed opera director Graham Vick did some extraordinary warehouse productions with his Birmingham Opera Company in which the performers encircled or mingled with the audience and you were treated as a participant in the drama. And, as a journalist, I have also had privileged access to rehearsals where I was invited to sit in an orchestra’s ranks. That was certainly an eye-opener. Placed next to the first horn in a London Philharmonic rehearsal directed by Georg Solti, I experienced the frisson of being on the receiving end of one of his terrifying howls of anger. He hadn’t been told that a journalist would be staring at him. I still tremble at the memory. The first horn, incidentally, found it hilarious. I later discovered that he and Solti had a mutual hatred going back years.
But I digress. My point is that in a normal concert set-up the audience’s awareness of the music is constrained by what, in the theatre, is called the ‘fourth wall’ – that invisible but nevertheless perceptible barrier between stage and stalls. We listeners are hearing the music loud and clear, no question, but only as passive recipients.
Maybe we are also (as I am) active musicians too, in which case we know full well the thrill and terror of performing in public. But the vast majority of people who attend classical mus
