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Too much music? Perhaps not enough

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  • Too much music? Perhaps not enough

    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
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