The new week-long Bristol Proms series aims to break classical music out of its ghettos. Has it succeeded, asks John Lewis?
Classical promoters and record label bosses have long claimed that they want to "take this music to the masses", to "break out of the classical ghettos", or to "find a new audience for this music". The same barriers are often cited. Symphony halls are stuffy and uncomfortable. Orchestras wear black and you can't see what they're doing. Conductors have their back turned to you, rarely say anything and never talk about the compositions. Audiences can't applaud between movements, or even clap between a series of linked pieces.
The Bristol Proms is the latest effort to address some these obstacles. It's the brainchild of Max Hole (CEO of Universal Music) and Tom Morris (artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, former leading light of the National Theatre and the Battersea Arts Centre, director of War Horse and, as he's probably sick of people pointing out, brother of Chris). Their stated aim is to find theatrical ways of enhancing the live music experience.
Appearing at the Bristol Old Vic this week are some big names – violinists Nicola Benedetti and Daniel Hope, teenage piano prodigy Jan Lisiecki, award-winning cellist Guy Johnston – but each performance is accompanied by an intriguing visual gimmick. Bach's cello suites are performed with a live dancer. Medieval madrigals are sung in darkness. Multiple cameras are used to capture the close-up technicalities of piano performances, or to film reactions from audience members, with the results relayed on giant screens behind the performers. Max Richter's "re-composition" of Vivaldi's Four Seasons is accompanied by a live 3D animation that is triggered by the musicians.
There have been other attempts around the world to make live classical music more user-friendly in recent years. Musician Gabriel Prokofiev (who leads a string quartet, produces the likes of Lady Sovereign and fronted the punk-funk outfit Spektrum) has been running the Nonclassical club nights in Shoreditch for nearly a decade, where small chamber groups play alongside DJs. London's 100 Club has staged intimate Limelight events for a while, while similar events are often staged at Le Poisson Rouge, in New York's East Village. Meanwhile, Deutsche Grammophon - and their digital incarnation Sinfini - run "Yellow Lounge" nights where artists from the DG or Decca rosters perform in clubby spaces, initially in Berlin, increasingly on tour in London, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Seoul.
The Bristol Proms is a concentrated effort to do this over the course of a week. Most of the events take place at the venerable, 270-year-old Bristol Old Vic. It's a venue with a fine acoustic that hosted Niccolo Paganini in 1831, and which actually hosted indoor "promenade" concerts in the 1840s, predating the Henry Wood's Proms by half a century. But, even with the front seats removed to facilitate £5 "promming" tickets, this bijou space only holds 600 - around a tenth of the Royal Albert Hall's capacity.
The audience, in honesty, isn't much younger or diverse than what you'd encounter at a Prom or classical concert at the South Bank. Audiences are still not allowed to film or take photos during performances, but they're not discouraged from bringing in drinks, or clapping whenever they like.
The first night opens with Singing in the Dark, in which the 17 singers of the Fitzhardinge Consort perform in the underground, windowless Old Vic Studio, which holds around 50 people. Performing works medieval (Palestrina, Tallis) and modern (David Bednall, Richard Jeffrey-Gray, Gustav Holst), the lights were dimmed at various levels throughout, often into pitch darkness. For the choir it meant that they couldn't see the conductor (not that it appeared to harm the performance); for the audience it forces you to concentrate on tiny details. Each breath takes on a dramatic tension, each plosive and fricative from the mouths of the singers seemed amplified. It was exciting, slightly scary and – in the middle of a heatwave – rather uncomfortably stuffy.
From enhancing aural receptiveness through blindness, the next events try the opposite approach. Here solo piano recitals are filmed by half a dozen cameras, images from which are projected on a giant screen behind him. The multi-media shtick works well at the late-night show, where German pianist (and techno musician) Hauschka plays pieces for prepared piano. On the screens we get to see the spanners and toys and boxes of Tic-Tacs rattling on the strings; we get to see him stick gaffer tape to the hammers and place E-bows on the string to create drones. It certainly enhances the performance.
But with the earlier show, in which the remarkable Polish-Canadian pianist Lisiecki performs all of Chopin's fearsomely tricky Etudes, the visuals were rather less fruitful. We want to see this teenage prodigy's fingers – preferably from an aerial shot, as it was an instructional video – and we want to see the expression on his face as he plays. Instead, we get annoying images filmed from his back, which have been digitally treated so that he resembles a pixelated robot from Tron. It also didn't help that several notes on the Yamaha grand were out of tune.
More interesting than the visuals were the fact that Lisiecki's audience could applaud each individual Etude, which served as an interesting barometer as to what was going down well. Lisiecki makes some much welcome announcements (the Etudes are punctuated by a Bach, a Messiaen and a Chopin Nocturne), and quotes Chopin's dictum that: "After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
It might well be that the most effective visual innovations in the Bristol Prom might not be the complicated, gimmicky ones, but the simplest ones.
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by John Lewis via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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