Through These Ears

Behind The Scenes With Andreas Scholl

Countertenor superstar Andreas Scholl has produced a very nice short film of interviews and rehearsal voyeurism.  Scholl hosts a behind-the-scenes look at rehearsals for Handel's Partenope at the Danish Royal Theater.  Even though they're brief, he gets some good insights into the work from both Music Director Lars Ulrik Mortensen and scenic designer Lous Désiré.

I suppose Scholl wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible with this, so everyone speaks English.  Although you may have to turn the volume up a bit to hear all the rehearsal chatter.

(From il giornale della musica)

Scholl makes an interesting point about Handel possibly adapting to the new (for his day) style simply to satisfy the public.  He ran his own company in London, and had to constantly struggle to turn a profit.  Handel's fortunes went through many boom and bust cycles, and it was a tough scene.  Sometimes the fad was for oratorios, sometimes for opera in the Italian style, sometimes it was something else entirely. Partenope was premiered at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, London, in 1730. 

This was just a couple of years after Handel had to shut down the company he ran for about ten years, the Royal Academy of Music (no relation to today's RAM).  He dissolved his company because everyone in London wanted to see John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and similar works.  So his response was to start a new Academy, and Partenope came along soon after.  Small wonder he was trying to strike a new pose with the music.

So London has been a tough scene for almost 300 years.  No wonder Daniele Gatti was looking for a break.

The short film is well worth watching.  The short-haired brunette is Tuve Semmingsen and the blonde singer we see briefly is the Partenope, Ingrid Dam-Jensen.  Also, it turns out that Scholl's doing three of these behind-the-scenes films, and he has a link to the first two on his own website. And is it just me, or does Scholl's speaking voice sound like a cross between Placido Domingo and Mandy Patinkin?

Danish radio station DR P2 will be broadcasting the performance live on October 11.

The Concert Hall Is Not Like A Restaurant

It has long been my view that programming non-Classical works during a concert season is a problematic way to bring new audiences to Classical Music.  From the revenue-centric perspective of a venue or production organization, it does make sense.  Revenue is revenue, and we should all be happy if money is coming in from concerts of movie music and Broadway numbers to subsidize the music we're really interested in.  But that doesn't really bring new audiences to Classical Music.

This is what I call treating the concert hall like a restaurant.  It generally doesn't work, because people who go to a Pops concert or "An Evening with John Williams" don't tend to think to themselves afterwards, "Hey, that was good - let's go back next month and try something else on the menu".  Unless the non-Classical draw is programmed with "serious" concert music, very few will make the association between the server and the meal.

The same thing can be said about mixing non-Classical music in the Classical category on record labels and sales charts.  When Peter Gelb put the "Titanic" soundtrack on the Sony Classical ledger, it went to the top of the Billboard chart and made plenty of money for the division.  While this brought in some nice income to subsidize the serious music on the label, it was nothing more than a bit of accounting prestidigitation, and not an actual method of bringing new audiences to Classical Music.

So this is all fine and good for the profit center, but does little to get people to come to the other concerts.  Mixing genres in one program, however, is a different matter.  Having movie music or the like share the bill with more "serious" concert music will give the segment of the audience who came to hear the movie themes a chance to hear something which is part of the regular menu, so to speak.  Only then can they know if it's worth coming back or not.

In fact, this kind of audience is more likely to be receptive to more modern music than they would be to Mostly Mozart or Brahms #3.  The language of so much film music today is lifted directly from a lot of different 20th Century composers.  In fact, much of it used to be written by actual 20th Century composers, or at least people who were fully qualified to be so.  A quick glance at this list of significant film composers (by no means complete) shows a number of composers known at least as much for their concert music, if not more so:  Malcolm Arnold, Georges Auric, John Corigliano, Wojciech Kilar, Erich W. Korngold, Miklos Rosza, or Mikis Theodorakis.  What this means is that the more modern language of contemporary Classical Music will already be familiar to them.  This is an important point, and one about which I'll have more to say at another time.

The same thing can be said for what I think can be the next big draw for non-Classical Music fans:  video game soundtracks.  I'm not talking about the cutesy kiddie ones, but the interesting and sophisticated music for the more mature games.  War games and the big adventure games tend to have full-blooded orchestral scores, as well as music that would be considered elctronic or electro-acoustic if it were to come from the hallowed halls of a music conservatory.  There are already quite a few CDs for sale with this music, and they sell well.  It's not surprising when one considers that "Halo 3" was the biggest selling media release of all time, bigger than any record or movie release.  There are huge audiences out there who will happily attend concerts of video game music, in large numbers.  It's already happening in Europe and Asia.   This music is also heavily steeped in the language of modern composers, although the war games tend to have their more old-fashioned "war-movie music moments".  But audiences eat that up as well.

What this means is that programming along these lines gives many more opportunities to create that connection between Classical Music and the music they already like.  That's how taste barriers begin to break down.