On Hearing the First Concert of Fall
The first concert of the regular season in 2014-15 brought a good program and an auspicious air of change.
I passed over the gala opener with Anne-Sophie Mutter playing the Bruch concerto. Why, I figured, would I pay to see Meryl Streep play a cheerleader? The Bruch offers me little more than a couple of catchy toe-tappers.
And so the season began on the evening of Saturday September 20--at the new early time of 7:30. I made it to Heinz Hall by about 7:15 only to be stuck in traffic. The Bucs' successful summer and late-season game appears to have clogged up all parking within 2000 feet of Heinz Hall. The new bike lanes on Penn Ave. confounded a minivan that tried to drive onto them, creating four-way chaos. Another exciting evening Downtown.
I emerged from the garage east of 11th St. at exactly 7:30 and began my sprint across the city, passing two new Cultural District restaurants and a lot of sidewalk seating. Pittsburgh seems to be removing the tongue from the cheeky moniker "Paris of Appalachia." The sidewalk seating didn't impede my sprint, since I was able to run in the new bike lane most of the way. Small squadrons of bikes passed to and fro. I also saw a bike rickshaw (as I did in Oakland the other day) and even a horse-and-carriage. Not only Paris now, but New York, too? Change indeed.
Before I swooped inside, I spotted some protesters outside the hall objecting to the evening's piano soloist, Valentina Lisitsa. Has she made racist comments on Twitter as they say? I just needed to get to my seat. But political activism with signs objecting to Wagner at a symphony concert in Pittsburgh?--now that's stirring things up!
I sat down to find the previews still running on the large drop-down screen. Hooray, I thought, the PSO is continuing to use this instrument of intimacy. Manfred Honeck's twelve-foot head turns the speck he would be on stage into a virtual presence, his disembodied voice into a personal chat. Jeremy Branson's playful introduction to the PSO's bells lightened the mood. Mason Bates's introduction to his music transformed a series of odd noises into a personal story with a visible, human storyteller. Could these little films perhaps be shown not only before the concert begins but preceeding each part of the concert?
And what is the concert anyway? I've noticed a small but positive change in the layout of the program page. Not long ago, mention of the "Pre-concert" "Concert Prelude" (Jim Cunningham speaking with Composer of the Year Mason Bates) was hidden away above the large type listing "Manfred Honeck, conductor." Now the pre-concert is listed as if on a par with the rest of the concert, first on a list of events including "Intermission," where the audience is invited to "explore" the lobby exhibits on Lorin Maazel. This is good change. It shows the PSO closeting the cordon sanitaire that has isolated classical music from the rest of the world and from general audiences. Talk about the music is being acknowledged as part of the concert-going experience, not just an accessory to it. The verbal and visual associations we bring to the music are being acknowledged as part of the same delicate ecosystem of music-making (which includes the audience!) as the performance on stage. What an appropriate night to hear Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, usually regarded as the first work to include a program book to enrich the audience's experience!
One final welcome note. It was "CMU Night @ the PSO" and the students from Carnegie Mellon let loose all manner of approbrium: hoots, whistles, roars, and whoops. The atmosphere was youthful and festive--thank goodness! And the music was generous. After the opening films, the screen rose up and away and the Star-Spangled Banner hailed the new season. Opening with a new work by a young composer made a powerful statement and provided just the right direction the PSO needs (especially to counterbalance its protracted and ongoing Beethoven Project). Three further works followed (not counting the works in the lobby on Maestro Maazel), one of them, a bit of Bach, performed explicitly with Maazel in mind--and not just in mind but in sight. The PSO lowered the screen to project his image during this musical homage to the man who catapaulted the Pittsburgh Symphony to the front rank of the world's orchestras.
The PSO seems slow to me to change its repertory, but it strikes me as subtlely but proactively changing the concert experience to better accommodate today's complex, interactive, multimodal world, where music and culture at large inform and interpenetrate one another in ways that put the "post" in "postmodern." With more non-musical elements added to the program, and even more and shorter pieces, the season has set forth in welcome new directions. Will it, like the restaurants up Penn Ave., find an increased presence on the sidewalk outside Heinz Hall and in the eyes, ears, hearts, minds, and wallets of Pittsburgh?
