A high-level event like the Banff International String Quartet Competition puts the audience and the programming under the same microscope as the competitors. What takes weeks or months to notice as a trend in the real world becomes apparent in mere hours here.
By the end of today, 10 quartets will have performed a required programme of one of Franz Schubert’s teenage string quartets and a work from the 20th century.
It’s a fascinating pairing that by the end of the fourth quartet’s recital last night had revealed much.
The audience in Banff is large. I haven’t counted but I’m guessing there were about 600 people in the hall for each performance yesterday. Unlike regular concerts in a regular city, which mixes enthusiasts with reluctant guests, everyone present really wants to be here and really cares about every note being played.
There’s deep, attentive silence while the music is on. No one claps between movements. Dozens of listeners follow scores as the music unfolds. The standing ovation — by a handful of people at most — is reserved for something truly special.
Just like the quartets on stage, which cellist Dennis Brott described in a masterclass yesterday as needing to be greater than the sum of their parts, the audience becomes something more significant. It is like a giant barometer, a collective consciousness that begins ranking the players and their programmes as soon as they step out on stage.
For me, the biggest revelation so far has been how well the musicians have presented their 20th century pieces, and how powerfully their listeners connected with that.
Schubert’s early quartets, written exactly 200 years ago, midway between Haydn’s death and Beethoven’s Op. 132 string quartet, are pretty music. There is Classical proportion and Romantic rebellion, in careful doses. The music sings. There is the repetition and variation of great poetry. These pieces place an x-ray machine in front of each quartet’s core artistic values as well as basic technique.
But, so far, the most arresting music has come from the 20th century, from Béla Bartók and Henri Dutilleux and György Ligeti. Little of this is pretty. Much of it is dissonant. It is intensely difficult to perform and it takes an effort to listen.
The quartets yesterday exceeded their challenges — and the audience reserved it’s loudest praise for the results.
So what about Schubert’s pretty music? There is nothing wrong with it, but it is not of our time. Ligeti, who died seven years ago, and Dutilleux, who left us earlier this year, are of our time.
Our lives are soaked in music, even while we sleep. We hear it everywhere yet we have less and less time in our busy lives to stop and truly listen.
We can drift in and out of Schubert, but the 20th century pieces programmed at Banff command total attention. It doesn’t work as aural wallpaper or the accompaniment to a daydream about my kitchen renovation.
Once we’ve obeyed the command to listen, we confront to messiness of the Modern psyche — busyness for busyness sake, the push-pull between relativity and objectivity, and the struggle for self-actualization. It’s a messiness that resonates in each one of us, young or old.
There’s a similar dynamic at work in the act of interpretation, as well.
In the Modern world, the artist is encouraged to express themselves to the outermost limits of their ability. The composer creates intense soundworlds that the interpreters need to command with strength and determination — as well as a vision of the music’s ultimate shape. Pushing harder can, in some cases, actually make it better.
Push Schubert’s music harder, and it begins to fall apart, or begins to sound overdressed and over made-up.
The quartets need to tread ever so carefully, balancing delicacy with strength, purpose with the ability to savour individual notes, phrases and cadences. It can make for some unnecessary timidity, as some of yesterday’s performances showed.
We may, in the wider classical world, buy more Mozart, but, deep inside lies a much stronger potential connection with the messiness of our times. But it takes commitment.
What do you think?
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All Banff competition performances are being streamed live here.
John Terauds