Yesterday’s music and opera news was a study in contrasts: sadness at the demise of New York City Opera and the selfish intransigence destroying a fine symphony orchestra in Minnesota, and elation that Toronto’s Against the Grain Theatre has two tricks up its artistic sleeve this season.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
To turn a metaphor on its head, Against the Grain was a chirpy little canary, excitedly hopping in its cage amid some rubble in an unstable mine tunnel, alerting everyone that there is plenty of fresh outside air still coming in.
If a musician or an opera presenter presents its ideas with enough imagination, conviction and strength, and knows that it needs to cultivate personal connections with its audience, there will ultimately be more people wanting to be a part of that experience than there are tickets.
Because so much of art music (and Western culture in general, really) is about institutions, we are reminded every day — usually in small ways that are easily overlooked, but sometimes in big wallops like yesterday in the case of Minnesota and New York City — that there is nothing inherently permanent about a building or an organization.
Both were created by people and must continue to inspire support by people in order to stay viable. If they don’t keep evolving to connect with each new generation, why not create new ones instead of keeping old ones on life support?
With every production or presentation, Against the Grain knocks down all the little building blocks that make up the history of a particular work or performance style and then carefully, intentionally rearrange them, sometimes making new blocks to suit their vision.
When the period-performance specialists came to the fore nearly four decades ago, the sound of their Handel and Bach and Rameau was shockingly different. But that sound created a whole new audience for art music.
Our descendants will be listening to Bach (there is no doubt in my mind), but the interpretations in 2088 may very well be vastly different from ours today. Opera will be alive and well, but we can’t guess what audiences will see — and how they will see it.
But in treating artforms as institutions, we are acting as if we could impose forms on objects in a state of constant evolution and metamorphosis. That is delusional.
Thank goodness for those individual artists and organizations who come along every generation to make veteran audience members as excited as people who would normally never have experienced the artform. It’s all about how something is realised — not about who or where it is realised.
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As an illustration of something odd and unsettling, yet ultimately quite powerful, here are adventurous Montrealers Quartetski, with their reimagining of what Igor Stravinsky’s 100-year-old Rite of Spring can sound like in The Adoration of the Earth (a full, live performance happens at Toronto’s Music Gallery on October 11 — details here):
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From the other end of music history’s timeline, there is an excellent essay by John Julius Norwich on the birth of opera in Venice four centuries ago in the Guardian — here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
