Audiences, unlike critics, can't seem to get their fill

ARTHUR KAPTAINIS
The Gazette

Saturday, May 31, 2008


"Not enough audience," concluded the headline last week, this being the natural and inevitable corollary of the first clause: "Too much classical music." Maybe there are too many concerts for cantankerous critics to review. But paying customers are, in fact, abundant. The Gazette regrets the error.

Take, for example, last Monday. We shall call it Big Monday. The Montreal Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano and featuring the Austrian pianist Till Fellner, filled 2,880 seats in Salle Wilfrid Pelletier. Meanwhile, across the Place des Arts concourse in Théâtre Maisonneuve, the Montreal International Music Competition enjoyed a gate of 969 (including about 150 freebies for host families, but not including a live national radio and Internet audience in five or six figures).

Up at Pollack Hall, the McGill Chamber Orchestra under Boris Brott sold all 500 seats for a concert featuring the Vancouver-based American pianist Sara Davis Buechner. That makes about 4,200 paid admissions on the same night for three concerts, each involving piano and orchestra.

Nor was Big Monday a sudden oasis amid a Sahara of inactivity. Nagano sold out the first performance of the Beethoven-Shostakovich program on Sunday afternoon and the third the evening after. The Montreal International Musical Competition packed in 1,121 on Tuesday, when the Armenian teenager Nareh Arghamanyan handily won the Grand Prize.

This night could almost be said to be oversold, since people started to invade the corbeille level, which was reserved for judges and other elite types. And bear in mind that the competition had been fielding quarterfinal and semifinal recitals the previous week, afternoons and evenings. Attendance in Salle Pierre Mercure was robust.

All this while the Montreal Chamber Music Festival was winding down in St. James United Church (the organizers claim a month-long attendance of 5,000) and while the Opéra de Montréal was busy selling out its entire six-performance run of Madama Butterfly.

Now take a deep breath and think about it. Twice as many people - 17,400 - will see Puccini's opera than will hear Leonard Cohen at the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Oops. Check that. At least three times as many will do the Puccini thing, if we factor in the free outdoor projection of June 7. Eric Clapton at the Bell Centre on Wednesday? A mere 14,200 tickets. Mr. Clapton is cordially invited to eat Puccini's dust.

The wonder is that all this happens at the end of a long season, when one might suppose classical fans to be financially drained and musically saturated. Opera tickets, while not quite so stratospheric as Leonard Cohen tickets, peak at about $140. The onset of Nagano has also inflated some MSO tickets to the three-figure plateau. But people keep coming.

Not enough audience? Not likely.

Judges and journalists gathered on Wednesday for a postfinal scrum on the Montreal International Musical Competition. Some interesting points emerged.

Why was the piano concerto repertoire so limited? Tchaikovsky 1, Rachmaninoff 3, Prokofiev 2 or 3 are the faves. Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Ravel get honourable mention. What about Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Grieg? To say nothing of offbeat choices like the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.

The Belgian judge André de Groote, well known himself for his unusual repertoire, disputed the viability of Tchaikovsky 2 (ever heard of it?) as a choice because of textual problems and the need of an orchestra (in this case, the Orchestre Métropolitain) to be familiar with the music.

As for Schumann's Piano Concerto, it is widely regarded on the competition circuit as a "death trap" - a piece with which you cannot win first prize. (Montreal judge Marc Durand, however, recalled one exception to this rule.) What do judges listen for? Piotr Paleczny of Poland had an interesting answer: Nothing. "The most exciting moment is when I am lost. I only listen." He could think of only a few occasions when this happened in Montreal.

Memory slips? They are less important than the way a pianist handles them. The case of Elizabeth Schumann, an American with a lyrical touch but a memory problem, was much bandied about. She should have improvised in the preliminary rounds rather than fitfully restarting a passage when she ran into trouble.

Arnoldo Cohen, a Brazilian judge, revealed that Schumann (no relation to the composer!) was upset because conductor Jean-Marie Zeitouni dragged the tempo in her Tuesday performance of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1.

"He slowed down the tempo because you allowed him to do so," was Cohen's ruthless response. All the judges look for professionalism, for assurance under pressure. Thus the inexperience of the OM as a concerto ensemble (these musicians are more into opera) could be taken as a positive thing. A great orchestra can hide weakness in a soloist.

A few judges identified Arghamanyan's semifinal performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Sonata No. 2 as the highlight of the entire event. On the question of what a competition win can or cannot do for such a player, Cohen had this to say: "This is not a passport to a great career. This is a passport to a chance."



akaptainis@sympatico.ca
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008

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