Adaptations

On Tuesday off to the RFH to hear the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra do Brahms (Piano Concerto No.2 Op.67), Schoenberg (Theme and Variations, Op.43b) and Schoenberg flavoured Brahms (Piano Quartet No.1 Op.25), all under the baton of Mr. Tilson Thomas.

All fairly new to me in that I do not get further into Brahms than a couple of popular chamber pieces (this despite my quite extensive holdings of him on vinyl) and I do not do Schoenberg at all. Furthermore, of recent years I have done orchestras very rarely. So an orchestra sporting 8 double basses and 4 percussionists was something of a novelty. Not to mention the brass player who had a mute for all the world like one of the black plastic buckets we use in the garden. There was also a triangle which I could not place, sounding as if it came from the back of the second violins, nowhere near the percussionists at all. Most annoying. As was the large gentleman sitting slap bang in the middle of the front row of the choir wearing a short sleeved, loud blue sweat shirt, made even louder by a loud design on the chest. People who sit in such conspicuous positions should have more consideration for those of us sitting out front.

I have noticed the absence of black people at classical concerts before, but there were at least two at this concert. There were also a lot of east asians in the audience and maybe 10% of the orchestra were women. I wondered why there were no women conductors when there were plenty of women soloists. What puts them off? Is being a conductor any less family friendly than being a soloist?

The Schoenberg was good fun, although I am not sure that it is a piece I would want to hear very often. Both Brahms pieces were very good, although it took a while to adjust to an orchestra and there was a striking difference in size between the conductor and the pianist. The audience was sufficiently enthusiastic to earn an encore and I wondered whether the orchestra has a small repertoire of encores which they can crash into with no music and no notice: the conductor just has to whisper 'encore 3' and bring down his baton.

The adjustment to the orchestra was a little odd, in that one seemed to have to let go in some sense and let oneself be swept along. All rather passive compared with the more cerebral experience of chamber, but maybe this would change with time. It was also odd in that I was hearing an orchestral adaptation of a chamber piece - and I failed completely to find the trace of the piano in the orchestral score - but at least it made a change from pondering over screen adaptations of Agatha Christie. I nearly bought both chamber and orchestral versions from Amazon this morning with a view to comparing and contrasting, but in the end I thought that I was unlikely to do very much of that sort of thing and settled for the chamber version for now.

All in all, very good. Only marred by the publicity people decorating the printed programme with images from the 1930s, a programme which was already making a tiresome feature of 'The Rest is Noise'. Trying to make the programme like a course book for GSCE history is not going to do anything for their core audience, at least not this part time member of it.