What was your last concert?

[HighlandDougie]

TS

Many thanks for the report. I'm even more jealous - 'Asrael' isn't programmed that often and I would very much like to have heard it in the flesh conducted by the young Mr Hrůša. I'm not surprised that it was 'a really fine performance' as, judging from the Janáček and Dvořák I've heard him perform on CD and in concert, he has a particular flair for the music of his native country. A bit depressing, though, reading about the poor attendance - it will simply put off concert promoters from including works by composers other than the usual suspects, not least Mahler.

[EdgeleyRob]

Great review there ts.
I must confess I don't know Asrael at all,I will try to find the time to have a dabble this weekend.

I don't understand why people only want to hear the usual suspects ?

[teamsaint]

I must confess I don't know Asrael at all,I will try to find the time to have a dabble this weekend.

If you want to get to know Asrael, I'm sure that there is much wonderful expert opinion to be had on the board, but this work is very special to JLW I think, so perhaps we could tempt her out to play to share some opinions on the work, how to approach, etc.

As Petrushka mentioned recently, this one demands some time........

[Dave2002]

20th May
RFH

Chabrier: Espana
Saint-Saëns: 5th Piano concerto, soloist Stephen Hough
Debussy: Images
Ravel: La Valse

RPO conducted by Charles Dutoit

Very good as heard from W54 in the side stalls. Almost loud enough!
So much better than almost any "hi-fi". So much more detail, and a lot more going on which was audible, and
demonstrated that some orchestral music really is very complex.

Not sure how meaningful CD's stick movements or other gestures are, but they seem to be effective, either because of, or in spite of.

A disappointingly small audience though - this concert was worth hearing.

[Ferretfancy]

A very disappointing recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday 19th by Nelson Freire.
This was a concert that had been postponed from early March because of the pianist's health.

This began with Beethoven's Andante Favori, followed by the Op. 111 Sonata. The piano sounded dreadful, with a very clangy metallic tone, piercingly uncomfortable in loud passages. Freire could play the notes all right, but I thought this was a terrible example of bad Beethoven playing, all the accents ridiculously over exaggerated, and with weird rhythmic changes applied for no apparent reason. Not just wayward, but clumsy.

After the interval he ploughed his way through some Debussy, Les Collines d'Anacapri, La soiree dans Grenade, and Poissons d'or. La soiree is one of my favourite Debussy pieces, completely wrecked here. I'm afraid that we decided to leave before his Rachmaninov and Chopin.

I'm at a loss to understand what went wrong. Under preparation? Ill health affecting execution ? I've heard Nelson Freire at other times give fine performances. If he is
poorly perhaps it might have been better to cancel outright before the original date in March rather than soldier uncomfortably on.

[amateur51]

A very disappointing recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday 19th by Nelson Freire.
This was a concert that had been postponed from early March because of the pianist's health.

This began with Beethoven's Andante Favori, followed by the Op. 111 Sonata. The piano sounded dreadful, with a very clangy metallic tone, piercingly uncomfortable in loud passages. Freire could play the notes all right, but I thought this was a terrible example of bad Beethoven playing, all the accents ridiculously over exaggerated, and with weird rhythmic changes applied for no apparent reason. Not just wayward, but clumsy.

After the interval he ploughed his way through some Debussy, Les Collines d'Anacapri, La soiree dans Grenade, and Poissons d'or. La soiree is one of my favourite Debussy pieces, completely wrecked here. I'm afraid that we decided to leave before his Rachmaninov and Chopin.

I'm at a loss to understand what went wrong. Under preparation? Ill health affecting execution ? I've heard Nelson Freire at other times give fine performances. If he is
poorly perhaps it might have been better to cancel outright before the original date in March rather than soldier uncomfortably on.

Very sorry to hear of this Ferret. In his pomp I agree he is a fine pianist.

[Blotto]

Philharmonia/Hrusa/Mork.

Dvorak cello concerto/ Suk "Asrael" symphony.
RFH.

Disappointingly, a really poor attendance. Balcony closed, rear stalls about a third full in the centre, almost empty at the sides, and front stall only about 60/70% full I would think. Plenty of coughers, and several folk left during the symphony.

I get rather depressed by poor attendance at Philharmonia concerts

I don't know how the demographics and things like season bookings/corporates/concessions work. I am constantly surprised though that the top price tickets for these concerts (which are fairly steep prices) always seem to sell pretty well, while the middle and lower end seem so much less popular, at least for certain concerts

Edit: There was also a pretty modest turnout for the Faust Trio concert at the the QEH a couple of weeks ago.

I really don't know if there are pricing issues. For many SBC concerts there are tickets available at more than reasonable prices. I have to say I am seldom tempted to upgrade, because one problem with the pricing is that some of the seats that are not much better than the cheapies are a lot more expensive ... perhaps more tickets at around £15 in say the front of the rear stalls would help, for less popular concerts/

As discussed elsewhere, the website isn't the most user friendly, but its surely not bad enough to cause such poor attendances. Programming is pretty standard, plenty of popular stuff, and some things to interest the more curious.
Beats me !!

The odd thing is that for people with good access to Waterloo from the south, Its very easy to get to, , and with the price of the cheaper tickets, I can see a concert there almost as cheaply as a Philharmonia concert in , say, Basingstoke.

But then I have issues with the way arts organisations go about sales and marketing ...

20th May
RFH

RPO conducted by Charles Dutoit

A disappointingly small audience though - this concert was worth hearing.

Hi. There are other ways to phrase it but it looks to me as if concert-going in London is going the way of church attendance and the record shop and for very similar reasons.

The audiences have been elderly for a long time and the elderly audiences are dying. Like the churches, the point arrives where a very substantial proportion of the shrinking attendees die in a short space of time and the halls begin to empty; the empty halls in turn are less attractive places to be.

As significantly, alternate, near-free or cheap and spontaneous access to a huge range of music via Spotify, Youtube, Amazon etc means that a concert hall is a dingy corner shop by comparison and a corner shop it may take an hour or more to get to and another hour to get home from.

It's also a place where I can almost guarantee to be irritated by noise - phones, crisps, jabber - and seeing people wiping their shoes on the seats, either by walking over them or slumping, legs akimbo with their boots on the back of the seat in front. As at the British Film Institute, many people coming in to rows don't even speak to the person they want to get past - either to ask to get past or to thank them for standing.

The public culture has been changed and for a middle-aged man like myself, it's simply too tiresome to contemplate enduring.

I live in north London. The Barbican is my nearest orchestral venue. I would only ever buy cheaper seats (£20 plus £5 transport is about my limit). A £10 or £12 ticket gets me into the balcony (and there's almost always space to move to another seat).

But even there, to book a seat, I'm charged £3 online or £4 by phone. The automatic adding to the tally of another £3 or £4 'donation' when booking online does affect my approach to the website. It's a presumptuous irritation and, to be frank, I feel the institution is taking the piss - and this has an influence on my willingness to approach the site as presumptious behaviour by the staff and owners would stop me entering a shop. I won't go somewhere or spend money on something that I know will put me in a bad mood.

One positive about the Barbican site is that it's easy to find basic information about concerts that might interest me. The South Bank site by comparison is exceptionally feeble and bloated.

Funnily enough, I was looking for the first time in 6 months last night to see what might be upcoming but I stopped attending concerts on the South Bank last year and I don't think anything could get me back. This is a message I wrote to the London Philharmonic after attending one of new music programmes there in December. I've removed the swearing (of which there was, I'm afraid, alot). The events at this concert were the straw that broke my back. I'm not educated musically, and to get something from new music and to take anything away from it), I have to concentrate hard. To concentrate, I need stillness. The audience was substantial and evidently substantially composed of kids with a different expectations of concert behaviour and different abilities than mine to be still.

NOISE is an LPO scheme for under-25s to get best available seats and free Heineken for £4.

"I wish I could say I'd enjoyed the concert last night (7th December) but the noise from the audience made concentrating impossible. The girls behind me had little chats throughout, rummaged through their bags and clattered their jewellery. The last part of their performance included actually slamming the rear stalls door when one of them went out during a piece to use her phone. Never heard a concert door slammed before; didn't know they could be slammed. You live and learn. Last night's learned lesson is: don't go to a concert at the Southbank centre again. Why did I bother going after last month when the student in front of me let his phone go off during the final moments of the Ligeti? When the music's all on Spotify and Youtube and the RFH's priority is cultivating an audience of subsidised tipplers, it's time to give my seat up to them. The line of girls who ran up the stairs to get out during the Turnage were what I'd expect from people who got their discount tickets through a scheme called NOISE.

Noise on Facebook: "Make some NOISE."

There are too many halls and the halls are too large. There are too many people wanting to play and not enough people wanting to listen. Supply of live music outstrips demand.

There are other reasons why audiences are shrinking and changing but the above are some mine.

[french frank]

Food for thought, Blotto (and welcome, btw!). This will be in spite of R3's stout efforts to get younger people interested in film music, rock musicians &c &c

[Dave2002]

Food for thought, Blotto (and welcome, btw!). This will be in spite of R3's stout efforts to get younger people interested in film music, rock musicians &c &c

I repeat my earlier phrase from msg 544

So much better than almost any "hi-fi". So much more detail, and a lot more going on which was audible, and
demonstrated that some orchestral music really is very complex.

I suspect many people have never experienced anything remotely like that. Mp3 players, spotify etc. even good "hi-fi" don't come anywhere near. They don't know what they're missing, but they're probably never going to find out either, or maybe even think of wanting to.

[Blotto]

Food for thought, Blotto (and welcome, btw!). This will be in spite of R3's stout efforts to get younger people interested in film music, rock musicians &c &c

I think - in many ways - Radio 3 has done a fairly good job of adapting itself to the times. It's one of many recorded/live routes to 'serious' music rather than having a monopoly. I don't find the more 'pop' new music they play any more unrewarding than the abstruse stuff. The one bonus of playing pop junk is that I don't feel ashamed or depressed by my inability to react positively. It's simplicity makes it easier to be confident that it's crap.

I repeat my earlier phrase from msg 544

I suspect many people have never experienced anything remotely like that. Mp3 players, spotify etc. even good "hi-fi" don't come anywhere near. They don't know what they're missing, but they're probably never going to find out either, or maybe even think of wanting to.

Here again, the older audiences may not experience it that way; 'even good "hi-fi" don't come anywhere near' the sound in a hall if the listener has good hearing. The ageing audiences with reduced acuity of hearing are the people more likely to benefit from listening to music at home - adjusted bass and treble, adjusted volume, proximity and position in relation to the sound source etc - if they have the equipment set up right.

Alot of users of digital hearing aids seem to have no idea how to use them and it's not uncommon to find they haven't been programmed to use loops or that the owner knows how to set the aid if the the programme is there.

One thing that halls could do is try running hearing aid clinics before concerts and at the intermissions. It must be crushing to go to a concert terrified that your aid is going to start whistling. This happened at a concert last year and the conductor stopped and waited for the user of the aid to silence it. Imagine your mortification if it were you and the dread it might engender in you and other users of aids in the hall.

Conversely, the audiences habituated to ipod and smart phone music played in public and on transport - on foot, bus, train, car with the attendant noise of others and engines - to them, a hall's quietness may be quite unfamiliar and unrewarding, still photographs of nature compared to the liveliness of nature itself.

The world changes.

[Blotto]

Food for thought, Blotto (and welcome, btw!).

Thanks for the welcome.

I don't think it's all bad news (though I appreciate that confronting death and ageing don't have a cheering effect on everyone!). Audiences at big halls may be shrinking but that just means that music needs to de-industrialise. Perhaps - beautifully - there will be an increase in small venue performance with a greater diversity of audience 'styles'.

I've never liked the big halls. I find a piano played to an ordinary standard in my own living room much more moving than any public concert I've ever attended. I think there's a compensation for lesser musicianship when it's genuinely intimate (genuinely as distinct from the version of intimacy referred to by advertisers.

Much public music making is industrial, remote and spiritless, I think.

The audiences have changed, access to music has changed and concert hall audiences have diminished accordingly. The perverse thing is that - as far as the South bank in London goes - it was the possibly successful capture of a younger audience that drove me out. The concert did have Evelyn Glennie on the bill so this may have been a big factor in the audience size, I don't know. But the disturbance I described above isn't overstated and it finished me off for that venue.

[teamsaint]

hi Blotto.

I was interested in your comments on supply and demand, and on industrialised music performance.

Its certainly true that music education has , as in so many other occupations, oversupplied the current market . The answer to this is for orchestras and musicians to adapt to the new environments that you rightly allude to.

If big ,highly professional orchestras cannot fill halls and sell enough tickets, (although 70% capacities may in fact be enough in the current funding environment) perhaps some entrepreneur somewhere can find opportunity.

Musicians elsewhere have managed to adopt to new technology and an over supplied market by selling themselves in new ways, for instance by selling downloads and CDs direct from websites.
It is frequently in my mind that there must be a way of reconciling the needs of musicians to earn, the needs of composers and music to be played, and the desires of audiences to hear different kinds of music to that currently on offer. No doubt there are other parts of the equation too.
Orchestral music is really hard to fund, and I suspect that the full-time professional model may in future only be part of a , potentially rather healthier mix.

[Dave2002]

Here again, the older audiences may not experience it that way; 'even good "hi-fi" don't come anywhere near' the sound in a hall if the listener has good hearing. The ageing audiences with reduced acuity of hearing are the people more likely to benefit from listening to music at home - adjusted bass and treble, adjusted volume, proximity and position in relation to the sound source etc - if they have the equipment set up right.

Alot of users of digital hearing aids seem to have no idea how to use them and it's not uncommon to find they haven't been programmed to use loops or that the owner knows how to set the aid if the the programme is there.

One thing that halls could do is try running hearing aid clinics before concerts and at the intermissions. It must be crushing to go to a concert terrified that your aid is going to start whistling. This happened at a concert last year and the conductor stopped and waited for the user of the aid to silence it. Imagine your mortification if it were you and the dread it might engender in you and other users of aids in the hall.

I fear I would now be amongst the older people you think of as having hearing deficits, yet my hearing is not terrible. I have some friends whose hearing has deteriorated very rapidly - and I hope I'm not going the same way. I certainly found the RFH experience far superior to listening to any form of canned music, and I generally do find the sound at live venues much better.

With very good equipment it might be possible to actually exceed the sound levels experienced in the hall - certainly with headphones - but the clarity of sound in the hall more than compensates. Sound quality and emotional impact are not simply related to volume of sound - youngsters who simply want to turn up the volume don't realise this. Clarity and the wash of sound one can get at live concerts have more effect.

I feel some sympathy for the hearing aid user you mention, but OTOH I went to a piano recital which was significantly ruined by sounds which I suspect were whistles from somebody's hearing aid. I wish that the promoters had done something about that.

One significant factor if the average age of audiences is increasing is that many older people really do not like travelling into large cities like London. Whereas when they were 40 or 50 they would not have thought twice about it, as they progress into their 70s and beyond, many are reluctant to travel - all the hassle with trains, buses and tubes - just too much for many.

[Blotto]

I feel I've jumped in here and been a bit free with my opinions. If I may, I'll drop back with proper responses tomorrow.

[Richard Tarleton]

I feel I've jumped in here and been a bit free with my opinions. If I may, I'll drop back with proper responses tomorrow.

Welcome from me too Blotto - I've been bemoaning the shrinking audiences in Cardiff on this thread for a while, I hadn't realised that it was because we were simply dying off actually your first post struck several chords with me. Though at 65 you have me fingering my collar nervously as well.

And it's a 2 hour drive home for me