Why attend a live performance

(Another little something I wrote for Concentus' blog (the women's group in which I sing):

Why does anyone bother to attend a live classical concert?  It seems obvious that if Bruce Springsteen or Coldplay came to town, the hall (or, more likely, stadium) would be sold out.  But a choral concert?  Or the symphony orchestra?  Why not just stay home and listen to a CD, while doing something productive, instead of sitting captive for an hour or two?  I can think of many reasons to witness music live –for example, to hear different musicians’ and conductors’ interpretations of familiar works, to be introduced to unfamiliar pieces, to share in the social experience.

When I was younger and would tell my mother about having gone to see a particular  concert, she would correct me:  you go to hear a performance, not see it.  In thinking about why it matters to go to live performances at all, it occurs to me that she wasn’t entirely correct.  If one just wanted to hear Holst’s The Planets* or “perhaps a piece of Mahler’s,” one could just listen to a recording at home.  If one wanted exposure to unfamiliar music, there’s always (for now, at least) a local classical music radio station.  So I beg to differ – I do go to concerts to see the performance, in addition to hearing it! 

In a live performance, you can actually observe, as well as hear, the music rippling through an orchestra.  Or see the singers’ intensity or watch them sway to the beat. You can follow the conductor as he or she guides the musicians.  And only in live performance will you have the opportunity to experience the unexpected – the hiccups that get edited out for the sake of recorded perfection, or the spontaneity of a truly deserved standing ovation.  I’ve been in an audience which witnessed a touching moment  when Alicia de Larrocha blanked in the middle of a piano solo and had to be brought the score, and in another where we couldn’t get enough of the folk choir “Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares.”

In addition, you also get to see different conducting styles.  Years ago, my brother Bill and I attended a New York Philharmonic concert conducted by Bobby McFerrin, and we will never forget it.  McFerrin didn’t quite connect with the orchestra, and they managed to practically ignore him as he did, in Bill’s words, “his dance of the sugar plum fairy imitation.”  At the other end of the spectrum, Leonard Slatkin, conducting the same orchestra, was so in tune with the musician as they responded to his every movement, that the audience was actually able to watch, as well as hear the music, as melodies bounced from one section of the orchestra to another.

Rochester has an amazing range of resident classical musical groups, orchestral and choral, professional and amateur, that there is surely something for everyone.  The only challenges are finding out who’s performing where and when, and finding the time to fit it all in. Live.

*Concentus will be reprising their “stellar” RPO performance of this piece with the Penfield Symphony Orchestra in October – click here for more information: http://www.concentus.org/concerts/e/penfield-symphony-orchestra-out-of-this-world