Change of Venue is Music to their Ears

Monday, 10. 6. 2008

by JEREMY EICHLER — Boston Globe — December 7, 2006

On Tuesday night, I attended two richly satisfying concerts without stepping foot in a concert hall. The first was a new music program presented by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project at the Moonshine Room of the popular Club Cafe in the South End; the second was a performance by the up-and-coming Parker String Quartet in the Lizard Lounge, a low-slung basement club space in Cambridge. Next month, the Firebird Ensemble will perform in a local barbecue joint.

What is classical music doing in these spaces? It may sound quirky or even perverse, but it is in fact an excellent idea and a growing trend. Of course Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall are in no risk of losing their core constituencies, but they may well stand to gain some listeners if this practice continues.

At 10 p.m., about an hour after the BMOP program ended, I was being handed a wristband at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, and the Parker Quartet, an ensemble of graduate students at New England Conservatory who have already gained impressive notice, were setting up beneath a pink disco ball suspended from the ceiling. First violinist Daniel Chong grabbed a mike and welcomed the crowd, admitting this was the largest young audience they had ever had at a concert.

Indeed, the players in this impressively talented quartet are in their early to mid-20s. It is a sad fact that students choosing a career in classical music today by and large do not get to perform for members of their own generation. Friends might show up to support you at a concert, but they are generally more likely to be found at places, well, like the Lizard Lounge.

It was refreshing to see the Parkers play through some of their repertoire—movements of works by Schumann, Mozart, Ligeti, Shostakovich, Ravel—in this setting. After the quartet blazed through a Scherzo from Schumann’s A-minor quartet, a guy in the corner with a beer offered a spontaneous shout of “Awesome!” The cellist Kee-Hyun Kim later drew some laughs from the crowd when he introduced the final Haydn work by announcing they were going to “kick it old school.”

But beyond the alternative space and the banter with the audience, what distinguished the Parkers’ set was their fiercely committed performances. They conveyed an appealing sense of urgency in Ravel’s Quartet, and brought out the rugged extraterrestrial beauty of Ligeti’s First Quartet. These qualities come through all the more strongly in such an intimate venue. If you had closed your eyes during many parts of the set, the biggest difference from what you might hear in a concert hall was the rapt silence. There were no coughs, no cellphones.

Alternative spaces are not a panacea—there can be obvious logistical problems, bad PA systems, obnoxious or indifferent crowds, and myriad other challenges—but they are spicing up the scene while allowing, at times, for a rare directness of connection with both new audiences and traditional ones. Ultimately, the battle for the next generation of listeners should be won or lost based on the quality of the music being offered and the persuasiveness of the performances. Sometimes this requires slicing through the traditional packaging that, when viewed from the outside, can too often be mistaken for the concert experience itself.