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.
The logic is clear. In recent years, it has been dawning on classical music presenters that the eternal quest for new audiences is being stymied by an image problem. Especially for young or otherwise uninitiated listeners, a major barrier to entry is not the music itself but the packaging. Concert halls are too often seen as solemn temples of high art governed by a formal, rigid, and altogether foreign code of etiquette. For many it is more than just a fear of clapping in the wrong place; it is a larger sense that a new subculture must be learned before they will be able to enjoy a live performance.
What would happen if you simply brought the music to the places where these listeners were already comfortable and familiar? The cellist Matt Haimovitz was the first player I know of to put this question to a sustained and rigorous test. In the age-old folk-tradition, he packed up his cello and drove around the country playing Bach Suites as well as bracing contemporary music in cafes, bars, and clubs.
I once heard him play in a country music venue in Nashville and in a pizza parlor in Jackson, Miss. It was surreal to watch baseball-capped frat boys, innocently out for a slice of pizza, wander into a passionate performance of microtonal music. But by and large, audiences seemed to love it and responded viscerally to such direct contact with a top-flight performer. It was not about finding a new performance gimmick, but about stripping away the packaging to unleash the music’s natural expressive power.
Tapping into some of the same logic, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (or BMOP) is in its third season of presenting concerts at Club Cafe. On Tuesday night, the space was packed with a lively audience. The atmosphere was bustling, with waitresses taking orders for beer and chardonnay as the players were setting up onstage.
This year, the Club Concerts are being curated and hosted by Lisa Bielawa, BMOP’s new composer in residence. This is good news for fans of the series, as Bielawa not only has an inviting stage presence as emcee but also a rich network of composer connections through her experience as artistic director of the MATA Festival of contemporary music in New York City.
Tuesday’s program was packed with music written in the last decade by Keeril Makan, Gordon Beeferman, Jocelyn Morlock, Roshanne Etezady, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Aaron Trant. The styles ran the gamut from the rippling, post-impressionist textures of Morlock’s “QUOI???” to the highly structured freedom of Trant's “Dictit,” which combined elements of 12-tone music with improvisation.
One highlight of the program was the introduction of Bielawa’s own “Synopsis Project” in which she will write short studies for about 20 BMOP players over the course of her residency. The first two in the series were highly engaging, and it will be interesting to see how this project unfolds. Bielawa herself is also a vocalist, and she performed an alluring excerpt from Beeferman’s “West of Winter,” singing in a vocal quartet for which she had pre-recorded the other three parts. Pianist Sarah Bob, violinist Gabriela Diaz, and percussionist Aaron Trant were the other brave performers of the evening.
Programs like this one seem to breathe more comfortably in unconventional spaces, where the freshly minted music can stand free of the mammoth shadow cast by the standard repertoire. The presentation format also seemed just about right. In a small but telling detail, the two Bielawa pieces on the program were being given their first performances but there was no mention anywhere of that weighty phrase: “world premiere.” The concert was more akin to dropping by a gallery where one could casually sample an invigorating swath of music from our time.
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. |
