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May 20, 2006
Watching Music
I went with a friend to Carnegie Hall a week ago to see Mitsuko Uchida play Mozart piano works. I go so frequently to dance and infrequently enough to music concerts that the differences in performance conventions are fascinating and disorienting.
Carnegie Hall is elegant, decorated with ornate gilt moldings but restrained for its time – there is enough white space on the walls to still feel uncluttered and airy. The hall is more intimate than the State Theater and at least the lower rings have an old fashioned system of box seating rather than rows. The absence of an orchestra pit changes the dynamic between the stage and the house. Without a pit as a buffer zone, the stage ends and the audience begins.
The performance has less ritual or ceremony than dance – or it could be that the rituals don’t look like rituals to me because they’re not familiar: The house lights do not dim and there is no real stage lighting; the soloist comes out onto the unadorned stage through a door unconcealed at the side of the stage. She bows to the audience and sits. Uchida was not one to waste time; the moment she sat, her hands went to the keyboard, there was an intake of breath and she began.
It was hard for me to even get through the first piece, the Fantasie in C minor K475, because of the adjusting I had to make. It’s music. What was I supposed to watch? With an orchestra there is motion on the stage; the players often trade melodies or movements cascade and ripple through the string sections like wind through wheat fields. Even though our seats were quite good, a solo piano recital at Carnegie Hall is not the same as in a salon. I couldn’t see Uchida’s face clearly and besides her fingers, not much moved. Because the lights were up, I often watched the audience watching.
At intermission I had several questions that betrayed my own background:
There’s no director, is there? Is there anyone besides a stage manager backstage?
Does she rehearse at all on stage? Is anything “staged”?
What instrument were the sonatas designed for? (A pianoforte.)
What does she do during intermission? (It’s painfully practical for dancers – if you’re a woman, you’re readying your shoes for the next ballet. Otherwise, you’re either resting or getting ready for the next piece, but the intermission is essential for the dancers as well as placed there to give the audience a respite)
The minutiae were fascinating to me. Barry explained that for concerts here the pianists did not play a “house” piano. Most of the time, they went to Steinway (a short distance away) and tried out one of many pianos that were there to find the one that sounded and felt best to them. That piano was then delivered to Carnegie Hall for the performances. The production details were a handle to the music itself, which was marvelous, but as with opera I would need more consistent exposure to be able to discuss it properly. I thought it was interesting that the first half of the program was much darker in tone than what I associate with Mozart and Uchida purposefully took a Romantic reading.
Watching music without dance reminded me what I like most about music with dance: choreography fixes music in time. When I was listening to the concert I felt like I was floating in a becalmed and featureless sea. I knew I was in the water, but did not know where I was headed. With dance, music becomes a journey that has a beginning, middle and conclusion.
When I’m at home listening to music, it is a private act done on my terms. I listen attentively or do other tasks. I back the music up and repeat. I play only my favorite parts if I choose; it's up to me. Music in a theater is a more ancient, communal experience, just like dance – yet dance does not transfer well enough to recording to have gone through the transition music made from a communal to a private art. I’m glad dance didn’t frankly, one of the reasons I’m mostly uninterested in recording technology for dance. I don’t want dance to leave the theater.
Uchida played an extremely brief encore (probably Webern) before a more traditional and contemplative one that was a lovely way to send us into the night. There was nothing but a piano, a soloist, an audience and Mozart. I need more experience and training in the zen of watching music.
Posted by Leigh Witchel at May 20, 2006 11:58 PM
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Comments
Piano recitls have their own set of rituals but, compared to ballet, the rituals are rather spartan. The performer acknowledges the audience, but exists primarily in a world of her own. All the action takes place in a space circumscribed by the distance from the piano stool to the keyboard. The challenge for the artist is to create an aural space for the audience to enhabit. Paradoxically, that is accomplished by way of an intensely private exchange between the performer and the composer through the medium of the instrument.
What I like about recitals is that they offer up the music raw, with as little distance between the composer and the listener as possible. With dance, the music is not the primary focus; in recitals it is the only focus.
I know a blind woman who I see frequently at both Carnegie Hall and at the Met with her seeing-eye dog. (That dog has heard more music than most humans.) For her, the music is a complete world in which eyesight is irrelevant. I've never seen her at the ballet.
Carnegie Hall is a place that resonates with musical ghosts - it has been the one indispensable stop for every important soloist, chamber ensemble, orchestra, and conductor of the past century. The standard was set with the hall's inaugural concert - conducted by Tschaikovsky, no less. Is there any dance venue outside Russia that carries the same weight of history?
Posted by: Barry at May 22, 2006 12:38 AM
I always find it very freeing to go to a music concert -- I can look down at my lap, from side to side, I can even close my eyes!
Posted by: sandi at May 25, 2006 2:34 AM