ONE MORE TIME!!!

I’m about to enter my own personal hell and it has led to some reflection on repertoire and the rep choices that orchestras make.

Up in the Great White North which is Edmonton we are on the verge of holding Principal Clarinet Auditions.  An audition of this importance is stressful for everyone – the organization, the committee, and especially the candidates.  But for me there is an element of “my own personal hell” in this particular audition because the first piece on the list, as I’m sure it is on the Principal Clarinet audition list for just about every orchestra on earth, is the Mozart concerto.  This is where I feel the flames of Hades licking at my shoes.

Usually hearing any Mozart is a labor of tremendous joy.  It’s Mozart, after all, and the guy knew what he was doing, and as a Music Director I don’t want to work with a clarinetist who has no clue about how to play his music, so hearing it in an audition serves an important purpose.  But my wife is a professional clarinetist and this concerto is part of her regular practice routine.  I have now heard the first part of this concerto many, many hundreds of times.  Despite the possibility that she will hear about this post I must admit that when she starts in on this concerto my nerves grate on me.  I immediately think “Sweetie, you’ve played this a billion times, why don’t you work on a different concerto?”

But there lies the problem.  Look at the clarinet concerto repertoire.  Once you get past concertos by Mozart, Copland, Debussy, Nielsen……… suddenly the pickings get very, very slim.  There are some major concertos written in the last few decades – Rouse and Corigliano amongst them – but from the previous two centuries there just isn’t much to choose from.  Honestly, can you really consider music by Carl Maria von Weber a major part of your concerto repertoire?  Really?

I am a pianist, and because of that I’m utterly spoiled.  No matter how you start counting those clarinet concertos by the time you get into double digits you HAVE to mention the Weber concerti.  As a pianist by the time I’m in double digits I’ve played through ……… 10 major Mozart piano concertos, and I’ve got a few more before I even hit the ones we consider juvenilia.   One of the strangest moments in my life occurs whenever my wife refers to “The Mozart.”  If you said that to any pianist they would look at you blankly.  We’re so spoiled we refer to the Mozart concerti by their “K” numbers.  “I’m doing 503 with the Upper Podunk Community Orchestra next week.”  Every pianist will know what you’re talking about. The only question might be “which C Major is that?” since we have at least 3 to choose from and it’s hard to keep track of them all.  We pianists have so much concerto repertoire that it’s nigh unto impossible to get through it all in a lifetime.  We won’t even start talking about solo and chamber music repertoire where the disparity is even worse.  32 Beethoven sonatas for piano and counting, many of them just referred to by their nicknames.  My wife plays The Mozart concerto regularly because 1) it’s a great piece; and 2) she has very little choice.

Orchestras generally have the opposite problem.  There is so much fabulous repertoire out there that, once again, it would be impossible to get through the least part of it in a lifetime (Neeme Järvi seems to be the obvious exception here and I don’t know how he does it).  But we consistently rotate the same few dozen pieces through our programs.  Part of the argument is that we play what our public wants to hear, but another part of the problem is that we have pigeon-holed our programming to such an extent that there is a whole wealth of rep that we never expose our audiences to.  We are afraid that we will scare away our audience.

But perhaps we are looking at the problem the wrong way.  If we continue to market ourselves as the “Safe One Hundred Symphony Orchestra” then the only thing that our constituents will look for is which Beethoven symphony we’re playing this week.  A concert is a concert is a concert.  What is we instead marketed our concerts as events, and programmed accordingly?  This would require us to invest marketing expertise in the fact that we provide great live concerts with fabulous artists, in (hopefully) a great acoustic, surrounded by your fellow and like-minded members of your community, etc.

This is a more adventurous way of looking at how we interact with our audiences, and in some ways a more dangerous one.  You do have bigger odds of offending someone who is only interested in the aforementioned Beethoven symphony on every concert, but there is 95% of the community out there who we usually don’t service, and they are looking for an event.  Which is more important – to have your audience enjoy your performances or to have them appreciate them?  I am using the word “appreciate” in the direction of “understanding” the music.  Frankly I couldn’t care less if you understand the interesting use of the plagal cadence in Brahms’ 4th symphony.   If you do that’s really nice.  Much more important to me is that you enjoyed our performance of that fabulous work, and that your experience at the concert inspires you to come back.

Of course this approach requires more than just good programming.  The way the orchestra interacts with the audience must change.  The whole experience of going to the concert must be enjoyable and special.  Front-of-house staff must be welcoming, marketing must be better targeted, the acoustics must be clear, ticket service must run smoothly, etc., etc.  And, of course, you’ve got to hope that your Music Director doesn’t use this approach to push through that year long exclusive festival of the 2nd Viennese school that he/she/it has been aching to do since forever.  You have to pick your battles and hope that there are enough people out there willing to follow you into rep they may have not heard before.  Importantly though, if you have established the kind of relationship with your audience so that they do look at your concerts as important events then I would wager a large portion of your regulars will go where you lead them.

This is a subtle but profound shift in thought.  It is simple but it is certainly NOT easy, but I would wager it would be the best change for the long term and it would lead to a larger and more engaged audience base for our concerts….. oops, i mean our events!  Meanwhile, I shall do some mental yoga and prepare myself for our full day of The Mozart concerto.  Perhaps I should bring a personal fire extinguisher to the audition.