 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Music Review: 'Soundbytes' makes respectable debut with 'Classical Scandals
Monday, November 16, 1998 By Mark Kanny
It wasn't the Stones at Altamont, but there was a riot at Heinz Hall Saturday night.
To re-enact the scandalous premiere of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," factions of actors shouted outrage at the music and in reply outrage at the outrage while the music was being played. People ran to the edge of the stage. Fists were thrown. Bodies fell down.
Saturday night fights at Heinz Hall got everyone's attention. Symphony Soundbytes has arrived. It is the Symphony's latest attempt to reach out to "the many people who we believe want to make live, classical music a part of their lives." The Hoshin process (virtually a mantra upstairs at Heinz Hall these days) led to creation of a team that conducted research into what the target demographic group wanted. Soundbytes is the partly musical concert product that resulted. The three themes are scandals, love and humor.
"Classical Scandals" was a hit, due principally to the work of creative producer Peter Frisch and host David Ogden Stiers. Frisch and co-writer Lauren Dale Rice wrote a continuously entertaining script, mostly humorous and wry, about Claude Debussy's affair with a married woman, Beethoven's neurotic tyranny over his nephew Carl (which drew a laugh for a failed suicide), Tchaikovsky's homosexual relationship with his brother, and Liszt's fooling around. There was a certain sado-masochistic odor to the way Wagner's love life was told, but if anything Wagner and Cosima, Liszt's daughter, were nastier than the audience heard. It would be tough to say who had the more virulent bigotry at heart.
Stiers supplied the perfect balance of wry humor and mock offense to make the script a winner in performance.
Best known, despite much other fine work, for creating the role of Major Winchester, Stiers and the script made no allusion to one of the most touching musical episodes of M*A*S*H, in which a group of Korean musicians play Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. Must have been the wrong type of music for 25- to 45-year-olds.
The musical portion of the program was mainly fast and loud. James Judd, the music director of the Florida Philharmonic for the past decade, was guest conductor. Although I've heard good performances from him on radio broadcasts and compact discs, I've not seen him before. Therefore I assume the script called upon him to impersonate a nervous hyperkinetic conductor. He did well.
Given the rushed tempos, the performances weren't neat but they did have impact. The percussion section was outstanding. It was certainly clever to offer performances of this kind.
People who go from Soundbytes to subscription concerts will know they've done the right thing because they will hear a much higher level of musical performance.
After the opening scene, audiences ceased to be the target of ridicule.
Aside from bringing composers down to size, the writing of critics proved a reliable gag. And why not? There's even a great book of hilariously bad reviews of great new music called "A Lexicon of Musical Invective" by Nicolas Slonimsky. Criticism has changed since then, partly by that book.
Today the prejudice is the other way. The sequel could be called "A Lexicon of Fatuous Praise."
The best line in the script on critics was by Sibelius, who said no statue has ever been erected to a critic. But there have been some biting caricatures, not to mention rumors of small dolls with pins in them.
Soundbytes was good, and has room to grow. For example, no use was made of Heinz Hall's television capacity, aside from teleprompters. It will live or die on the strength of scripts and hosts.
|
||||||||
