Who is listening, and why they are there

When I was fourteen I heard the Opus 44 Dvorak Serenade for the first time. The concert was at Jordan Hall in Boston, and was performed by high school students. I remember how beautifully Kip Wilkins (who later became a conductor) played the first oboe part. It was a life-changing experience for me. I had never before heard anything instrumental that was so beautiful, so engaging, and so multi-textured.

Last night I heard a fine performance of the piece given by an ensemble made of university faculty, university students, and a non-university-affiliated freelancer. Just as the performance was about to begin I realized that the last time I had heard the piece in a live concert was when I was a teenager is Boston (when all concerts were live, unless you heard a radio broadcast of a live concert). I have, of course, heard it played on recordings, but for this piece, with all its variety of lower-octave textures (two bassoons, one contrabassoon, one cello, one bass, and a low third horn), recordings rarely do it justice. This one comes pretty close if you follow the score. In a concert a score for this piece isn't necessary because you can see who is playing what.



But I digress . . .

The point of this post is that when you are giving a performance the piece you happen to be playing could be a piece that has special significance in the past, present, or future life of someone in the audience. For me it was a tying together of the musical person I happened to be when I was fourteen with the musical person I happened to be almost half a century later.

This piece is so spectacularly written that as long as the musicians are up to the task at hand (and as long as you have an excellent first oboe and first horn, and first bassoon, and clarinetists who play well together) listening to a performance is a similar experience whether it happens to be in Boston, Downstate Illinois, or Prague, or in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century.

But I digress again . . .

I'm writing this post as a reminder to always remember that a concert is a special occasion for a whole host of reasons, very few of which the people performing know or will ever know.