iNote

‘Twas the week before Christmas, and I went to see my friend Rob Moose
and his string quartet OSSO perform at (le) poisson rouge in the West
Village. They played just after pianist Gloria Cheng, whose program
Allan Kozinn from The Times describes:

The
program Gloria Cheng played at Le Poisson Rouge on Monday evening was
drawn from her most recent Telarc recording, a compilation of the
complete (if slim) piano music of Esa-Pekka Salonen and Steven Stucky, along with a Lutoslawski rarity, the youthful Sonata (1934).

But
other threads bind the works as well. Ms. Cheng is friends with Mr.
Salonen, who composed “Dichotomie” (2000) for her. Mr. Salonen, who as
a conductor has been a champion of Mr. Stucky, persuaded Ms. Cheng to
include Mr. Stucky’s “Four Album Leaves” (2002) on her disc. Mr.
Stucky, who published a monograph on Lutoslawski, put her onto that
composer’s Sonata. And as it turns out, the piano music of all three
composers draws heavily on the harmonic language and textures of the
French Impressionists.

“When you play works by composers you
know,” she said at the start of her set, “you see more in the music
because you know the person; but you also see more in the person
because you know the music.”

The
threads that bind a program of music by living (and recently deceased)
composers that Kozinn details above are useful to include in a review. 
They are also, of course, useful in program and liner notes, either written by
the artist or written by someone who knows the artist and the composers
involved well enough to write an approaching-first-person account.
Kozinn only mentions Cheng’s verbal introduction to her set, but in fact she talked
the whole time, which was fantastic. She talked about being backstage
with Salonen at the LA Phil and him saying, “I want to write a little
piano piece.” (I believe the final piece was 17 minutes long in two
parts.), she talked about how in one part of piece she thought the
machines – the general subject of the composition – “go nuts”. It was
the kind of backstage intel I feel so privileged to discuss with
my artists, and there it was, all over the concert. Of course it helped
that Cheng was extremely articulate, clearly serious, and very funny
without that familiar “Thanks folks, I’ll be here all week” tinge.

My
friend from IMG who’s a friend of hers was there, and he introduced us
after the concert. “I loved the way you talked about the pieces!” I blurted, of course. “Really?” she replied, “I just found out today that
there wasn’t going to be a program!” But this was far better than a
program: Some branches of trees were saved, no one was reading
during the concert, the familiar paper shuffling and crinkling was
decidedly not missed, and most importantly, the audience got a sense
of the artist’s personality, musical perspective, and role in the
creation of contemporary classical music in an organic way.

I recently learned at a visit to MOMA that you can now download an MP3 from their website
or connect via WiFi on your iPhone/iPod Touch at the museum rather than pick up an audio guide to an exhibition. So let’s say I was going to the OSSO/Gloria Cheng concert, and wanted
to know what I was about to hear in the artist’s own words. I could download an audio file of
Cheng talking about the pieces, telling little anecdotes about hangin’
backstage with EPS, put in on my iPod, and listen on the 1 train en
route to the performance. I, personally, would do that for every concert I could –
new music or otherwise – and actually, venues could charge for it: add
an audio program note package to your subscription, buy the program
note with your ticket, etc.. If more venues’ sites supported this, an
artist could produce one “note” at the beginning of a recital tour, or
for a concerto they were going to play throughout a season, and their
management or publicist could distribute to presenters. If this wasn’t
something an artist could pre-produce, perhaps presenters could team up
with local classical radio stations and produce them while the artist
is rehearsing. Audience members would learn that, on the day of a
concert, an audio program note would be available for them to download
from the presenter website to listen to in/on the car/walk/bus/subway on their way the
concert.

If we wanted to take the artists out of the equation, since schedules, interest in participation, and personalities often get complicated, why not have members of an organization talk about programs? This is the dramaturg discussing the play you are about to see and here is a clip from the play; here is the artistic administrator talking about why (s)he booked this show; here is the music director of the orchestra…so on, so forth. Again, this could be something a local radio station would probably be happy to produce in exchange for sponsorship credit.

And if your artistic director sounds anything like Philippe de Montebello, you’ve struck gold.