I’d never seen this musical staged before, although I’d seen the film as a teenager in the mid-1980s. Afterwards, I dragged my mother off to the specialist record shop near Michael’s Music Room (its name is escaping me just now) where the sales assistant advised us that the Broadway version was superior to the motion picture soundtrack. Nowadays, owning both, I can confirm he was right; the numbers added or updated for the film didn’t really improve on the impeccably honed score of the original. In particular, “Let Me Dance for You” – Cassie’s big number in the film – isn’t a patch on “The Music and the Mirror”.

Which is a long way of saying that I was glad to be finally seeing the show in its original form.

And now I hear of the death of its composer, Marvin Hamlisch, on Monday. He has gone to the great chorus line in the sky. Sobering – especially since he was only 68.

Apart from A Chorus Line, I became aware of Hamlisch through the family record collection: his soundtrack for The Sting, which also introduced me to the music of Scott Joplin, and the soundtrack for They’re Playing Our Song. 

In A Chorus Line I thought I’d recognised a sly nod to They’re Playing Our Song when Cassie sings, “Give me the chance to look forward to sayin’: Hey listen, they’re playing my song.” On checking the chronology on the weekend, though, I realised the nod would have to have been in the other direction if at all.

Seeing it at the Capitol Theatre seemed appropriate. In the old days, before the theatre was restored, that block was also home to the ballet studio of Joan and Monica Halliday. The Hallidays. I didn’t study there, but I did attend the intensive summer and winter schools. And it seemed lyricist Edward Kleban had been there himself when I heard his chorus for “At the Ballet”:

Up the steep and very narrow stairway
To the voice like a metronome
Up the steep and very narrow stairway
It wasn’t paradise, it wasn’t paradise,
It wasn’t paradise,
but it was home.

Not glamorous at all, but very, very serious. Does that song resonate with me? Well, I guess I’d probably take Bebe’s verse. 

A Chorus Line is in some ways a disturbing musical. Especially in productions where the director-choreographer Zack remains disembodied, Svengali-like and more than a little creepy – which is how I remember the film. There’s an underlying metaphor that can cut too close to the bone. But when I first saw it, it was just a strong, coherent musical with really well-written songs, a simple, compelling narrative and some fabulous choreography. “One. Singular sensation…!” Later, on learning how these stories had all come from workshops with real Broadway chorus dancers, it seemed more touching. And you don’t have to be a hoofer to feel keenly the experiences of Cassie (“Let me wake up in the morning to find I have somewhere exciting to go”) or Paul (whose collapsed knee and likely ended career prompts “What I Did For Love”).

Some obituaries…

New York Times
Chicago Tribune
LA Times

Postscript…

As already wondered via the social media: Why publish a program book that lacks the one essential component: a program page? This is like publishing a book with no title page and no list of chapters. A puzzlement.

I was pretty certain I’d never seen Apollo before. But a check of the Australian Ballet’s repertoire history suggests that I might have seen it, around the time I was at uni. There are all sorts of explanations for that: a missed performance, the ballet may have been offered in Melbourne but not Sydney (the repertoire history gives only the date of first performance), and so on. Anyway, I was effectively seeing it for the first time.

Recently the Australian Ballet quoted me in a program book as saying that ballet was “music made visible”. Not an original observation by any stretch; still I was rather chuffed. And if any choreographer exemplifies the idea of music made visible in dance it’s Balanchine. This is the man who said that if he weren’t a choreographer, he “would not be anything, probably. Perhaps a musician.” In the ballet, Apollo’s favoured muse is, naturally, Terpsichore, music of the dance, but she carries as her symbol a lyre, a musical instrument. Balanchine is the kind of choreographer who asks you to listen to the ballet and see the music. 

Apollo (English National Ballet)

Which is why you can’t see Apollo and imagine it being danced to any other score – unlike the work at the other end of the triple bill: Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc to music from Lalo’s Namouna. (Flautists who’ve studied their orchestral excerpts will know the particularly taxing number from towards the end.) Suite en blanc is one of those company showcase pieces in the tradition of Pas de Quatre, created for Taglioni and three other leading 19th-century ballerinas. The effect is numbingly generic, even when beautifully executed and the ballet hasn’t aged particularly well.

And yet Apollo was premiered in 1928, Suite en blanc in 1943. Apollo, however, is the ballet that still seems fresh today and remains a delight to watch. Choreographic originality is a big aspect of that. And there’s no denying that Apollo has the better music. 

In the middle: a selection of three pas de deux: Hans van Manen’s piece to Satie’s Trois Gnossienes (with the piano and its player on stage) was new to me and a real treat. The Manon pas de deux was the bedroom scene, in which Manon interrupts Des Grieux from his letter writing. I was slightly disappointed: for musical reasons my favourite is the pas de deux from, if I recall correctly, earlier in Act I – the one that uses Massenet’s Elégie. (Flautists who’ve worked from Marcel Moyse’s Tone Development Through Interpretation will know this gorgeous, haunting melody.)

The fireworks came in the form of the Black Swan pas de deux from Act III Swan Lake, the one with the 32 fouette pirouettes ,which we of course applaud.* While it’s fun to see something like this performed as a showpiece, like any bleeding chunk you lose a lot in the context. Where are the courtiers? The other potential brides? Siegfried’s mother? And where’s Rothbart, coaching his daughter Odile from the back corner of the stage and providing the explanation for her sudden shift from coldly imperious to tender and vulnerable with the trademark fluttering ‘swan arms’.

The ‘live orchestra’ of the publicity turned out to be a scaled-back Willoughby Symphony Orchestra (strings: 5.4.2.2.1) led by Sophie Rowell and performing in a smidgin of a pit. They acquitted themselves well in Apollo, which may well have received the most rehearsal.

My thoughts on the Concourse Theatre? This is a small space seating about 500. I can imagine it working very well for drama and for small-scale musical theatre, but it felt wrong for ballet  – too small both literally and psychologically. Ballet will never be an intimate art form. Perhaps that’s partly due to its origins in court display, partly to its physicality and partly to the supreme level of artifice involved – you need a certain ‘distance’ as an audience member to enjoy its spectacle and the dancers need a certain amount of space in order to do their thing and sustain the magic. Seeing ballet in this intimate space made me feel like I was seeing a provincial tour. (Not helped by some fairly basic lighting and creaky stage furniture.) It brought to mind the kind of scene you get in The Red Shoes when the undiscovered Moira Shearer is dancing in a suburban town hall, and backstage someone is dropping the needle on the next record. Of course, we know Moira Shearer is a star, and so are these dancers. But I’d rather see them in London’s Coliseum.

* Postscript…
Once again, I envy the ballet world. No hang ups about applause here. It’s very simple: if the dancers take a bow (or if the music makes a definitive pause for a change of scene) it’s a cue to applaud; if somebody does something overtly impressive then a smattering of applause mid-variation (as in a jazz club) is just fine, if you wish. Some ballets are more applause-inducing than others and it seems there’s very little confusion about which is which. No one glares at anyone. Although I was mentally glaring at the couple of ladies behind me: beautifully quiet during the neoclassical and abstract works, the minute they got the “more passionate” ballets they’d been waiting for they started in with the whispered commentary. Ssssigh.

Post-postscript…
Not fond at all of foyer music during interval – live or piped. Especially in any performance involving music, the interval is a time for rest and creating a fresh mental space.

The tricky matter of French baroque music emerged, including the fact that it often doesn’t seem to satisfy or even be really successful when played on the piano. Which prompted me to air a long-held theory as to why Bach, Handel et al work on piano but the French baroque composers don’t…

Some music succeeds in its bones (think JS Bach, think Beatles). The things that make us love these works and which draw us in are at a very fundamental level of melody, harmony, rhythm and pulse. And such music can “take” a lot of varied treatments. You can play pieces like this on different instruments, arrange them, use them as the basis for jazz improvisation, you name it.

Some music succeeds because of its surface, its skin (think French baroque, think ABBA). The value is in the style, the gesture, the ornaments, the colours, the very mode of performance. This kind of music is much less malleable and often resistant to being rearranged, or having its performance style modified. It works when you play it “authentically” with the original performance practices of its creation and on the instruments intended. The further you depart from that the less satisfying it is.

As they say, the exception proves the rule, and one exception at the French baroque end of things is a delicious piece by François Couperin, Les Baricades mistérieuses. (When I eventually get a piano, this will be its baptismal piece.) In the Couperin the beauty and the appeal of the music is to be found in its harmonic bones and its textures. Which is why it can work very nicely on the piano.

Postscripts…
I’ve just learned that Angela Hewitt’s (piano) performance of the Couperin was used in the soundtrack for the recent film The Tree of Life.

Be wary of the performances of Les Baricades that are to be found on YouTube. Unlike Scott Ross, many keyboardists seem to miss the sensuousness of this music and play it much too fast. (Or, in one or two cases, they take it way too slow.)

Want to play it yourself? The 1717 edition of the ordre or suite from which it comes can be found here, with Les Baricades beginning on page 6 (requires the reading of alto clef for the right hand), and a modernised edition here.

That’s The Queen of Spades by the way. In the middle of Act II Catherine the Great arrives at a grand masked ball. Music is sung in greeting, but the scene ends before we actually see her on stage. Curtain.

Opera Australia and ABC 702 Sydney are running an operaplot style competition at the moment, hashtag #opera702. The prize is a walk-on part in Consumptive Courtesan by the Cove in March, which has prompted me to put a particular spin on my entries: each one has to convey the plot from a mute or walk-on cameo character’s perspective. Or in the case of The Queen of Spades, a character who doesn’t even get to walk on.

The problem with this approach is that it rather limits the number of operas that can be plotted, which is probably a good thing. Operaplotting can be addictive.

My other entries…

2 girls: trafficked. Pasha: spurned. Lover: to the rescue. Ruse: get my master drunk. Result: noble outcome. Me: I’m mute #walkon 
The Abduction from the Seraglio 

Door 1 red. Door 2 orange. Door 3 gold. Door 4 aqua. Door 5 white. Door 6 dark. Door 7 silver. Bartók and the Technicolor #walkon
Bluebeard’s Castle

I’m the deaf old servant, so while Figaro thwarts one marriage & facilitates another, I just get to #walkon and say “Eh?”
The Barber of Seville

I may have a stab at Lulu, so to speak, but after that I think I’m done. 

As for me, I could write tens of thousands of words on this theme, but I’ll try to keep it under 1500…

First, all live concerts are “visual” regardless of what the presenter might do or not do. (You may read that again.)

Indeed, many concert conventions are, in a perverse way, visually driven. Musicians wear black (and modern pianos are black), for example, in order to create a uniform, non-distracting impression so listeners can more easily focus their attention on the sounds. Not that there still isn’t a great deal to watch! 

And there are musical works that are intrinsically visual: in Golijov’s Last Round two string quartets (or multiples thereof) stand either side of a double bass, their flying bows creating a visual tango to match the musical one. In Brahms’s Fourth Symphony I always pray the conductor will request that first and second violins sit either side of the podium so we can really see and hear the musical dialectic of the first movement. 

But then there’s the matter of concert presentation style, and visually speaking, this tends to go one of three ways:

1. Nothing but the Music.
This approach is low-key and unobtrusive. It avoids, at all costs, distracting the listener from listening. This is the norm: ‘quiet’ or quietly glamorous clothing; unadorned stages (or discreetly decorated); subtle, practical lighting; offering optional visual aids such as program books, which can be read or ignored at will.

It’s a long-standing approach, which relates, I think, to the parallels between concerts and religious practice. Although, if you read about concerts in previous centuries you realise just how much the conventions have changed over time and with them our ideas of what constitutes a distraction.

Radio broadcasts and audio recordings have cemented this approach as the status quo, and shaped the expectations many music-lovers bring to concerts. 

2. Music Plus.
Taking existing music and adding a visual element with a view to enhancing the listener’s experience. I think of the marvellous interpretations of music in Disney’s Fantasia, or the photography by Icelandic musician and photographer Helga Kvam that accompanied Schubert’s Winterreise in the 2010 Sydney Festival. I only found out after the recital that Kvam is a musician, but it was evident through the way she’d struck the right balance of capturing and interpreting a mood, without turning the music into a mere accompaniment for a slide show. (The pacing of the images to the music was spot on as well.) Or, if I can brag about my own orchestra, the powerful combination of Herbert Ponting’s photographs from the Scott Antarctic expedition with Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia antartica – itself based on a film score.

This approach probably seems like a new phenomenon, but it isn’t really. The pantomimed presentations of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in the 19th century are evidence that people have been music-plussing for a long time, often to ghastly effect.

What is new, though, is video, and one nice result of this technology has been the ability to project enlarged detail from the performing ensemble in real time. Especially in a big hall, this brings you closer to the action, and in the hands of a musical and smart director the video can help you to listen more intently, by linking musical colours and voices to the instruments from which they come. We do listen with our eyes to a certain extent.

3. More than Music.
Creative works that engage multiple senses, usually through the blending of multiple performing disciplines. In other words, works that are conceived from the outset to integrate film, visual imagery, movement, costuming, drama or staging with the music. At their most successful, works such as these lose something if heard via radio broadcast or an audio recording – much like listening to a film soundtrack without its film.

This too might seem to be a fairly new phenomenon: examples include Ross Edwards’ oboe concerto for Diana Doherty, in which choreography for the soloist plays an integral part (although the concerto can also be performed ‘straight’ if the oboist chooses). But in fact this sort of thing isn’t all that new either: Scriabin and his perfume and colour organs spring to mind. Silent movies with specially composed scores sit at this end of the spectrum. I’d even count the tradition of incidental music in this category. (Looking at you, Mendelssohn.)

Speaking of Mendelssohn, readers of this blog will know that one of the concert highlights for me in recent years was the presentation in Sydney of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Shakespeare’s play and Mendelssohn’s music. This production had some technical challenges, it’s true, but the thing I loved about it was the way it brought together theatre and music and the way it communicated – joyfully and fearlessly – that a live concert can be about “putting on a show” and not always some figmentary idea of “pure music”.

***

A lot of what is done when presenters aim to devise more visually interesting concerts falls into the category of Music Plus. The more interesting or successful projects might head in the direction of More than Music. (While some of the most thrilling concerts remain Nothing but the Music.)

But it doesn’t hurt, to ponder the intrinsically visual side of classical concerts. Doing that leads to matters such as:

• what we wear and how we wear it (a ten-thousand word topic in itself); 
• basic stagecraft, i.e. how musicians move and engage with the audience (and that’s before we even get to the matter of talking from the stage);
• how the stage is ‘dressed’ and lit; 
• whether musicians sit or stand;
• the placement of instruments (once, the idea of a solo pianist sitting in profile to the audience was a radical thing); and
• the effect film, television and theatre technology has on audience expectations for a concert’s production values.

Some of these points may seem mundane or unbelievably subtle, but their effect can be huge. They play a fundamental and non-optional part in the presentation of any program.

I believe that many attempts to impose visual elements on top of live performances (most of the Music Plus stuff, in other words) are really just a reflection of an underlying appreciation that concerts should be intrinsically showmanlike.

(Yes, I think live concerts should, at some level, be ‘shows’ – entertainments. Bite me, as they say.)

But really, all ‘being showmanlike’ means is catering properly to the eyes as well as the ears. We are human beings, not disembodied ears-and-brains.

My guess is that concert presenters will continue to explore visual enhancements for concerts. Some of it will be gimmicky or inartistic, some of it will be unhelpful, some of it will drive the audience nuts with distraction. And some of it will work like a dream. The better examples of Music Plus and More than Music will survive to give continued pleasure. But I also believe (ok, fervently hope) that along the way we will stumble on the solutions that will make all concerts more visually exciting and stimulating to attend (assuming top-notch performances and programming as a constant, of course). 

Postscript…
One thing I haven’t touched on in this piece is the use of visual elements not so much to enhance the music itself as to help the audience navigate the music in some way. This practice veers away from the idea of concerts as entertainments and introduces an overtly educational aspect. In any case, it’s yet another ten-thousand-word topic. Another time.

12 hours pretending I wasn’t really working
2 hours being all editorial and advisory by the light of the moon
550 kilometres
22 madonnas (and more) from Italy
100 manuscripts from Berlin (drool)
30 minutes photographing historical correspondence
1 hour of Tchaikovsky piano music (Album for the Young, The Seasons)
1 hour of Haydn sonatas (those that weren’t beyond my dormant technique)
3 movements from Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite in an arrangement for four hands
1 riotously wayward piano duo rendition of the overture to Die Meistersinger
2 hours of hand stitching
6 hours of ballet class
2 hours choosing spectacles
4 successful tussles with pumpkin hour
1 hour contemplating matters horticultural
0 tax returns completed 

Something in there was priceless – probably the piano playing.

This is one of the traps of working in music. Attending lots of concerts is a fabulous thing, enviable even, but it’s very easy to feel jaded after a while. So it’s helpful to imagine myself a “civilian” and think about the local orchestra concerts I would have attended if I were choosing to attend just nine – much in the same way that some people devise fantasy football teams. 

And so, my fantasy subscription for 2011:

Ashkenazy/de Lancie et al (Grieg’s Peer Gynt with narration)
The world needs more orchestral concerts that are conceived and presented as “shows”, as entertainments, without compromising artistic quality or programming integrity in any way. This was one of them. 

De Waart/Sydney Philharmonia Choirs (Beethoven, Barber, Adams)
Beethoven Seven. Best Beethoven symphony of the lot. ’Nuff said.
And Edo conducting Adams. 

Carter (Kerry, Grainger, Bartók)
The premiere of a new work by a composer I admire – of course I was looking forward to it. Topped off, on the night, by especially brilliant introductions by Andrew Ford. Grainger; the Australian guy in his shed. I won’t be forgetting this image in a hurry. 

Lang Lang in Recital (Beethoven, Albéniz, Prokofiev)
Every bit as astonishing as I’d expected. It was heartening to see he’d abandoned the satin polka dot suit and the unbearable OTT-ness I remembered from Blossom 2005.

Morlot/Pahud (Bach, Jarrell, Holst)
This was always going to be about the Jarrell flute concerto. Sue me. 

Evgeny Kissin in Recital (Liszt)
Fascinating, intriguing, jaw-droppingly impressive. There is nothing he can’t do. When I’m an old lady I will bore my sisters’ grandchildren with stories about hearing Kissin. Four times now. 

Strobel (Metropolis, restored with Huppertz score)
I had never seen Metropolis before. People I know who had seen it, told me that, with this new restoration, the whole movie made sense to them for the first time. The score lacked originality but what was so interesting about it was its sophistication and effectiveness as a film score given that this was a nascent genre in 1927.

Nott/Zimmermann (Brahms, Dean, Schubert)
It was the Dean I wanted to hear most of all, but my interest was further stimulated by the things Jonathan Nott had told me concerning his approach to the programming of the concert as a whole. 

Vänskä/Weilerstein (Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Beethoven)
See earlier comments. 

Inevitably there’s a concert you leave out of your fantasy subscription which turns out to be one of the highlights. This year that was the program with Nigel Westlake’s Missa Solis. I was aware from the beginning of the very personal significance of the piece and the terrible story behind it. But somehow that doesn’t prepare you for the experience of hearing the music, in the concert hall, with the composer conducting, and knowing that every musician on the stage is heart and soul behind this moving performance.

1. Frustration. Is “20th Century” a period or a state of mind?

Choosing a whole century as a category, especially one as stylistically diverse as the 20th, was always going to problematic. For some – including me – “20th century” means “modern” on some level, and by extension a lot of musical works written after 1900 are throwbacks or 20th-century only by a technicality. 

In the past, apart from the classic “general” polls, Classic 100 has polled for a genre, a composer or an instrument a clearly defined stylistic period. [Correction: there has never been a poll for a stylistic period.] Not this time. And if anything, it made the result less focused, less meaningful and, I suspect, less satisfying for nearly everybody. (See point 3)

2. Frustration. The unfair advantage of old age. 

Aka, the Gerontius effect. Acquiring favourite status inevitably takes time, especially in a deeply canonical art form such as classical music. For the repertoire that’s more than a hundred years old, age is immaterial. But when you’re comparing music that’s, say, 111 years old, with a piece that might have premiered last year, the newer piece is at a disadvantage.

The situation can be influenced by programming and promotion – I’m thinking of the clever way the Christopher Lawrence/Felix Hayman “Swoon” spot used to sneak in, with audience approval, all sorts of works that would normally have met with resistance on the grounds of youth and unfamiliarity. 

But mostly, the older a 20th-century work is, even if it approaches the “nasty modern music” end of the spectrum, the more fans it will have acquired. That’s one reason why the scattergraph for this poll shows a downward linear trend. That’s why the confronting (in character, not necessarily in style) Rite of Spring made it into the top ten, while other less-confronting but much newer works were ranked lower. Or perhaps The Rite of Spring is just better music… 

3. Frustration. (Or Amusement?) A polarised audience.

It was to be expected there would be parties throwing up their hands in disgust at the “dreadful noise” of Messiæn and others equally disgusted by the presence of backward-looking romantics such as Elgar. That’s the 20th century for you.

I could have treated it as a frustration, but the crux of the matter can be found in point 1 and this was really just the inevitable side effect. So I followed along via the social media and laughed.

4. Frustration. The vagaries of the Long Tail.

What didn’t make me laugh were some of the bizarre rankings at the bottom end of the list. (And towards the top too.) Given the very small polling sample (7,000 I believe, which must be barely 1 per cent of ABC Classic FM’s national reach) this is also not very surprising. I had to keep telling myself: “Small sample. Popularity contest. Small sample. Popularity contest.”

But despite the affirmations, I swore a bit when the Warsaw Concerto outranked Lieutenant Kijé; when ALW’s Requiem ranked higher than both Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings and Elgar’s Violin Concerto; when a folksong arrangement by Grainger came in three places ahead of Daphnis et Chloé (!!!!).

Of course, you see what’s happening here: I’m taking a poll that was unashamedly about “favourites” (and for which I myself was quite careful to choose my favourites) and I’m assessing the results against values of relative quality, importance and greatness. “Small sample. Popularity contest…”

5. Frustration. Insidious Albion.

This last frustration is purely a matter of personal taste. There are great works by English composers; I even shortlisted some. I just found it disheartening to see English music dominate the top 100. Especially so much English music of the pleasantly modal, folk-music inspired, stirringly hymn-like variety. But that’s just me. I have a serious bias towards the Russians and the French. And if there’s going to be folk inspiration I want wicked rhythms and wonky harmonies à la Bartók.

Postscript…

ABC Classic FM has shared the 100 runners up.