My take on music reviewing

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While the 2024 SSO concert season looks to be pretty exciting, there is not much public scraping, plucking, blowing and walloping until February.

Fraser Beath McEwing

Deservedly, the SSO players get a break although, if you’re a professional musician, you lose touch with your instrument at your peril. So between family fun time I’m sure you’ll find SSO players obeying their ruthless master: practice.

For music reviewers like myself, the only instrument I can pick up is my mind and my computer keyboard. I wait for an idea to pop into my head so that I, too, can keep in practice.

This is a rather laboured preamble for me to talk about music reviewing.

Immediately we come across the always present, but not always appreciated, extremes of performance, from the purely academic, deadly accurate arrangement of notes and pauses, to the wild imaginings of how the composer should or could have written the work. Audiences are on the same train. The lofty academic passengers will not tolerate liberties taken with exactly how the composer wrote the score. Their main points of discussion centre more on which is the most preferable of a composer’s revisions or what he really meant by cryptic notes to the conductor that might say ‘fast, but not too fast’. On the other end of the train are the crazy romantics who care less about what the composer intended and more about getting a musical orgasm.

The problem is, the further you stray from the centre the more passengers you will offend. What is a conductor to do? – because it is up to him or her to set the calibrations. I doubt that conductors labour this point too much because they know, deep down, that they’ll always cop it from somewhere. Drawbridge up, they ponder the score, maybe read about the composer’s life and thoughts at the time of creation, write lots of notes to themselves and set off to the first rehearsal with a clear plan of what they want to the orchestra to do. The audience no longer needs to be factored in.

Solo performers are under the same constraints. For instance, there are pianists who will be criticised for pedalling Bach to those who, like Murray Perahia, believe that Bach was a forward thinker and would have embraced the modern piano and its pedals.

Concertos can throw spanners into the works. If you have a strong-willed conductor with an equally strong-willed soloist, and they don’t see eye-to-eye, the conflict crimps the performance. There was a famous brouhaha between conductor Leonard Bernstein and pianist Glenn Gould over the tempi of Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto. So deep was the disagreement that Bernstein poured out the whole sorry tale to the audience and then sportingly gave in to Gould’s preference – while making it quite clear that he hated it.

A spanner closer to home took place a couple of years ago when Lang Lang was imported as the soloist in a merry Mozart piano concerto. Why Mozart, when Lang Lang was a giant – killer of the romantic repertoire with a matching, sizzling technique? On he strode, waved to an adoring crowd and then proceeded to turn Mozart into a romantic composer. The purists vomited while the other end of the train went off to Nirvana.

We may well ask ourselves, is there a sweet spot? Are there performances that would have the composer and purists nodding with approval yet still sound fresh and innovative? Yes, there are, but they are rare, and in the end they get down to a matter of opinion anyway. Dead composers can’t nod and freshness depends upon how familiar the listener is with the music.

But I cherish this rarity, and occasionally, it comes my way. It happened last November when Alexander Gavrylyuk played Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto with the SSO under Sir Donald Runnicles. Gavrylyuk was faced with playing a work very familiar to his audience, who doubtless wanted a sure-footed technical rendition but spiked with interpretive innovation. And that’s just what he, Runnicles and the SSO delivered. It was immediately recognisable as pure magic. Even now I can close my eyes and hear bits of it, almost tearing up.

Without a doubt, live performance is the oil that enables the whole illogical symphony orchestra machine to keep moving forward. Recordings are clearer, often better visually, more convenient, a lot cheaper and you don’t have to do battle with a double helix car park. But the magic lives in the Opera House and may it remain there for the rest of my days.

Fraser Beath McEwing is a pianist, commentator on classical music performance and is a founding member of The theme & Variations Foundation which assists talented young Australian pianists. His professional background is in journalism, editing and publishing. He is also the author of five novels and a Governor of the Sir Moses Montefiore Home. A body of his work can be found on www.frasersblography.com