 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Ralph G
Date: 2005-04-19 14:16
The wife and I went to the local symphony’s inaugural concert at the new concert hall here in town. Van Cliburn was the featured performer, playing the Tchaikovsky 1 piano concerto. The new concert hall is at the local university, where my wife does PR (and much of it for other events at the concert hall), but since it was a symphony event and not a university event, no free tickets for us. So we shelled out some pretty good-sized bucks for tickets (it was a benefit concert, and you know how inflated fundraiser prices can be).
This new concert hall is a marvel. Lots of stories have been done on its great acoustics (thanks to my wife’s PR), so I was really eager to hear Cliburn, as well as the Pines of Rome, also on the program. Unfortunately, the great acoustics didn’t apply to our seats on the top level. Everything sounded muddy and flat (plus our seats were right in front of the antiphonal brass used in the Respighi finale, so they drowned out the orchestra on stage). And I guess Cliburn played beautifully, but so much of the sound was lost in the bad acoustics. Though it was great to see Cliburn perform live, hearing him wasn’t all that great.
Afterward my wife took me down to the lower levels to show off the hall. On the way down I bumped into a local piano dealer from whom took lessons once. He raved about how great the concert sounded. I played nice and agreed, but was thinking to myself, “Did you hear the same concert I did?”
Apparently not! As soon as we entered the first balcony (where he was sitting) I could tell how much more open the sound was -- it felt electric. Then when we went to the floor level, it was like we were miked up. Every word, every breath, everything resonated through the hall. Now I could see what all the fuss was about.
I’m kicking myself, though, because if I had spent just a few bucks more, I might’ve been able to score seats on the second level instead of the top (floor level seats were long sold out). What a difference that would have made!
Kids, the moral of the story is pay extra for better seats! (and get the wife to suggest to the hall people they adjust the resonance panels above the stage to feed some sound to the top level!)
BTW, Van Cliburn is really a gracious performer. He came back for three encores and gave a really nice impromptu chat congratulating everyone for supporting the arts. Then he had a lot of people in tears explaining how his final encore, Schumann’s “Dedication,” was a wedding gift Schumann gave to Clara Wieck simply because he was too poor to give her anything else. It was a sweet way to close out a nice evening.
________________
Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.
- Pope John Paul II
Post Edited (2005-04-19 14:24)
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Author: John Morton
Date: 2005-04-19 15:00
Yes, it is important to have the hall scoped out for acoustics and visibility. This is not something you can tell from the seating chart. And sometimes it pays to pay less ...
I recently learned of a Paquito d'Rivera/Assad brothers concert at the 2500 seat concert hall on the campus where I work, with only 2 days' notice. I was already grumpy from learning that the staff discount is a lousy $1, and then had to choose between cheap seats at the extreme end of the first row and expensive seats in center section, somewhere around the 20th row. I sprung for the former, and have never had a better concert seat in my life. We were no more than 20 ft. from Paquito, and the sound was immaculate. The players were seated far enough back that we could see all three, but that put them no farther away because the stage is curved.
And I learned something: Paquito swabs from _both_ ends of the clarinet, a policy I don't remember reading in our periodic discussions of swabbing!
John Morton
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Author: Steve Epstein
Date: 2005-04-19 21:58
John Morton wrote:
>
> And I learned something: Paquito swabs from _both_ ends of the
> clarinet, a policy I don't remember reading in our periodic
> discussions of swabbing!
>
> John Morton
Yes, I swab from both ends myself. Will this help me sound more like Paquito?
Steve Epstein
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