This past Wednesday the highly acclaimed and relatively young pianist, (though I must confess to using this word rather liberally seeing as the man in question is 35 and has been performing internationally since his early 20s) Leif ove Andsnes, played a programme of Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Eivind Buene at Carnegie Hall. Let us pass over the aforementioned Haydn and Beethoven and most especially the Mozart, for the latter is being talked and dissected and, quite frankly, played, to death this year, which marks the 250th anniversary of that man’s birth and instead turn our attention for a moment to Eivind Buene, a Norwegian composer born in 1973, which, if nothing else, makes him a great deal younger than Mozart.
Also it means that his music sounds like nothing like Mozart’s. And that’s a good thing and a meant to be a compliment. Indeed if I had to hazard a comparison I would liken him to Radiohead. Not all Radiohead, but some of Kid A and Amnesiac but without Thom Yorke’s singing.
The piece was actually called Langsam und schmachtend, which means “slow and languishing†and refers to a rather famous Prelude in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
But I digress. The point is not so much exactly what the music sounded like, or what the concert itself was like (although if you want to know, both the New York Times and the FT ran reviews only one of them laudatory, which, if you are so inclined are here and here respectively, though if I were you I would read the FT one first as I think its better written and more pleasurably nasty), rather what I want to talk about is the coughing which, while it accompanied all of the pieces really didn’t take off except in the Buene piece where it rose to new heights, both in frequency and volume in spite of the fact that there are mountains of free Ricola cough drops at every conceivable entrance to the Stern auditorium.
Indeed it was like a form of criticism in itself. The audience truly seemed to register its boredom, and its pleasure, by how important they deemed it to hold their coughs in (as a side note: these days clapping is not so reliable a measure as pretty much anyone who is famous and has put out a lot of CDs gets bravoed and standing ovation-ed). And by this measure they really, really hated Langsam und schmachtend, just as, back when Mozart was the really hot new thing out of Austria, Emperor Jospeh II had registered his own disinterest by yawning during the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro, which was consequently played only seven more times during its debut year.
But nowadays, Mozart is what is wanted. All the time. Mozart and Haydn and Beethoven and a handful of others whose melodies are easily recognizeable. And that’s rather sad. And its also somewhat of a trickly puzzle to get out of because the people who know how to listen to someone like Buene tend (and I must emphasize tend) to be those who are somewhat close to him in age, i.e. people in their twenties and thirties. They are quite willing to let Radiohead experiment with sound and harmony and their ears have long been trained to accept dissonant sound layers that fall and rise and seem to encompass the listener. But these people are, in large part, also those who think that classical music is pretty much over, that it had its day, oh, hundreds of years ago. And, on the other hand, those who do get out on a Wednesday night for a bit of music at Carnegie Hall register what they want to hear rather vocally. With a cacophony of coughing.
And people wonder why classical music is dying. I’d say we do a pretty good job of killing it ourselves, or maybe just preserving in amber, which is just as bad. And just as worrying.
