Random mutterings in which our writer displays her ignorance

Sunday was the last concert of the South Mountain Chamber Music Series for this year.  It went so quickly, already the concerts are all a blur in my head.  I suppose I need to focus more.

Still, it was a lovely concert.  We heard the Saint Lawrence Quartet and for the final piece they were joined by Menachem Pressler for the Shostakovich  Quintet.  Of course the Shostakovich was spectacular.  It is one of my favorite pieces of music, one I listen to often and with which I am quite familiar. We have two recordings, each quite diffferent.  The performance on Sunday was like neither of the recordings.  Oh it was obviously the same piece of music, and some parts were like one recording, some like the other, some like neither.  I found it fascinating and quite enjoyable.  Increasingly the more I hear a work, the more familiar I become with it, the more I can sometimes appreciate different interpretations — they add something to the experience, perhaps cause me to look at the music differently, to discern something I had missed before. 

Of course that is not always the case, sometimes I suppose one just does not like the way someone else interprets a particular piece of music.  For example I love to listen to Mitsuko Uchida play Chopin but when I heard her playing Beethoven I was not moved.  There are other pianists I would chose to play Beethoven.  I don’t know that any of them are more "right", they are just what I prefer, and I am not sure that my preference is based on any particular knowledge of the music, but probably more by my experience of listening to it performed a particular way.

I suppose if I actually knew more about music and pursued it with a more single minded devotion I might have more firmly held opinions about what is good or "right" and what is not.  But then again I might not.  I would hope that I would be better able to vocalize or pinpoint what I did or did not like about a performance, but I would also hope that greater familiarity would not close my mind to the possibility of being surprised by any given performance.

So many people I that also attend these concerts seem to be more conscious of the music and how they expect it to sound.  They remember what they heard in the past and how so and so played such and such.  I suspect I need to be more focused.

I would for example like to know how one determines if a performance is good or bad.  I don’t want to know this so I can judge performances, I really just want to sit back and enjoy the music and perhaps be transported or see the world a little differently because of the experience.  This may be a naive expectation on my part.   

The Saint Lawrence is fairly well regarded, I am not sure they would actually do anything badly but then again I am no critic.  During intermission I walked outside to hear someone loudly proclaim "They played the Schumann badly".  I wished I had been able to pinpoint who made that statement, not because I wanted to argue with them, but because I would have liked to know why they thought so.  What was disappointing in the music?  What had they expected?  Perhaps I would learn something.  I like to listen to Schumann, but I am really not at all knowledgeable.  Other people loved the piece.  Why?  I was actually rather indifferent.  I am not sure it was the Schumann, I think that I was just still so wrapped up in the opening Haydn quartet that I hadn’t gotten my head quite wrapped around the Schumann yet, perhaps another reason that I need to be more organized and disciplined in my approach. 

As it is I have no complaints.  I heard two really fabulous concerts this weekend:  one in NYC and one in Pittsfield.  And we went to Ben & Jerry’s after the South Mountain concert, another Pittsfield tradition for us, one we had not indulged in yet this year.  It would have been a shame to end the season without once going out for ice cream.