See you in the (orchestra) pit
A classical newbie heads to Carnegie Hall
Sir Simon Rattle, on another night a few years ago
People at classical-music concerts pay attention, and not just the regular kind of attention that means they don’t talk or drink or text or devote large stores of energy to thinking about who in the crowd is hot. Instead, they just sit and stare. And they listen, intently, in a reverential state that is both highly inspiring and a little bit strange.
At least they did last Thursday at Carnegie Hall. The occasion was the second of three big concerts featuring the Berlin Philharmonic, which ranks by most counts as one of the best philharmonics in the world. I don't know much about classical music, especially the traditional repertory kind, but I had gathered enough general understanding about it—via newspaper reviews, Alex Ross' book The Rest Is Noise, and some increasingly fitful attempts to gather a working-base discography for a realm I've always figured I would get into some day—to know that the Berlin Philharmonic was serious business.
It certainly was serious business for the woman sitting next to me, an older lady, around 60, who looked like she had tied her sweater around her shoulders the same way for 40 years. She sat in a disarming pose—totally still, her eyes closed and hands clasped almost the entire time. It was easy to imagine getting lost the way she did, but there was too much action onstage for a classical newbie to pass up: all the sawing and churning, the looks on the faces of players hitting high notes, the shock of white hair hanging oddly from the head of conductor Sir Simon Rattle…
The program included two works by Arnold Schoenberg and one by Johannes Brahms. The first by Schoenberg, "Chamber Symphony No. 1," ran suggestions of fleeting anxiety into moments of incredible levity and weightlessness. The orchestra played it with a tranquil sense of collectiveness, mellower than what would come. There was a calmness to it that raised the question of what a conductor actually does on-stage, as all the musicians stared soberly at their sheet music and looked up only on occasion.
The second Schoenberg, "Erwartung," upped the ante. A vocalist joined the orchestra to sing a text about confusion and death and maybe madness. (It was in German, but the air of dread was unmistakable.) The piece was stranger and more discordant. During breaks in the text, the singer, Evelyn Herlitzius, looked positively startled when she didn't have notes to attach to the feelings she obviously couldn't just turn on and off. The audience was bowled over. Wallace Shawn, sitting in the balcony in a turtleneck, clapped appreciatively.
The Brahms was "Symphony No. 2," a longer piece that was more colorful and more approachable several times over. It was a striking sensation, odd at first but ultimately extremely comforting, to settle into a piece of music that would go on for 40 minutes. It offered a chance to luxuriate in all the newness of experience that a classical-music concert had to offer: the sound of big music presented unamplified, the placement of notes within the sound-field as it correlated to its placement on the stage, the abstract wholeness of cohesive sounds summoned by literally dozens of players playing at the same time.
And, in the end, it was the special kind of attention that stuck. Almost everyone there, it seemed, had gone through a transformation of some kind or other. There was really no choice, nothing else to do. We all just went, sat down, listened to a program's worth of serious music, and left—each of us changed.
