Richmond Symphony, be not proud

The following appears in the April 2006 edition of RVA magazine, on stands now. It is my first time being published, outside of the college literary magazine and a few letters to the school paper, and I am moderately proud. A link to the RVA magazine website may be found to your right.

Back in February the Richmond Symphony performed the Mozart Requiem, and I went to hear them do it. They did a good job, as they almost always do-- the Richmond Symphony is a good orchestra. I wish more Richmonders knew how lucky we are to have them.

Before the performance conductor Mark Russell Smith, always one for the sound of his own voice, made some brief remarks: the expected stuff about it being Mozart’s 250th birthday, and the outstanding chorus directed by James Erb, and how the Requiem was a fitting tribute to some important local personage, recently deceased, of whom I had never heard. Then the soloists walked out, the orchestra tuned, and the Requiem began.

A word about the venue: in 2003 the Symphony was temporarily evicted from the Carpenter Center, and sent to live as refugees in a number of area churches. This particular performance took place at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Glen Allen, a perfectly nice building that requires, for logistical reasons I am not privy to, that concerts there be played with the house lights up.

House lights up shouldn’t be a big deal, and at first I almost didn’t even notice. But as the bassoons and basset horns began their dark opening lines above the quiet detached notes in the strings, building to that small climax just before the chorus enters for the first time, it struck me exactly what it meant to have the house lights up. It meant I could see the audience, and the audience, typical of a classical music performance, was generally in its mid-to-late eighties.

I’ll admit that at first I felt tremendously put off by this. Hundreds of articles have been written about classical music’s aging audience and its taste for the established, its fear of the new and the dissonant. I have resented this audience for years, not because they’re old and crazy and they talk during the music, but because orchestra programs pander to them, usually at the expense of what I want to hear. I know they aren’t bad people, but we have different tastes: I want something to stimulate and engage, they want something to comfort and soothe-- a friend to hold their hand while they go, so to speak. I want to hear Penderecki and Bartok and Daugherty. They want to hear Beethoven and Brahms and, above all, Mozart.

As the soprano began singing her first solo, all around me I could see eyes glazing over, mouths hanging open, streams of drool beginning to form. Just before the Kyrie, as a woman behind me hacked up some phlegm, it occurred to me that this was actually the perfect way to experience this music. Here, as I listened to one of the great artistic examinations of human mortality, all around me was the disturbing physical representation of same. Music that had been in the past abstract, about the death that awaits everyone, in the distant future, the death we must all come to terms with, eventually, took on a startlingly immediacy. Death was present in the room with us, sitting all around me, coughing and asking his wife if she had seen his program. This performance wasn’t about the general death we all face. These people sitting around me were slowly dying as I listened, and taking the classical music industry with them. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I am surprised at least one audience member didn’t pass on in the middle of the concert.

During the Lacrimosa I swear I saw the bald scalp of the man in front of me decay before my eyes. My father, who was sitting next to me, noticed something was wrong and asked if I was alright. I nodded that I was okay, but in the distance, behind the horns and the timpani, I thought I heard ambulance sirens.