More $$ For Less Music? Think Again.

For the past few days, we've been performing one of the more difficult and exhausting concerts of our season: a string orchestra arrangement of Beethoven's massive Grosse Fuge, Chopin's 2nd Piano Concerto (with the amazing Garrick Ohlsson,) and Mozart's 40th Symphony. There are a lot of different things that can make a concert seem difficult, and this particular rep covers most of them.

In fact, the moment our first concert of the week (a Thursday morning matinee) was over, my stand partner turned to me and said, "Wow. This feels like a really long program." I agreed. Though, in fact, the concert was right around our usual two hours from start to finish, it felt like a marathon. My shoulder ached, and I saw a number of other musicians massaging sore limbs as well.

So you can imagine how surprised a number of us in the orchestra were to read this paragraph at the end of the Star Tribune's otherwise positive review of the concert:

"It is distressing to note that this program contained barely an hour of music. For people paying top price, that works out to more than a dollar an [sic] minute. This increasing brevity is a disturbing trend."

Now, first off, I don't know what trend he's talking about. A local trend? A national one? I haven't done any research on this, but in the ten years I've been in the orchestra, it seems like the vast majority of our subscription concerts have hovered around the two hour mark, including a 20-minute intermission. Add in the time it takes the orchestra to tune before each piece, the audience to clap before and after each, and the stage crew to reset the stage between pieces, and you're generally talking about something like 90 minutes of actual music per show, give or take.

Second, and more importantly, the reviewer (who I don't actually know personally, but he's a respected music writer of long standing in this town) is just flat wrong about the length of the music on this particular concert. I know because the paragraph above so shocked me that I timed each piece the next night. Here was the breakdown:

Beethoven - 18 minutes

Chopin - 32 minutes

Various encores by Ohlsson: 5-7 minutes

Mozart - 33 minutes

So not counting intermission, stage moves, applause time, tuning, or the entertaining five-minute speech violist Mike Adams gave at the top of each show to introduce the Grosse Fuge, that's 88 minutes of music. In fact, when all the extraneous stuff was factored in, all the concerts but Thursday morning ended north of the two-hour mark. Thursday (the concert the Strib reviewed) ended just under two hours, because Garrick didn't play an encore that day. (Our Coffee Concert crowds tend to be considerably older and less demonstrative than our evening crowds, and they rarely clap long enough to draw an encore from visiting soloists.)

So what was the critic thinking? A glance at our program book explains part of it - we print estimated performance times next to each piece, and this week, there was a typo: the Mozart was listed at 22 minutes instead of 32. (Update: our publications editor informs me that the error was not, technically, a typo, but a reprinting of an error in a source publication we use for such things.) And all three estimates were at least a minute under our actual times, so if you went by the book, it did look like we had only programmed 69 minutes of music. Still, I find it hard to believe that anyone who was actually present at the concert could have come away finding it to be a short enough program to be worthy of comment.

But that's where the nature of deadline writing likely comes into play. A critic attending our concert has only a few hours (at most) to get his review filed for publication, so most experienced writers write a few paragraphs in advance - the basic background information on the music and the performers that won't be affected by the quality of the performance. I'm guessing that Mr. Beard also pre-wrote his objection to the program's length based on the misinformation in our book, then didn't think to revise or remove it after the actual concert.

Understandable, yes, but sheesh. Way to make us seem like we're nickel-and-diming the paying public out of their rightful amount of music...