Those of us who followed the 11th Banff International String Quartet Competition from beginning to end listened to approximately 40 hours of music in six days — not counting talks and masterclasses. This heightened reality yielded some interesting lessons.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
I’ve already written in previous posts this week about how this kind of hothouse atmosphere affected listening, performances and judgment.
But, as I close the summer and this competition with a couple of final thoughts, I wondered again about this audience that never was less than 500 people, who devoured everything the Banff organisers threw at them, and who enthusiastically debated music appreciation and understanding amongst themselves morning, noon and night.
Anyone who worries about classical music needs to experience something like the Banff competition to realise that not only is chamber music alive and well musically, but there is a rock-steady core audience out there ready to do its all to make sure that it remains part of our concert lives.
But 40 hours in one week, even at the exalted level at which this competition operates, is just too much music for the average human being. There is a larger force perpetuating this.
Was the audience here for music appreciation or to be swamped by something, or be carried off by a force field larger than the sum of several hundred souls?
Because one could see three nearly three full Ring Cycles in the amount of time we sat listening to string quartets, I wondered if the Banff audience’s total immersion isn’t the same as the one treasured by Ringheads the world over, or the people who need to watch all the Star Trek movies in one weekend.
Our global, wired, instant, 24/7 world can make us feel awfully small. Perhaps the Ring Cycle or 40 hours of string quartets are two large-scale ways of fighting back, of reclaiming territory that defies our normal temporal demands.
We the audience will leave for home on Monday morning transformed — but I’m not sure it will be by music in the purest sense.
The quartets will certainly leave transformed, as well.
Over the past 48 hours, I’ve chatted with several competitors and have been bowled over not just by their commitment, which transcends a single competition, but by their grace. I’m sure there are emotional bruises behind closed doors, but in public, these young musicians have been real troopers.
I bumped into the members of the amazing Noga Quartet mid-morning, chatting in the shadows of the Banff Centre’s pine woods. I overcame my inhibitions and asked them how they felt about being excluded from the finals.
I can’t imagine what it must be like for these musicians, who hold jobs with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Deutsche Oper, to be told by a jury that they are not the best. But Joan Bachs, the ensemble’s cellist, said that the Banff experience had actually been good for them.
“We discovered something about ourselves,” he explained in French. “We found a core that told us who we are, and that might not have happened otherwise. We are going to continue working and getting better.”
Bachs smiled a genuine smile, and his quartet-mates did, too. They had turned a public loss into a personal win. I hope the many other fine quartets in this year’s competition achieved something similar.
That leads straight to the question that people have been debating for decades: Are music competitions a good thing?
Some very famous musicians, most notably Glenn Gould, have maintained that they’re not the path to great music. On the other hand, some of the greatest musicians of our time were brought to our attention thanks to competitions.
But what do they do for the artform?
As I wrote earlier this week, the competition’s intensity made me hyper-critical. In the process, I believe it also made me much more conservative than I would be during the regular concert season in Toronto. What might impress me as daring interpretation at home came across as reckless when everything is compressed into 40 nearly continuous hours.
I could live with that until last night’s awards session, where the (excellent) resident filmmakers showed off their farewell video compilation. It closed with a montage of each quartet bowing. Each bowed the same way, dressed in very similar clothes.
Had a stranger with no background in chamber or classical music walked out of the forest, they could easily have thought these were the same people bowing 10 times.
Let’s pull the slide out of our competition microscope: Had this person walked into the theatre repeatedly and randomly over those 40 hours, they would have seen four people arranged in a tight circle, barely moving, making similar-sounding music.
The initiates like this, and we certainly know that the music — be it the work or its interpretation — varies wildly. But how much does a competition do to impress on the musicians that they have to think about the random stranger as they go out into the real world to become apostles of chamber music?
Not enough, I fear. Yes, there will be new converts to the joys of string quartets every day around the world. But there are other ways of getting fresh ears interested in what’s going on, and I can’t help thinking that a competition would be the ideal place to try out some alternatives, specifically because everything is under a microscope already.
Yesterday I suggested to one of the Banff Centre’s resident masters that adding a twisted competition round — like pulling names out of a hat to pair quartets into octets and getting them to prepare a creative short programme, for example — might help highlight personalities and creativity.
But adding even more events to the week seems like an impossible task, unless we can find a way to do without sleep.
In the meantime, I’ll take inspiration from musicians like Bachs and his quartet-mates any day.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
