Classical Music and Its Venues

Most analyses of classical music performances focus on a standard set of elements: the work itself, of course, and its history and style and intrinsic merit; the performances by the artists, individually and as a collective, and the choices they made in reifying the original creators’ blueprints; and the reception of the work by the audience. Less carefully studied, yet just as essential to an understanding of the experience, is the venue in which the work is performed and the impact of that venue on the performance. This gap is perhaps due to the sheer paucity of classical performance spaces and the advanced age of most major venues. When you see an opera in New York, you are almost certainly going to the Metropolitan Opera House or to the Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theater). When you hear a symphony in Chicago, you are hearing it in Orchestra Hall. Chamber music presenters are a bit more peripatetic, but even so, the roster of venues is drawn from a long-standing list. New theaters are built, of course, and often generate a good deal of discussion in their opening season. But even the most spectacular venues eventually become part of the background; how much more is there to say, really, about Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles? For the connoisseur, the imposing places we attend to consume classical music have become, in a way, transparent. We are so used to their particular characteristics that we no longer are aware of them as factors in the musical experience.


As music written in the Western classical tradition moved from church to court to salon to public theater to private home to performing arts center, artists have adopted their methods and their expectations and audiences have developed complex codes of behavior and response. Over the last fifty years, as classical music has increasingly become a luxury artifact, the sites in which it is performed professionally have dwindled in number, while increasing in importance and stature. “High-art” music venues are now basically museums, or even temples, with corresponding rituals and acolytes. We expect to hear opera in our regular opera house and symphonies in our regular concert hall and, with few exceptions, pay no real attention to the unique set of resonances—physical, acoustical, technical, historical, social—that each performance space carries.


And yet the setting in which you see a performance of an opera or instrumental work has a profound influence on its reception. Some artists have recognized this and have paid correspondingly close attention to the vagaries of the spaces in which they make their art. Wagner famously built his own theater out of dissatisfaction with the existing opera houses in Europe, and the result is a venue that is such a draw in and of itself that a seven-year waiting list is required to purchase tickets, a list one gets on long before the productions are announced. Seeing a Verdi opera at La Scala has a special thrill that spectators attribute to something essentially Italianate that is intrinsic in the walls of the house itself—akin perhaps to what winegrowers call terroir. Hearing Mozart in his native cities, Salzburg and Vienna, has a similar veneer of authenticity, and an excellence based on the very real depth of experience of the native musicians.


Other venues have legendarily marvelous acoustics. The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam draws visitors from around the world eager to experience its lush, warm envelopment of orchestral sound. (Comparing sound environments has passed from the realm of art into that of science: a new software platform allows theater designers and engineers to hear music through the filtered lens of different venues’ particular acoustical characteristics. A piece of music can be digitally manipulated so that it sounds as it would at Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Staatsoper, or any theater in the database.) Some theaters are just as much a part of the show as the performance itself. The new opera house in Copenhagen, located in the middle of the city’s harbor, is a modern visual treat. The Semperoper in Dresden (rebuilt after the war) is such a masterpiece of baroque architecture that one can happily spend an evening staring at its auditorium even if the show on stage does not satisfy. Enthusiastic music fans often swap tales of unique venue-based experiences in concert halls and opera houses around the world. My personal favorite trivia is what one eats or drinks at intermission: Rote Grütze (a red fruit pudding) in Munich, open-faced herring sandwiches in Stockholm, local Shiraz wine in Sydney.


The unusual, occasional stimulation of the new and the exotic is, however, the exception that proves the rule. For the most part, we go to hear classical music in beloved but standard venues that have long lost their ability to imprint the work being performed. One of the results is a corresponding solidification of the audience that attends such venues and a sense that the ranks of attendance are closed. There is an increasing notion in classical music circles that the problem in audience development is not actually the music, but rather the places in which it is performed. Young people and non-regulars are not put off by Beethoven and Stravinsky. They are put off by Carnegie Hall and Covent Garden. More particularly, they shun the perceived costs and rules of the high-art venues. They see an older audience who seems to know what to wear, what to say at intermission, and exactly when and when not to applaud. They see an exorbitant dollar figure on their ticket stub. And they feel that while this might be an interesting place to visit once, it is not a place where they feel at home.


George Steel, the new General Manager and Artistic Director of the New York City Opera, feels this challenge intensely and identifies a challenge facing administrators, particularly at the traditional opera houses. “It’s the Puccini-_plus_-opera house that can be off-putting to new audiences, as well as the penumbra of connoisseurship that lingers around the field of opera,” said Steel in an interview. “There are many restraints in a traditional venue: no talking, no whispering, no reading, no coming and going, keep your shoes on. Audiences these days can resist that; it’s hard to surrender your personal freedom.” Paradoxically, those very restraints are what often bind regular attendees to the experience and, in fact, can seduce the budding fans, says Steel. “It’s those same hurdles that people like jumping once they do jump it.” To Steel, the trappings of the traditional opera-going experience are essentially a MacGuffin. “Once you get an audience there, they realize those things are adjacent to the artistic experience but not the artistic experience itself.” Major companies, in their eagerness to develop and sustain new audiences, have begun paying very close attention to the particular characteristics of their houses and how they affect the audience experience. City Opera, for example, added central aisles to the orchestra seating area. “You should be comfortable in a theater,” says Steel. “This sends an incredibly powerful message: You’re welcome here. You’re not an afterthought. You’re the reason we’re putting on the show.”


How do big companies let new audiences know they are welcome and will feel comfortable? How can artists and administrators reach young people who falsely equate the classical music tradition itself with a certain forbidding institutionalism that accompanies the major theaters? “Without a doubt, the venue has a giant impact on a work and its reception,” says Steel. “Traditional concert spaces come weighted with some expectation of social function. Upsetting that expectation can be a valuable tool to opening the concert-going process.” When traditional companies take their work outside of the home hall, the result can be liberating. For years, in fact, these organizations have preached of performing classical music in non-traditional venues as an audience development tool. Such efforts have become veritable marketing clichés for established companies, must-have initiatives to prove their street cred and their dedication to the future. Some companies are better at these efforts than others are, but few have established viable long-term off-site program models. Music outside of the big halls and theaters is still the Wild West, in many ways. The prototypes for execution are legion and the surefire formulas for success nonexistent. Many established companies essentially re-create their standard fare outside of the house. In this category we might include the hugely popular High-Definition broadcasts that so many opera companies currently employ. Fans around the world can drive to their local movie theater and see a superbly filmed, digitally projected live performance in spectacular surround sound. Off-site performances of works that would not be suitable candidates for the main house are another model. New York City Opera brought Massenet’s little-known one-act La Navarraise to the World Financial Center last summer, for example. Summer outdoor festivals are another long-standing way in which big companies freshen up their audience and lure in larger, less experienced crowds: the Chicago Symphony at Ravinia, the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, and so forth.


These examples of off-site performances by major companies reflect varying degrees of innovation and artistic worth. And the question of how many of the attendees become lifelong fans with an investment in regularly attending performances at the main theater is an open one. Perhaps the real future of classical music, especially when it comes to developing younger audiences, lies with upstart new companies, loose collectives of performers, and entrepreneurial impresarios who have taken the initiative to carve out their own non-traditional performance spaces of various stripes. The story of classical music in the twenty-first century may eventually be about a gradual loss of authority by the big companies in the big halls and a corresponding rise in the importance and artistic valence of a much larger collection of spaces in which such music was not traditionally welcome. In such places, the new audience whom classical music so desperately wants to reach feels at home. And traditional enthusiasts with open minds can find themselves energized, their passion reinvented in the new surroundings as they are increasingly able to pursue specialized interests and are not at the mercy of the sometimes-formulaic programming of the established music presenters. In other words, the “long tail” of internet fame has begun to weave its power over the classical music world, just as it has already transformed the marketing and performance of popular music.


Europe, as usual, has led the way. In Switzerland, the national television network has filmed a series of classic operas in unusual settings: La Bohème in a modern apartment complex and a shopping mall, La Traviata in the central train station in Zurich. In each case, important international singers performed along with the Zurich Opera House orchestra and chorus. Ratings were through the roof. Composer Marios Joannou Elia, from Cyprus, takes another approach, specializing in complex works for non-traditional venues. His music has been performed in a terminal at the Salzburg international airport with takeoffs and landings as a visual backdrop, at the Ministry of Science and Culture in Hannover, and at the Volkswagen Factory in Dresden. His latest piece, Die Jagd, premiered in the exhibition hall of one of the largest car dealers in Stuttgart. And in the populist vein, a wave of videos on YouTube has recently made the rounds, each depicting singers and musicians spontaneously performing classical music in crowded European public spaces, surprising and delighting the onlookers. These examples are not necessarily paradigmatic, but they suggest the possibility of a genuinely populist and popular approach that bypasses all of the traditional encrustations associated with serious music and reaches audiences right where they work and play.


One particular genre of offbeat venue is the “site-specific” performance space, in which the setting refers directly to the content of the work itself. The mother of all such stagings was a filmed version of Puccini’s Tosca from 1992, performed in Rome in the actual historical locations of the opera’s setting and filmed at the exact times of day in which the three acts take place. The result was a decent performance of the opera, a large audience, and an avalanche of press coverage, an indicator of the central benefit—and challenge—of such stunt-driven presentations. In most cases, novelty and P.R. trump the required compromises, such as the loss of acoustic quality and the lack of control over lighting and sightlines. In 2007, the Vertical Player Repertory company staged Puccini’s Il Tabarro on an actual barge in Brooklyn, with the Red Hook docks and the Manhattan skyline as backdrop. The performance began at sunset—the same time as the opera’s story begins. The result was satisfying, thanks to the resonant setting, but not revelatory as an artistic experience. In February of this year, Boston Lyric Opera presented Britten’s ghost-story opera, The Turn of the Screw, in the old Park Plaza castle, a spooky, barn-like structure built in the 1890s that carries the resonance of a haunted English manor that has seen better days. The ambience was perfect for the opera, but the width of the playing area was too wide for this intimate work, and the performers had difficulty holding dramatic tension over such a diffuse space. The decision to stage the opera here ultimately felt less like an artistic added value proposition and more like a pragmatic solution for BLO, which, according to the Boston Globe, saved money by presenting outside its usual venue, the Shubert Theatre. On the positive side, ticket prices were lower than at the Shubert, with the hope of attracting a new and younger audience.


Non-traditional performance venues carry challenges beyond the acoustic and visual. Often, dressing rooms and backstage areas are non-existent. Seating may have to be imported or improvised. Union regulations further complicate the presentation. Venues that are already artistic in nature—particularly museums—have had some success in solving these issues. Chamber music has appeared in museums for decades; last year I heard an extraordinary concert of classical Christmas carols at the Guggenheim Museum, performed in the atrium with the singers arrayed above the audience along the iconic spiral perimeter. Other performances belong in the one-off stunt category, despite their artistic pedigrees. In January, New York’s Gotham Chamber Opera presented Haydn’s little-known opera, Il Mondo Della Luna, at the Hayden Planetarium. “Haydn at the Hayden,” as the event quickly became shorthanded, was a P.R. bonanza (a Google search yields hundreds of hits) and a sold-out success, even with high-priced tickets. The opera, written and set in the eighteenth century, concerns an aging pantaloon who mistakenly believes he has traveled to the moon at the invitation of the lunar king. The performance was set in the planetarium’s central spherical auditorium, with the visually stunning projected universe as backdrop. The director, Diane Paulus, has made something of a specialty of site-specific work; her breakout hit, The Donkey Show, was an updated reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, taking place at and in a Downtown club. The Haydn performance took two years to pull together, thanks to the technical challenges of creating a platform for the orchestra, a stage with ladders and platforms, and lighting solutions that preserved the virtual darkness required by the star-scape projections (the solution: neon lighting elements built into the costumes themselves). The result was fun but gimmicky and, more importantly, an unrepeatable exploit. Such performances reap mini-storms of attention but do not develop and sustain a new audience.


Programming entities dedicated to avant-garde and international theater and music such as the Lincoln Center Festival and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (and their sister festivals in other major cities such as the Barbican’s BITE in London) have long-standing commitments to exploring alternative venues, a corollary of their openness to the new and the unusual. Recently, Lincoln Center has presented works in the Armory on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a magnificent, enormous space out of an Edith Wharton novel. A visiting production of Zimmerman’s opera Die Soldaten was a noted hit there in 2008. As with many non-permanent off-site venues, however, using this sort of space requires importing bleacher seating, equipment, temporary staff—logistically complex and expensive tasks that are not viable on a long-term, night-to-night basis. Ultimately, the need exists for a permanent rule-breaking venue.


Le Poisson Rouge, in New York’s Greenwich Village, is a salient and sustainable example of a permanent venue that has made exciting strides in presenting classical music to new audiences. Called “the coolest place to hear classical music in New York” by the decidedly uncool New York Times, Le Poisson Rouge (or LPR as it is known to its fans) is an 800-seat nightclub which opened in June 2008. The founders, composer/violinist David Handler and cellist Justin Kantor, consciously set out to create a throwback to the storied Art Deco clubs of 1920s Paris and Berlin, with a tech-forward vibe (the club has its own blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed). About half of the programming is contemporary and popular, with the rest divided between jazz and serious classical works, but the distinctions are somewhat perfunctory; a fusion of popular and art culture is the venue’s mission. Even more important, perhaps, is the stated desire to “revive the symbiotic relationship between art and revelry.” The club is a place of socializing, imbibing, and celebration. It is the opposite of a traditional venue with its “preacher and congregation seating,” in the words of Mr. Handler, as quoted in the New York Times. LPR sees this ethos as a return to the past, a reclaiming of a more natural and congenial relationship between the audience and the artwork. “It doesn’t seem like a very radical proposition to be able to have a beer and listen to some Bach,” says Ronen Givony, who produces LPR’s classical music programming, in an interview. “If anything, we believe ourselves to be more traditional than people give us credit for. . . . In everything from the name of the venue to the interior style and aesthetic, the founders were looking for something like a salon setting, like when Schubert and his friends were getting together writing and performing songs.”


LPR has certainly drawn headlines for successfully presenting potentially forbidding modernists like Xenakis and Reich. Groups such as Axiom, a Juilliard new-music ensemble, have enjoyed intense connections with sold-out hipster crowds who seem thrilled to be communing closely with artists in such a festive setting. A non-traditional venue allows the audience to approach these pieces with an open, unprejudiced mind. Yet modern art music is not necessarily LPR’s mandate, as Givony is quick to point out. One of the most successful presentations in the club’s history was a fascinating production of Monteverdi’s baroque opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea, by the upstart Opera Omnia company. Period instruments, along with an English translation and modern costumes, allowed audiences to take in the work without any linguistic or historical barriers.


What does the success of a venue such as Le Poisson Rouge mean for those looking to develop a new audience for classical music? The LPR denizens are not necessarily the same people attending Uptown concerts, at least for now. “Lincoln Center is always thinking about how to bring young people in,” says Givony. “But we think they’re looking in the wrong place. They are looking for people who can donate money and buy a gala ticket. We’re interested in people who are at their computer buying Radiohead music the minute it goes on sale, or the people who go to see Björk and bands like Grizzly Bear. There is a gigantically underserved audience of young people who don’t have a lot of money but are serious about enjoying what the city has to offer. Those people will always be able to be turned on by classical music; they just need an introduction.”


Serious music has always been performed in non-traditional venues, from subway stations to rooftops. But establishing a professional, sustainable and fertile tradition outside the traditional houses requires a commitment and dedication that is only just now gathering momentum. Such a project is important, but the future of classical music demands a variety of choice. Ideally, audiences and venues are not mutually exclusive. The Vienna Philharmonic is not going to perform at Le Poisson Rouge, nor should they. If one wants to hear music-making of that sort—and every serious music fan should—then the traditional halls will always have a place. New venues are critical for audience development, but there is room for both the new and the old in classical music connoisseurship.