Recordings bring every orchestra into every room. Live music offers something they cannot: the shared, unrepeatable evening.
Never has so much music been so easily had. Almost the whole classical repertoire, in more interpretations than a lifetime could absorb, can be summoned in seconds and played through a speaker the size of a pebble. It would be reasonable to wonder why anyone still puts on a coat on a wet November evening, crosses a city and sits for two hours on a velvet seat to hear a symphony available at home.
The answer lies in what a recording, however fine, cannot do.
Sound with walls
The first reason is acoustic. A full orchestra in a good hall produces a sound of a size and complexity no domestic system reproduces. It does not arrive from a point. It fills the room, reaching the listener from many directions at once — reflected by walls, ceiling and balconies in ways the hall’s builders calculated, or in older rooms simply hoped for.
Many of the most admired nineteenth-century halls are long and rectangular, the so-called shoebox form, prized for warmth and clarity. Later designers experimented with other shapes, some placing the audience in terraces around the orchestra. Each offers a different experience, and part of the pleasure of concert-going is learning how a particular room sounds — where the basses bloom, where the woodwinds sit forward, which seat in the upper tier the regulars quietly prefer.
“A recording is a photograph of a performance. A concert is the performance.”
Once only
The second reason is time. A recording is fixed; it will sound the same on the hundredth hearing as on the first. A performance happens once. The musicians respond to the hall, the audience, each other and the evening itself. A tempo eases, a phrase is shaped differently, a silence is held a fraction longer than anyone expected, and the room holds its breath with it.
Regular concertgoers know that some evenings are simply better than others, for reasons no one can quite explain. The uncertainty is part of the attraction. One never knows, taking one’s seat, whether this will be the performance remembered for twenty years.
A thousand people, listening
The third reason is the audience. There is something distinctive about listening in a room full of people all attending to the same thing. The quality of silence in a hall — before the first note, or in the hush of a slow movement — can be extraordinary. It is a collective act of concentration, and taking part in it is a pleasure available almost nowhere else in modern life.
The smaller room
For those who find the symphony orchestra overwhelming, chamber music offers a gentler way in. A string quartet or piano trio in a small hall — or, in the older tradition, in a private room with the chairs pushed back — lets one hear every voice distinctly and watch the players converse through a glance, a lifted bow, an intake of breath before a downbeat. Much of the greatest music ever written is chamber music, and it repays close listening like nothing else.
Experienced concertgoers give simple advice. Go often, and go to things you do not know. Sit in different parts of the hall until you find where you hear best. Read a little about the music beforehand, but not so much that you listen for the programme note rather than the performance. Switch the telephone off, not merely to silent. Hold the applause between movements unless the rest of the hall decides otherwise.
Above all, treat the evening as an occasion. The concert hall is one of the last places where a large gathering of strangers agrees to give its full attention to one beautiful thing for two hours. That alone is reason enough to find one’s coat.
