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no concert
B. saw an announcement that a choral group we'd never heard of was giving a free concert of Mozart's Requiem on Sunday afternoon in a local church, so we decided to go. I don't know how it came out; we didn't stay for the performance.
We'd arrived early enough to read the quite extensive comments on the strange composition history of the piece, and its musical contents, in the program book. By 3 pm, the announced time, the sanctuary was packed with concertgoers, some of them children.
The conductor stood up and started to speak into a microphone. (Not very clearly: her voice kept fading in and out.) Now, many conductors have adopted the irritating habit of speaking a few superfluous sentences before pieces, but usually they're done in a couple of minutes. Not this one. She took some 15 minutes to tell the entire story of the commissioning, composition, and publication of the Requiem. I thought about shouting out, "We can read all this in the program book! Let's hear the music!"
Perhaps I should have, because then the conductor turned to an analysis of repeated musical motifs in the Requiem, with musical illustrations by the rehearsal pianist.
It was at about this point that B. asked if we should just leave. I said I hoped the talk would be done soon. It wasn't. After five minutes - this had now gone on for 20 minutes total, and it still wasn't done - the conductor was on her third motif, and we got up and left. I walked to the back parking lot to fetch the car while B. waited at the front door. When I picked her up, the conductor was still talking.
Look, if you want to give a pre-concert talk before the concert, schedule it for an hour before showtime. Don't incorporate it into the actual program. Then people can decide if they want to attend or not. Besides, this wasn't really a pre-concert talk in content. The motivic analysis made it more like a lecture in a junior college class on Mozart.
I won't dignify the ensemble by naming it, but we certainly won't attempt to attend any more of its concerts.
We'd arrived early enough to read the quite extensive comments on the strange composition history of the piece, and its musical contents, in the program book. By 3 pm, the announced time, the sanctuary was packed with concertgoers, some of them children.
The conductor stood up and started to speak into a microphone. (Not very clearly: her voice kept fading in and out.) Now, many conductors have adopted the irritating habit of speaking a few superfluous sentences before pieces, but usually they're done in a couple of minutes. Not this one. She took some 15 minutes to tell the entire story of the commissioning, composition, and publication of the Requiem. I thought about shouting out, "We can read all this in the program book! Let's hear the music!"
Perhaps I should have, because then the conductor turned to an analysis of repeated musical motifs in the Requiem, with musical illustrations by the rehearsal pianist.
It was at about this point that B. asked if we should just leave. I said I hoped the talk would be done soon. It wasn't. After five minutes - this had now gone on for 20 minutes total, and it still wasn't done - the conductor was on her third motif, and we got up and left. I walked to the back parking lot to fetch the car while B. waited at the front door. When I picked her up, the conductor was still talking.
Look, if you want to give a pre-concert talk before the concert, schedule it for an hour before showtime. Don't incorporate it into the actual program. Then people can decide if they want to attend or not. Besides, this wasn't really a pre-concert talk in content. The motivic analysis made it more like a lecture in a junior college class on Mozart.
I won't dignify the ensemble by naming it, but we certainly won't attempt to attend any more of its concerts.