Most classical music concerts that are made and unmade in the West share a common trait: predictability. Indeed, either because our halls program and regurgitate at most 5% of the sonic tradition (in other words; we listen to the same works repeated ad nauseam) or because, if we don't know a particular program, we go to an auditorium because we adore the interpreter in question, the listener of what we wrongly call classical music suffers from the ailment of repetition. I know that the reader or the interpreter, equally predictable, will argue that each concert is a different experience and that there is no identical evening. But, if we get rid of nonsense, we must admit that most music lovers still suffer from the reified listening that the philosopher Adorno spoke of: far from wanting to surprise us, we rush to a concert to listen to what we already know or, in any case, to contrast it with our favorite version.
All this cheap metaphysics comes to mind because of the concert that took place last Thursday at the Palau de la Música, a new must of the Palau 100 cycle starring the Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe, the Orchestre des Champs Élysées, the Collegium Vocale Gent and the pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout, performing a Beethovenian program with the fourth concerto and the Mass in C major, op. 86. I realized that this would be a particular performance when, a few minutes before the whole mess began, the hall of the Palau de la Música was still very full of people; a fellow citizen informed me that the concert would be delayed a few minutes because some members of the orchestra had arrived late from Paris. Half an hour later, already inside the hall, a Palau official (why not its artistic director!?) informed us that the matter was more serious: fifteen musicians from the ensemble had not been able to leave Paris due to a snowstorm.
But it didn't end there! Far from canceling the concert, the artistic directors of the hall decided to perform an almost impossible contortionist pirouette: Bezuidenhout would perform only a first part on the pianoforte, with pieces by Schubert and Beethoven, and in the second part the orchestra would play only four movements of the mass in question, replacing the absent musicians with artists from our country who had performed at the Palau that very day! Some of my companions in the stalls frowned (I understand, when one pays to hear a specific program, one can demand respect for what was established), but I found the experiment extraordinary and I want to highlight the Palau's skill in pushing the evening forward: because in the end the most important thing, and forgive my sentimentality, is that the music doesn't stop, even if it's in fits and starts. As Quimi Portet, apologist for our national sonic stoicism, reminds us, "si plou, ho farem al pavelló" (if it rains, we'll do it in the pavilion).
It is clear that a concert that would have done justice to its program would have reached greater heights of beauty. But this airport mishap gave us a delightful evening full of contingencies. Until now, we knew of the immense talent of pianist Bezuidenhout, but since the other day we can now consider him a major artist; because, to put it in technical terms, you need to have a good pair of balls to present yourself alone before an audience like Thursday's, notoriously annoyed by the changes, adapt to a program of enormously demanding pieces, and manage to capture everyone's attention with moments of sublime silence. Kristian, my respect, and even more so if, apart from the difficulty of the change, Bezuidenhout had to maintain concentration due to the usual interferences in the form of telephone gadgets and... the unfortunate fainting of a fellow citizen in the stalls!
We hope the lady in question has recovered. As for the subsequent mass, it is a nuisance to have to decapitate the natural discourse of a piece so well woven by the Bonn composer. But the climatic contingency showed something very important; namely, that our musicians can face a complex score practically at sight. When Herreweghe thanked them for their willingness to come and play with them, the Palau erupted in a great ovation; this is not a product of our appalling national chauvinism, but of an audience that needs to be proud of its musicians and that, if they were programmed as they should be, could appreciate them as much or more than the superstars of Palau 100. In fact, given the chance to give the most punk concert, I would have been so bold as to interpret the entire mass; that, we already knew, was not a night for perfection, but for pure survival.
Many music lovers, I insist, thought that the Palau would have done better canceling the concert... and that's that. On the contrary, I applaud its organizers for having pulled off this show must go on, because we already have our eardrums full of memorable concerts for their predictability. Perhaps we did not hear what we already knew, nor with the perfection of a recording: but we experienced a great exception in our very boring condition as music lovers, and it is called unpredictability. Blessed be it, I assure you, and I hope we experience it more often.