Mixtur, the Joy of Live Music

Happiness does not exist, but the jovial impact produced by leaving a concert where you have just discovered unknown music is the feeling that most resembles it. The corny ones say that the singularity of musical interpretation lies in the fact that each repetition of a work, even of those most over-programmed pieces, becomes a new experience. The commonplace is true, of course, but when 90% of the music we hear/see in auditoriums around the planet is part of the traditional repertoire (there are seasons when we have attended authentic polytoxicomaniac binges of Winterreise and requiems by authentic Wolfie, and I don't care if the adjective doesn't exist), the act of going to a concert transforms us into lazy beings who only want to recognize the sounds that the industry associates with enjoyment. It is what the bore Adorno described as musical fetishism or, more specifically, Regression des Hörens.

All this cheap metaphysics comes to mind because last Thursday I left the Auditorium happier than Jeffrey Epstein in a kindergarten, just after the opening concert of the Mixtur Festival, which this year celebrates fifteen years of happy normalization of contemporary music in Barcelona, for which its directors Oliver Rappoport and Oriol Saladrigues, former students of our ESMUC (which also celebrates a quarter of a century), thought that the occasion deserved a gala opening with an orchestra. I enjoyed the premiere of the Overture by my dear colleague Joan Magrané (a piece that paints wonderfully, madrigalist as always... but I sense it's more combative than usual), but above all I was energized by Beat Furrer's Konzert für Klavier und Orchester, an authentic masterpiece where the Austrian genius manages to restore the percussive nature to the piano, while recreating himself in the muscular agility of the romantic concerto. This also goes for discovering new performers and moving away from the usual star system... and I must say that the Serbian pianist Ana Ostojić, whom I had never heard before, seemed to me an artist overflowing with intuition and theatricality. Loud applause!!!

We often forget that the best guarantee of a good interpretation lies not only in technique, but also in enthusiasm. This was evident on this evening, in which the musicians of the ESMUC Symphony Orchestra demonstrated that the desire to make music can even embellish the dreadful acoustics of our Auditorium. The grown-up children of the OBC should have attended the concert, not only because they would have re-encountered their former conductor Ernest Martínez Izquierdo (who, in this repertoire, is a guarantee), but because they would have seen how twenty-something year olds can conclude a concert with the Symphony in Three Movements by daddy Stravinsky with remarkable quality, and even more so considering that the students must have prepared it by snatching dead hours between classes. At home, we think that there is no classical or contemporary, cultured or popular music... but only things well done or badly done and concerts that move or are just-get-it-over-with; and this opening is among the former.

Most spectators know Rachmaninov's music as well as Beat Furrer's sounds

The problem, even if its curators don't want it, is that festivals like Mixtur often fall into the stigma of programming music only for the convinced. If our sound life were healthier, the most recent concert repertoire would normally cohabit with the most beloved works of the musical tradition. In this, it is necessary to remind music lovers of a hurtful but basic thing; namely that, in terms of strict musical wisdom, most spectators know Rachmaninov's music as well as Beat Furrer's sounds. The only difference, alas, is that they have listened to the Russian composer's piano works some seven hundred thousand times and in hundreds of different versions... while they will swallow the music of a living author on a single occasion and in a more specialized context. This explains why a concert like Mixtur's inaugural one, which had more general quality than the recent visit of the New York Philharmonic with Gustavo Dudamel, only managed to fill the stalls of the Auditorium. It is not the fault of the performers or the organizers (who do enough by organizing a competition with half a shoe), but of a lazy audience and a public musical culture that takes risks at a snail's pace. A pity, because the victim of all this is not only performers or authors, but the joy of the public.

That's why I recommend that you consult the website of initiatives like Mixtur and attend the concerts of Trio Abstrakt or pianist Rei Nakamura, and also get closer to the sounds of highly renowned authors such as Simon Steen-Andersen or Isabel Mundry. That you don't have the slightest damn idea who all these people are is not bad news; on the contrary, it's the best thing that can happen to you, because you are about to discover them. Because getting emotional in front of what we already know perfectly well has no merit, and art, theory said, is the antonym of laziness. Listen to me, for I watch over your joy, for live music, and for the well-being of everyone, just in general.