Shopping for Chopin

It's been a long time since I've been to a live classical music performance. Back when I was in school and could get concession tickets, I watched a shitload of stuff because at $5 to $15 a concert, I could afford to. Nowadays, I can rarely get tickets for anything less than $25. CD's cost about $25. There is the occasional live performance that's darned good, but more often than not you're better off listening to a CD. What's more, for the same price (or less), you can hear it over and over again. And with the ultra-conservative programming that passes for classical music concerts these days, you'll probably hear more stuff by collecting CDs as opposed to watching concerts.

But today, I went to watch a live classical music performance. Or should I say, a performance that included live classical music. Shopping for Chopin was done in a black-box space, with a pianist playing live Chopin, video projections and pre-recorded music and voice. Each of these elements interacted with each other to create this performance.

There was a plot to it all: a love story, about a boy and a girl who meet at a Gramophone store and who share an interest in Chopin's music. The details of this plot you had to absorb by reading the texts projected on the screens, and by listening to the pre-recorded voice. I was too lazy to really do either. So I was just in this "this is a love story" haze.

Some have labelled this "basically a piano recital", but from the pianophile's perspective, it is not. It's not easy to describe what it was, but I'll try anyway. John Cheng (from NAFA) began ordinarily enough, with a sweet rendition of the Andante spianato (without the accompanying Polonaise). After this he rested, while an orchestrated version of the Op. 28 No. 7 Prelude was piped in to accompany a video projection. Then we were taken back to the Andante, and then to the orchestrated Prelude again.

Some voiceover, and then we heard the opening section of the second Ballade, the F major bits. But the pianist stopped there. It wasn't until we'd finished hearing more voiceover that he continued into the violent A minor section, played a bit further past that section, and then stopped there. The fiery coda we did not hear.

More voiceover, before some video accompanied by bits of the second Concerto's slow movement, from a recording. Then we heard the pianist perform the first half of the Op. 53 Polonaise, stopping just before the chords that herald the descending octaves. We never heard the rest of the Polonaise.

Next we had the pianist playing the Op. 28 No. 4 Prelude, while a recording of another completely different piano piece was playing in the background (I couldn't tell what it was).

Some more voiceover, and then the Op. 27 No. 2 Nocturne. But we heard only the left-hand accompaniment, without the melody. It was not until some time later that the melody was introduced.

If you weren't familiar with Chopin's music, you may not have noticed a lot of this: that the Chopin is not Chopin per se, but Chopin edited and modified and spliced. This is a problem, I think, because this performance was billed as a theatre-ish sort of thing. It attracted theatre-goers, who may not necessarily have been familiar enough with the music to catch these details. It may have looked like 'just another piano recital', when it really was far from orthodox for a piano recital.

Theatre-goers may also seldom walk into Gramophone stores. The significance of part of the set may therefore have been lost on some, for there was a glass human head with headphones on it. If you shop at Gramophone, you'd have recognised it.

Technically, too, there were a number of problems with the performance. Firstly, if you're someone who listens attentively, you may have found the juxtaposition of the live music and the recorded music a little jarring, because the sound quality of the recordings was not up there, and did not match the clarity of the live music. This was partly because some of the recordings being used were pretty old. But there was at least one Lang Lang recording (the second Concerto), which was probably pretty new but still sounded botched through the speakers.

Also, the piano wasn't perfectly tuned. They'd probably tuned it once before the first performance, and then left it to languish for the next few days while the air-conditioning came on and off. You might get away with this if your performance is in a large concert hall and the pianist is on stage and everyone else is not, but in a small space where the listener is within 10 metres of the piano, the flaw is noticeable.

The pianist wasn't perfect either. He took the F major section of the Ballade too fast for my taste, while the A minor section, comparatively, was too slow. He was clearly having technical difficulties with the Polonaise, even though he didn't have to do the octaves. I've always loved the Op. 28 No. 4 Prelude, which is so tragic in its simplicity. But because of the other piano recording playing simultaneously, we couldn't really appreciate this piece properly. He was best in the concluding Nocturne, I think, where his tone was nicely rounded and he was able to make the melodies sing. His runs here were pretty clear too.

Overall, I liked the concept. It's something that would have been worth paying $25 for. For one thing, it was interesting, which is more than can be said for most of the classical music calendar nowadays. I hope there will be more.

Shopping for Chopin is presented by Play Den Productions and runs till 31 August 2010. For details, click here.