Last year on the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra blog, Eddie Silva sagely observed, “Anything that’s been pronounced dead as often as classical music needs to move on to another subject. Classical music is not like a dying race track, or an old sports arena, or a typewriter. It is real estate open to reinvention.” I’m happy to report that classical music mavens are taking this advice to heart, working ferociously on reinvention on many fronts — and that a genius in San Diego has revitalized one concert element especially dear to my heart. Just look at the League of American Orchestras’ Innovations Forum, for instance, which lists examples in 10 areas of innovation, with especially interesting activities in the Audience Development and Education and the Community Engagement sections. Here you’ll read about such initiatives as the Atlanta Symphony’s “360°” program, where
each concert begins with backstage cameras shooting live interviews with musicians in a pregame format, shown on screens in the concert hall. Once the musicians arrive on stage, a roving emcee with a wireless microphone moves through the audience, prompting them to ask questions of the orchestra.
But to me, the most impressive of all audience development and education activities is what Nuvi Mehta has been doing for the San Diego Symphony lately. My discovery of his strategy was unexpected. I went there in late April strictly because of repertoire: Music Director Jahja Ling was going to conduct Edward Elgar’s Symphony No. 1, one of the more rarely played of his masterworks, and I was eager to hear it live.
I knew the concert was part of what the San Diego Symphony organization calls its “Symphony Exposed” series, which I thought would be a clone of the San Francisco Symphony’s 6.5 Series, given its description:
Symphony Exposed lets you dig deeper into your favorite music! Host Nuvi Mehta ... will give you the “inside scoop” on some of the most well-known pieces (and their composers) in the symphonic literature.
I was expecting the usual: Some musty professor would show up and say a few words about the composition, maybe play some recorded excerpts for a few minutes, and disappear. Or worse, said professor would sit with Ling in a couple of chairs placed at the front of the stage, asking him a couple of questions thought up less than an hour earlier, then giving up and turning to the blindsided audience for their queries. At best, I hoped Ling himself might lead an excerpt or two live, as Marin Alsop does for the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz.
Musty Professor — Not
But what I got instead was a consummate actor — Mehta himself — dressed as Elgar, accent and all, musing about “his” composition and failed amateur
chemistry experiments and offering deep insights from the score. For example, he described the all-too-overlooked fact that the exact notes of the scherzo are slowed down unrecognizably to create the gorgeous adagio movement. “Elgar” asked Ling to conduct substantial excerpts — not only of the Symphony but of other Elgar pieces, as well, and even a snippet of the influential Dvořák Sixth Symphony, which “Elgar” fondly recalled hearing in concert “years ago.” Next, in the most revolutionary of all innovations concocted by Mehta, Ling led the orchestra through the entire first movement of the Elgar Symphony No. 1 ... then stopped. “Elgar” came back out and described the remaining movements, asking Ling and the orchestra to illustrate with excerpts. Afterward, while this insightful information was fresh in the audience’s minds, Ling conducted the rest of the piece.
It worked. For the first time in my career as a critic, a fantasy was realized: Someone had put as much effort into explaining a piece as the musicians put into learning and perfecting it. In fact, two conductors had spent their time and energies, in different ways, helping the audience learn deeply about the music.
Later, in a telephone interview, I asked Mehta how he decides on a way to interpret music for his audiences.
What excites me about the piece? That is my first question. What is the genius here? What was the world like? What were the times like? What was his life like? What’s exciting, and where’s the story? ... Then comes an outline, a lot of research, a lot of reading, to find what was going on and how the story will best be told. Once I have a trajectory of the outline of the story, then I start pulling the pieces together and gradually, very gradually start to write it. ... It goes through several edit processes to get to the real crucible — no wasted words. ... From the time I sit down and put pencil to paper, we’re looking at about three weeks, roughly speaking.
It turns out that despite the superb quality of Mehta’s presentation, the concert I attended was one of the less extravagant performances:
We’ve done actually one-act, 30- to 40-minute plays with actors ... with of course the orchestra there as a backdrop chiming in, literally, with editorial comments from the music. The actors, as the composers, discuss their trials and tribulations and their difficulty in writing music. ... We’ve done two short plays about Dvořák. ... We showed his early struggles as he tried to get his music performed and failed. And then he finally got some early successes, like the connection to Brahms in Vienna. The String Serenade was the main piece on that program. We had five or six characters on stage, including a couple of his students. We had [the composer Bedřich] Smetana on stage. We had one of his students at the piano, we had Smetana conducting the orchestra. We generally use a lot of music that is not the composers’ [own] music, because we’re trying to create the world of the time, what the influences were and what the conversations were.
Musical Mehtas
Mehta is well-qualified for this job. His father’s uncle is the conductor Zubin Mehta, who helped Nuvi out when he was a music student at Juilliard. A violinist, Nuvi Mehta played with the San Diego Symphony while he honed his conducting skills on the side. Now he conducts orchestras full time, except for his “Symphony Exposed” stints. It was the conducting that led him to the inspiration for his cutting-edge interpretive programs:Studying a score of a great symphony fills you with so many revelations that go into your interpretation when you take the stage that I found myself often wanting to be able to share the remarkable things that I was learning.
While many are trying to rethink the experience of classical music nowadays, it may ultimately be the creative artists such as Mehta who are going to truly revitalize classical music. As he puts it,
What we’re trying to do is put a human face [on the music]. For many people, everyone knows these composers did great things, they were geniuses, but they are these sort of ivory-tower figures, formidable, hard to approach — just a word, just a name that people know one basic image about, and don’t really have any kind of personal touch with. We’re trying to point out that no matter how much of a genius a composer is, they are also human beings who go through a great deal to achieve what they achieve. ... And somehow, that can actually make people even more stunned when they hear the music. ... The struggles that Beethoven faced are no different from the struggles that someone faces just walking into a concert hall today.
With folks like Nuvi Mehta around, struggles for newcomers to classical music will be far less difficult as far as the music itself is concerned. Now, finding a parking space, or ponying up cash for the ticket — that’s a different story.