The events themselves couldn’t have been more diverse. Mahler's massive opus, subtitled "Symphony of a Thousand," calls for enormous forces, and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas melded the orchestra, the S.F. Symphony Chorus, the S.F. Girls Chorus, the Pacific Boychoir, and a stellar team of vocal soloists in a transcendent, gloriously outsized reading. La Bohème, with a fine cast headed by soprano Angela Gheorghiu, emerged newly energized under the fervent leadership of Music Director–designate Nicola Luisotti. And Kurtág's miniature settings of Kafka's texts, as delivered by Upshaw and violinist Geoff Nuttall, came across sounding remarkably incisive.
Yet, as different as these performances were — the hair-raising sonic magnitude of the Mahler, the enveloping warmth of Bohème, the focused intensity of the Kurtág — something was strikingly similar about all three. It was a heightened immediacy, a direct transmission from artist to audience. It was the sense that these works, despite all knowledge to the contrary, were being created on the spot. Anyone attending a great performance knows the feeling. Some describe it as electric. For others, it's a sense of total immersion. But what really happens when we hear music live? What is it, in this era of iPods, MP3 players, and YouTube videos, that continues to make the live experience essential? Part of it is strictly visceral. It's the excitement of witnessing the music unfold in the moment, the emotion we feel as any work creates tension and grants resolution.
Along the way, there's an element of risk: Will the tenor hit that high C? Will the string quartet pull off the composer's most difficult passagework? Can the conductor find his or her way to the heart of the piece? It's a little like watching a high-wire act, with all the implied danger and hope for a successful outcome. Another aspect, acousticians will tell you, has to do with the quantifiable properties of live music. When we listen to a live orchestra, for example, the sound generated is rich, complex, multidirectional, with each instrument producing a signal that travels directly to our ears.
Recorded sound, in contrast, is subject to diverse methods of processing and compression. It's the difference, in visual terms, between seeing a live, three-dimensional person standing in front of you and viewing a photograph. Speaker quality and placement can also greatly affect the way we perceive the sound of a recording. All of which suggests that when people say they've experienced a performance that no recording could capture, they're probably right.
The Science of Hearing Music
According to Jonathan Berger, a composer and professor of music at Stanford University who has spent much of his career studying the impact of music on the brain, live performance has a certain quality that can elude the most sophisticated recordings.
For first-rate listening, you certainly didn't need to venture out to hear the works in last month's performances. There are recordings aplenty of Bohème and Mahler's Eighth on the market, with another on the way: The San Francisco Symphony's digital recorders were running throughout the Mahler concerts, and the CD, due out next fall, promises to be one for the ages. At least one good recording of Kurtág's Fragments is available, though I hope that Upshaw and violinist Nuttall will commit their extraordinary interpretation to disc. Still, the evidence suggests that our ears, when given a choice, prefer live music to recorded.
Berger cites an experiment conducted in his lab with a computer-driven acoustic piano — a sophisticated "player piano" capable of reproducing what a human performer has played. "We did two recordings," says Berger, "one of the live performer and one of the computer-generated performance. Both recordings were, for all practical purposes, identical, with the exception of incredible subtleties." (These included breathing, the sound of fingernails hitting the keys, and noise from the piano bench.) "Then we did a preference test, and lo and behold, the preference for the recording of the live performer was clearly, statistically higher." This defies logic. The computer-generated recording, after all, was cleaner, without flaws or distracting "human" noise. Asked to explain the result, Berger says the answer is complex. "But I think that there is this sense that, when we listen to music, we try to associate it with humans creating it."
Sharing the Act of Listening
And, perhaps, with other humans experiencing it. There's a communal aspect to live performance that can't be overlooked. Listening as part of an audience — whether it's a group of 50, 100, or 3,000 — may be one of the most rewarding things we can do. It makes us feel connected (that's a feeling you don't get on a BART train full of iPod wearers). It makes us feel energized. It makes us feel human. Of course, the venue plays a significant part in the experience.
Here's another aspect in which Bay Area audiences have an edge. Within a hundred-mile radius in and around San Francisco, it's possible to hear music in an astonishing variety of settings, from Davies Symphony Hall, the War Memorial Opera House, Zellerbach Hall, and Stanford's Memorial Auditorium to tiny chamber music venues such as Freight and Salvage, and the Hotel Rex. In between, there are many congenial midsized houses. For many, UC Berkeley's Hertz Hall is the preferred space for vocal recitals. The Paramount Theatre in Oakland, the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason, the California Theatre in San Jose, and the Hofmann Theatre at Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts are all employed, to good effect, for regional opera and symphony performances. And dozens of low-cost (or free) performances are given every weekend in community churches around the Bay Area.
There's a wealth of music out there. This week alone, it's possible to hear the Berkeley Symphony playing Adams and Beethoven (Dec. 18, Zellerbach Hall); the American Bach Soloists performing Handel's Messiah (Dec. 18-19, Grace Cathedral); the San Francisco Girls Chorus singing Poulenc (Dec. 19, St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley); "Pomegranates and Figs, a Feast of Jewish Music" (Dec. 20, Zellerbach Hall) with a women's ensemble plus a klezmer band; and the Berkeley Community Chorus, in a program of opera choruses that includes selections from Philip Glass' opera Appomattox (Dec. 21, St. Joseph the Worker Church). All of these are wonderful programs, with endless possibilities — for the size of the hall, a larger or smaller ensemble, a slight change in focus or interpretation, will make each performance unique. How could it be different? Each will be live, performed in the moment by living, breathing artists. Even if it's a work you know by heart, we're betting you'll hear it differently this time. But don't take our word for it. Go out, listen, and decide for yourself.