Concertgoers tend to focus, understandably enough, on the music, but it turns out applause is also an essential part of the concert experience. Just try doing without it.
In the face of concern about the coronavirus — a consideration that has already led to the cancellation of a growing number of performing arts events — the folks at the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble showed an admirable degree of gumption and resilience on Monday, March 9. Instead of simply calling off their planned program outright, the musicians performed to an empty hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and live-streamed the event to an audience watching on YouTube.
Maybe this is what the arts are going to be like for the foreseeable future. It certainly beats the alternative.
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For much of the program’s 90 minutes, you could almost believe this was business as usual, even if Artistic Director Anna Presler got things rolling with a welcome to an online audience. The performers took the stage and made their way through a delightful array of music both old and new.
Storyteller Susan Strauss gave vivid renditions of animal myths from Native American traditions, punctuated by composer Chris Castro’s sharp, colorful instrumental interjections. Violist Phyllis Kamrin and pianist Allegra Chapman made their way with tender eloquence through Schumann’s late duo “Fairytale Pictures.”
And in the program’s highlight, soprano Nikki Einfeld unleashed a virtuoso combination of singing and narration in the world premiere of Carl Schimmel’s “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut,” a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” that joins Howard Chace’s marvelously fractured text with a vivid, illustrative score for five instruments.
Yet before and after each piece, the emptiness where the audience’s applause should have been was overwhelming. Performers walked onstage in silence, and later on the music dissolved into silence.
It wasn’t merely the absence of the usual response, either. This felt like a positive void, a palpable presence that seemed to fill the room. There was something completely integral missing from the entire concert.
It was the applause, to be sure, but ultimately that was just a proxy for what was really absent — all the other listeners. I listened to the program alone in my study at home, and although I knew there were others doing the same (for one thing, the chat box on the side of the YouTube screen would occasionally come to life with expressions of appreciation) I felt the solitude as never before.
We’re not meant to experience music this way. Novels, sure. Paintings? Maybe, I don’t know. But music is a communal undertaking, a world we all inhabit together at the same time. Or so it seemed on Monday night, as I felt for the presence of my fellow audience members as if for some sort of phantom limb.
Thank heaven for technology, and for the way it allows us to make the best of a bad situation. One feels gratitude, too, for the determination of the ensemble’s planners. It would have been easy enough, after all, just to call the whole thing off, and instead we got a fine performance recorded for anyone to hear.
If this is how we have to make music during the current crisis, so be it. It’s certainly preferable to no music at all.
Yet it may be that the sweetest sound in the whole undertaking came right at the end, when the performers joined together to applaud Schimmel for his witty and inventive score. That little scattering of appreciation burst forth like the sweetest harmony. It was the sound I didn’t even realize I’d been yearning for all along.
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