Overheard as I was walking out of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic’s opening night concert last night:

“That’s not the sort of thing you pick if you want to get chosen for Fort Wayne.”

Context: This year the Philharmonic is auditioning eight candidates for the Music Director’s position, to replace Edvard Tchivzhel. Each gets to conduct two concerts, one with a full orchestra and one with a chamber orchestra. The opener, and the Unplugged concert at IPFW, were conducted by Tito Muñoz, currently Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. Muñoz, who’s only 25 and has a good rapport with the audience and, from a layman’s perspective at least, seems to with the musicians as well, led the orchestra in the opener in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (yes, it’s really called that).

Now, the Rachmaninoff concerto is a showpiece for a virtuoso pianist, and the guest pianist that the Philharmonic brought in, 20-year-old Yuja Wang from Beijing, was phenomenal. The piece is delicate (even to the extreme of being a little weepy) and Romantic and, in 20th-century terms at least, doesn’t take a lot of risks. The (heavily elderly) audience had no problem leaping to their feet for a standing ovation.

But the Bartók piece which followed went over rather differently. Béla Bartók fled the Nazis and his native Hungary’s pro-German government during World War II and emigrated to the United States, where he lived only a few years before dying of chronic myeloid leukemia. The Concerto for Orchestra was his penultimate major orchestral piece; he composed it during the war while waiting to die of the disease, appearing at the premiere less than a year before his death. While it’s still a traditional orchestral work in structure, it exemplifies a lot of the nontraditional elements of the twentieth century: there’s dissonant fourths all over the place, weird rhythms and irreverent nonmelodious sounds being passed back and forth during the middle movements, a parody and shouting down of a Shostakovich symphony in the lighthearted fourth-movement Intermezzo, and a couple descents into Bartók’s characteristic Night Music, described by Amherst College music prof David Schneider as “eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies.” (Bartók sometimes emulated birdsong, using, for example, the song of the Wood Thrush—a close relative of the familiar and somewhat similarly sounding American Robin—in his Piano Concerto No. 3.)

The elderly audience was amusingly reluctant to stand for the ovation after that one, despite that being the end of the show. As we were shuffling out, I overheard the above contemptuous comment as the people behind me were discussing their belief that the guest conductors were allowed to select the pieces they would perform. So apparently, in Fort Wayne, encouraging your audience to step outside their comfort zone—to the extent of exposing them to something that was experimental sixty years ago—runs a significant risk of being met with fear and contemptuous church-lady glares.

Tags: Music