Music - Simon Callow says we need to bring drama to the concert experience
Despite the annual triumphant orgy of classical music at the Proms, the concert scene in England is worrying. It's the old story, common to most of the performing arts: audiences are dwindling, and those who do come are of a certain age, class and race. There is a strong feeling that the basic format needs to be rethought, and one of the more successful innovations, I'm delighted to say, has been the involvement of actors in concerts - delighted because I am an abject groupie of classical music and, being unable to play any instrument or even sing in tune, how else could I be involved with my heroes? I've appeared in any number of concerts, none more successful than a whole year's worth that kicked off Jane Glover's trailblazing leadership of the London Mozart Players, in which I read relevant letters from Mozart and his father. Putting the music in a living context was clearly a great deal more effective than confining such information to the programme notes. So when the London Mozart Players (now under Andrew Parrott) recently asked me to have a long-term relationship with them, not only taking part in concerts, but also devising programmes and directing them, I was a very happy man.
Music and actors have been associated from the very beginning. In the Greek theatre, they were indissolubly linked - the actors chanted as much as spoke their texts. Although the spoken word began to be separated from the musical accompaniment, writers and managers, and indeed actors, have always understood the peculiar potency of music in conjunction with the spoken word, and as a binding factor in the theatrical event. Shakespeare asks for hautboys as Mark Antony dies. Again and again, in both comedy and tragedy, goes up the cry "Music, ho!". Part of the job of court musicians was to provide music for the plays - songs, underscoring, overtures, entr'actes, finales. In the 19th century, the highest-flying names were happy to write for the stage: Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bizet, Sullivan, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Sibelius, Faure, among the most celebrated.
Until the middle of the 20th century, well-established composers such as Shostakovich, Britten and Tippett regularly provided inventive and memorable music for stage productions. In the 1960s, Nino Rota evoked Sicily for Franco Zeffirelli's Much Ado About Nothing at the National Theatre. A decade or so ago, Harrison Birtwistle was the composer-in-residence at the NT. Astor Piazzolla wrote a sensationally sexy, bandoneon-haunted score for A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Comedie Francaise. Today, composers such as Jonathan Dove and Dominic Muldowney write for the theatre.
Most of this music is heard for the brief span of the production and then lost in the theatre's music archive, which is a terrible waste. There is a vast resource of this music, the creation of which often allows a composer otherwise preoccupied by larger symphonic or indeed operatic forms to write shorter pieces and to explore atmospheric effects. Some of it has been abstracted into concert suites, but all of it gains immeasurably from being heard in the context for which it was written. To hear the Peer Gynt music with Henrik Ibsen's text is a revelation, as is Bizet's music with Alphonse Daudet's L'Arlesienne. Likewise, to hear Sibelius's Valse Triste arising out of the scene in his brother-in-law's play for which it was written (in which an old lady dreams of dancing with death) would surely be fascinating.
My suggestion is to gather together a group of actors who are excited by this sort of work (Sam West, Sara Kestelman, Joseph Fiennes, Simon Russell Beale and many more) and from time to time exhume a play and its incidental music for a concert staging. It might even be possible to put on a very simple staging in an appropriate venue: Everyman, for example, with the elemental score Sibelius wrote for it, could be a shattering event in one of the City of London's churches. A different sort of event could be provided by linking together music by more than one composer for - a very easy one, this - Shakespeare plays, from the music of his contemporaries through to Birtwistle, with appropriate texts read by the actors. Moliere is another possibility, as is Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Pelleas et Melisande haunted imaginations at the end of the 19th century and inspired both Sibelius and Faure to write some of their finest music. The play has disappeared from the repertory (only Debussy's opera keeps the story alive); a concert performance could probe its charms.
The use of actors in concert performances of opera can be equally exciting: a few years ago, Dirk Bogarde narrated Tom Stoppard's linking text for The Merry Widow, with huge success. Stoppard was also involved in an extremely successful collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London Symphony Orchestra with Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Commissions of this sort could result in provocative and original work either within the regular concert format or through a series of staged or semi-staged concerts, say, at the QEH or Fairfield Hall.
Works that directly involve speakers and orchestra are few, but always highly appreciated: Peter and the Wolf, Barbar the Elephant, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. It would be good to expand the repertory in this direction, perhaps for multiple voices. H K Gruber's wild assaults on the orchestra in Frankenstein!! and other outrageous pieces are dazzlingly effective and far from sedate.
There is another, almost unknown repertory, too, once highly popular: the melodrama repertory - melodrama, that is, in its strict sense, the fusion of the spoken voice and instruments. The 18th-century composer Benda produced a number of remarkable pieces in this genre, and many composers of the 19th century, including Liszt and the young Richard Strauss, wrote pieces of this sort, mostly for piano and speaker.
It might be equally interesting to bring to life an important figure in the history of music and have an actor impersonate him or her: Sergei Diaghilev and Nadia Boulanger are two figures who come to mind, introducing and commenting on works that they brought into being.
Essentially, the idea is to dramatise the experience of concert-going: to give it a sharper, more imaginative profile in a way that doesn't interfere with the music-making, but which stage-manages it, so to speak. It seems to me that there are few limits to what could be done - it could be a small revolution.
Simon Callow is currently touring in The Mystery of Charles Dickens
For full details of the London Mozart Players autumn series, in which original pieces of theatrical music will be accompanied by an actor, call 020 7222 1061
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