In Public

One of the many great things about listening to music played 'live' is the understanding the experience engenders that the music needs to be made and one's increased awareness of the skill and effort needed to do so.. This ties in with the sense of something close to celebration, certainly gratitude, that live performance brings along with it. The sustained applause given to last night's performance of Britten's War Requiem was evidence of that.

With live music also comes a sense of drama. No matter how well you know a piece it is still being made before your eyes, or rather ears, and in the case of a composer like Britten with his extraordinary sense of the dramatic (all those operas didn't come about by accident) this effect seems to be happily, sometimes exhilaratingly, multiplied. To take one simple example from last night: the way the final choral 'Amen', and all that it signified, faded lingeringly into silence, invested the conclusion of the oratorio (if that's what it really is) with a meaning beyond either the music or the words. In fact, Britten seems to me to be more acutely aware of the reality of silence than any other composer I can think of.

The remarkable range of sonorities encompassed by the War Requiem also seems to me essentially dramatic rather than musical.

Unfortunately part of the wonder of yesterday evening evaporated, in my case at least, due to the unexpected accompaniment to the music of a chattering little girl sitting three seats away. And that's a reminder of another quality of live music: its brittle vulnerability in the face of inappropriate competition.