An Intense Musical Experience

I know I said this blog was about things literary-based, but I also remember saying that I just want to rant sometimes, so I’d like to share something that I really enjoyed this evening.

Tonight the Durham University Palatinate Chamber Orchestra performed in St Margaret’s Church, and I experienced a phenomenal feeling playing in the orchestra. Our programme consisted of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Glinka’s Valse-fantasie and Bruckner’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, but the highlight for me, and surely for everyone present, has got to be Beethoven’s Symphony No.2. I honestly have to say I didn’t have the greatest hope for DUPO Chamber at the beginning since there was never full attendance in rehearsals (we often rehearse with an entire section missing) and progress being so slow. Technically, tonight’s performance wasn’t the most perfect with occasional slips and discrepancies in tempo here and there, which was probably due to lack of rehearsals. However, there was a feeling that was so strongly felt by everyone in the room which made the performance so special, and it is this feeling that I want to address.

The conductor, Harry Lai, is a great character, one of a kind. From the very start he has shown great enthusiasm in conducting and being part of this orchestra. In fact, he is so humble he sees himself more as part of the orchestra rather than an individual imposing his ideas on us. At times this has caused rehearsals to be less efficient than it could’ve gone, but I think his passion in what he does really touched us; tonight especially. The huge smile that he put on when we finally got the entries right just goes to show how much we’ve gone through and improved: both the orchestra and the conductor. The end was so much more thrilling because we witnessed our own improvement, and we felt the bonding within the orchestra, and this bonding extended to the audience sitting only metres away from us.

And that has got me thinking. How do we define a good performance? Growing up in a culture where technical proficiency is highly valued, it took quite a while for my mindset to change upon coming to England. Even when teachers back in Hong Kong say they value musicality more, it is only because technical perfection has already become an unspoken prerequisite. And yes, certainly a musical performance with no wrong notes would be a unanimously agreed “good performance”. And yet does music have to be so inaccessible? Is such degrees of musical experience available only to people who spend their lives practising? That wouldn’t be fair.

There is something about the spontaneity of the musical experience tonight that really intrigues me. It isn’t like we have been practising so hard and that this is the fruit of our labours, because tonight’s performance was so much BETTER than we would’ve attained, and I think that’s because in that moment, we are able to present something raw and pure in human experience, and share it in that church with wonderful acoustics. We have all been touched by Harry’s sincerity about the music that we are finally able to share this pure human experience and that’s what made the performance so wonderful. I was literally buzzing after the final D of Beethoven’s exciting symphony.

And I think this also adds a point to the age-old debate of whether recordings can replace live performances. If I listen to a recording of our performance tonight, I wouldn’t think it was that great, because the errors would have ticked me off, but tonight at the moment of the performance I did not care about the wrong notes at all, and that’s because I’ve experienced something more human that can only be experienced in St Margaret’s Church at 7:30 pm on Sunday the 3rd of December 2017, and that moment is gone forever, and since humans are flawed, the wrong notes added to the beauty of its imperfection. I strongly believe that such an intense experience is irreplaceable and can only occur once. I would like to chase this experience because that is what makes music so great for me.

I’m sorry if what I’m saying is confusing. It’s 2 AM in the morning after the concert and I’m slightly delirious.