onstagepittsburgh.com: Guest conductor Sir Mark Elder, piano soloist Paul Lewis, and the great ensemble of talent that is the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, offered a brilliant program to a none too large audience at Heinz Hall last evening. The crowd was big enough to create quite a racket after the various pieces concluded, and at the curtain calls, but there were disquietingly numerous gaps of empty seats staring back at the stage.
2 comments:
I have never seen an Orchestra perform in person in my entire life without there being a musical attached. I know even less about musical performance as an art in and of itself, although I definitely have the utmost respect for them and the art form itself. It is upsetting to hear that they are having trouble with attendance as it is not a good omen for performance art in general, I can only hope that these problems are just the issues that came from Covid and will eventually dissipate and get back to the kind of attendance that it was at before. I wonder if there is anything they can do to make the performance more entertaining or appealing to a wider audience or if they can engage in any community outreach programs that could bring the orchestra back into the public consciousness. Unfortunately, nowadays we are fighting against shortened attention spans and the convenient entertainment brought to people by their phones and the internet at large today.
I am a big fan of this program - I’ve been meaning to get out to listen to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra for a bit, but I really haven’t had time. A lot of my pre-theater background is in orchestral music (I played in an orchestra for four years and played my instrument for around 6) and I really enjoy it. It’s been interesting, in college, talking to my friends studying music performance and seeing what they learn and what repertoire they examine in their playing. In this program, the Strauss tone poem would be a really interesting listen, as well as the Mozart pieces. One of the last pieces I played in orchestra was Strauss’s tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie (I would 100% recommend listening to this - it gives me chills every time I do) and the orchestration of that piece and the melodies are just so beautiful - so I’d love to hear this tone poem. I think that the combination of pieces programmed here is so smart - keeping the audience engaged with different types of pieces by different composers and in (sometimes) different styles.
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