Messiaen packs out QPAC with a little help from Brian Cox.

QPAC, Brisbane

November 9, 2014

If Brian Cox is not a name familiar to you, imagine a younger David Attenborough with a dash of early Richard Dawkins. He’s the BBC’s latest pop science celebrity; he’s slick, he’s funny, he’s smart. Cox opened the QSO’s Physics of Time, with the music starting about halfway through. This is fairly standard hustle. You use a celebrity to draw in a crowd that rarely come, then try to hook them with something special and keep them coming back for more. That’s the essence of two-fer programming.

The tactic was a success. The Queensland Symphony Orchestra managed to pack out QPAC for a full weekend of shows. As Brian archly pointed out, Physics of Time is probably the first concert Messiaen has ever been played to a full house – in Brisbane, at least. Will the new listeners come back again? We can only hope.

They even managed it with half the city missing. An unknown large number of Brisbanites have fled pending the arrival of Barack Obama’s large security detail.

I do like the irony, though – using science, of all things, to sell music. Whoever thought cosmology, or the theory of time, was sexy? And yet, nowadays, they so obviously are. Brian Cox is a pretty cool dude, strolling around the stage in his sports jacket and jeans, with his Oxford-ish English accent quoting John Updike and Albert Einstein with arch glee. He knows his stuff, too. He’s a particle physicist at CERN in Geneva when he’s on holiday from his jobs at the BBC, or perhaps the other way around, and he’s an entertaining and illuminating lecturer. (Full disclosure: I’m a huge fan of Brian Cox).

But what about the music? This was the second of two concert programs QSO has organised: they’ve split the difference between the sublime and the familiar (Holst’s The Planets, the obvious choice, was the bulk of the other gig). This concert was somewhat more adventurous (and appropriate). Messiaen’s the Quartet for the End of Time, which as everyone is obliged to mention was written and first performed in a POW camp (not a concentration camp as is often claimed). It probably the best music ever written in a jail.

In some ways this is an inspired choice. It’s a briefish three-quarter-of-an-hour work, written for piano trio with clarinet, inspired by the Book of Revelation. Messiaen, a devout Catholic, used the Biblical symbolism to write about his own personal apocalypse. Much of it is unison. Messiaen shifts from solo to full quartet sometimes effortlessly, sometimes with some effort. You wonder how all that unison playing would have sounded on the clapped-out instruments at Stalag VIII-A.

My guess: it would not have been as divinely in-tuned as this quartet. Violinist Jack Liebeck and Li-Weiz Qin are probably the best-known. Qin in particular played his heart out, like a true romantic cellist. Messiaen gives Paul Dean’s clarinet the most outright virtuosic playing, particularly the notoriously difficult third movement. I’m a Paul Dean partisan. This was probably the most gorgeous and playful solo clarinet playing I’ve heard all year.

Annoyingly, though, the audience applauded after every movement! It turned the work from a consistent, flowing whole into eight separate works. Even more annoyingly, people actually left during the performance. Clearly they did not know what they were missing.

But did the marriage of science and music work? It was a little strange, I admit. A more explicit connection between music and lecture might have helped. Nonetheless, I thought it was a good and satisfying experiment.

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