Christopher DeLaurenti - Favorite Intermissions

DG Stereo

Growing up as the son of a symphony musician, I spent my childhood being dragged to orchestra concerts and rehearsals, usually against my will. I have many of memories of those times, but rather than the concerts themselves, I remember best the backstage horsing around, card games behind strategically arranged lockers, pre-performance tuning and clowning, stage door meetings with legendary conductors, and all the other times when the facade of mannered performance gave way to a richer spectacle of secret goings-on.

Composer & phonographer Christopher DeLaurenti has brought back many of those memories for me with this new binaural recording of intermissions from orchestral performances of music by Beethoven, Stravinsky and Holst. Intermissions are the least formal time during any symphony performance, as musicians often return to the stage almost immediately to tune, practice, arrange music on the stand, and otherwise fool around. It is also the time when audiences are the least prim and formal, as the self-consciousness that blankets them during a concert is abandoned as they make beelines for bathrooms, cough and complain, and climb over each other. DeLaurenti has often recorded and re-presented crowd scenes, including memorable discs of the 1999 Seattle WTO demonstrations, and the protests at the Republican National Convention in New York, 2004. But this disc is perhaps even more engrossing than his previous works, as it both violates and documents an aspect of performance that is rarely paid any attention.

From the opening strains of "Holst, Hitherto," I find myself sucked into the scene. A clarinetist runs through a few arpeggios while a percussionist checks the tuning of a concert bass drum over a lush background of audience chatter and laughter. For 17 minutes, the scene develops in complexity, with new instruments appearing, and a growing density to the audience chatter builds to a great roar, punctuated by louder, more intrusive conversation from those closer to or passing by DeLaurenti's vicinity. Eventually the crowd gives a muted wave of applause as the concert master returns to the stage, followed by the oboe signaling the call to tune. The piece ends just before the traditional return of the conductor. Right away DeLaurenti is using the inherent form of the public event, and all its trappings as a generating device of musical form. This is what distinguishes this disc for me as being more than a mere field recording. The phonographer's choice of not only what to present, but in what sequence and with what elements of composition, bring us beyond the simple experience of environmental sound wonder to a deeper one of great creativity. The Deutsche Grammphon-esque cover art is an inspired touch, as well.

Some of the best "music" made by instruments on this recording is on the track "Before Petrushka," where strings, percussion, piano and a trombone soloist create an awkward collage of Stravinsky fragments and random bleats of virtuosic blather. It's better music than you're likely to hear at Bang On A Can, and with no pretensions at all. By the time the last track, "After Beethoven," ends with an announcement that the orchestra will not pause between the next two pieces, asking the audience to please hold their applause; it's the perfect retrograde inversion of the concert experience.

~ Reuben Radding