Going to classical music concerts became a bit of a habit when my Iranian friend was here a few weeks ago. He is deep into music and dragged me to six concerts in ten days. Outside that musical week, I go to concerts only very rarely. However, here in London one is in the enviable position of going to a concert because one likes the music or the artist – and not because one likes to listen to music that night, as might be the case in places less richly endowed with venues and orchestras.
Last night I went to Queen Elizabeth Hall to hear the London Philharmonic Orchestra play Shostakovitch's Seventh, also known as 'Leningrad', a symphony that I've been interested in for a long time. To find out what to expect, I had got a CD last Sunday, a recording of the National Symphony Orchestra directed by Mstislav Rostropovic. The first movement made my speakers jump on the shelf and my neighbors in their easy-chairs. And yet, I knew nothing.
The concert was spectacular. The hall in its immensity was reverberating during the crescendo and the finale. It was an utterly physical experience that is as impossible to describe as it is to convey in recorded form. I'm not only talking about the pathetic radio alarm that my iPod docks to or the decent full-size stereo in my living. No, even half-a-million dollar high-end systems will fail miserably where an orchestra of close to one hundred play their hearts out. The power, the intensity and the richness of the music can only be done justice live.
On my way back on the tube, I seriously considered destroying the CD I had just bought. Instead, what I did when I got home was note the date and place of the concert on the disk. The next time I immerse myself in it, ears ensconced in the buckets of headphones, memories will overwhelm me, and my neighbors won't even know.
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