Many orchestras go outdoors in the summer-the N.Y. And the softest timbres disappear into the noise of the night: the ex-nihilo opening of Beethoven’s Ninth may be drowned out by crickets. The precious phenomenon of resonance goes missing: you aren’t enveloped by the music as it bounces off surfaces all around you. The resulting sound may, in decibel terms, be louder than what you hear in the concert hall, but the impact is less substantial. Classical instruments, especially strings, turn fuzzy and indistinct the bass has an artificial throb fortissimos splinter into distortion. systems have readily delivered earthshaking volume, but clarity and warmth are a different matter. Much is also lost when music goes outdoors. Up there, the audience was more varied than down below: I heard Spanish and English spoken in equal measure. I attended several concerts by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Bowl this summer, and one night I bought an eight-dollar ticket for the benches at the top of the hill, just below where Walter Neff and Lola Dietrichson had their Schubertian chat. Lower ticket prices would certainly help, although the mental barrier might be even stronger.
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When the New York Philharmonic plays for free before tens of thousands in Central Park, critics and professionals invariably wonder what it would take to bring the same crowd to Avery Fisher Hall or to the Met-whose present labor-management crisis is related to a sudden plunge in attendance. Tickets are too expensive a veneer of élitism keeps the ne’er-do-well insurance man and the roller-skating teen-ager at bay.
We’re told that obstacles both financial and psychological stop people from venturing into the concert hall. No culture gap is apparent: Schubert writes the soundtrack to the seething L.A. Floating up from the orchestra shell are the strains of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, brooding over a desperate man’s predicament. Witness the scene in the 1944 film noir “Double Indemnity” in which Walter Neff-the downward-spiralling insurance salesman played by Fred MacMurray-spends an evening in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl, conversing uneasily with the young daughter of the man he has murdered.
Veteran concertgoers may be reminded of a bygone age when the art form had a more vital place in mainstream culture than it does now. Crowds are generally bigger, more youthful, more ethnically diverse. Spurious rules about when to applaud are relaxed. The stiff ceremony that has fastened itself to classical music in the past century recedes. When an orchestra plays outdoors, you have the sense, on the best nights, that it has been released back into the wild.