The perils of outdoor music - opera companies should get a room

We’ve attended a few open-air events during the past week, with very mixed results. First, there was a performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro last week in the grounds of Chiswick House. As these experiences go, it was the usual curate’s egg.

The tickets, at £26 a pop, were cheap for a theatre, but struck me as fairly expensive for what was on offer – i.e. a not very high-grade production of a repertory standard in traditional frocks and britches, with a limited orchestra and one or two dodgy vocal performances. You sat wherever you could find space, gobbled a picnic of your own making beforehand, and then either watched the opera perched on portable chairs (again, self-supplied) or sitting on the ground.

There are some benefits to open air opera. First, there’s the setting: allowing your eyes to wander over stately trees, a Palladian villa and manicured lawns sloping down to a dignified distant pond while beautiful music wafts through the air around you is a definite treat. Then there are the pointillist clouds of insects roiling around the tops of the trees, and hundreds of Swifts pirouetting elegantly through the late evening air in a balletic feeding frenzy. Then there’s the welcome informality of the arrangement, the freedom to loll around, unconfined by West End seats designed to accommodate an underfed ten-year old rather than an average-sized adult (quite apart from someone as generously appointed as your correspondent).

But that’s about it, upside-wise. The downsides are legion – and then some. First, when the performance started at 7.15, it was broad, if somewhat overcast, daylight. There was little to distinguish between what was happening on the stage and what was taking place amongst the audience. (“Quentin! Over here! Quent! You-hoo!”) For the better part of two hours, there was no dramatic focus: the scene on stage was just one amongst many competing for our attention. The music seemed to have no connection to the distant singers. Consequently, there was absolutely no sense of drama. When daylight eventually gave way to darkness, this all changed: the stage became the focus of attention, one began to follow the story and started to care about the flibbertygibbet sillies being portrayed, and the music, which had been nothing more than a vaguely pleasing background noise, became magnificent and beautiful and meaningful.

The seating arrangement – or the lack of one – exacerbated the dispersal of focus. Until the final hour, when darkness had fallen, many members of the audience were more focused on their companions than on what was happening on the stage. Nearby, a group of three young women practically turned their backs on the performance in favour of a really good gossip. The man immediately behind me, a  somewhat dissolute 40-something upper-middle class Englishman, kept drawling loud remarks to his seemingly half-witted female companion, despite being shushed several times. When I eventually asked him, politely, if he would stop talking, he replied, “But I like to talk”. “Then go somewhere else,” I suggested. “I shall go on talking,” he said, sounding like Lord Haw-Haw. “In that case,” I remarked, “you’re a bit of an ill-mannered creep, aren’t you.” 

I don’t know if it was the realization that I was much larger than him, or the use of the word “creep” rather than another apposite noun beginning with “c”, but, remarkably, he shut up after that. Soon after, a voice issued from the darkness near our chatty trio of girlfriends, asking them to shut up, and they picked up their chairs and, mercifully, slunk off into the night. (They’re probably still gabbing away as I write.)

Apart from a dull ache in my lower back and the occasional stab of sciatica in my right thigh, and the fact that it was bloody cold, the last 45 minutes were wonderful. But I’m not sure if they made up for the other 150. 

I suspect that open-air opera in an informal setting is something to look forward to with relish and to look back on fondly rather than to experience. 

By contrast, yesterday, during the weekend fair on the local green which is the centerpiece of Chiswick and Bedford Park’s annual Greendays Festival, our church’s Sunday morning service was held in the open air, with the central stage serving as an altar. Hymns were accompanied by a brass band. (Unamplified brass instruments create the only music which – along with unaccompanied voices - sounds absolutely “right” outdoors, as Northerners, Cornishmen and the military have been demonstrating for ages). Here, the rituals, the words, and the music are the sole focus of attention, and the myriad potential distractions – stallholders setting up for the day, passing trains and cars and buses, the trees and buildings, gawking passers-by – are an intrinsic part of the religious experience, as we view the ordinary, everyday world through the numinous prism provided by the familiar rhythms and ceremonies of an ancient act of communal worship.

Or something.

As our vicar reminded us yesterday, when he first introduced what has become a tradition, regular communicants stayed away in droves, scared of being caught doing in public what they normally only did in the privacy of their own church. Now, I’m sure I’m not alone in finding this one of the most uplifting services of the whole year: I’d hate to miss it. (Mind you, it helps that, year after year,  whatever the prevailing weather conditions, the service inevitably takes place in blazing sunshine, for which our vicar always takes full credit.)

Later in the day we attended one of the regular series of concerts of Bach Cantatas which have been held in our church since 1997. For a change, two works were performed. For the second one, a short work written to be performed outdoors (and not really a cantata), the packed audience trooped into the vicarage garden behind the church to hear the choir perform, accompanied, as earlier in the day, by brass instruments. 

As dusk fell, an unexpected but extremely talented soloist – a blackbird – stole the show, while wide-eyed children gazed at us, like putti, from a neighbouring garden. Again, the distractions heightened rather than diminished what was a magical experience.