In Wednesday’s (3/9) San Francisco Chronicle (subscription required), Joshua Kosman writes that “Friday night’s extraordinary concert by the Jack Quartet … amounted to an intriguing counterproposal” to the strategy of adding visual components to classical concerts. “Perhaps, it suggested, what musical audiences actually need is less visual stimulation. Much, much less—perhaps even none at all…. Some [multimedia] projects can be rewarding … but too often the insistence on visuals for their own sake betrays a fatal lack of faith in the power of music to hold an audience’s attention.… Friday’s performance of the Third String Quartet by the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas summoned up a kind of deep, immersive listening that many of us engage in only under special circumstances. In keeping with the composer’s stern instructions, all the lights at the Strand Theater were turned out.… The result had a kind of wonder even beyond the specifics of Haas’ score…. I couldn’t help wondering, ‘What if musical performance were always like this—so immediate, so uncompromising?’… And even if we would obviously not want to go to blackout concerts on a regular basis, there’s something here that seems worth aspiring to, instead of the visual hubbub of the video world.”
Posted March 9, 2016
