Does it help to have difficult pieces at a concert explained to you before you hear them?
As part of the Guardian Hay festival, London Sinfonietta put this to the test with a concert at which Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, interviewed composer-conductor George Benjamin before each of the pieces on the programme, which included a work by Benjamin as well as Birtwistle's Ritual Fragment.
Apart from Benjamin's coy refusal to name composers that he thought were really bad (which would have been fun), I must say I found the exercise very useful.
The conversational to and fro was more lively and engaging than a programme note, and Benjamin conveyed an infectious enthusiasm; it was hard not to get caught up in his passion. Best of all, though, was when he actually started explaining the nuts and bolts of some of Ligeti's techniques in his Piano Concerto, such as his use of different metres simultaneously, and how, despite the conductor's beat remaining the same in the fourth movement, the music appears to start slowly and accelerate into a fevered allegro. I'm an idiot with this kind of stuff: I need someone to tell me.
Not everyone does like this sort of thing, though. Some people feel it breaks the atmosphere of the concert - not least musicians, who don't necessarily find the ping-pong between chat-show mode and performance mode an easy one to handle.
There's also the difficulty of how you pitch your audience. For some people, whatever you say is going to be dreadfully basic. For others, double Dutch. The compromise, I suppose, is the pre-concert talk or composer interview. Speaking for myself, though, I hardly ever get myself together to go to these: far too much like going to school, somehow.
In the end, I like it when conductors or composers talk during the performance - especially when it's new music on the menu. I remember it working particularly well at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's contemporary music festival Floof, in 2003. And I've heard John Adams talk brilliantly about his own music at the Barbican. Just two rules as far as I am concerned. Keep it brief, and don't even think of patronising the audience.
