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BBC Symphony Orchestra/Lawrence Foster conductor A good sized audience flocked to The Barbican for this opening concert, attracted by the expectation of novelty and the promise of 'mayhem', which in the event was decorous and not likely to make the front pages. I did not stay in the auditorioum for the second and third movements of John Cage's 4'33" (1952), never before (not-) performed by a large orchestra in Britain. The conductor indicated pauses and turned over (blank) pages; the audience had maintained perfect silence throughout the first movement until, when authorised to do so, they resumed normal fidgeting and winter coughing. Had everyone been meditating or just nervously waiting for someone else to break the silence? All we could savour of Cage's 'everything is music' was the air conditioning machinery (fairly quiet) which we normally try to ignore. From out in the foyer during the remainder of this masterwork we could see on screen the cameras ranging around orchestra and audience trying to find something to amuse home listeners & viewers, and at the end we heard the ovation of conventional clapping which relieved the tension. It would perhaps have been more rewarding to listen to ambient sounds for four and a half minutes at an out of doors concert, with or without John Cage's permission? Having scored a belated UK first, the BBCSO may be considering a cost-effective second UK orchestral of performance of 4'33" for large orchestra (achieving those is a significant hurdle for new orchestral works) maybe at the Proms; it should not need an excessive amount of rehearsal time? To bring it up to date, in a Cageian spirit of openness to random sound becoming music, I suggest that the audience should be encouraged to switch on their mobile phones (not to make outgoing calls, of course) so that the multitude of listeners, present and at home, could relish the expectancy of contributions which are normally anathemised. Yes, it might go even better in the Royal Albert Hall and provide an unsurpassably enriching Cageian experience? Of the rest of the programme, I found Cage's Seasons passed pleasantly to forgetfulness, Schuman loud and brash, Cowell & Antheil good to hear (once) and Copland (always welcome, though I'd like a miniscule delay before the bass drum thwacks); Ives beat the lot of them for enduring originality. The weekend was so comprehensively covered elsewhere (in all the broadsheets and, e.g. on line in Classical Source) that I'll leave it at that.
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