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On 12 March 2020, pianist Igor Levit tweeted the following:

He then rushed out of his flat to purchase a cheap camera stand, returned home, then realised he also needed a stand for his phone, so he slipped out again. A friend was co-opted to help ensure the livestream was working. At 7pm Berlin time, Igor Levit gave his first livestreamed “haus konzert”.

Two days before, on 10 March, his birthday, Levit gave a concert in Hamburg; the next, in Cologne, the following day was cancelled, and it was now clear that live music, and similar activities, were being shut down, who knew for how long, in response to the global coronavirus pandemic.

Levit gave 52 house concerts via Twitter, dressed casually and livestreamed from his flat, its minimalist decor interrupted only by the shiny grand piano and a striking painting on the wall behind. It became a nightly ritual, for pianist and audience. He performed whatever repertoire “felt right” – from Beethoven to Morton Feldman, Nina Simone to Schubert and Bach; it didn’t matter, for these performances were about being together when we were isolated in lockdown. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in via Twitter every night and the livestream feed was crammed with comments, compliments, emojis; there was a potent sense of a shared experience, even though we were all listening on our own, separated by lockdown, yet together. Spontaneous and unplanned, these house concerts helped to alleviate Levit’s – and others’ – lockdown despair and isolation, a means of keeping live music going when it was unclear when we would be allowed back into the concert halls to enjoy live music again, together. The Observer chose Levit’s online recitals as number one in its top ten classical picks for 2020.

From a pragmatic point of view, the house concerts were also an incentive for Levit to keep practising, an impulse shared by so many musicians whose performing careers stopped dead in March 2020. Like many of his musician colleagues, in the months before the covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, Levit was enjoying a busy career: without concerts, what was the point of practising?

Igor Levit performing in his Berlin flat during lockdown

Igor Levit’s new book ‘House Concert’ (published in the UK by Polity press in November) is about these Twitter concerts – the musician’s need to play, to express oneself through music, and the experience of playing in isolation to an unseen audiences of tens or even hundreds of thousands – but it’s about much more than this too.

Organised in a series of conversations and diary-type entries between Levit and German journalist Florian Zinnecker, ‘House Concert’ explores what it is to be a professional musician in the 21st century, and charts Levit’s career from an unknown young pianist to an internationally-acclaimed performer who plays to sold out houses around the world. It’s about the development of an artist; what it means to “be” a pianist and the need to perform, to share one’s music with others; the role and power of social media, in particular Twitter; the classical music industry; and wider issues of whether it is appropriate for an artist to engage in politics and other pertinent issues of our time – the pandemic, racism, climate change.

Levit’s path to international fame was not an easy one. As anyone who has attended one of his concerts will know, he is an uncompromising player who has a remarkable ability to create an intensity of sound and concentrated emotion when he performs (Alex Ross of The New Yorker describes him as “a pianist like no other”). His choice of repertoire may be considered “narrow” by some: eschewing the big showpieces or “top of the pops” of the pianist’s repertoire, he has instead chosen to focus on a handful of composers, recording and performing the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and Rzewski’s mighty ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated’, together with lesser-known works by Busoni, Reger and Ronald Stevenson. As a young pianist at the start of his career, his uncompromising attitude and refusal to “play to the gallery”, as it were, to satisfy the whims of the market by including the popular classics in his programmes, meant that he was overlooked by artist managers and agents who felt he was not sufficiently marketable. This section of the book offers some really fascinating, honest and sometimes brutal insights into the workings and attitudes of the classical music “industry” today – where marketability is placed above artistic integrity. Levit didn’t fit the image that record companies were looking for and he was not willing to compromise; as a consequence it was a long time before he was picked up by a manager who was sufficiently sympathetic to his way of doing things. (An indication of how the industry reacts to the maverick, when Levit recorded Beethoven’s last five piano sonatas for his debut disc, there were more than a few mutterings that he was too young, that it was an impertinence that he should record these works at his age. It was a risk, but it was a worthwhile one: as anyone who has heard Levit perform late Beethoven knows, he is a master in this repertoire.)

The Twitter concerts throw an interesting light on the ecosystem of the classical music business and the power structures within in. In his house concerts, Levit demonstrated that it was possible to reach an audience directly via social media, without the usual tools of the business – marketing, publicity, staging. The simplicity of the Twitter concerts made them special – and for Levit they made him feel strong, that he wasn’t a fake.

For the pianist, Levit makes some challenging assertions regarding interpretation, context and the over-intellectualisation of music and its performance. He eschews the notion that music must have “meaning” or a distinct narrative, or that there is a “right way” to play it, and feels it is “just there to be experienced”. He sees the role of the musician as an “enabler”, one who brings the music to life from the page by making the piece his own.

“I’m telling my own story…the one that’s closest to my heart. The information about what happened to this piece one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago isn’t really my business.”

Igor Levit

In the realm of classical music, with all its conventions and tradition, where fidelity to the score and an appreciation of the context in which the music is written is regarded as essential to any “authentic” performance, Levit bucks the trend. Because he’s not interested in tradition or convention; for him it’s all about the music. He’s not interested in whether in his performances of Beethoven we hear the sound of Beethoven. For him, “it’s Beethoven, of course, but played by me.”

A keen activist, the book also explores Levit’s vocal opposition to German right-wing attitudes to immigration, anti-Semitism and online hate crime, and his advocacy for environmentalism, the plight of Syrian refugees. He’s received abuse and even death threats for his views but he refuses to submit to “artistic neutrality”. Does he believe music can make a difference, shift attitudes and effect change? Absolutely not: “If you believe music will make fascists less fascist, then you’re just naive” – and for this reason his music and his activism are kept largely separate, though his large social media following and reputation undoubtedly serves his activism.

This absorbing and highly readable book is neither diary nor straightforward artist biography. It shifts back and forth between periods in Levit’s life, from student days, to now, and explores a variety of themes, not all of them musical. It not only showcases the remarkable achievements of a charismatic classical musician, it also reveals their anxieties and doubts, strengths and weaknesses, and offers an important snapshot of the difficulties faced by professional musicians in a highly competitive industry riven with convention, power structures and tradition. The success of Levit’s house concerts – and similar livestream projects from other musicians all around the world – perhaps prove that the industry does not necessarily need all the trappings of “the business” to communicate and share the power and joy of music with others.

‘House Concert’ is published by Polity books (November 2022). Further information here

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In response to my article Where Have All The Audiences Gone, a reader, and a keen concert-goer, makes this response:

First, we need a functioning transport system at a price that normal people can afford.  We need trains outside London running 24/7 as tube and bus has inside London for years.

Second, we need to radically reduce the “cost of experience”. I have no issue with venues making a profit but a sandwich in Waitrose is about £3 so a 10% uplift would seem reasonable – say £3.50.  Drinks likewise.  And have everything open!  Covid is being used as excuse for poor customer service – plain-as.

Tickets – bring the cost down and fill all the seats. The Proms was a case in point – much better to have ALL the seats filled for £10 each rather than the 50% empty I witnessed. I found £44 stalls seats for the Labeque Sisters on StubHub for £11, a sure sign that the market has collapsed. Have transport-included/subsidised offers – buy two tickets for concert X and get the associated rail fare for 50%.

And start giving out tickets for students and children for free via schools and heavily reduced for their responsible adults – get young, really young people back just as the Schools Opera and Robert Meyer concerts did for my generation.

And. Stop Talking about COVID! My view is that our reaction to it was totally overblown, likely to kill more people through a depressed economy than the illness itself. My generation (50s) has always been the cultural backbone audience and so many that I know have taken Covid as an excuse to curl-up into early retirement. I rage against the dying of that light.

Comments are open if you would like to join in this discussion, or respond via Twitter

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There has been a fair amount of commentary and angst in recent months about a noticeable drop in audience numbers for concerts as live music returns to (almost) normal post-pandemic. The subject of a number of articles in the press, the issue was also aired in an episode of BBC Radio Three’s Music Matters series. In almost every article and discussion, ongoing anxiety about Covid was cited as the main reason why audiences are not returning – whether anxiety about catching Covid in a crowded concert venue or opera house, or the possibility that the programme may be changed, or the concert cancelled at the last minute due to illness amongst performers.

In fact, audience surveys reveal that Covid is fairly low on audiences’ list of concerns (source here: https://www.audienceoutlookmonitor.com/post/june-27-executive-briefing-with-alan-brown-goodbye-again-hello-uncertainty).

So if it’s not Covid that’s keeping people away, what is it?

  1. Cost of tickets. Concert tickets have noticeably increased in price since the pandemic as venues try to recoup lost revenue when they were closed or forced to operate with limited capacity (West End ticket prices are about c30% since the spring). This is in the face of a serious cost of living crisis which means people have less discretionary spending, even those from the more affluent demographic which tends to comprise classical concert audiences. As pressure on personal finances bite, people cut back on activities and spending which they may deem to be “non essential”. Unfortunately, for many people concert-going may now fall into this category.
  2. Additional costs of attending a concert. On top of the concert ticket (c£25-£30 on average in London), there are additional costs such as travel and food and beverages (a glass of wine at a leading London venue now costs nearly £10!). Add these to the ticket price and it’s already turned into quite a pricey night out. (See 1. above.)
  3. Time value. Is this concert worth my time? Will I get value for money and value for my time if I attend? High ticket prices raise the level of audience expectation: the higher the price, the less likely that expectations will be met, leading to disappointment (see also 5. below).
  4. The seductively low or zero cost of streaming services at home. Why schlepp up town with all the additional costs of going to a concert or opera when you can watch from the comfort of your living room, the only spend being a reasonably-priced bottle of wine from Lidl.
  5. Programmes. Audiences are reporting that some promoters/artistic directors/venues are simply not offering them the kind of music they really want to hear. We have an inherent cognitive bias rowards minimising disappointment over maximising enjoyment; this especially works against ‘new’ content.
  6. Ease of booking. Organisers and promoters report that audiences are booking later and later, which is deeply anxiety-making for concert organisers. Because there is an assumption amongst concert-goers that there will be last-minute availability, and online booking is easily accessible via your smartphone, concert-goers will act accordingly and book at the last minute. This also ties in with 3. above, whereby people are weighing up the benefits/value to them of attending a concert and then deciding at the last minute whether or not to go.

Some possible solutions:

  1. Dynamic pricing — in which ticket prices increase as demand increases (a pricing model favoured by airlines such as EasyJet). To make this work, you have to first open with a low ticket price and step-up prices as demand builds. So, for example, you might run an ‘Early Bird’ ticket offer in the first instance, and increase prices as the concert date approaches. Audiences may be incentivised to book earlier because of the special offer.
  2. Lower prices across the board. Venues are reporting low audience numbers and while all of the points above may be contributing factors, price is the single most important issue at present. Most concert tickets are priced according to seat position in the venue – the best seats cost the most. While some people may enjoy the kudos of being in the most expensive seats in the house, I suspect many more would happily pay a lot less. Why not offer lower prices across the entire venue and enjoy potentially higher attendence?
  3. Give audiences the programmes they want to hear. It is possible to offer programmes which include both the well-known/popular works of the classical canon alongside lesser-known, rarely-performed or new music. Remember that people go to concerts for entertainment (in the best possible meaning of that word), to escape from life’s daily grind for a few hours, to meet up with friends, and because they enjoy live music.
  4. Build greater trust between promoter/organiser/artistic director and audiences. Nurture and respect your audiences and they will repay you with their presence. (I will write more about trust in a future article.)

Photo by Kilyan Sockalingum on Unsplash

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Ayriel Studios is a new residential recording studio and creative retreat set within the spectacular landscape of the North York Moors National Park. Against all odds, the studio was launched during the pandemic and is attracting world-class musicians inspired by its idyllic rural location.

The brainchild of internationally-renowned cellist, artistic director and cultural entrepreneur, Jamie Walton, it has taken six years from inception to completion. The studio is in a large, converted barn, with three adjacent self-catering farm cottages that sleep up to 12 people, surrounded by stone-walled fields on one side and heather moorland on the other. It is a musical haven, where artists enjoy an extremely personal and bespoke service that starts from before they arrive with help for travel arrangements. Artists may stay on site and have everything taken care of, including home-cooked meals, so they can relax and focus fully on their project.

The L-shaped, oak-floored studio is expertly designed, offering a unique sound – rich, clear, natural – with great acoustic versatility and an unusually broad reverberation range (from 0.8 to 2.6 seconds) suitable for all musical genres. The studio space is overlooked by a comfortable, well-equipped control room housing the latest SSL Origin 32 channel analogue mixing desk, ideal for an all-digital workflow and easy to use. Both spaces are flooded with natural light.

“We aim to provide the optimum working conditions for our guests,” comments owner and technical director, Simon Hopkins. “The studio is temperature controlled and benefits from a continual air exchange, keeping the air as fresh inside as it is outside. We offer the studio on a 24-hour day rate, so artists can work whenever they want and for as long as they want. Noise is never an issue as the building is so well soundproofed.”

“A sense of timelessness and freedom is what helps this studio stand out from the norm” observes artistic director, Jamie Walton. “We’ve created a space for musicians to do their best work, to focus on their creativity and self-expression, and to completely immerse themselves without distraction.

“It seems to be working – pianist, Peter Donohoe, surprised himself by recording 17 sonatas in one visit, Viktoria Mullova and Alasdair Beatson recorded a disc of Schubert and finished early, and I recently recorded The Bach Suites in three days.”

Other notable classical artists to have discovered Ayriel Studios include oboist, Nicholas Daniel OBE, who described it as “the most beautiful place imaginable to record.” To find out more about Ayriel Studios visit www.ayrielstudios.com, or call the studio manager, Hannah Ahrens, on 01287 669900 for rates and availability, or email bookings@ayrielstudios.com.

Source: press release

(Image credit: Paul Ingram)