THE MAGIC OF MUSIC IN THE CITY
It’s always a thrill to visit a great European city, but there’s an extra frisson of excitement if you’ve prepared a musical or operatic treat for yourself. This isn’t just because you’ll encounter performers and performance styles you won’t find back home. It’s the fact that for the space of those few hours, you stop being an outsider. Instead of just gawping with all the other tourists at the opulent staircase at Paris’s main opera house, the Palais Garnier, you stride up it, ticket in hand, feeling as if you own the place.
Also, buildings of that kind only truly come alive when they’re filled with the passion of performance. Vienna’s Musikverein and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw concert halls are a feast for the eye but their perfect acoustic is a marvel in itself, and you will only discover that at a performance. A visit to Edvard Grieg’s house just outside Bergen is like stepping back a century and a half, but how much more rewarding it is
if you time your visit to include a concert in the fabulous music room downstairs, where as you listen you gaze at the lake that inspired the composer every day.
Another reason to book some musical events is that you see the inhabitants of the city at play. Watching the bourgeois ladies in the foyer of the Large Festival Hall in Salzburg dressed in their traditional dirndl is hugely entertaining, especially if one of them turns out to be famous and the paparazzi are out in force. And going to an event can bring a change of cultural tone, which sometimes is sorely needed. I once spent a day in Madrid visiting baroque churches and convents, which was fascinating, but it was a relief to then go to the art-deco Café Central and plunge into music from a totally different era.
If you venture off the beaten track musically, you’ll see a side of the city that won’t feature on any tourist itinerary. Years ago I was in Berlin, looking at romantic paintings in the Alte Nationalgalerie, and for a change of scene went to an avant-garde concert in the evening. It was in a run-down part of Berlin, on an upper floor of a gaunt 1960s block. Bare wires trailed everywhere, and you could see gaping holes in the floor. It turned out the building was due to be demolished. At the bar I got chatting to Berliners who expressed anger at how art and culture were being priced out of the city centre. The next night I was at the State Opera, for a Wagner production. Such experiences let you feel the pulse of a city in a way that gazing at the sights can’t match.