Sotto Voce on Tour with NACO: Alexander Shelley
INTERVIEW — Follow along as Cannopy's Classical Music Correspondent joins the National Arts Centre Orchestra for an international tour
The National Art Centre Orchestra's performance in Seoul was an incredible affair for many reasons. The Seoul Art Center is stunning inside and out (especially out). The orchestra played with furious abandon, meeting their debut in South Korea with the gravitas it deserved. The weather was drop-dead gorgeous, with a high 27° beneath a cloudless sky. Which meant that everybody was out in droves, and the atmosphere had that light sizzle that you can only get when you're just 3 days away from a national election. But the primary reason why this concert will linger in a picturesque afterglow for a long time in the minds and hearts of its attendees is the relentless energy with which the sold-out audience responded to an equally animated orchestra. (Sotto Voce here, I’m still on the road with the NACO ─ here’s part one and two of this journal, if you missed it.) I’ve reviewed hundreds of concerts and not once have I stopped to think about the audience's performance. Yet all 2,507 patrons that showed up at the Seoul Arts Center seemed to get the memo that the energy you give is the one you get: all told, they received six separate encores throughout the nearly 3-hour concert experience (including the very long autograph line for pianist Yeol Eum Son post show).
When a concert is this successful, especially 10,507 kilometers away from the orchestra’s home audience, you have to do some detective work to see which stars aligned, and why they don't online more frequently back home. After the show, I tried to do some soul searching, because my first instinct was thinking: why can't Ontario’s audiences be this regularly enthusiastic about our own orchestras? But this eventually felt like I might be comparing my orchestral apples to oranges, and unnecessarily pitting one cultural context against the other. Yet, there are so many things that are held constant because of this tour: it's the same orchestra, a fairly similar program, and the same soloist. The one key difference is merely a change of address. Thankfully, Cannopy’s Chief Editor Michael Zarathus-Cook recently joined this trip and was there to witness the energy in the room. Thereafter, he sat down with NACO’s conductor Alexander Shelley In the lobby of a hotel in Tokyo as the two of them spelunk through the artistic and social missions of this tour, and trY to deduce exactly what the heck happened in Seoul.
It's a wide-ranging conversation on everything from the dramatic pause that comes after the Fate Motif in Beethoven’s 5th Symphony (which Shelley provides a 15-minute defence on why he chooses not to pause), to the cultural diplomacy provided by this tour, mathematics, AI, spirituality, the over-complication of bidets in this part of the world─and, surprisingly, much more:
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