Stuck in our ways ? - Concert observations from overseas.
- Aug 4
- 2 min read
Whilst in Zurich recently, I saw the concert advertised in the poster above, the poster doesn't say that the concert was 30 Swiss francs and just a 45-minute recital ( which, to be fair, lasted just over an hour).
It does say, however, that the music would be by Bach and Heinrich, not Justin, Biber, the latter not the most well-known of composers but famous for a Sonata The Sonata Representativa, which, amongst its movements, imitates animal sounds (nightingale, cuckoo, frog, hen, and cat).
At 9 pm on a Friday, and with quite high ( for the UK) ticket prices for such a short concert of not well-known music, I thought it quite safe to arrive fairly close to concert time, not expecting that many people would be at such a 'specialised' event.
As Picture 2 shows, one can always be surprised, and by the time we arrived at 8.45 the church was already on its way to being full, and indeed by concert time it was crammed with 350-plus people spanning all age groups.
Of course Zurich is a busy place and full of tourists, but it also has many churches and many concerts, indeed we had been to Vespers at a nearby church before this concert.
Again, it has set me thinking about our own concert policies, universally accepted until recently by most choirs that Saturday night at 7.30 is the set-in-stone slot for Concerts, but why? Competing with Strictly, or 'The Wheel' or other Saturday night telly, why do we expect people to desert their comfy living rooms and come to a cold church to hear music that they would never normally encounter?
For many years, I have advocated Saturday or Sunday afternoon concerts; I have been delighted to have seen excellent audiences at two Concert and Cake concerts that my choir has done recently on Saturday afternoons, in widely differing locations.
The books that I have written on this subject explain my thinking and well-respected figures in the musical world have always given them excellent reviews. If your group are in the position of having excellent audiences for events, you don't need my help, but if like many choirs, you find yourself outnumbering the audience, isn't it time that you took a long, hard look at concert policy?
Even an old lag like me, with over 35 years' experience in running choral concerts, can still be surprised at what can be achieved by thinking out of the box.
My thoughts are in the 'Seven Steps to successful concerts' you can order below, if even one idea from this mini guide helps you, or causes you to think differently, then the book will have done its job.
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