A short piece about brevity.

I’m back home visiting my family at the moment. My dad’s overseas until next week, so my mum had a spare subscription ticket for a chamber music concert tonight. Seeing no good reason to say no, when she offered the ticket to me I accepted it.

Apart from knowing that it was classical chamber music, I had no idea what was going to be played at the concert. My mum didn’t either, having forgotten to check the program. As it turned out, it was a solo recital by a very fine pianist named Stephen Hough. The concert, as is typical at a classical chamber music concert, was divided into two halves; and it was the second half that was of particular interest to me.

It was comprised entirely of short waltzes from the nineteenth century. The waltz aspect is, to me, not important: what struck me was that the longest of these pieces was ten minutes long, while the majority were between two and five minutes.

This isn’t particular unusual at a rock concert, but classical music has for some time now been obsessed with the lengthy, especially in live performance: sonatas, string quartets, concerti. I’m no expert on classical music, so I don’t know why this might be, but I think it’s symptomatic of a larger mindset: despite the fact that the first lesson any of us learn in high-school English classes is “quality, not quantity”, by and large we persist in equating length, or size, or general overwhelmingness, with value for money. The idea that something only a couple of minutes long can move you just as much as something twenty or thirty minutes long is anathema in Western society these days.

It wasn’t always so: just look back at the early days of rock ’n’ roll. Buddy Holly’s songs were all around the two minute mark. Admittedly that was largely because of restrictions imposed by recording technology, but have a listen to “That’ll Be the Day”: it has an intro, two verses, four choruses, a guitar solo, and an outro. All in two minutes and sixteen seconds. And, it could be argued, as far as rock ’n’ roll goes it hasn’t been bettered yet.

The punks recognised the value in brevity, of course. But it’d be hard not to recognise it when you’re living in the seventies and you’re surrounded by people singing fifteen-minute long acid-flashbacks about dragons or aliens or whatever the hell the prog rockers were going on about. Punk, however, was largely about the short, sharp shock. But short doesn’t have to be sharp.

Back to tonight’s concert. That second half was all waltzes, and they were all short, and they were all composed in the nineteenth century, but other than that there was a great deal of diversity between them: from the outright romanticism of Chopin, to the relative sparseness of Saint-Saens, to the dreaminess of Debussy, to the exuberance of Liszt. It was a welcome reminder of just how staggeringly massive and diverse is the classical repertoire of short solo piano works. It was a delight and a pleasure to hear a few of them given an airing for a change.