Vancouver vignette no. 2

The Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver hosts a music series. One of the local favourites in the well-respected Canadian pianist Robert Silverman, a long-established import to the Vancouver music scene who has enjoyed renown as teacher, scholar, and performer there for three decades. I attended the third of his "From the Inside Out" series of lecture-recitals this past Saturday at two o'clock in the afternoon.

The very fine acoustic space of Christ Church made for interesting auditory observations of others. Before the concert, audience members were behaving in typical pre-concert audience ways: one lady behind me and to my left was clipping and filing her nails. The younger women immediately behind me spoke in a hush about something, presumably funny, in Polish: they giggled a lot. I hoped they weren't laughing at me. The music students farther back could only be heard when I concentrated on them: they were discussing their repertoire for the year, especially that which was represented on Mr. Silverman's program. One of the girls was excited to hear the performance of Chopin's Barcarolle; the young man was there mostly for the Liszt excerpts. The group of three to my right and a row back were the arrogant type and clearly had some sort of hierarchy in which the gentleman seated in the middle was the final word on all matters Classical music.

(Warning: there is a little bit of Western art music snobbery--the kind for which it is so famous, especially in media such as television and film--below.)

Part of Mr. Silverman's biography in the program read, "Robert Silverman resides in Vancouver where he was a faculty member at the University of British Columbia for thirty years, served a 5-year term as Director of the School of Music in the 1990s, and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters in 2004. He now devotes himself full-time to concertizing and recording. He is frequently heard on the CBC network, he plays Steinway pianos, and records for EMI, Stereophile, Marquis Classics, OrpheumMasters and CBC Records." Mr. Sir was reading it aloud, then stopped to laugh himself: "Concertizing? That's not even a word." His minions laughed, too. He read on, putting on a mock voice for "he plays Steinway pianos -- oooooh," before declaring proudly, "I myself am personally partial to 'Bozendorfers.'" The female minion to his left quickly slipped in her two cents (which Mr. Sir had dropped): "Oh, yes. Me, too."

Clearly the wealth of knowledge Mr. Sir possessed was astounding: 'concertizing' is in fact a word in common usage. It's been around for at least a century now. He was so proud of the Viennese lineage of piano fabrication (of which he spoke like a proud father waxing eloquent to the other good ol' boys in a satiric film set in a 1960s New England private library) that he ignored the umlaut on the first "O" and thus getting the pronunciation all wrong. I smiled at my own cleverness for noticing such things, and then at the thought: "I doubt that Mr. Sir or his minions would get anything out of a pun on Mignon [Goethe's character and poem from Wilhelm Meister, set many times by famous composers of German art song]," but said nothing. I found it interesting that packaging and marketing have as much to do with people buying another's word as it has to do with buying a more conventional product in a more conventional market.