Rachel Smith
A colleague and friend of mine told me recently that he’d been listening to an old LP recording of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra doing a live concert for the Edinburgh Festival. ‘Yes, the music and the performance were beautiful’, he said, ‘but what really got me was the sound of the audience. Like a living, breathing animal - I was moved to tears.’
Today I heard a poet and performer speaking on the radio about how he misses ‘surfing the energy of the people in the room’. These thoughts verbalise what I’ve been missing for so long now. One can hear, see and sometimes even smell a live audience, but the energy - the most palpable thing of all - is the invisible and reactive thread that spurs us on to tell the story on stage. A live concert is a ‘trialogue’ between composer, performer and audience; often the balance can be skewed towards one of these, but if we’re missing one altogether, it loses a dimension. After a forced break of 6 months from o