Katy Hamilton

One of the great buzz phrases of commerce and indeed education, as anyone who has ever worked in either will know, is the need to ‘manage expectations’. Put to particularly brilliant effect in the BBC’s hysterical 2012, the idea of managing expectations can cover everything from carefully choosing publicity shots in order to avoid suggesting that your modest Victorian terrace B&B is likely to resemble Longleat, to making students aware of the likely content (including everything for assessment requirements to trigger warnings) in a forthcoming module. In each and every case, though, managing expectations has one very important effect: if we listen to your ‘managing’, our reaction to what comes next is liable to be shaped by them. If you promise an Olympic swimming pool at your villa, and your friends turn up to find you proudly filling up a paddling pool in the front garden, they are much more likely to be annoyed than if you had said nothing. If you serve up a meal announcing that the beef is undercooked and the potatoes burned but they turn out to be nothing of the sort, those eating it will be pleasantly surprised and will probably protest that you undersold your culinary abilities. And so on.

A little while ago, I attended a performance of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. This is one of my particular favourites within Brahms’s output, and as Brahms researcher and big fan, I was exciting to hear it live, as I always am when the opportunity arises. If you don’t know it, I can only recommend it in the highest terms: it is lyrical, dramatic, melancholy, dreamy, Schubertian in its light and shade… a varied and vividly imaginative work by a man with many decades of compositional experience (and it even quotes an earlier work – here is the book to read if you want to know more about that).

So I got my programme, settled into my seat, and sat expectantly as the performers came on. Before they began, however, the clarinettist got to his feet. Lovely, I thought, an introduction to the piece. Lots of nice things that could be said about Brahms working with, and writing for, a particular clarinettist – Richard Mühlfeld, or ‘Fräulein Klarinette’ as Brahms used to call him. Maybe he’s going to mention the link to the earlier piece, or the Hungarian gypsy-style flourishes in the second movement? The fact that the piece can also be performed with a viola taking the clarinet’s role? Perhaps he’ll just welcome us all and say he hopes we’ll enjoy the concert?

In fact, none of these things. In fact, we were told that the Brahms Clarinet Quintet was one of the warhorses of the clarinet chamber repertoire (true, but a weird thing to tell your audience), that we were in for a serious piece of some length, and that it was, in his opinion, one of the most miserable things that Brahms ever wrote. Every time you thought it might be about to cheer up… it didn’t. So hold on to your hats, everyone, cos he was telling us now, we were all going to be semi-depressive and seriously in need of that interval alcohol by half time.

Then they performed the piece, rather beautifully, and yet I spent most of it frowning in puzzlement. Partly this was because I don’t believe at all that the Quintet is an exceptionally miserable piece of music. Partly it was because, even if they believed it, there was no evidence that I could find in their rendition to justify this. And partly, I simply wondered: why would you choose to tell your audience that you thought they were going to find what they were about to hear so miserable?

I was reminded of two previous performance introductions where a conundrum of this kind had presented itself.  The first was a concert of music by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern several years ago, introduced by a panel of people including Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, the composer’s daughter. Her chairman spent some time ‘managing expectations’ by using the words ‘modernist’ and ‘modern’ and ‘avant-garde’ quite frequently, because he clearly wished to ensure that we all had an idea of what, musically, was coming up. After a while, Nuria turned to him. ‘But why,’ she asked, immediately revealing the undercurrent in her chair’s introduction, ‘does modern have to be bad or difficult or dangerous? Why can’t it just be something we listen to like we listen to music that isn’t modern? Why set it up in a different way?’. The second was an introduction I gave myself to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, the ‘Tragic’. I was not so concerned to suggest to the audience that it would be ‘tragic’ – rather that by no means all of it was tragic… but that it was (particularly given the acoustics of the performance space) going to be very loud. That they should be prepared for a lot of noise. It was glorious noise, but still – those in the front row were going to get more than an earful.

It’s a tough call, and if a piece is particularly unusual, extreme, unexpected, I can completely understand the desire to ensure that an audience has some idea of what’s coming. But beware: some words (‘modern’, for instance) can carry implicit value judgements in certain circumstances which are not always helpful. And sometimes, a simple ‘for me,’ or ‘I feel as if’ can be an important nuance if you’re about to tell people they’re in for a depressing ride. Oddly enough, when the interval did arrive, almost everyone I saw and spoke to was smiling as they headed for the bar.