My visit to Bath this past May coincided with the start of the annual Bath Festival, and I couldn’t miss this chance to hear a concert in the ballroom of Bath’s famous Assembly Rooms. Painted robin’s egg blue and sparkling with crystal chandeliers, the ballroom was well known to me from references in Jane Austen’s and Georgette Heyer’s novels. It was this location, rather than the program or performers, that made me go to this concert. But hearing Spira Mirabilis perform Beethoven’s 7th Symphony proved to be a very unexpected delight.

The marvelous spiral

Spira Mirabilis is made up of young musicians, all of whom play regularly with other orchestras but who get together periodically to perform a single masterwork. They work without a conductor, studying the score in advance of a brief but intensive rehearsal period, where they work out their interpretation of the piece, discussing and playing together. Then they go on tour, playing only this one masterwork in each concert.

I have enjoyed many classical music concerts but never experienced the joy and exhilaration that this performance evoked. I sat grinning and swaying as they played and found myself laughing in sheer delight at the end of each movement. And I was not the only one to be so affected. At the end, people jumped to their feet and clapped and cheered and cheered, until finally the musicians came back out, positioned themselves in a rough circle around a section of the audience, and played the third movement again. More clapping and cheering, which didn’t end until the performers filed off and it became clear they were done playing for the night.

Dancing Beethoven

What is so special about the way Spira Mirabilis plays? I think it’s partly the fact that performing without a conductor requires from the musicians what I might call radical co-presence. They must pay keen attention to one another and rely on gesture to keep time and make the ensemble work. It’s like chamber music but on a much grander scale. In a more typical orchestra concert, one expects this sort of visible expressiveness only from the conductor and a featured soloist. The other players, confined to their seats, are typically restrained in their movements. But here, with the exception of the cellists, all the musicians were standing — in fact, they were almost dancing — and their expressive gestures were integral to the audience’s experience and understanding of the music.

The concert-mistress naturally took the lead much of the time, setting tempi and indicating entrances with broad movements of her head, shoulders, and arms. But so too did the other musicians, as a musical theme passed from one section to another. The flautists, the oboists, the violists… each section took the lead in turn. The audience could see the interaction of the sections and the passing of motifs from part to part, like wind moving through a wheat field. The musicians not only played the piece, they danced it — and their gestures mirrored and magnified the acoustic experience.

DIGRESSION: I have sung in many choral concerts where we were specifically admonished not to move to the music but to stand as still as possible — the idea being, I assume, that any movement would distract from the audience’s experience of pure sound. I know that I frequently failed to follow this admonition, but the irony was that people often told me that they particularly liked watching me sing, because I was so clearly enjoying it!

Effect transcends intent

In the Q&A after the concert, I had the chance to ask Spira Mirabilis about how the experience of playing with this group compared to playing in other orchestras. One vocal violinist replied decidedly that their performance wasn’t unusual — and that the performance was not the point. Their aim, he insisted, was simply for the audience to enjoy this great piece of music and to leave thinking about what a great composer Beethoven had been. He seemed impatient with our eager questions about the ways in which this orchestra was different from others.

For my part, though, I think that violinist very much missed the point! But perhaps this is not surprising, since the unique flavor of these concerts can only be fully appreciated from the vantage point of the audience. Spira’s expressive performances invite their beholders into a more immediate — and more intimate — understanding of the music than can be gained by simply listening. I wish every classical concert could evoke this kind of delight and exhilaration. I would attend more often — and doze off less often!

A blessing on the musicians of Spira Mirabilis for bringing Beethoven to life —
and gratitude for those times when we are able to create

something more magical than we ourselves realize.

Connections

• The Bath Festival
• Bath Assembly Rooms
• Spira Mirabilis
• NPR: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92
• Alfred Schütz: Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship
  When I was in graduate school, I read this article by sociologist Alfred Schütz, which discusses the ways that musicians carefully attend to one another’s cues in order for the ensemble to work. At the time, Schütz’s argument seemed obvious to me: after many years of choral singing, I already knew all this. And yet in the years since, this article is one of those that I recall most often — and it was very much on my mind during this concert.