Saturday 22 February 2014

A quite bizarre orchestral layout in Birmingham

Having noticed in recent reviews that the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra had tinkered with their strings layout, I was keen to get along to a concert to see and hear how it was working out in practice.

For those readers not familiar with my blog posts, I am a nerdy student of orchestral layouts and a proselytiser for the use of antiphonal violins. As far as conducting is concerned, these matters are hardly unimportant though there are seemingly some practitioners who do little to demonstrate their engagement with them.

Anyway, I gathered that the CBSO had relocated their double bass section from the right hand side of the stage (conductor's view), behind the celli, to the rear of the stage. This change can be illustrated (very roughly) as follows:

From...

 to...



The concert I caught, conducted by Edward Gardner, featured a programme of Mozart and Elgar. For the Mozart, the smaller double bass section (represented by 'CB' in the diagrams above) remained on the right behind the celli. For the Elgar, featuring the full section of eight basses, the new formation was adopted.

Theoretically, this layout makes very little sense to me. Having rear-ranged basses like this is actually ideal as far as I am concerned, though my own orchestra has too few basses to make this a practical possibility. However, this is in the pursuit of making the bass the foundation of the orchestral sound, upon which everything else is built. As such, one would also ideally locate the celli in the centre of the sound picture and stage. This can either be centre-left (as Boult favoured) or centre-right (as Monteux favoured). If one is to follow this to the logical conclusion then the bassoons would be situated on the same side as the celli and the bass brass instruments would be situated more centrally also. My own hypothesis is that locating the celli on the same side as the horns creates the added benefit of underlining their melodic role in Romantic music when playing in unison.

Returning to the new CBSO layout, the bass sound would be expected to lose focus with the celli on the right and their bass colleagues disconnected and relocated to the rear of the stage. This was, indeed, the case in practice. Though the writing for celli and basses became more and more independent through the late Classical and Romantic periods, their co-ordination is still of great importance. At one stage in the concert I attended I saw a front desk cellist, seemingly vexed, straining to see his bass colleagues in order to co-ordinate simple unison pizzicato notes. Of course, when basses are situated behind the celli the latter cannot look at their bass colleagues in order to do this. However, the opposite is certainly possible and the two sections would tend to move as one in that telepathic way that cannot be fully explained in rational terms.

The CBSO previously had a focused and punchy bass sound in their previous formation, even if I did not approve of it being located away from the centre of the orchestra. I feel this was compromised in their new formation. I do hope that the new formation is a mere experiment and that they will either revert to their previous layout or, even better, consider going the whole hog and relocating their cellos to the middle of the orchestra where they can be reconnected with their bass colleagues whilst allowing the violins to be arranged how Elgar would have expected them to have been.

1 comment:

  1. Just stumbled over your blog when looking at orchestral layouts. Interested after listening to Mahler 4. Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemeperer. I like the extra clarity it seems to bring.

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