Special to The Washington Examiner The well known and widely admired musicologist and lecturer, Rob Kapilow, says that he is never happier than when classical concert audiences “get it” — the music, that is.
| Onstage |
| What Makes it Great? |
| Where: Baird Auditorium, National Museum of Natural History |
| When: 6 p.m., Sunday |
| Info: $15 and up; 202-785-9727; wpas.org |
To that end, Kapilow presents the second installment of his Washington series, What Makes It Great? The Peabody Chamber Players join him in a full performance of Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” probably one of the most popular works of music ever written. Even if the title is unrecognizable, everyone has heard the piece in one form or another and will, at some point, deliver that “aha” of understanding that makes Kapilow’s job worthwhile.
“I think a lot of the stuff that’s grown up around ‘classical,’ when to clap, for example, has nothing to do with the music, [only] the ridiculous notions of ‘classical,'” Kapilow pointed out.
He realized this phenomenon early in his musical career when he held down two seemingly polarized positions. As a music professor at Yale, he would often conduct the orchestra to a less than half-filled house. However, when he traveled to New York for his night job conducting in the pit of the Broadway musical “Nine,” he saw people lining up for tickets.
“I could not help but be struck by the vast differences between those two worlds,” Kapilow said. “Everyone was dying to listen to [Broadway music] … it was their language and you didn’t need to explain it.”
Then he would return to the podium at Yale where he said the people were simply “not getting it.”
“I didn’t want to do the music unless people were going to get it,” he said. “I didn’t know then that I was going to do ‘What Makes It Great?’ I didn’t know it would become a radio program. I just couldn’t bear how much of this great music people were missing.”
The concert’s format is straightforward: The first hour will involve a discussion and demonstration between Kapilow and the Peabody Chamber Players. After intermission, the Mozart piece will be performed in its entirety followed by an interactive Q&A with audience and performers.
“The audience can ask anything they ever wanted to know [and] when you watch them getting it, it’s really thrilling,” Kapilow concluded, as though he were teaching a master class in which everyone could participate. “Once you take it apart for people, it’s empowering!”
