Saturday night, as Amy's birthday present, I bought tickets to go see the London Symphony Orchestra perform in Daytona Beach, during the Daytona Beach International Festival. The show, called "LSO Pops! Celebration of Speed", took place at the Ocean Center, and with the exception of the performance by the orchestra, felt like a complete and utter disaster.
Indulge me today as I pick apart the entire experience and discuss why the coordinators of this event clearly don't know their assholes from a hole in the ground.
First, the music. A symphony is all about the sound and feel of the music. That's it. It's the only component that really matters. That's why most symphonies occur in a magical place called a symphony hall. Not a large arena akin to a large gymnasium. In a symphony hall, the acoustics cause the music to surround you. You feel it on your skin and in your seat and it sounds full and rich and tangible. In the Ocean Center, the speakers they had to use hum and buzz and rattle and distract you from the only reason that you attended in the first place.
Oh, but that wasn't the only aural distraction. The floor of the Ocean Center was set aside for the DBIF sponsors, one table per sponsor where dinner was apparently served. That was a neat idea. The not-so-neat idea was the bartender operating the cash bar. Rather than closing down the bar during each piece, the bar was open and active, and during quieter and subtler parts of a piece, you could clearly hear the lovely sounds of the cash register, the click-hiss of cans opening, and other miscellaneous noise from the bar. Did I say lovely sounds? I meant fucking obnoxious sounds.
If only the distractions were the sole element of annoyance. Ah, but we can't forget the unwashed masses who descended like shrieking morons rushing the door at Wal-mart on Black Friday. Let's have a little multiple-choice quiz, shall we?
What Things Don't You Do At A Symphony?
A. Bring in concessions, like popcorn and beer and candy that you unwrap and munch throughout each piece.
B. Talk to the orchestra while they perform, saying intelligent things like "Yes. Thank you. That was wonderful." loud enough that everyone around you can hear you.
C. Refrain from clapping your hands so that you can stomp your feet loudly instead, just like you're at a high school pep rally.
D. Come to the symphony a full thirty minutes late, or, if you're the usher, allow idiots who come late to enter during the middle of a piece, slamming the door, using your flashlight, and forcing people to interrupt their enjoyment and stand up so that some shitlicking fucknuts can get to their seat.
E. All of the above.
F. None of the above.
The answer, of course, is E. However, in the white trash capital of Florida, apparently the correct answer is F.
In the end, though, all of these are minor complaints compared to the audio/visual component of the evening. I'm not sure which moron was responsible for this amateurish display of idiocy, but I think it was either the design "firm" Zgraph (which, honestly, even if it wasn't, they designed the piece-of-shit website for the DBIF that has fucking autoplay music. What a joke) or Godonis Design, a company whose website has a flash intro, which is about as trendy as leg warmers. Whomever the culprit is, they should immediately quit their job, walk to the nearest McDonald's, and apply for the burger line there. Because that's honestly the only job for which they're qualified. "Why is that?" you may ask. Allow me to explain.
Above the orchestra hung three large screens. A reasonable person may assume that these screens were to be used to display video sent by the cameras surrounding the orchestra, showing the entire audience close-up video of the orchestra as they played each piece. A reasonable person would think that displaying these experts at their craft would be the only thing that would make sense for these screens. This reasonable person would be completely wrong.
Ten percent of the time, these screens were used for a reasonable purpose, and it worked excellently. Getting to enjoy the visual experience while listening to the music helped supplement the tinny sound coming from the speakers and the other distractions.
The other ninety percent of the time, however, the screens were used to display completely random, poorly edited and spliced clips from movies that had little to no relevance to the piece being played. An example, you ask? Ah, but there are so many. One that comes to mind would be the time that the orchestra played John Williams's Superman score (let's not get into the fact that the pieces chosen were all designed to pander to the white trash Daytona audience and were completely dumbed down). The screens started out by showing Iron Man, then switched to the Flight of the Navigator, the Neverending Story, Harry Potter, Spider-man, Zorro, Batman, and then finally Superman. Another example would be when Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" was accompanied by video of ants and birds. It was arbitrary, it was amateurish, and it was stupid. Every piece was distractingly supported (or detracted, actually) by a jumbled mess of video clips that looked like it had been created by the audio-visual club of a remedial high school where everyone is classified as mentally retarded. And their teacher was actually a monkey.
The final straw was the piece played by the concert master, Carmine Lauri. I'm sorry to say that I cannot remember the name of it and the program we received did not in any way reflect the actual pieces and the order in which they were played (another shining example of the poor job done). At any rate, it was an extremely quick tempo violin piece, where it felt like he was playing 10-15 notes a second. Some mental midget made the decision to avoid showing him play this masterful piece at all. Instead, we got clips from Highlander. What the holy fuck is that all about?
In the end, we enjoyed the music and tried our best not to let the horrible environment (I forgot to mention the layout, which required everyone to sit in their seats at a 45 degree angle to be able to face the orchestra), white trash attendees, and amateurish work performed by so-called A/V and design firms ruin it. It is a testament to the quality of the work done by the London Symphony Orchestra that the coordinators pretty much did everything wrong that someone could do for a symphony and, even with that, the orchestra's skill still remained clear and undeniable.
