Orchestral Theatre and the Concert as a Performance Laboratory

Abstract

In the past decade the National Theatre has presented two restagings of earlier productions, now featuring an onstage orchestra (the Southbank Sinfonia) that has been choreographed and made a key part of the spectacle: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, by Tom Stoppard, with a musical score by André Previn, performed in 2009 and 2010, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, performed in 2016 and 2018. Contemporaneously, a vanguard of British orchestras has begun to explore how concerts can be presented in ways that are more theatrically sophisticated than the standard concert format. Here Adrian Curtin investigates ‘orchestral theatre’ as an aesthetic proposition by examining the collaborations between the Southbank Sinfonia and the National Theatre, and their legacy in a series of experimental concerts staged by the Southbank Sinfonia entitled #ConcertLab. He aims to identify the artistic and cultural significance of these collaborations and #ConcertLab so as to better understand contemporary efforts to present orchestras (and, more broadly, classical music) in a theatrically innovative manner. Adrian Curtin is a senior lecturer in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014) and Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (Manchester University Press, 2019), and principal investigator of the AHRC research network ‘Representing “Classical Music” in the Twenty-First Century’.

Staging Scores: Devising Contemporary Performances from Classical Music

“…This recalls the way the composer, Salieri, describes Mozart's Adagio for the Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus (1981). Re-staged with a live orchestra at the National Theatre in 2016, Amadeus asks the audience to immerse themselves in the music and is part of a wave of what Curtin has termed 'orchestral theatre' (Curtin, 2019). Standing downstage listening to the music, Salieri speaks this text.…”

Analysis of the use of pop singing in musical theater singing based on data analysis

“…Therefore, it is very important to study what kind of singing style actors use in a musical and the use of popular singing styles in musical singing and to study it from a theoretical perspective [7][8]. Musicals are distinguished from other forms of musical performance by their diverse musical expressions, intuitive dramatic evolution and colorful stage and screen effects, which have the property of co-existing with various art forms since their inception [9][10]. From a cultural point of view, the multiple ways of narrative and characterization in music are more universal and entertaining, then the importance of the singing method can be seen through the musical expression of the various forms and emotions conveyed in the play [11].…”