Cover photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

And by ‘play,’ I mean listen to as an individual, or more significantly, program as a music director or some sort of managerial staff of an ensemble.

If you’ve ever followed a recipe online and not had a fully stocked pantry, you might have experience with having to make substitutions. Usually that’s kind of a negative thing, a sub-par alternative.

But what if you looked at it as at least a lateral move, if not an upgrade, a swap-out that has the allure of being lesser known, mysterious, unique, but still checks most of the same boxes as the tried-and-true-and-overplayed original.

It may seem somewhat condescending or unflattering to pitch wonderful pieces that should stand on their own merit as replacements or substitutes of some kind, but think of all the conductors (very few of whom actually come to mind right now) who got their big breaks as last minute stand-ins, if my memory serves, for example, Esa-Pekka Salonen taking over at the helm for Mahler 3 (or was that… yes I think it might have been Michael Tilson Thomas in London. YKWIM.)

Let’s think of it in terms of use cases: “We have an open position for (what sounds like) a standard-issue Romantic-era violin concerto. Bruch and Mendelssohn are away on leave, and we did Brahms already this year. Something rich and melodic and colorful, a crowd pleaser that won’t take up 45 minutes of the program either.”

You know what? Try Glazunov! If you want something short, there’s also Busoni or Strauss.

It’ll take me some time to prepare a list of pieces that orchestras have relied on for a century or more to fill seats, please crowds, and appease administration, but I thought of the idea “if you’re looking for [this], try [that] instead” today teaching one of my English students. Of course some of that is a bit (or a lot) subjective, but how cool would it be to say, “What if we wanted to scratch the Rachmaninoff itch but program something new?” Try Medtner.

I should of course state that there are oft-played pieces that have their highest-echelon status for good reason and can never be replaced, but the Mendelssohn or Bruch or Tchaikovsky violin concertos just aren’t it, for me, and neither are the piano concertos of Tchaikovsky or Chopin, etc. and cetera. So no piece is going to be an exact replacement for any other, but even if it reads as “if you like X, you might like Y,” then fine.

I’ll say from experience that there is one area where no recommendation of that sort has ever satisfied and never ever will. I would love to enjoy someone else’s music the way I enjoy TOOL’s. I’ve been listening to them since high school and have certainly put their music on an emotional and nostalgic pedestal that will never fall, but I have longed in the past for another discovery of a band with whom I can fall in love the way I did with TOOL, and it’s just never happened. Time and place. Everything that’s ever been recommended or suggested or similar has always been measured against the standard of my own personal love of their music, and is destined to fail.

So no, there will never ever be another Sibelius violin concerto, or Beethoven, or Schoenberg, and if you’re going into a listen expecting that something else will offer the exact same nostalgically charged thrills and chills, you’ll always be disappointed, but if you want to add some variety and interest and freshness to a playlist or concert program, then maybe a “Try this instead of that” chart is a great cheat sheet.

The only area where this falls short in the ‘use case’ scenario is that people recognize names: Chopin’s name on a program is going to draw a bigger crowd than Hummel or Henselt or Bortkiewicz or Stanford or whoever, and that’s kind of what got me thinking of this idea, of how to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ in the previous post about the music industry.

I had the great pleasure to speak in the past with the former music director of the Taipei Symphony, maestro Gilbert Varga, about some obscure recommendations. The TSO was for a time doing some really excellent programming under Varga, of course not all of which he himself conducted (the Taiwan premiere of Allan Pettersson’s fourth symphony under Christian Lindberg, for one), things like suites and quirky pieces from Milhaud or Respighi or something. My only gripe about some of his/their program choices was that he seemed to shy away from the big, standard-repertoire works, or even just big works: it seemed to me quite rare that he’d lead a large-scale work, the kind of thing you’d usually put on the second half of the program as a standalone work. I seem to recall that he did, like, Mendelssohn’s Scottish, Beethoven’s Pastoral, things like that, but absolutely nothing of the scale of Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, etc. He seemed to much prefer smaller, daintier, lighter-weight pieces, which is wonderful from the standpoint of variety and interest, but I do occasionally want a standard-repertoire piece of significant heft.

I digress. I recommended some pieces from the likes of Vagn Holmboe and some others, and he actually did get back to me with interest, so it’s not impossible to have the opportunity to have that sort of conversation, even if Varga was exceptionally accessible and amenable to such interaction.

So that’s that. Keep on the lookout for what will likely take the form of individual articles with an old-and-new layout, some swap-outs or suggestions for tried-and-true pieces in the repertoire. It’ll take me some time to prepare, but I do aspire to having this as an occasional series in my renewed effort to be more regular with writing.