Eleven thousand strings in a round temple: Holland Festival highlight, but also missed opportunity?

Jet fighters, drones, thunderstorms with accompanying flooding and lovely babbling brooks with the occasional bird in a pine tree. All of Austria descended on the Gashouder at Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek grounds this weekend and it is what it promised: spectacle as only Austrian music spectacle can be. The work 11000 Saiten by Georg Friedrich Haas is a great superlative: surround with emdr and binaural beats combined, enough to arouse trauma and heal it again.

50 young pianists, students from every conservatoire we have left, on upright pianos against the round wall of this Amsterdam steampunk temple, before them timpani, accordions, cymbals, cellos, violins and flutes, played by top ensemble Klangforum Wien. It is big, it is many, it is loud and it overwhelms. 

Dust wipes

As the students walked to their pianos and grabbed dust cloths and gloves, I thought for a moment that they were going to perform some kind of purity ritual, but the utensils turned out to be particularly useful for rushing over the keys to make the fifty pianos, each tuned a fiftieth of a semitone in relation to each other, sound like natural forces or war, depending on the mood of the audience. 

Technically perfect, yet something was missing, and that had to do with the arrangement of the chairs for the audience. They were arranged in circles from the centre, and as befits our concert practice, facing the nearest musicians. Who sit with their backs to you.

 In the middle of the gigantic round hall, this is of course nice, but at the edges you are then close to those few musicians in your field of vision, but the vast majority of the sound and the people making it are behind you. Not very Feng Shui, but also a waste of the sound experience. 

Rather a circle

How nice it would be if there was real synergy at the Holland Festival and this western set-up was exchanged for something that the Brazilian part of the programming does so well. In other words, wouldn't flipping the seats be much better, and all of us thousands could sit in a big circle, a cypher, enjoying the amazing building, the music all around and each other's faces?  

Now I do know that lovers of classical music prefer to enjoy it with their eyes closed and the picture doesn't matter so much, but in this case it would also have been better for the sound experience. When 90 per cent of the sound is behind you, as in the arrangement used now, you certainly miss half the effect. 

So next time, turn everything around. Because a concert like this is all about the shared experience.