Obscuring the dates

If you think that chronological lucidity is vital to an orchestra’s concert brochure for the coming season, neither the Royal Scottish National Orchestra nor the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will win prizes this season for clarity of presentation.

Both brochures, in their different ways, are smart and snappy, though the RSNO’s is perhaps over-illustrated, and both contain the facts we want to find in them, even if these are not necessarily in the right order.  The SCO’s brochure, for instance, takes nine pages to reach the opening concert, though other concerts are listed in detail before that. In contrast the RSNO does rather better, coming to the point by announcing its opening programme on page five, and not confusing the issue beforehand with details of events coming later in the season. Yet  the RSNO’s opening concert, on its first  appearance in the brochure, does not stand out. You scarcely notice that the season has begun

Am I merely being pernickety? Perhaps, but a concert brochure should be a precise, sharp-edged, unconfusing statement of intent. The SCO’s opening concert, which is announced belatedly on page nine, is an attractive, eye-catching, not unserious full-page spread about the concert’s contents, linking the two works being performed, and explaining why.

As planned by Jonathan Mills, the Edinburgh Festival’s annual brochure has tended to be rather more strikingly presented, and this year it was refreshingly clear, though details of when the Festival began and ended were not perhaps as prominent as they should have been, with the closing concert in particular almost apologetically listed.

But the RSNO and SCO brochures, at least, contain plenty of good things, even if the RSNO seems excessively fixated by glossy pictures of how athletically the players spend their spare time - do we really want to know? - and by their conductor’s similar fondness for sport.

To details of the programmes themselves, and what’s worth hearing, I shall return in a later blog.
4 September 2014