In the dark

An advertisement from the Wigmore Hall reached me this afternoon for a Beethoven string quartet to be played, from memory, in the dark. Presumably not total darkness as the performers would need to be able to see something of their instruments?

Puzzled as to why it is so cheap, the Sacconi being a busy enough quartet to judge by reference 1, and a quartet which appeared on the Dorking Concertgoers programme in both 2011 and 2018, with notice of the former being found at reference 3.

Of particular interest to me for the difference that being in the dark would make. My present feeling being that seeing the performers is an important part of the action, providing plenty of visual cues to supplement the aural ones, and that audience presence is probably important in some less obvious way - less obvious to me, anyway. So being in the dark, would knock out the former and much weaken the second. So where would that leave one?

I recall an anecdote from my father, who attended many concerts in his younger days, about how they once did an experiment. Perhaps the people from the 'Gramophone' magazine, which has been going since 1923. Get a whole lot of classical music lovers into a concert hall. Put some screens on the stage. Divide the concert into chunks, with a quartet behind the screen doing some chunks and state of the art sound reproduction equipment (this experiment probably dating from somewhere in the range 1930-1960) doing the remainder. His punch line was that the audience, on average, could not tell the difference. I have not attempted to track down any such experiment, but, in common I dare say with many other concert goers, I am confident that I would know the difference - but without caring or having the opportunity to test that confidence!

But it is all academic. Returns only - and I doubt whether I will go to the bother of trying to get one.

Reference 1: http://sacconi.com/.

Reference 2: http://dorkingconcertgoers.org.uk/.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=sacconi.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=Op.131. A reasonably well known (to us) quartet with at least two outings in the three and a half years covered by this volume of the blog.