Nonstandard approaches to performance have been a longtime source of amusement for serious concertgoers. One of the first examples I experienced was when Victor Borge played “The Blue Danube” on the piano with the score turned upside down. Yesterday I encountered a more recent contribution to this genre on YouTube. The content consisted of a highly abridged (only three and one-half minutes in duration) performance of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero.” The performers were listed as the Wiener Cello Ensemble 5+1, whose members are Sebastian Bru, Bernhard Hedenborg, Florian Eggner, Milan Karanovic, Joanna Sachryn, Gerhard Kaufmann; but the video involved only four of them (all male) playing on a single cello:
As far as I can tell, this required not only highly rehearsed choreography but also well-planned scordatura tuning. There was also a bit of costuming involved, since all four of them were wearing Hispanic bright red sashes for belts. Towards the end, there was even a suggestion of bullfighting associated with that color: One of the performers struck the pose of a picador moving in the strike the cello as if it were a bull:
This all made for well-needed amusement for all of us getting frustrated with the fact that we cannot go out to concerts right now!
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