It’s intermission at the classical music concert. You’d like a nice glass of wine, so you go out to the bar in the lobby, where you stand in line for fourteen minutes.

Eventually, you reach the counter, and the bartender asks, “What would you like, sir?”

“What’s that white you’re pouring?”

The bartender lifts a chilled bottle out of the ice bucket. It’s a chardonnay from a vineyard called Whizzing Grebe. The bartender must sense your apprehension, so she assures you, “It’s a good wine. It’s from the Cuyahoga River Valley.”

“How about the red?”

“We have a 2010 Marmot Menses merlot today.”

Conductor John Stubbs at Luscious Noise.

^{Photo by Paul Parks}

You go with the merlot. The bartender carefully pours it into a polyethylene cup, then hands it to you with one hand while taking your sawbuck with the other. With the tip, you don’t get any change back. You wander through the crowd, hoping for a place to sit down, on the lookout for any sudden movements of elbows or hips which could slosh the vino onto your pants or jacket. Unable to find a chair or table, you stand uncomfortably and try to savor your purchase.

You inhale an aroma of rust, with strong notes of coffee grounds and bile. The merlot slashes your taste buds with a predominant flavor of nail polish remover, with hints of strawberry, A-1 Steak Sauce, and cat poop. There is a caustic, fuzzy finish on the tongue, with a lingering aftertaste of warm pancake batter and WD40.

Perhaps if you gulp it down quickly, you’ll get used to it, but—Oh no! The lights are flashing to signal the end of intermission, and you can’t bring your drink into the hall. You end up tossing most of the wine in a trash can.

Sound familiar?

Imagine a concert hall where waiters quietly bring glasses of fine wine and elegantly prepared food to your seat as classical music plays. All you have to do there is listen to the music, eat and drink, and pay your check at the end of the show. We’re not there yet in San Diego, but Luscious Noise at Anthology approaches that epicurean Elysium.

Organized by John Stubbs, who also conducted the chamber orchestra there, Luscious Noise alternates movements of classical music with videos of dance, opera, and film. There’s probably no better place to do this than Anthology, with their state of the art camera and projection system. The amplification on the instruments and the mixing in the house was top-notch.

Luscious Noise is a monthly event; I attended the concert Sunday evening. The whole show lasts 90 minutes, and during this time delicious food and beverages are served. Food, drink, music, and video—these elements are presented to the audience. How well one enjoys them will likely depend on their classical music concert-going experience.

For novices, there is probably no more enjoyable way to hear live classical music decently performed. The movements selected are short, in general no longer than 7 or 8 minutes at a time. Each musical segment is then followed by a video segment.

On Sunday, a small string orchestra performed excerpts from the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, Grieg’s Holberg Suite, and Intermezzo, op. 8 by Franz Schreker. This last work, something of a rarity in local concert halls, proved to be a lush and rapturous slow movement, reminiscent of Richard Strauss or Korngold. The performances were all competent renditions.

Igor Pandurski played the second movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata no. 2, the celebrated “Funeral March.” This was a performance with no surprises to experienced concert-goers. Pandurski played all the notes, but his interpretation never really went past them to become something deeply spiritual.

The one memorable musical moment of the evening belonged to Demarre McGill, who gave a considerately beautiful and rich performance of Debussy’s sexy solo flute piece, Syrinx.

The video interludes were all selections which one might see on Classic Arts Showcase, the performing arts hodgepodge seen on public access TV here. Excerpts were shown from Prokofiev’s Cinderella (the odd but haunting Maguy Marin staging with Lyon Ballet), Weill’s Street Scene, Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman, and Jiri Kylian’s postmodern dance Petit Mort, set to the slow movement of the Mozart C major Piano Concerto no. 21. These all worked reasonably well enough, but what was that excerpt from Carol Reed’s The Third Man doing there?

The one video moment which worked very well was a dance excerpt from the 1935 film version of A Midsummer’s Night Dream (this sequence). It looked stunningly gorgeous on Anthology’s video projection screen.

For the more experienced concert-goer, though, the video interludes probably seemed more like interruptions than complementary courses. One wished the orchestra would have simply played the whole Tchaikovsky Serenade and the entire Holberg Suite, maybe with one or two videos separating the works. Ideally, Stubbs could commission artists to create videos to be played in tandem with their performances; the current scheme of live music alternating with videos was not very satisfactory, even with a few beers in my system.

Hopefully Stubbs and his musicians will refine this formula and come up with something a little more substantial than Sunday’s show. It’s not a bad idea, but there’s room for improvement.

One final consideration: when one adds up the ticket prices ($10-$15), food, drinks, and tip at Anthology, and parking costs in Little Italy, it may turn out to be a less pricy night out to just buy some tickets to Summerfest next month. Seats are available for some shows for as little as $20 each through online discounts, and that will likely be a much more pleasant—and somewhat cheaper—musical experience.