Bravo! Encore!

By Thomas Wolf

A special message for musicians: Do you know how to make certain your audience will demand at least one encore, and maybe several? I share my family’s secrets here. Audience members take note.

“BRAVO! ENCORE!” These are the magic words we musicians hope to hear above the din of applause at the end of our concerts. Translation: “We audience members loved what we just heard and we want more.” And, often, encores are an audience’s favorite part of the program.

My grandmother, Lea Luboshutz, was famous for her encores. She played eleven of them at her first concert in Carnegie Hall in 1907 at the age of 22 and just as many or more in the great salons in her native Russia. I have always loved this particular painting which I first saw at the Manchester Art Gallery in England because it is how I imagine my grandmother must have appeared at those salon concerts as she prepared to play an encore. The painting is “Hush” or “The Concert” by James Joseph Jacques Tissot (1875).

 How can we musicians be sure the audience is going to request an encore at the end of a concert? Encores are important—after all, they are validation of the audience’s adulation. So, there is certainly nothing more disappointing than having the applause die out before we get a chance to play one. I learned a lot about this at an early age when I realized that encores don’t just happen. Musicians, at least musicians like me, must make them happen.

 I watched older family members, seasoned by years on the concert stage, graciously accept the demand for encores as their due. As a fourth-generation musician, I heard about their early successes including the legend (later confirmed by research) that the audience at Carnegie Hall in 1907 had demanded that my grandmother play eleven encores when she made her debut there at the age of 22. Clearly, she must have been a sensation. I couldn’t compete with that.   

As I grew older and my grandmother and other family elders prepared my brother and me for success as performers, we learned that often what we were seeing on stage was a bit of an illusion. I thought my relatives were relying on their winning personalities and superb playing. But even if we could generate the same adoration from audiences (which we couldn’t), it turned out that it was not enough. An important life lesson… and one not limited to musicians: If something is important, don’t leave it to chance.

So, what was the secret? How was I to make sure I got to play an encore in the first place? It started with keeping the second half of my programs short. “Don’t tire out your audience,” my grandmother counselled. “Make people want more.” And I will never forget the words that followed: “No one ever complained that a program was too short.”

At the end of her life, she criticized young players like me for exhausting audiences by putting the longest and heaviest pieces at the end of a classical music recital. “Don’t do it,” she would say.  

Instead, I was taught to finish a relatively short second half with something brilliant that would send the audience into paroxysms of enthusiasm. It was a set-up for more music—in other words… an encore (or more than one).

There it is again—that charmed word: “encore.” In French it means “again,” “another,” “more” (though to complicate matters the French say “bis” to indicate a jmusical encore). And while occasionally some encores do involve playing the last piece on the program again, most of my family’s encores offered opportunities for audiences to hear another work or two or three (in other words, more and different music).

My grandmother’s advice about programming was not the sort of thing she would have shared with great, internationally-acclaimed performers because such musicians are the exception to the rule. They can play just about anything of any length in the second half of their programs and their audiences will still demand encores.

Sviatoslav Richter, the great Soviet pianist, did not have to rely on any tricks when it came to encores. Audiences always demanded them. At his debut concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra, he ended the program with the hour-long second Brahms concerto and then repeated not one but two final movements adding another 25 minutes to the evening.

A case in point: She once took me to a concert given by the Soviet pianist, Sviatoslav Richter, who was appearing with the Philadelphia Orchestra. This international celebrity was on his initial tour of America and for years there had been tremendous anticipation of his arrival. At the concert I attended at the sold-out Academy of Music, Richter ended his program with the second piano concerto by Johannes Brahms, a work lasting nearly an hour. Audience members went wild and they were treated with an encore—a repeat not just of the final movement, but of the last two, adding another 25 minutes to the already long program they had just heard.

But I was no Richter and I needed any help I could get. When my family attended my concerts, I knew I had a leg up and better than a fighting chance to play an encore or two. Some musicians have “claques”—a group of people paid to create noisy enthusiasm. I never stooped to such depths. I had my family and each person had a role to play in egging on an otherwise timid or reluctant audience.

For example, my grandmother, Lea, and her brother, Pierre, had a special technique when attending family concerts and it was remarkably effective. In the instant of silence between the ending notes of the final piece and the applause that would follow, they would exclaim in voices sounding full of spontaneous excitement: “Ach! Bravo, bravo!” (their Russian accents lending cultural authenticity to the words!) Usually, there was just time enough for these words to be expressed dramatically and heard clearly by the audience before their voices were drowned out by clapping.

But their psychological impact lasted far longer. Magically, the words always seemed to goad the audience into heavy-duty applause and additional shouts of “bravo.” Their job done, Grandmother Lea and Uncle Pierre would not even bother to clap, but would talk to each other in Russian about the merits or deficiencies of my performance.

A standing ovation at the sold-out historic Opera House at a summer concert in Rockport, Maine where we often played. My hunch is that my mother, sitting up near the front, was the first to stand up.

Then it was my mother’s turn. Her loudest clapping occurred not as we musicians were bowing but after we had left the stage, when applause generally dies down. She was determined to keep the ovation going long enough to bring us back on stage. And it was often my mother, sitting near the front of the hall, who would rise—judiciously waiting until midway into the first curtain call—to ensure a standing ovation.

After all, what are families for? 

My brother Andy and I as teen-agers, playing an encore at a house concert. Even by this age, we had already been schooled in how to elicit the “demand” for encores.

My pianist brother, Andy (who often played joint recitals with me), and I had been trained to time things perfectly with respect to exits and entrances. A second valuable life lesson: Don’t dally. If something is important, don’t stand around waiting for it to happen.

For us that meant walking off the stage and getting back as quickly and as often as possible. Unlike some of our inexperienced colleagues who prolonged their first bows and waited for what seemed like an eternity backstage before returning for additional ones, we were taught to complete the bowing expeditiously and not linger before coming back to acknowledge the applause. The elapsed time for a couple of our exits and entrances was often less than that of a single round trip for other musicians—two curtain calls being the absolute minimum requirement for an encore.

Are you shocked? Did you, as I did as a child, imagine that a musician’s stage behavior was spontaneous and unplanned? Not in our family. My brother and I learned the secrets of encores at an early age.

Then there was the science of encore selection. Once a musician has achieved the glory of having an encore “demanded” by an audience, he or she may well try for a second… and then a third (though when people start leaving the hall in droves, one has probably played too many).

If multiple encores are in the offing, I was taught to start with something short, lively, and fun like the two-minute Scherzino (Italian for “little joke”) by Joachim Andersen. The composer was a Danish flutist who just happened to have worked for a time in my family’s country of origin (Russia)—which gave me an extra motivation for choosing it. Then there was the business of announcing the encore. How frustrating for audience members when the details of composer and name of work are not announced or when the announcement is inaudible. A musician might think that everyone in the audience ought to recognize a piece but most probably do not. A short description or anecdote or reason for selection to go along with the announcement is usually appreciated as well.

If there was to be a second encore, I was encouraged to choose something of a completely different character. As my grandmother put it in a third lesson about encores (and life in general): There is nothing more boring than people who keep telling the same story.

Encores can range from brilliant and fast to somber and slow, from the Baroque to the contemporary, from funny to sad. So why should they all sound the same?

Jules Massenet, the composer of the Méditation from the opera Thaïs (1894). It was one of my grandmother’s favorite encores that I too could play.

One of her favorites, a complete contrast to the lively Scherzino, is the immensely beautiful and contemplative Méditation, the symphonic intermezzo in Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs written for solo violin and orchestra. My grandmother played it in a transcription for violin and piano but because there was another transcription for flute and piano, it was one of my grandmother’s encores that I too could play and it was always a winner. The rendition offered in this link is the violin version played by Christian Li who in this video was about the same age as I was when I played it for the first time.

Every rule is made to be broken, I suppose, and my great uncle and aunt, the duo-piano team of Pierre Luboshutz & Genia Nemenoff, while following most of the family rules, always broke one of them. True: the second half of their programs tended to be short and they always ended with something brilliant like “The Bat,” Pierre’s arrangement of themes from Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, that always elicited great applause.

My great Aunt Genia and Uncle Pierre. They were elegant and regal and refused to hurry off stage and rush back again for an encore. Their more deliberate method of a slow walk and several minutes back stage before returning was entirely in character and always worked for them. I never attended one of their concerts when they didn’t play at least two encores.

But my aunt, who was an elegantly dressed Parisian lady whose stage presence was queen-like, simply refused to hurry off the stage and hurry back on. Genia’s technique, which Pierre dutifully followed, was the opposite of what we youngsters had been taught. She and Uncle Pierre bowed slowly and regally, walked slowly off the stage and stayed there seemingly for endless minutes until, walking deliberately back to center stage with the audience by this time in a frenzy, they bowed again, went to their respective pianos, and played their first encore—often this delightful arrangement of one of Rossini’s most famous arias from the opera, The Barber of Seville.

I only tried Aunt Genia and Uncle Pierre’s method once. When I finished the program I was playing, I bowed deeply, walked off the stage slowly, and then stayed backstage for quite a while. Not having the commanding presence of my relatives, the audience assumed the concert was over, got up, and left the hall. Sad and embarrassed with no encores to brag about, I decided never to try that experiment again.

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NOW IT’S YOUR TURN: Do you have a favorite encore? Send your suggestion to me at thomaswolfmusic@gmail.com. At a minimum, please include the composer and the name of the work. If you have a link to a performance so we can hear it, include that as well. Finally, a sentence or two about what to you is special about the work would be appreciated. I will include some of these in a future blog (let me know if I can include your name). And thanks!