Do you know how far the perception of beer has come in the last ten years? A very long way indeed, and a lot of that is down to craft brewers getting involved with locations outside of the places that you’d traditionally find them. As I look at the lineup for Craft Beer Week, I’m noticing that there are a lot of events that go outside of the traditional “Here is a pint of beer. It’s better than the beer that you’re used to drinking. Why don’t you give it a shot?”

It’s for that reason that this year I’m determined to seek out some of the more esoteric Craft Beer Week events. There are some that are listed on the website. For instance, Cameron’s is involved with a Polo tournament featuring the Royal Jaipur team. No one saw that coming. There are at least three festivals just within Toronto alone this week: C’est What, Session and the Beach BBQ and Brews Festival. Not to mention the Wine and Spirit Festival. Consider how unlikely that would have been five years ago.

I decided to kick the week off with a fanfare. Literally.

Atmospheric lighting! Mellow, yet reminiscent of a planetarium!

It turns out that the popularity of craft beer has gotten to the point where it is popping up as a draw in places that you’d never expect it. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra had an event last night that was meant to appeal to a younger demographic: a 10:30 PM performance of Mahler’s fifth symphony in C sharp minor. Before that, though, they had a BBQ tailgate party in their parking lot. With beer provided by Steam Whistle.

It’s apparently part of a program called Tsoundcheck, which is designed to make the symphony more approachable. The astounding thing to me is that it works. While the tailgate party was full up, I did sort of hang around the barriers to have a look at the crowd. The TSO’s PR representative had told me that they were aiming for a demographic of 25-40 with their promotion, and I think that it may have actually skewed younger than that.

It turns out that if you combine things that people like (music, beer and food) they will show up in droves. The parking lot was jammed with fashionable young people who had paid 75 bucks to eat barbeque, drink craft beer and then go listen to a symphony.

Not only that, but they licensed the auditiorium at Roy Thompson Hall. You could take a beer in with you! Now, I didn’t think much of that until I walked in the door, but I was early and struck up a conversation with a bartender. It’s not something that they do often, but it seems to me to be the kind of thing they could pull out at will. And it was mostly craft beer! I had a Tankhouse. As the bartender said “It’s quite civilized, if you ask me.”

This is your beer.

Do you know what happens if you let people take drinks into the auditorium to listen to serious classical music? Well, the first thing is that the audience is slightly looser. I sometimes dislike performances of classical music because I feel like I ought to be sitting immobile, which results in an uneasiness. I feel like a slight rustle from the audience will be perceived by the woodwinds, even though I know from having played in wind ensembles that this is not true. In this case, the place was packed to the rafters and the crowd had less inhibition than usual. Everyone behaved themselves. Civilization did not collapse. Peter Oundjian even suggested that we applaud during the breaks if the mood struck us.

The other thing that happens is that since people have drinks to sip, there’s less of the stifled coughing that you usually get in an air conditioned concert hall. You know the kind. The violins descend to a pianissimo pizzicato counterpoint and that’s the moment that you inevitably find that you have a tickle in your throat. Well, not if you’ve got a beverage. You can just take a sip and avoid the annoyed glances from the wealthy dowager in seat 6B.

This is your beer on music.

The other thing that’s worth noting is that Mahler’s fifth is a bloody challenging piece of music. It’s seventy minutes long and has five movements. It was completed in 1902 and was so challenging that it wasn’t premiered in England until the 1930’s. The fourth movement, an Adagietto, was the most accessible part and was usually played as an excerpt before then. It’s technically difficult. The amount of lung capacity needed by the French Horns is such that you had better have an oxygen tent waiting backstage if you’re going to perform it.

The other thing is that it’s not programmatic. That is to say that there’s no story that goes along with it. That might have been alright for Debussy and Berlioz, but Mahler wasn’t having any of that “Prelude To The Afternoon of a Whatsit” stuff. It’s just music. You can ascribe whatever influences from Mahler’s personal life you want, but it’s not designed that way. You can say that it switches from C sharp minor to D major for the final movement and that that’s because he found the love of his life and was recovering from a near death experience while writing it and it’s for that reason that it’s a porthole into the transformative journey of the human soul, but that’s a load of historically revisionist nonsense. It just IS, if that makes any sense.

And it’s beautiful. Not having heard it, you can tell where the musical line is going to go. His melodic lines reach that point and then continue on as if defying expectation. They’ll crescendo to the point where you think that the timpanist is going to wreck his equipment and then back completely off. The finale is so big and brash and joyful and is possessed of so many false endings that it actually made me giggle because it becomes practically a caricature of itself.

The symphony got the longest standing ovation I’ve ever seen at Roy Thompson Hall. Longer than the premiere of Eric idle’s Not The Messiah, anyway. It might have been because of the comparative youth of the audience. It might have been because of the slight inhibition loosening qualities of the drinks they were allowed to bring in. I think, though, that it was because they were expressly informed by the nature of the event that they were allowed to have fun.

Maybe we should look for other ways to get craft beer into cultural venues like this one. It’s not an audience craft beer usually gets, and it seemed to improve peoples’ enjoyment of what is, let’s be honest, a long and challenging symphony. That’s got to be a win for everyone involved.