Messiaen packs out QPAC with a little help from Brian Cox.

QPAC, Brisbane

November 9, 2014

If Brian Cox is not a name familiar to you, imagine a younger David Attenborough with a dash of early Richard Dawkins. He’s the BBC’s latest pop science celebrity; he’s slick, he’s funny, he’s smart. Cox opened the QSO’s Physics of Time, with the music starting about halfway through. This is fairly standard hustle. You use a celebrity to draw in a crowd that rarely come, then try to hook them with something special and keep them coming back for more. That’s the essence of two-fer programming.

The tactic was a success. The Queensland Symphony Orchestra managed to pack out QPAC for a full weekend of shows. As Brian archly pointed out, Physics of Time is probably the first concert Messiaen has ever been played to a full house – in Brisbane, at least. Will the new listeners come back again? We can only hope.

They even managed it with half the city missing. An unknown large number of Brisbanites have fled pending the arrival of Barack Obama’s large security detail.

I do like the irony, though – using science, of all things, to sell...