It ain't easy

How's this for a crazy week; three different programs, three rehearsals, eight performances. Hard enough for the orchestra to keep track of all that music, overwhelming for me as the only staff conductor in town (and thus the conductor of all eight concerts). The vagaries of orchestra scheduling often mean that non-subscription weeks like this one are crammed to the gills with the other types of concerts that are the mainstays of any ensemble - educational concerts, pops presentations, special series (like "Inside the Classics"). To add to the load, I'm gearing up for a week in Korea to premiere a new Requiem, and I have yet to see a complete full score (note to composers - if you want your conductor colleagues to ever speak to you again, don't be orchestrating a week before the first rehearsal!)

Staff conductors the world over are nodding their heads with sympathy. The tough part about heavy conducting weeks like this one is not the actual conducting itself, but the preparation. Unlike the rehearsal schedule for a subscription concert (where one usually has four rehearsals to put a program together), young people's and pops concerts are allotted a single rehearsal. This means not only that I have to plan that rehearsal down to the minute, but that I need to have a complete grasp of everything the first time around and fix things on the fly - there's often no time to run a piece again or do anything over, no time for uncertainty or trying something a slightly different way.

In a way it's an exciting challenge, and a particular skill that one has to master to be successful in this business. By the same token it's hard to sometimes gloss over the finer details of what we're doing in the interest of time and efficiency. I'm tremendously lucky in that the Minnesota Orchestra doesn't slack off musically because we might feel underrehearsed - in fact, because things feel so fresh, the level of musical energy often rises. I'm looking forward to concerts tomorrow - two Young People's Concerts in the morning, for which I am host, conductor and piano soloist (in a fantastically oddball piece by Henry Cowell ), and then the premiere concert of Inside the Classics. As I said, a crazy week...