We had a nearly full house for the Thursday concert, which was an incredible thing to see for such a new concert series! Thanks to everyone who showed up, and I hope we'll see you all (and a few of your friends, maybe?) at our spring concerts. For now, though, this is the place for those of you in the audience Thursday to chime in and tell us what you thought of the show, and what you'd like to see more (or less) of in future concerts. Just click the Comments button below, and have at it...
If you were at Wednesday night's Inside the Classics concert at Orchestra Hall, here's your chance to weigh in as we continue to develop the series with your help! In the comments section below, tell us what you liked (or didn't like,) what else you wish we'd covered, what questions you still have about the Tchaikovsky, or the orchestra, or soloist Peter McGuire, and/or anything else you can think of. As always, thanks so much for supporting live music, and for giving Sarah and me a chance to test out all these new ideas in front of such a supportive crowd. You guys rule.
Okay, so I have a confession to make. I'm still working on the show.
...yes, tonight's show. The show we're doing tonight. That show. Still working on it.
This is not an ideal position for me (or the show) to be in. In a perfect world, everything would have been cut and dried and etched in stone two weeks ago, and Sarah and I could have spent the last several days relaxing in front of a roaring fire and exchanging witty bon mots about Leopold Auer and Eduard Hanslick while sipping hot buttered rum and pretending that we'd never heard of wind chill.
This is not a perfect world. It's fifteen below zero. And I am still. working. on. the show.
At this point, the work is largely cosmetic, since any major changes would have needed to be made before Tuesday morning's rehearsal with the orchestra. I can't cut any of our demonstration excerpts, or change their order, or write a whole new draft of the script or anything. This is a great relief, since I've been doing all of these things more or less constantly for three weeks now.
But even after the bulk of the work is done, there always seems to be more to do. Tuesday night, after an hour-long discussion that took place entirely inside my own head, I determined that it would look strange for me to have my full script on a music stand in front of me during the show (because, see, Peter's going to be standing where I normally stand during these concerts, which creates a bit of a logjam at the front of the stage, and if I have a stand, I'll be stationary right in front of the first stand of first violins, which seems wrong somehow, and blah blah blah) and ran off to buy a pack of 4x6 index cards (with which to create a fully portable, handheld script) before my local Target closed. (Side note: Target really shouldn't ever close. There should be a law. If I need reasonably priced jeans, a furnace filter, and PEZ dispensers in bulk at 2am, I should be able to get them.)
Then there's the need for special versions of the script to be prepared and double-checked for accuracy. Some of these versions go to our long-suffering stage crew, who need to know what doors need to be opened and closed, when exactly we want special lighting cues to happen, which microphones need to be hot at what times, and when we need all the mics shut down so that they don't start picking up bits of the orchestra and amplifying them to the entire hall. Any member of the orchestra who is participating in the show in some way other than by playing his/her instrument (think David Wright's turn as the Kastchei in November's Firebird concerts) needs what I call a "scriptlet," which isolates their moment in the sun and tells them how to know it's coming and what to do when it does. Finally, there's a last-minute insert to be stuffed in every orchestra musician's folder, reminding them of a certain cue that they'll be getting late in the show which could bring the whole production to a grinding halt if it's missed.
The last few bits of prep actually won't take place until this afternoon, mere hours before we take the stage. After we finish playing two performances of the Young People's Concert that Sarah wrote about yesterday, I'll dash off to a local costume shop to pick up a couple of rentals that we need for tonight. Later in the afternoon, I'll gather the few props we're using for the show and distribute them to the people who need them along with any final instructions.
Around dinner time, I'll give every copy of the script that's still in my possession one last read-through to be sure that my computer hasn't accidentally deleted a page or substituted an earlier draft for the final one. At some point during this process, during which I'll likely be pacing around backstage at Orchestra Hall like some sort of deranged freak, Sarah will appear, looking completely composed and fabulous, and instruct me to calm the hell down. Since I always do what Sarah tells me to, I will.
And that's really the key to this whole thing, I think. We spend an ungodly amount of time and energy getting these shows ready for prime time, but the reality is that whether a given performance sinks or swims is less dependent on absolutely everything going exactly as we planned than it is on all of us having a good time while we're doing it. And neurotic as I may sound right now, less than twelve hours before we drop the puck, I know that I'm going to have a great time with this show.
Yes, we are in the thick of preparations for tomorrow night's Inside the Classics concert, and I'm happy to report that we all survived this morning's rehearsal intact (Peter sounds fabulous). There are, however, other concerts going on this week as well, and this afternoon the orchestra rehearsed for tomorrow morning's Young People's Concerts, a full performance of Rimsky-Korsakoff's "Scheherazade" with dancers from the University of Minnesota and professional dance ensembles. All four movements have been specially choreographed for this show, and it's really quite fascinating. Instead of taking the obvious path of creating a "story ballet" to go along with the programmatic elements of the music (Sinbad's ship, the tale of the prince and princess, etc.), the choreographers have instead devised abstract pieces that are reactions to the sound of the music itself.
The result is at times positively kaleidoscopic, with groups of dancers whizzing across stage in opposite directions - it's a really kinetic piece, which I think will suit the audience (upper elementary kids). The dancers often have gestures that accompany a certain melody, and the return of the gesture when the tune comes back puts a spotlight on melodic repetition and musical structure. To me, the dance effectively amplified the expressive content of the music, often highlighting certain emotional elements, often reflecting the fluctuating energy of the piece.
Adding visual elements to "concert" pieces always has an element of controversy. The argument, usually, is that these works were meant to stand alone without any "extras", and doing so somehow detracts from the music. I really think it depends on how it's done - in this case, not only are there dancers, but also projections above the orchestra of words used by elementary school students to describe the music in each movement. Thus, we are given several different perspectives - the thoughts of students via the projected words, the expressive motions of the dancers, and the glorious aural sweep of the music itself. I found myself totally engaged during the rehearsal.
What I'm very curious about is how this will translate to a hall full of students tomorrow morning, particularly as each movement of "Scheherazade" clocks in at over 10 minutes - a pretty long time for young attention spans. It's an unusual show (and very abstract when compared to most of our other Young People's Concerts), but I'm delighted that our education department is willing to take the risk to try something utterly new, which really is the only way to find out if it works!
In last week's podcast, Peter McGuire and I talked a bit about the challenge he'll be facing when he takes the stage as a soloist in this week's Inside the Classics concerts. For an orchestral player to step into a solo role is more difficult than you might imagine, and on top of simply playing the Tchaikovsky concerto, Peter will also be a full participant in the first half of the program, playing excerpts from the piece and talking about the strange and ultimately triumphant backstory behind it. To be perfectly honest, I'm feeling more than a little bit guilty about it all, since Peter honestly had no real idea of what would be expected of him in this show when he agreed to play the concerto more than a year ago. But Peter is one of those guys who would probably smile and nod agreeably if you asked him to play the Bach Chaconne while walking barefoot across a bed of hot coals, so if he's at all worried about the unusual nature of these performances, he hasn't let on.
These unusual demands on a soloist's skills, however, did put me in mind of another challenging performance of a Tchaikovsky concerto that I once saw, courtesy of the boys from Monty Python...
Continuing the runup to next week's Inside the Classics concerts, we wanted to take some time to introduce you to the guy who will be the star of the show: our violin soloist, Peter McGuire.
One of the tough things about preparing this show has been the realization that there's so much we'll have to leave out - with less than an hour to cover the history of the Tchaikovsky concerto, its reception by press and public, the musical ideas it contains, and the intricacies of performing it, it was inevitable that some things we wanted badly to talk about are even now winding up on the cutting room floor. In particular, we're not going to have a lot of time to chat with Peter onstage about just who he is and how he came to be standing there, which is a great shame, because his is one of the more fascinating life stories in the orchestra.
But for those of you interested in learning more than the program notes will tell you about one of the best violinists this orchestra's ever had (and one of the nicest guys, too, just for the record,) here's your chance. Peter and I sat down to talk over lunch this week, and you can listen in by clicking below...
You know you've made it when they name foodstuff after you
Osmo has his bobble-arm doll, but Gustavo Dudamel (incoming music director of the LA Philharmonic) ups the ante by getting his own hot dog. I may have to alter my life goal to getting a sushi roll named after me...
Sam described in his most recent post the process of scripting our Inside the Classics shows - a process that I'm quite delighted about, because he really does a majority of the work, and it takes an enormous amount of time. The fact remains, however, that we need to brainstorm the initial ideas together, and I'm responsible for the content of my own sections (like the "musical geekery" - showing thematic connections in Stravinsky - in our "Firebird" show) and for learning those lines well enough that I'm not tripping over myself onstage.
Talking from the podium (or anywhere from the stage, for that matter!) is tricky. First of all, one wants to sound knowledgeable, but not uptight, both erudite and down-to-earth. Second of all, there is the matter of keeping everything in order in one's head; the contrast between conducting an orchestra and whipping around to chat with the audience is tremendous - I'm convinced each skill uses completely different parts of the brain, which have to be engaged on a moments notice - not to mention trying to speak intelligibly into a microphone when you're sweaty and out of breath from a particularly vigorous bit of music!
To add to my script load for the upcoming concerts next Wednesday and Thursday, I'm conducting another concert pair of Pops shows on Thursday and Friday with its own script to learn. It's a lot of extra-musical work to keep all those words straight, and when I'm running over outlines in every bit of spare time I have and tripping over words, I'm often reminded that I didn't master the English language until I was 5...
Speaking from stage is becoming an increasingly requested skill in conductors - in fact, it is becoming a criteria for certain positions. Thinking about all of the concerts I do with the Minnesota Orchestra, I realize that all of them require some sort of interaction with the audience, whether it be Young People's concerts, Pops, outdoor presentations, donor concerts, etc., not to mention Inside the Classics. It's the kind of thing that was never addressed when I was in music school a decade ago and certainly a skill I had to learn on the fly, for the most part. I will say that I spent most of my high school years on the speech team and was at one point the state champion in original oratory, but at that time I had no idea that my extracurricular activities would be so helpful in my career, years down the line!
All that being said, I find that it's a part of my job that I enjoy a great deal - I like to think of it as the "human touch", as it really makes me feel as if I've made a connection with the audience. Because, after all, I think that part of the reason we like to attend concerts is that they're such incredible communal experiences, and it's nice to feel like you're really sharing it with the people onstage as well.
It probably bears explaining why I keep referring to the "script" for our upcoming show. This is a concert, after all, not a play, and it's not as if every word we say on stage during these concerts is hammered into stone well in advance and the whole production could fall apart if one of us flubs a line. More than anything, live music sinks or swims on its ability to sound spontaneous and new, even when it isn't, so we don't ever want the explanatory first halves of our concerts, diligently planned as they are, to come off seeming as if we're reading lines.
Still, when Sarah and I took over the production and hosting duties for this concert series, one thing we both agreed on was that the usual way that this type of series is presented didn't really fit what we had in mind. Orchestras have been holding pre-concert lectures for decades, solemn and dry rituals that Anna Russell once referred to as "talks given by great experts for the edification of other great experts."
In an effort to make such in-house education more accessible to a wider audience, a lot of orchestras have experimented with shows in which someone (nearly always the conductor) speaks from the podium during the concert about the music, and provides examples to illustrate his/her points. The Minnesota Orchestra was one of the first to create a whole series out of this type of concert, first with staff conductor Bill Eddins (now music director of Canada's Edmonton Symphony) serving as host, and later with the always engaging David Alan Miller, who helmed the series up through this past spring.
What Sarah and I are trying to do with the series now is to take the next logical evolutionary step in this line, taking our series from a hybrid of concert and music history lecture to something more integrated, where music, information, and pure entertainment blend seamlessly into a complete production. If we're doing our job, every one of our shows should make you laugh, think, and experience music in a new way without either of us ever telling you how we want you to do any of those things. In other words, we'd like to do for classical music what Ira Glass did for public radio. It's a tall order, and this is why I spend weeks sweating over a carefully worded script for every show.
Having established what we'll be playing and in what order, Sarah and I now turn to exactly how we'll be using the excerpts we've chosen. Obviously, we have some preexisting reason for choosing the excerpts we do, but that doesn't mean that we always know exactly how they'll be presented in the concert. Sometimes, this is the kind of thing that develops over the course of several conversations and meetings. This time, because of the intervention of the holidays and Sarah's out-of-town schedule, it all came together in a single telephone call a little over a week ago.
I should stress at this point that coming up with the sequence of non-musical events on the first half of the concert is essentially my job, and there's nothing in Sarah's job description that requires her to help with this. But being the very model of a modern multitasking conductor, she willingly pitches in when I get stuck, which is a very good thing, because as of the day of that phone call in mid-January, I had been essentially staring at the excerpt list for a week and entirely failing to turn it into anything resembling a script.
It took about an hour for the two of us to bust through my writers' block, mainly by throwing out any crazy idea we could think of ("What if we had Peter make a grand entrance on a zip line attached to the third balcony?") and then whittling it down until it became something we could actually use. By the end of the night, I had a complete outline of how the first half will hopefully unfold, and six days later, that outline had become the first complete draft of our script.
That was yesterday. What remains of the preparation will likely include several rewrites of the script as it now stands, careful editing of my own lines (mainly to condense and remove material - my first drafts are always way too wordy,) prop acquisition (those tiaras and battle axes in the first show weren't just sitting around backstage) preparation of separate briefing materials for the stage crew, the orchestra, Sarah, and Peter, and a couple of complete recitations of the script in front of a microphone, to check for overall length and proper flow. For this, I have exactly seven days left. Plenty of time...
It's been a while since my last post - the end of a very busy guest conducting weekend intervened - and I'm delighted Sam is giving you all some insights into the process of producing our Inside the Classics concerts. As you can tell from his post, it's an incredibly labor-intensive venture, for many reasons; the number of excerpts the library has to prepare, the script that goes through multiple drafts over multiple weeks, the coordination of individual ideas so we present a cohesive concept onstage, scheduling meetings with our soloist, not to mention the year-out planning for future seasons!
Add to the complication of that the fact that Sam already has a full-time job as a member of the MO viola section, and the fact that I haven't been in Minneapolis since December 18th, and you can get a sense of how difficult planning can be. As I was dashing off yet another email while leaving a voicemail during a layover at the Atlanta airport, it struck me how much more difficult preparation would be even 15 years ago, before the genesis of cell phones for the general populace and the normalizing of internet connectivity. In fact, at one point last week Sam and I were having an email back-and-forth to set up a time to talk via cell phone, which I found pretty funny in retrospect.
Between Sam's full schedule in his purely musical commitments and my being on the road, coordinating these concerts would be pretty much impossible without these late 20th century/early 21st century technologies. I can't imagine how we would have kept sending updated lists to the library - with the incredible volume of faxes which would have been sent I shudder at the number of trees we would have killed just with our upcoming concert! But this all makes me wonder; are we able to do this planning because we have cell phones and email and instant connectivity anywhere and everywhere, or do we plan and operate differently because we know we have this technology??
This Is Why You Never Want To Watch Anyone Make Sausage
We're now a little more than a week away from our next set of Inside the Classics concerts at Orchestra Hall, and that means that it's crunch time for me. Sarah and I start planning these shows months in advance, but the last couple of weeks before we take the stage are always a flurry of preparation and last-minute revision. I don't know that it's actually a very good idea for me to let the audience in on this in advance, since a) it might bore you to tears, and b) it might detract from the (hopefully) seamless flow of the concerts, but since it's more or less all that's occupying my thoughts at this point, I'm going to do it anyway. For the next week or so, I'll be offering what amounts to a running diary of how a concert like this comes together.
The process starts when Sarah and I, along with a host of Minnesota Orchestra staffers, choose the repertoire for the coming season. And actually, in the case of the 2007-08 season, Sarah was brought on board as the official conductor of the series after we had already chosen the rep, so she didn't have much of a voice in the process. (Now that she's part of the team that plans the series, of course, her voice is arguably the most important when it comes to repertoire choices.) This should give you some idea of just how far in advance our seasons are planned - in fact, we're already completely done choosing the pieces we'll be featuring n 2008-09 (and have since before our first show in November,) and we've got some pretty good ideas about what we'll be doing in the two years after that as well.
Once we know what we'll be playing, things settle into a lull until a couple of months before the next concert is scheduled. At some point, usually about 8-10 weeks before the next show, we sit down together with our primary administrative contact, Kari Marshall, and start to talk about what we know we want to focus on, what musical ideas we want to be sure to get across, and what creative techniques we might use to accomplish this. Usually, Sarah and I each come into this meeting with a few concrete ideas, but a lot of our best material comes when one of us says, "I don't know how we're going to fit in Idea X," and the other one says, "Well, I guess we could..." That's more or less how the Firebird pantomime that you all seemed to like so much in the November show came into being. Kari's role at these meetings is to be completely unflappable and encouraging, no matter what ridiculous ideas are coming out of my mouth, and to take copious notes, which become extremely important in the weeks ahead, when Sarah and I frequently lose our own notes and have no specific memory of what we were planning.
That first meeting is also when we discuss what actual chunks of music from the featured piece we'll want to excerpt on the first half, and what other pieces we may want to drag into the mix as well. This is probably the most important part of the process to get done without delay, because as anyone who's ever played in an orchestra knows, sheet music does not just appear on the stands. It has to be meticulously researched, purchased (if we don't already own it,) rented (if it can't be purchased,) prepared, bowed by the string section leaders, and placed into folders at least two weeks before the concert, so the musicians have time to check it out and practice it before the one rehearsal we get for this series. Handling this job for us is our staff of three full-time librarians and several part-time assistants, each of whom knows more about the music we play than anyone in the orchestra ever will.
Making the librarians' job harder is the fact that the Inside the Classics concerts are designed to move along quickly. Traditionally, if there's an orchestra on stage, the music starts once everyone holding an instrument is ready, and anything else that might be going on has to be secondary to that. In our shows, though, everything is highly scripted and a lot of things are dependent on quick timing and fast changeovers between excerpts, so there's just no time for the musicians to be scrambling around looking for the next thing they're supposed to play. So the library has to prepare a special excerpt book for every musician on stage to use during the first half, with all the excerpts they'll be expected to play clearly labeled and in the proper order. If a certain instrument doesn't play in a certain excerpt, there needs to be something to alert the musician that s/he'll be sitting one out. It's extremely time-consuming work, and in order to get it done in time, the library needs us to have our ducks in a row as far in advance as possible.
In the case of our upcoming Tchaikovsky show, the library also served another important purpose. Shortly after Sarah and I had submitted our last and final excerpt list, our principal librarian, Paul Gunther, pulled me aside at a rehearsal to point out that we'd included a single 4-bar excerpt from a certain Tchaikovsky symphony, and that this particular excerpt would require a whole herd of wind, brass and percussion players who otherwise would not be needed in the concert to show up in order to perform for about 7 seconds. This seemed downright silly, although the musicians in question would certainly have showed up without complaint had we asked them to, so after much discussion, we scrapped the excerpt. (We had another one already in the mix that was going to be used to make much the same point, in any case.)
At this point, it was already the first week of January, and while we had an excerpt list, and a series of components that we knew would be included in the concert, we did not yet have a specific outline or anything that looked like a script for the first half. Oh, and we'd yet to talk to our soloist, who was battling the flu, about any of this, and Sarah was conducting out of town and wouldn't be back in Minneapolis until four days before the first show. Good times...
There was a funny moment at this morning's rehearsal. Osmo thanked us for our work in the Thursday performance (as he always does at the first rehearsal after a concert,) then grinned and noted that, "I have read in today's Star Tribune that the critic thought that we were not always with the movie. He said there was a band on the screen, and we were not playing when they played. This is so. Chaplin believed that his audience did not need to hear a band to see that one was playing, and he assumed that the people would imagine the sound of the band, which is why we don't play there. But perhaps Chaplin overestimated the imagination of critics..."
I've tried to avoid using this space to flog the Minnesota Orchestra's weekly concerts (other than the ones in our Inside the Classics series, of course,) because Sarah and I are very conscious of the potential for an "official" orchestra blog to come across as little more than a crass attempt to sell tickets by pretending to embrace the online world of user-generated content. So in writing about specific concerts that we play, I've generally waited until after they're over to post anything, and I don't think I've ever written anything that sounds like "run out and buy a ticket to this show right now."
That abundance of caution is taking the day off. If you're free tomorrow night, you need to run out and buy a ticket to our concert. (And you need to hurry, because a glance at our online ticketing system tells me that we don't seem to have many seats left.) Because what we're doing this week presents one of those rare chances to see something that you've probably never seen before in your life, and may never get a chance to see again.
Last summer, when I saw on our preliminary 2007-08 schedule that we would be mounting a two-week mini-festival of film music, I must admit that I didn't expect it to be a highlight of the year. Orchestras play movie music all the time these days, and too often, it's just an excuse to slap the "serious music" tag on something that's little more than a glorified pops concert. (I mean, honestly, I liked Pirates of the Caribbean, too, but that score is five minutes of cliched dreck repeated for two hours. And don't get me started on Lord of the Rings.) Seldom do you see an orchestra really make an effort to communicate just what it is about music and cinema that inspires such powerful emotion in us. It's not that we can't do it - it's that it's easier just to play Star Wars again, and the tickets cost the same either way.
But my cynicism proved to be unfounded this time. The centerpiece of our Sounds of Cinema festival (which does, yes, include a pops show hosted by George Takei of Star Trek fame) is a live performance of the complete scores to two classic silent films, as the movies play simultaneously on the big screen behind the orchestra. This week's flick is Charlie Chaplin's classic "Little Tramp" adventure, City Lights, which stands as one of the funniest and most poignant movies of all time, more than 75 years after it was made.
It's a huge undertaking to screen a film with a live orchestra providing the soundtrack, particularly when the score was composed specifically to complement Chaplin's side-splitting physical humor. It's not enough for the right tune to just more or less line up with the right scene - specific notes and phrases have to hit at the exact moment that the Little Tramp jumps in the air, or scratches his head, or tries to cope with a swallowed dog whistle. To that end, the conductor's score for this show (which is a whopping 455 pages, by the way - approximately equivalent to two of Mahler's longest symphonies) is filled not only with the usual staves of music, but with constant verbal cues as to what ought to be going on onscreen during any given measure. While leading us in what should sound like a normal performance, Osmo has to constantly dart his eyes between the score and the video monitor in front of his podium, making sure that his cues to us line up perfectly with instructions like "eyebrow lift," "taxi cab" and "fourth hiccup." If he misses a single cue, or fails to follow the exact tempo indicated for a given section, we'll be out of sync with the movie. Meanwhile, the hardest part for the orchestra is keeping our eyes on our parts and Osmo rather than twisting around to watch the screen.
We did the first performance of City Lights this morning, and judging from the waves of laughter rolling through the audience throughout, I think we hit our marks. Osmo really seems remarkably at ease with the score (although he did admit in rehearsal yesterday that "I have been practicing at home with a DVD, and I know it is the same movie, but this feels like a different version!"), and the music itself, which Chaplin wrote with the help of an orchestrator, is fantastic stuff, dipping and rolling all over the place and changing tempos ever so slightly to indicate when a character is getting tired, or drunk, or whatever.
The movie lasts just under 90 minutes, and with the exception of a 70-second stretch during which recorded sound effects take over for a particular Chaplin gag, the orchestra plays continuously for the entire length of the film. It's exhausting, but man, it's fun, and having watched City Lights several times before, I can honestly say that the live music is vastly superior to the tinny (and, frankly, not very well played) recorded version of Chaplin's score that accompanies the copy of the movie that you can watch at home.
If you really can't make it out to the Friday performance, or if big epic dramas are more your speed, come see us next Saturday, when we'll be rolling five or six Shostakovich symphonies into a massive live soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. I promise you won't regret it.
1) Upon meeting someone in front of the South Carolina State House, I'm asked "What do you do?" "I'm a conductor" "Is that with an orchestra?" "Yes it is, in fact, I'm conducting a concert here on Saturday night." "Are y'all playing Enigma Variations by Elgar? That's my favorite song!"
Never mind that they called it a song, not a piece - it's both surprising and delightful to hear things like this.
2) The delectable-ness of shrimp and grits owes more to bacon and butter than to the shrimp and grits.
3) There are an extraordinary number of people in a hotel fitness room at 9 o'clock at night (perhaps connected to the aforementioned shrimp and grits?).
A South Carolina newspaper ran a very nice profile of our Ms. Hicks this past weekend, in advance of concerts she'll be conducting there this week. I suspect that she's far too modest to post it herself, but I wanted to call attention to it for a couple of reasons.
The first is that the article talks openly about the fact that Sarah is a candidate for the music directorship of the orchestra she's conducting, the South Carolina Philharmonic. This is highly unusual: orchestras usually treat music director searches as covert operations which risk disaster if anyone in the general public even knows who the candidates are. (Osmo Vänskä was virtually unknown to Minnesota audiences when we announced him as our tenth music director in 2002, partly because we wanted to be sure that we snapped him up before any other American orchestras started sniffing around and beat us to him.) The SCP is taking a very different approach, announcing its seven finalists for the job (The Magnificent Seven - hee!), and inviting the public to hear them each conduct over the course of the current season. I would imagine that this ups the pressure on the candidates considerably, of course, but it's also a great way to get the audience involved with the orchestra and impart a sense of real civic ownership to the community.
My second reason for highlighting the article is that it includes a story Sarah told at one of our post-concert Q&A sessions last November, about how she came to take up conducting after being dealt a devastating physical blow in her quest to become a concert pianist.
"She developed tendinitis, a chronic inflammation of the cords that attaches muscles to bones. The condition often affects pianists — but usually not at 17. It was unclear what she should do.
Then her father took her aside and said, 'You can still hold a baton, you’re musical, you’re organized.'" - The State (Columbia, SC)
Tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome, often dismissed as minor ailments suffered by cubicle drones and typists, are actually some of the most widespread and career-threatening conditions encountered by musicians. It makes sense when you consider the physical nature of what we really do for a living, which is to repeat the same small muscle motions thousands of times in a row, at an abnormally high rate of speed. It is a rare musician who hasn't experienced some level of pain while playing, and a majority of us will become injured enough to prevent us from playing at all at some point during our careers. The specific nature of the injuries varies from instrument to instrument - cellists are famous for developing back and neck problems, violists get a lot of shoulder injuries, and wind players have a whole range of mouth-related problems to contend with - but the risk is always there, and few orchestras go a season without a few players hitting the injured reserve list, as it were.
What makes Sarah's case different, particularly for such a young musician as she was when her tendinitis took hold, is that she stayed in the business. Most of us who play music for a living never really wanted to do anything else, and our training forces us to zero in, laser-like, on that goal. So when something as frightening and potentially life-altering as a performance injury is suddenly staring you in the face, it's a natural reaction to want to turn away from the business completely. One very talented violist I went to college with was stricken with severe tendinitis in grad school, and changed gears completely to become a graphic designer. One former Minnesota Orchestra cellist went back to school after injuries ended her performing career, and is now a practicing lawyer. After all, if you can't do the thing that you believe you were born to do, why would you want to seek a job on the periphery of the same profession, forever reminding yourself of what might have been?
Sarah didn't do that, though. I'm sure that when she got hurt, she felt the same bone-deep terror we all feel the first time we have to miss a concert because our bodies have suddenly stopped working the way they're supposed to, and I'm sure she entertained plenty of thoughts about what else she might do with her life besides play the piano. But she chose not only to stick with music, but to take a stab at a job which is far, far more difficult in every way than that of any instrumentalist. I'm sure she's cringing to read this, but it's true: not many of us would have the fortitude or the confidence to make the decision she did, and even fewer of us would have had the personal and musical strength to succeed at it. It's a remarkable story, if you ask me, and one that Sarah tells completely cavalierly, as if everyone had at some point in their life had their dreams ripped away from them and then replaced them with bigger ones. I'd like to think I'd have had the same sense of commitment in her place, but I know better than to assume that I would have.
Postscript for anyone I freaked out back in the second paragraph: It would be entirely possible for Sarah to become music director of an orchestra in South Carolina and remain on our staff (and in her role with Inside the Classics) at the same time. You may feel free to root for her without fear of it coming back to bite you. (Besides, she's under contract in Minneapolis for a few years yet...)
Check out this interesting, if slightly baffling, MSN.com article on careers with fast-growing salaries. According to these statistics, salaries of "music directors and composers" are growing by 5.6% every year. Which is all fine and well (hey, we're doing better than film and video editors!).
What I'm a little baffled about is the combination of music director and composer - it seems positively...18th or 19th century. I can't think of very many people who fit this bill these days (Boulez? ) unless we're talking more about the entertainment industry. Or maybe composers and conductors are so difficult to differentiate for the non-classical fan that it makes sense to lump us all into one category (and conductors are just serving the composers' visions anyway, right?).
Our latest question comes from Don Picard, who asks...
Q: From your two perspectives, what skills mark the difference between an average orchestra conductor, a good conductor and a truly great conductor?
Don, you may or may not know it, but that is the kind of question that just begs a musician to give back a smartass answer. Honestly, I thought of six punchlines before I even began to consider that you might be serious! However, as part of my continuing effort to behave as if I am older than 14, I have searched high and low to find the definitive answer to your query.
To start with, we should let Sarah have her say, which is likely to be far more erudite and (let's face it) informed than anything I might come up with...
Sarah's Answer:Here are the essential proficiencies that any conductor must master to be able to conduct at any level at all: a strong background in theory and harmony; a highly developed ear (the ability to hear discrete pitches, harmonies and individual voices within larger textures); the ability to read and analyze a score (including score reading at the keyboard); mastery in one or more instruments and an excellent grasp of the mechanics and proclivities of all orchestral instruments; knowledge of the core orchestral repertoire and the stylistic elements contained therein; a gestural vocabulary that is reasonably clear and instructive; and an essential understanding of musical phrasing and the ability to communicate it. The average conductor would have all of the above skills and qualities.
Now here's where it gets a little more nebulous, for me, at least. A good conductor would fulfill (and really excel at some of) the above. In addition, they possess the ability to inspire (a real intangible!), a strong musical viewpoint (and not of the "because I feel it" variety - it comes from an intimate knowledge of the score), and leadership skills (another intangible - a good conductor can, in many different ways, coax and cajole an ensemble to their musical viewpoint - inability to do so means the inability to express that viewpoint at all.)
Even more ambiguous are those qualities that make a conductor great. For me, the essential element is the existence of an overarching individual musical aesthetic that comes from deep understanding of scores and the innate grasp of larger musical structure. The best conductors, in other words, have an incredible understanding of music and of the flow of music within the flow of time - they can take the audience (and orchestra) on a real voyage over the course of a piece of music. Many very good conductors will give you an exciting performance full of peaks and valleys, but for me, this is an episodic approach to making music that ignores the larger viewpoint, the one that makes it feel "right" when you reach the last chord, that takes you somewhere and brings you back.
It's all kind of ambiguous, isn't it? Great conductors have "It", and "It" is hard to describe. The greatest conductors aren't bound by some of the conditions of basic conducting, either - conducting technique itself seems less relevant when there is a truly powerful musical viewpoint behind it, because the force of that viewpoint can overcome any technical shortcomings. And then there is the tricky issue of charisma - some conductors are charismatic because of their musicality (usually in the "good" or "great" category) while others are personally charismatic (and musicianship can be anywhere on the spectrum), so this is not necessarily a good measure.
Okay, it's Sam again. Contrary to my earlier flippancy, it turns out that musicians have some pretty good answers to this question as well. So last week, while the orchestra was recording a couple of Beethoven symphonies, I began accosting people backstage more or less at random, and asked for their thoughts. The result, in podcast form, is here...
That's the title of the song written specifically about Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul by a supporter and musician named Steve Dorr. Yes, dear friends, it's primary season, and I've been glued to CNN on many a night, awaiting caucus results with absolute fascination. No, I have to confess, my interest is not purely political (although there is a LOT of interest going on there...) - rather, I wait with baited breath to hear what music the candidates play at their rallies and concession speeches.
A quick glance at Hillary Clinton's list shows quite a variety, running the gamut from the Police's "Every little thing she does is magic" to Dolly Parton's "Working 9 to 5" (I particularly like the line of pouring yourself a "cup of ambition"). Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have used Stevie Wonder's "Signed, sealed delivered", and several candidates play Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' care of business". Anyone in PR or marketing can tell you, music is crucial to the "sell", a subtle and subconscious way to get a message across, set a mood, project an image. In fact, quite a bit has been written about the effect of the candidates' musical choice - I particularly like University of California musicology professor Robert Fink's take on U2's "Beautiful day":
"The effect [of the U2 song] is uniformly reported to be exhilarating, and you can see how a song that relies for its feeling on the simultaneous sensation of fast-forward motion and slowly changing harmonic scenery -- old and new at the same time, moving very fast, yet feeling safe and secure -- would appeal to candidates trying to appear both energetic forces for change and reassuring figures of stability."
(For a pretty comprehensive list of tunes, check out the tail end of this article).
For me the most memorable campaign tune is Fleetwood Mac's "Don't stop (thinking about tomorrow)", which became the anthem for Clinton/Gore in 1992 - a song so identified with the campaign that President Clinton persuaded the then-disbanded group to reform to perform it for his inaugural ball in 1993. (I confess a lot of the memorable-ness has to do with the fact that it was the first election I ever participated in...)
Which all makes me think, if we could have a song (or any piece of music, really) start playing the minute we walked into a room, what would it be?
It's been a while since we caught up on our Ask An Expert questions, mainly because I got a batch of them around Christmastime, and promptly forgot about them in my post-holiday daze. Here's a good one from Lakisha Jones:
Q: When there is an event such as someone singing with the orchestra, does the orchestra get to pick who they want to sing with? And if so, how do they choose who they perform with?
Ohhhh, Lakisha, you are about to get a longer answer than you probably wanted. See, glancing through my schedule book, I see that the Minnesota Orchestra will play host to no fewer than 56 soloists (instrumental and vocal) in the 2007-08 season alone! (And that doesn't include Sommerfest - which typically tacks on another dozen or so - or the various guest speakers, choruses and children's choirs that we bring in for several shows each year.) Where do all these people come from?
The short answer is that no, the musicians of the orchestra do not get an official vote on what soloists are engaged to play with us, nor, I think, would we particularly want one. The music world changes so fast, and incredible young musicians turn up in our profession so frequently these days, that those of us making our living within a large ensemble in a single city could never hope to keep track of them all. Certainly, when we play with someone we love, many of us make a point of telling those in charge that we'd like to see them again, and in the rare event that we feel a soloist is perhaps not up to our standard, there are channels through which we can make that clear as well. Our management is pretty good about being responsive to our concerns, but there's no question that booking soloists does not fall to those of us in the band.
That job is actually shared by a number of people, but the guy at the top of the list is our vice president and general manager, Bob Neu. I asked Bob to summarize just exactly how he goes about choosing soloists and planning our seasons, and his response follows:
Bob's Answer: The process is one that is on-going and ever-changing. Our future planning is quite far out and in various stages. For example:
2008-'09 season - Completely finished.
'09-'10 - All conductors hired, most soloists hired, touring planned, most large projects in place
'10-'11 - Schedule is laid out, Osmo's weeks are secured, a couple of major artists tied to major projects are in place.
'11-'12 - Just laying out the schedule.
As Music Director, Osmo has the final voice in the guest artists that are engaged. I try to serve as his sounding board, editor and organizer. To that end, I keep all kinds of lists reminding us of who needs to be brought back, who we're curious about, who's just starting to emerge as an important artist, and who might be an interesting gamble. Part of my job is to stay on top of this by keeping in touch with the industry - daily reading includes The New York Times, Financial Times of London (great arts reporting), and the London Times. Monthly reading includes Opera News and BBC Music Magazine, lots of internet monitoring, and talking with my colleagues around the country and in Europe. I don't actually listen to a lot of recordings but strongly prefer hearing potential soloists in a live performance situation. You learn a lot more that way! I also spend a great deal of time being sure that the artists' managers are connected to the Orchestra and feeling positive about us. Most of the managers are located in New York and London so this entails lots of phone and e-mail time and I make a point of going to both locations at least twice a year to make personal calls on these companies, essentially serving as an ambassador for Osmo and the Orchestra.
In planning a season, we try to have a mixture of established talent, artists who are emerging with major careers, and artists who are perhaps not so well known but whom we think show enormous potential and deserve opportunities. Osmo also believes very strongly in featuring our own musicians as soloists. We also consider a mix of instruments - by virtue of repertoire, this tends to be weighted towards pianists and violinists, but we try to add variety. (An amazing percussion ensemble from Sweden, Kroumata, will be with us later this season.) And like pretty much everyone else, I work within a budget, so that is an additional consideration. Happily, I work with a Music Director who understands that and appreciates the balance of "art vs. commerce."
Last but not least, one has to actually engage the artist by making sure he/she is available for the period we're filling, as well as determining if they're offering compatible concerto choices (sometimes we suggest a concerto, sometimes the artist does), and finding out if the artist wants to come to Minneapolis to perform with the orchestra and conductor. The latter is never a problem given the quality and reputation of the Orchestra and of Osmo. In fact, a good amount of my time is spent (tactfully, I hope) NOT engaging artists who clamor to be here but that we aren't able to engage for one reason or another.
I can't really say how long it takes to plan a season since we're always working on several seasons at once and things move around and change up until sometimes just day before a season is announced. It's very much a jigsaw puzzle, but yet it all has considerable thoughtfulness behind it. It's great fun to tackle, and Osmo's leadership in the process is fantastic. His tastes and preferences are specific and strong, and that makes my job a lot easier.
Oh, boy, this would be an interesting one - check out this recent article from the Guardian. Just what we need; "celebrity would-be conductors". I really waffle on stuff like this. On one hand, I'm always delighted to have orchestral music out there in the mainstream. On the other hand, I cringe to think that a TV show like the one the BBC proposes might suggest that anyone could go pick up a baton and fancy themselves a conductor... but I think I would definitely tune in to watch what happens!
It's gotten awfully serious around these parts lately, so I thought we could all use a good laugh. To that end, here's one of my favorite bits of musical comedy: Anna Russell's hilarious summation of Wagner's Ring cycle of operas. There's actually a lot more to it than this - the full routine lasts more than 20 minutes, and is well worth a listen.
Russell was a classically trained singer living in Canada when she came to the difficult realization that her voice (which was quite shrill) was unlikely to lead her to a glorious operatic career, and she began to peddle herself as something of an educational speaker on music for adults, putting together quite the variety of routines as she did so. ("How To Enjoy Your Bagpipe" is a classic, as is her song for overly dramatic sopranos, Schreechenrauf.) Through sheer persistence (most audiences outside of her home city of Toronto had no idea what to make of her for a very long time,) she became a huge star all across North America, and her albums have never, to my knowledge, gone out of print. There would be other musical comedians after her - notably Victor Borge and Peter Schickele, both brilliant in their own ways - but in my opinion, no one was ever more simultaneously entertaining, informative, and welcoming to the world of this supposedly "serious" music than Russell.
Before I get to responding to the commentary about "overfunding" arts organizations, many readers of Tindall's tome have expressed anything from mild surprise to outright shock regarding the more intimate details of Tindall's social life. While she makes clear that these are her own personal experiences and not the general modus operandi of working musicians, she does paint a rather unflattering picture of many New York orchestral musicians drowning in booze, dabbling (or more) in hard drugs and engaging in frolicsome sex lives (apparently mostly of the extramarital variety). To those who are terribly surprised by this, all I can say is, while we may look so dignified, formal and disciplined onstage, classical musicians are people too, prone to the same temptation and indulgence as anyone else, if not more so (hey, it's the artistic temperament). Sex, drugs, and Rachy 2, right??
Now, for the serious stuff. I tend to agree with Sam's response that arts organizations are neither overabundant nor overfunded. As for overabundance, I would point out that, for instance, there is only one 52-week opera house in the United States (the Met) - compare that to, say, Germany, with over 80 year-round houses, and one only begins to scratch the surface of the paucity of classical music organizations in this country. Budgetary issues of orchestras in this country are not surprising; they are costly ventures that, in all other parts of the world, are supported in most part by government subsidies and national funding. US orchestras have no such systematic and traditional support (and we in the orchestra business, I feel, tend to be unnecessarily apologetic about the necessity of this kind of backing - another great topic for a later post).
And I would, like Sam, argue that a great deal of this issue lies in performing arts administration - mostly, I think, because it is essentially still in its nascence (relatively speaking). One must consider that it was really post World War II when many of the big orchestras we know now expanded their seasons to become truly full-time, and the real flowering of arts organizations began in the late 50's and 60's. This is essentially a very new business, still (particularly in the smaller markets) run by boards and administrators who have little or no experience in the field (much less training specific to this particular type of non-profit organization.) Much of the music we play has been around for centuries. But the business of running an orchestra in this country? Merely decades.
As for the inflated salaries of superstar soloists and conductors, it could be argued that they can be excessive - again, a whole other topic for another time. And I'm not sure that Tindall's assertion is necessarily that this is the cause of suppressed salaries for working musicians, because it really makes a difference just which working musicians you are talking about - have you seen what some orchestral players make, particularly in the top 10 orchestras in this country? As my own little aside, I think the greater imbalance lies in the discrepancy in orchestra salaries, particularly when one considers this; say that East Coast Orchestra P, with a 52 week season (and 10 weeks paid vacation - so, 42 weeks of work) pays upwards of $110K as its base salary, and that East Coast Orchestra R, with a 38 week season (no paid vacation, about 86% the number of total performances as Orchestra P) offers a base salary in the mid $20Ks. Hierarchies and inequity can be found everywhere...
If you're a Facebook type (and really, who isn't these days?) you should check out the new Event page I just threw together for our next Inside the Classics concert, which is now a mere three weeks away! We really are relying on word of mouth to spread interest in the series, so if you were at our November concerts, or if you've been enjoying the blog, please take a minute to join the guest list and invite a few friends! You can also post on the event wall, upload any cool photos you have of the Firebird concert (which you weren't really supposed to be taking, but whatever, it's the age of unlimited content, right?), and generally help us evangelize ourselves. Just, y'know, if that sounds like something you'd like to do.
Sarah and I have been thrilled with the response to the blog that we've gotten in a relatively short period of time, so any help you guys can give us in filling the hall would be much appreciated! We'll have more about our preparations for the Tchaikovsky show over the coming weeks here on the blog, so keep checking in regularly, and let us know if there's anything specific you'd like to hear about in the runup to the concerts...
I want to go back to something Sarah was writing about last week - the idea that our conservatories and music academies are currently overflowing with aspiring musicians, many of whom are simply never going to find permanent, steady employment in this field. Sarah was very kind to suggest that the problem here is simply an issue of supply outstripping demand, but I'll take it one step further: many college students majoring in music are simply not good enough musicians to ever have a real hope of making it in the professional world, and no one is telling them this!
This is a bigger problem than I think we want to acknowledge. It certainly doesn't apply to all schools - Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, for example, is still small and exclusive enough that it accepts only the very, very best young musicians, all of whom have at least a chance of finding success in this highly competitive field - but I believe it applies to most. I attended a fairly prestigious conservatory with a strong reputation and plenty of alumni spread across the music world, and I was consistently shocked by the presence of students who were clearly deluding themselves in pursuing a career in music. I'm not talking about other violists who I somehow felt didn't measure up to my own abilities here. (If anything, I have a bad habit of always assuming that I'm the worst player in any given room, and my college studio was a pretty non-competitive one in any case.) I'm talking about people with little to no sense of rhythm, pitch, or musicianship, who were somehow being allowed to train professionally for a job which they would clearly never be able to perform.
Now, I know that everyone, regardless of profession, knew people in college who were just sloughing along, wasting their parents' money and minoring in drug use and slacking while doing just enough work towards their degree to avoid flunking out. These people presumably found work of one sort or another after graduation, even if it had little to do with the profession they were ostensibly training for in school, so what's the big deal if a few wannabe musicians end up chucking the business after they leave school?
But this is exactly the problem. With a few exceptions such as pre-med, most undergraduate majors at American liberal arts colleges are designed not just to train you for a specific job, but to give you a complete and well-rounded education that will serve you well professionally even if your life takes an unexpected turn after you leave school. Music schools are different - in fact, they're less like colleges than they are like trade schools, academies for the focused instruction of a single topic. The upshot is that people who graduate with a Bachelor of Music degree are usually trained and prepared for one and only one professional sphere. And it is a sphere that many of them are wholly unprepared to enter, and will have little chance of ever breaking into.
The more self-aware of this unfortunate group may realize quickly that they are out of their depth as performers, and seek another professional path before it's too late. But what most non-musicians don't realize is that, once you leave school, you receive almost no feedback on your playing from other musicians (auditions are anonymous exercises, remember,) with the result that it is entirely possible for an inadequate musician to continue bumbling along on the fringes of the business, convinced that only bad luck and vast conspiracies are keeping them from full and satisfying employment.
This is a tough problem to attack, especially for those of us who have had a modicum of success in the business. Among freelance musicians, there is a very real (if frequently unspoken) belief that those with full-time gigs have just gotten lucky. In the same way, freelancers who have trouble getting even menial gigs are often convinced that those at the top of the gig ladder have gotten there not through superior musicianship, but by playing the political game. (Fueling these delusions, of course, are the undeniable facts that a) luck does play a role, albeit a small one, in a successful audition, and b) there are political games being played in most professional situations.) It's a simple human defense mechanism: admitting failure is much, much harder than finding an alternate explanation that involves someone else's sinister machinations.
So what's the solution? I'm tempted simply to say that conservatories need to stop admitting so many students, and teachers at the collegiate level have to start being honest with their underperforming charges. You could even make a case that undergraduate schools that aren't prepared to seriously train top young musicians for the professional world have no business even offering a music major. It's fine for the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople to have an orchestra, and even to offer private lessons. But a major indicates that, after four years, the school expects that you will be prepared for a career, and most undergraduate music departments can't come close to fulfilling that promise for most students.
I know that it isn't as simple as that. Teachers are supposed to encourage their students to improve, and if they bail on all but the obvious prodigies, a lot of promising young musicians might never have a chance to fulfill their potential. (I might actually have fallen into that group, since I know for a fact that I didn't work nearly hard enough in my first couple of years at Oberlin, and only woke up to the reality of my situation in my junior year.) And maybe this whole thing isn't as big a problem as I think it is - I know more than a few former classmates who've gone on to non-performing jobs on the fringes of the music business and are perfectly happy.
But I also know a lot of musicians who were probably never going to be good enough to make it, but were never told so, or never believed it if they were. And after years of watching success elude them, I've watched them slip into some very, very dark places. And every time I see it, I just wonder what might have happened if, back when they first considered majoring in music, someone had taken them aside, and said: hey, c'mon - we both know this isn't for you.
CORRECTION/APOLOGY, appended 01/08: In a response to Don Picard's comment below, which references the book, "Mozart in the Jungle" by Blair Tindall, I explained my skepticism of Ms. Tindall's conclusions in part by claiming that she had been sloppy and inaccurate on several important points in an article written for the New York Times about the Minnesota Orchestra in 2004. A wounded and mystified Ms. Tindall subsequently replied in the comments, as well as in private communications to me, that she could remember writing no such article, and in fact that she didn't work for the Times in 2004.
She is absolutely correct, and I was clearly the sloppy and inaccurate one. Somehow, in a raft of follow-up correspondence (most of it written more than a year after the article ran) with concerned musicians' union leaders, Ms. Tindall's name got substituted for the name of the actual author of the piece, Cori Ellison. I've deleted my original comment containing the incorrect assertions. I've reposted the part of my comment that was relevant to Don Picard's original question at the bottom of the comments. My sincerest apologies not only to Ms. Tindall, but to anyone who was misinformed by my sloppiness.
Wrapping up my favorite concerts of the year, two in particular stood out this past fall...
9. Shostakovich Violin Concerto w/Lisa Batiashvili - October 6, Orchestra Hall Orchestra musicians and soloists have an interesting relationship. More accurately, we generally have a complete lack of a relationship. We (orchestra players) are always in the same place, the same city, playing on the same stage with the same people. They (soloists) are nomads, wandering the Earth and performing with nearly any orchestra that will have them. We usually see them for only an hour or two of rehearsal before the performance, and unless one of us grew up with the soloist du jour, there isn't a lot of personal contact backstage - they stay in their dressing rooms, we in our musicians' lounge.
So when a soloist's performance causes an orchestra to buzz for days on end, it's an event. And Lisa Batiashvili's debut with the Minnesota Orchestra this fall was one of those times. Her Shostakovich was brilliant, yes, but more than that, her overall musicianship and stunning technique had many members of the orchestra excitedly telling each other, "We ought to get her back to play [ridiculously difficult and exciting concerto x] next time!" From the reaction of the critics and audience members in attendance (and at least one reader of this blog,) it was evident that everyone was in agreement. I suspect we'll be seeing Lisa again as soon as she has an open date in her schedule.
10. Mendelssohn Symphony No. 4 (Italian) - November 21, Orchestra Hall I really don't know why we bother having concerts the week of Thanksgiving. Very few people come to them, and having to play the night before and night after the holiday merely insures that none of us ever get to travel to spend the holiday with family out of state. Furthermore, there have been years in which the programming seems directly at odds with the festive spirit of Thanksgiving week (the year in which we engaged Oliver Knussen to conduct a concert of his own highly complex and difficult music stands out in particular.)
But this year, Thanksgiving week saw us playing an up-tempo program culminating with one of my favorite symphonies, led by the conductor who always leads the field whenever Minnesota Orchestra musicians are polled on the subject of who we should consider hiring as a principal guest conductor. I've blogged about Gilbert Varga before, and I've honestly never heard a musician say a bad word about him, which is pretty rare for a conductor. The level of respect that we have for him is so high that, early in the week, when he didn't like the way we were playing the first movement of the Mendelssohn, not a single person appeared to take any offense at all when he snapped, "You're too good an orchestra to be playing it like that!" It wasn't an attack, it was a statement of fact wrapped up in a backhanded compliment, and because we know and respect Varga, we all took it as exactly that.
Largely because of Varga's uncompromising insistence on quick tempos and intense drive, the Mendelssohn had an unmistakable intensity and brilliant shine to it, and I had a fantastic time playing it all week. Even in the hands of good orchestras, the first and last movements of the piece are too often sloppy and rhythmically lazy, and a turkey hangover could have made things even worse, but Varga's enthusiasm is decidedly infectious, and prevented any such pitfalls. I don't think we've ever played a better Thanksgiving concert in my time here.
So that's my list, and you're all welcome to chime in with your own favorites (or busts) of '07 in the comments. The orchestra reconvenes next week, when we'll spend five days making the last recording in our cycle of Beethoven symphonies before starting up the concerts again. The coming month will feature a two-week mini-festival of great film music (culminating with a full performance of Shostakovich's score for Battleship Potemkin with the film playing on a giant screen behind us); a pops show hosted by Star Trek star George Takei; a children's concert focusing on Scheherezade; and of course, our next Inside the Classics concert, featuring Peter McGuire on the Tchaikovsky violin concerto on January 30 & 31. Hopefully, we'll see you all there!
We tend to think of Christmas as the big "musical" holiday - what with the Nutcrackers, Messiahs, caroling and holiday concerts and all - but New Years has its own musical delights.
As I nurse my champagne hangover this afternoon, I'm enjoying a Great Performances broadcast of the 2006 Metropolitan Opera "Live in HD" version of Mozart's "Magic Flute". It's a Julie Taymor production (she of the Broadway "Lion King" fame), and it's visually quite stunning (I laughed out loud to the floating food scene - you've gotta see it), and of course the music is wonderful. Immediately following is the New Year's Concert with the Vienna Philharmonic (complete, in its broadcast form, with ballroom dancers and prancing Lipizzaners). This year, Georges Pretre becomes the first Frenchman to conduct this annual concert in its nearly 70-year history.
But my favorite turn-of-year musical extravaganza is the inimitable "Red and White Song Festival" (Kohaku Uta Gassen), the annual Japanese music show of the NHK broadcasting company. Essentially, there are two teams: "Red" (women) and "White" (men), all popular singers of all genres, from teeny pop to old fashioned enka. There are judges, an audience vote, and a team is named winner a few minutes before midnight. It's been a Japanese tradition since 1951 - it's exquisitely over-the-top, full of jaw-dropping costumes and performances. In fact, a performance by DJ Ozma last year included costumes so...realistic, shall we say...that NHK was barraged by outraged viewers for days on end (really, watch that video to the end!). It's all in good fun, and a big part of my early childhood - I spent most of my winter breaks in Tokyo with the Japanese side of the family, and watching Kohaku was a great tradition.
Wishing all of you a healthy, happy, music-filled New Year!
