Dog day afternoon

Those are my lovely girls, Bamse (the hairy German Shepherd in the back) and Sieglinde (my deaf mutt), doing what they do best on a chilly Virginia afternoon (chilly being a relative term – it’s a balmy-for-Minnesota 40 degrees.)

While Sam’s been exploring the glorious northern hinterlands on the Orchestra’s State Tour, I’ve been home in Richmond, VA all week on some planned downtime. My schedule with the Minnesota Orchestra allows me these occasional breaks; although I’m frequently acting as cover conductor when I’m not conducting, I share those covering duties with our Associate Conductor, Mischa Santora, so when the stars align – Mischa’s covering and I’m not required to be somewhere else on a guest conducting stint – I get a glorious week at home with the husband and dogs (and, man, does absence makes the heart grow fonder…)

Downtime, of course, is a completely relative term, as I’m pretty much working every day when I’m home in Richmond, as evidenced by the state of my kitchen table, below:



(And yes, I do love a glass a wine when I’m working on Shostakovich.)

Weeks like this are a luxury because I can actually get up in the morning, have a leisurely cup of coffee and start going through scores without any time constraints whatsoever. During conducting weeks, it’s hard to find time to be studying other scores – and my brain’s filled with the stuff I’m performing that week. Covering weeks aren’t so bad – outside of rehearsals, I’ll have some free time to work on upcoming music, although my schedule is often crammed with the non-musical parts of the job – meetings, presentations – that need to happen while I’m in town. Guest conducting weeks can be impossible, particularly if I’m being trotted around for media interviews and board events. So when I can carve out a week at home, I’ll spend the time working on upcoming repertoire without distraction, which feels like an extravagance.

Most musicians I know always feel pressed for time to learn music, and conductors only more so. When you consider the schedule of a typical full-time orchestra, it’s easy to see why; the progression of concerts over the season is relentless (at least a full concert’s worth of music every week), frequently with only one day off every seven. It requires some pretty highly-developed time management to figure out how to be prepared in time for new repertoire or difficult pieces that are coming up.

Whenever I can I try to prepare pieces many weeks out, if not months. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, preparing a score is labor- and time-intensive venture. I always calculate, for a new piece, that for every hour of music, I really need about 20 hours to feel comfortable with it on the podium (and of course, every conductor is different, as is every situation – I’ve certainly had to do pieces on nothing more on a couple of hours notice, and then you just cross your fingers and hope the orchestra is aware of the situation…). And the vagaries of the human mind make it so that those 20 hours are better spent over a longer period of time than crammed into a couple of days, which is where all that time management comes in handy.

So take a look at that pic of my messy kitchen table again – I snapped this shot because I found it so indicative of the learning process that I had to capture it for posterity. Shostakovich Symphony #5 is for tomorrow, when I’ll be reading it with the orchestra at the University of Minnesota; Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra is for next season (October, to be exact); the Copland Ballet Music compilation includes “Appalachian Spring” is for our next Inside the Classics at the end of April; and the Debussy compilation on the bottom includes L’apres midi d’une faune, which I’m doing in a Young People’s Concert in a few weeks. And in the foreground, open, is Schoenberg’s Ode a Napoleon, because it’s cool, and this is one of those few weeks where I can crack open a score just because I like it…

…or just lie about with my dogs, the ultimate activity for a quiet Sunday afternoon.