100% Organic

Well, before getting sidetracked back there by disruptive clappers, I promised a great story about the specific associations orchestras can form with certain pieces of music. Those few of you who've been nosing around this blog since the beginning may already know this one - we talked about it on our first podcast back in November - but it's my favorite MN Orch story ever, and most of you probably didn't make it all the way through that magnum opus of an audio file, so here's the written version...

It happened in the summer of 2000, I believe, although it could have been 2001. It was a summer season concert of light classics - operatic stuff, mostly. On the podium was a conductor of some international reputation. Since I like my job, let's call him Gus.

Anyway. One of the works on the program was the omnipresent Intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. So we're slogging through it in rehearsal, and suddenly, Gus stops us, and snaps, "Where is the organ?" Well, none of us knew that there was an organ part for that piece, and apparently, neither did our keyboardist, because he wasn't even in the building. Gus insisted that there was an organ part doubling the strings in the middle section (the main melody), and that he had to have it, or the show could not go on. So the personnel manager arranged for the keyboardist to come in that afternoon for a special one-on-one rehearsal with the conductor, and we finished the morning rehearsal without incident.



Now, we don't have a real, full-size organ at Orchestra Hall, and the really high-quality electronic one takes quite a long time to set up and takes up a lot of space on stage, so for this brief piece, our keyboardist was using a small, high-end synthesizer pumped through the house sound system. You wouldn't want to use it for anything too important, but it sounds like an organ, so no big deal. But we would later find out that, during the afternoon one-on-one, Gus continually insisted that the organ was not nearly loud enough. Our stage crew tried to explain that it would be much louder that evening, with the board operator controlling the volume level from the back of the hall, but he would have none of it, and was reaching over the keyboard player to turn volume knobs and generally do anything he could to make the little keyboard louder.

None of the rest of us knew any of this, of course, and that night, we arrived at the Intermezzo, and began to play, with the synthesizer stationed near the door at stage right. We in the strings played the introductory segment, took a hefty luftpause, and began to launch into the slow, sweet melody that everyone knows. Immediately, it was clear that many, many, many things were horribly wrong. First of all, the organ, which had joined us in unison as requested, was playing at approximately the volume level of a jet engine, causing about half the audience to jump as if they'd been shot.

But this was not the worst of it. It seems that, in his rage at not being able to get the instrument loud enough in rehearsal, Gus had begun turning knobs more or less at random, and he had unknowingly turned the transposition knob one half-step to the sharp side. We had 60 string players sawing away in F major, and one impossibly loud organ doubling us in F#.

Even worse, the chaos of the moment utterly flustered our keyboardist, who… kept… playing. Gus was so apoplectic that he couldn't even signal a cutoff -- he just stood there on the podium, his arms fluttering and his face turning purple. The keyboardist knew something was wrong, obviously, but he wasn't entirely certain if it was him or not, and he figured that, with the organ turned up so loud, he'd better not just stop dead. So he kept on going. One of our percussionists was turning pages on the organ part, and actually considered pulling the power plug on the synth, but decided he'd better not chance it. Meanwhile, our friendly, supportive Minnesota audience was plastered against the back of their chairs by the dissonant noise.

After a couple of bars, when it became clear that the organ wasn't stopping, those of us with perfect pitch worked out what key it was playing in, and slid on up to join it, in the hope of salvaging something from the piece. But around that time, Gus cut through his near-paralysis with a mighty slash of his baton directed at the keyboardist, who, stunned, stopped playing immediately. So now, we had -- along with a significant decibel loss in the hall -- 30 string players in F, and 30 in F#. It took a full beat for us all to slide back down to the original key. By this time, one second violinist and one cellist were laughing so hard that they had had to stop playing entirely. The rest of us weren't too far behind. Gus was the color of a Minnesota Vikings helmet.

We finished the piece, somehow, and Gus stalked angrily offstage, with most of the audience sitting in stunned silence, and a few hardy Minnesotans offering polite applause. Before the door had even closed behind him, Gus was yelling in German at whatever unfortunate soul happened to have been standing in the wings. The orchestra burst into peals of laughter, except for the poor keyboardist, who had already made his escape from the building. A minute or so later, Gus stalked back out onstage, without a word or a smile or an apology to the audience, and continued the concert as if nothing had happened.

Every orchestra has a favorite train wreck story, but I've never heard a better one than ours. The only sad part is that our library claims not to have recorded the concert, so we don't actually have it on tape. But that's okay, really: to this day, whenever we play the Intermezzo, at least 4 or 5 string players are guaranteed to start the middle section a half-step high in the first rehearsal...

Light Blogging Ahead: This will likely be my last blog post for a couple of weeks, as I'm headed out East tomorrow to play and coach at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in rural New Hampshire. I'll try to post something while I'm there, but the nearest internet access is miles away, so no guarantees. I'll be back in Minneapolis somewhere around the 4th of July...