Big week, Part II

A quick follow-up to Part I, which covered the choice of repertoire for my subscription concerts last week.

During the first rehearsal last week, I opened by mentioning to the Orchestra that over the course of my two seasons with them, I had conducted over 70 performances (yes, I counted!), and of those, not a single one received more that one rehearsal, which was kind of an astonishing thought. All of our Inside the Classics, Pops, Sampler/Preview, educational and outreach concerts are done on a single rehearsal, and preparing a show on one rehearsal is a skill set unto itself, and one I feel like I've pretty well mastered. The pace is relentless, and there is little time to go back and fix anything but the most egregious of errors. (During a recent Sommerfest concert, I recall, we were missing the ending to a piece due to a library mishap. We had no time to fix and rehearse, so we simply crossed our fingers and played it for the first time in the performance that night with a singer, no less!) What counts most is absolute clarity of intent.

But rehearsing a subscription week is an utterly different experience, and I often had to remind myself to slow down my usual hyper-efficient pace - we had four whole rehearsals - a luxury in itself. More rehearsal times means more time to work on the larger musical shape of a piece, as well as tackling the smallest details. Often, on those one-rehearsal shows (and particularly if it's something unfamiliar), I feel I have to pull the ensemble along by sheer force of will. Having the time to work on passages over multiple rehearsals helps us establish a groove together, which means that come concert times there are sections which will simply "happen", ensemble-wise, which allows me to focus more on the purely musical aspects.

Rehearsing is an interesting psychological process as well, because over the course of those 9 or so hours, one establishes a certain synthesis through both compulsion and compromise. It's never lost on me that an orchestra is a collection of individuals, and the concomitant variety of predilections and perspectives; it's the conductor's job to get everyone on board with a single viewpoint, and so it needs to be one that everyone can respect even if they don't necessarily agree with it.

In the end, for me, the rehearsals are the most challenging (and thus the most interesting!) part of the whole process. Concerts are thrilling, yes, but we couldn't have gotten to that point without the work before. Performing, despite its conclusive nature, is the easy part, where you enjoy the fruits of your labor; the magic of a concert can only come from cumulative, careful work in rehearsal.