How To Make Your Orchestra Rock

A while back, we were talking about pops concerts, and why musicians frequently seem to have a bad attitude about playing them. Basically, it comes down to the high percentage of such shows that seem like they'd be better without the orchestra. When you sit down to play a concert with some famous pop singer, and the charts on your music stand consist of a bunch of long sustained tones and an occasional flourish at the beginning or end of a song, it's dispiriting. You feel like you're not contributing anything to the show, and in truth, you aren't.

But this weekend, we're doing a pops show that couldn't be more engaging, or fun, or make better use of the orchestra. The stars of the show will be the amazing Finnish vocal group, Rajaton, who you may have seen singing ABBA tunes with us in the past. This time, they're taking on the music of Queen, and regardless of how you feel about '70s music, there's no question that, like the ABBA show, this concert was designed with an orchestra in mind. And I can prove it. Exhibit A: It's a rare thing to get to a pops rehearsal and see this many notes on your stand...

(click the image to see it full size)

And that's a fairly typical page in this show. There are about 20 more just like it. It's actually fairly challenging to play, something that I'm not sure I've ever said about a pops show before. There are even a few viola solos! The entire band is really involved in what's going on musically, and there's a lot going on.

So who's responsible for these Rajaton shows being musically better than nearly any other pops concert I've ever been a part of? Well, when we played the ABBA concert, Osmo did some of the arrangements himself, and that made a huge difference. Not only is Osmo a reasonably good orchestrator, but he knows how an orchestra works. You'd be amazed at how many composers and arrangers don't. Only a musician who's really spent time in and around orchestras is going to know, for instance, that inner strings can do a lot to create interesting textures in the sound, or that there's no point in having the strings do a bunch of impressive-sounding passagework if you're going to have the entire brass section playing full force at the same time.

For the Queen concert, the arranger is Jaakko Kuusisto, who just happens to be the concertmaster of Osmo's "other" orchestra, Finland's Lahti Symphony. (If memory serves, Jaakko also did some of the ABBA arrangements.) He's also conducting the show, which he's done many, many times before in other cities. So right there, two important plusses: an arranger who knows as much about how to use the orchestra as it's possible to know, and a conductor who knows the material cold, and how best to take the orchestra through it in a short amount of time. (We only get one rehearsal for pops shows.)

That one rehearsal for the Queen show was this afternoon, and while we didn't technically get to hear Rajaton's part of the performance (long story, tell you later,) I'm blown away by the quality of the music. Jaakko even drops a few inside jokes into his arrangements - my sharp-eared stand partner, Megan Tam, noticed that, towards the end of We Are The Champions, the horns suddenly started playing the famous tune from the last movement of Sibelius's 5th Symphony! (Those Finns, honestly.) And because he's an orchestra musician himself, rehearsing with Jaakko on the podium felt like we were rehearsing a standard classical program. He speaks our language, and made sure that our parts spoke it, too.

Now, the obvious question: How soon can we get Jaakko to churn out a Spinal Tap pops show?