Harold In The Balcony

It's been an interesting week at Orchestra Hall, in part because we're working with one of my favorite guest conductors, in part because there was a 46-hour turkey-related gap between our first and second concerts of the week (always dangerous, since professional orchestras work by creating extremely fast muscle memory for each week's program, then discarding and starting again the next week,) but mostly because we're playing Berlioz's Harold in Italy, the world's strangest viola concerto.

In truth, Harold isn't a concerto at all. It's more of a symphonic tone poem which happens to feature a particular solo instrument. (Not unlike Strauss's Don Quixote, which features the cello and viola as the title character and his trusty sidekick.) For the bulk of the first movement of the piece, the viola is front and center, playing more or less as a soloist with the orchestra chiming in on several extended tutti passages. But in the second movement, the solo viola doesn't play a lot, and what he does play is mainly accompanying the melodic progression of the orchestra. In the third movement, the orchestra keeps playing the melodies, while the viola chimes in occasionally with a bit of an obligato over the top of things. And finally, the finale barely features the soloist at all, other than a few flourishes at the beginning that hearken back to earlier movements. In fact, some violists choose to either melt back into the orchestra at this point, or at least start playing the orchestral viola parts from the soloist's position, just to avoid having to spend ten minutes standing there looking like a dweeb while the orchestra finishes your concerto for you.

So while Harold is a very fun piece to play and listen to, it's a bit awkward to watch if you're used to the traditional interplay between orchestra and soloist. Our principal viola, Tom Turner, actually called a number of colleagues around the world before the week began to ask how they handle the odd semi-soloist role. He got a number of opinions, but nothing that really dealt with the problem. But on the second day of rehearsals, Tom and conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier hit on a bizarre but surprisingly effective solution.

(Spoiler Alert: I've waited to write about this until the end of the week, in case a bunch of you were planning to come to the concerts. But we've still got the Saturday night concert to come, so if you're holding tickets for tonight, or think you might want to stop by, you'll be wanting to wait to read the rest of this post. Trust me - the whole effect is much more fun if you don't know what's coming ahead of time...)

So, what happens in the Tortelier/Turner version of Harold is that, towards the end of the first movement, when the viola has played its last solo and the orchestra is crashing through our last tutti, Tom takes his instrument off his shoulder, turns a few pages in his score, and then walks briskly down a set of stairs attached to the front of the stage, and walks straight out one of the doors on the main floor to the right of the stage. He's gone before we finish the movement, as the audience stares and tries to figure out what's gone wrong. (Our audiences thus far have seemed about evenly divided between those who are utterly baffled by this, and those who figure out almost immediately what's going on.)

As we begin the second movement, a pilgrim's march led by the strings, Tom is nowhere to be seen. And it isn't until a minute or so later that he reappears, standing in the corner of the first balcony overhanging stage right. From that position, he plays nearly the entire second movement, which creates the effect of the accompanying viola hovering over the orchestra sonically - it's more clear to the audience that he is no longer in a traditional solo role than it would be were he still standing at the front of the stage playing arpeggios. As the movement ends, Tom again turns and leaves the concert hall, stopping outside the balcony door long enough to play his final phrase from out in the hallway, with the door held open by one of our crew.

The third movement begins with a sort of sea shanty in the violas and piccolo, after which a lyrical motion takes over. This time, Tom pops up in the opposite balcony, again overhanging the orchestra and using his position to sing his obligato lines over the top of the ensemble. Again, he leaves before the end of the movement, and this time, as he plays his closing cadence from outside the door, the crew actually lets the door swing slowly shut, creating a real-life fadeout.

At this point, while the orchestra and conductor catch our breath and the audience begins looking around for where else the soloist might materialize, Tom essentially has to run out the balcony door, down a flight of stairs, up a sloping hallway, and into the very back of the hall on the main floor. We give him roughly an extra 20 seconds to accomplish this, but he has no chance to reach his position before we start the finale, and the conductor would ruin the effect by looking back to see if he's there before giving our cue, so there's a fair amount of trust involved. Were Tom to trip and fall on the way down the stairs, things could get interesting.

As it is, we start the last movement, and almost immediately, Tom is singing out from behind everyone. As his first phrase finishes, and the orchestra takes over, he stalks down the aisle and takes up a new position about two-thirds of the way to the stage, where he plays his next solo entrance (while, it should be said, mugging for the crowd around him a bit.) Following that, he walks to a third position nearly right in front of the stairs he came down at the end of the first movement, and plays one more solo line, before bolting up the stairs, striking a bit of a pose, and launching into the last real solo passage he'll play before the orchestra takes us the rest of the way. By this time, a good percentage of the audience seems to be grinning back at Tom, and he's been tossing a few smirks the way of the viola section as he swashbuckles through this last bit.

For the remainder of the performance, Tom essentially becomes our principal viola again, albeit a principal standing apart from us. He plays most of the orchestral passages, and finishes the piece as part of the larger ensemble. But since he's already played so many different roles over the course of the performance, it doesn't seem in the least odd, and the ovation he's been getting would seem to indicate that the crowd approves of the theatrics. It's always dicey to add a non-traditional element to an orchestra concert (Will the critics approve? Will our more traditional-minded concertgoers tolerate it? Will anyone understand what we're trying to do?), but in this case, it's definitely been worth the effort. I'm now firmly of the belief that Harold should always be played this way.

(A funny moment happened following the first performance of the week, as the violas crowded backstage to congratulate Tom. As we all marveled at his calmness in such an unusual situation, and his smooth transitions between the movements, the most veteran member of our section, Tokyo-born Eiji Ikeda, came up to shake Tom's hand, but then shook his head and admonished our principal. "Tom," said Eiji, "why you no make costume changes between movements?")

So, if any of you were at the concerts, I'm curious to hear how you reacted. Were you shocked? Amused? Bemused? Let us know in the comments, and enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend...

Happy Turducken Day!

Hope everyone is enjoying a holiday full of family, friends and feasting! My Thanksgiving table will be dominated by a turducken:



(File photo - mine's nowhere near done...)

For those who are scratching their heads, a turducken is, yes, a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. It's so wrong, but so delicious. And decadent! Although, for true, true decadence, check out this monstrosity which goes by another name but which I think should be called a "dodecaducken".

Yin and Yang

A little counterbalance to Sam's post on the Rozhdestvensky meltdown over at the Boston Symphony (to which I have mixed feelings. The first reaction is, "Oh, come on!" - it's about the music in the end, not the egos, what's with the unbecoming hissy fit? The second reaction; well, he does come from an era where artists of his caliber were treated with a certain respect and gravitas that has largely been abandoned in the current marketing-driven era, and I can understand his consternation at feeling deeply insulted. Perspective is a funny thing, isn't it?)

In any case, as much as conductors can be the source of kerfulffle, they can act as a peacemaker of sorts; I'm thinking of a recent New York times article profiling Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim, amongst his myriad other activities, which run the gamut from guest conducting at the Met to premiering, as pianist, Elliott Carter's "Interventions" with the Boston Symphony, is the conductor of the West-Eastern Divan, an orchestras of young Arabs and Israelis that he founded in 1999 with Edward Said.

Barenboim on his ensemble: “The Divan is deeply nonpolitical in the end. In other words, it’s not in any way linked to the situation in Israel and the occupied territories. If we all end up killing each other in the Middle East, then we at the Divan would have had 10 years of a beautiful experience. Or else this is 10 years of preparing for a beautiful situation. Either way, it’s worthwhile.”

It's an endeavor that promises harmony on the common ground of music for people who have little common ground, and one that deserves the lauds it receives.

But what caught my eye in this article was an excerpt from Barenboim's recently published book, “Music Quickens Time” (Verso Books). I've often spoken of the deep comfort I feel on the podium; I've never been able to adequately explain what that is - and Barenboim comes much closer to the sentiment than I've been able to express:

“When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique state of peace, partly due to the fact that one can control, through sound, the relationship between life and death...Since every note produced by a human being has a human quality, there is a feeling of death with the end of each one, and through that experience there is a transcendence of all the emotions that these notes can have in their short lives; in a way, one is in direct contact with timelessness.”

Good stuff, however you look at it.

Tantrum In Beantown

Sarah and I spend a lot of time on this blog trying to tear down stereotypes about stuffy, self-important classical musicians who glide around the world in a haze of ego, forever thinking only of Bach and Mahler. The reason we do this is that we both believe passionately that a) there really aren't a lot of musicians like that anymore, and b) the few that are around make us all look bad.

So you can imagine my reaction to this story from Saturday's Boston Globe. It seems that a well-known Russian conductor, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, has pulled out of an entire run of concerts with the Boston Symphony at the last possible second (as in, after rehearsals had begun.) This normally happens only if the conductor in question is seriously ill, or is called away on a family emergency, in which case a staff conductor who has been at all the rehearsals will step in.

But in this case, the conductor is not only perfectly healthy, he's actually still sitting in Boston, giving interviews to the press about the horrific mistreatment of his apparently royal person that caused him to walk out on one of the most famous orchestras in the world. It seems that the maestro was taking a walk around Boston's Symphony Hall between rehearsals last week, when he noticed a poster advertising his concert. And on that poster, cello soloist Lynn Harrell's name was bigger than his.

Yep, that's the whole reason he walked out. His name wasn't in big print on a poster. (Okay, fine, he also claims to have been slighted further in the BSO's season brochure, where he wasn't included in a section on "Artists who inspire.") Unbelievable.

The Globe makes note of the fact that BSO assistant conductor Julian Kuerti, who took over the performances after Rozhdestvensky's hissy fit, "won a robust ovation and the clear appreciation of the orchestral musicians onstage, who insisted that he take a solo bow." I'll bet they did. Ask any musician: we'll always take a humble, competent leader no one's heard of yet over a superstar with an ego to match...

After Hours: Thursday Edition

Your turn, Thursday crowd. Let us hear your thoughts on the show, the series, the orchestra, and anything else that's on your mind in the comments, and don't forget to check out the Cutting Room Floor for more on Mozart, the other Mozart, and prodigies in general. Also, keep on coming back to the blog throughout the year - Sarah and I are pretty much always writing...

Our next Inside the Classics shows come up at the end of January, and I can tell you without hesitation that this is a program I've been looking forward to writing and performing for well over a year now. Felix Mendelssohn have been the greatest musical prodigy of all time, and his music, whether written at age 15 or 30, is full of childlike energy and the kind of inner drive that you can't help but get caught up in. It certainly ought to be enough to make you forget momentarily about the long, dark winter we'll undoubtedly be slogging through at that point. I hope you'll be with us, and as always, bring a friend along!

Cutting Room Floor: Mozart On Wheels

On the heels of our Mozart extravaganza, here's one last piece of related brilliance for you to enjoy. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for finding it...

(That's Mozart's Symphony No. 40, by the way. Dude has excellent rhythm.)

After Hours: Wednesday Edition

If you were with us tonight at Orchestra Hall, here's your chance to let us know what you thought of the show! We really do pay attention to what you tell us when we plan these concerts, so be as specific as you care to be about what parts you thought worked, what you think could use some tweaking, and any big ideas you might have for the future of Inside the Classics.

Also, if you're reading the blog for the first time, click on the Cutting Room Floor tag to see a whole bunch of stuff we didn't have time for in the show. Thanks to everyone for showing up tonight, and I hope we'll see you all again in January!

Last push

Wednesday afternoon before the first show on "Inside the Classics" weeks is always a bit of a mad rush to the finish line. The hardest part of it for me is to get a feel for the flow of the show before we actually perform it once - when we rehearse these concerts, we rehearse the musical excerpts and the featured piece, but we never get a chance to do it with the script and whatever shenanigans we're up to. So, my afternoon pre-concert is spent running and re-running the show in my apartment - and if there's no-one else home, I'll do the script out loud.

When my brain gets weary of repeating the same complicated paragraph for the umpteenth time, I entertain myself with random YouTube searches; here's my current obsession:



I know, I know, I've got an odd sense of humor...

Cutting Room Floor: Mozartian Myths

One of the things we're going to be getting into briefly in this week's concerts is the wealth of misinformation that's been floating around about our featured composer ever since a movie called Amadeus came out back in 1984. I was 8 years old at the time, and good little violin-playing nerd that I was, I went to see the film on its first weekend in the theaters. (It should also be noted that I nearly left in tears after the opening scene, in which a decrepit and evil-looking Antonio Salieri attempts a grisly suicide. I didn't know who Salieri was, I only knew that this was a helluva lot more intense than the next-most-intense movie I'd seen at that point, The Fox & The Hound.)

Like a lot of other moviegoers, I erroneously assumed that, in writing and adapting Amadeus, playwright Peter Shaffer's motivation had been to tell Mozart's fascinating life story to a modern audience. This was not remotely the case: Shaffer, who also wrote the disturbing psycho-drama Equus, in which a naked Harry Potter blinds six horses on Broadway, had seen in Mozart the bare bones of a fascinating character, and created a world around him that, while based on a thin layer of history, was mainly fictional. Mozart's excesses, while legendary, probably never approached the garish and off-putting level of Shaffer's character. And despite the guilt-racked protestations of Shaffer's Salieri, there's little to no evidence that the composer had a hand in the real Mozart's premature death at age 35.

While Salieri was certainly a professional rival of Mozart's, there's not much evidence that he even harbored much resentment toward the young phenom, which is only natural, since the two composers achieved roughly equal success in their lifetimes. (Salieri has since faded from historical view, but he was as much a presence in 18th-century musical society as was Mozart, and the free conservatory he founded in Vienna counted Beethoven and Schubert among its alumni.)

Interestingly, the idea that Salieri was responsible for Mozart's death (most scholars guess that rheumatic fever was the real culprit) did not begin with Shaffer, and like so many conspiracy theories, it includes a grain of true history. Rumors that Mozart had been poisoned actually began shortly after the wunderkind's death in 1791, sparked by witness accounts that the body was swollen and bloated. And only five years after Salieri's death in 1825, the Russian literary giant Alexander Pushkin published a longform poem accusing the Italian of having killed off his Austrian rival, and composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov later used the poem as the libretto for an opera. Shaffer was playing off Pushkin as well when he wrote Amadeus, although he never went as far with the murder plot as did the original.

Mozart has always seemed to be a figure ripe for the taking of dramatic license, and plenty of authors have used the outlines of his biography as fodder for their own melodramatic ideas. One such novel, Dark Melody, imagines a heroine who time-travels back to Mozart's final year of life, and has a whirlwind affair with the dying genius. Another recasts Mozart as the leader of a coven of vampires. And no less an august author than Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange, among many, many others) penned a hilarious and touching tribute to Mozart, set in Heaven, in which such notables as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner argue about Wolfgang's life, legacy, and music.

With all this Mozartian fantasy floating around, it's no wonder that we sometimes want to believe more than was true of such an outsized personality. Truth be told, there were a couple of points in my preparations for this week's show when I wrote something I believed to be true into the script, only to find out later that it was part of the myth. If only truth really were stranger than fiction...

Guerrilla Marketing

Hey, are you a Facebook type? (Of course you are - who isn't? Even my mom is on the FB, and yours probably is too.) Anyhow, if you've got a couple of minutes to spare and want to help us get the word out about this week's Inside the Classics concerts, just pop on over to our Facebook event page and invite a bunch of your friends! (Hopefully, friends who live in the MSP area.) You could even RSVP yourself while you're there. Think of it as making a contribution to the orchestra without having to spend a dime. Thanks in advance, and we'll see you Wednesday or Thursday night at Orchestra Hall...

Cutting room floor: The Other Mozart

It's been a busy couple of days of script-polishing; writing our "Inside the Classics" shows is a multi-month process that begins with an initial brainstorming meeting, goes on to choosing musical examples, and proceeds with drafting, redrafting and redrafting again. With our upcoming Mozart show, there was just so much to say (it's pretty difficult to reduce the essence of Mozart down to 45 minutes!) that inevitably a few really important points had to be left out.

I have to confess that I have a soft spot for Maria Anna "Nannerl" Mozart (as well as Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann). Nannerl was the older Mozart sibling and one half of the brother-sister act that toured the capitals of Europe to tremendous acclaim. History has it that she was a brilliant pianist, with a talent "scarcely inferior to her brother's"; in fact, as late as 1765 (when she was 14), she had top billing in their concert advertisements.

But all good things must come to an end, or at least they do for a young woman in polite 18th century society, where it would be improper for a girl of marriageable age to be performing in public. In 1769, at the age of 18, Nannerl was forbidden from further concertizing and remained in Salzburg as brother Wolfgang continued his triumphal trajectory. Leopold, ever the controlling father, rejected suitor after suitor; Nannerl did not marry until 33 and settled in St. Gilgen with her husband, children and step-children. Years later, after her husband's death, she returned to Salzburg to live modestly as a piano teacher.

There's a quiet tragedy in Nannerl's story - but I always wonder if I see it as such through 21st century lenses. After all, in Nannerl's world, it was all that could be expected. It was probably extraordinary enough that she lived the childhood of a traveling musical prodigy (and that's certainly what she was). Who knows how her talents would have developed if she had been allowed to continue her musical career?

It all touches home for me. I've written several posts on my take on being a woman in my particular field; it's hard enough navigating the minefields of gender in the 21st century, much less the 18th. Change comes slowly; I'm reminded of the fact that women did not have the right to vote until 1920 - only a (long) lifetime ago.

And I think of the writings of Rousseau:

"The Education of women should always be relative to men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young and to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable--these are the duties of women at all time and what they should be taught in their infancy."

And:

"Women, in general, possess no artistic sensibility...nor genius. They can acquire a knowledge...of anything through hard work. But the celestial fire that emblazens and ignites the soul, the inspiration that consumes and devours...,these sublime ecstasies that reside in the depths of the heart are always lacking in [women's artistic endeavors]."

Nannerl would have been fighting a losing battle.

Cutting Room Floor: From The Minds of Babes

As we draw within a few days of our first Inside the Classics concerts of the season, Sarah and I are in our usual mode of painstakingly cutting material from the show that we desperately want to get to, but simply won't have the time for. And as we did last season, we'll be using the blog as a way of giving you access to some of these extra bits and pieces. (Click the Cutting Room Floor tag to see all the entries that fall into this category.)

Later this weekend, Sarah will be writing about Mozart's largely ignored sister, who by all accounts was nearly as talented a musician as Wolfgang, but who was expected at a certain point to give up her music and settle down to raise a family. (All three of the "Young Wonders" we're featuring on this year's concerts actually had or have similarly talented siblings, so this is a subject we'll definitely be returning to throughout the year.)

But for today, I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about just what defines a prodigy in the neurobiological sense. What was so different about Mozart's 5-year-old brain as compared with yours or mine at that age, and how do the extraordinary minds among us develop differently than those with more average intellects? To that end, I've sought out an expert in this particular field to help us out - an expert, it should be said, to whom I have a deeply personal connection. Listen in below...

First Sign of Winter

Every Monday, our top management types (CEO, CFO, VPs of every description, etc) get together for what they call a Management Team meeting. I've never been to one of these confabs, but I gather that they're sort of a weekly State of the Union conference, a chance for everyone to be sure that everyone else is on the same page they're on, and that no one is caught by surprise by any new initiative, program, or directive that might come down the pipe. Everything from day-to-day finances to ticket sales to marketing is on the table, and at the end of it all, someone sends around the minutes of the meeting to all the musicians in the orchestra, and I believe to all of the staff as well. To be honest, I usually just skim these communiques, looking for key phrases like "Inside the Classics," "Grammy nomination," or "massive deficit." (That last one hasn't come up lately, fortunately.)

But for the last couple of weeks, the meeting summaries have taken note of a sharp uptick in audience complaints regarding... coughing. Yes, people do actually bother to call or write to us about their fellow patrons coughing in the middle of a performance, and every one of those complaints gets carefully logged and sent up the chain. (Even folks who complain verbally to an usher or a ticket sales rep about something or other have their comments officially noted and passed on.) This tends to happen most years around this time, because... well, you know why. We're all coming down with the winter's first salvo of The Crud, that's why. If half the audience is afflicted with Martian Death Flu, or whatever we're calling it this year, there are gonna be more than a few involuntary expulsions during the slow movement, and there's not much anyone can do about it.

But that doesn't stop our more sensitive concertgoers from getting up in arms about it, and I can understand that, I guess, although I have a hard time taking offense myself, unless the offender is well and truly hacking up a lung and refusing to leave the hall to deal with it. And at the moment, I'm truly sympathetic to the coughers, because I'm battling a serious chest cold myself, and truth be told, I was narrowly saved from hacking my way through this morning's first half by the fact that fellow violist Ken Freed happened to have a spare Halls to hand me. (Note to anyone planning to attend a concert with a cold: Halls are the way to go. I'm not saying they're the best cough drops in the world, just that they're the ones that come in soft, pliable, silent wrappers. All those little hard candies in crinkly cellophane? Those are from the devil.)

I've always divided concert hall coughers into two groups - sick coughers and bored coughers - and their presence signals two very different realities for those of us onstage. (You can tell the difference because, if your hall is full of sick coughers, you can just hear the phlegm behind it. Bored coughers sound like they're trying to alert you to the fact that the person you're saying mean things about is walking up behind you.) The sick coughers signal that winter has arrived, or is still here, or is dragging on into April. The bored coughers signal that something has gone wrong with the performance: either the conductor's interpretation is failing to engage, or the orchestra doesn't seem believable enough in its commitment to the music. Either way, the audience has lost (or failed to ever achieve) the rapt attention we're hoping to inspire. And that's a lot more our fault than theirs.

So what do we do about the coughing, and the concomitant complaints? Well, it seems like our management team is considering an array of options, from making a pre-concert announcement, to posting signs informing patrons that our ushers have cough drops available on request, to looking for a sponsor to reinstate the huge boxes of drops we used to keep at every door. (They vanished in a previous round of budget cuts several years back, which should tell you something about just how deep the budget knife can fall when tough times strike a nonprofit company.) But in the end, there's always going to be coughing, and I presume there will always be people who complain about it. Chalk it up as just one more risk of going out in public, I suppose...

All's well that ends well

A very long day yesterday which started with a 7 am (EST) flight that went through a bit of rough weather (I hate hate HATE flying! And of course I do much of it. Sigh...). But things calmed down on the final approach to MSP and ended with a flawless landing. You can tell the skill/experience of a pilot in the timing of a landing, which is, from a safety standpoint, probably the most significant part of a flight. And, as the last part of a plane-travel experience, certainly an important ending to the journey.

Which got me thinking about good endings. When my husband is warming up on the French horn (a daily sequence that I’ve memorized – sometimes when I wake up in a hotel room on the road I still hear that warm-up in my head!), there’s an extended section in which he practices long tones. Which are hard, because not only is it to practice sustaining notes, but a way to perfect the very endings of those notes – at the termination of a note, you need to maintain the pitch and tone quality and let it taper to the right point before releasing. Because you'll forget how nicely a note was played if it doesn't end well.

Which made me think about his horn teacher back when we were students at Curtis, Myron Bloon, legendary principal horn of the Cleveland Orchestra during the Golden Days of George Szell’s music directorship. Mr. Bloom (after all these years I still can’t think of him as Myron) was notoriously tough on his students and was the source of such bon mots as “That’s not a sound, that’s a noise!” - or, after hearing a student play a solo passage that was not played to his liking, “No, no, a thousand times no!”. Many lessons ended with students, crestfallen or near tears, slouching out of the studio. Not a happy ending.

I was back at my alma mater last week for rehearsals and concerts with 20/21, the contemporary music ensemble of the Curtis Institute. The centerpiece of the concert was Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques (which I’ve mentioned in a previous post). At the very end of the piece there is a written-out bar of rest, where the composer indicates that “The conductor must keep his arms in the air”. During our final rehearsal, when we got to that point, I did exactly as the composer asked, while several of the students in the ensemble quietly put down their instruments to wait out the silence (it's a really long measure). I reprimanded them – there should be no movement, just an absolute stillness. This should be a moment of uncertainty and suspension, a dramatic moment with the kind of rich silence from an audience not quite knowing what to expect next. It’s a little bit of visual theater worked into a dense and complicated piece, and it was this very suspension, stillness and silence from the assembled mass onstage that created the effect of this particular ending. A silently thrilling ending.

Which led me to a final thought, of my piano teacher back in Honolulu, who took me from my very first Hanon exercises to the F minor Ballade of Chopin. Before I took the stage for a concert or an audition (and it seemed like it was every other week in my formative years) he would remind me, “It’s good to start strong. But no matter what happens in the middle, all can be forgiven with a good ending.”

All In The Timing

Whenever marketing types sit around a table and start talking about ways to attract a wider range of concertgoers (by which they generally mean "people under 40,") the subject of concert start times is bound to come up. Why does everything have to start at 7:30 or 8pm, they moan? Why, if only we played a few shorter concerts that started just as all the younger folk are getting out of work, and maybe served some food and drinks as well, why, we'd be beating off the youth demographic with a stick!

To me, this sounds dangerously close to dinner theater, which is to theater as Ashlee Simpson is to music. And I used to play in an orchestra that tried something like this, even offering up free booze themed to the program du jour (vodka for an all-Russian slate, champagne for French fare, etc.), and the whole thing went down like a lead balloon. Granted, the 20 or so people who bothered to show up for these concerts did appear to be younger than the average symphony crowd, but I'm not sure that made up for the fact that we'd spent more money on alcohol than we took in via ticket sales.

What I've rarely heard anyone talk about is shifting our concert times the other direction, which, if you're trying to attract a demographic that is basically defined by its interest in going out late at night, would seem like an obvious idea. The major reason for this is that most orchestras (ours included) have specific prohibitions in their union contracts against concerts that go on into the wee hours, or at least prohibitively expensive overtime scales designed to accomplish the same thing as an outright ban. And most arts professionals who have spent time running a shop full of union workers are well aware that it's rarely worth banging your head against the concrete wall of a Collective Bargaining Agreement if you don't absolutely have to.

But there are ways to massage these things, and a few groups are making the effort. London's Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment recently launched a series of 10pm concerts aimed squarely at the city's young professionals, and guess what? They're apparently turning out in droves. (Part of the appeal appears to be that the audience is allowed, nay, encouraged to drink during the show. No word on whether the orchestra gets to imbibe as well.) In this country, the groups that have tried late-night concerts are generally smaller ensembles unburdened by strict CBAs, but anecdotal evidence suggests that these, too, have been successes.

So, if you're part of the ridiculously coveted 18-to-40 demographic, what about it? Would you be more likely to show up for a casual, dressed-down, late-night concert than a starchy, formal, early evening one? If we suddenly started doing an Inside the Classics show at 11pm on a Friday night, would you consider starting your bar crawl with us? Or are we really better off looking at the dinner theater option?

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On another note entirely, guess what, you guys? We've got our first Inside the Classics concerts of the season coming up next week! (And we haven't said a word about it on the blog yet, which I'm guessing is driving our marketing department batty.) We're talking Mozart, featuring his Jupiter symphony, and trying out a bunch of new ideas to keep the series fresh. (The script isn't 100% finalized yet, but I can confidently guarantee that an adorable child, a patented Sarah Hicks Fugue Takedown™, and a green garden hose will all feature prominently. As will, y'know, Mozart.)

I know money's tight for everyone right now, so here's what we're doing. If you head on over to our subscription sales page, you can get a ticket to all three of our 2008-09 ItC shows for 50% off the normal price. That's less than $14 per concert, if you subscribe before November 20. And if you're not into planning ahead, we've dropped our single ticket prices for all our November concerts to a maximum of $25. ($10 for your kids.) That's right - the best seat in the house is $25. It's normally $83. Get you some. Transmission ends.

Autumnal canines

Well, it's an iPod day on the blog. Sam's post made me think back to my drive from Washington DC home to Richmond earlier today, with the iPod on shuffle. A gem I hadn't listened to in a while; Coltrane and Hartman doing "Autumn Serenade", which seemed particularly fitting as I drove past the just-past-peak foliage lining I-95.

To add to the autumnal mood; my dogs frolicking in leaves when I returned:





And, of course, chewing on sticks:

Cloudy Day Shuffle

We haven't done an iPod playlist in quite a while, and for some reason, gray, wintry days always put me in the mood to curl up with a book and some tunes, so I'll hit shuffle on my machine and throw out the first five songs that come up...

1. Floating - The Lowlands. "I'll be swaying in the wind just like a suspension bridge, so glad to be hangin' out with the sky." Lyrics don't come much sunnier than that, do they? This Philadelphia-based bluegrass band (I know that sounds odd, but Philly actually has a massive folk music scene) doesn't tour a lot anymore, but I love their sound, and their energy. One thing that always endears a musician of any genre to me is when s/he looks and sounds like s/he's having a blast on stage. It's something rock and folk musicians are great at, but a majority of classical musicians could do a lot better with.

2. Barfly Blues - Martin Zellar & the Hardways. And just like that, the sunshine is gone like a thief in the night, courtesy of Minnesota's own Martin Zellar. I wasn't around the Cities in the days when the Gear Daddies ruled the clubs, but Zellar's solo stuff is right up my alley. Dark and brooding with just a hint of optimism forever peeking through, he also personifies a kind of music that, growing up on the oh-so-hip East Coast, I had assumed was dead forever - good, honest, straight-ahead blue-collar rock 'n roll. As it turns out, all those bands just moved to Minneapolis, and judging from the recent national success of groups like The Hold Steady, the genre seems to be making a comeback. Good news for me...

3. Golden Slumbers - The Beatles. Ohhhhhhhh. God, I love this song. And this whole album. Has there ever been a better front-to-back effort than Abbey Road? The way the B-side is basically one continuous song, the hilariously inappropriate lyrics of Maxwell's Silver Hammer, the sweet opening hook of Here Comes the Sun, and that perfect little 20-second bonus cut at the end: "Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl / someday I'm gonna make her mine..." Whenever I hear from a fellow classical musician that he doesn't bother to listen to any other genres, because they just aren't interesting or intellectual enough, my first response is always to strap him down to whatever's available, and start up Abbey Road.

4. I'm Talking - Doomtree. Okay, I know from experience that whenever I start talking or writing about hip-hop to a classical music audience, I'm fighting a losing battle. Most of you are already rolling your eyes into next week. But on the heels of last week's FutureClassics concert, I am dead serious when I say that this Twin Cities-based hip-hop collective is doing things every bit as innovative as the composers on that bill. In fact, this particular track begins with a sample that I swear comes from a Pierre Boulez piece that I can't quite identify, before exploding into some of the most rhythmically original and well-conceived lyrical bursts you'll hear anywhere. "I came, I saw, I played Contra / You sang the song / we saved the saga turned opera / The world is off-beat / but the beat don't stop me / It goes on the backbeat / Born to the concrete / Watch me / keep walking."

5. Tenderness on the Block - Shawn Colvin. Just a sweet, sad, simple song to round out this playlist. Before she made it on MTV in the late '90s with Sunny Came Home, Colvin was a fixture on the folk circuit, covering everyone from John Prine to Sting, and penning some truly beautiful tunes of her own as well. I believe this song was originally by Warren Zevon. It's not particularly profound music, but it's guaranteed to put you in a better mood than you were in before it came on.

Brevia

The good, the bad and the resigning.

Yes, everybody is feeling the pinch. Which tests our collective mettle, as well as our guiding philosophies; is it a time where the only solution is to streamline, batten down the hatches and hope to ride it out or a time to embrace the notion that "Taking bold artistic chances always opens new avenues"? Or perhaps those seemingly opposed notions are different sides of the same coin.

At least there's always some good news out there. The eternal optimist that I am, I'll always choose to believe that, in the end, we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Feedback Day

Having just spent the day rehearsing the seven pieces that will make up our FutureClassics concert tomorrow night, I can now confidently say that the audience (which you're planning to be a part of, right? I mean, c'mon, the tickets are ten bucks...) will be in for quite an array of styles and sounds.

Composer Aaron Jay Kernis, who runs the Composer Institute along with MN Orch staffer Beth Cowart, seems to make a point of selecting participants who come from very different backgrounds and musical points of view. So this year, we've got a minimalist, a couple of hardcore atonalists, one fan of electronica, one storyteller, and a couple others that I can't begin to categorize. I'd be lying if I said I loved all the pieces, but that's exactly the point of a concert like this. We all listen with different ears, and a work that leaves me cold might just make your night. (And for the record, there were a couple of pieces that so impressed me that I'm hoping we get a chance to play them on a subscription concert in the near future.)

Part of the rehearsal process for this concert that differs from our normal routine is that each member of the orchestra is given a feedback form for each composer, and we're asked to comment on everything from the overall feel of the piece, to how the writing works (or doesn't) for our individual instruments, to whether the parts we're working off of are laid out well. I always struggle a bit with these forms, because I'm sure the composers get a lot of contradictory advice - musicians aren't known for our group-think abilities - and I don't want to add to any confusion or frustration they may have on reading our reactions to their work.

So I try to make my comments as specific as possible. If I don't think a piece works, I try to figure out exactly what would need to change to make it work. (Much of the time, my advice tends to be, "Thin out the orchestration!" Composers used to writing for small ensembles frequently try to do too much at once with a full orchestra, which is when you wind up with a cacophony. 98 musicians make a lot of noise in full cry.) Today, I advised one composer to change the register of some high pizzicatti in the viola part (they were so high up the fingerboard that they sounded like pitchless clunks,) suggested that another reformat the parts to make some of his rhythmic figures easier to understand on the fly, and wondered whether some orchestrational choices had caused a third piece to be more difficult than necessary to hold together rhythmically.

The harshest thing I wrote was this: "There is nothing inherently wrong with atonality, but you can't just use it as a weapon against your listeners. When you give the audience nothing at all to grab on to aurally, they'll simply shut down in defense, and won't bother coming along to wherever you're trying to take them." Tough, yes, but I wouldn't have bothered if I didn't think the composer on the receiving end was an obviously intelligent individual, capable of writing great music.

The bottom line is that we should have quite a show tomorrow night, with each of the composers appearing on stage to talk about their work before we perform it. And if you really can't make it out to Orchestra Hall (seriously, people - ten bucks), the concert will be broadcast live on the classical stations of Minnesota Public Radio (99.5 KSJN in the Cities,) and streamed live on MPR's website.

Pushing The Limits

The Composer Institute is in full swing now, with the participants going through daily seminars with musicians from different instrument groups of the orchestra, each of whom pick apart the scores mercilessly, pointing out any register problems, notation vagaries, and other issues that will make the parts either difficult or impossible to play. I've led some of these seminars in the past, and with very few exceptions, I've been deeply impressed with the humility of the composers as their work is critiqued, and their openness to new ideas, even when they don't entirely agree with what's being said.

One of our blogging composers, Ted Hearne, discussed this difficult process today, and brought up an issue that seems to come up more and more as composers push the envelope of what musicians can do on stage:

One of the composers called for the timpanist to hit the copper bell of the drum, and there was massive resistance to this idea from the percussionists. "I didn't do it for John Corigliano, I'm not going to do it for you," the timpanist was relayed as having said. I understand this mentality, given the price of the drum you're asking a professional to play in an unconventional, potentially damaging way. However, some string players don't like to play col legno [hitting the string with the stick of the bow] and some piano technicians won't let you prepare the piano or touch the strings either... The question is: as a composer, where do you draw the line?

Now, this is a tricky problem. The reason our timpanist doesn't want to hit the bell of the drum is that timpani are a) hugely expensive and b) more fragile than you might imagine. The drum wasn't designed to be struck anywhere except the head, and even a small dent in the kettle can affect the quality of sound. But Ted's also right that musicians can be awfully whiny about unconventional methods of playing their instruments, and some musicians are more squirrelly than others, so it's nearly impossible for a composer to find that imaginary line when dealing with an ensemble as large as a symphony orchestra.

Just for instance, a few weeks ago, on the program Sarah conducted, the Shchedrin piece called for some of the string players to rap the sticks of our bows on the edge of our music stands (which are made of either metal or hard plastic) in a fast rhythmic pattern for about 15 seconds. I knew immediately that I couldn't do this. My primary bow, which I purchased from MN Orch violist Myrna Rian when she retired a couple of years back, is worth over $16,000 (more than my viola, actually,) and is my most prized possession. (I also haven't finished paying it off yet.) It's made of rare Brazilian pernambuco wood, which is uniquely stiff yet flexible, but still as fragile as you would expect a thin dowel of hardwood to be. When Myrna owned it, she never even played col legno with it. I do (gently,) but I draw the line at thwacking it repeatedly against a sharp edge.

Ordinarily, I might have switched to one of my backup bows for the piece (I have two others, one of which I might be willing to risk against the stand,) but the Shchedrin is a fairly tricky piece, and I wasn't comfortable trying to perform it on a less than stellar piece of equipment. So instead, I armed myself with a sturdy pencil, and knocked that against my stand in the performances instead. (Since pencils are shorter than bows, this also made my rhythm much more accurate, too.) I would say that more than half the viola section did the same.

Still, my refusal to execute the passage exactly as the composer wrote it doesn't mean that I think he shouldn't have written it. These things tend to be situational, and most of the time, if a musician balks at a direction in the score, a suitable compromise can be found. So I generally think that composers are better off asking for exactly what they want, but being prepared to negotiate later if necessary.

One more day

I can't wait until the election is over - it's been an exhausting media blitz in the last few days, and I'm itching to get back into a more regular news cycle - I mean, does anyone know what's been going on in the rest of the world in the last week or so? (A random recap: it's been flooding in Yemen, Panasonic is making Sanyo a subsidiary, and Norway is lending cash-strapped Iceland 500M Euros).

But here's a work of utter musical cleverness, good for a smile, regardless of your political predisposition (the mimicry of vocal cadences is pretty amazing!):




Hoping that everyone is fulfilling their civic duty and casting their ballot today!

Minneapolis Overrun With Composers!

I'll be writing more about the Minnesota Orchestra's vaunted Composer Institute later in the week, as the orchestra itself joins the festivities and starts rehearsing the seven works that will make up this Friday's FutureClassics concert, the Institute's culminating event. (Get your ridiculously affordable tickets here.)

But if you'd like to follow along with our participating composers as they struggle through what will undoubtedly be one of the most exhausting and information-packed weeks of their young professional lives, you can check in over at the excellent NewMusicBox website, where New York-based composer Ted Hearne and St. Olaf College composer-in-residence Justin Merritt are blogging the week. If they're anything like the blogger/composers NewMusicBox has tapped for this duty in past years, they'll have no shortage of opinions, and likely a few things to say about the experience of working with us jaded, cynical professional musicians. Stay tuned...

A little nit-picking

I'm headed to Philadelphia for rehearsals and a concert with 20/21, the Curtis Contemporary Music Ensemble. The program next Friday includes a trio of pieces by Messiaen, one of which is "Oiseaux Exotique", which captures Messiaen at his most birdsong-obsessed. It's a trippy soundscape of timbres and rhythms, citing the calls of over 40 species of birds, and is one of the more rhythmically complicated pieces I know. It's hard for the ear to catch any single thing that's happening because it's so densely orchestrated, with individual instruments most often playing discrete parts.

The Minnesota Orchestra played it a few seasons back under de Waart, with Peter Serkin as soloist, which I remember as an excellent performance. Yesterday, as I was poring over the score, I decided to listen to a recording that had been recommended to me, of the London Sinfonietta led by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring the Messiaen specialist Paul Crossley at the keyboard. I was rather enjoying the recording (people seem to have vastly differing ideas about tempi in this piece!), until I got about midway in the long central tutti. I've been studying this score for several weeks, and have a pretty good grasp of it, but as I listened, something felt very, very off.

Which, I discovered, it was. I listened to those few minutes a few more times, to discover that the xylophone is off by an entire half-measure for about 16 measure (or 26 seconds of music, depending how you want to look at it). I don't usually listen to recordings looking for mistakes (and with modern recording technology, anything is fixable, so it's usually useless to go looking in the first place!), but this one surprised me. Particularly because, even within the dense writing, Messiaen expressly states that in this tutti the xylophone is forte and solo, an important voice. Granted, if you were simply listening to the recording it might be impossible to catch, but as, say, a conductor or producer looking at the score (or even the xylophone player, who clearly had to add two beats to get back in sync with the rest of the ensemble) the error is obvious. Which makes me wonder why they didn't bother to fix it. Or did they simply not catch it?

Any other recorded "errors" out there that people have encountered?