Cutting Room Floor: Alternate Fingering

Posts tagged as Cutting Room Floor are where we put all the material relevant to our Inside the Classics concerts that we know we won't have time to get to in the actual shows. Some of it is serious, some of it is silly, and some of it is just extra information about the featured composer or piece of music that we didn't know what else to do with. Click the tag to see all this extra source material in one place...

On the heels of our Mendelssohn concerts this week, we've got one last bit of Octet-based fun for your enjoyment. As those of you who were at the show will remember, the finale of the Octet for Strings begins with a ridiculously fast growling melody line in the second cello part, played in our performances by MN Orch principal cello Tony Ross. (Why was Tony playing second cello, you ask? Because he wanted to, and we don't argue with Big Tony.)

Anyway, Tony has played this piece a lot, and one of the frustrations cellists have with it is that, no matter how accurate and nimble your fingers are with that opening lick, it winds up just sounding like a bunch of ultra-low rumbling until the violas come in with the same line an octave higher. So Tony, ever the enterprising soul, has come up with a unique way of playing that opening growl that saves a great deal of wear and tear on the fingers...

(Apologies for the poor video quality. I don't have a real video camera...)

He actually threatened to play it that way at the show this week. And if he had, I'm betting only a few people would have been able to hear the difference. Looks totally ridiculous, though...

After Hours: Thursday Edition

Your turn, Thursday crowd. Here's the place to let us know what you liked or disliked about the Mendelssohn concert, and really, about your whole Orchestra Hall experience.

In particular, we're interested in hearing what you thought of the pacing of the first half of the show. We made a conscious decision (based largely on audience feedback from past ItC shows) to jump around more in the first half than we have in the past, spending less time than usual on the featured piece specifically and more time exploring the composer's life and music as a whole, and the way the orchestra approaches the music in rehearsal and performance. So if that worked for you, let us know, and if it didn't, tell us why, as well as any ideas you might have for future concerts.

In any case, thanks for being there - you Thursday people always have fantastic energy, and we're looking forward to seeing you again in March...

After Hours: Wednesday Edition

Well, our first Mendelssohn concert is in the books, and as usual, we're eager to hear what you thought about it! If you were in the house on Wednesday night, chime in down in the comments and tell us what you liked, what you thought needed a different angle, and what you would have liked to hear more or less of.

In particular, we're interested in hearing what you thought of the pacing of the first half of the show. We made a conscious decision (based largely on audience feedback from past ItC shows) to jump around more in the first half than we have in the past, spending less time than usual on the featured piece specifically and more time exploring the composer's life and music as a whole, and the way the orchestra approaches the music in rehearsal and performance. So if that worked for you, let us know, and if it didn't, tell us why, as well as any ideas you might have for future concerts.

As always, thanks so much for taking the time to come out and support live music, and I hope we'll see you all again for our March concerts...

Cutting Room Floor: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Posts tagged as Cutting Room Floor are where we put all the material relevant to our Inside the Classics concerts that we know we won't have time to get to in the actual shows. Some of it is serious, some of it is silly, and some of it is just extra information about the featured composer or piece of music that we didn't know what else to do with. Click the tag to see all this extra source material in one place...

One of the themes we'll be turning to a lot in this week's Mendelssohn concerts is the composer's distinctive voice, his embrace of raw, unvarnished emotion, and how that approach stemmed from his teenage years, when he wrote some of his best-loved works. Illustrating this point for us will be the finale from Mendelssohn's incredible Octet for Strings, which we'll be tacking onto the end of the first half of the concert.

We won't actually be talking a lot about the Octet itself, though, which is why I wanted to get to it here. We could go on forever about the intricacy of the writing, about how impossibly hard it is from a compositional standpoint to get two complete string quartets playing together without cacophony being the result, or about the supreme confidence with which a 15-year-old Felix Mendelssohn obviously approached this task.

But what I want to talk about is that fantastic adolescent quality that pervades the Octet, the driving, pulsating energy that rushes up to you in the first moments of a performance and refuses to let go until you've been drained of all your stamina. Most composers aren't good at sustaining that level of intensity, and truth be told, most performers aren't, either. This is what led one teacher I used to study with to declare flatly that the Mendelssohn Octet should never be performed by anyone over the age of 18. It's a teenager's piece, written with a teenager's view of the world, and requiring a teenager's endless supply of energy to pull off, so why beat around the bush? Get a bunch of teenagers to play the damn thing.

We won't be taking that approach at our concerts, but there's something to the idea. At the summer camp that I wrote about last August, the Octet has become a signature piece, the first and last movements played more or less every year by groups of teens so thrilled to be part of the experience that you practically have to shield yourself during the performance to avoid getting soaked by their adrenaline.

This is at the camp's senior session, which comprises young musicians aged 14-18, many of whom are at just the right level to be attacking the Octet for the first time. At the junior session (ages 10-13) where I teach, we don't generally do the Octet. Trying to pick out eight kids that young who can handle the blazing speed, the non-stop passagework, and the various other pitfalls of the piece is just too risky, and we tend to stick more to Mozart, Haydn, and early Beethoven.

But back in 2003, we decided that we finally had a group that could handle the massive first movement of the piece, though we knew it would be a major stretch for all of them. I practically begged to coach the group, and embarked on one of the most exhausting yet exhilarating teaching experiences I will ever have. For six frantic days, I clapped rhythms, stomped beats, yelled entrance cues, begged for them to listen to each other, and spent many extra hours giving private lessons to a little blond girl from North Dakota who couldn't quite believe she'd been placed in the group.

In the end, the performance was exactly what we'd hoped for: the eight of them started off somewhat cautiously, like they weren't sure they could do this, even as they were plainly doing it. But somewhere about halfway through the performance, they hit their stride, and you could sense the crackle of electricity passing between them as they stampeded to the end.

The audio below is of that 2003 concert, starting roughly two-thirds of the way through the movement. It is not a professional-caliber performance - it's better. You can hear the group occasionally start to pull apart, then snap back together as collectively, all eight musicians recognize a milepost in their parts. At the 2:22 mark, you know for certain that you're listening to kids, as they hit the first of several climactic moments in the coda, and slam their bows into their strings like their lives depend on it. At 2:52, you hear the first cellist desperately attempt to calm himself after several minutes of frantic scrubbing for his last lyrical solo, which comes out of nowhere. And the moment the piece comes to its shattering conclusion, you'll hear the audience (made up of all the other kids at the camp, plus parents, faculty, and staff) explode like no crowd you've ever heard at a Juilliard Quartet concert. It brought tears to my eyes back in 2003. It still does.



The performers are violinists Oren Ungerleider, Nikki Leon, Rebecca Ryan, and Brian Ho; violists Nate Lesser and Geertrui Spaepen; and cellists Tavi Ungerleider and Chloe Perret. With the exception of Spaepen, who was a camp counselor, all were either 12 or 13 years old in August 2003.

Still on the road

I'm finishing up my time in Vermont, where I've been premiering a Double Concerto by David Ludwig with the Vermont Symphony and Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson. Which has been very cool on many different levels - first of all, because David and I have been the best of friends for over a decade, and it's fun to collaborate with a colleague you are so close to (and he writes absolutely wonderful music!), and second of all because I grew up on recordings of the famed Kalichstein-Laredo Robinson Trio, and it's amazing to be at a point in my career where I'm collaborating with artists that I admired as a youngster!

We just played a matinee in Rutland, where we'll also be spending 6 hours tomorrow recording the Double Concerto. As we're an hour and a half out of Burlington, the Vermont Symphony's home, we're all ensconced in the local Holiday Inn - soloists, composer, conductor, recording engineers (who just arrived from New York), as well as the entire orchestra. Which has lent the hotel halls the atmosphere of, say, a Youth Orchestra tour, in the best sense. Musician are excitedly visiting back and forth - I saw a case of beer being lugged up the stairway, bags of wine and snacks purchased at the Hannaford down the street. At this point in my career, hotel living has lost its luster (I often wake up in the middle of the night having no idea what city I'm in until I rouse myself to look at the the Hotel Services booklet to see where I am), but put an orchestra in a hotel and they'll find a way to have fun. It's nice to see that kind of enthusiasm, particularly when you're a little travel-weary - I'm just looking forward to being somewhere (anywhere!) for more that 5 days at a time (which I might have around February 15)!

Cutting Room Floor: Unauthorized Mendelssohn

Posts tagged as Cutting Room Floor are where we put all the material relevant to our Inside the Classics concerts that we know we won't have time to get to in the actual shows. Some of it is serious, some of it is silly, and some of it is just extra information about the featured composer or piece of music that we didn't know what else to do with. Click the tag to see all this extra source material in one place...

Composers who die young, like Mozart and Mendelssohn, almost always leave behind some unpublished work which trickles into the public realm over the years and decades following their passing. But in Mendelssohn's case, the amount of largely unknown material that he composed is truly staggering: musicologists estimate that as many as 270 pieces of music attributable to Felix remain unpublished. (And that number doesn't even take into account the works originally attributed to him that turned out to have been written by his sister Fanny.)

This year being the bicentenary of Mendelssohn's birth, there is understandably greater attention being focused on him than usual, and in New York this week, conductor Stephen Somary is presenting a concert featuring thirteen pieces of chamber music that Somary claims have never been heard in public before.

The reasons behind there being so much missing Mendelssohn are many. Some claim that Mendelssohn's international reputation was damaged when his music (along with that of all other Jewish composers) was banned by the Third Reich, removing him entirely from the repertoire in the heart of classical music's active European centers for years. Then there's the fact that Mendelssohn just wrote a huge amount of music - more than 700 works altogether - and it's only natural that some of it would never have gone to press.

But then there's the issue of what the composer himself wanted published, and that's what makes the reviving of long-lost manuscripts a controversial matter. It's very likely that at least some of Mendelssohn's unpublished music was stuff that he never wanted to see the light of day. The AP article about Somary's concert quotes conductor Leon Botstein as saying that, "If the composer leaves it unfinished or kept it out from publication, you have to respect the composer's wishes." Mendelssohn was known to be hugely critical of his own work, often revising and re-revising works for years after they had been premiered, so Botstein may have a point.

Still, the argument against Botstein's philosophy is that, if we were to go solely with a composer's recorded wishes in all matters, concert music would sound a lot different than it does in many cases. Beethoven's metronome markings, for instance, are notoriously erratic, and the vast majority of orchestras and conductors use them as a vague guide rather than as definitive tempo markings. Mahler famously removed the Blumine movement from his first symphony, but many orchestras today re-insert it. Sibelius wrote several different versions of his 5th symphony, all of which have been performed and recorded in recent years. And Mendelssohn himself was hugely unhappy with the Italian Symphony that we're featuring on next week's ItC concerts (despite nearly universal consensus that it was a masterpiece,) and tried for years to revise it. We make use of none of his revisions today, that I know of.

My own view tends to be that composers do not have an eternal say over the music they wrote. If a manuscript is available and hasn't been played yet, why not play it? It might turn out to be of little interest, in which case it can safely go back in the drawer. But on next week's concerts, we'll be featuring a song by Fanny Mendelssohn so seldom performed that our library had to order the music for it from some random person we found on the internet. It's stunningly beautiful, and I'd hate to think that it might have stayed buried because someone was worried about whether or not Fanny meant for us to hear it.

Busted.

So, as it turns out, that wonderful live performance at the inauguration by Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, et al? Wasn't so live.

Now, on the one hand, it seems silly to criticize either the performers or the organizers for having pre-recorded the piece that they then pretended to play live, since playing instruments with any degree of dexterity when temps are in the teens is essentially impossible. (I should also point out that, had it been the Minnesota Orchestra scheduled to play at the inauguration, the performance would simply not have happened, since we have strict minimum temperature standards to protect our instruments, and that minimum is a helluva lot higher than an average January temp in D.C.)

On the other hand, controversies over lip-synching seem to crop up constantly when pop music is involved (Ashlee Simpson, anyone?), and it doesn't seem fair that classical musicians should get a complete pass. So what do you think? Should the pre-taping have been explicitly disclosed at the time of the "performance"? Should, perhaps, the pre-taping have included video, which would have allowed everyone present to watch the actual performance, rather than a mock-up? Or is this all just much ado about nothing?

Music fit for a president

By coincidence of schedule, yesterday was a day off for me, which meant many hours glued to Inauguration coverage on an endless assortment of news channels (although, I must say, for no-frills production and the ever-amusing/enlightening/frightening call-ins, no-one beats C-Span!).

An absolutely extraordinary and historic day in so many ways (when was the last time you heard a president discuss the importance of personal and collective responsibility in an Inaugural Address??), more so for the musical highlights. Aside from the usual lineup of military bands and singing sailors (the national anthem was sung by the aptly named "U.S. Navy Band Sea Chanters"), things got off to a soulful start thanks to a great "My Country Tis of Thee" from the incomparable Aretha Franklin.

What I'd been looking forward to, however, was the performance that immediately preceded the presidential swearing-in, a John Williams work/arrangement performed by Itzhak Perlman, Anthony McGill, Yo Yo Ma and Gabriela Montero, the first time in memory a quartet of classical musicians has been presented as part of the ceremony:



I was surprised to see Ma playing a conventional cello (I'm wondering, was he playing his Montagnana??) rather than the much-touted carbon fiber instrument. Kudos to the quartet for performing under unideal conditions - outdoors, exposed, in sub-freezing temperatures. And a special congratulations to Anthony McGill, a Curtis classmate of mine, who I saw last about a month ago at an after-hours party in Philly (at the Russian United Beneficial Association hall - a story for another time...).

Another bit of alma mater pride came during the post-Inaugural parade:



The Punahou School JROTC and marching band proudly participated in the event (during which President Obama gleefully waved a shaka sign or two). Punahou is, now famously, Obama's alma mater, and mine as well (and the President and I also share that whole growing-up-in-Hawaii thing). Having come from a place where the average January temperature is 81 degrees Fahrenheit, I can only imagine how the kids in the band felt, but they did themselves proud, playing an upbeat version of "Aloha 'Oe" by Queen Lili'uokalani, the last monarch of Hawai'i.

A historic day.

The Change We Need

Kyle MacMillan, one of my favorite classical music writers, had an excellent article in Sunday's Denver Post about classical music's next wave of innovators:

This new generation of classical artists possess all the technique necessary to tackle Brahms or Beethoven, but they would rather perform innovative repertoire that blurs into genres from hip-hop to electronica, rock and beyond... They might substitute with the New York Philharmonic one night, play a concert or two with a pop group then join other colleagues in some hybrid ensemble in between.

Sarah and I have written about this sort of genre-hopping in the past - she's been known to lead orchestra performances in bars and used to sing with a punk band, and I've played everything from avant-garde classical to jazz to bluegrass to disco in venues ranging from recital halls to New England barns to college bars - but Kyle puts his finger on what makes the trend significant to the wider world of classical music.

Specifically, this is the generation that will likely put an end to the war that has been going on for more than 50 years between traditionalists, who never trucked with controversial innovators like Carter, Cage, and Babbitt and just wanted everyone to go back to playing Brahms and Beethoven and pretend that most of the 20th century never happened; and hardcore modernists, who decided decades ago that they cared more about impressing each other at conferences than they did about writing music that audiences, even sophisticated ones, could relate to.

To musicians in their 20s today, these battles are not just tired, they're quite literally history. Someone born in 1988 looks at the debate over serialism in much the same way that s/he looks at Communism: a relic of the past, to be viewed through the lens of history, and while perhaps important to study, certainly not an ongoing debate one has with one's friends. The fact that many 20th century composers chose to write music that sounded harsh and deliberately unpleasant to most ears is a fact that young musicians recognize, but they don't associate that fact in any way with the dynamic and genre-busting new music they focus their careers on today. Nor should they. Here's MacMillan again:

All art forms need to be revitalized to survive, and too often classical music has been more concerned with preserving its past than defining its future. These groups offer an exciting way forward. They honor the essence of classical music, while devising meaningful ways to refresh and extend the genre.

On this historic inauguration day, with the word "change" on everyone's lips, I can't think of a more important revolution for the entire music world to embrace.

Necessary procrastination

So, a grey afternoon here in Virginia, where I finally have a few days off to gather my thoughts, learn a truckload of music, wash my concert clothes and get back on the road again - I'm in Burlington, VT next week premiering a piece by my very good friend David Ludwig with the Vermont Symphony, and then back in Minnesota for the second installment of "Inside the Classics" shows of the season.

It's been an exhausting month since mid-December - a pretty unrelenting schedule which has been hitting me physically and psychologically (hey, conductors need breaks, too!). All of which makes it harder to be sitting here in my studio, trying to get some work done. It's nice to have some good distractions, and this is one of my favorite things to listen to when I need a couple minutes to clear my brain (it's got quite a surprising ending - don't let the meandering mood fool you):



György Kurtág's music takes you into a completely different realm, with an intensity and precision and often an altered spatial sense that is transportive. And sometimes you really, really need to get out of your own head - or at least I do, when I'm spending hours poring over dots on a page! Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Kurtag: "I keep coming back to the realisation that one note is almost enough" - enough, that is, to sum up the essence of a thought, a gesture, a sensation. Or, as in the case of the video, a selection from Játékok, a set of "learning pieces", maybe one technique (the glissando) is almost enough.

A good way to procrastinate for a few minutes. But now, back to work!

When It Rains...

The fallout from the global financial crisis is only just beginning to make itself felt at American orchestras and opera companies, and everyone in the business is battening down the hatches, slashing costs wherever they can, and generally preparing for a frightening few years.

Even on the off chance that the current recession turns out not to be as severe as everyone seems convinced it will be, nonprofits will be hurting for some time because of what's known as the trailing average. Basically, in order that businesses like ours, which do not stockpile profits and therefore have little margin for error on the balance sheet, not be caught with our pants down when an economic downturn hits, we base our fiscal management not on current economic data, but on the average data of the past three fiscal years - the trailing average. This has the advantage of giving us time to adjust to severe fluctuations in the market, since we'll be hit by them gradually over three years, but has the disadvantage that we'll still be climbing out of the hole three years after the market swings back to positive territory.

That trailing average is one reason why, despite the complete collapse of the credit markets and the plummeting stock averages, you've seen a lot of orchestras (Minnesota included) trumpeting balanced budgets and even surpluses for the most recent fiscal year. It's not that we're not affected by the dismal state of things - it's that the collapse hasn't yet shown up in our official balance sheet.

But the New Year is bringing plenty of bad news for the economics of performing arts groups. The Metropolitan Opera, by far America's largest classical music organization, has been flying high artistically for the last decade or so, but now, their general director has openly admitted that the company's endowment has been so battered by the markets that it has reached a level where the Met cannot draw a single dime out of it until things improve. Further, ticket sales have stagnated and the company is at risk for a whopping $40m deficit for the current year.

Over in Philadelphia, a leadership vacuum at the Philadelphia Orchestra (which currently has no music director or music director designate, and just bumped its CEO out the door last week) has the ensemble's board supremely nervous, and there's talk of asking the musicians to reopen their contract. Philly has a long history of bad blood between the musicians, management, and board leadership, so this situation could be one of the first to get truly ugly.

There's more: the Baltimore Symphony laid off five staffers last week, New York City Opera is in a huge fiscal and artistic mess, Washington National Opera has canceled its planned 2009-10 production of Wagner's massive Ring cycle, and smaller groups from coast to coast are in even more severe trouble. It's almost a certainty that a handful of small orchestras will close up shop completely before it's all over, which will very likely lead to yet another round of poorly written, poorly conceived articles in the national arts press claiming that orchestras just aren't economically viable in today's world. (The reality is that well-managed orchestras are perfectly viable. But a lot of orchestras, especially smaller ones, are managed by people who don't even have a basic knowledge of the economics of non-profits.)

At our shop, the weekly Management Team notes that are e-mailed to us show our leadership group trying every money-saving trick they can think of to shave costs and prepare responsibly for a very scary couple of years ahead. So far, we haven't had to lay anyone off, and no one's said anything (yet) about reopening our contract (we're in the second year of a five-season deal which was designed as a "catch up" contract to get us back to parity with other major American orchestras after half a decade of wage freezes and token 1% raises,) but the possibility of both of those scenarios is certainly in the back of everyone's mind.

If there's a silver lining to all this (and I'm not saying there is,) it could be that, in times of economic turmoil, anecdotal evidence suggests that some donors (particularly those on the high end of the income spectrum) actually tend to up their donations, perceiving that the causes and organizations they support have a greater need than usual. Also, past recessions have sometimes caused Americans to reevaluate their priorities, and spend more time and money helping others, even as they cut back on personal spending. This is the kind of altruistic behavior that drives Wall Street batty (giving $100 bucks to Habitat for Humanity does absolutely nothing for the Consumer Price Index,) but gives those of us in the non-profit world a prayer of surviving the fiscal winter.

This isn't to say that we're likely see an uptick in overall donations this year, by the way. While some generous souls who can afford to will give more, the vast bulk of mid-level donors, those who give us between $1000 and $10,000 in an average year, say, will likely be in no position to do so this year, and the dropoff could be severe. And of course, you can't blame people for not giving away money they don't have.

So what should you watch for over the coming year or two to determine whether your favorite charity or arts group is in serious danger, or weathering the storm? There's no single canary in the coal mine, but I always keep an eye on three basic contextual signals:

1) How are other similarly-sized arts groups in the region performing? (In other words, if you're worried about the Minnesota Orchestra, keep an eye on the Guthrie and the Walker Art Center as well.)

2) How transparent and open is the organization being about its economic situation? (A struggling but well-managed arts group will always go out of its way to be as transparent as possible, to show that it has nothing to hide, and wants its supporters to feel involved in helping it keep its head above water. Organizations truly on the brink of collapse tend to turn inward and start claiming that everything is fine, just before they go over the cliff.)

3) When cuts are made, are they made to areas that can be restored later without hurting the organization, or are they cuts designed to permanently scale back the group's operations? (For instance, an orchestra that cancels an international tour for lack of funding is making a one-time cut that, while painful, will not affect the group's ability to tour in the future when funds become available. An orchestra that locks out its musicians for weeks and forces a 25% pay cut across the board has just dropped itself out of its national peer group, and very few orchestras ever make it back to major league status after such a cut.)

The good news is that Minnesota continues to be just about the best state in America for arts and cultural support, and believe me, every one of us in the business locally is well aware of how lucky we are at a time like this to be living and working in MSP, rather than in, say, Columbus. Undoubtedly, we're in for some rocky months and years ahead, but it's in times like this that it's most important for us to remember to say thank you to those who keep us going year after year, and to perform with the kind of passion that makes you want to keep supporting us.

Help Us Entertain You

Okay, here's the deal, people. We don't ask for a lot around here, aside from the occasional intelligent comment (which y'all have been excellent about providing) and your continued willingness to take an interest in what Sarah and I do for a living.

But we're looking for a bit of help here. Times are tough, as you know, and any arts organization will tell you that getting people out of their houses and into a museum, concert hall, or theater is darned tough in the month or two after Christmas, even in the best of economic circumstances. But the fact is, we've got an Inside the Classics concert coming up at the end of the month that we're awfully excited about, and if you were to push me, I'd confess that I'm pretty sure it's going to be the best show we've done yet in two years of putting these things on at Orchestra Hall.

So here's what we're asking. We've thrown up an event page over at Facebook, with a basic description of what we'll be doing on the 28th and 29th, and invited everyone we know who might be in the MSP area on those dates and doesn't actually play in the orchestra. But we need more invites, so if you're a Facebook type (and we know for a fact that some of you are,) please take a couple of minutes to head on over to our page and invite literally everyone you know in the Twin Cities metro. If you wanted to add a note telling them about past ItC shows you've attended, more power to you. But even just spreading the word would be a tremendous help to us.

Even if you're not a Facebooker, we want to do everything we can to pack the hall for these shows, and you'd be amazed how a little word of mouth can make a difference. So if you were already planning on attending, first of all, thank you, and secondly, would you consider asking a few friends to come along? And if you've been perusing this blog or any of the rest of the MN Orch web site and wondered why the heck we're not using Proven Viral Marketing Technique X to attract people to the hall, chime in down in the comments and let us know what we ought to be doing! We're always looking for new ideas...

So, to sum up:

Facebook Event Page Here

Concert Detail Page Here (with link to online ticketing)

Comments Here

"Museum and laboratory"

The New York Philharmonic has announced its 2009-10 season, incoming music director Alan Gilbert's inaugural season, at a press conference that is available in its entirety (94 minutes!) via this webcast. There's much of interest: Magnus Lindberg as newly-minted composer-in-residence; artist-in-residence Thomas Hampson; a new music ensemble; the New York premier of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre; a three-week mini-festival of Stravinsky curated and conducted by Valery Gergiev; Alec Baldwin as "announcer-in-residence". Great stuff, all.

Two bits I liked, one line from Gilbert and one from Lindberg - Gilbert puts forth the idea of an orchestra as both museum and laboratory - curating the great art of the past while supporting the curious chemistry that creates great art of the present. And to tie in to that, Lindberg talks about the necessity for a "dialogue between our time and the past". It reminds me of a discussion about programming during a League of American Orchestras workshop I attended years ago about how pieces in a concert program should be in an "active dialogue". I like the sense of the importance of connection and interdependence.

It reminded me of the questions I received after the numerous presentations I've been doing this week as part of a music director search week here in Reno - inevitably, after I discuss my interest in contemporary American composers, an audience member will raise a hand to ask, fearfully, if that means that I want to play "all avant garde music all the time". First of all, I try to explain, American concert music tends to be much more musically conservative than what's coming out of Europe, but second of all, my interest (as with most who like the "new stuff") is in presenting contemporary works with established masterpieces so that the new and the old can shed light on each other, to be presented "in dialogue". That's one of the more enjoyable parts of programming, and a direction to look for as the New York Phil and Gilbert begin their relationship.

Cutting Room Floor: Felix's Dark Side

As has become the custom around here, we'll devote a few posts in the weeks leading up to our next Inside the Classics concerts to covering some of the things we won't have time to get to in the show. (Click the Cutting Room Floor tag to see all the entries fitting this description.) In the case of Felix Mendelssohn, there's so much available material to choose from that it was initially tough even to know where to focus our energies. And just when I thought I was getting a handle on the man's biography, an article from one of Britain's leading dailies shattered a fair chunk of his squeaky-clean reputation only this past weekend.

At the heart of the posthumous bombshell dropped by London's Royal Academy of Music is an allegation that Mendelssohn may have written a letter to Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, "declaring passionate love for her, begging her to elope with him to America, and threatening suicide if she refused." Lind's husband destroyed the letter to preserve the reputation of his wife, but later swore out an affidavit testifying to the letter's existence, and placed it in the Royal Academy's Mendelssohn archive with orders that it remain sealed for a century. Now, after years of questions from scholars regarding the affidavit's contents, those in the know are speaking about it, just in time for the composer's bicentenary.

Now, the possible romantic link between a 19th-century composer and a woman not his wife might not seem like a very big deal, but in the case of this particular composer, it's causing quite a stir. As The Independent puts it:

"Until now, Mendelssohn has been deemed the happiest of composers... Born into a privileged family, he was a child prodigy, and went on to become a highly successful composer, conductor and educator. He was also gifted in painting and writing, enjoyed a happy marriage, and had five children. It has been thought that the only tragedies he experienced were the death of his sister Fanny in May 1847, followed by his own six months later, aged 38."

The circumstances of Mendelssohn's early death have always seemed a bit, well, storybook. Stroke risk ran in the family: a stroke killed Fanny, and doctors at the time pronounced Felix, too, a victim of "a series of strokes." But the suicide threat, coming shortly after Fanny's demise, would seem to at least suggest the possibility that Mendelssohn made good on his threat. It certainly makes clear that the composer's life was not as charmed as we've been led to believe.

We won't be getting much into Mendelssohn's personal life in our concerts, but in rethinking his reputation, The Independent touches on a theme that, by coincidence, Sarah and I had already decided to use as the centerpiece of our script...

"The nature of Mendelssohn's music could be a giveaway... Its emotional content is high-impact, driven, with deeply romantic sensibilities, but almost always within contained classical forms. But it packs such an intense punch in terms of nervous energy, something probably had to give."

A note from the desert

Many thanks to Sam for picking up my blogging slack this week. I'm indeed in Reno for a music director search week, and apart from keeping a very busy schedule (packed with board lunches, radio interviews, staff meetings and donor dinners), I'm suffering the indignity of paying for internet service (is it me, or is $13.99 for 12 hours of internet just really galling? Or am I just full of internet entitlement?). But, couldn't resist forever, so here I am.

Just a thought about a combination of pieces that I'm doing here that I've been pleased with - the second half of my program is centered around the 1919 "Firebird" Suite by Stravinsky, which is prefaced by the "Bluebird" Pas de Deux from Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty", reorchestrated by Stravinsky. The reorchestration is really just a resetting for theater-sized orchestra that totally retains the charm of Tchaikovsky's original. What I like about the combination of these two pieces is on several different levels. First and foremost, I love the notion that "Sleeping Beauty" was premiered in 1890, "Firebird" in 1910 - a mere 20 years apart - and I can't imagine two pieces more divergent. Tchaikovsky has all the oom-pah-pah-ness of conventional ballet music; the contrast with "Firebird", with all that atmospheric creepiness in the opening, could not be greater. Then there is, of course, the odd connection in Stravinsky's reorchestration of "Bluebird". And then, the very surface connection (but connection nonetheless!) that both pieces are about birds.

But they work together in an odd way, "Bluebird" a charming miniature of four short dances (pas de deux, two variations and coda), and "Firebird" a monumental piece of morphing harmonies, modal melodies and an aura of exoticism. It's always fun to discover that two pieces that you like individually make an utterly new impression when taken together.

Wrapping Up Recording Week

I honestly don't know how we managed to finish these recordings. Getting an entire symphony or concerto down on disc in usable form always seems to take longer than anyone is expecting - our 5-year Beethoven symphony project was originally only supposed to take 3 years - but this week in particular seemed awfully ambitious. In fact, going into our final day of studio sessions, most of us in the orchestra just assumed that there was no way we were going to finish the piano concerto. We had just one 3-hour session left (which works out to only about two hours of actual recording time when you subtract playback breaks,) and we hadn't even finished the first of three movements of the concerto when the day began.

Miraculously, we did get it done, although calling it "done" implies that every note that will be on the CD was complete when the orchestra left the stage. To save time, any extended passage that the piano soloist plays without the orchestra - cadenzas and so on - was skipped, to be added after the orchestra went on its way. This kind of non-linear recording bothers some audiophiles and music critics tremendously, because it seems somehow dishonest, as if a recording were really not a performance, but just a collection of notes assembled by a skillful engineer.

To a certain extent, that's undeniably true - a great CD requires not only great performers but top-notch producers and engineers, and the finished product is at least as much their achievement as it is ours. One of the reasons our recordings with BIS have garnered as much positive attention as they have is that the quality of recorded sound BIS puts out is just about the best that current technology is capable of. The discs they record are multi-layered, so that they sound amazing in both high-tech "Super-Audio" CD players and in regular decks, and the precision their crew brings to bear on our projects borders on the obsessive. (By contrast, we used to record discs for an audiophile label that catered mainly to the kind of enthusiasts who own $50,000 home audio systems, and I was repeatedly assured that the CDs we put out with that label sounded incredible on those systems, but in my $300 home stereo, they just sounded tinny.)

Earlier in the week, I mentioned our BIS producer, Rob Suff, who I believe I called "ruthless." A better description might be "mercilessly meticulous," as Rob is a perfectionist in much the same way that Osmo is. In fact, one of the side benefits of spending a week in the studio with Rob and Osmo is getting to watch Osmo react to Rob's constant orders and requests for retakes in exactly the same way that we in the orchestra frequently react to Osmo in rehearsal.

There's undeniable respect and affection in both relationships, yet it's difficult to constantly be told that you haven't gotten something right yet and maintain your composure. Osmo is famous for pushing orchestras to work ever harder, and demanding that musicians push the limits of our capabilities at all times, even while keeping our energy at a fever pitch. We musicians tend to like the results of such prodding, but the process can be hugely frustrating at times.

In the same way, when Osmo gets a recorded take that he thinks had exactly the musical/emotional qualities he wanted, only to have Rob come over the loudspeaker and announce that a) the winds were slightly flat for two beats of the second bar and b) the violas and basses were a hair off kilter rhythmically on the downbeat, our music director frequently winds up bent over at the waist, breathing hard, trying to keep himself from arguing. Allowing the frustration to take over would only result in another bad take, and we all know that, but staying on an even keel is a lot harder in a recording situation than it is in a performance.

In a concert, you're trying to create a smooth overall ensemble effect by reacting constantly to what's going on around you, and rolling with small mistakes in such a way that the audience, which hears not every little scrap of sound but an amalgam of everything happening on stage, never knows they occurred. On a recording, reacting to mistakes is useless, because the microphones hear everything. Once a mistake is made, you've got to start over. And over. And over.

Still, I admit to taking a fair amount of pride in the recordings we've been able to produce over the last several years, and while I don't exactly look forward to the weeks we spend enslaved to Rob's disembodied voice, I'm definitely looking forward to hearing the big viola solos in the second movement of Bruckner 4. Especially now that I know that Rob can't make me play them again.

Last Sarah Standing?

I know, I know, I said I'd post something more about the recording sessions a day or two ago, but I'm flat exhausted, and I've been using most of my non-stage time to deal with the last-minute complications that inevitably arise when we're getting close to our next ItC concerts. But just to tide you over, here's a link to an article in the Reno News-Review, where it would appear that our Ms. Hicks has gotten herself involved in yet another popularity contest. (The reason you're not hearing about this adventure from Sarah herself is that her hotel apparently charges something like $60 a day for internet access. Ridiculous. She'll be back on the blog eventually, but possibly not until she gets clear of Nevada next week.)

Anyway, you'll notice that the article includes a link to the Reno Philharmonic's website, where concertgoers can actually vote on their favorite candidate to become the orchestra's next music director. We're certainly not suggesting that you should follow this link and vote without having attended the concerts based on your Reno-independent love of Sarah. (Also, as far as we can make out, the orchestra isn't actually guaranteeing that the candidate with the most public support will get the job.) We're just saying there's a link in the article. Do what you want...

Photographic Evidence That We're Actually Working This Week

So, as promised, here are a few shots I managed to squeeze off in between takes of Bruckner 4 at today's recording sessions at Orchestra Hall. (Click any of the images for a full-size version.) First off, here's a look at the chaotic, microphone-strewn mess that our stage becomes during one of these weeks...

Notice that not only are there mics and cables everywhere, but also an assortment of spotlights you would expect to find at a neighborhood ballpark. There's a good reason for these: the stage lights at Orchestra Hall, being more than thirty years old, actually emit a low-level hum that BIS's oh-so-sensitive mics pick up when we're playing softly. So they bring in their own lights and leave the rest of the hall dark while we're recording, which creates a very eerie glow around the auditorium.

Oh, yeah, and they hang giant curtains from the rear of the house, all the way from the third tier to the floor. Since we're close-miked for BIS recordings, they don't want to capture any reflected sound from the empty hall (which is much more echo-prone without an audience there to soak up sound waves,) and the curtains apparently help with that. At least, I assume they do, because I would imagine that it's a heck of a lot of work to get them up there.


This is a shot of the control room, which is ordinarily a backstage storage space and rehearsal room. The BIS crew sets up shop here with all manner of high-tech recording, mixing, and playback equipment, plus at least three laptop computers dialed into whatever it is they do with the noises we make, and in between takes, Osmo, Jorja, and an ever-changing assortment of the rest of us pile into the room to listen to the playback and decide what sounds good enough to make the cut, and what needs to be redone, and redone, and redone again until it's perfect. During the playback that was going on in this shot, you've got trombonist Kari Sundstrom and timpanist Peter Kogan wearing the headphones in the foreground, and BIS producer Robert Suff at the main mixing table with Osmo and two other BIS engineers who I believe are named Hans and Fabian.


This is the other thing that goes on in hurried fashion when a break in the session is called, which happens often to allow for playback. Principal musicians leap to confer with Osmo at the podium about mistakes or imperfections they already know will need to be rerecorded when we continue. In this shot, Jorja and Osmo confer in the background, while principal viola Tom Turner and assistant concertmaster Roger Frisch hold an urgent conversation which sounded to me like it had nothing whatsoever to do with Bruckner. Oh, and there's one other individual in the photo, lurking back there in the shadows just to the right of Jorja...


That's producer Rob Suff again. Or at least, that's the main contact most of us will have with him over the course of the week, as he literally calls the shots to the stage from back at his desk in the control room. Rob is utterly ruthless, in that perfectly mannered and unfailingly polite way that only the British seem able to achieve. I'm sure I'll have more on him as the week goes on.

For now, we seem to be more or less on schedule, with the first movement of Bruckner in the can, and just over half of the slow movement done as well. We've technically got another day and a half of session time to finish the symphony, but I've heard rumors that Osmo and Rob would like to get an early start on the piano concerto if at all possible, so things could get tight. In any case, we're back at it bright and early tomorrow, and I'll update either Tuesday or Wednesday night...

Playing For The Microphones

The orchestra heads back to work Monday morning, after two weeks away from the hall, but those of you waiting for a concert will have a while to wait yet. We'll spend this week recording new CDs, which for the first time under Osmo will feature a composer other than Beethoven. Okay, actually, we are recording some Beethoven - his fourth piano concerto with the up-and-coming Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin, but the bulk of the week will be spent on Bruckner's massive 4th symphony.

(Someone asked me the other day why we would pair these two very different pieces on a single CD, and the answer is that I'm pretty sure we won't be. Taken together, the Bruckner and Beethoven represent around 90 minutes of music, so I'm pretty sure they wouldn't fit on a single release. Whether the concerto will be released as a stand-alone CD or will sit on BIS's shelf until we've recorded another of the Beethoven concertos with Sudbin next season, I don't know, but I'll try to find out for those of you who care about such things.)

This will also be the first time since November that we'll be playing what musicians consider standard concert hall repertoire. As a commenter recently pointed out, our Decembers are given over entirely to holiday programming, and while some of it is certainly quality music, none of it is actually challenging to play. Throw in the additional fact that the last concert we played under Osmo was way the hell back on November 15 (a runout performance in Watertown,) and jumping feet first into a recording session with no rehearsal starts to seem like the musical equivalent of joining the Polar Bear Club. (Which, I'm reliably informed, one of our horn players actually did this weekend.)

The good news is that Osmo doesn't tend to throw us a lot of curveballs that we aren't ready for (we know him pretty well by now,) and we've worked with BIS producer Rob Suff for more than five years now, so the pace of the recording sessions will be familiar, if exhausting. Because we have to stop frequently to listen back to various takes, recordings take much longer than our regular rehearsals and concerts - we'll be at the hall from 10am to 6:30pm Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and from 10am-1pm on Friday. (The off day on Wednesday is by design, so we don't end up sounding lethargic on the later takes.)

I'll chime in with some posts about the recording process as we go through it, and I'll try to score some photos and audio from the control room as well, if I can do it without annoying anyone too much. And for those of you waiting for us to get back into the tuxes, and who may have worn out your Minnesota Orchestra recording of Beethoven's 5th, here's a slightly different interpretation that I've been enjoying recently...

Yes, that would be Mr. Bean...

Happy Year of the Cow!

Well, it's actually the Year of the Ox (if you're into the whole Chinese/Japanese astrology/zodiac thing), but Cow is so much funnier...

Of course, no mention of the New Year would be complete without a Neujahrs-Konzert with the Vienna Philharmonic, a tradition since 1939, this year led by the inimitable Daniel Barenboim.

I've written about Mr. Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra - although ostensibly non-political, the ensemble has given him a platform to promote deeper understanding between two opposing factions, and given the current violence in the region, I was wondering if Barenboim would take advantage of the Vienna podium to share his thoughts.

Which he certainly did - while his remarks at the actual concert were limited to a simple wish that 2009 be a "year of peace in the world and of human justice in the Middle East", he did release a statement that was tantamount to a criticism of Israeli air strikes against Palestinians on the Gaza Strip.

While one may not agree with his politics, it's hard not to admire a man who takes a stand on his strongly-held convictions, particularly when those convictions are borne of an understanding of both perspectives (the Israeli-Argentinian conductor is also an honorary Palestinian citizen).

But, as always, the music transcends all. I particularly love "Spharenklange" by the Waltz King's brother, Josef Strauss:



I'm not a huge fan of the sweeping shots of the Alps (and the odd close-ups of alpine lichen), but, hey, it's TV, people! The notion of "Harmony of the Spheres" is a nice one, particularly given the tenor of violence in the world discussed earlier.

And of course, you can't have a New Year's Concert without the obligatory encores - in this case, ALWAYS "Blue Danube" and my favorite, Radetzky March, the perennial opportunity for conductors to ham it up and mug for the audience/camera (not that there's anything wrong with that!!):




Wishing a healthy, happy and unturbulent New Year to all!!

What Musicians Want

The post-holiday period tends to be a very slow time of year for the music biz, and there's not much out there in terms of arts news in early January. But for those who take an interest in the inner workings of orchestras, former Chicago Symphony CEO (and now president of the League of American Orchestras,) Henry Fogel, has written a blog post about conductors and musicians that's well worth reading, especially in light of the recent conductor-inspired dust-ups in New York and Boston.

As someone who sat on the management side of the orchestral table for many years, Henry's heard a great deal of noise from both musicians and board members about conductors and the way they get hired, so he's in a unique position to see things from both sides. (Musicians tend to be highly suspicious of management types, since they tend to be the bearers of bad fiscal news, but Henry has usually been viewed by orchestral players as one of the truly good guys in the industry.)

In his post, Henry dispels the myth that orchestras just want a conductor who will go easy on them (it's often the opposite,) makes the case for why musicians deserve a role in hiring their own boss, and explains why the dictatorial style employed by some famed conductors in past eras simply won't work today. He also gently takes apart some of the more fanciful misconceptions board members tend to have about the musicians they support.

My favorite two sentences from Henry's post are these: "You will rarely get unanimity from an orchestra about a music director or a guest conductor. But the truth is that you will almost always get an obvious consensus." He's absolutely right, and that general consensus usually dictates whether a given conductor/orchestra partnership will be successful.