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.
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.
Labels: chamber music, cutting room floor, the young people
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