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...