Crunch Time

It feels like forever since we left Minneapolis, and even longer since the orchestra played a concert (last Thursday night,) but today, finally, is the first official day of the tour - Concert #1, at the Barbican Centre in London. When we gather on stage for a brief rehearsal late this afternoon, it will have been five full days since we last drew our bows together, and to be honest, that kind of gap scares the life out of me. Professional orchestras generally work on very tight schedules, rehearsing and performing a concert in the space of only a few days, and our ability to play as much music as we do is largely based on there not being big gaps in the preparation time. Throw in the fact that last Thursday's concert was, according to pretty much everyone, not our best work, and today becomes a vitally important day.

The London concert is arguably the most important of any European tour for an American orchestra, simply because it's where we'll get the bulk of our critical reaction from the English language press. At a time when newspapers are seeming to breathe their last in many cities, London still sports close to ten dailies, and nearly all of them employ full-time classical music critics with very strong opinions. (Back in 2004, I wrote about a concert we played at the Barbican that garnered two diametrically opposed views from two prominent London critics, both named Andrew.) We've heard there will be 7 or 8 critics in attendance tonight, and one thing you can be sure of: they won't care that it's been five days since our last concert. We need a knockout punch tonight to get us off on the right foot, and that means everyone stepping up together to find whatever spark was missing last Thursday.

Sarah and I promised you some video content on this trip, and we're planning to take our first stab at it in this afternoon's rehearsal. With any luck, I'll get the results up and posted before we leave for Berlin early tomorrow morning...