Nielsen's Fresh Hell

Okay, yeah, I'm a terrible blogger - nothing new on the site for three days. I apologize. It's just that things are extremely busy around the shop this week, as we get set to take off on a major European tour on the 21st of the month, and we've begun rehearsing the repertoire that we'll be playing in London, Berlin, Vienna, and a handful of other cities. In particular, we're working like dogs on what may well be the most difficult piece of orchestral music I've ever played:



Oh, I know, it doesn't sound so bad at the start, right? Well, just wait until the 2:07 mark, and then listen to what the strings are doing. All that little noodling around with sharp-edged bowstrokes? That's brutally difficult to do, especially that softly, and most especially when the composer chooses to have every single string player playing the same notes at the same time. Keep in mind that, for the most part, we can't hear each other across the stage, so we're going almost entirely on visual cues, cues which require us to look up at the conductor and our principals constantly, which we can't actually do in this case because the notes are so ridiculously counter-intuitive and difficult to play that, if we look away from our music for even a moment, we will crash and burn like you wouldn't believe.

Those four pages of 8th-note hell are hardly the extent of Carl Nielsen's torture devices, either. Around the 5:25 mark of that clip above, he decides to drop us into an absurdly fast-moving fugue that's almost as difficult to navigate as the unison section. And way back at the top of the first movement of the symphony, the viola section spends nearly five continuous minutes hammering our fingers down in the same repeated pattern, which becomes so physically painful after a while that our principal has given each of us carte blanche to stop playing and rest our fingers whenever we need to.

We've actually played Nielsen's 5th under Osmo before, a few years back. (It was actually the first week of work for one of our violists, Matt Young. What a way to start your new job!) I sort of figured that, this time around, it would be easier for me to play, since I'd have the familiarity of a past performance. No dice - it's still absolutely brutal - and if you'll excuse me, I'm off to spend the morning hacking away at it again. Talk to ya later, if my hands don't permanently seize up before the end of the week...