Home Stretch

Just a few touring odds and ends to report as we prepare for the final concert of the run here in beautiful Vienna, Austria:

1) The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg appears, from our very limited time there, to be a somewhat strange place. The concert hall (which is awfully good, by the way) is in what looks like a 5-mile long office park on the outskirts of the city. Said office park is bisected neatly by a 6-lane highway called John F. Kennedy Avenue. There is one daily newspaper, which contains some stories in French and some in German, with no immediately available explanation as to how it is determined which stories merit what language. An advance article about our concert in said paper was headlined (translation mine,) "105 Years & Seven Music Directors," despite the undeniable facts that a) the Minnesota Orchestra has had ten music directors, and b) all ten were accurately listed in the article.

2) While we were warming up on stage before the concert, watching the extremely well-behaved denizens of Luxembourg stream to their seats, fellow violist Ben Ullery and I got into a discussion of what such folk are called. Luxembourgers? Luxembourgians? Luxembourgish? Ben eventually decided, based on their stoic manner and eerily synchronized movements, that they are, in fact, The LuxemBORG. This pretty much insured a steady stream of entertainment for the rest of the evening. Resistance was futile.

3) There is this thing that happens now and again just before the beginning of an orchestra concert, and it's always fascinating when it does. As you know, American orchestras gather on stage before the concert to warm up, and the audience generally enters the hall to a low level of musical cacophony emanating from the front which only quiets when the lights dim and the concertmaster emerges from the wings.

But have you ever wondered what would happen if the whole orchestra just happened to take a break from warming up at the same time? This is what we refer to as the dreaded "Awkward Silence," in which it is clearly not yet time for the concert to begin, and yet we have all, for one reason or another, ceased making noise, which has caused the audience to cease talking, and everyone just sort of sits there looking at each other, wondering what's going on. Most of the time, it happens because the concert start is being held up for one reason or another, and it's thrown off our internal sense of timing with our individual warm-up routines. But sometimes, it just happens because we're fatigued, or bored, or because we've been playing the same repertoire on the road for two weeks and no longer have to scramble to be sure we've gone over every difficult lick in our parts.

And so it was that the Awkward Silence descended on the concert hall in Luxembourg Tuesday night. Sometimes, when you hear the Awkward Silence coming, you and a couple of friends can forestall it by immediately beginning to play something, anything, and hope that others take the hint. But on this night, the transition from chaos to silence took place in a matter of mere seconds, and suddenly, there we were in Awkwardbourg. At this point, there's nothing anyone can really do, because no one wants to be That Guy who starts loudly playing his/her instrument just to break the silence, and besides, the audience has noticed us now, and we weren't ready for that, and it's all just, well, awkward.

It's especially awkward if the silence descends more than 20 or 30 seconds before the house lights were due to dim anyway. And in this case, as it turned out, we had settled into quiet time a full four minutes beforehand. It was, needless to say, a very long four minutes, during which The Borg stared quizzically at us, and we did our best to look as if we had no idea what they were staring quizzically at, we do this all the time, it's an American tradition to meditate quietly for a few minutes before concerts, and blah blah blah. The Borg did not appear to be fooled in the least.