Home Stretch
In case you're wondering about the blog silence over the last several days, it's largely a result of just how busy this particular chunk of the season is for the orchestra. We're in the final weeks of what we oddly call our "winter season" (it's really the whole season minus Sommerfest - insert your own Minnesota winter joke here,) and our artistic planning team backloaded a huge amount of very tough music this year, which is causing no small amount of scrambling on the part of the orchestra.
Last week, we played a brand new (and massively outsized) concerto for violin and full choir by Jennifer Higdon, and then finished out the week with a completely separate jazz program featuring our own Chuck Lazarus on trumpet. (This was no ordinary pops show, either, where the orchestra could afford to just slide into our chairs at the last minute and glide through a bunch of easy half notes and slapped-together arrangements. As a member of the orchestra, Chuck knows exactly what we're capable of, and his orchestrations take full advantage of that knowledge.)
This week, our marketing department is selling our concerts as a chance to watch us make a live recording of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto with the estimable Stephen Hough. And we are, in fact, doing that, and that will certainly be no small task, but I feel fairly confident in saying that it's a virtual guarantee that not a single musician in the orchestra is spending any serious practice time on the Tchaikovsky as we get ready for our first day of rehearsals tomorrow. And the reason that we aren't exactly focused on the concerto is that we're all frantically cramming on the ridiculously difficult piece that will be on the second half of the program: Kalevi Aho's 10th Symphony.
We've played some Aho in the past - he's one of Osmo's favorite living composers, and I quite like what I've heard of his music, too. But this piece, well... let's just say that professional musicians are not easily intimidated by new challenges (you can't really succeed in a business that requires you to practice, rehearse, and perform a new two hours of music every single week without having a fair bit of confidence in your ability to pick things up quickly,) but I started hearing whispers and squawks about the Aho nearly a month ago, when the parts first started trickling into the stacks of folders we pick up to practice for upcoming concerts. The first violins, in particular, have taken to wandering around backstage looking shellshocked, and murmuring to each other, "I mean, have you seen that part on page 26? How do you even play that?"
What makes the Aho so insanely hard from an individual player's point of view (as opposed to the perspective of the full ensemble) is that a) much of it is very, very fast, and b) much of it is very, very high up in the register of each instrument. It's one of those situations where we're pretty well used to playing fast things, and there's really no one in the Minnesota Orchestra who's afraid of a few high notes, but when a composer puts those two things together, and then sets up a lot of the notes in such a way that your brain is tricked into thinking it detects a pattern only to discover that your perception just caused you to play six wrong notes in a second-and-a-half... that gets frustrating.
As if all that weren't enough, a glance at the orchestra's rehearsal schedule tells me that not only have we not added a fifth rehearsal to the week (four is our norm, but we've done five before when the repertoire posed a particular challenge,) the Aho is only scheduled for two of the four rehearsals. 'Cause, y'know, we're recording a piano concerto, too, and there's a Nielsen tone poem that no one's ever heard of on the program as well, so efficiency will have to be the watchword of the week.
The chaotic pace of things doesn't end with this Saturday night's concert, either. To cover the possibility that our recording producers won't have gotten absolutely every take they need of the Tchaikovsky from our three performances, we've got a patch session scheduled for 10:30pm Saturday night, right after the show, which could run anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. We'll repeat the same act next week, when Mr. Hough records a different Tchaikovsky concerto with us. Oh, and did I mention that next week's concerts will open with a 16-minute world premiere by a composer who once participated in our Composers' Institute, and whose music, as I recall, tends to be extremely complicated to prepare? Or that we'll also be spending a day auditioning for new staff conductors on repertoire ranging from Brahms to Stravinsky to Rodgers & Hammerstein? 'Cause we will.
Not complaining, you understand. I love my job. But right now, I need a nap.
Last week, we played a brand new (and massively outsized) concerto for violin and full choir by Jennifer Higdon, and then finished out the week with a completely separate jazz program featuring our own Chuck Lazarus on trumpet. (This was no ordinary pops show, either, where the orchestra could afford to just slide into our chairs at the last minute and glide through a bunch of easy half notes and slapped-together arrangements. As a member of the orchestra, Chuck knows exactly what we're capable of, and his orchestrations take full advantage of that knowledge.)
This week, our marketing department is selling our concerts as a chance to watch us make a live recording of a Tchaikovsky piano concerto with the estimable Stephen Hough. And we are, in fact, doing that, and that will certainly be no small task, but I feel fairly confident in saying that it's a virtual guarantee that not a single musician in the orchestra is spending any serious practice time on the Tchaikovsky as we get ready for our first day of rehearsals tomorrow. And the reason that we aren't exactly focused on the concerto is that we're all frantically cramming on the ridiculously difficult piece that will be on the second half of the program: Kalevi Aho's 10th Symphony.
We've played some Aho in the past - he's one of Osmo's favorite living composers, and I quite like what I've heard of his music, too. But this piece, well... let's just say that professional musicians are not easily intimidated by new challenges (you can't really succeed in a business that requires you to practice, rehearse, and perform a new two hours of music every single week without having a fair bit of confidence in your ability to pick things up quickly,) but I started hearing whispers and squawks about the Aho nearly a month ago, when the parts first started trickling into the stacks of folders we pick up to practice for upcoming concerts. The first violins, in particular, have taken to wandering around backstage looking shellshocked, and murmuring to each other, "I mean, have you seen that part on page 26? How do you even play that?"
What makes the Aho so insanely hard from an individual player's point of view (as opposed to the perspective of the full ensemble) is that a) much of it is very, very fast, and b) much of it is very, very high up in the register of each instrument. It's one of those situations where we're pretty well used to playing fast things, and there's really no one in the Minnesota Orchestra who's afraid of a few high notes, but when a composer puts those two things together, and then sets up a lot of the notes in such a way that your brain is tricked into thinking it detects a pattern only to discover that your perception just caused you to play six wrong notes in a second-and-a-half... that gets frustrating.
As if all that weren't enough, a glance at the orchestra's rehearsal schedule tells me that not only have we not added a fifth rehearsal to the week (four is our norm, but we've done five before when the repertoire posed a particular challenge,) the Aho is only scheduled for two of the four rehearsals. 'Cause, y'know, we're recording a piano concerto, too, and there's a Nielsen tone poem that no one's ever heard of on the program as well, so efficiency will have to be the watchword of the week.
The chaotic pace of things doesn't end with this Saturday night's concert, either. To cover the possibility that our recording producers won't have gotten absolutely every take they need of the Tchaikovsky from our three performances, we've got a patch session scheduled for 10:30pm Saturday night, right after the show, which could run anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. We'll repeat the same act next week, when Mr. Hough records a different Tchaikovsky concerto with us. Oh, and did I mention that next week's concerts will open with a 16-minute world premiere by a composer who once participated in our Composers' Institute, and whose music, as I recall, tends to be extremely complicated to prepare? Or that we'll also be spending a day auditioning for new staff conductors on repertoire ranging from Brahms to Stravinsky to Rodgers & Hammerstein? 'Cause we will.
Not complaining, you understand. I love my job. But right now, I need a nap.
Labels: composers, inside the orchestra
posted by Sam at
5:37 PM
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