And now for something completely different...

...a man with two noses.

(It's been a Monty Python kind of afternoon.)

The phrase came to mind as I was flying back to Minneapolis last night (and in a decidedly non-Pythonian context) - I was putting Post-Its on my La Mer score to mark excerpts for our Inside the Classics concerts this week (fun arts and crafts!):



I've just finished a subscription week with the North Carolina Symphony (my "other" orchestra) and baritone (and dear friend) Randy Scarlata, a program of Liszt, Mahler and Dvorak. It's an interesting mental leap to go from a very standard concert format playing some great warhorses - with 4 rehearsals, to boot! - to an unconventional format where I'm worried about timing my music theory portion and making a smooth transition between talking and conducting and marking excerpts correctly...and making it all happen on a single rehearsal.

But the very challenge is what makes it fun, and I remind myself that one of the reasons I do the things I do is that I love the different-ness of it all.

Ask An Expert: Downbeats and hand waving

A question posed in the "Ask an Expert" feature on our site. Bethany Holt wonders:

"How does the orchestra conductor keep the tempo? Perhaps its because I'm used to high school band, but I see no downbeat--just a lot of hand waving that miraculously guides the musicians."

First of all, Bethany, sorry it took me two months to get to this question!

Second of all, excellent question, and one that, in many different guises, gets asked frequently. The simple answer is that all conductors give some sort of tempo indication (including downbeats), just in very different ways, and depending on the circumstance.

With a highschool band, you're talking about a group of young musicians who are at the very beginning of their ensemble playing experience; in this situation, clarity of beat (downbeat is ...HERE!) is of primary importance, and simply keeping tempo/ensemble is probably the primary function of a conductor.

When dealing with a professional orchestra of the level of, say, the Minnesota Orchestra, while establishing tempo and aiding ensemble is important, it's rarely the singular focus of whoever's on the podium. In fact, as Sam and any other member of the Orchestra will tell you, there are large swaths of music during any performance where the musicians don't really need a conductor acting as a metronome. At that point, the conductor's job becomes more about indicating articulation or dynamic motion or phrase direction or overall mood. And when you're trying to do that, indicating tempo in a very vertical way (ie, with big downbeats) can get in the way.

The more complex answer is that this all depends on the conductor as well. There are those who are very insistent on beat patterns (or large beats); there are those who rely less on points in a beat and more on velocity of movement to communicate tempo; there are those with a completely ambiguous physical vocabulary that still somehow get their point across. It's all a matter of intent, as well as every conductor's individual way of relaying that intent. And it always amazes me how orchestras can adjust, week to week, (or occasionally day to day) to different conductors.

So, yes, Bethany, I guess, in the end, there's actually something pretty miraculous about it!

4-3-2-1...

Gearing up for what should be an epic New Year's Eve (which I'll - hopefully - post about tomorrow):



In the meantime, a few musings on 2009:

It's been a tumultuous year, by all accounts, and there have certainly been casualties of these troubled financial times (although one could argue that the Honolulu Symphony was in terminal condition long before the current state of the world).

Tough times force a certain amount of navel-gazing; the danger in this is the possibility of becoming stuck in pensiveness, without the possibility of action. In a year predicated on the overarching notion of Change (yup, with a capital "C"), it's encouraging to see that some major organizations have taken some actual bold steps, particularly in choosing artistic leaders; Alan Gilbert began his stint at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, weeks before the Los Angeles Philharmonic welcomed Gustavo Dudamel as its new music director.

Gilbert seems both an unusual choice (a young American less-known in his home country) and a natural fit (as the son of NY Phil musicians) - an interesting direction for a conservative organization that nonetheless seems to concede to the need for a larger cultural relevancy (witness the choice of Alec Baldwin as its radio host). On the opposite coast, the Dudamel PR juggernaut is motoring at full throttle, drumming up the kind of buzz of which other orchestras can only dream. "The Dude's" charisma is unquestionable; whether it will translate into artistic fulfillment or increased ticket sales, only time will tell.

And speaking of new appointments and charisma, that of Yo-Yo Ma as "creative consultant" to the Chicago Symphony is one that has me very interested. It's the kind of outside-the-box thinking - utilizing talent in an unconventional manner - that signals some of the most exciting development in the orchestral field.

But it wasn't the year for change - or choice - for everyone; the Philadelphia Orchestra is still rudderless, heightening concerns about one of the most beleaguered of the "Big Five" (which reminds me, how do we rank orchestras these days, anyway?).

On the personal front, change came in the form of two new jobs and moving my household to Minneapolis, all of which has been simultaneously challenging and enormously satisfying.

On the Inside the Classics front, Sam and I are busy preparing for the next set of concerts (La Mer! I've been looking forward to this one...) while, thanks to result reports from Wallace Foundation-funded focus group studies, we continue to reevaluate and tinker with format and content for upcoming seasons. As much as I like change - as I've frequently said, my favorite quote = "If you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less" - there are some constants I've come to rely on, like a co-host/co-writer/cohort whose inventiveness and wit and sense of vision are a constant inspiration to me. Thanks for a great 2009, Sam; now if we could only find a time for our "Four Seasons" initial script meeting...

Happy New Year to all!!

In the crosshairs

I'm finishing up Michael Pollan's wonderful The Omnivore's Dilemma, which, I have to confess, I started back when the Orchestra was on tour in late February (I have a bad habit of reading up to a dozen books simultaneously, which often results in taking many, many months to finish a single one.) It's a thought-provoking read (who knew how corn permeates so much of what we consume?) describing four meals from four different sources - factory farming, industrialized organic agriculture, self-sustaining polycultural organic farming and hunting/gathering.

A phrase in the hunting/gathering chapter caught my eye; "the hunter's ecstatic purple". Describing his participation in a pig hunt in northern California, Pollan goes on to explain:

It was as if I'd dialed up the gain on all my senses or quieted myself to such an extent that the world itself grew louder and brighter...So much sensory information was coming into my head that it seemed to push out the normal buzz of consciousness. The state felt very much like meditation, though it took no mental effort or exercise to achieve that kind of head-emptying presence. The simple act of looking and listening, tuning my senses to the forest frequencies of Pig, occupied every quadrant of mental space and anchored me to the present.

Reading this was an "aha" moment for me, as I realized that's exactly how I feel while conducting opera.



No, I'm not comparing pig-shooting to Cavaradossi in the crosshairs of the firing squad (I just love that poster). It's more about the feeling of absolute focus on the necessities of the present, which is so all-encompassing that, as Pollan says, one forgets both the passage of time and any physical discomfort.

Opera conducting is an entirely different beast from the orchestral variety. Ostensibly, the biggest difference is the addition of singers, costuming and scenery, but practically this translates into an approach to performance that is completely divergent.

First of all, much more so than in a purely symphonic realm, one has to be acutely aware of the necessity to create a coherent narrative from a musical standpoint; it's a matter of constant attention to dramatic pacing. Which would be hard enough on its own, but the major complication of opera is that you have a bunch of singers running around on stage, and while you may have rehearsed something to perfection in the rehearsal hall, all bets are off when you hit the stage.

Conducting singers is often like herding cats (said with all love and respect for my singing friends and colleagues - but it remains fact that singers rarely have to work under the constraints of communal agreement and consistency that orchestral players do). Combine the artistic license being taken vocally on stage with a prop door that doesn't seem to want to open with a smoke machine that threatens to asphyxiate your first violin section, and you have all the makings of a disaster.

But, oddly (and that very same scenario happened to me several weeks back during the Orchestra's run of Hansel and Gretel), just as those little calamities are piling up, I feel calmer and more focused. After a particularly harrowing act in which a soprano threatened to skip over several lines of music, our principal horn Mike Gast found me backstage and asked, "Geez, doesn't that make you crazy? How do you not panic?"

Call me crazy, but I love that feeling of chaos. When it happens, I utterly understand Pollan's "ecstatic purple"; time slows down, and all those constant bubbles of subconscious thought ("'Did I feed the dogs? Will my house in Richmond ever sell? Should I call my dentist tomorrow?") completely dissipate. My attention is given fully to the task at hand (lassoing the errant soprano, holding a cue until the door can be opened, fanning the violins with a spare hand) and on nothing else. Which for me is incredibly mind-clearing, and thus intensely pleasurable. It's ironic that at those moments when a conductor should feel as if they're caught in the crosshairs, I feel the most relaxed and free - anyone have any comparable experiences in other fields?

Don't get me started...

I'm always surprised what passes for "news", particularly in our corner of the music industry. For instance, I've mentioned in past posts, every now and then we get yet another piece about the "phenomena" of female conductors, few of which draw any new conclusions (if they draw conclusions at all).

So, in view of all the talk of orchestras slashing budgets and struggling on the fiscal front, I guess it's time to trot out another "conductors are overpaid" article, this one from the Guardian.

To say that pieces like this one - written with little apparent understanding of either the business of music, or, more importantly, the artistic process of music – frustrate me to no end is an understatement.

First off, I don't deny that there are some conductors who demand exorbitant fees by anyone's standard (“rockstar fees”, they say, but even rockstars are taking fee reductions in this recession). But I really object to using those very few to judge the majority. One can find people with extreme salaries in all walks of life - athletes with contracts worth well over $20 million come to mind. If you leave the big leagues and look at rank-and-file, however, salaries are nothing to write an article about; the starting salary for a minor league ball player, for instance, is in the $25-35K range. Should we judge athletes' salaries by the few that make astronomical figures? No. Neither should we for conductors.

Then comes the bit that really rubs me the wrong way:

But how much difference does the average conductor make? What can be said is that music, given players sufficiently accomplished, speaks for itself. Even in the case of the talented few maestri, the skills on offer are subject to an indefinable alchemy of charisma and self-belief. And as is the case with any dictator, what seems paramount is the ability to inspire confidence in their powers.

You do not have to be a musician to wonder if such a nebulous yet omnipotent job description might be dangerous.

To say that “music speaks for itself” defies a bit of logic; one needs only to hear five or six examples of the opening of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony (try it on iTunes, it really is illuminating…) and one begins to understand how any decent conductor puts a distinct imprint on the score at hand. The notes on the page, everything printed in the score, might hypothetically “speak for itself”, but how that translates to an actual sonic world is entirely the responsibility of a conductor.

As for “the ability to inspire confidence in their powers”, let me tell you this; musicians are acutely aware of whether a conductor is full of musical knowledge of simply full of it. An orchestra will have little confidence in an overbearing podium personality if a seriously studied understanding of the score and inherent musicality is not there. Charisma counts for very little (at least from the musicians’ perspective – audiences are more easily fooled) if a conductor doesn’t have the goods to back it up.

The article's premise seems predicated on the notion that the major job of a conductor is to cut a dictatorial figure on the podium, acting as a symbolic figure that players don't even pay attention to:

The truth is that almost the last place you look as a musician is towards the conductor. There simply isn't time. The notes fly past and the brain is in overdrive, busy processing vast amounts of information on the page...

To assume that the conductor is largely responsible for the music is a bit like believing an air-traffic controller should take most of the credit for a Red Arrows display.

Any player or conductor will tell you that it's impossible to have eyes glued to the podium. That would be both impractical and nonsensical. Furthermore, people who make these kinds of observations assume that what they see and hear in a concert is the be-all and end-all of a conductor’s role. ANY player (and any good conductor) will tell you that the most significant work a conductor does is in rehearsal.

As for the argument that orchestras could play conductor-less; yes, some specialized ensembles do (and they tend to be chamber orchestras), but they take a great deal of extra rehearsal to be able to coordinate and to come to artistic agreements. Apply that working model to a large modern symphony – 80+ players – and just imagine the artistic differences, never mind the practical hurdle of working on ensemble with so many people. With the number of extra services needed to accomplish that, you could hire an “overpaid” conductor several times over, and save everyone hours, to boot.

But that's just assuming a conductor is merely a glorified metronome. The most important function of a conductor is to give a focus and unified vision to the repertoire being played. And that focus and understanding comes from 1) long hours of study of a score (20 hours per actual hour of music, minimum, to really begin to understand a score) and 2) the ability to communicate the knowledge gained from this study, by both physical gesture and verbal explanation, whether it be the largest of musical ideas to the smallest detail of tuning a tricky wind chord or fixing an inner rhythmic figure.

Perhaps I take umbrage in this article simply because it insults what I do for a living, but the larger issue is that when obviously one-sided rants like this one hit the mainstream media, it casts a negative light on the classical music business as a whole. And we certainly don’t need that right now. If it’s just muckraking and stirring controversy so one can be self-righteously indignant (and it’s easy to get people worked-up about money in an economic downturn), so be it. It’s simply perturbing to come across an article that the average reader with little knowledge of classical music might take as fact, when it is clear that the author has a very specific bone to pick.

And that’s my rant for the day!

Old friends

I'm back in the Twin Cities and settling into my new house - the movers arrived yesterday with several tons of belongings (pianos and scores are very, very heavy), and with the cable installed I finally have internet access! I managed to unpack most of my books today and am in the midst of the arduous process of reordering, recataloging and reshelving several hundred scores.

Often, hearing just a few moments of an old, familiar song on the radio (80's nostalgia, anyone?), we're taken back into a particular moment in life - the summer of a first love, a memorable high school dance - (for me, 50 Cent's "In Da Club" takes me back to a difficult couple of months during the messy dissolution of an orchestra with which I was working, but that's a whole other story...) . I experience something similar when I merely glance at certain scores, because they bring back powerful memories of when I first encountered them.

Dvorak - Symphony #8: the first piece I ever conducted, at 16. My high school orchestra director handed me a baton and took off to take a phone call. I was both utterly enthralled and completely terrified; it's the moment I got totally hooked.

Chausson - Symphony in Bb Major: on the podium at the Monteux School in Maine many years ago, being yelled at by Charles Bruck. One of the very few times I've had to fight back tears on the podium.

Bach - Brandenburg Concerto #1 onstage at the Curtis Institute with an all-star cast of classmates; extraordinary music-making, but more importantly, an extraordinary sense of cameraderie and a unity of purpose that one rarely experiences. The death of one of the performers several years ago only adds to the poignancy of the memory.

Brahms - Symphony #4: a subscription debut with a professional orchestra during my final student years; I had carefully annotated my own parts, and the concertmaster and I came to loggerheads with the bowings for the third movement. "It's backwards!" he said; "But it puts the accent and the long note in the right place!" I replied. I won the argument - after several rehearsals, I finally won the concertmaster's approval.

Strauss - Egyptian March: one of the pieces I conducted on a concert the night after my father died. I've done everything else on the program since then; subsequently, the memory of that awful period has been erased from them. But this is a piece I've not encountered since, and hearing it takes me back to a very dark time.

Stravinsky - Petrouchka: first heard as a young kid on "Dance in America" as part of a tribute to Nijinsky featuring Rudolf Nureyev. I had never been so mesmerized in my (at that point, very short) life, and hearing the whirling exuberance of the opening carnival tableau always reminds me of the sense of thrill and wonder I felt then.

It's been a ridiculously busy couple of weeks moving my household (and husband) half-way across the country, an effort not without it's stresses. But there's a deep reassurance in opening box after box of my old friends, a flitting memory accompanying each, as I ease each volume onto the shelf.

Conductor hero

A conducting game very much in the vein of "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band"...except the cues have even less to do with the music in the conducting version than they do for the other two, making it an oddly amusical experience. Interesting idea, although I'm not sure what it does except to equate conducting to pushing a bunch of buttons. Oh, if only it were so easy...

Late September Brevia

I'm in the home stretch of my move - house was finally packed Tuesday night, movers arrived Wednesday morning just as I was leaving for Philly, and now I'm in Washington DC between a rehearsal and performance for a show with Ben Folds and the National Symphony Orchestra. I'm driving home after the show to a now-empty house in Richmond as my husband plays his final concerts as Principal Horn of the Richmond Symphony.

I other news: it seems like every year that there's an article like this about women in the conducting field. I've kind of stopped reading them because they always say the same thing; we've made inroads (cue JoAnn Falletta and Marin Alsop), but it's still hard out there for a chick, orchestras are conservative in nature and change moves at a glacial pace, etc etc. It always bugs me that the finger is pointed at orchestras as bastions of old-school conservatism; look at the fact that there are only thirteen female CEO's of this country's 500 largest publicly traded companies.

Speaking of Marin Alsop, the Baltimore Symphony opens their regular subscription season with my friends Time for Three. They are absolutely fantastic, and great guys, to boot.

And speaking of conductors, I leave you with a virtual tour of the posh backstage pad of New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert.

Let's See Sarah Do This

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Sarah Hicks isn't a dynamite conductor. I'm just saying that I doubt she's ever wrangled an orchestra, a choir, Madonna, the Beatles, and a herd of sheep in a single rehearsal...



But I suppose I could be wrong about that.

Changing of the guard

Worth a thousand words:

Quarter for your thoughts

We've begun our epic Symphony for the Cities week that takes us from Hudson, WI to Plymouth, Winona and Excelsior, MN. They're all outdoor venues, which present their own very peculiar challenges (I don't usually have to fight gnat swarms on stage at Orchestra Hall), but also their very particular pleasures (including the throng of kids dancing on the grass right in front of the orchestra).

On Monday night in Hudson, I turned to the audience before starting "Radetzky March" to explain to them how I'd cue their "clapping entrance", how I would indicate a soft dynamic, a loud dynamic and, most importantly, how I'd cut them off. "Now, I want you all to stop clapping right on my cutoff. If I hear any clapping after the cutoff, you own me 25 cents." I've asked for dollars in the past (and something I've done with student orchestras playing, say, rhythmically complex pieces like "The Rite of Spring" - "don't fall in the hole!"), but I figured it's tough times for everyone, so a quarter would do. It garnered some chuckles from the audience.

The Orchestra and I then started "Radetzky"; I cued the audience to come in, they clapped as softly as I indicated, then went to forte on my cue. At my cutoff, a thousand people stopped clapping - well, OK, except a few stragglers, who I pointed out in the crowd, grinning. We went through the series of clap soft/clap loud/stop as we performed the piece, and at the last chords the rhythmic clapping quickly disintegrated into applause.

I thought nothing more of our little clapping exercise as we finished up the program (I have to confess I get tired of doing "1812"...). After our Sousa encore, as musicians began to pack up, I was chugging bottled water behind the bandshell when a woman approached me.

"I just wanted to give you this," she said, handing me a quarter.

"Actually, this is for my husband. He kept clapping after you stopped us, all three times. I guess he doesn't follow direction too well. Anyway, he was too embarrassed to give it to you himself, so I'm doing it for him!"

I had a good laugh. If this keeps up, maybe I can buy a soda at the end of the week...

Quick turnaround

Apologies from me as well for being a spotty blogger, although I can't claim Aho as an excuse. Instead, it's been a couple of days that reminds me how flexible and versatile my job requires me to be.

This weekend found me in Atlanta with a whole bevy of shows with jazz trumpeter Chris Botti and the Atlanta Symphony (three in two days). I first worked with Chris when he came to play with the Minnesota Orchestra; we hit is off from day one, and he immediately booked me for upcoming shows.

This kind of work poses challenges very different from, say, conducting Lutoslawski - jazz requires a different kind of timing than what classical training prepares you for, and without a feel for it, it's impossible to set the right mood orchestrally. It also requires a flexibility that's no longer a part of the classical sphere - in the middle of a chart, the band might go off on a riff or elongate a solo. I guess the closest equivalent might be playing a different cadenza every night, but that doesn't begin to explain the improvisatory nature of what goes on onstage, and what I need to do to make sure everything's going to fit correctly (at one point on Friday night I was trying to figure out how to mime "B3" - a rehearsal number - to indicate to the orchestra that we had to repeat back to a certain section - all while keeping track of where the band was going. Challenging, but so much fun, for some reason...).

Of course, the rockstar aspect to these shows is undeniably fun - cheering, adoring fans, stage-shaking set playing, roving spotlights, pre-concert cocktails, etc.

I flew home yesterday on 2 hours of sleep (the rockstar behavior continues post-show, of course...), took a nap, drank a pot of coffee and started back to work on a 27-minute world premier for narrator and orchestra that I'm performing this week with the National Symphony Orchestra for a set of Family Concerts. Which is about as divergent, both musically and generally speaking, from this past weekend as one could get!

I'm used to switching gears on a weekly basis (and, as Sam points out in his post below, orchestra musicians are pretty adept at it), but this switch is a particularly extreme juxtaposition of the very disparate kinds of concerts I do. It highlights for me the flexibility I need, both as a musician and as a stage persona, to create a concert experience for divergent audiences. But it's also what makes my job endlessly challenging, and I sure do love a challenge.

One Man's Energy Is Another Man's Interpretive Watusi

Sarah's written recently about the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the playing styles of various orchestras, and about how ingrained the performance culture of a single orchestra can become in each of that ensemble's musicians. Since most of us spend nearly all our time playing as part of only one group, we come to think of our way of playing music as How One Plays Music. Even when a major shift in leadership occurs, such as a new music director or concertmaster, the collective musical memory of the ensemble is always a major factor in shaping the sound.

Audiences and critics, too, get used to the local style that they hear week in and week out, and they tend to filter everything they hear through that familiar prism. This is why a conductor like Christoph Eschenbach, who everyone seems to agree is a brilliant man and fine musician, can be hailed as an orchestral savior in Houston, and then be greeted with what amounted to a community-wide shrug when he become music director in Philadelphia. It's not necessarily that there's anything wrong with Eschenbach, or with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It's just that the communal playing style of the orchestra didn't turn out to be a great match with the personal style of the conductor.

Another case in point that will hit a little closer to home: Osmo's down in Chicago this week, conducting the Chicago Symphony in a program of (what else?) Beethoven and Sibelius. I have it on good authority that he's been having a fine time in his debut with the Chicagoans, and the critics have said some nice things as well. But one passage from Andrew Patner's otherwise positive review in the Chicago Sun-Times struck me odd:

"[Vänskä] is clearly an individual with his own ideas. It must be difficult even for seasoned players to know what those ideas are, since he communicates in a bizarre fashion, offering a sort of interpretive Watusi with a beat that seems wrong when it is discernible."

Now, along with being pretty unnecessarily snippy, that sounds nothing like the Osmo I know (and I'm also a bit taken aback to think that there's a music critic in a major American city who doesn't seem to realize that a conductor's ideas are largely communicated in rehearsal, not through some magic twirling of the baton during the concert.) While there's no denying his physicality as a conductor (using his body to channel and direct the energy of the orchestra is one of Osmo's signatures, and he's hardly alone in this style,) I've never found it to be difficult to discern what he wants us to do, even in his first appearance with us back in 2000.

So what would seem so different to an observer in Chicago? Presumably, Patner has no prior axe to grind with Osmo, and was only passing along what he thought he saw during a performance about which he actually said many nice things. The first thing that occurs to me is that the CSO is an orchestra steeped in the highest European classical traditions, and their music directors and principal guest conductors over the decades have generally reflected that legacy. From Daniel Barenboim to Pierre Boulez to the incoming Riccardo Muti, the orchestra has usually played under conductors who, while not without flair, prefer to maintain a relatively refined podium demeanor. The music should speak for itself, says this philosophy, and the musicians (conductor included) are doing the composer a disservice if they call attention to themselves in any visual way.

So it's only natural that Osmo, who throws himself as physically into every performance as he asks his musicians to, would cut an unusual figure on Chicago's podium, and to a jaded critic who's not used to such visual stimulus, I can see how it could even seem off-putting. But I'd be very curious to know what the CSO players thought of their week with our boss (not least because they so recently let out a public cry of disappointment when the LA Philharmonic snapped up the young Venezuelan wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel, an over-the-top physical stick-waver if ever there was one, as their next music director before Chicago could offer him the job.) It's always possible that what seemed jarring to a regular concertgoer could have felt like a refreshing change to those on stage.

Or not. It's a mysterious thing, chemistry, and the audience's willingness to come along for an unfamiliar ride is probably an element of the equation that we don't consider often or carefully enough.

Singular viewpoints

I'm a little disappointed to be missing the Orchestra's Carnegie concert, but schedule intervenes, and after this week I won't be back to the Twin Cities until well into June. In the interim I get to spend a couple of very-much-needed weeks at home with my husband and dogs, as well as guest-conducting with a handful of symphonies - Eastern Connecticut, Atlanta, National.

This reminds me of a very interesting conversation a few weeks back with our principal percussionist, Brian Mount. After rehearsal one day he popped into my dressing room, sat down, and said, "I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you, like every other conductor who's on our podium, conduct ahead of the orchestra. What's up with that? Is it just us, or is every orchestra like this? I can't tell, because at this point this is the only orchestra I know."

I hadn't really thought of it this way before. Not the beating ahead part - all orchestras play on varying degrees of delay, and it's something you get used to, to a certain extent. Usually it's a matter of finding just the point where you keep momentum up without being so far ahead that it starts muddying up the beat or the musical intent. But how would the average orchestra musician know if this was normal or not? After all, if you're in a full-time professional orchestra, it's unlikely that you spend any amount of time working with other orchestras, so your understanding of orchestral playing becomes totally dependent on your job.

My answer to Brian was, no, it's not necessarily just any orchestra, although our Orchestra has a very strong tendency to take time at the end of a phrase and start the next phrase at a slightly slower tempo - the effect is a long and steady slowdown over the course of a piece - and to counteract that, I'll push ahead when needed. There were a couple of groups that I've conducted recently - LA Phil in particular pops to mind - where the orchestra tended to be more on top of the beat. Every group is different. But then, how would you know unless you've experienced the variety?

There's an upside and downside to this. The upside is the individual character ensembles can develop over and extended time of playing together (like the plummy MO string sound - which, incidentally, is also a contributing factor to the whole slowing-down thing...). The downside is that just as much as good habits can be reinforced, bad habits can be institutionally ingrained.

A conductor with an active guesting career has built-in checks and balances; it certainly keeps me honest. One might get a little lazy working with the same group for an extended period - musicians can figure out a conductor's strange habits or lapses in technique and learn to work around them. But take that sloppy technique to a new orchestra and you'll probably find yourself in some trouble.

Academia quite wisely prevents burnout and encourages the furthering of knowledge through sabbaticals; wouldn't a similar situation, in an ideal world, benefit orchestra musicians? How about a mandated musician swap every 5 years? It would certainly be a learning experience for everyone, and keep viewpoints from becoming too singular...

The Uncertainty Principal

It goes without saying that times are hard in the orchestra business, although there are modest signs that we may have gotten through the worst of it in a larger sense. (Then again, I'm just an eternal optimist...).

What makes it more difficult is the built-in lag time for any large non-profit organizations; the current season is largely based on funding that was either pledged or collected last season, before the bottom dropped out of the markets last fall. The market collapse, which has a detrimental affect both on corporate and individual donations (as well as endowments), will be felt much more acutely next season ('09-'10), when, perhaps (again, eternal optimist speaking), the economy might be staggering back onto its feet.

It all creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty - which then got me thinking about volatility and change versus normalcy and routine on a more personal level in the orchestral field.

An orchestral musician's life is predicated on a high amount of certainty; rehearsal and concert schedules are largely set by the beginning of the season (and if there are additions or alterations, there are rigid requirements about lead-time before the proposed changes), most repertoire for an upcoming season is set by spring of the previous season, musicians work with the same colleagues every day with little variation, and, except for a guest conductor the ensemble has never engaged before, one has a pretty good idea what to expect on the podium all year. The tenure process assures musicians lifetime employment barring extraordinary circumstances (career-ending injury, bankruptcy of the orchestra or diminishment of playing ability that is severe enough to necessitate a review process - an infrequent and often controversial occurrence). In an era of rampant job insecurity, orchestral musicians in a well-run organization have a enviable level of professional certainty.

I'm pretty well acquainted with this perspective on musical life, as a vast number of my friends (as well as my husband) are full-time orchestral musicians. I'm also acutely aware of how a conductor's life is on the opposite end of the certainty spectrum.

First and foremost, conductor don't have any sort of tenure system (unless you're working in academia, which is a world unto itself). This means there's a built-in endpoint for every conductor/orchestra relationship. From an artistic standpoint, this makes a good amount of sense; most conductors have a preferred repertoire (or at least certain composers they are most comfortable with), favorite guest artists, a particular approach to music-making, etc. Which can all provide new perspectives, deepen understanding of certain repertoire, encourage artistic growth in particular areas, etc. There is a perceived point, however, at which music directors no longer stimulate this sort of growth and discovery, because they have imparted all of their individual expertise to their orchestra (or so goes the belief).

The average tenure of music directors these days seems to hover in the 8-12 years slot - in stark contrast to, say, Ormandy, who after a brief stint with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra) went on to helm the Philadelphia Orchestra for 44 years. As Sam has discussed, selecting and hiring a music director is a complicated, multi-year process. What this means, practically, for conductors is that once you've landed yourself a music directorship and settled in after the first couple of years, you have to start thinking about what your next gig is going to be. For staff conducting positions, where the average tenure is more frequently in the 3-5 year range, this means that the minute you're named to a position, you're already job-hunting again.

It's a strange position to be in, and the built-in job insecurity can be really wearing on the psyche. A conductor's life tends to be a complicated matrix of current positions, future positions, potential positions and guest conducting that could be a potential position (and then perhaps a future position!). The jet-setting maestro who spends little time with their home band has been much bemoaned, but in a way, how can they be blamed, if they need to secure future employment, which is what it all basically boils down to? Because, in the end, we're just free agents. (Osmo, to his defense, spends a lot more time at home with the Minnesota Orchestra that do music directors of similar stature).

No grand point to make here, save the personal reflection that built-in uncertainty in one's work becomes exacerbated by global uncertainty. My question to you; what do you think of "term-limits" for conductors?

Osmo In His Own Words, & ItC In The Strib

If you follow the Minnesota Orchestra at all closely, you're probably no stranger to our music director's biography. In his six seasons with us, he's been a media magnet, and countless articles in newspapers at home and abroad have laid out his reputation as a builder of orchestral underdogs, a tireless detail man, and a dynamic presence on the podium.

But what you probably haven't had much exposure to is Osmo himself - he rarely speaks from the podium, and journalists tend to "clean up" his quotes if he words something oddly, which takes much of the considerable personality out of the way he speaks. So I thought I'd post a link to an extended conversation an interviewer at Deutsche Welle (the English-language German broadcaster) had with Osmo recently. The interviewer has something of an odd speaking style, but he asks excellent questions, and Osmo gets to answer in as extended a fashion as he cares to.

If the link above (which should pop up an audio player) isn't working for you, click here to go to Deutsche Welle's site, and scroll down for the audio link...

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On another media-related note, if you haven't made it out to one of our Inside the Classics concerts before, Graydon Royce over at the Star Tribune has a very nice piece in tomorrow's paper detailing just what it is we do with our little corner of the orchestra's season. Click here to read it online...

Good to be home

We've done an extraordinary amount of traveling in the past two weeks, a pretty endless succession of flights:


(In the foreground; bassist Matt Frischman and percussionist Kevin Watkins)
A couple were chartered, orchestra-only flights, which generally meant both an easier check-in and the chaos of open seating:


(in the foreground; principal viola Tom Turner and associate principal oboe John Snow)
Countless airport bus transfers (expertly organized - I don't think we ever lost anyone):


A bunch of long bus rides as well, mostly conducive to catching up on a little sleep, but a perfect opportunity to get some studying in; as luck would have it, we had a whole slew of conductors on my bus (one of 4) from Frankfurt to Luxembourg:


(Bassist Bill Schrickel, also music director of the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra)


(Violist Ken Freed, also music director of the Mankato Symphony, delighting in Mahler 5)


(Brownie points for whoever can figure out what Osmo is studying - hint: it's a last movement)

For the record, my score-for-study during this 3 hour bus trip was the Greenberg Symphony we're performing at the upcoming Inside the Classics concerts. I ended up lugging around about 8 scores for upcoming performances - there's always works to do and concerts to prepare for, no matter how hectic the travel!

Ears wide open

We're in the midst of preparations for our European Tour - five rehearsals this week instead of the usual 4, and our customary concert schedule has shifted to allow for our travel itinerary this weekend, meaning that we have concerts Wednesday and Thursday rather than over the weekend.

My job as cover conductor on the tour entails being prepared for the extremely unlikely possibility Osmo is unable to conduct, but another function I will also provide is being the pair of ears in the halls as we do our pre-concert soundcheck in each venue. One of the things I'm most looking forward to on our European jaunt is hearing the Minnesota Orchestra in some fabulous halls, including the Philharmonie in Berlin and the Musikverein in Vienna. While I've heard the the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic play their own halls, I've never heard my "home" orchestra in them, and I imagine each will be distinctly different from our home, Orchestra Hall.

Each hall is an utterly different animal; musicians feel it the minute they get onstage. Orchestra Hall has its own acoustical anomalies; you can hear someone unwrapping a cough drop in row 29 from onstage, but you often can't hear people across the stage. Certain sonorities carry better that others, and everything changes completely when there is a sizable audience sucking up some of the reverberations.

I have a pretty unique perspective on our hall, because I'm one of the few people who spends a great deal of time both onstage and in the audience; I certainly get the "stage perspective" during the 30+ concerts I conduct every year, but when I'm covering for Osmo, I'm out in the hall hearing the acoustic from the audience's perspective. Musicians rarely have the chance to listen to the Orchestra from out in the hall - and when they do, they invariably express surprise in "how it all sounds out here".

I try to bring my insights from both perspectives to both parts of my job; when I'm on the podium, I need to remember that, for instance, while the horns may sound rather subdued from my perch, they'll actually carry very well out in the hall, and when I'm out in the hall listening for balances while Osmo conducts, I try to listen for the details that can be heard in the hall that you can't hear on the podium because such a huge wall of sound is rushing towards you!

People often marvel, "As a conductor you must have the best seat in the house"; well, yes and no. Yes, the immense rush of sound with everything coming at you from all directions is pretty thrilling. But, no, because the sound is "unmixed", unblended - halls are built so the optimal sound reaches the audience, not the podium. It takes quite a bit of experience to discern the relationship between what you hear and what it actually sounds like (if that makes any sense).

The challenge for the halls on tour is that I'll have no stage perspective (and presumably Osmo will have no time to amble into the hall and have a listen), so any suggestions I may have for him about balances will have to be taken on faith. It's all part of the experience, and one I'll be taking in with ears wide open.

"Museum and laboratory"

The New York Philharmonic has announced its 2009-10 season, incoming music director Alan Gilbert's inaugural season, at a press conference that is available in its entirety (94 minutes!) via this webcast. There's much of interest: Magnus Lindberg as newly-minted composer-in-residence; artist-in-residence Thomas Hampson; a new music ensemble; the New York premier of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre; a three-week mini-festival of Stravinsky curated and conducted by Valery Gergiev; Alec Baldwin as "announcer-in-residence". Great stuff, all.

Two bits I liked, one line from Gilbert and one from Lindberg - Gilbert puts forth the idea of an orchestra as both museum and laboratory - curating the great art of the past while supporting the curious chemistry that creates great art of the present. And to tie in to that, Lindberg talks about the necessity for a "dialogue between our time and the past". It reminds me of a discussion about programming during a League of American Orchestras workshop I attended years ago about how pieces in a concert program should be in an "active dialogue". I like the sense of the importance of connection and interdependence.

It reminded me of the questions I received after the numerous presentations I've been doing this week as part of a music director search week here in Reno - inevitably, after I discuss my interest in contemporary American composers, an audience member will raise a hand to ask, fearfully, if that means that I want to play "all avant garde music all the time". First of all, I try to explain, American concert music tends to be much more musically conservative than what's coming out of Europe, but second of all, my interest (as with most who like the "new stuff") is in presenting contemporary works with established masterpieces so that the new and the old can shed light on each other, to be presented "in dialogue". That's one of the more enjoyable parts of programming, and a direction to look for as the New York Phil and Gilbert begin their relationship.

A note from the desert

Many thanks to Sam for picking up my blogging slack this week. I'm indeed in Reno for a music director search week, and apart from keeping a very busy schedule (packed with board lunches, radio interviews, staff meetings and donor dinners), I'm suffering the indignity of paying for internet service (is it me, or is $13.99 for 12 hours of internet just really galling? Or am I just full of internet entitlement?). But, couldn't resist forever, so here I am.

Just a thought about a combination of pieces that I'm doing here that I've been pleased with - the second half of my program is centered around the 1919 "Firebird" Suite by Stravinsky, which is prefaced by the "Bluebird" Pas de Deux from Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty", reorchestrated by Stravinsky. The reorchestration is really just a resetting for theater-sized orchestra that totally retains the charm of Tchaikovsky's original. What I like about the combination of these two pieces is on several different levels. First and foremost, I love the notion that "Sleeping Beauty" was premiered in 1890, "Firebird" in 1910 - a mere 20 years apart - and I can't imagine two pieces more divergent. Tchaikovsky has all the oom-pah-pah-ness of conventional ballet music; the contrast with "Firebird", with all that atmospheric creepiness in the opening, could not be greater. Then there is, of course, the odd connection in Stravinsky's reorchestration of "Bluebird". And then, the very surface connection (but connection nonetheless!) that both pieces are about birds.

But they work together in an odd way, "Bluebird" a charming miniature of four short dances (pas de deux, two variations and coda), and "Firebird" a monumental piece of morphing harmonies, modal melodies and an aura of exoticism. It's always fun to discover that two pieces that you like individually make an utterly new impression when taken together.

Last Sarah Standing?

I know, I know, I said I'd post something more about the recording sessions a day or two ago, but I'm flat exhausted, and I've been using most of my non-stage time to deal with the last-minute complications that inevitably arise when we're getting close to our next ItC concerts. But just to tide you over, here's a link to an article in the Reno News-Review, where it would appear that our Ms. Hicks has gotten herself involved in yet another popularity contest. (The reason you're not hearing about this adventure from Sarah herself is that her hotel apparently charges something like $60 a day for internet access. Ridiculous. She'll be back on the blog eventually, but possibly not until she gets clear of Nevada next week.)

Anyway, you'll notice that the article includes a link to the Reno Philharmonic's website, where concertgoers can actually vote on their favorite candidate to become the orchestra's next music director. We're certainly not suggesting that you should follow this link and vote without having attended the concerts based on your Reno-independent love of Sarah. (Also, as far as we can make out, the orchestra isn't actually guaranteeing that the candidate with the most public support will get the job.) We're just saying there's a link in the article. Do what you want...

Happy Year of the Cow!

Well, it's actually the Year of the Ox (if you're into the whole Chinese/Japanese astrology/zodiac thing), but Cow is so much funnier...

Of course, no mention of the New Year would be complete without a Neujahrs-Konzert with the Vienna Philharmonic, a tradition since 1939, this year led by the inimitable Daniel Barenboim.

I've written about Mr. Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra - although ostensibly non-political, the ensemble has given him a platform to promote deeper understanding between two opposing factions, and given the current violence in the region, I was wondering if Barenboim would take advantage of the Vienna podium to share his thoughts.

Which he certainly did - while his remarks at the actual concert were limited to a simple wish that 2009 be a "year of peace in the world and of human justice in the Middle East", he did release a statement that was tantamount to a criticism of Israeli air strikes against Palestinians on the Gaza Strip.

While one may not agree with his politics, it's hard not to admire a man who takes a stand on his strongly-held convictions, particularly when those convictions are borne of an understanding of both perspectives (the Israeli-Argentinian conductor is also an honorary Palestinian citizen).

But, as always, the music transcends all. I particularly love "Spharenklange" by the Waltz King's brother, Josef Strauss:



I'm not a huge fan of the sweeping shots of the Alps (and the odd close-ups of alpine lichen), but, hey, it's TV, people! The notion of "Harmony of the Spheres" is a nice one, particularly given the tenor of violence in the world discussed earlier.

And of course, you can't have a New Year's Concert without the obligatory encores - in this case, ALWAYS "Blue Danube" and my favorite, Radetzky March, the perennial opportunity for conductors to ham it up and mug for the audience/camera (not that there's anything wrong with that!!):




Wishing a healthy, happy and unturbulent New Year to all!!

What Musicians Want

The post-holiday period tends to be a very slow time of year for the music biz, and there's not much out there in terms of arts news in early January. But for those who take an interest in the inner workings of orchestras, former Chicago Symphony CEO (and now president of the League of American Orchestras,) Henry Fogel, has written a blog post about conductors and musicians that's well worth reading, especially in light of the recent conductor-inspired dust-ups in New York and Boston.

As someone who sat on the management side of the orchestral table for many years, Henry's heard a great deal of noise from both musicians and board members about conductors and the way they get hired, so he's in a unique position to see things from both sides. (Musicians tend to be highly suspicious of management types, since they tend to be the bearers of bad fiscal news, but Henry has usually been viewed by orchestral players as one of the truly good guys in the industry.)

In his post, Henry dispels the myth that orchestras just want a conductor who will go easy on them (it's often the opposite,) makes the case for why musicians deserve a role in hiring their own boss, and explains why the dictatorial style employed by some famed conductors in past eras simply won't work today. He also gently takes apart some of the more fanciful misconceptions board members tend to have about the musicians they support.

My favorite two sentences from Henry's post are these: "You will rarely get unanimity from an orchestra about a music director or a guest conductor. But the truth is that you will almost always get an obvious consensus." He's absolutely right, and that general consensus usually dictates whether a given conductor/orchestra partnership will be successful.

Travel Madness!

Sorry for the paucity of posts, it was a nutty week! Between the Scandinavian Christmas show with the Orchestra and hightailing it to LA for more Christmas merry-making I've had little time for...well, anything besides traveling, rehearsing and conducting shows (although I did get to visit with a bunch of West Coast friends).

And now, as usual, I'm killing time in an airport because I've missed yet another connection. I'm not sure if the ready availability of (still reasonably) affordable air travel is a boon or a bane. In the next 10 days I'm in 6 different cities: Richmond, Philadelphia, Princeton, San Francisco Raleigh and DC. So, please forgive the sparse posting! Although I'll certainly have something entertaining up for Christmas...

Oh Kaplan, My Kaplan

There's a good chance that you've never heard of Gilbert Kaplan, even if you follow the music world pretty closely. On the other hand, if you're a devoted Mahler fan, the type who has more than one complete set of his symphonies and strong opinions on the issue of Claudio Abbado vs. George Szell in the matter of Mahler's 6th, you likely know exactly who Gilbert Kaplan is. (Yes, Spartacus, I see you waving.)

Kaplan is an extremely rare bird in the orchestra world - an amateur musician and Mahler devotee who, some years ago, decided to devote himself to learning how to conduct Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, and to do so more accurately and convincingly than anyone else. Never mind that Kaplan isn't and never has been a professional conductor - he has passion, and intellect, and drive, and isn't that supposed to be all it takes to achieve our dreams in America?

So, for some time now, Kaplan has been traveling the world, conducting Mahler's 2nd (and only Mahler's 2nd) with orchestras large and small. By and large, he's been received with great enthusiasm by critics, who have latched onto his fascinating narrative and penned profile after profile of the eccentric and obsessive Mahlerian.

There's just one problem: Kaplan is apparently a terrible conductor, at least according to the New York Philharmonic, which just performed the Resurrection under his baton. According to a story running on the front page of the New York Times' arts section today, the Phil was so horrified by Kaplan's lack of stick-waving ability that the musicians called an emergency meeting with their CEO the day of the concert to vent their frustrations. The next week, one of the orchestra's trombonists took to his personal blog to lay out a devastatingly specific takedown of Kaplan, and by extension, of anyone who actually thinks the job of a conductor is so unimportant that a complete novice should be allowed to stand in front of one of the world's great orchestras.

So, before I wade any deeper into this obviously prickly story, 3 statements:

1) I have never worked under Kaplan, nor have I ever heard a performance he has led, so I won't be making any attempt to assess his abilities here.

2) I'm actually stunned that the NY Phil, which (like so many orchestras) is normally fastidious about controlling all information in and out of its organization, has been as forthcoming about the whole thing as they have, with a spokesman actually acknowledging to the Times that Kaplan won't be asked back, and (so far as I can tell,) no internal attempt to muzzle David Finlayson's blog writings. Good on the Phil!

3) Not that Finlayson (who I've never met) needs my help in defending his writing, but I noticed that one angry commenter on his blog accused the Phil musicians of whining after they'd already agreed to be conducted by Kaplan. This needs clarification, because it's probably a common belief that musicians pick their guest conductors. We don't - while we can always provide individual feedback on specific conductors who appear in front of us, and that feedback may hold some sway on occasion, decisions on who leads our concerts are made well above our pay grade.

Now, since I've already said I'm not going to talk about Kaplan specifically, let's talk about the larger issue here, which is the all-too-frequent gulf between what critics and audiences think of a conductor, and what musicians think of the same conductor. Without getting specific, I can confidently say that there are conductors of some considerable reputation, who have appeared to critical acclaim in front of the Minnesota Orchestra, who we in the orchestra consider to be utter frauds. I can't count the number of times that I've sweated my way through a concert that is just barely staying on the rails because of the incompetence emanating from the podium, only to open the paper the next morning and see the conductor lavished with praise for his "elegant turns of phrase" or some such nonsense.

Now, part of the problem is simply that, for a critic writing about a single concert, for which s/he has not been allowed or had the time to attend any of the rehearsals, it's almost impossible to truly judge what elements of a performance are happening because the conductor ordered them, and what elements the orchestra is simply playing on it's own initiative. So most critics stick to the time-honored tradition of holding the conductor responsible for more or less everything, good or bad. It's not a great tradition, but it's better than guessing at who was responsible for what.

The larger problem, I think, is that audiences, critics, and musicians all have different expectations of what a conductor should be. Most audience members, beyond simply wanting to hear an engaging concert, want a conductor who gives them some visual sense of what they're hearing, a sort of physical guide to the music. Critics often seem to want a conductor who reminds them of their favorite conductors from yesteryear, and they also prize those who manage to look interesting without showboating. (Critics also love conductors who physically reach out to the orchestra, and get the players to react physically as well. Exhibit A at the moment would be all the cooing over Gustavo Dudamel getting his Venezuelan youth orchestra to dance in their chairs, which admittedly is pretty cool.)

Musicians basically want two things from a conductor: a) a clear, precise beat, and b) clear, precise rehearsal instructions backed up by an obvious knowledge of the score. Beyond that, we don't really care how physical our leader is, or whether s/he scowls or grins on the podium, or whether s/he has a nifty life story.

So who's right? Well, I'm obviously biased, and I'll preface this by saying that I don't think any of the above viewpoints are wrong, exactly. But it seems to me that unless you have the two elements that the musicians are looking for, you will not have a truly great concert. You could have a good concert, or an exciting but obviously flawed concert, but it won't be one of those mind-blowing experiences that you tell your friends about. And at the prices we charge, I feel like we ought to be striving to provide those experiences as often as humanly possible.

The problem with the critical viewpoint is that critics, like all journalists, are tasked with setting the world around them to an engaging storyline, and conductors and the concerts they lead don't always come with a neat or salacious narrative. So critics naturally gravitate to the ones that do, the same way that sportswriters gravitate to Sean Avery every time he opens his stupid mouth, while ignoring quiet production machines like Mikko Koivu. I don't think music critics deliberately snub quietly efficient conductors in favor of demonstrative ego factories, but I also know that the latter do tend to attract a lot more press than the former. And that's how you end up with the NY Phil's dirty laundry splashed all over the pages of America's leading daily...

Late addendum: I only just noticed that this post is our 300th entry here at the ItC blog. During the relatively brief period that we've been blogging, Sarah and I have filled this little wad of bandwidth with just over 157,000 words, which works out to something close to 300 pages in your typical Word doc. I don't actually know whether that has any significance at all in the greater blog world, but considering that we've been open for business for a mere 14 months, I'm calling it a milestone. Happy tricentennial (or whatever) to us, and let's hope there's a lot more silliness and pot-stirring to come!

Bully pulpit

The Louisville Courier-Journal just ran a commentary/critique that reminded me of how far we've come in our expectations of an optimal concert experience.

The gist of the article: the Louisville Symphony presented a concert with Beethoven - Prometheus, Strauss - Metamorphosen, Beethoven - Symphony No. 3, a program in which the first two pieces connect thematically to the Symphony. The critic's complaint? That there was passing mention of this fact in the program notes, but nothing more was made of it. As he writes:

Still, consider how much more could have been accomplished. What if Mester had asked the orchestra to play a snippet from the "Prometheus" incidental music in which the "Eroica" tune appears? Then the orchestra might have followed up by playing the excerpt from Strauss's "Metamorphosen" that also alludes to the symphony?

It's lovely to have pre-performance comments by orchestra CEO Brad Broecker and a board representative, but that's no substitute for having the music director inform their listeners. All it takes is a little planning and, yes, imagination.


Which, to me, points out to the tremendous sea change that has been going on in our business. The implication is that it's not enough to entertain; the point is to educate and enlighten. This is particularly important in the context of current cultural norms; whereas 50 year ago, we may have been able to assume a certain level of knowledge about orchestral music and standard repertoire, these days, with the push to expand and diversify audiences, we can no longer make those assumptions.

What was even more fascinating to me was the direct plea to the music director to do some pre-concert explanations - certainly many organizations have pre-concert lectures (including the Minnesota Orchestra - the "Music Up Close" program), often led by a musician or musicologist or sometimes the conductor of the concert. More to the point, the suggestion in the Courier-Journal was for the explanation to involve the orchestra, to essentially be an integral part of the concert experience for the entire audience, not just an added extra for people who bothered to show up early.

Speaking from the podium is a topic that I've frequently
addressed, and it's a major feature of my work. After all, conducting is the ultimate bully pulpit, why not use the opportunity to enlighten? As I keep saying, the concert experience will undergo further (and maybe radical) changes within my career lifetime, and it behooves us all to think about what keeps audiences engaged and enthralled.

Yin and Yang

A little counterbalance to Sam's post on the Rozhdestvensky meltdown over at the Boston Symphony (to which I have mixed feelings. The first reaction is, "Oh, come on!" - it's about the music in the end, not the egos, what's with the unbecoming hissy fit? The second reaction; well, he does come from an era where artists of his caliber were treated with a certain respect and gravitas that has largely been abandoned in the current marketing-driven era, and I can understand his consternation at feeling deeply insulted. Perspective is a funny thing, isn't it?)

In any case, as much as conductors can be the source of kerfulffle, they can act as a peacemaker of sorts; I'm thinking of a recent New York times article profiling Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim, amongst his myriad other activities, which run the gamut from guest conducting at the Met to premiering, as pianist, Elliott Carter's "Interventions" with the Boston Symphony, is the conductor of the West-Eastern Divan, an orchestras of young Arabs and Israelis that he founded in 1999 with Edward Said.

Barenboim on his ensemble: “The Divan is deeply nonpolitical in the end. In other words, it’s not in any way linked to the situation in Israel and the occupied territories. If we all end up killing each other in the Middle East, then we at the Divan would have had 10 years of a beautiful experience. Or else this is 10 years of preparing for a beautiful situation. Either way, it’s worthwhile.”

It's an endeavor that promises harmony on the common ground of music for people who have little common ground, and one that deserves the lauds it receives.

But what caught my eye in this article was an excerpt from Barenboim's recently published book, “Music Quickens Time” (Verso Books). I've often spoken of the deep comfort I feel on the podium; I've never been able to adequately explain what that is - and Barenboim comes much closer to the sentiment than I've been able to express:

“When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique state of peace, partly due to the fact that one can control, through sound, the relationship between life and death...Since every note produced by a human being has a human quality, there is a feeling of death with the end of each one, and through that experience there is a transcendence of all the emotions that these notes can have in their short lives; in a way, one is in direct contact with timelessness.”

Good stuff, however you look at it.

Tantrum In Beantown

Sarah and I spend a lot of time on this blog trying to tear down stereotypes about stuffy, self-important classical musicians who glide around the world in a haze of ego, forever thinking only of Bach and Mahler. The reason we do this is that we both believe passionately that a) there really aren't a lot of musicians like that anymore, and b) the few that are around make us all look bad.

So you can imagine my reaction to this story from Saturday's Boston Globe. It seems that a well-known Russian conductor, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, has pulled out of an entire run of concerts with the Boston Symphony at the last possible second (as in, after rehearsals had begun.) This normally happens only if the conductor in question is seriously ill, or is called away on a family emergency, in which case a staff conductor who has been at all the rehearsals will step in.

But in this case, the conductor is not only perfectly healthy, he's actually still sitting in Boston, giving interviews to the press about the horrific mistreatment of his apparently royal person that caused him to walk out on one of the most famous orchestras in the world. It seems that the maestro was taking a walk around Boston's Symphony Hall between rehearsals last week, when he noticed a poster advertising his concert. And on that poster, cello soloist Lynn Harrell's name was bigger than his.

Yep, that's the whole reason he walked out. His name wasn't in big print on a poster. (Okay, fine, he also claims to have been slighted further in the BSO's season brochure, where he wasn't included in a section on "Artists who inspire.") Unbelievable.

The Globe makes note of the fact that BSO assistant conductor Julian Kuerti, who took over the performances after Rozhdestvensky's hissy fit, "won a robust ovation and the clear appreciation of the orchestral musicians onstage, who insisted that he take a solo bow." I'll bet they did. Ask any musician: we'll always take a humble, competent leader no one's heard of yet over a superstar with an ego to match...

A little nit-picking

I'm headed to Philadelphia for rehearsals and a concert with 20/21, the Curtis Contemporary Music Ensemble. The program next Friday includes a trio of pieces by Messiaen, one of which is "Oiseaux Exotique", which captures Messiaen at his most birdsong-obsessed. It's a trippy soundscape of timbres and rhythms, citing the calls of over 40 species of birds, and is one of the more rhythmically complicated pieces I know. It's hard for the ear to catch any single thing that's happening because it's so densely orchestrated, with individual instruments most often playing discrete parts.

The Minnesota Orchestra played it a few seasons back under de Waart, with Peter Serkin as soloist, which I remember as an excellent performance. Yesterday, as I was poring over the score, I decided to listen to a recording that had been recommended to me, of the London Sinfonietta led by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring the Messiaen specialist Paul Crossley at the keyboard. I was rather enjoying the recording (people seem to have vastly differing ideas about tempi in this piece!), until I got about midway in the long central tutti. I've been studying this score for several weeks, and have a pretty good grasp of it, but as I listened, something felt very, very off.

Which, I discovered, it was. I listened to those few minutes a few more times, to discover that the xylophone is off by an entire half-measure for about 16 measure (or 26 seconds of music, depending how you want to look at it). I don't usually listen to recordings looking for mistakes (and with modern recording technology, anything is fixable, so it's usually useless to go looking in the first place!), but this one surprised me. Particularly because, even within the dense writing, Messiaen expressly states that in this tutti the xylophone is forte and solo, an important voice. Granted, if you were simply listening to the recording it might be impossible to catch, but as, say, a conductor or producer looking at the score (or even the xylophone player, who clearly had to add two beats to get back in sync with the rest of the ensemble) the error is obvious. Which makes me wonder why they didn't bother to fix it. Or did they simply not catch it?

Any other recorded "errors" out there that people have encountered?

Big week, Part II

A quick follow-up to Part I, which covered the choice of repertoire for my subscription concerts last week.

During the first rehearsal last week, I opened by mentioning to the Orchestra that over the course of my two seasons with them, I had conducted over 70 performances (yes, I counted!), and of those, not a single one received more that one rehearsal, which was kind of an astonishing thought. All of our Inside the Classics, Pops, Sampler/Preview, educational and outreach concerts are done on a single rehearsal, and preparing a show on one rehearsal is a skill set unto itself, and one I feel like I've pretty well mastered. The pace is relentless, and there is little time to go back and fix anything but the most egregious of errors. (During a recent Sommerfest concert, I recall, we were missing the ending to a piece due to a library mishap. We had no time to fix and rehearse, so we simply crossed our fingers and played it for the first time in the performance that night with a singer, no less!) What counts most is absolute clarity of intent.

But rehearsing a subscription week is an utterly different experience, and I often had to remind myself to slow down my usual hyper-efficient pace - we had four whole rehearsals - a luxury in itself. More rehearsal times means more time to work on the larger musical shape of a piece, as well as tackling the smallest details. Often, on those one-rehearsal shows (and particularly if it's something unfamiliar), I feel I have to pull the ensemble along by sheer force of will. Having the time to work on passages over multiple rehearsals helps us establish a groove together, which means that come concert times there are sections which will simply "happen", ensemble-wise, which allows me to focus more on the purely musical aspects.

Rehearsing is an interesting psychological process as well, because over the course of those 9 or so hours, one establishes a certain synthesis through both compulsion and compromise. It's never lost on me that an orchestra is a collection of individuals, and the concomitant variety of predilections and perspectives; it's the conductor's job to get everyone on board with a single viewpoint, and so it needs to be one that everyone can respect even if they don't necessarily agree with it.

In the end, for me, the rehearsals are the most challenging (and thus the most interesting!) part of the whole process. Concerts are thrilling, yes, but we couldn't have gotten to that point without the work before. Performing, despite its conclusive nature, is the easy part, where you enjoy the fruits of your labor; the magic of a concert can only come from cumulative, careful work in rehearsal.

Big week, Part I

As Sam noted in his recent post, I've been a little preoccupied this week with my subscription debut with the Orchestra.

In many ways, it's a big deal; it's my debut on a series that's considered both "front-ranking" and the most artistically significant. And, of course, Minnesota is a major American orchestra, so these concerts carry a weight, in terms of my career, far beyond Minneapolis; other orchestras and presenters watch with interest when a staff conductor takes on a major program.

In many other ways, this week has been just business as usual; first of all, because I've certainly conducted subscription concerts with many other orchestras (albeit smaller organizations), and second, because this is my home orchestra, everything has been a well-known quantity (there's certainly a huge benefit to knowing an ensemble well).

Since this week's program has been in my book for about 10 months, I've had ample time to wrap my head around the program - which is a challenging one, both for myself and the Orchestra! Two pieces were "given" to me - the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Winds and Copland's "Quiet City", pieces meant to showcase members of the Orchestra as soloists. I ran with the whole idea of showcasing our musicians, which is where the idea of Concerti for Orchestra (Shchedrin and Lustoslawski).

I've been asked why I chose the Lutoslawski as my main work rather than, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, which is certainly a better-known piece and a staple of the repertoire. My choice of Lutoslawski comes from two strongly held convictions; one, that part of my job as a musician is to champion lesser-known but artistically worthy pieces that can help broaden the standard repertoire (in particular, if I have a powerful connection to those pieces), and two, that as a young conductor, my artistic growth is enhanced by working on repertoire that is not already ingrained in an ensemble.

Osmo and I agree on that second point (we chatted about it sometime last season). An orchestra of Minnesota's standing has played the standard repertoire countless (countless!) times - just thinking about the collective experience with, say, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, is staggering. Which means that the Orchestra has deeply etched ideas of how that piece should go, how the work "feels" when played by this particular ensemble, and which idiomatic or traditional "extras" (not indicated in the score, perhaps, but part of an accepted performance practice) that they'll execute without even thinking about it. All of which, while easy on an ensemble, is hard on a conductor, particularly if you have a differing view of the work. The challenge in this lies in getting an ensemble to see your perspective and to adopt that view over the rehearsal period.

Rehearsing a piece that hasn't been played in 15 years (1993 was the last time the Lutoslawski was performed here) presents very different challenges, mostly because there is little collective perspective of the piece. Ask the Minnesota Orchestra to play, say, any Brahms Symphony, and they'll happily fall into a groove - everyone knows how they fit in with everyone else, everyone knows what to listen for, everyone knows where the challenging passages are, everyone knows the variations of tempi. Given a less familiar work, there is a shallower collective understanding to fall back on, making an orchestra more reliant on the conductor, which presents me with more work to maintain ensemble.

But the benefits far outweigh this challenge, because a less familiar piece allows me to work with a much cleaner state. Without strong predispositions toward a piece, it is much easier to mold the musical architecture from my own perspective of the work. And this musical molding, of giving a piece a viewpoint that is both true to the intent of the composer and unique in its perspective, is the most fascinating work that I can do as a conductor. And working those details and making artistic discoveries is heightened when working on less familiar repertoire.

It's been an enormously rewarding week from a personal viewpoint so far; over the weekend, my second post on the topic will delve into the rehearsal process and the concerts themselves.

Sarah's Big Week

In case you're wondering why you're not hearing a lot from our Ms. Hicks on the blog this week, the answer is that, well, she's kinda busy. This is a huge week for Sarah - her subcription debut with the Minnesota Orchestra, and (as she noted at our first rehearsal of the week,) her first time getting more than one rehearsal for a concert with us after more than 70 (!) performances in Minneapolis. (As we've noted more than once, the orchestra gets 4-5 rehearsals for a subscription concert week, but only one chance to rehearse pops shows, young people's concerts, and Inside the Classics.)

Making a major orchestra debut is always a nerve-racking experience for a young conductor (and make no mistake, Sarah is a seriously young conductor - mid-thirties is about 13 in conductor years,) and thus far, Sarah's been handling it with extreme calm and efficiency in rehearsal. I'll leave it to her to talk about the specifics of the experience, but I think we should have some awfully fun concerts ahead of us this week, and if you normally only come to our Inside the Classics shows, I'd strongly encourage you to check out Sarah's programs on Thursday and Friday.

The repertoire for these concerts (which Sarah picked out) is some of the most interesting we'll do all year, and it really highlights the orchestra as a whole. I know all the ads we're running for this program say "Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante," (shades of last year's Mahler 9 program being promoted as "Schubert's Unfinished Symphony," no?) but the real meat of this concert are the bookending pieces by Schedrin and Lutoslawski. Not exactly household names, true, but the Lutoslawski is an incredible magnum opus that manages to be intellectual without ever becoming off-putting, and the Schedrin is just good, hard-rocking fun. (If you remember the percussion extravaganza we put on last spring, Schedrin was the composer of that ridiculous and wonderful adaptation of Bizet's Carmen.)

So if you've been waiting for a chance to see Sarah conduct without the goofball standing next to her cracking silly jokes the whole time, here's your chance. And don't forget to come back to the blog after the show and let us know what you thought...

Delinquent

Sorry for the sparse posting on my part; I've been trying to finish up some arrangements for our Scandinavian Christmas concert in December and, in the parlance of my Hawaiian roots, it is kicking my 'okole. Arranging and composing always seem to take me much, much longer that I anticipate; add to that the fact that I've just recently switched from Finale to Sibelius, and things slow to a crawl (although I think I prefer Sibelius, now that I'm getting the hang of it...).

We're not even into the thick of the season, and I'm already pretty swamped. Different concerts have different timelines; for instance, for subscription shows, I need a ton of time to focus on the repertoire, as it's usually a good amount of music, and it's all about the music. As I've described in several posts, learning repertoire, or even polishing up repertoire that I've already done, is a time-consuming process - you just can't fake preparation. I've got my subscription debut with the Minnesota Orchestra coming up, which is preceded by a subscription show for another orchestra (more on that at a later date!), so that's a good amount of repertoire to contend with.

Then of course we have our very first "Inside the Classics" concerts coming up in November, which require a different kind of preparation - scrip-writing, preparing excerpt lists, memorizing lines, etc. Time-consuming in a very different way! Pops concerts present their own challenges, particularly if I'm providing arrangements. Not to mention that I head to Fort Wayne tomorrow to rejoin Ben Folds on his fall tour (we did a show together in Philly in early September and hit it off). All of which tends to lead to blogging delinquency! But, as they say, a busy conductor is a happy conductor...