Still on the road

I'm finishing up my time in Vermont, where I've been premiering a Double Concerto by David Ludwig with the Vermont Symphony and Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson. Which has been very cool on many different levels - first of all, because David and I have been the best of friends for over a decade, and it's fun to collaborate with a colleague you are so close to (and he writes absolutely wonderful music!), and second of all because I grew up on recordings of the famed Kalichstein-Laredo Robinson Trio, and it's amazing to be at a point in my career where I'm collaborating with artists that I admired as a youngster!

We just played a matinee in Rutland, where we'll also be spending 6 hours tomorrow recording the Double Concerto. As we're an hour and a half out of Burlington, the Vermont Symphony's home, we're all ensconced in the local Holiday Inn - soloists, composer, conductor, recording engineers (who just arrived from New York), as well as the entire orchestra. Which has lent the hotel halls the atmosphere of, say, a Youth Orchestra tour, in the best sense. Musician are excitedly visiting back and forth - I saw a case of beer being lugged up the stairway, bags of wine and snacks purchased at the Hannaford down the street. At this point in my career, hotel living has lost its luster (I often wake up in the middle of the night having no idea what city I'm in until I rouse myself to look at the the Hotel Services booklet to see where I am), but put an orchestra in a hotel and they'll find a way to have fun. It's nice to see that kind of enthusiasm, particularly when you're a little travel-weary - I'm just looking forward to being somewhere (anywhere!) for more that 5 days at a time (which I might have around February 15)!

Photographic Evidence That We're Actually Working This Week

So, as promised, here are a few shots I managed to squeeze off in between takes of Bruckner 4 at today's recording sessions at Orchestra Hall. (Click any of the images for a full-size version.) First off, here's a look at the chaotic, microphone-strewn mess that our stage becomes during one of these weeks...

Notice that not only are there mics and cables everywhere, but also an assortment of spotlights you would expect to find at a neighborhood ballpark. There's a good reason for these: the stage lights at Orchestra Hall, being more than thirty years old, actually emit a low-level hum that BIS's oh-so-sensitive mics pick up when we're playing softly. So they bring in their own lights and leave the rest of the hall dark while we're recording, which creates a very eerie glow around the auditorium.

Oh, yeah, and they hang giant curtains from the rear of the house, all the way from the third tier to the floor. Since we're close-miked for BIS recordings, they don't want to capture any reflected sound from the empty hall (which is much more echo-prone without an audience there to soak up sound waves,) and the curtains apparently help with that. At least, I assume they do, because I would imagine that it's a heck of a lot of work to get them up there.


This is a shot of the control room, which is ordinarily a backstage storage space and rehearsal room. The BIS crew sets up shop here with all manner of high-tech recording, mixing, and playback equipment, plus at least three laptop computers dialed into whatever it is they do with the noises we make, and in between takes, Osmo, Jorja, and an ever-changing assortment of the rest of us pile into the room to listen to the playback and decide what sounds good enough to make the cut, and what needs to be redone, and redone, and redone again until it's perfect. During the playback that was going on in this shot, you've got trombonist Kari Sundstrom and timpanist Peter Kogan wearing the headphones in the foreground, and BIS producer Robert Suff at the main mixing table with Osmo and two other BIS engineers who I believe are named Hans and Fabian.


This is the other thing that goes on in hurried fashion when a break in the session is called, which happens often to allow for playback. Principal musicians leap to confer with Osmo at the podium about mistakes or imperfections they already know will need to be rerecorded when we continue. In this shot, Jorja and Osmo confer in the background, while principal viola Tom Turner and assistant concertmaster Roger Frisch hold an urgent conversation which sounded to me like it had nothing whatsoever to do with Bruckner. Oh, and there's one other individual in the photo, lurking back there in the shadows just to the right of Jorja...


That's producer Rob Suff again. Or at least, that's the main contact most of us will have with him over the course of the week, as he literally calls the shots to the stage from back at his desk in the control room. Rob is utterly ruthless, in that perfectly mannered and unfailingly polite way that only the British seem able to achieve. I'm sure I'll have more on him as the week goes on.

For now, we seem to be more or less on schedule, with the first movement of Bruckner in the can, and just over half of the slow movement done as well. We've technically got another day and a half of session time to finish the symphony, but I've heard rumors that Osmo and Rob would like to get an early start on the piano concerto if at all possible, so things could get tight. In any case, we're back at it bright and early tomorrow, and I'll update either Tuesday or Wednesday night...

Playing For The Microphones

The orchestra heads back to work Monday morning, after two weeks away from the hall, but those of you waiting for a concert will have a while to wait yet. We'll spend this week recording new CDs, which for the first time under Osmo will feature a composer other than Beethoven. Okay, actually, we are recording some Beethoven - his fourth piano concerto with the up-and-coming Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin, but the bulk of the week will be spent on Bruckner's massive 4th symphony.

(Someone asked me the other day why we would pair these two very different pieces on a single CD, and the answer is that I'm pretty sure we won't be. Taken together, the Bruckner and Beethoven represent around 90 minutes of music, so I'm pretty sure they wouldn't fit on a single release. Whether the concerto will be released as a stand-alone CD or will sit on BIS's shelf until we've recorded another of the Beethoven concertos with Sudbin next season, I don't know, but I'll try to find out for those of you who care about such things.)

This will also be the first time since November that we'll be playing what musicians consider standard concert hall repertoire. As a commenter recently pointed out, our Decembers are given over entirely to holiday programming, and while some of it is certainly quality music, none of it is actually challenging to play. Throw in the additional fact that the last concert we played under Osmo was way the hell back on November 15 (a runout performance in Watertown,) and jumping feet first into a recording session with no rehearsal starts to seem like the musical equivalent of joining the Polar Bear Club. (Which, I'm reliably informed, one of our horn players actually did this weekend.)

The good news is that Osmo doesn't tend to throw us a lot of curveballs that we aren't ready for (we know him pretty well by now,) and we've worked with BIS producer Rob Suff for more than five years now, so the pace of the recording sessions will be familiar, if exhausting. Because we have to stop frequently to listen back to various takes, recordings take much longer than our regular rehearsals and concerts - we'll be at the hall from 10am to 6:30pm Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and from 10am-1pm on Friday. (The off day on Wednesday is by design, so we don't end up sounding lethargic on the later takes.)

I'll chime in with some posts about the recording process as we go through it, and I'll try to score some photos and audio from the control room as well, if I can do it without annoying anyone too much. And for those of you waiting for us to get back into the tuxes, and who may have worn out your Minnesota Orchestra recording of Beethoven's 5th, here's a slightly different interpretation that I've been enjoying recently...

Yes, that would be Mr. Bean...