If You Can Make It There...

One of the great things about being a musician in the internet age is the constant two-way connection you can make with your audience. Where professional critics once stood alone in assessing the quality or relevance of a performance, now anyone with a keyboard and five minutes to set up a blog can have his/her say. There are downsides to this, as everyone knows, but in a relative niche market like classical music, the benefits far outweigh the annoyances.

On a related note, our orchestra has been in New York this week, where we played our annual Carnegie Hall concert on Monday night, pairing Michael Steinberg's arrangement of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge with Sibelius's monumental Kullervo. (And of course, a rousing encore of Finlandia for good measure.) To be honest, I wasn't sure what the New Yorkers would make of this program and the way we play it. These are two works in which Osmo demands a lot of very aggressive, even brutal playing, and while many people consider that kind of edge-of-your-seat music propulsive and exciting, those raised on the deliberate, contemplative style of conductors like Karajan or Maazel might sometimes find our approach jarring.

But so far, every word I've seen written about the Carnegie Hall concert has been a rave, and it's been fun, as always, to discover what new classical music blogs have popped up in New York since I last checked in. Here are some links to the write-ups I've found so far - I'll add more to this post as they pop up. (And yes, I'll include any negative reviews as well, but so far, there don't seem to be any, which is a nice feeling...)

The New York Times: "Mr. Vanska has led the Minnesota Orchestra to impressive heights since becoming its music director in 2003, and the ensemble sounded fantastic on Monday. From the sweeping opening melody of the Introduction, the playing was detailed and intensely expressive, carrying the listener along..."

Musical America: "The truly awesome perfection of ensemble was jaw-dropping... To hear the five string bodies converse fortissimo with such unanimity and split-second force was jaw-dropping, but the pianissimos—a Vänskä speciality—arrested the listener’s attention no less. More than once I exclaimed to myself, 'My god!'"

ConcertoNet: "The real hero, though was Osmo Vänskä, a conductor who never shirks from “becoming” the dynamics he is conducting. A player told me his baton technique is faultless. But Mr. Vänskä’s essence is that his excitement–for the painfully enigmatic Beethoven and the instinctually emotive Sibelius–was expressively infectious."

Classics Today: "There's no denying the fact that Vänskä, a superb Beethoven conductor generally, has the Minnesota strings in top form. They tore into this awkward piece like a pack of happily unanimous demons."

The Classical Source: "Vänskä led a performance of the choral version of Sibelius's “Finlandia” that was breathtaking, concluding what was easily the finest concert I've heard so far this season."

Building For The Future

This is going to be a delicately written post, for a lot of reasons. Anytime politics and the arts start to get mixed up with each other, there seems to be a better than even chance that someone is going to start shouting at someone else, and the last thing we want is for that to happen here. But I wanted to draw your attention to a major project that the Minnesota Orchestra is preparing to undertake, and offer up some ways you could help us out if you felt like it.

If you follow the Twin Cities' arts scene closely, you've probably read something about a proposed renovation of Orchestra Hall that's been in the works for years now. You may even remember when the (decidedly preliminary) plan was for this to be a truly gargantuan, $100-million undertaking, and people were excitedly throwing out ambitious ideas from a full-scale restaurant in the lobby to a condo tower on top of the hall.

That, of course, was in the days when the American economy looked unstoppable, and huge cultural construction projects were popping up all over the Twin Cities, and for that matter, across the country. Today, as everyone knows all too well, things are very, very different, and the folks in charge of our organization have known for some time that we would need to significantly scale back our plans for the venue that houses our orchestra, our patrons, and our staff if we wanted the dream of a better Orchestra Hall to come to fruition.

Everyone involved knew immediately that, when we began to talk about what absolutely has to change to make Orchestra Hall a truly functional and welcoming 21st-century venue, we would have to focus primarily on the spaces that we musicians are almost never in. To put a finer point on it: our concert hall seats 2,450 people. Our lobby, on the other hand, can comfortably hold about 800. That's not a good situation for anyone trying to find a bathroom, buy a drink at intermission, or even just have a nice conversation before or after the show.

Secondly, as much as we all love the interior of our acoustically superior hall, it was built in the early 1970s, and technology has come a long way since then, to put it mildly. We have one of the very best stage crews in the business, but they are frustrated every day by how difficult it is to stage the simplest of events (especially Young People's Concerts, which tend to involve elaborate staging and amplification) with the sound, light, and audio/video equipment we have available. And speaking of education, the concerts we play for kids have become a hugely important part of our mission as an orchestra, and the renovation plans include the addition of more flexible and welcoming spaces for children to experience live music. As someone who spends a lot of hours playing the award-winning WAMSO Kinder Konzerts for the pre-K set, I can't wait for the day when we can give those kids a truly first-class place to visit.

Now, over the next few weeks, you're likely going to be seeing news about our plans start popping up again in the local press, because the legislature is about to open its session, and begin considering what capital projects to include in this year's bonding bill. For cultural organizations, a bonding request is not something you approach lightly. No one wants to be seen asking the public to foot the cost of a project that doesn't already have significant measurable public support. And no one needs to be told that money is tight everywhere right now.

Still, with construction costs going nowhere but up, and nearly 2/3 of the cost of our scaled-back renovation already pledged from private individuals and corporate supporters, we're taking our case to the legislature and Governor Pawlenty this session, in an effort not only to better serve the hundreds of thousands who come through our doors every season, but also to create hundreds of construction jobs at a time when our state desperately needs them. The amount we're asking for isn't small, but it is, I believe, responsible, and promises a huge return on investment.

Here's where you come in. If this is something that interests you, and you'd like to help us out by showing your support for the Orchestra Hall renovation project, we've created a special corner of our web site which contains a lot more information, answers to a lot of questions about what we're planning and why we're planning it now, and even an e-mail list you can join to get updates on the bonding process. Essentially, this is a way for you to let those who will hold the fate of this project in their hands know that you care about the Minnesota Orchestra and its continued vitality.

Make no mistake: the folks at the legislature and in the governor's office are going to have to make a lot of very tough decisions in the 2010 session. And when you ask people in government how they make calls like these, they tell you that, first and foremost, they try to find out how their constituents feel, and where their priorities lie.

We know for a fact (in fact, those of us in the orchestra brag about it regularly to our friends who work in other US cities) that the people of Minneapolis-St. Paul are second to none in their passionate support for the arts and for live music in particular. Our audiences are among the most enthusiastic and diverse that you'll find anywhere, and I love the fact that, on any given night, I can look out into the crowd at Orchestra Hall and see a middle-aged guy in a suit seated next to a college student who looks like he's going duck hunting. It's that kind of engagement from all corners of the community that makes Minnesota such an incredible place to live and work. I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I'm guessing that most of you wouldn't, either.

So if you'd like to help support our Building For The Future project, please take a moment to click over to the site and sign up to be an advocate for Orchestra Hall. We need all the help we can get, and hopefully, we'll be able to return the favor several times over in the next few years...

We Are So Hollywood

So, apparently, those of you attending the orchestra's Sounds of Cinema festival this weekend or next will be getting an intermission faceful of all that video we were shooting during last October's Inside the Classics concerts, wrapped up in classic Tinseltown movie trailer format...



Heh. Nothing like getting a high-definition look at yourself on stage - I'm still decidedly unused to to that part of my role in this series, and the anxiety I feel whenever something like this is in the works has made me understand why people who work on camera for a living are so obsessed with cosmetic surgery. (Sarah, of course, looks fabulous as always. Maybe I need to stand further away from her so as not to invite the comparison - St. Cloud, say.)

Interestingly, the tagline that the unseen voice intones at the beginning of the trailer - "Don't think of it as a concert, think of it as a show about a concert" - was taken from a bunch of meaningless backstage banter that our video crew taped as Sarah and I were getting ready to go on stage for the first ItC show of the year. You just never know where you're going to find your next advertising slogan.

And speaking of video, we've got a whole mess of raw and edited footage taken from those same October concerts over at the new and improved Video section of the website. In addition to the introductory videos Sarah and I shoot for the series each season, you'll now find extensive clips of the first half of the Beethoven Pastoral show, as well as a bunch of videos of our favorite audience members talking about what exactly we do up there. Thanks to anyone and everyone who jumped in front of a camera for us - y'all say it better than we ever could...

(P.S. Extra credit to anyone who can pick out which audience member featured in the above trailer is related to me...)

Cover Models

So, the new issue of Symphony Magazine is out! (Yeah, I know - you had no idea there was such a magazine. Marketing isn't exactly their strong suit, and besides, it's put out by the League of American Orchestras, so it's sort of a trade publication in any case.)

Anyway, the first issue of 2010 is out, and I bring it up because their lead story is all about classical musicians who blog, and, um, well...

Yah. So that happened. Which is interesting, because Sarah and I are not even remotely the sole focus of the article, which also features the fantastic online work of Nico Muhly, Stephen Hough, Tim Munro, and others. I suspect that we're on the cover because the orchestra happened to have professionally shot photos of the two of us pretending to type on a computer, and I'm guessing that none of the other bloggers in the article had such shots readily available.

Anyway, the article is interesting in that it reveals how the most popular classical bloggers seem to be the ones who realize that they should write about a lot more than just how Beethoven used deceptive cadences and how much they practice. Nico writes about exotic dining experiences as often as he writes about music, and Tim gets into all sorts of logistical stuff about the difficulty of being a touring ensemble.

I don't know what it is about blogging that makes the content more entertaining when the author is writing outside his/her actual area of expertise, but it does seem to be a genuine thing. My friend Kate, a violist in the Buffalo Philharmonic, writes a hilarious and comprehensive blog about (wait for it) the Buffalo Sabres hockey team. Seriously, she does, and guess which activity - viola playing or blogging about hockey while giving her favorite players nicknames like "Pommerdoodle" - has landed her in the pages of the New York Times?

Anyway, thanks to Symphony Mag for including us, and to anyone who's just come to our little corner of the interwebs via their link, welcome, and you should probably just go over to the right and click on the "fun" tab if you want to get a basic idea of what we do here. Unless you're one of those serious musical types, in which case, you want "stirring the pot," or maybe "elitism." Your call...

Gratitude, With A Dash of Hucksterism

I don't know whether it's the hectic pace that this fall seems to have brought to Orchestra Hall, or just the fact that Sarah and I are three years into our Inside the Classics careers at this point, but we've done shockingly little blogging about our season-opening concerts coming up this week.

Actually, a big part of the reason for the lack of pre-concert promotion is that we're feeling less pressure to personally beg people to come to our concerts this season, and for that, we have all of you to thank. In what is arguably the toughest year in several generations for performing arts organizations, you guys have boosted us to a whopping 95% subscriber renewal rate, and a better than 15% boost in subscription sales year over year! And that's before we even begin to count the single-ticket sales for our Beethoven show, which are looking unprecedented for this series. So before I say anything else, I just want to say that y'all are absolutely the best, and we're blown away by the support you continue to show this orchestra in general, and Inside the Classics in particular.

That having been said, we've still got some seats left for this Thursday and Friday (yes, Friday - it's a little experiment we're trying,) and if some of you who haven't made it out to a concert before wanted to snap those up in the rush line, well, that'd make our day. We can promise you a broad take on Beethoven that you likely haven't heard before, a very unexpected detour into the early days of the American avant garde, and one of the sweetest coloratura soprano voices that you've ever heard at Orchestra Hall. And now that my beloved Philadelphia Phillies have pretty much sewn up a second consecutive World Series title, there's clearly no need to waste your time staying in and watching Game 2...

If you can't join us in person, however, we're very excited that, for the first time ever, an Inside the Classics concert will be carried live by Minnesota Public Radio (KSJN 99.5fm in Minneapolis/St. Paul, or find your local affiliate here) and you can listen in across the Upper Midwest, or online at Classical MPR's website. This is a live stream only, so tune in Friday night at 8pm Central (9E, 6P) and help us make our first broadcast the kind of event that MPR will want to repeat!

As always, we'll be soliciting your feedback after each of the concerts in our After Hours blog posts, and this week, for the first time, we'll also be asking you to chime in at the concert hall, as our videographers will be scouring the lobby for comments at intermission and after the shows. And for those of you who'd rather produce your own video feedback, we've set up a special page for you to upload your comments. (There are even prizes! And I'm pretty sure you're eligible for them even if you upload a video laying out everything you hated about the concert.)

All kidding aside, we really do take the comments we hear about ItC seriously, and we've used a lot of your feedback to develop the always-evolving feel of the concerts. So thanks again for all the support you've shown us up to this point, and we'll see you at Orchestra Hall this week to start it all over again...

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...

---------------------------

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...

Help Us Entertain You

Okay, here's the deal, people. We don't ask for a lot around here, aside from the occasional intelligent comment (which y'all have been excellent about providing) and your continued willingness to take an interest in what Sarah and I do for a living.

But we're looking for a bit of help here. Times are tough, as you know, and any arts organization will tell you that getting people out of their houses and into a museum, concert hall, or theater is darned tough in the month or two after Christmas, even in the best of economic circumstances. But the fact is, we've got an Inside the Classics concert coming up at the end of the month that we're awfully excited about, and if you were to push me, I'd confess that I'm pretty sure it's going to be the best show we've done yet in two years of putting these things on at Orchestra Hall.

So here's what we're asking. We've thrown up an event page over at Facebook, with a basic description of what we'll be doing on the 28th and 29th, and invited everyone we know who might be in the MSP area on those dates and doesn't actually play in the orchestra. But we need more invites, so if you're a Facebook type (and we know for a fact that some of you are,) please take a couple of minutes to head on over to our page and invite literally everyone you know in the Twin Cities metro. If you wanted to add a note telling them about past ItC shows you've attended, more power to you. But even just spreading the word would be a tremendous help to us.

Even if you're not a Facebooker, we want to do everything we can to pack the hall for these shows, and you'd be amazed how a little word of mouth can make a difference. So if you were already planning on attending, first of all, thank you, and secondly, would you consider asking a few friends to come along? And if you've been perusing this blog or any of the rest of the MN Orch web site and wondered why the heck we're not using Proven Viral Marketing Technique X to attract people to the hall, chime in down in the comments and let us know what we ought to be doing! We're always looking for new ideas...

So, to sum up:

Facebook Event Page Here

Concert Detail Page Here (with link to online ticketing)

Comments Here

Guerrilla Marketing

Hey, are you a Facebook type? (Of course you are - who isn't? Even my mom is on the FB, and yours probably is too.) Anyhow, if you've got a couple of minutes to spare and want to help us get the word out about this week's Inside the Classics concerts, just pop on over to our Facebook event page and invite a bunch of your friends! (Hopefully, friends who live in the MSP area.) You could even RSVP yourself while you're there. Think of it as making a contribution to the orchestra without having to spend a dime. Thanks in advance, and we'll see you Wednesday or Thursday night at Orchestra Hall...

All In The Timing

Whenever marketing types sit around a table and start talking about ways to attract a wider range of concertgoers (by which they generally mean "people under 40,") the subject of concert start times is bound to come up. Why does everything have to start at 7:30 or 8pm, they moan? Why, if only we played a few shorter concerts that started just as all the younger folk are getting out of work, and maybe served some food and drinks as well, why, we'd be beating off the youth demographic with a stick!

To me, this sounds dangerously close to dinner theater, which is to theater as Ashlee Simpson is to music. And I used to play in an orchestra that tried something like this, even offering up free booze themed to the program du jour (vodka for an all-Russian slate, champagne for French fare, etc.), and the whole thing went down like a lead balloon. Granted, the 20 or so people who bothered to show up for these concerts did appear to be younger than the average symphony crowd, but I'm not sure that made up for the fact that we'd spent more money on alcohol than we took in via ticket sales.

What I've rarely heard anyone talk about is shifting our concert times the other direction, which, if you're trying to attract a demographic that is basically defined by its interest in going out late at night, would seem like an obvious idea. The major reason for this is that most orchestras (ours included) have specific prohibitions in their union contracts against concerts that go on into the wee hours, or at least prohibitively expensive overtime scales designed to accomplish the same thing as an outright ban. And most arts professionals who have spent time running a shop full of union workers are well aware that it's rarely worth banging your head against the concrete wall of a Collective Bargaining Agreement if you don't absolutely have to.

But there are ways to massage these things, and a few groups are making the effort. London's Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment recently launched a series of 10pm concerts aimed squarely at the city's young professionals, and guess what? They're apparently turning out in droves. (Part of the appeal appears to be that the audience is allowed, nay, encouraged to drink during the show. No word on whether the orchestra gets to imbibe as well.) In this country, the groups that have tried late-night concerts are generally smaller ensembles unburdened by strict CBAs, but anecdotal evidence suggests that these, too, have been successes.

So, if you're part of the ridiculously coveted 18-to-40 demographic, what about it? Would you be more likely to show up for a casual, dressed-down, late-night concert than a starchy, formal, early evening one? If we suddenly started doing an Inside the Classics show at 11pm on a Friday night, would you consider starting your bar crawl with us? Or are we really better off looking at the dinner theater option?

----------------------------------------

On another note entirely, guess what, you guys? We've got our first Inside the Classics concerts of the season coming up next week! (And we haven't said a word about it on the blog yet, which I'm guessing is driving our marketing department batty.) We're talking Mozart, featuring his Jupiter symphony, and trying out a bunch of new ideas to keep the series fresh. (The script isn't 100% finalized yet, but I can confidently guarantee that an adorable child, a patented Sarah Hicks Fugue Takedown™, and a green garden hose will all feature prominently. As will, y'know, Mozart.)

I know money's tight for everyone right now, so here's what we're doing. If you head on over to our subscription sales page, you can get a ticket to all three of our 2008-09 ItC shows for 50% off the normal price. That's less than $14 per concert, if you subscribe before November 20. And if you're not into planning ahead, we've dropped our single ticket prices for all our November concerts to a maximum of $25. ($10 for your kids.) That's right - the best seat in the house is $25. It's normally $83. Get you some. Transmission ends.

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...

Best Day of the Year. (No, Really.)

As you probably know if you're reading this blog, we're kicking off the Minnesota Orchestra's Sommerfest this weekend, beginning as usual with the massive, day-and-night-long Day of Music. Considering how many thousands of people this event draws every year, it's difficult to imagine that anyone who regularly attends the orchestra hasn't been yet, but if you haven't, for some reason: for God's sake, get yourself down to Peavey Plaza tomorrow! Yes, all the performances are still 100% free, and yes, that means first come, first seated for the indoor shows, and yes, that does mean you have to get there super early if you want to see us play Tchaikovsky's 5th at 8pm, but honestly, even if you don't make it into Orchestra Hall at all, the rest of the acts should keep you more than satisfied. (Unless, of course, it thunderstorms, which I'm told is a possibility. If it does, I think we can all assume that it's Paul Douglas's nefarious revenge on his former employer and our Day of Music media partner.)

When a couple of our management types, now long gone from the organization, conceived the Day of Music back in the early part of this decade, I'm not sure they had any notion that it would become the local music phenomenon that it has. The acts that have played on our stages over the years run the gamut from electronica to roots rock to hip-hop to world beat to old-time folk, always with a healthy dose of the kind of straight-ahead club rock that Minneapolis is known for. I've loved it from the start, and more than once, I stayed at the hall all night after we finished (one year, I even got to introduce Gary Louris of the Jayhawks and Adam Levy of the Honeydogs to a screaming crowd at a midnight show,) finally heading home when the children's music started up on Saturday morning.

Oh, and the orchestra plays as well. And that's actually one of the great ironies of the whole enterprise: supposedly the centerpiece of the whole event, the orchestra actually winds up being just another performance in the massive slate. Much of what gets written by local rock critics about the Day of Music doesn't even mention that our staff are the ones who book, coordinate, and organize the entire operation. It's a counter-intuitive way of marketing yourself as an orchestra, but I love that someone had the guts to try it, because it makes the whole day seem like Minneapolis's event, not the Minnesota Orchestra offering a supporting role to a few bands. And despite the enormous expense (in both money and time) of putting on a free event of this magnitude, I know that it's worth it, because the people who fill the hall for our 8pm concert are always the most enthusiastic crowd we see all year long, and a fair number of them have told me they've never been to see us before, and that they're definitely coming back.

Anyway, like I say, if you've never been, you need to come. The Day of Music kicks off Friday at noon, and runs through Saturday at 3pm. (They'll take an overnight break this year from 1am-9am, which makes me a little bit sad, but is probably a good idea, since the years I stayed all night, the spectators tended to be outnumbered by the musicians and staff by 3am .) If you're looking for a few great acts worth seeing, Star Tribune pop critic Chris Riemenscheider's got you covered. I like his list, and I'd throw in the Honeydogs (8pm on the Peavey Plaza south stage,) the Spaghetti Western String Company (10pm over on WCCO-TV's plaza stage,) and the Charles Lazarus Group (4pm on Peavey north) as well. See you there...

Postscript, 10.49pm: Okay, fine, so everything outdoors got rained out before 10pm. Whatever. We had fun inside. And it's actually sort of amazing that we got through seven full years of this event without a rainout, so I guess we were due. (I'm still blaming Paul Douglas, though. His known pal Don Shelby was walking all too casually around the plaza about three hours before the deluge, and I'm guessing he was doing an elaborate slow-motion rain dance on Doug's behalf...)

Chatting Up The Broadcast Outcast

Anyone who knows the radio scene in the Twin Cities knows about Tommy Mischke, the self-styled Broadcast Outcast, KSTP's homegrown radio anarchist who made his name hurling all manner of brilliant nonsense into the night air where it was picked up by a fascinating assortment of listeners and callers. Although his show isn't quite the same carnival it once was (getting bumped from late night to midday will force a guy to tone it down a bit,) the Mischke Broadcast is still, for my money, the best thing on the radio anywhere in Minnesota. (That's right, MPR geeks, I said anywhere. This American Life is great stuff, and no one loves Morning Edition or 89.3 The Current more than I do, but Mischke does radio on an entirely different level.) Back in the days when I was writing long-form essays for my personal web site (now mostly defunct,) I once wrote around 3,500 words on Mischke, and what I'd gotten out of listening to his show. At the time, I had a vague notion that I might get the chance to run into him someday, and tell him how much I loved what he was doing on AM1500's air.

I finally got the chance last week. During an afternoon rehearsal, my stand partner looked up into the first tier box, where reporters and other backstage visitors frequently sit to watch us practice, and whispered to me, "Who's the guy nearly falling out of the box?" I looked up and did a violent double take. It was none other than Mischke, craning his neck every which way and leaning so far forward to hear every word that was being said on stage that he did seem about to plummet down to our level. I've never seen anyone look so engaged in what we do, us included.

Afterwards, our PR chief asked if I'd stick around along with a few other musicians (violists Tom Turner and Mike Adams, timpanist Peter Kogan, and bass player Bill Schrickel) to talk to Mischke for a piece on the orchestra he was preparing for his show. I've done a lot of press interviews over the years, but I don't think I've ever before been quite so puppy-doggish in leaping at the chance to do one. As it turns out, Tommy asks great questions, and the six of us ended up stretching what was supposed to be a 10-minute interview into nearly 40 minutes of chatting about music, life, and being on stage for a living.

Mischke aired our chat this afternoon, devoting more than half of his program to it, which was incredibly flattering. Tom and Mike and I spent part of our lunch hour gathered around a portable radio listening, and fortunately, KSTP now archives all its shows online, so you can listen too, if you're so inclined. (I don't know how long the links below will stay active, but they should work for at least a week...)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE MISCHKE BROADCAST

HOUR TWO OF THE SHOW IS HERE

The Big Reveal: Inside The Classics '08-'09

A number of you have been asking whether we're ever planning to make public our plans for the Inside the Classics series beyond the current season, and at long last, we have answers! The official press announcement concerning our 2008-09 season of concerts went out a day or two ago, and those of you who are subscribers and/or longtime patrons of the series should be getting the new brochure in your mailbox within the next few days. Still, we wanted to get the first official word on the new season up on the blog before it drops anywhere else, so here it is.

The first thing to tell you is that Sarah and I will be continuing in our respective roles as conductor and host of the series in 2008-09, and that we will also continue to write and produce the shows ourselves (along with the Minnesota Orchestra's invaluable artistic administrator, Kari Marshall,) as we have in this inaugural year. We'll also be preserving the format of the concerts, whereby we spend the first half delving into the music and the people who bring it to life, and then give the second half of the evening over to a complete performance of a single featured work.

We've spent a lot of time this first season experimenting, both musically and verbally, to try and get our points across in as many creative ways as possible, judging our success levels by what we hear from both our colleagues in the orchestra, and you in the audience. Some of this feedback came in the form of blog comments, e-mails or phone calls, but the bulk of it came simply from taking the measure of the room at the moment one of our "bits" connected - or failed to.

Essentially, this series has been, and will likely continue to be, a work forever in progress, as we attempt to nurture new ways of connecting people to music. To that end, the 2008-09 season will be all about starting you off with some music you're likely already comfortable with, and then asking you to trust us to introduce you to something completely new.

Our theme for the year is "Young Wonders," composers who became masters of their craft at a shockingly young age. One of them is probably obvious, another will be quite familiar, and the third you are likely never to have heard of - but we guarantee that you'll never forget him. So without further ado, here's the rundown on next year's concerts...

Concert 1 - November 19 & 20, 2008
Featured Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Featured Work: Symphony No. 41, Jupiter

Well, we really couldn't do a season on prodigies and leave him off the list, could we? Mozart was the quintessential stage kid - paraded around Europe like a circus act, playing spectacular piano and violin solos while blindfolded as a party trick, and generally living out his father's dreams of musical stardom. In his 20s, he quickly developed into one of the most beloved composers of his day. But he never really outgrew his youth, and his inability to deal with the adult world on its terms is something that we'll definitely be getting into. Musically, we'll spend the first half taking you from his earliest works through his early adulthood; then, on the second half, you'll get to hear Mozart at his most mature - the last symphony he ever wrote, full of energy and bombast, but also perfectly paced and beautifully orchestrated, as only he could do.

Concert 2 - January 28 & 29, 2009
Featured Composer: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Featured Work: Symphony No. 4, Italian

Everyone knows about Mozart's prodigiousness, and that he died in his late 30s, leaving us to wonder what might have been had he lived a few more decades. Few listeners, however, realize that Mendelssohn's lifespan was as short as Mozart's, or that his early compositions were even more impressive. Mendelssohn was penning legitimate masterpieces in his mid-teens, as a member of one of Europe's most celebrated musical families. We'll trace the lineage on the first half, and bring you, among other things, a movement of his spectacular Octet for Strings, written at age 15. Then, on the second half, you'll get a full dose of what many believe to be Mendelssohn's greatest orchestral work, jumping with energy and unmistakably tied to the youthful enthusiasm that defines so much of his music.

Concert 3 - March 18 & 19, 2009
Featured Composer: Jay Greenberg
Featured Work: Symphony No. 5

Unless you are a devoted viewer of the CBS News program, 60 Minutes, or are seriously plugged into the American new music scene, you probably have never heard of Jay Greenberg. That's okay. Until about two years ago, I'd never heard of him, either. Of course, two years ago, he was 14 years old, and had just completed his fifth fully scored, fully realized symphony. A year later, that symphony, which we're featuring as our season finale, was recorded by no less a luminary band than the London Symphony Orchestra and released by Sony Classical. Jay describes the symphony as "a counter-stereotypical work combining a Romantic melodic sweep with... methodical mathematical thinking." One prominent composition teacher at Juilliard has declared the soft-spoken kid from New Haven, Connecticut to be "a prodigy of... the likes of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Saint-Saens." That's quite a hefty description for a teenager to bear on his shoulders, and we'll spend our first half asking him about it in person, as Jay Greenberg joins us live on stage to talk about his life and his music. Then, after intermission, we'll give you a complete reading of this remarkable piece, by this remarkable young man.

So there it is, at long last. Sarah and I could not be more excited about these shows, and we're thrilled that Jay will be able to join us for the third set of concerts! (As you may have guessed, his participation was the important confirmation we mentioned a few weeks back that we were waiting on before announcing the new slate of concerts.) It should be an awfully fun ride, and we hope that all of you who've joined us at the hall or on the blog this year will make it out for all three concerts, and bring your friends!

Ask An Expert: Getting Around To Copland

Just in time for us to begin ramping up the marketing efforts for our last Inside the Classics concert of the season, Bill Stroud checks in with this latest Ask An Expert question...

Q: What instruments are used in the orchestral version of Copland’s Appalachian Spring? I think that I hear a piano and a Xylophone, and is a piccolo (as opposed to a flute) used for some of those extremely high notes?

One of Copland's specialties was doing more with less, especially when it came to orchestration. In fact, the original version of Appalachian Spring was written for only 13 musicians (flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano, and strings) and it has a sparse, lonely sound that fans of the more popular full orchestra version might find jarring. Copland's choice of a small ensemble was dictated not by musical considerations, but by the fact that the pit at Washington, D.C.'s Coolidge Auditorium, where the ballet premiered, could only accommodate a small number of players, especially if a piano was to be in the mix.

The fully orchestrated ballet suite, which is eight minutes shorter than the original score, premiered almost a year after the 13-player version, and Bill is pretty much right on in his assessment of what he's hearing in its fuller, more integrated mix. The instrumentation is as follows:

2 flutes, with the second flute doubling on piccolo
2 oboes
2 clarinets (in both A and B-flat)
2 bassoons
2 horns
2 trumpets
2 trombones
harp
piano
timpani
xylophone
snare drum
bass drum
cymbals
tabor (long drum)
wood block
claves
glockenspiel
triangle
full orchestral strings (violin, viola, cello, bass)

We've Been Noticed

Ordinarily, these outstate tours of ours pass quietly by without much attention from the Twin Cities press. But this time, we've actually had something of a press boomlet: the Star Tribune's Graydon Royce and Jeff Thompson accompanied us to Jackson and Worthington, as did Mike Anthony, the former Strib music critic who is currently working on a book about Osmo.

Graydon turned in a nice front-page piece about the first day of the tour in this morning's Strib, and there's a very cool audio slide show on the paper's web site as well. Our pal Naomi made the front page as well, shaking hands with Bill Schrickel and Richard Marshall. (Thanks for the heads-up on that last one, Nicki...)

As if that weren't enough, the Marshall Independent carried a morning-after story about our concerts, and it seems likely that Willmar's West Central Tribune will run a story in the next day or two. So if you just can't get enough of reading about us on the road, there's your linkfest for the day.

I'll be back on late tonight with the post-game wrap from here in Willmar. But first, I'm off to check out my favorite Scandihoovian souvenir and bookstore downtown...

Music To Go With The Words

For anyone who was intrigued by my last post about Stephen Paulus's oratorio, but didn't get a chance to see it live this week at Orchestra Hall, there's one more chance to hear it before the CD we're currently making comes out late this year. Minnesota Public Radio taped Tuesday's performance, and will be airing it tonight in our normal Friday night slot on all MPR Classical stations across Minnesota and the Upper Midwest. (The flagship is KSJN 99.5fm in the Twin Cities, and if you're outstate, or in many parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, either Dakota, the Michigan UP, or Idaho, you can find your local affiliate here. MPR also streams live 24/7, so you can hear the broadcast online as well.)

The concert starts at 8pm Central, and includes a stirring first half featuring clarinetist Burt Hara performing a movement from Olivier Messaien's Quartet For The End Of Time, cellist Janet Horvath soloing in Bruch's Kol Nidrei, and the string section of the Minnesota Orchestra playing Steve Heitzeg's tribute to the victims of war and genocide, Wounded Field.

A few blogs have written about the performance as well, which also happened the last time we played this piece. Over at MSP Mag, Lani Willis called it "a gut-wrenching experience I expect to be digesting for a very long while." (She meant it in a good way, I think.) And those of you music diehards who double as Twins fans (as I do) may have been surprised to see an extended post from the one and only TwinsGeek describing his daughter's experience as a member of the children's choir performing the oratorio with us. (Full disclosure: the Geek is an old friend of mine, and I've been known to pen articles on baseball and hockey from time to time in one or another of his various online and print publications.) His daughter's favorite part of the experience? "When Osmo pointed to us, and we standed up alone, and everyone clapped extra hard.” Well, naturally.

Boldy going...

For all you Trekkies out there, the Minnesota Orchestra is presenting, tonight and tomorrow night at Orchestra Hall, a program entitled "To Boldly Go" featuring both music inspired by space (the final frontier) and the inimitable George Takei. We just finished the single rehearsal for the show (from 3-5:30 pm this afternoon), and I am blogging, eating dinner and getting ready for the 8 pm performance. It's a tough schedule for both orchestra and conductor, but we can't wait to see how many people show up for the costume contest and how the capacity crowd will react when Mr. Sulu walks onstage!

Little Tramp, Big Concert

I've tried to avoid using this space to flog the Minnesota Orchestra's weekly concerts (other than the ones in our Inside the Classics series, of course,) because Sarah and I are very conscious of the potential for an "official" orchestra blog to come across as little more than a crass attempt to sell tickets by pretending to embrace the online world of user-generated content. So in writing about specific concerts that we play, I've generally waited until after they're over to post anything, and I don't think I've ever written anything that sounds like "run out and buy a ticket to this show right now."

That abundance of caution is taking the day off. If you're free tomorrow night, you need to run out and buy a ticket to our concert. (And you need to hurry, because a glance at our online ticketing system tells me that we don't seem to have many seats left.) Because what we're doing this week presents one of those rare chances to see something that you've probably never seen before in your life, and may never get a chance to see again.

Last summer, when I saw on our preliminary 2007-08 schedule that we would be mounting a two-week mini-festival of film music, I must admit that I didn't expect it to be a highlight of the year. Orchestras play movie music all the time these days, and too often, it's just an excuse to slap the "serious music" tag on something that's little more than a glorified pops concert. (I mean, honestly, I liked Pirates of the Caribbean, too, but that score is five minutes of cliched dreck repeated for two hours. And don't get me started on Lord of the Rings.) Seldom do you see an orchestra really make an effort to communicate just what it is about music and cinema that inspires such powerful emotion in us. It's not that we can't do it - it's that it's easier just to play Star Wars again, and the tickets cost the same either way.

But my cynicism proved to be unfounded this time. The centerpiece of our Sounds of Cinema festival (which does, yes, include a pops show hosted by George Takei of Star Trek fame) is a live performance of the complete scores to two classic silent films, as the movies play simultaneously on the big screen behind the orchestra. This week's flick is Charlie Chaplin's classic "Little Tramp" adventure, City Lights, which stands as one of the funniest and most poignant movies of all time, more than 75 years after it was made.

It's a huge undertaking to screen a film with a live orchestra providing the soundtrack, particularly when the score was composed specifically to complement Chaplin's side-splitting physical humor. It's not enough for the right tune to just more or less line up with the right scene - specific notes and phrases have to hit at the exact moment that the Little Tramp jumps in the air, or scratches his head, or tries to cope with a swallowed dog whistle. To that end, the conductor's score for this show (which is a whopping 455 pages, by the way - approximately equivalent to two of Mahler's longest symphonies) is filled not only with the usual staves of music, but with constant verbal cues as to what ought to be going on onscreen during any given measure. While leading us in what should sound like a normal performance, Osmo has to constantly dart his eyes between the score and the video monitor in front of his podium, making sure that his cues to us line up perfectly with instructions like "eyebrow lift," "taxi cab" and "fourth hiccup." If he misses a single cue, or fails to follow the exact tempo indicated for a given section, we'll be out of sync with the movie. Meanwhile, the hardest part for the orchestra is keeping our eyes on our parts and Osmo rather than twisting around to watch the screen.

We did the first performance of City Lights this morning, and judging from the waves of laughter rolling through the audience throughout, I think we hit our marks. Osmo really seems remarkably at ease with the score (although he did admit in rehearsal yesterday that "I have been practicing at home with a DVD, and I know it is the same movie, but this feels like a different version!"), and the music itself, which Chaplin wrote with the help of an orchestrator, is fantastic stuff, dipping and rolling all over the place and changing tempos ever so slightly to indicate when a character is getting tired, or drunk, or whatever.

The movie lasts just under 90 minutes, and with the exception of a 70-second stretch during which recorded sound effects take over for a particular Chaplin gag, the orchestra plays continuously for the entire length of the film. It's exhausting, but man, it's fun, and having watched City Lights several times before, I can honestly say that the live music is vastly superior to the tinny (and, frankly, not very well played) recorded version of Chaplin's score that accompanies the copy of the movie that you can watch at home.

If you really can't make it out to the Friday performance, or if big epic dramas are more your speed, come see us next Saturday, when we'll be rolling five or six Shostakovich symphonies into a massive live soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. I promise you won't regret it.

Who Wants To Be Socially Networked?

If you're a Facebook type (and really, who isn't these days?) you should check out the new Event page I just threw together for our next Inside the Classics concert, which is now a mere three weeks away! We really are relying on word of mouth to spread interest in the series, so if you were at our November concerts, or if you've been enjoying the blog, please take a minute to join the guest list and invite a few friends! You can also post on the event wall, upload any cool photos you have of the Firebird concert (which you weren't really supposed to be taking, but whatever, it's the age of unlimited content, right?), and generally help us evangelize ourselves. Just, y'know, if that sounds like something you'd like to do.

Sarah and I have been thrilled with the response to the blog that we've gotten in a relatively short period of time, so any help you guys can give us in filling the hall would be much appreciated! We'll have more about our preparations for the Tchaikovsky show over the coming weeks here on the blog, so keep checking in regularly, and let us know if there's anything specific you'd like to hear about in the runup to the concerts...

Inside the Classics Facebook Event Page

We Accept!

Well, as of a few hours ago, we are officially your Grammy-nominated Minnesota Orchestra! The list of noms came out this afternoon (not that we were sitting around waiting for it, you understand... ehrm... well, maybe we were just a little bit...) and our recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony made the list for Best Orchestral Performance. We're hardly the frontrunners - that dubious honor would probably go to the Nashville Symphony, whose recording of a new Joan Tower piece co-commissioned by a gigantic consortium of orchestras from all 50 states has been getting the full-on salivatory treatment from the arts press in recent months. But hey, it's our first nomination in one of the "major" categories in quite some time, and it's for a recording that I genuinely loved making, and that's enough to get me excited.

Have a little faith in me...

Well, the day has finally arrived, and we'll be kicking off our new Inside the Classics concert series this very evening at Orchestra Hall, dissecting Stravinsky's Firebird, poking fun at the patently absurd plot that accompanies same, and generally trying to justify the faith that's been placed in us by our bosses, not to mention our long-suffering colleagues in the orchestra.

That last one is an aspect of launching a new series that we haven't really talked about on the blog so far, but the more I think about it, the more I'm amazed that Sarah and I ever came to be in this enviable position. Generally, when an orchestra is launching or revamping a concert series, it looks around at what other orchestras are doing, tries to locate a conductor who does that sort of thing as a specialty, and if a host is required, recruits one from the local public radio station or something. The emphasis is always on safety - why take a chance that the wheels could come off when, instead, we could just follow a proven formula that dozens of other orchestras have already field tested?

That's not what happened here. Sarah certainly has experience with unconventional concert formats (in addition to regularly conducting the Richmond Symphony in a nightclub, she stands as the only staff conductor in Minnesota Orchestra history to throw back a whiskey shot in the middle of a performance, said shot having been proffered by legendary Irish tenor John McDermott, who was not going to take no for an answer) and I've spent enough time with a microphone in my hand to know how not to trip over my own tongue, but never before has either of us done anything quite like what we'll be doing tonight. So it took a tremendous leap of faith for the people in charge of the orchestra to tap us as the right pair to revamp, reinvent, and relaunch an already much-loved series of concerts.

Equally amazing to me is how little we've been interfered with in our preparations. Several times this fall, in the course of conducting the seemingly endless meetings that go along with any concert series (artistic planning, logistics, guest artists, etc.) Sarah and I found ourselves tentatively asking if the Powers That Be wanted to, y'know, actually see some of what we were planning to do in our first show. The answer was always the same: Nah. We trust you. Knock 'em dead.

That level of trust (which is quite literally unheard of in the management structure of other major orchestras, by the way) extends to the orchestra itself, too. As Sarah mentioned, we get only a single rehearsal for these concerts, and for us, that rehearsal was yesterday morning. We had just under an hour to prepare our full performance of Firebird, and another hour and a quarter to work on all the excerpts, extras, and shenanigans that we've planned for the first half. This is generally the acid test for any show - orchestra musicians, even our fun-loving bunch, do not like having their time wasted even a little bit, and while they're certainly rooting for us to do well, they are not interested in spending their rehearsal time listening to me talk into a microphone. (To be honest, since they're sitting behind the speakers that project out into the auditorium, they won't be able to understand half of what I'm saying during the show, anyway...) So you've gotta work fast, and efficiently, and know going in what the orchestra needs to be told, and what can be left out. The upshot is that, while my fellow musicians now have a firm grip on what they'll be playing during the first half of the show, and in what order, they have literally no idea of how I plan to tie the thing together. They just do their job, and trust that I'll do mine.

All that having been said, Sarah and I have been designing, writing, and prepping this show for months now, and we can't wait to actually walk out on that stage tonight. If you haven't already made plans to join us, it's not too late - you can get tickets online here, or just stop by the box office at 11th and Marquette in downtown Minneapolis. I can't claim to know for sure just exactly how everything will unfold onstage over the next two nights, but hey - you can trust us, right?

ItC on MPR

Just a quick note for anyone thinking about coming to this week's inaugural Inside the Classics concerts at Orchestra Hall: Sarah and I will be appearing on Minnesota Public Radio's classical music stations this afternoon (Monday) to talk about the series, the blog, and whatever else comes up. I don't know exactly what time the segment will air, but it should be sometime between 3 and 6pm, with MPR host (and closet violist!) Steve Staruch presiding.

MPR Classical is 99.5fm KSJN in the Twin Cities, and streams live from this page. If you're in outstate Minnesota, either Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa, or the Michigan UP, you can find your station here...

Update, 12:42pm: As it turns out, the segments we taped at MPR today will not be airing until later this week, probably Wednesday, the day of our first concert. So you'll just have the leave the radio on until then. (Or not.) If any part of the interview winds up on the MPR website, I'll link to it here.

You Only Think You Hate New Music

As I'm still out of town and away from the orchestra, I'm not able to blog extensively about the FutureClassics concert that the orchestra is playing tonight, which is a great shame, because it's one of my favorite things we do all year. Plenty has been written in the local press about our Composers' Institute (and as usual, one of the participating composers is blogging the week for the excellent NewMusicBox,) so I won't rehash the details of the program here, but suffice to say that there is a lot of great stuff being written out there right now, and tonight's show will be one of the few opportunities most of us get to hear a large amount of it played by a major orchestra.

There are a lot of reasons that orchestras don't play more new and avant garde music, the most basic having to do with the fact that orchestras are huge organizations with massive budgets that are absolutely dependent on packing as many people as possible into the hall every week. Throw in the fact that a large percentage of audiences have been seriously averse to unfamiliar music ever since a generation of composers back in the mid-20th century spent about 20-30 years writing music that was intentionally, aggressively hard to listen to, and you start to see why the disconnect occurred. But these days, the vast majority of composers write music that is fun, fascinating, and while often challenging, aimed squarely at engaging the listener, rather than making the listener feel stupid. And if the success of last year's first FutureClassics concert proved anything, it's that people who are adventurous in their music choices don't care a whole lot about genre labels - they just want to hear something good, being played by people who care as much as they do.

If you can't make it out to the concert tonight (and you should - student rush tickets are only $10, and everyone else gets in for $20,) you can listen to the whole show on MPR Classical - that's KSJN 99.5fm in the Cities - and also streaming from MPR's website live at 8pm Central. I can guarantee that it'll be nothing like what you normally hear played on classical radio.

Downbeat.

tap... tap tap... this thing on?

Ah. Excellent. Always difficult to know just how to start these things, but let's go with this: welcome, one and all, to the first official Minnesota Orchestra blog! Over the coming weeks, months, and (hopefully) years, conductor Sarah Hatsuko Hicks and I will be using this space to take you behind the scenes here at Orchestra Hall, and introduce you not only to the music that we love, but to the truly fascinating cast of characters that populates the Minnesota Orchestra. As you can see from the menu above, we'll also be adding podcasts in due course (read: as soon as we finish reading Podcasting for Dummies and staring blankly at the opening screen of our editing software), fielding questions about music and the music business, and generally doing whatever we can to give you a fresh look at an art form that's frequently accused of being hidebound, elitist, and out of touch with anyone born after 1934.

(Feel free to insert your own bitter joke here regarding an orchestra thinking itself cutting edge for launching blogs and podcasts 5 or so years after everyone else in the Western hemisphere did the same thing. Trust me, we've heard them.)

As you've probably noticed, this blog and the rest of the Inside The Classics site are loosely tied to a new series of Minnesota Orchestra concerts launching this November with Sarah on the podium and me on the microphone. Each show will see us presenting one complete, uninterrupted piece of music after intermission. Before intermission, we'll do our best to take you into our backstage world, showing you what goes into an orchestral performance as well as into the composition of the featured work. That sounds awfully dry, but trust me, it won't be. Sarah and I both abhor the conceits of the stereotypical orchestra concert, and we'll be doing our best to knock as many of them down as we can.

Still, what I think orchestras (and the music business as a whole) need most at the moment is not more shameless self-promotion, but an honest embrace of the world that we tend to assume falls outside our target demographic, so I want to be clear that this blog was not created as a marketing device to lure you to our concerts. Even if you never set foot in Orchestra Hall - even if you don't live anywhere near Minneapolis and the last concert you went to was in a cramped bar packed full of shrieking college students and wailing guitars - we hope that we can provide something you'll find worth reading on a regular basis. Stuffy reputations aside, the world of a professional orchestra is a deeply fascinating one, filled with a bizarre combination of big talent, bigger egos, and incredible music. We intend to take you there, and if possible, leave you inside forever.