For reasons that remain unclear to me (but which almost certainly have to do with Blogger being ridiculously sucky at generating blogs,) we do not have a blogroll here at ItC Central. So when we discover a fabulous new music-related blog that we think all y'all should be reading, we pretty much have to dedicate a whole post to telling you about it.
Fortunately, I have no problem with that in this case. I've written before about my friend Kate Holzemer, a native Minnesotan who spends her days playing viola in the Buffalo Philharmonic, and her nights blogging hilariously about her beloved Buffalo Sabres. And now, with the Buffalo Phil preparing for a tour of the ever-lucrative state of Florida, the powers that be at the BPO have tapped Kate to apply her writing skills to their official tour blog.
Pretty much every orchestra that goes on any sort of tour these days puts up a blog, and to be brutally honest, most of them range from unreadably bland to offensively self-promotional. So I really can't recommend Kate's BPO blog highly enough, because I've known this woman for about 15 years now, and I can pretty much guarantee that she is the antithesis of bland and self-promotional. So far, she's referred to her viola as her unborn child, dubbed her stagehands SUPER-DUPER-MEGA-PROS, and called one of the BPO's percussionists a liar. And I'm assuming that's just her warm-up act.
The blog is at http://bporchestra.wordpress.com/, and you should all go there immediately. And then, you should forget how funny Kate is and come back here. Because honestly, we can't compete with that.
Join a community of music lovers and world-class artists on a unique vacation experience. Attend daily performances by a full symphony orchestra, chamber music concerts, and solo recitals by the artists in residence. Enjoy opportunities to socialize with the professional musicians who will be your fellow passengers.
I'm curious as to who members of the orchestra will be, as well as what the clientele is like...
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.
Mahler scores are notorious detailed with nit-picky instruction to both player and conductor - woe betide the conductor who hasn't figured them out before the first rehearsal, when a suspicious wind player might test their preparedness by asking a pointed question about an obscure marking!
A list of translations can prove very helpful. Or, in this case (a "memo" to the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Newton, MA), very funny (via Alex Ross).
To whet your appetite:
GERMAN - ENGLISH
Langsam - Slowly
Schleppend - Slowly
Dampfer auf - Slowly
Mit Dampfer - Slowly
Allmahlich in das Hauptzeitmass ubergehen - Do not look at the conductor
Im Anfang sehr gemaechlich - In intense inner torment
Alle Betonungen sehr zart - With more intense inner torment
Getheilt (geth.) - Out of tune
Immer noch zurueckhaltend - With steadily decreasing competence
Sorry for the spotty posting - I've been on a busy guest-conducting week, and the Orchestra, of course, has been at Carnegie (read the glowing review here). I'm disappointed to have missed some excitement - namely, soloist Leonidas Kavakos and concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis in a violin switcheroo mid-Sibelius. Sam, I'm sure, will have some first-hand insights when the Orchestra returns!
We've just arrived in Frankfurt, Germany's financial capital, where we'll be playing a concert tonight before heading west to Luxembourg tomorrow, and to be perfectly honest, I'm getting a little tired of bus travel. Airports may be a royal pain to get into and out of these days, but there's just something about spending 3 or 4 hours on a bus driving down some anonymous highway that makes you feel like you're wasting your day.
Still, busses it is, for now, and seeing as I got to spend a leisurely day off in Stuttgart yesterday catching up on e-mails, practicing whatever I liked on my viola, and wandering the city's relaxing plazas, I shouldn't be complaining.
Reviews of our various German concerts are steadily trickling in, but unfortunately, they're in German, and we don't have most of them translated yet. Still, if you happen to be multilingual, or just enjoy seeing the words "Minnesota Orchestra" in the middle of a mass of foreign gibberish, you can get your fix here, here, here, and here. My German isn't great, but I can usually understand the gist of most of what I read, and my impression is that we're continuing to rack up (mostly) positive reaction from the press. Certainly, our audiences have been quite appreciative at every hall we've played.
Speaking of language difficulties, one of the aspects of international touring that used to confound me was the way that Germans, in particular, seem able to sense immediately when an English-speaker has wandered into their place of business, even before we open our mouths. Try it sometime - walk into a coffee shop, bar, or food stand in Germany, and just stand at the counter for a moment. I can almost guarantee that, more than 50% of the time, you'll be greeted in English. It's uncanny.
Now, this used to annoy me, partly because I make a point of being as inconspicuous as possible when I'm traveling (in my experience, there's nothing louder on the planet than a group of Americans talking to each other in a non-English-speaking country,) but mostly because I actually do speak some German, and I'm eager for opportunities to practice. Of course, I can still try coming back in German to a barista who's just asked in English what I'd like to order, but it seems sort of pointless, especially since I usually need a moment to absorb whatever has just been said to me in German and construct my answer, and once we've established that everyone else in the joint speaks my language better than I speak theirs, I'm just wasting everyone's time.
I used to take the preemptive English greeting as a sign that Germans assume that all Americans and Brits are monolingual idiots who must be treated like small children, lest we start shouting and threatening to bomb things in frustration. But recently, I've begun to suspect that the English-speakers I encounter here are actually just as eager to demonstrate their linguistic proficiency as I am to test mine. On the occasions that I manage to slip under the Amerikaner Radar and conduct a transaction entirely in German, I rarely get as big a smile or as effusive a "thank you" as I do when I just give in and speak English. (And yes, it's possible that this is because my German is even weaker than I imagine, but I'm really not terribly stretched by placing an order at Starbucks, so I doubt it.)
In any case, my run of being able to communicate even slightly in the local tongue will shortly be coming to an end. While there is German spoken in Luxembourg, French (which I haven't a word of) is dominant, so I plan to follow Sarah around like a puppy dog while we're there. (I'm not sure she's ever mentioned it on the blog, but our Ms. Hicks is actually trilingual, fluent in Japanese, French, and English.) And while Vienna, where we'll wind up the tour, is full of people who claim to be German speakers, I've spent enough time listening to them talk to be fairly confident that they are lying, in much the same way that the Scots are lying when they claim to be speaking English.
By the way, blogging may be light for the next couple of days, because our travel schedule is about to get hectic again, and the prices that hotels on this continent charge for internet access is beyond outrageous, so we're mostly dependant on finding nearby hotspots at cafes, which we won't have time for again until at least Wednesday in Vienna...
Just time for a quick post as I sit here with a surprisingly decent cup of coffee at a McDonald's on Budapesterstrasse here in Berlin. (I know, I know, I normally wouldn't think of going into a Mickey D's in Europe, either, but let's just say that the Internet situation has been somewhat dodgy lately, and every Golden Arches on the continent is guaranteed to have a connection to the wireless service I subscribed to before leaving home.)
Following last night's concert in Berlin, we've actually now played two of the three truly high-profile concerts of the entire tour - the last will be at our final stop in Vienna one week from today. From here, we head to Cologne, Duesseldorf, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Luxembourg, and we'll be changing up our repertoire a bit, playing Nielsen's 5th in place of the Beethoven tonight, and Sibelius 2 in Stuttgart.
More reviews of our London concert have appeared: The Guardian has weighed in with a reasonably good notice, and The Times (Britain's leading daily where prestige is concerned) is positively effusive, even implying that Osmo has lost weight since his last trip to London. My favorite review so far is from The Telegraph: "The Minnesota sound is magnificently 'up-front' and vivid throughout... Vänskä and the Minnesotans built a cumulative tension through every twist and turn [of the Beethoven,] right up to the final explosion of joy at the end."
Here in Berlin, we played the same concert last night to an enthusiastic if somewhat sparse crowd at the legendary Philharmonie just down from Pottsdammerplatz. Sparse, you say? Why, yes, I say. But... but... Joshua Bell, you say? Yup, say I, but you've got to remember that Berlin hosts the very best soloists, orchestras, and chamber ensembles nearly every night of the week, and much as our European profile may have been building over the last several years, few in this capital of the music world know or care what Minnesota is. Prairie Home Companion doesn't come in here, if you know what I mean, and the average Berlin concertgoer might be forgiven for looking at the posters and thinking, "Hm. Beethoven with something called Minnesota? Nah. I'll wait for the Berlin Phil to play it again..."
Still, those who were with us last night were a great audience, and demanded encores from both soloist and orchestra at the end of our respective portions of the concert. The first half flew by for me, as I was struggling slightly to adjust to being seated in an entirely different part of the stage than I've been sitting in. But in the second half, I managed to relax and just enjoy the incredible privilege of playing Beethoven in arguably the greatest concert hall in the world. Osmo clearly enjoyed himself, too - when he was presented with a flower bouquet at the end of the concert, he accepted it, then turned and left it on the conductor's stand as a gesture of gratitude to the orchestra.
I'm about to miss my bus to the airport now, so I'll wrap this up by promising once again to have some video for you soon. We've shot a number of good clips - the problem has been finding a wireless connection speedy enough (and free enough) to upload them. Hopefully, Cologne will have one of those...
Late Update, 6:25pm Central European Time: Cologne does, in fact, have one of those, although not so much with the "free" part. Also, the BBC broadcast our London concert on Radio 3 in the UK last night, and they've made it available for free on their website until March 4. Also, Minnesota Public Radio will be broadcasting the same concert on their Classical Music Service (99.5fm KSJN in the Twin Cities) this Friday night at 8pm Central...
It feels like forever since we left Minneapolis, and even longer since the orchestra played a concert (last Thursday night,) but today, finally, is the first official day of the tour - Concert #1, at the Barbican Centre in London. When we gather on stage for a brief rehearsal late this afternoon, it will have been five full days since we last drew our bows together, and to be honest, that kind of gap scares the life out of me. Professional orchestras generally work on very tight schedules, rehearsing and performing a concert in the space of only a few days, and our ability to play as much music as we do is largely based on there not being big gaps in the preparation time. Throw in the fact that last Thursday's concert was, according to pretty much everyone, not our best work, and today becomes a vitally important day.
The London concert is arguably the most important of any European tour for an American orchestra, simply because it's where we'll get the bulk of our critical reaction from the English language press. At a time when newspapers are seeming to breathe their last in many cities, London still sports close to ten dailies, and nearly all of them employ full-time classical music critics with very strong opinions. (Back in 2004, I wrote about a concert we played at the Barbican that garnered two diametrically opposed views from two prominent London critics, both named Andrew.) We've heard there will be 7 or 8 critics in attendance tonight, and one thing you can be sure of: they won't care that it's been five days since our last concert. We need a knockout punch tonight to get us off on the right foot, and that means everyone stepping up together to find whatever spark was missing last Thursday.
Sarah and I promised you some video content on this trip, and we're planning to take our first stab at it in this afternoon's rehearsal. With any luck, I'll get the results up and posted before we leave for Berlin early tomorrow morning...
In Which The Blog Goes All Arty And Introspective (For A Change)
While Sarah and most of the rest of the orchestra are still getting over their jet lag from Saturday/Sunday's overnight flight from Minneapolis to London, I'm feeling downright energetic today, having taken the opportunity to jet over to the UK a day early to visit some friends and reacquaint myself with one of my favorite cities.
This morning, I hopped on the Tube and headed down to the area just south of the Thames known as Bankside. For my money, the view from the south bank of the river looking back into Central London is the perfect encapsulation of this complicated metropolis. From a single vantage point, you see London's past, present, and future colliding before your eyes. Look one way, and the sooty, majestic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral fills your field of vision, until you glance down to see Anthony Caro's futuristic Millenium Bridge leading from Bankside to the Cathedral Gardens. Look to the right, and the gleaming cone of the glass skyscraper known as The Gherkin towers above stately old Southwark Bridge. Glance back over your right shoulder, and the unmistakable thatched roof of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre rises comfortably from a riverside walkway which also leads next door to the massive, warehouse-like Tate Modern, arguably the world's most celebrated contemporary art museum since its opening in 2000.
It was the Tate that had brought me here, and specifically, a newly opened exhibit focusing on two of the giants of the Russian/Soviet Constructivist art movement, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova. Having grown up in the dying years of the Cold War, I've always been fascinated by all things Russian, and studied Russian language, literature, art and history through my high school and college years. I remembered Constructivism as something of a precursor to Socialist Realism (though I suspect that real art scholars would call that a distortion,) and more generally as an art movement that I'd never really understood in my school days, so I was eager to take another whack at it.
The original Constructivists (not to be confused with New Constructivists - ain't art fun?) essentially believed that art had become far too bourgeois and enamored of its own worth, and wanted to reduce the artist's profession to something simpler and more scientific than had been the case in the 19th century. Rodchenko and Popova shared a belief that art could and should be made in the same way that an engineer designs a road, by arranging existing materials in a highly meticulous fashion and eschewing emotionalistic flourishes. Their work is doggedly geometric and, usually, completely abstract (they would eventually break with even visionary abstractionists such as Kandinsky over what they saw as Kandinsky's over-reliance on the physical world.)
In looking over the works in the exhibition and reading about the evolution of the Constructivist philosophy, I was struck by one particular paragraph detailing the context of some of Rodchenko's early works. The catalogue reads: "Rodchenko's own investigations placed a particular importance on the line as the sole essential element in a work of art. Colour, tone, texture and surface, he argued, could all be eliminated as mere decoration, or as techniques for imitating the appearance of things."
Now, this is useful information when you're looking at Rodchenko's paintings, but taken simply as a mile marker in the developing ideology of an art movement, it bears the unmistakable ring of rigidity and absolutism, which, to me, is where any ideology (artistic or otherwise) begins to go off the rails. Indeed, only a few years after commiting to the supremacy of line, Rodchenko would paint three flat canvases with a single primary color - red, yellow, and blue - and declare that he had essentially ended the universe of painting. That kind of brash self-importance can be amusing, and even informative, but is always self-defeating in the end, if you ask me.
I bring all this up because, as I wandered through the Tate exhibit, I found myself thinking a lot about the piece of music that will be opening every concert we play on this tour, beginning tomorrow night at the Barbican. It's a not-terribly-well-known work called Slonimsky's Earbox, by one of the lions of American composition, John Adams, and to be perfectly honest, I have a bit of a problem with it.
Let me stress that I have no problem at all with John Adams as a composer. His Chamber Symphony is, in my opinion, one of the very best compositions of the late 20th century, his operas are frequently revelatory, and he has demonstrated throughout his career a willingness and ability to evolve and adapt with the times that most composers haven't the talent or imagination to achieve.
That having been said, there are some Adams pieces that I find myself inwardly frustrated with when I perform them, and Slonimsky is one of them. It's the kind of piece that many listeners and critics would label as "minimalist," though that label has been known to annoy Adams. Essentially, it's machine music, steadily driving forward through the use of snippets, small motives, and repeated drones. It doesn't have melodies or traditional harmonic motion, and instead uses the ever-changing blend of disparate sounds to create a flow. Dynamic changes, when they occur, are stark and jarring, and traditional phrasing is almost non-existant (at least, on the individual level at which musicians normally think of it.)
This may be a flawed comparison, but as I stared at the Rodchenko paintings, I began to see them as a visual representation of Adams's Slonimsky. What better way to describe such music than as a highly developed representation of line and geometry, with a bare minimum of colo(u)r, tone, texture and surface serving as mere ornament? In a way, Adams is asking the listener to experience a complete work of music performed by that most vibrant and versatile of ensembles, a full symphony orchestra, but to do so without most of the normal accoutrements and contexts that an orchestra provides.
I suspect that this may be the reason that Adams's music has a tendency to be easier to listen to than it is to perform. Even if we disagree with a philosophy that says that only line and geometry are important to the creation of art, our minds are fully capable of indulging the idea long enough to appreciate a painting created under those strictures. Similarly, a piece like Slonimsky can sound to the human ear like a constantly bubbling fount of musical ideas, even as it asks the musicians performing it to put aside many of the ideas and skills that we're trained to bring to every new piece we play and focus only on the endlessly cycling notes in front of our eyes.
It occurred to me as I left the Tate that Rodchenko was lucky to be working in a medium like painting, where his canvasses are left to history exactly as he imagined them. Poor John Adams has to simply trust that overanalytical performers like me won't screw up his musical ideas at the first opportunity just because we don't fully agree with the philosophy behind them...
...for Europe for a 12-day, 8 city tour. We'll be blogging regularly; look forward in particular to our video posts (both Sam and I have Flips, with which we hope to capture some of hectic spirit of moving 100+ people daily).
And, yes, we're flying, of course, but couldn't resist the picture.
Back around this same time of the year in 2004, when the Minnesota Orchestra was heading out for a major European tour, there was a fair amount of excitement among press and public about it, and the advance coverage we got (it was Osmo's first year as music director, so there was a certain audaciousness to an attempt to showcase our collaboration internationally after such a short time) bordered on breathless at times. I wrote an extensive blog about the tour for ArtsJournal.com, and the amount of attention it garnered from both the mainstream press and ordinary people following the tour seemed positively unreal.
It's decidedly different this time around, and not only because our orchestra's rise under Osmo's directorship has become something of an old story after five years. The fact is, with the world economy well and truly in the crapper, and everyone wondering how the fallout will affect each of us personally, it's an awkward time to be mounting something as big and flashy as an international orchestral tour. To a lot of folks on the outside, it might even seem insensitive. So why not just stay home and quietly wait for things to perk back up at least a little bit before we go gallivanting off around the globe?
The answer is both complex and simple at the same time. The simple answer is this: tours are planned years in advance, and to call off a tour that is already fully planned and funded would do untold economic damage to our orchestra, to each presenting organization that will be hosting us, to the thousands who have bought tickets, and most importantly, to every individual who works for any organization associated with the tour. As with any business hit by an unexpected wave of misfortune, it's the aftershocks that can do the most damage.
Our orchestra has had a policy in place for a number of years now that says that we do not pay for touring out of our general operating budget, which is the budget that the money we receive from ticket sales, endowment draws, and general contributions goes into. If we decide that a tour is a wise use of our time and resources, the money for that tour must be raised separately from our main budget, and the tour cannot be confirmed until that money is in place. In other words, we would actually hurt our financial position by not touring, since the money that's offered to us to pay for it cannot be used for any other purpose.
There's also an aspect of all this that I think sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when everything we hear on the news suggests that the world is circling the drain and we're all going down together. I thought of it recently when I read of a sharp exchange between a local reporter and an executive with the Minnesota Twins, who were unveiling the design of the multimillion dollar public plaza at their new ballpark in the Warehouse District. The reporter asked whether the Twins didn't think it a bit crass to be trumpeting such a project at a time when people are losing their jobs in other industries. The executive's response was, "Not every company is bankrupt, you know."
The importance of that statement was more or less lost in the ensuing brouhaha over whether this was or was not a slap at the reporter's employer, which is bankrupt. But the truth of the statement is that every company has employees, and every last job in the world is frighteningly valuable right now. For the Twins, a profitable company, to scale back their plans simply because they were worried about appearances would affect not only their company's bottom line, but the jobs of every construction worker who's employed on the project, every individual who works in the team's sales, ticketing, or promotion offices, and every employee of every company that does business with the team. Given that fact, wouldn't it be irresponsible of the team, which, again, is on firm fiscal ground, to fail to undertake such a project?
Blogger Andrew Taylor wrote an excellent post a couple of weeks back about the strange notion that funding the arts at a time of fiscal austerity might be considered irresponsible, pointing out that arts organizations are workplaces like any other, and employ many millions of Americans whose salaries, benefits, and fiscal stability are as important (and as at risk) as anyone else's. Many of those employees are not artists or performers themselves, but bookkeepers, stagehands, designers, payroll managers, and all manner of other office workers. As Sarah put it when she and I were discussing this earlier today, "Is a carpenter who builds opera sets for a living less of a carpenter than one who builds houses?" Not in my world.
By my count, the Minnesota Orchestra employs nearly as many non-musicians as we do musicians. They're incredible people, as deeply committed to their jobs as I am to mine. And at the end of the week, they never get the chance that I do, to stand on stage and be applauded by thousands of people for their work. And the task of those at the top of our organization is to do everything possible to make our company thrive, even in the worst of times, so as to protect not only my job, but the job of every 9-to-5 (or 7-to-7) worker we employ. It's a scary time, yes, everyone knows that. But we're not going to climb out of this hole by continuing to dig ourselves in.
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.
With the orchestra about to embark on a major European tour at the end of next week, we're all starting to think about the logistics of such an undertaking, and preparing in our own way for the various challenges that might lie ahead. Most of the concert halls we'll be playing are familiar to those of us who've been in the orchestra for a while, and our tour staff does a remarkable job of taking care of us, but there are always unexpected problems that crop up when you're trying to move over 100 people, 90-some instruments, roomfuls of wardrobe trunks, and tons of other cargo around the world. Particularly grueling for our stage crew will be the first week of the tour, when we'll play five concerts in five cities in five nights.
The range of things that can go wrong on a tour is remarkable, and it's amazing that more concerts aren't canceled as a result of some unforeseen glitch. Back in 2004, when I was blogging about touring for ArtsJournal.com, I wrote a minute-by-minute description of the day that we and all of our gear had to get from Glasgow, Scotland to Lahti, Finland in a single 12-hour period (with a two-hour time change and winter weather working against us,) and we almost didn't make it. And just this week, an even worse situation was unfolding for the Philadelphia Orchestra in Budapest, and only some quick thinking and quicker emergency rehearsing saved the concert.
Sarah will be along on the tour as the cover conductor, and naturally, we'll both be blogging as we go. We've even procured some video capability, so assuming that we learn how to use it, you can expect at least a few multimedia moments as well. The orchestra's intrepid Outreach Manager, Mele Willis, is also hard at work on an eTour web site aimed at kids, so if you have some of those, watch this space, and we'll let you know when Mele's site goes live.
Lastly, if you want to really get inside the touring experience, the BBC is teaming up with Minnesota Public Radio and the man who hosts our Friday night live broadcasts, Brian Newhouse, to produce a week's worth of radio programming about the Minnesota Orchestra, including a live broadcast of our tour-opening concert at London's Barbican Centre. The BBC offers a live stream of Radio 3, and MPR's Classical stations will be rebroadcasting the London concert during our usual Friday time slot. I'll have more details as we get closer to the date.
The Columbus Symphony has been through some mightytryingtimes over the last year or so, and the musicians seem relieved to be back at work despite the sizable paycut they've agreed to take. A perception-altering fact; with a population of 747,755 (the 15th largest metropolitan area as of 2007), Columbus now supports an orchestra of 53 full-time musicians playing a season reduced from their previous 46 weeks to 38, while Minneapolis, at 377,392 the 46th largest city, supports a 98-member orchestra for a 52-week season. Which always begs the question; what ideal combination of factors - history, corporate sponsorship, board leadership, community pride, charisma of music director - lead to such discrepancies?
Rehearsal went well this morning (it's a good band), and musicians seemed to be in pretty good spirits; I'm sure many readers join me in saying I'm glad your back, Columbus Symphony!
A few other thoughts:
Regional jets + 66 mph gusts (the Columbus airport was purportedly shut down for awhile. I certainly don't think we should have even tried to land) = one of the scariest flights I've ever been on, and you regular blog readers know I fly 40-60 times a year. I've been on bumpy flights before, but...sheesh...
Now, air travel has, admittedly, been pretty miserable the last few years, what with all the mergers and flight cutbacks, and I understand the frustration of missing multiple connections and taking 20 hours to make what should have been a 5 hour trip. However, I remind everyone, if a reservation agent on the phone or the check-in person at a previous airport has messed up your re-(re-re-, depending on how many connections you've missed) booked flight, please do not scream at the gate agent! It's like yelling at Steve Campbell because you didn't enjoy the performance of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony (N.B., there are no tubas in "Jupiter" - yes, Steve's in the orchestra, but did he contribute to that particular performance? No. Is the gate agent culpable for the inadequacy of some other Northwest Airlines employee a thousand miles away? No.) (I witnessed this scene as I was on a cancelled/rerouted/standby-only flight to Columbus via Milwaukee - the screamer made the gate agent cry!)
Finally, as much as traveling has become an enormous pain (and the part of my job I least enjoy), it allows me (and every traveling musician) to experience life somewhere else, firsthand, which I find immensely important. It's easy enough to become so entrenched in everyday life that we start seeing things from a very singular perspective. Being on the road, meeting people from all over, experiencing daily existence in dozens of cities across the country (and around the world) remind me that there are always half a dozen ways to look at anything, and a million ways to approach the basic truths in life (family/community, art/beauty - you know, the good stuff). It makes every day fresh for me, which I wouldn't trade for anything in the world.
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)!
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...
The other day, I had the following conversation with an old friend, a violinist in El Paso, on her Facebook page:
Her: I'm trying to remember how to play the violin...
Me: The bow goes in the left hand, I'm almost certain.
Her: And what do I do with my right hand?
Me: Hold your beer. Duh.
This exchange is a variation on what is more or less a running joke among professional musicians - that we all stop practicing whenever we're not working for a couple of weeks and lose our ability to play. For the most part, it really is just a joke, because most of us can't afford to take an extended break from our instruments. We tote them along on vacations, family trips, cross-country drives, and squeeze in a few minutes of practice wherever we can, because you'd be amazed by how long it can take to recover, musically speaking, from even a week off.
But in recent years, the renewed emphasis on airline security has made traveling with an instrument, even one which fits in the overhead compartments, a logistical nightmare. Oboists who've forgotten to remove their reed knives from their cases face grilling by TSA flaks, string players are told our cases must be checked because they don't fit neatly into the stupid little carry-on sizing box (you can't check a string instrument, under any circumstances, because the cold baggage compartment would crack it, not to mention that any number of baggage handlers would be hurling it around like a duffel bag,) and God help the poor traveling bassoonist, whose instrument looks like nothing so much as a disassembled rocket launcher under the x-ray machine.
Every musician has at least one airport horror story, and most of us have a lot more than one. (My best one involves getting left standing on a tarmac in Detroit as my plane taxiied away without me after I refused to put my viola in the baggage compartment.) It's gotten so bad in recent years that a lot of us actually have started to leave our instruments behind when we travel, especially at peak travel times. It's an uncomfortable feeling to not have your instrument at hand for days at a time when you're used to it practically being an appendage, but increasingly, I find that I just don't have the stomach for the inevitable fights with pushy security folk, harried gate workers, and snippy flight attendants.
So when I got back from spending Christmas with family out in Portland, Oregon, I was a bit nervous about what I might have lost in the week since I'd touched my viola. I'm playing a wickedly hard piece of chamber music in a few weeks, and I'll also be playing a movement of the Mendelssohn Octet on our next Inside the Classics concert, so I can't afford to be a step slow at the moment. And even now, after three days of regular practice, I still feel the effects of having stopped cold turkey for the holiday.
But on the plus side, taking an extended break can sometimes help cure you of bad habits that had begun to creep into your playing. Because your body has forgotten whatever stresses were causing this muscle to tighten or that joint to flex the wrong way, you can start fresh, and just focus on recreating a fluid technique. So there is that silver lining.
Still, I and every other musician I know are eagerly awaiting the day when our government gets over its obsession with what one journalist recently dubbed "security theater," and once again grants my viola the hassle-free flying privileges it deserves. But I'm not holding my breath.
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...
A very long day yesterday which started with a 7 am (EST) flight that went through a bit of rough weather (I hate hate HATE flying! And of course I do much of it. Sigh...). But things calmed down on the final approach to MSP and ended with a flawless landing. You can tell the skill/experience of a pilot in the timing of a landing, which is, from a safety standpoint, probably the most significant part of a flight. And, as the last part of a plane-travel experience, certainly an important ending to the journey.
Which got me thinking about good endings. When my husband is warming up on the French horn (a daily sequence that I’ve memorized – sometimes when I wake up in a hotel room on the road I still hear that warm-up in my head!), there’s an extended section in which he practices long tones. Which are hard, because not only is it to practice sustaining notes, but a way to perfect the very endings of those notes – at the termination of a note, you need to maintain the pitch and tone quality and let it taper to the right point before releasing. Because you'll forget how nicely a note was played if it doesn't end well.
Which made me think about his horn teacher back when we were students at Curtis, Myron Bloon, legendary principal horn of the Cleveland Orchestra during the Golden Days of George Szell’s music directorship. Mr. Bloom (after all these years I still can’t think of him as Myron) was notoriously tough on his students and was the source of such bon mots as “That’s not a sound, that’s a noise!” - or, after hearing a student play a solo passage that was not played to his liking, “No, no, a thousand times no!”. Many lessons ended with students, crestfallen or near tears, slouching out of the studio. Not a happy ending.
I was back at my alma mater last week for rehearsals and concerts with 20/21, the contemporary music ensemble of the Curtis Institute. The centerpiece of the concert was Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques (which I’ve mentioned in a previous post). At the very end of the piece there is a written-out bar of rest, where the composer indicates that “The conductor must keep his arms in the air”. During our final rehearsal, when we got to that point, I did exactly as the composer asked, while several of the students in the ensemble quietly put down their instruments to wait out the silence (it's a really long measure). I reprimanded them – there should be no movement, just an absolute stillness. This should be a moment of uncertainty and suspension, a dramatic moment with the kind of rich silence from an audience not quite knowing what to expect next. It’s a little bit of visual theater worked into a dense and complicated piece, and it was this very suspension, stillness and silence from the assembled mass onstage that created the effect of this particular ending. A silently thrilling ending.
Which led me to a final thought, of my piano teacher back in Honolulu, who took me from my very first Hanon exercises to the F minor Ballade of Chopin. Before I took the stage for a concert or an audition (and it seemed like it was every other week in my formative years) he would remind me, “It’s good to start strong. But no matter what happens in the middle, all can be forgiven with a good ending.”
David Patrick Stearns had an interesting piece in this past Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer (one of the few American dailies that still employs not one, but two full-time reporters covering the classical beat,) in which he points out a puzzling new development in our industry. Stearns writes: "With a weak dollar, strong euro, U.S. visas requiring much paperwork, and risk-wary American presenters, the once-global community of classical musicians has become fragmented in ways that beloved, familiar talents on one side of the ocean are unknown on the other."
Now, to some degree, America and Europe have always had differing views of various composers and performers, and what's trendy and popular in New York or Boston might be seen as unimportant or unmusical in Berlin and Vienna. But the point Stearns is making is that the musical universes of Europe and America increasingly seem to be operating on parallel tracks separated by a brick wall. We in the States simply don't get to hear a lot of the top European talent that's out there these days, because getting permission for them to enter our country has become such a hassle.
Case in point: the Finnish a cappella group, Rajaton, with whom we performed last weekend's pops shows, almost didn't make it to Minneapolis, despite months of careful preparations by both their people and ours. They had a valid American work visa that was supposed to cover them for several US performances over the course of a calendar year, as did conductor Jaakko Kuusisto, and since none of them were carrying instruments, they wouldn't even need to worry about all the hassles most musicians have to go through every time we try to get on an airplane.
But the day before we were scheduled to have two rehearsals for the Rajaton show, word filtered through Orchestra Hall that conductor and band were stuck in Edmonton, Alberta, where they'd just done the same show we were about to do, and were being denied entry to the US pending a closer examination of their paperwork. Our people, who have been through this garbage more times than they probably care to remember, got on the line to whatever government entities you call in these situations, and figured out that the hang-up seemed to be that our guests were European citizens trying to enter the US through Canada. Apparently, this sends up all sorts of red flags over at Homeland Security, I suppose on the general assumption that a terrorist wanting to sneak into the US might figure he had a better shot if he could come across the border from a country friendly to America. (If, in fact, there are any of those left.)
The upshot of the delay was that we had to cancel one of our two rehearsals when it became clear that there would be no one present to lead us or sing with us. And by the time the second rehearsal rolled around, only conductor Kuusisto had managed to make it past the border patrol. So we rehearsed the whole show without our soloists (some of us did, ahem, try to be helpful by singing key passages of our favorite Queen songs as we played,) and crossed our fingers. And eventually, late Thursday evening, Rajaton managed to get on a plane bound for MSP, courtesy of an artful, complicated, and completely ridiculous bit of paper-shuffling that involved our management, their visa, and for reasons that will never really be clear to me, the Charlotte Symphony.
The show went off without a hitch, thanks mainly to Kuusisto's perfectly prepared and meticulously annotated orchestra parts. But I can't helping thinking that, were I a European performer going through what our guests had just gone through, I'd think seriously about whether I wanted to accept any future offers to perform in America. And that's bad news for all of us.
Well, Sarah has her definition of vacation, and I have mine. I've never been much for relaxing on a sunny beach, or for that matter, relaxing at all. Having a lot of free time tends to make me nervous, so when the orchestra takes a break, I tend to look around for something else to do. And the something else that I look forward to most is called Greenwood.
Now, I know how obnoxious it is when someone goes on and on about some summer camp you never went to, so I'll just say that I've been going to Greenwood every summer since I was ten years old. (Okay, I missed 2006, but that was the orchestra's fault - we were on a European festival tour.) It's a beautiful place, nestled on 75 wooded acres in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts, where the cell phone towers can't find you and the internet is a vague rumor.
yep, they're singing. spontaneously. for fun.
Like Apple Hill, my other New England summer haunt, Greenwood is not a place bent on turning out prodigies or drilling the fundamentals of instrumental music into a bunch of overstimulated 12-year-old heads. It's a place for kids to be themselves, to form lifelong bonds with other kids over a shared interest, and mostly, to be astounded by just how much they're capable of. When they come off stage to a roar of applause and shouting after performing at their first Saturday night concert, every kid has the same look. It's a look of surprise and exhilaration at what they've just done, of only-just-acknowledged exhaustion following a week of hard work, and mostly, of sheer pride that they are as good as they hoped they might be.
So this is where I'll be spending the next few weeks. Like I mentioned, the net hasn't exactly found Greenwood yet, and since the nearest town of any size is 40 minutes away, you probably won't be hearing from me more than once a week or so until the end of the month. But you can bet I'll have some excellent stories to tell when I get back...
Stumbling out of an Airbus 330 after an eight-hour red-eye flight from Honolulu to Minneapolis at 5:30 this morning, I was bleary-eyed, comatose and cranky. I'm not a good flier to begin with, but the overnight thing compounds problems because I can't sleep on planes, leaving me completely useless the day I arrive (although I did manage to get through a vocal/choral rehearsal this evening for the Broadway show tomorrow). Exiting the plane, I made my way to the ladies room in the terminal in a miserable mood.
For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of frequenting the facilities at MSP, let me say that I always look forward to hearing the music they play in them, which is invariably classical and runs the gamut from Haydn trumpet concertos to Debussy piano pieces. I find it a little odd that it's the only place in the terminal in which continuous classical music is played, but far be it for me to complain - and, besides, it kinda classes up the joint a bit, you know? So, this morning, at 5:40-ish a.m., the selection playing in the ladies room in the G terminal was Dvorak's String Serenade.
More specifically, it was the first movement of the String Serenade, which I find to be one of the more sublime creations on earth, and it's one of those pieces that invariably makes me smile. There's something about the melody that unknots the tension I carry between my shoulder blades, something that lets me breathe a bit easier. It's a piece which, for me, is tremendously comforting, and it did wonders in alleviating by crabby mood this morning.
I imagine we all have "comfort music", music we wrap ourselves with in times of stress or distress, music that we turn to time and again to calm us with its familiarity. For me, Chopin Marzurkas are the musical equivalent of comfort food; I'm almost always in the mood for them, they are somehow filling and deeply satisfying, and they're nice to curl up with on a cold night. When I'm having an existential crisis, the 2nd movement of Brahms's Third Symphony always seems to set me to rights. And for those days I'm feeling particularly gloomy and isolated, anything by Bach does the trick - I'm not quite sure how it works, but when I listen to Bach I no longer feel utterly alone in the world.
One of the questions musicians get asked most frequently, usually by someone who works a standard 9-to-5 type job, is: so what does your typical work week look like, anyway? It's a complicated question to answer, since we don't really have "typical" weeks very often, and a lot of our most intensive work is done in our own private practice rooms at home, before we even start rehearsing a concert as an orchestra. During our regular season (which runs mid-September through mid-June,) we might spend three or four weeks playing nothing but our regular classical concerts, followed by a week in which we whip through 8 or 10 young people's concerts, plus two Inside the Classics concerts and a weekend pops gig for good measure. The week after that, we might not play any concerts, but spend the entire week recording a CD.
And then, there's the summer schedule. Summer is supposed to be a relaxing time, but for musicians, it's anything but. (This is actually pretty obvious, when you think about it. Since we're professional entertainers, it stands to reason that our busiests times of year should be when "normal" people have the most time to kill and interest in getting out of the house.) During the five weeks that make up our summer season, we'll play around 15 or 16 concerts, not including chamber music performances, and with the exception of the outdoor shows we play around the 4th of July, each of the programs we rehearse will be performed only once. (During our regular season, we might play four classical concerts in a single week, but all four will be the same show. In other words, it takes about four months of the regular season to cover as much music as we play in a single month at Sommerfest.)
As you might imagine, this makes the Sommerfest rehearsal schedule fairly chaotic. At the moment, we're in rehearsals for three completely different concerts, all of which will be performed this weekend. Here's what's on the schedule, concert-wise:
Friday, 8pm - a light but jam-packed concert featuring two waltzes, a few polkas, a bunch of brassy favorites like Bugler's Holiday, a hilarious concerto for two bassoons, and an almost totally unknown piano concerto by the dude who wrote Sleigh Ride.
Saturday, 8pm - An arm-buster of a program. A Verdi overture, Grieg's piano concerto, and Tchaikovsky's massive 4th symphony.
Sunday, 4pm - This concert is way the heck down in Winona, Minnesota, where we'll be helping wrap up their annual Beethoven Festival with a concert featuring Osmo conducting the 1st and 6th symphonies.
So, with that kind of repertoire stacking up on the docket, you can imagine how confusing the rehearsal schedule can get. Here's how it looked for us this week:
Wednesday - A double rehearsal day with Osmo conducting the two Beethoven symphonies. We know these pieces very well, having recorded them just last year, but this is the only shot we have to get them back under our fingers. We won't play either symphony again until the Sunday concert.
Thursday - Another double rehearsal day, with Sommerfest director Andrew Litton on the podium. In an unusual move, the morning rehearsal actually includes repertoire from both the Friday and Saturday shows. We start with the Verdi, move on to Tchaikovsky's 4th, then whip through some of the shorter pieces from the Friday concert. In the afternoon, we cover more of the Friday music, including the Bassoonapalooza and the Anderson concerto, and finish up by quickly touching the polkas and waltzes.
Friday - We'll have a single 2-1/2 hour rehearsal at 2pm, covering only the music for the Friday night concert. History suggests that Andrew will focus heavily on getting us to style the waltzes and polkas exactly the way he likes them.
Saturday - I never get used to our summer Saturday morning rehearsals. During the regular season, we rarely rehearse on Saturdays or Sundays, and never in the morning. Musicians tend to be night owls, so dragging yourself in for a 10am rehearsal the morning after a concert that ended only 12 hours earlier is no fun. But there we'll be, again with Andrew on the podium, to tighten up the Verdi and Tchaikovsky for the Saturday night concert, and rehearse the Grieg concerto for the first and only time.
What about Sunday? Well, with 3-1/2 hour bus rides on either end of the Beethoven concert in Winona, there won't be time for a rehearsal. We'll just have to snap to without getting a chance to test out the unfamiliar hall. Par for the course - the summer course, at least...
So, as I mentioned a while back, I'm spending a couple of weeks in rural New Hampshire, teaching and performing at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music. It's my second summer here, which, as anyone who's ever worked at a summer camp will tell you, means that it's my first summer actually feeling comfortable in my surroundings. Like most other music camps, Apple Hill is chock full of people who've been coming for years or even decades, and it takes a newcomer a while to get his/her bearings. To make matters worse, I spent most of my time here last summer either on the phone dealing with a sudden and unexpected family crisis or rehearsing frantically for a performance of Bartok 4 that seemed to be on an impossible timetable. I left after putting in my two weeks, wondering whether I had come across as an antisocial jerk, and not 100% sure that I'd done a very good job as a coach.
As it turned out, I can't have screwed it up too badly, because I got asked back almost immediately, and judging from the number of Apple Hill people who found my Facebook profile and got in touch over the year, I must have at least been social enough to leave an impression. And that's a good thing, because I'm having an absolute blast this time around. I'm performing a Mendelssohn quintet that I've always wanted to play with four incredible musicians, two of whom I went to college with and have been waiting for the chance to reunite with. (The piece also induces a lot less stress than a Bartok quartet, which is nice when you have only six days to rehearse.)
I'm also coaching three small chamber ensembles - early quartets by Mozart and Haydn, and the Franck piano quintet - and as always, I'm struck by the unique challenge each separate group poses. On the one hand, I've done enough coaching in my life that I've developed a style that tends to stay with me regardless of who's in front of me. But one thing I learned from my college viola teacher was the importance of adapting to the needs of your students, and to me, that's the most challenging aspect of the job. I've had quartets so timid that the slightest sharp word would put them near tears, and others so enthusiastic that it was all I could do to keep them under control. Most fall in between those extremes, and the really fun groups have a mix of personalities in which a good coach can use the strengths of one player to draw out new skills from another.
It's a heavy schedule of teaching, rehearsing, and performing here - I'm actually working many more hours each day than I do back home with the orchestra, and since we live in the same basic area as the participants, I'm more or less always on duty if someone needs help with something. But places like Apple Hill, while they may be exhausting, offer the kind of experiences that professional musicians will often go out of their way to seek out.
When you make your living playing concerts week in and week out, it can become a grind, and grinding leads to cynicism and a lack of real appreciation for what we get to do for a living. Helping a group of teenagers learn how to pull off a single, confident, competent performance of a piece that was flummoxing them only a few days earlier is rejuvenating. More than that, it's a living reminder of similar experiences that made each of us want to play music for a living.
A few minutes ago, as I was writing this, the violist from my Franck piano quintet bounced in the door and flopped into the chair next to me. She's from Bulgaria, and is studying music in Boston. In our first coaching today, I wasn't sure how to approach her - she seemed a bit shy compared to the others in the group, and I didn't want to overwhelm her on the first day of what will surely be a difficult week. But here she was tonight, sitting here and talking a mile a minute about how much she loves viola, how her favorite composer is Shostakovich, and how excited she was to hear that a violist would be coaching her group. And all I could think about was how I used to sit on the porch at my own childhood music camp, talking a mile a minute to my favorite coach about how great the viola was, how Shostakovich was my favorite composer, and how excited I was to dig into the piano quintet I'd just been assigned for that week.
I think tomorrow, I'll try pushing her a little harder for that extra rich sound I need on her big solo in the Franck...
A recent Star Tribue article about the ranking of the Minneapolis/Saint Paul airport in a survey of 60 airports (dead last in customer satisfaction).
I do a fair amount of traveling on multiple airlines to multiple destinations. A quick review of travel in the last 6 months revealed that I've flown: AirTran, USAirways, United Airlines, Delta, Continental, Midwest and (of course) Northwest to: ATL, RIC, CVG, ORD, SFO, CAK, CAE, CLT, DTW, NRT, ICN, PHL, EWR, LGA, MKE and MSP (yes, I'm more likely to identify a city by its airport code than anything else...). I have to say that I utterly disagree with the survey results, and I think I have enough of my own personal data to make the comparisons.
Minneapolist/Saint Paul Airport (MSP) is easily navigable and not the sprawling monstrosity of, say, Atlanta. The food offerings are ample (French Meadow Bakery is my favorite), there's decent shopping (The Body Shop, particularly, to replace toiletry items confiscated at the security check), and plentiful vending machines. There are enough security lines to keep things going most of the time (I try to travel off-peak, which helps). While the baggage claim may take a while, it seems pretty par for the course for a comparable airport (and at least your bags are never chewed to bits, as has happened to me on more than one occasion at Denver International).
It's entirely possible that survey-takers were swayed by the oft-delayed flights and cancellations that plagued Northwest (which counts MSP as a hub), but really, it's nothing in comparison to, say, Chicago-O'Hare, where over 50% of both arrivals AND departures were delayed last month (MSP is in the high 20%s). (I once spent the night in the baggage claim at O'Hare on a cot during an epic thunderstorm that stranded thousands - a whole other story!) MSP is clean, well-lit, and doesn't smell like the inside of a garbage can (which JFK often feels like). Sure, it doesn't have a trippy underground passageway with a lightshow like Detroit, but I'm not fussy.
I'll admit that the nicest airport I've been to lately is Seoul-Incheon, mostly because you could get really tasty bibim bap, read newspapers in 27 different languages and (window)shop at Hermes all in the same terminal, but those are just perks. All in all, I find MSP easy to get around, conveniently close to downtown Minneapolis, rarely horribly crowded, and generally a decent place to spend an hour or so every week. What more could you ask for in an airport??
LaGuardia Airport, NY, sleepily ambling through the Northwest terminal looking for coffee, who do I bump into but an old friend, violinist Soovin Kim along with pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Of course, because this is a random surreal moment, we are all on the same flight to, of all places, Detroit. Soovin and Mitsuko are on their way to play Messaien's "Quartet for the End of Time" in Kalamazoo. Mitsuko, in her inimitable voice, tells us, "The last time I was there, I received a pen that had written upon it 'Yes, there is a Kalamazoo'!".
Random Surreal Moment #2:
Hungrily ambling down Monroe Street in downtown Detroit several hours later, looking for a meal, I'm assaulted by blaring music. At the intersection of Beaubien and Monroe, in the heart of Greektown, a couple of street musicians are playing drums and sax, riffing on a funk groove, going full throttle. They abruptly stop, and after a moment of silence, the drummer begins an unmistakable ostinato, and four bars later, the sax comes in with...Bolero.
I have to apologize for the sparser-than-usual blogging; I've had a busy week in Philadelphia, and the culminating concert at Curtis is tonight. I did, however, have a day off yesterday, which allowed me the great pleasure of hopping a train to New York to catch the Minnesota Orchestra concert at Avery Fisher Hall.
It's always interesting to hear an orchestra out of their usual context. In my 18 or so months with the Minnesota Orchestra I have heard them almost exclusively in Orchestra Hall, which has an incredibly live acoustic. It's a remarkably resonant space and one that our players are accustomed to - they've figured out how to sound their best on that particular stage. The way the Orchestra sounds in Orchestra Hall is what my ears have become used to as well, so it was a surprise to hear them in the very dry acoustic of Avery Fisher.
The players I spoke to after the concert noted that unlike in Orchestra Hall, where sound tends to "swim" a bit because it's so resonant, there was a clarity in Avery Fisher which was almost unnerving, because each player (particularly in the strings) could hear their own sound so well. I had a similar sense from sitting out in the hall; I could actually pick out the sound of individual players and could clearly hear the occasional "crunch" of bow hair attacking strings. For me, there was a greater intimacy to the sound, but I wonder if it's not where I was sitting, 15 rows in on the floor (I tend to sit somewhere in the tiers when listening in Orchestra Hall).
I'm hoping that Sam might have a word or two to share from his perspective as well. As for myself, it was a pleasure to root for my home team from the audience, particularly at the instantaneous standing ovation at the end of the Mahler.
I don't actually have a lot to say tonight, and there appears to be a massive orchestra hang going on at our hotel bar that I want to get in on, so I hope you'll settle for a few bullet points from our Willmar tour stop...
- The concert hall here is a very cool old stage in a big, imposing brick building in the center of town, which makes for a nice contrast with a lot of the other modern rooms we're playing on this trip. We've been here before, three seasons ago, and my memory of the crowd as enthusiastic and warm was quite correct. Real good people they got out here.
- The awesome chocolatier that we all remembered from our last trip here has moved out of its beautiful old location downtown (same old story, ask any small town in America) and into a strip mall on the edge of the highway south of town. Even more disappointing, it closes at 1pm on Saturdays, as many orchestra members discovered when we rolled in at 3. Megan, Jen, and I alleviated the pain by paying a visit to the Scandihoovian outpost I mentioned earlier, and more or less cleaning it out of Nordic chocolate bars and books of old Finnish wisdom to use against Osmo as the occasion arises.
- The unsung heroes of these tours are really our tireless stagehands, who have to work just as hard on a tour of outstate Minnesota as they would on a tour of Europe. They have to arrive at every new stop hours ahead of us, and insure that every bit of cargo (and we have thousands of pounds of it - instruments, wardrobes, podiums, stands, you name it) is unloaded, placed correctly, unlocked, unpacked, and readied for the orchestra's arrival. Simultaneously, they have to work in perfect tandem with the in-house crew of whatever hall we're visiting and make sure that our stage, sound, and lighting needs are perfectly understood. During the concert, they have to make any required stage changes quietly and efficiently, even if the amount of room on the stage is less than ideal. Finally, once the musicians are done for the night, and head off to party, sleep, or otherwise entertain ourselves, the crew packs everything up again, loads it into our specially climate-controlled semi trailer, and heads for the next town. It can be an awfully thankless job, and our crew is one of the very best in the business.
- We've got one more stop on this trip, tomorrow afternoon in the Finn-intensive town of Cokato. The concert's at 2pm, and we'll make the 1-hour drive for home right after we're done. Since I plan on collapsing onto my couch with two cats and a beer the minute I arrive, I doubt I'll be blogging. So let's consider this the last entry in this mini-travelogue. It's about time I let Sarah get a couple of words in edgewise anyway, and I'll be back later in the week to talk about the freakish and terrifying world of orchestra auditions...
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...
We turned back north this morning, heading up US-59 to the college town of Marshall, Minnesota, out near the South Dakota border. And as is so often the case on these trips, getting there was the bulk of the adventure.
It should be no more than a one-hour drive from Worthington, where we stayed after our concert in Jackson last night, to Marshall, and yet, I always seem to find ways to extend these things. To begin with, I noticed months ago that this particular leg of the tour would take us within 15 miles of the little prairie town of Walnut Grove, which those of you good with childhood memories will have immediately placed as the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder during the years when her family was living in a sod house on the banks of Plum Creek. In my world, this is a big, big deal, and my traveling companions, violists Megan Tam and Jen Strom, agreed just enough to allow me to turn the car east on highway 14 and spend an hour or so exploring the place.
Walnut Grove is well aware of its important place in the history of children's literature, and from the moment you hit the otherwise modest city limits, you're bombarded with Ingalls references. The museum itself is closed in winter, but the folks who run it (and the attached gift shop, which stays open year-round) are more than happy to let visitors wander around the grounds. The main attraction is a recreation of the sod house the Ingalls family lived in while waiting for their real house to be completed. (The original sod house, which washed away more than a century ago, as sod houses were always meant to do, is located on a family farm a mile north of town.)
What gets soft-peddled is the obvious fact that Walnut Grove was hardly the town where the Ingalls had their best years: Mary went blind here from scarlet fever, a son was born and then died within a year, and Pa's dream of becoming a successful wheat farmer was dashed. Eventually, the family hightailed it over to South Dakota, and never looked back. You couldn't really blame them.
Rolling into Marshall a half-hour or so after leaving Plum Creek behind, our trio of violists opted for an afternoon of decompression in our hotel rooms before tonight's concert at the local high school. Around 5pm, we met up again to find some food, which is often one of the trickiest parts of an outstate tour, made trickier by the fact that Jen is a vegetarian. Fortunately, we discovered a more than passable bagel-and-coffee joint a few blocks from the hotel, and made quick work of some sandwiches and caffeine. It was 6pm when we left the cafe.
I mention the time because I want to establish right off the bat that it was not my fault that we somehow managed to show up for our 6:30 rehearsal at the high school, which was less than a mile from the bagel shop, at 6:32. See, what happened was that I had plotted our trip using the addresses provided to us by the orchestra and whatever online maps were available to me, and Marshall was actually a bit tricky. The address I had for Marshall Senior High was on Tiger Drive, and every mapping site I consulted insisted that there was no such place. Being a resourceful sort, I used Google Earth to locate the high school, and then confirmed the information on a few other sites. Every source I had said that the school would be easily found just south of downtown, on South Saratoga Street. Since I could clearly see the roof of a school-like building at that address on Google Earth, that was good enough for me. Tiger Drive, I assumed was some unofficial name that only the locals knew.
It isn't. We drove up and down Saratoga Street for 20 minutes, and all we found was a middle school, and a couple of teenagers practicing for their drivers' tests. Eventually, as I started to get desperate, I spotted a lone teen practicing his penalty shots on an outdoor rink (how Minnesota can you get, right?) and hopped out of the car to ask if he had any idea where we might find the high school. He shook the iPod buds out of his ears, cocked his head to the side, and said, "Oh, sure. Do ya know where the Applebee's and the Best Western are, out by the highway? It's just kitty corner to them."
The Best Western was our hotel. We had driven all over town, and the damn school was literally within sight of our rooms. Jen and Megan clearly found this hilarious, but recognizing that I was not in the mood to be poked, stifled their amusement. I stepped on the gas, and managed to make it to the parking lot of the Fine Arts building just as Megan's phone rang to tell us that the rehearsal had started, and our personnel manager was wondering whether we were planning to join the party this evening.
In the end, the concert went well, the hall was warm and inviting, and the crowd was wonderful. But the memorable part of the evening came after the Beethoven had ended, and the audience assumed we were done for the night. We weren't. As everyone in Minnesota knows by now, something horrible happened in this part of the state earlier in the week, and it would have felt utterly wrong for us to blow into town, play a show, and leave without acknowledging it.
So as Osmo was called back to the stage for his third bow after the Beethoven, he stepped up onto the podium, and raised his hands for silence.
"We have all heard," he said slowly, "about the terrible thing that has happened here this week. And of course, we all have still so many questions. Perhaps there are no answers. But we would like to play for you now music for those who have lost their children. We would like to play music for those who are grieving the loss of friends. We would like to play music for the hearts of everyone in your town who has felt this pain. We would like to play the Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber."
I won't lie - the Barber Adagio is not an easy piece to play under the best of circumstances, and to attempt its whisper-soft textures and long, spun tones while your muscles are still twitching from the finale of Beethoven's 7th is something that string players ordinarily would balk at. But we've all been watching the news this week, and there are times when you just have to draw your musical strength from the far greater strength around you. I had to look away from a woman in the front row who had tears rolling down her cheeks even before we began (lest I choke up myself,) but I felt her gaze throughout, and when 60 bows lifted silently off their strings at the end of the impossibly soft chord that ends the Adagio, the room was quieter than any I've ever heard. Osmo waited a full ten seconds in the silence, then stepped off the podium and walked quietly offstage.
The applause didn't begin until he was almost off the stage, and in the silence, this whole trip became worth it for me. The idea that the music we play can silence hundreds in common mourning, can call up who knows how many personal and communal emotions, is why I will never get tired of this job. Critical accolades and CD sales are nice. Knowing that you've given a specific person an experience they'll carry with them is far better.
Now, it's an hour after the concert, and I'm sitting in the karaoke bar at our hotel, listening to an almost shockingly talented woman belt out Martina McBride's power ballad, "Independence Day," and it all feels right, somehow. This town couldn't be less like Minneapolis, and I know that a lot of my friends back home would probably take one look at the Friday night crowd in this bar and sneer. But I wouldn't trade the people who were with us in that high school auditorium tonight for anything, and I'm hoping they wouldn't trade us, either. There's common ground everywhere, y'know?
There are a few things that are the same on every one of our tours, regardless of whether we're in Cologne, Germany, or Cloquet, Minnesota. One is that at some point, in whatever room has been designated as the men's dressing room, our principal flutist, Adam Kuenzel, will haul out a device known as The Insultinator, which crafts loud, obnoxious pejoratives at the push of a few buttons, and start broadcasting electronic phrases like "You're a totally gross, boring nerd!" to the entire room. He rarely does this in our locker room at Orchestra Hall, but there's something about being on the road that causes "You're a completely bonehead!" (sometimes he forgets to push the middle button that supplies adjectives) to make us feel comfortable.
Another thing that never changes about touring is the routine of getting used to an unfamiliar concert hall in an uncomfortably short length of time. On these outstate tours, we play mainly in civic halls and high school auditoriums, so we're very fortunate that we live in a state which clearly believes in building deeply impressive school facilities. (In fact, I'm beginning to think that many of the newer high school auditoriums we play in were designed by the same architect.) Still, you just never know what the sound in a given room is going to be like until the first time our bows hit the string in the touch-up rehearsals we have before each show. Once we hear ourselves in the room, we've got only a few minutes to adjust before concert time.
The hall at Jackson Senior High School is, I can confidently report, absolutely bone dry. This means a couple of things to musicians. First, it means that we're going to be able to hear every tiny little bit of sound that gets made on the stage, and hear it cleanly and clearly all across the stage. That's the good news. The bad news is that the audience can hear every scrap of sound as well, and the acoustic insures that they'll be hearing it without even a bit of the reverberation that we count on to smooth out our collective sound in a larger, warmer room. So you've got to be extremely careful to keep the blend even, and to not let the energy of the group dip for even a moment, lest the sound die six inches in front of the stage and leave the audience wondering how so many musicians can make so little noise.
The first half of tonight's concert, which included a Sibelius tone poem and a double bassoon concerto (I know! Who knew such things existed?) by something called Dietter, came off well, although it was a bit difficult to assess whether the audience was enjoying it. Sometimes our outstate audiences are as effusive as those in Minneapolis, but sometimes, they're so exceedingly polite in their applause that you have to actually talk to a few of them to find out whether they're enjoying themselves. (Tonight, the uncertainty was heightened by the fact that only a miniscule number of audience members left their seats at intermission, while most remained sitting patiently, as if waiting for us to finish our break. It was sweet, in a somewhat disconcerting way.)
Backstage at intermission, while I was getting myself mentally ready to play Beethoven's 7th for the first time in a month and a half, a nervously smiling girl in a polka dot party dress appeared next to me on the arm of our board president, who had apparently met her in the audience. "She's a violist," he said, "from Worthington. She wants to get a few autographs from the viola section, if that's okay." It was definitely okay, and the girl, whose name was Naomi, quickly collected a page full of signatures in her copy of our program book, and spent a few minutes talking shop with our co-principal viola, Richard Marshall.
Back onstage, the Beethoven was vintage Osmo: crisp and energetic, as we used pure adrenaline to make up for the lack of reverb in the hall. When we finished, the applause was still polite, but I saw broad smiles on a lot of faces throughout the audience. As we retreated backstage and stowed our instruments for the trip to Marshall, I saw at least a dozen audience members collaring musicians to thank us for coming to their town, which still never fails to make me feel as if things are backwards: we really ought to be the ones thanking them.
As I changed back into my street clothes, I suddenly realized that I'd forgotten completely to snap a picture of the polka-dot girl for the blog - so typical of me, to miss the real highlight of the night while wondering what I should write about after it was over. But as I headed back out from the dressing room (actually the school library) to the lobby, who should be standing there, proudly holding the door for every male musician in the orchestra as we stampeded toward the bus, but Naomi, smiling far less nervously now. I quickly collared fellow violist Ben Ullery as he headed out the door, and snapped a shot of the two of them. Naomi tells me that she doesn't have internet at home, so I don't know if she'll see this or not, but just in case: thanks for coming, kid. You made my night.
