David Halen says it took him years to overcome the Eugene Ormandy records. When he was a kid in central Missouri, he played along to the Ormandy Philadelphia Orchestra recordings of Beethoven. “There were two textures, brutal and restrained,” David told me as we walked back in the rain from our Wolfgang Puck lunch at the Contemporary. That was the Beethoven he knew, and the Beethoven a generation knew.
We were talking about how a musician goes back to the basic repertoire again and again and keeps it fresh. “That’s the great thing about guest conductors,” he said. “One will clarify something about the rhythm, another will emphasize texture. The main thing is that you’re always finding ways to make it better. If you don’t, you die.”
You learn there are other ways to play Beethoven. You slough off the Ormandy of your youth for new sophistication. David says that in rehearsals with Gilbert Varga for the Seventh Symphony, “He’s really lightened it up. He’s told us to play it as if it were written by Haydn, with that kind of jocularity.”
We get back, damp and a little bit late. The two-minute call for the musicians to return to the stage for rehearsal has just been made and David rushes upstairs to get ready.
Meanwhile, backstage, one of our violinists gushes over guest artist Leonidas Kavakos, who is playing the Korngold Violin Concerto. “We’re swooning in there,” she says. “The sound that comes out of that violin…,” and she swoons some more.
