December 2004 Archives

Gary Giddins, the excellent jazz critic and biographer of Bing Crosby, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times on what he considers the story of the year: the lip-sync scandals. Ashlee Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Luciano Pavarotti, Shania Twain, Beyoncé, Madonna: such is Giddins’ list of shame.

Giddins is no prude however. His essay, “Put Your Voice Where Your Mouth Is,” gives the kind of sensible, historical perspective you’d expect from Giddins. The sky isn’t falling. It dropped to earth long ago, and some people even prefer it that way. Do you really want to hear what Britney sounds like when she’s gyrating out there? Cue the digital sound.

Which brings me back to a theme about the stuff that happens on the Powell Hall stage each week. What you see and hear is what you get – an unfiltered, undigitized, unmediated experience. And that is becoming a rare thing, I daresay verging on extinction. David Halen’s string breaks in the middle of the Mahler Seven. Peter Otto hands Halen his own violin so the concertmaster can play as Otto quickly restrings Halen’s instrument. That happened, and it was as much a part of the performance as the glorious sound that rang in my head all the way home.

Things happen. Musicians have different insights, hear different harmonies on stage and change intonation or blend in a way that hasn’t been done in rehearsal, or in the performance the night before. It really is the intersection of art and life. It’s a thrill.

I will be away until Tuesday, the fourth day of 2005. A happy New Year to you. I’ll be at the concert Friday night, and I’ll write what I can remember on Tuesday. It is New Year’s after all.

Looking ahead to Bela Bartók’s The Wooden Prince next weekend, a memory arrives. I’ve been listening to a 1992 recording of the piece by the Chicago Symphony with Pierre Boulez – David Robertson’s mentor during David’s years with the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. As one is coming to expect from a Robertson program, The Wooden Prince explores gorgeous sound worlds. Complex, dramatic, compelling, it takes you in and opens you up.

But the name Bela Bartók reminds me of a time of my youth. I was studying with the poet Richard Hugo in Montana. Hugo was a hugely influential force on young writers, especially those living in the American West, in the 1970s and 80s. He was a big, squarely built man, but as much a psychic presence as physical. He used the western landscape as the backdrop for the soul’s deprivation in his poems. Tough stuff, resilient and humane. Hugo grew up in a suburb of Seattle called White Center, and retained a longing attachment to that part of the world long before it was discovered – and reinvented -- by wealthy Californians and Bill Gates and Starbucks.

I don’t remember how it came up in class, but Hugo started telling a story about Bela Bartók. The Hungarian composer fled Europe at the outbreak of World War II, and found himself looking for a job in the United States. Hugo told us that the great musician came to the University of Washington in Seattle – Hugo’s alma mater – but, and at this point in the story the poet looked stricken: Bartók came to UW in want of a job, but no one on the music faculty knew who he was!

The tale may be apocryphal, but I still remember Richard Hugo with his big head in his hands, in agony at the thought of the lonely, war-tossed genius sitting in the heart of the foreign campus, unknown. “Bela Bartók!”

As you might suspect, it’s quiet around Powell Hall. Things will liven up tomorrow with rehearsals for the New Year’s concert. In the meantime, I’ve been listening to the Dvořák Piano Concerto, which Orli Shaham will be performing for the first subscription concert of 2005. At certain perverse moments, I wonder if we could get Orli to fling her hair back with her hand when she’s onstage with DR, get a kind of Sonny and Cher thing going.

Maybe not.

Every day after lunch I take a stroll around Grand Center, and there is always something intriguing that catches my eye around the district. The remnants of trolley tracks emerging at the surface of the street pavement, or on this nearly clear day, with dust rising into the air, the dome of the New Cathedral shimmers like a constellation of glimmering emeralds in the midday light.

Just as it should be the first day of winter. Quiet, calm, a slight tension in the air as we wait for the snow that may come. Homes wrapped in lights to oppose the darkest day of the year.

I’ll be back Monday the 27th. Until then …

The perils of holding holiday concerts the week before Christmas is that all those involved are then left with the feeling of “Whew! That’s over.” But then we realize that the real stuff with friends and family is coming, looming like a menacing tsunami.

However, all reports from those who were involved in the last week’s activities are positive, although told with a sigh that sounds much like near exhaustion. Gospel Christmas, as it so often does, rocked the house -- SRO with guests Richard Smallwood and Vision in superlative voice. The charming duo Jason Danieley and Marin Mazzie charmed their way into the hearts of audiences for six Holiday Concerts as well.

But here I must confess I lack a first-person perspective. I am one of those for whom the holidays are an obstacle course to reconnoiter with great care. The catalogues, the jingle jangle on every corner, the limited musical repertoire heard everywhere – there is only so much that one can take, especially if you are one who thinks the best way to face the holidays is in bed with a bottle of Stoli and a straw.

For those who are lifted up by our musical extravaganzas each holiday season, so much to the good. I did play the old John Gary Christmas Album this weekend, which my wife found for me last year on CD after I’d remarked on my nostalgic affection for it. Isn’t that enough?

Office space is transformed into dressing rooms for guest artists, which meant this morning, prior to the Holiday Coffee Concert, the eighth floor was treated to the warm up vocals of Marin Mazzie. It is a sign of a true professional to be able to display Broadway pizzazz (“Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl, no less) in the AM. For me, it was one of those funny, delightful, rare juxtapositions. Ms. Mazzie is hitting the crescendo (“Here I Am!”) as I’m looking through old programs to find who conducted Mozart’s Rondo in C major in 1977.

Did Streisand ever work with Gerhardt Zimmermann?

I got caught in a massive backstage traffic jam as a row of young choristers made there way through a thin passageway. Dressed in their red robes they looked like a procession of red inextinguishable candles.

A colleague stopped by this morning and said, with a smile on her face, “It may be the holidays but people are pretty wound up around here.”

And so we are, with seven concerts in the next four days, with three different choral ensembles, three different featured artists arriving for rehearsals, two different conductors, a sold out Gospel Christmas concert, and then the New Year’s Eve celebration with David Robertson on the very near horizon. And a partridge in a pear tree.

Of those featured artists, I just met Jason Danieley and Marin Mazzie as they stepped off the elevator. They are both tall and gorgeous with dazzling smiles, and compared to all around them, at complete ease.

When the going gets tough, the tough go bowling.

The holidays being the toughest time of the year – at least for those of us who admit to being holiday-averse – bowling can be as good a salve as anything. It works for the SLSO staff. Our holiday party was spent at the Tropicana Lanes – that oasis of Leave it to Beaver culture on Clayton Road. There were those who were first-time bowlers: approaching the foul line on tip toes, bowling arms distended parallel to unbent legs, and then a sort of thrusting of the sphere to watch it slowly, slowly make its way to wobble a few pins, or, more often, misdirect leisurely for the gutter. There were those who were going back to the pastime after many years, and who then rediscovered arthritic hips; and those hot shots who dared to compete.

And then there were those like me, who remembered flinging the ball the wrong direction a long time ago in the midst of some wayward years, and who find it best to order another drink and watch. I most liked watching the kids of our assistant stage manager, Joe Clapper. Every pin knocked down was cause for uninhibited celebration. Every pin left standing was a minor tragedy, although another bite of toasted ravioli quickly assuaged the grief.

Today we return to a world without pink flamingos, but the sound of oboes. Auditions for oboe all day. When I heard someone practicing in the Green Room, I remembered another time from the aforementioned wayward years, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a wonderful, warm October day, when from a small hedge came a bird song of such joyous noise: arpeggios, trills, full-throated arias, small-voiced twitters. A kinglet, I believe it was, a tiny bird that sings like its name, which was not unlike that oboe in the Green Room.

I have heard great things about last weekend’s concerts with LAGQ and guest conductor Jane Glover. Audiences responded enthusiastically to the visiting artists. Encores came from the guitar quartet and applause rained down for Ms. Glover. A nice end to the subscription series of 2004. Holiday Concerts on their way and Gospel Christmas and David Robertson’s New Year’s Bash. Then David and Orli Shaham return to begin 2005 with Dvořák and Bartók.

In the meantime, double bass auditions today. It can be excruciating to watch a musician emerge from a compact car with a double bass in tow – a sequence of physical contortions you’d expect from a Chaplin movie.

During a luncheon meeting in New York with David Robertson and music critic Greg Sandow, who writes the program descriptions for our season brochure – those atomies of precise and delightful exposition -- the two of them discussed the arrangement of musicians for certain compositions, and how various configurations could create a liberating sense of sound/space. Robertson would take to singing measures of music, and exuberantly beating complex rhythms on the table with his hand. Sandow talked about Brahms for a while, and then, sighed, “Music is so wonderful.”

“Without drama there is no art.” Picasso said that, or something like that. You get the idea. It’s an artistic dictum that came to mind after the Beethoven/Schubert concert, which just concluded this morning. You didn’t need a donut – although we were all grateful they were here – to experience the drama that made the art in Powell Symphony Hall.

Featured soloist Julia Fischer took the stage in a black velvety gown; her face, when in repose, like a Botticellian angel. When she and the orchestra launched into the jaunty theme of the final movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, Fischer was beaming. And when she leaned into her final cadenza, you felt everyone on stage and in the hall sit up and take special notice – extraordinary volume and color emerging from the fragile instrument in her hands -- the mesmerizing drama that is art.

At intermission, I spoke with our whipsmart Assistant Conductor Scott Parkman, who provided me with a little context for the Schubert. He considers Emmanuel Krivine to be of the crème de la crème of conductors (David Halen seconded this opinion after the concert). “The Great” Symphony, Parkman told me, can be deadly – too often played as a dense, slow, heavy Germanic work. Krivine fathoms the Viennese lightness of the Schubert Ninth.

Krivine is not a hugely demonstrative conductor. At times I hardly noticed he was there. Then he would make some small expressive gesture, as when his hands would rapidly flutter toward the woodwinds like a flurry of sparrow’s wings.

Rapturous this “Great” Symphony was, with all the drama great art requires.

I will be away at the beginning of next week. My next installment will be Wednesday, December 8, which is the day John Lennon died. It says something about me and my generation, I suppose, that the dates I remember most, pre-September 11, are November 22 and December 8.

Musicians are workers. They may be sitting on stage playing pretty music, effortlessly it seems, but that pretty music is produced through a great deal of physical and mental strain. Last week violinist Amy Oshiro commented on the sweat glistening on her own and her colleagues’ brows after completing the Beethoven 7 workout plan run by Gilbert Varga. It’s a symphony the musicians have played many times, yet they leaned into the music and pulled out a performance that was fresh, alive, extraordinary.

I was backstage as the orchestra was taking a break this afternoon, and if the sweat factor can be applied to the prospect of a terrific concert, the Schubert 9 is going to be magnificent tomorrow. There were more than a few pinkish faces that showed the glisten of perspiration – none more than guest conductor Emmanuel Krivine. His shirt was soaking.

A short breather – and they were all back to work.

In the early morning, most mornings, across the street from Powell, a man dressed in workout clothes and sparring gloves, uses the north windows of the Beaux Arts building as mirrors as he practices his boxing moves.

A couple hours later, Schubert’s Ninth rises from the stage.