July 2005 Archives

I have talked about Greg Sandow here before: music critic, consultant to orchestras, provocateur, change agent – and the blurb writer for our season brochure. “Blurb writer” doesn’t do justice to what Sandow does in giving meaning to the season programs. With an economy of language he suggests a theme to each concert and describes what the music is about. As former Riverfront Times critic Harry Weber used to say to me when I told him he had fewer words than he wanted for a review: “If it’s shorter, I’ll have to write it better.” Sandow’s blurbs are written superbly, communicating mood, theme, history, the interrelationship between works – and does it in such a way that gives you real stuff to connect with as a prospective ticket buyer.

The other day when I had David Halen on the phone from Aspen, he asked me in clandestine tones, “Do you know if we’ve hired the new principals?” Meaning: Had the new principal clarinet and principal cello, who had been selected through the audition process last spring, been signed yet?

The progress on the new wall of musician portraits has moved so swiftly, after a few stops and starts, that at least one staffer asked if the recently affixed shelves hadn’t been there before. Probably that’s a good sign -- it means the rows of photos in their gold frames will look right at home in the glamorous foyer. Something pleasing and new to look at by the bar.

Fresh mountain air arrives with a phone call from SLSO Concertmaster David Halen, who is in Aspen for the summer music festival. He’s there with the whole family, playing a lot of music and “hanging out in a place where you can see more musicians per square foot than anywhere else in the country at this moment. The other night I was talking with Orli Shaham and three conductors: Leonard Slatkin, David Robertson and David Zinman. Conductors are so much like ships that pass in the night. It’s amazing to see three of them standing in the same place like that."

When you come to hear the SLSO this season you’ll find some changes in the program notes. We’ll be listing compositions a bit differently (Piano Concerto No. 1 rather than Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, for example) and we will include the date of composition for a work and the birth and death dates of the composer on the program page. Nothing earth shattering about all this.

I was away from the hall most of yesterday and missed my posting. My apologies.

This morning I was on the phone with David Robertson doing an interview for a future Playbill article. Yes, believe it or not, it is mid July and I’m already involved in the September Playbill, just as everyone around me is stepping it up a notch as the season deluge is about to fall like Niagara.

Scott Parkman is the SLSO’s assistant conductor and the Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra’s (YO) music director. This summer he has been traveling through South American and has just gotten back to Interlochen Center for the Arts to conduct the University of Michigan All-State Orchestra. Scott, as you will see, is passionate about education and passionate about the youth-orchestra experience, which makes him a welcome asset to St. Louis (city and orchestra). This season the YO celebrates its 35th anniversary, and we are fortunate to have someone with Scott’s commitment in place for the festivities. Here’s Scott’s postcard:

This morning I arrived to find one of our IS guys, Matt Hoyt, putting up signs at the elevator and in entryways with those dreaded words “server is down.”

In writing about the programs for the upcoming season, whether in brochure copy, eminders, Greg Sandow’s blurbs or Paul Schiavo’s program notes, we try to provide windows or entryways into the music. Yet, we try not to say too much. In some of our first discussions with David Robertson, he talked about the importance of giving the audience room for interpretation. If every program is designed to present another thematic landscape, if every program is to be considered as a unique, one-time-only experience, then the audience needs to be allowed to define those themes and experiences. As David says, “In the end, the reason this music is interesting to us is that there’s a human expression that comes from one human being and is communicated to another human being. How this affects each person individually is what makes the musical experience so fascinating.”

I have requested a number of musicians to submit email postcards describing their summer activities, which I will then post here on the blog. Whether they are at festivals in Sun Valley or Aspen or Vermont, or giving private lessons in St. Louis, or bicycling through Nova Scotia, or just tending to the kids and the herb garden, I want to present a view into the musician’s life, however mundane or glamorous.

Mayor Francis Slay has his own website, paid for by the Slay for Mayor Committee, so before I suggest you visit it let me make some sort of political disclaimer that this is not an endorsement of Mayor Slay, the Democratic Party, or anything else that has to do with local politics. I fully endorse the SLSO, its new music director, the 2005-06 season, and the newly functioning stage lift.

Each summer a small, low-budget, totally endearing movie stands out amidst the storm of blockbusters. So far the prime candidate for summer surprise is Mad Hot Ballroom, which is currently screening at Plaza Frontenac. My wife and I saw it last night. Although I arrived with modest expectations – kids wrongfooting the merengue, too cute – I was completely charmed.

SLSO violinist Silvian Iticovici made a late change in the Stained Glass program yesterday, I’m told (I was somewhere near Flint Hill, Mo., enjoying dogs, horses, whippoorwills and margaritas with friends). He and fellow SLSO string players Takaoki Sugitani (violin), Mike Chen (viola), and James Czyzewksi (cello) played the first movement of Haydn’s String Quartet No. 2, and then the second movement of George Walker’s String Quartet No. 1, and concluded with the fourth movement of Haydn’s String Quartet No. 5 – and, I’m told, this made for a remarkably cohesive and entertaining three-movement collage.

If you are not sated from the Willie Nelson/Bob Dylan concert at the minor league baseball park in Sauget, Ill., on Friday night, you might add to your weekend concert calendar the Stained Glass Concert at True Light Missionary Baptist Church, Sunday at 3pm.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” begins Robert Frost's "Mending Wall." As is the way with the New England poet, he begins with a statement that he partly denigrates in the course of the poem. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,/ That wants it down” he says later, yet the action of the poem itself is the reparation, or “mending,” of a wall. The peripatetic swing of the language mimics the innate ambivalence of moral life.

In keeping with the summer plan to offer occasional notes from my files as I research the upcoming season (a project on which I have fallen sadly behind), and since I just got back from Idaho (the Silvafest was an astonishing success), here is a selection from an excellent New Yorker profile of American composer John Adams, by Alex Ross, which appeared in January 2001. The SLSO’s Opening Weekend program concludes with Adams’ exhilarating Harmonielehre, a work David Robertson has described as “probably the most exciting sound an orchestra, at this point in time, can make.”

A happy Independence Day weekend to all. I will be in Idaho for the Silvafest until Wednesday, which means missing the Black Eyed Peas at Fair St. Louis, but maybe they can get Gretchen Wilson next year.