August 2005 Archives

The SLSO’s principal and assistant principal trombones, Tim Myers and Steve Lange, respectively, were gracious enough to come down to the hall and demonstrate their new instruments for me today. I’m writing an article for the October Playbill about how Tim, Steve and Gerry Pagano selected new horns together this last summer: the goal to give their section a uniformity of sound. This is rare in the orchestra world, Tim told me. “I have heard where a dominant player in a section has said, ‘We’re going to do this’” Tim explained. “Some sections all play the same type horn. I can’t think of a situation where everybody sat down and said ‘Let’s try this together.’ I’m pretty happy how it turned out.”

You know the season is about to begin when you hear the phrase “no rest for the wicked” on almost every floor throughout the day.

I neglected a couple of other fine articles that focused on the SLSO that appeared in the local print media last week. In the September St. Louis magazine, along with the David Robertson feature, is Lynnda Greene’s art column “If Music Is to Matter.” She talks about the SLSO’s free community concerts, its education programs, and the Youth Orchestra as the critical components to the organization’s success. “The SLSO has correctly recognized that the orchestra will thrive only to the degree that it shows us why the music is great, why what it makes us feel can lift and change us. At a time when so much is ‘wrong’ in the classical business, the success of these free community performances proves what is, and always will be, right about classical music.”

Amy Oshiro called from “gorgeous Teton Village” during her walk to rehearsal this morning. Amy has moved from the Sun Valley Summer Symphony – where she called from a couple weeks ago – to the Grand Teton Music Festival in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she is performing as principal second violin.

An introduction is nice: smooths over the first-time jitters; gets you over the initial anxious hurdle. A proper introduction can set a relationship off swimmingly.

For those of you participating in the “Where’s David Robertson?” game – move your flag to Scotland. He’s involved in the Edinburgh International Festival, where (for those of you with some frequent-flyer miles to burn this weekend) he’s conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and featured soloists Luba Orgonásová, Karen Cargill, Pavol Breslik and Alfred Reiter, in a program of Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives and Mass in C. This Saturday at 8pm GMT.

If you are of a certain age, maybe the first, maybe the only, classical record you had in your collection was Walter Carlos’ Switched-On Bach, which presented the Baroque composer through the state-of-the-art Moog synthesizer. At the time it was a freaky trip, taking older-than-the-hills music and transforming it through 20th-century technology. People like Stevie Wonder would come along and do much hipper things with the Moog, but Switched-On Bach was quite a revelation. Carlos, in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, would make more powerful statements on the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. Carlos’ interpretations of Beethoven on the synthesizer, combined with Kubrick’s depiction of the delinquent Alex and his “droogs,” subverted the idea of the civilizing influence of high art in such startling ways the movie still makes the head spin 30 years later.

The electronic manipulation of sound is now standard inquiry in all musical forms and genres. Robert Moog died Sunday from a brain tumor. He was a true pioneer who opened new territory. He turned the switch.

The SLSO had a big news weekend. New York Times’ journalist Daniel J. Wakin wrote a thoughtful overview of how various orchestras are finding ways to attract new audiences. The SLSO took the lead, quite literally. Wakin’s article begins by quoting the copy that goes with our Seven 18 Club link – that is the Thursday night series where young professionals can mingle with drinks before the concert and then meet at a club with SLSO staffers and musicians post-concert. A photo from that link (www.718club.com), which features Principal Horn Jennifer Montone in a flapper mode, makes it to page two of “New Overtures at the Symphony.” You can read the full story at www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/arts/music/21waki.html.

The most alarming news I’ve heard in days had to do with the endangerment of the butter cow sculpture at the Illinois State Fair this morning due to a power outage.

Yesterday the SLSO’s new double bass player Sarah Hogan stopped in to be interviewed for a “Meet the Musician” profile in the September Playbill. Sarah is a native St. Louisan (Parkway South High) and an SLS Youth Orchestra alum. She has degrees from both Indiana and Rice universities, and spent a year with the New World Symphony in Miami – that arcadian training ground for young musicians. Sarah played with the SLSO on a one-year replacement contract last season, and then won a permanent position in auditions last spring. "I've been excited about it all summer," she said.

The bad Christo-wrap is off the south side of the building revealing the skeletal scaffolding beneath. More painting to come. And the musicians’ photo wall is up in the lobby and looking dandy. Scott Parkman is back from Buenos Aires, Argentina and Interlochen, Michigan and parts in between and spending numerous hours in the Green Room composing. The Youth Orchestra will premire the work this season as part of the YO’s 35th anniversary -- many big doings are planned. Double bassist Sarah Hogan is back from three weeks in Switzerland and looking energized and refreshed (a YO alum and new full-time member of the grownup orchestra). There was a sighting of Carmen Creel, returned from Sun Valley. Stage manager Mike Lynch is considering some more painting to be done in the hall. Musicians are visiting the library to check out scores – new works for audiences are new for musicians too, sometimes, and there is some complicated stuff to prepare for. The 2005-2006 banners on the north side of the hall (Robertson looking like he’s going to lead an expedition to find the Northwest Passage) and in the front of the house (Robertson captured in an array of conducting gestures) are in place. Single concert tickets go on sale Monday.

The big symphony machine is shifting into higher gear.

Mark Swed of the LA Times is one of the more perceptive music critics around. He recently wrote an article that gives an overview of the classical music biz – its woes, its strengths, who’s hot, who’s not – as well as a debunking of the myth of the Big Five. “The orchestral landscape in America is not what it used to be,” Swed declares. “Once, American ensembles were lorded over by the ‘Big Five’ – the main orchestras of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cleveland. East Coast critics, while conceding the orchestral energy emanating from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, continue to use that proprietary term, but it means nothing. The real scene has no center.”

One of the performers making an SLSO debut this season is the conductor Michael Christie. Christie is all of 31. Last week he was in the news for being named music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The previous leader of the Brooklyn ensemble was Robert Spano, who now leads the Atlanta Symphony.

If you’ve driven by Powell Symphony Hall over the last week you may have noticed what looks like a Christo project gone terribly wrong. Much of the south side of the building is covered by a layer of plastic, with sounds of noisy machinery emanating from inside.

Maybe if you got into a plane this morning you would be able to make it for the 6:30 concert in Sun Valley, Idaho. The Sun Valley Summer Symphony (SVSS) is free so you wouldn’t have to worry about a ticket, although the concerts are very well attended. Tonight you could catch SLSO violinists Alison Harney and Angie Smart playing selected movements from Dvorak’s Cypresses for String Quartet followed by Amy Oshiro and Shawn Weil playing violin as part of the Brahms Piano Quintet. And since the concerts last just an hour, you’d have time for dinner after – maybe trout and eggs followed by fresh huckleberry pie. Maybe Demi and Ashton would be at the table next to you.

In the new Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers, the droll protagonist Don Johnston (played by Bill Murray, who has become the pitch-perfect interpreter of middle-age melancholy in contemporary cinema) is asked, near the end of the story, if he has any philosophy to share. “The past is gone. The future isn’t here. All there is is the present.” Or something like that.

I apologize that the following postcard is a little dated, as it arrived about the time my fever hit. Cathie Lehr is assistant principal cello. Manuel Ramos is of the first violin section. They met in the SLSO, where Cathie was already a cellist when Manuel won his audition. Manuel comes from Mexico, and although he is a superb violinist, at the time that he joined the orchestra he knew no English. As Cathie tells the story, Manuel began visiting the International Institute in South St. Louis to learn English. He also moved across the street from Cathie, and they began to practice together on a regular basis. “And three children later…” Cathie likes to say.

This is my first day back to the office in over a week. I was laid low by a nasty virus, which kept me bed ridden with fever for too many days and nights. I missed Elvis Costello at the Pageant. I missed West Side Story at the Muny. I managed to catch most of the Cardinal games on the radio. I wasn’t able to concentrate well enough to keep up with the big Brahms biography I’d been reading over the last couple weeks. I was so out of it I could barely follow the Martha Stewart interview in Vanity Fair.