December 2005 Archives

You want behind-the-scenes info? We got it right here.

Best wishes for the holidays. I’ll be back to post on Friday, December 30, when I can offer up some City Lights rehearsal talk.

To see the Charlie Chaplin movie

POPCORN

We will have popcorn for City Lights in Powell Hall. O glory!

If you know a writer, you know the curse of any writer is an editor. Any writer will tell you so. Editors take our words, like precious jewels, and turn them to mud. They excise the life blood of our prose and deliver a pale, limpid simulation of what we have created. Oh, the injustice.

A while back on the Main page of the blog there was posted an ad for City Lights. Since there is a break in the action here at the hall, post-Messiah, pre-Chaplin, I will take the time to say that I am honored to be used as a marketing tool for one of my all-time favorite movies, which will be screened as the score is played live by the SLSO on December 30 & New Year’s Eve. I don’t know of a film that makes me laugh harder and cry more uncontrollably. A nice way to purge at the end of the year.

Sunday afternoon I found this ecstatic message on my voicemail from my friend and former colleague Jeannette Batz Cooperman, editor of St. Louis magazine. She was driving home from the Messiah concert and said: “I feel as though I’ve heard Messiah for the first time. It was glorious!”

We have all left things on the roof of the car: coffee, groceries, the homemade potato salad for the family picnic. These are minor disasters.

The pride of Warrensburg gets an honorary degree tomorrow. Check it out: www.cmsu.edu/x84988.xml

So, you still think life with a symphony orchestra is glamorous? Yesterday there were auditions for extras with the SLSO – those musicians who are called upon when more horns or more percussion or more strings are needed for a program than we have full-time players. Auditions ran from 12:30 to 5pm.

I’ve been hearing from a number of SLSO fans who were blown away by Yefim Bronfman’s performance of the Bartók Piano Concerto No. 2 at last weekend's concerts. As it happened, Bronfman also gave encores after each performance and our Artistic VP Jeremy Geffen has identified the works Bronfman played.

I stopped by 6 North this morning to see how David Robertson was handling the coffee orders. In fact, although he had an apron on, rather than re-filling cups of Joe his time was spent sitting at a table and chatting one-on-one with SLSO fans. All looked as if it was going well, and by the time I left David was accompanied by musicians Shawn Weil, Brad Buckley, and Angie Smart. David was on KWMU’s St. Louis On the Air this morning as well. He gets around.

An SLSO fan and blog reader emailed me today asking about the instrument Chris Woehr played in the Revueltas last weekend. As you may remember, Woehr did double-duty as violist and played “something that looks like a sea shell,” I wrote. Wasn’t it a real sea shell? I was asked this morning.

The first big snow of the season has hit St. Louis, which creates all sorts of psychic duress in a city that is not exactly comfortable with snow. For the musicians, they not only had to manage the manic traffic that snow causes here, but they had to remember their full concert dress for the orchestra portrait taken today – the first full “official” portrait with the new music director. On a day when sensible shoes and sweaters and scarves are the norm, the musicians are in patent leather, high heels, tuxedos and gowns.

If you know St. Louis you know Des Lee. If I tried to list the number of professorships he has endowed, the institutes he has funded, the educational initiatives he has helped create through his generosity, I would inevitably fail to acknowledge all that deserves inclusion. He and his wife Mary Ann have given to this community, and then given again. They are especially close to the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and have supported it through the darkest days. It is a remarkable, fond relationship between the Lees and the Orchestra.

After the Revueltas ended on Saturday night, the audience burst with applause. I can think of only a few times that I’ve heard people speak with such animated pleasure at the close of a concert. All that percussion charged folks up. It was a blast.

On my door I have a T-rex with the words, “Deadline: Grrrrrr” written across its fierce image. Which explains what I was doing during this morning’s coffee concert. However, I did run downstairs during intermission just to see the backstage scene.

Violinist Lorraine Glass-Harris asked me backstage after the La noche de los Mayas rehearsal, “You’re going to write something wonderful about the Revueltas, aren’t you?”