March 2006 Archives

Ultimately the voice of the actress and the sound of the music stopped. Darkness fell upon the stage, and there was a long, intense quiet. When the lights came back up and David Robertson and Barbara Sukowa returned for their bows, the applause rose and grew and grew. Soon the audience was on its feet. It was as if we had awakened from a dream of the abyss, and as unnerving, as stunning as that vision was, we had come out of it with an unexpected awareness of beauty -- its many dimensions, colors and extremes.

I run into English horn player Lisa McCullough, outside Carnegie Hall checking out a table of five-dollar handbags. She's wearing a vivid pink scarf. We both seek the stage door, wind our way down stairs and a few confusing signs, before we discover the backstage area.

Maybe it was the view of Radio City Music Hall down the street that made me think of a conversation I had with Principal Timpani Richard Holmes when we were doing his portrait for the new season brochure. If you have seen the brochure, we (a collaborative effort between SLSO designer Carol Stanton, photographer Scott Ferguson of Ferguson Katzman, and myself) interviewed 10 musicians, asking them to describe those moments on stage when real magic happens. Richard, in his marvelously poetic way, spoke of how it can seem as if a whole lifetime can pass -- a seed germinate, it flowers, it is battered by winds and storms, lives in sunlight, and inevitably fades -- all in the span of, say, a Mahler symphony.

The first group to fly to New York this morning, the Cassandre crew, made it to New York without a hitch. Operations goddesses Maggie Bailey and Andrea Drinkall had prepared for all of us three-ring binders that contained instructions on where to be, who to be with, where to wait, what to do when you got to where you were going.

Musicians who are not involved in Cassandre rehearsals at Forest Park Community College have been bringing in instruments to be crated and loaded onto the truck to New York this afternoon. Downstairs in the Musicians’ Lounge, horn players Jennifer Montone and James Wehrman were getting in some rehearsal time together.

I’m happy to announce that the SLSO Blog is going to Carnegie. You will be able to keep up with the exploits of your favorite traveling orchestra as it makes its second Carnegie trip this season. I will serve as chronicler. I will take pictures too, which will also be posted, but don’t expect Annie Leibovitz, OK?

I am taking a vacation. I will return with my next post on March 28.

Don’t miss the fantastic program this weekend. And don’t neglect the United States premiere of Cassandre with the captivating Barbara Sukowa at Forest Park Community College on the 29th.

At the Sunday afternoon concert, when pianist Leon Fleisher wasn’t playing during extended rests in the Mozart or Hindemith, he turned toward the orchestra and conductor, his back to the audience.

A Miles Davis kind of thing.

Whether in the elevator, in a doorway, backstage – encountering Peter Oundjian is making brief contact with a ball of moving energy.

Maggie Bailey does many, many things involving coordinating all that needs to be coordinated to get a big orchestra on the stage at the right time with all that it needs. She’s managing to not look frantic as preparations for the Carnegie trip move into the critical stages.

From the moment the bells started jangling in rehearsal I felt this sudden burst of happiness: Woody Allen music!

Proof is the title of a film from the early 90s about a blind photographer, who explains that the reason he became a photographer was so that he would have proof of the visual world that others experienced.

The LinkUp! concert was held today with Scott Parkman conducting the orchestra and nearly 3,000 fourth-through-sixth graders on recorders. LinkUp! involves students in nearly 50 regional schools in hands-on music education.

SLSO percussionist John Kasica gave me a call on his way to work this morning to talk about this percussion article I’m writing for Playbill. He talked about the many percussion concertos done by the SLSO when Leonard Slatkin was music director, and all the new music David Robertson is doing – and new music partly means lots of percussion.

One of the side stories going on at the SLSO with David Robertson as music director is a percussion revival. During Leonard Slatkin’s long tenure here, percussion took a position of prominence, with commissions to composers such as Joseph Schwantner, who, according to principal timpani Richard Holmes, “Of all composers for percussion, he has the greatest knowledge of its use.”

Violinist Amy Oshiro stopped by my office this morning to share her enthusiasm about the Picture the Music Awards Ceremony she took part in last night at the hall. Picture the Music is a program that involves schoolchildren throughout the region in projects that combine music and visual art. The SLSO’s Volunteer Association coordinates with public, private, parochial and home schools, with students, teachers and parents to create one of the more impressive annual art exhibitions in the area.

Brought to my attention recently was a column by Louise J. Esterhazy in the March issue of W magazine, in which she assesses who deserves (and who does not) to be considered a “dude.” She begins with a rumor that seems apocryphal at best: at a dinner for the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, President Bush informed the Duchess “I’ve met your mother-in-law. She’s a dude.”

Yesterday following the morning rehearsal, violinist Nicolae Bica grabbed me backstage, looked me in the eye and said, “This guy is fantastic!”

What I thought I heard Stanislaw Skrowaczewski say this morning was “All the strings – be like Bruckner,” which I thought was quite a directive to try and follow. Actually, “Stan” was referring to a place in the score, “start at letter B, B for Bruckner,” is what he meant.

SLSO receptionist Christine Michael had a full surroundsound experience this morning. From where she’s perched in the hall, she could hear the orchestra going through a fierce morning rehearsal of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, just as Ewa Kupiec made the piano emit lion roars as she rehearsed the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 2 in the Green Room. The promotional tag to this concert is “Romantic Power,” and Christine got a high-voltage jolt of it.