March 2007 Archives

I took concertmaster David Halen aside backstage at Carnegie this afternoon to ask him, “How do you do that?”

You know you’ve heard a terrific concert when the next morning you still have the finale, in this case Sibelius Symphony No. 2, still playing through your head.

In the crisp early morning air of midtown Manhattan I met the Henchmen near the instrument van, awaiting the opening of that van. Joe Clapper introduced me to George, the man who drove the van and got it from St. Louis to the stage door of Carnegie Hall in record time. “We really appreciate it,” I told George. “Hold on,” said Mike Lynch, “we haven’t opened it yet.”

Maggie Bailey and Andrea Drinkall (operations manager and orchestra personnel manager, respectively, which means they are in charge of making sure this big train rolls unimpeded down the track) greeted me, and everyone else, with the gleeful (nearly manic) smiling faces that are appropriate at 9am with 100+ musicians, crew, and entourage arriving for two flights to NY from Lambert. I passed through lickety split and found the necessary coffee and scone at Starbucks. How many of you remember when Lambert Airport was the only place where you could get Starbucks in St. Louis? (When I arrived at the hotel in NY, half a block from Carnegie Hall, I asked operations manager Robert McGrath, facetiously, where could I find a Starbucks nearby. “I think you can find one in the bathroom,” he replied.)

This morning an 18-wheeler moving van was parked near the hall and the Henchmen were loading the equipment crate by crate. The Powell Hall stage was a holding area for a wide collection of crates of different shapes and sizes. I observed Joe Clapper and Mike Lynch delicately placing Ayako Watanabe’s harp into a specially shaped crate, the harp itself protected by material that made it look like a giant blue mitten.

I’ll be tagging along with the orchestra on the trip to Carnegie Hall this week. If all goes well, you’ll be seeing my first post Thursday evening. Photos will be included, probably. I told our principal cello Danny Lee that I’d just follow him around the city and write about it. He didn’t seem too down with that.

At intermission of the Coffee Concert last Friday, a friend and I were talking about the Bartok Piano Concerto No. 1. I mentioned how I heard something Gershwiny in the first movement, then he came up with a comparison much more on the mark: Thelonius Monk. And we both started imitating those plink plink sounds, those wrong keys that are so right and righteous in Monkdom. Indeed, with percussionists John Kasica, Tom Stubbs and Richard Holmes set around the piano, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the keyboard, they looked like they could have been a Hungarian free-jazz combo.

Tomorrow morning, prior to the Coffee Concert, the caffeinated and sugared-up crowd may attend PreConcert Perspectives with David Robertson, Sudden Time composer George Benjamin, and SLSO percussionist John Kasica. This is the first time PreConcert Perspectives has been presented to the morning crowd. As with all PCPs, the talk begins an hour prior to the concert.

This morning I came in as four Henchmen were moving the new piano (“Barbara,” or “Babs,” named after former principal keyboard Barbara Liberman) from the Green Room to the backstage area in preparation for the first rehearsal of Bartok’s First Piano Concerto with Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

During the first rehearsal of George Benjamin’s Sudden Time this morning, David Robertson told the strings, “I’ll tell the pre-concert audience that this section calls for free bowing, so they won’t think you’re lost.”

Few great composers received as much ridicule in their lifetimes as Jean Sibelius. Virgil Thomson, the longtime dean of American composers and critics, said of the Symphony No. 2, which the SLSO performs this week, “I find this work vulgar, self-indulgent and provincial beyond any description.”

The French composer, conductor and music theorist Rene Leibowitz felt it worth his time and energy to produce a full treatise entitled “Sibelius: The Worst Composer in the World.”

Last fall I wrote about the writer and art critic Dave Hickey’s phrase “community of desire.” When Hickey was living in New York City in the 1970s, Andy Warhol was producing these colorful silkscreen prints of four-petaled flowers. Although lots of people found these works entirely bogus, a small group of people were passionately drawn to them. Caught up in the gravitational pull, those people got to know each other and create, what Hickey calls, a community of desire. Such communities can change the culture, as we now see reproductions of those Warhol silkscreens everywhere. The power of art can be defined by the formation of such communities, and how those communities last, and what they do, and how they expand and transform the larger culture.

When I hear this orchestra play Harmonielehre, I know why I work here.

David Robertson during this morning’s Harmonielehre rehearsal, as the musicians played softly up, up, up: “…like you are practicing scales in sleep.”

For all things John Adams, I recommend his website, www.earbox.com, to read stuff by and about this great American composer.

On a day when David Robertson and a number of SLSO musicians (among them Jen Montone, Diana Haskell, Dana Myers, Melissa Brooks-Rubright, Sarah Hogan, Chris Tantillo, Jen Nitchman, Carolyn Landis, Jim Meyer, Shawn Weil) and Susanne Mentzer and others are over at the Pulitzer rehearsing the Thursday night program (Berio, Saariaho, Ravel and more) and elsewhere musicians are readying for a lot of music this weekend (Mahler, Ravel, Adams and Tchaikovsky), Alison Harney saunters into Powell Hall announcing “Tax time” bringing everything down to accountancy.

Conversation between a young couple (mid-20s?), overheard in the refreshment line in the Met Bar at intermission Friday night:

This comes from new Artistic VP Peter Czornyj, who writes excellent email:

Our Norwegian guest soloist this week, Henning Kraggerud, performed his own arrangement of “Fantasy on a Theme by Ole Bull” as an encore on Thursday evening. Ole Bull was one of the greatest 19th-century violinists, also active as a composer, and a seminal figure in Norwegian music.

Now you know. Go tonight. And then, Saturday the Youth Orchestra performs its second concert of the season, at Powell. Go to both concerts, and by Sunday you will be musically cleansed in such a way that you can do your March Madness brackets with a pure mind.

I can’t recall a program I knew less about, and then in the listening to each rehearsal have grown more enchanted, as I have this week's.

My suggestion: Go!

I arrived at the hall during the Roussel (Bacchus et Ariane, Suite No. 2) rehearsal and the first sound I heard was Frances Tietov playing these enchanting, liquid sounds on the harp. Some sort of French liquid, appropriate music for an absinthe dream, perhaps. Anyway, she’s been practicing (see previous post).

Frances Tietov made a quick exit from the Young People’s Concert this morning after her harp part was done so she could get home to practice some more. She told me that there’s a harp part, and a difficult harp part, to almost every program until the end of the season and she’s feeling behind on everything (a common feeling around here).

Saturday afternoon I was at the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library in search of CDs. I found Gidon Kremer playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, so I could prep for writing stuff about Henning Kraggerud playing it this week. I found a classic recording of Britten’s Les Illuminations with tenor Peter Pears; Messiaen’s Turangalila performed by Orchestre de la Bastille conducted by Myung-Whun Chung – this was the composer’s favorite recording, and in the liner notes Messiaen describes the symphony as “a love song… a hymn to joy”; and I got Simon (pre “Sir) Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (his old gang before he headed for Berlin) in Britten’s War Requiem.

Friday was spent working furiously to complete PR stuff for the announcement of the 0708 season, which is why I am putting up this special Saturday edition. And when I say furiously, I mean furiously. I kept my door shut so my colleagues wouldn't be disturbed by my occasional outbursts of exasperated sailor talk. It's especially upsetting to be so totally wired and focused into my required labors that I can't really listen to SLSO Principal Second Violin Alison Harney playing the final rehearsal of the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5. Not being able to listen to this great music when it is in its work-in-progress stage is one of the unpleasant aspects of my job.

This from New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ blog today: