October 2008 Archives

If you come to Transylvanian Halloween Friday night you'll find spiders in the foyer and a costumed orchestra on stage. Lots of Schlafly pumpkin ale too. Yum.

And if you come Saturday and Sunday the muse of music will be invoked, St. Cecilia, and who knows what may come of that.

On a recent vacation, my wife and I visited a good friend who has a 10-year-old son, Jacob. I don't think I wowed Jacob with my video-game-playing skills. But, because Jacob has just started clarinet lessons through his public school, he was interested in hearing that I write about grown-up people who play the clarinet. Every day! As their job! We talked a little about his own music lessons. I asked: "Every Good Boy Does Fine?"

"Even George Bush Drives Fast," he responded.

I asked a colleague, "So how is Nic McGegan this week?"

"He's chipper!"

The Rest Is Noise Reading Group moves to the second floor Club Room of the Schlafly Tap Room tonight. I know that I'll miss the sounds of AC/DC from the jukebox downstairs, but I'm sure that Shawn Weil and Marc Thayer, who will be playing works by Bartok, Hindemith and Berio, will appreciate a little less competition. We'll talk about Chapters 4-6 of Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise, listen to music, and drink some beer. See you there at 7pm.

Colin Currie followed up his marathon week of performing three different percussion concertos over three concerts by actually running in his first marathon in London (actually a half marathon, but he probably made up for it with all of the times he crisscrossed the stage playing Steven Mackey, HK Gruber and Christopher Rouse on successive concerts).

You can read Colin's blog posting about his week in St. Louis, and his subsequent run, here.

A blog reader, who also happens to be a St. Louis composer learning his craft in East Lansing, sent in this faux bio of a page turner:

This afternoon I watched as the Henchmen were preparing the stage for Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques, which was something like watching a jigsaw puzzle being put together without knowing what the thing was supposed to like when it was completed: an oboe here, a flute and piccolo here, an assortment of clarinets, a bassoon, a couple horns, gongs and varied percussive gadgets, and will the piano go here or here? Even the soloist, Peter Serkin, looked a tad befuddled, but as a Messiaen virtuoso, he was taking it all in stride.

I want to thank all the folks who showed up for the inaugural Rest Is Noise Reading Group at the Tap Room Tuesday night. It's exciting to see a roomful of people who want to learn more about, talk about, and listen to music of the 20th century. I know there will be more soon-to-be RIN fans for the next session, which meets Tuesday, October 28, 7-8:30pm. We're going to move upstairs to the Club Room for that session (we'll be there on November 18 as well) to get away from the jukebox, although I found something appealing about AC/DC blasting in the bar while we talked about a 1928 conversation between Alban Berg and George Gershwin. I found it all entirely fitting. Chapters 4-6 next week.

One of the things I first recognized when I came to the SLSO was how many knowledgeable people I had working around me. I'm happy to say that some of those people will be at The Rest Is Noise Reading Group for its inaugural session, tonight at 7pm in the Eliot Room of Schlafly's Tap Room. I'm especially happy because when members of the group are asking questions about music that I haven't a clue about--my colleagues, who know a lot more than I do, will be there to answer. I am blessed.

The Bruckner 8, the way the SLSO played it with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting last weekend.

 

Amidst all the onstage and backstage bustle before Friday morning rehearsal (horns warming, trombones preparing oxygen tanks for the final movement of the Bruckner) guest conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski sat quietly in a chair, looking over a score he has undoubtedly looked over hundreds of times, the score riddled with markings, humming to himself.

 

At a break in Bruckner rehearsal, cellist Bjorn Ranheim, native Minnesotan, son of Norway, my candidate for the Young Jon Voight Look-a-Like Contest, talked about how thrilled he was to be playing for guest conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Bjorn grew up watching Skrowaczewski conduct the Minnesota Orchestra, way back when. "And it's amazing," Bjorn observed, "he still looks the same."

Bruckner rehearsal this morning, then a board meeting and luncheon, and a little party this evening celebrating the meeting of the Annual Fund goal last August. And a Family Concert on Sunday afternoon, and SLSO trumpeter Josh MacCluer and company playing a Musicale at the Lucas School House on Sunday evening, and I was working on a program for the next concert at the Pulitzer, on Wednesday, October 29; Molly Morkoski will play Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus, a series of jazzy piano miniatures. I was trying to find some words to say about it, and found these by Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise: "The jazzy tinge [in Messiaen's music] is felt even in the immense sacred landscape of the piano cycle Twenty Aspects of the Infant Jesus, written in 1944; one four-note motif in the tenth piece, depicting the 'spirit of joy,' sounds suspiciously like the jaunty four-note refrain of Gershwin's 'I Got Rhythm,' while the fifteenth, 'The Kiss of the Infant Jesus,' vaguely recalls the same composer's 'Someone to Watch Over Me.' Wagner, in Tristan and Parsifal, saw a fatal contradiction between body and spirit; Tristan and Isolde could complete their passion only in self-destruction, the Knights of the Grail could preserve themselves only by renouncing sex. Messiaen perceived no contradiction, indeed no difference, between the love of man and the love of God."

Meanwhile, I've had Peter and the Wolf in my head all day.

Ward Stare conducted his first education concerts of the season, taking two auditoriums-full of schoolchildren, and the orchestra, through Peter and the Wolf. Education concerts all have their special tone. What stood out to me was the rousing applause the bassoon received when it was introduced. Rarely is the bassoon so (deservedly) appreciated.

This weekend's Bruckner 8 concerts, with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting, is ranked as one of the most anticipated programs of the season by SLSO musicians and staff. Here is what they said:

Guest conductor Hans Graf has been an entirely amiable presence about the hall this week. He greets everyone warmly. After rehearsal he asks a musician about a part and listens to what he or she has to say. When he wants a certain phrase accented, he throws his whole body into motion to express what he means. On an elevator ride I mentioned the Bruckner 8 next week. He shook his head, "That's a marvelous piece," and then talked about the great leap Bruckner takes from the Eight to the unfinished Ninth, and, alas, then the elevator reached the floor of the conductor's suite and he had to leave, but first said a few things about the 9th's final movement. Then, we all had other things to attend to.

There's this marvelous moment late in Bizet's Symphony in C where all this marvelous French color transforms to something that sounds like Scotch-Irish folk music.

There were piccolo auditions today, which meant that one could hear the sounds of many piccolos warming up and tuning up and practicing around the hall. The sound of many piccolos can be as bright as songbirds at dawn; or it can be like an incessant screeching outside your bedroom window when you most need to sleep at the bloody dawn. It was a little bit of both today.

It's been a long week and I hardly have any words left in me (and listen to me, Colin Currie has two more percussion concertos to perform this weekend--and they are mega-demanding and super-amazing--see, I told you I hardly have any words left in me), so please, for now, let this suffice: click here and learn the news.

After a day of much music, including the Colin Currie percussion marathon, English music for Classical Detours (bring your cap and gown for Pomp & Circumstance)--rehearsals throughout the morning and afternoon--in the late afternoon came the sound of Mozart from the darkened auditorium, only two utility lamps on stage for violinist David Halen and violist Jonathan Vinocour, preparing Sinfonia concertante for next week. "It sounds good in the dark," I called out to David. "Maybe that's how we should play it," said David. Yeah, give it kind of a garage band feel. David and Jonathan can call themselves Mozart Garage.

You can now hear Paul Newman's narration of Copland's Lincoln Portrait, in performance with David Robertson and the SLSO at Carnegie Hall, April 16, 2005, by going to NPR's website here.