April 2009 Archives

When I arrived at the Hall this morning, double bassist Warren Goldberg was already here, of course, looking over his part in the piano concerto.

"The Saint-Saëns," I said, pronouncing the composer's name as I had learned to say it. Warren gently corrected me, pronouncing the final "s." But that sounded odd to me, so I researched the world wide wonderful web and found that the composer actually pronounced the final "s" himself, "in defiance of usual rules of pronunciation," one linguist/musicologist web-participant explained

However, you say it, Marc-André Hamelin played the St-S Piano Concerto No. 2 in rehearsal in such a way that the musicians let out a big "whoop" when he was done.

Many of the musicians were feeling very French today, what with rehearsing a program of Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Debussy and Franck, and under the baton of Yan Pascal Tortelier. Tortelier speaks a very clear English, but with intonations that sound almost like a parody of a French accent, as if he actually grew up as Jerry Thornbush from Hoboken and took on the persona of a French conductor. I tried to coax Concertmaster David Halen toward my double-identity theory, but he wouldn't bite. "No," David said, "he's just very French." And, as if to confirm, harpist Frances Tietov informed me, "He even called me Madame."

The annual LinkUP! concert, featuring the SLSO, resident conductor Ward Stare, and about 2700 students and teachers performing a selection of American music together, was the main event at Powell Tuesday morning. "Accompaniment" was a major theme, with visual aids--Stephen Lange played the trombone and an illustration of a trombone appeared on the big screen--and a lot of audience/orchestra interaction. Actually, the audience was part of the orchestra for much of the morning, playing recorders and singing to "Tis a Gift to be Simple," and everybody shouting "Mambo!" at the appropriate moments in the Overture to West Side Story.

Frequent SLSO keyboard player Vera Parkin--she did double duty on piano and celesta in last weekend's phenomenal Shostakovich 5--invited me to the graduation recital of the Webster Community Music School's preparatory program Sunday night, and I'm so glad that she did. Seventeen seniors performed in their final recital, playing chamber music in repertoire that ran the gamut: Haydn, Mendelssohn, Roussel, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Milhaud, Claude Bolling and Lowell Liebermann. I'll admit that when I first looked at the length of the program I thought I'd be looking for an early exit, but the musicianship, the willingness to take on daring material, the exemplary character that the young musicians displayed was well-worth a Sunday evening's night out.

Two Russians were talking backstage in their native tongue at the rehearsal break, SLSO violist Leonid Gotman and guest conductor Vasily Petrenko. Such things happen in the international realm of symphony orchestras. If there are guest Romanians or Hungarians, there are musicians in the orchestra who can make them feel a little more at home by speaking their language. Korean, Japanese, and Chinese can be heard at times. Double bassist Warren Goldberg is pretty good with his French. Spanish is covered in the orchestra as well. David Robertson can discuss tempi in a number of languages. The SLSO is a mini-U.N., although much more collegial. Nobody has yet pounded his or her shoe on podium or music stand. At least not in the post-Cold War era.

The reviews have been so positive, and if the box-office receipts follow, here is a preview of what you may be seeing in marketing copy from orchestras across the country next season:

The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra performs Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, "Eroica"--as heard in The Soloist--February 5-7, 2010.

I knew that Principal Percussion Will James had gone to the Masters Golf Tournament during the post-Carnegie break in the action, but I hadn't spoken to him since then. Will told me he and his father were there for the Thursday round. "We saw everybody," he told me. Walked the full course, would station themselves at a single hole for a while and then move on. He said the course at Augusta feels as if it exists in another world, completely disconnected from anything else. They got tickets from a friend, which is about the only way you get tickets to the Masters, Will told me. Those with tickets go every year; there isn't even a waiting list any more. He and his father stayed in South Carolina an hour away because there is no place to stay in Augusta--unless you want to pay Yankee Stadium Field Box prices.

Wednesday morning during Shostakovich 5 rehearsal, with guest conductor Vasily Petrenko, Principal Tuba Mike Sanders was shadowed by Matt Otten, a fellow tubist from Granite City High. Matt also sat on the stage behind Mike last spring during a rehearsal of Prokofiev 5, Carlos Kalmar conducting. Big Russian symphonies are just the ticket for tubists.

So I look all over the web for photos of The Soloist premiere in LA. I find pictures of Catherine Keener, Robert Downey, Jr., Jamie Foxx, Joe Wright, Steve Lopez, even Halle Berry and Jonathan Rhys Meyers--and they're not even in the movie.

Last week was all abuzz with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra throughout the media and online chatter. And now, only a few days later, all that buzz is gone. I'm admittedly more than a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to the claims that new technologies will work miracles on old art forms. The YouTube Symphony was, from the very beginning, more a promotion for YouTube than it was for orchestras, and it proved that if you invest a lot of money into something, have a select venue for it (isn't it interesting that even in the virtual world the venue really counted?), and you have a novelty act, you can get some attention.

The dull drone that someone with the proper psychic antennae may have heard emanating from Powell throughout the day Friday was the machinations of many departments completing their budgets of 0910. The orchestra and chorus had their final rehearsal of Berlioz's Damnation of Faust last night, so the only hell around Powell has been far too human and sadly unmusical.

Happily, this dull drone will be pushed out of the district by the dazzling sounds of Faust's journey to the abyss this weekend. You know the story: Boy meets Girl. Boy makes a deal with the Devil. Boy goes to Hell. (I think that's how Opera Theatre of St. Louis promoted Gounod's Faust a few seasons ago.)

A common question I have for musicians this week is, "Are you recovered from Carnegie?"

Cellist Chris Carson told me yes, "More than I expected to be." He was especially pleased by all the astounding press and reviews the orchestra received for both its musicianship and its adaptive skills in relating to the events of the Adventureland Tour. However, Chris added, "I don't want to get into a plane again for a very long time."

SLSO Concertmaster David Halen had something to add to my recent post about the poet Frederick Seidel studying violin from Isadore Grossman.

Backstage during a break in the devil dealing (Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust this week), SLS Chorus director Amy Kaiser was ebullient as ever, saying how wonderful it is to walk into Powell Hall and hear this music (David Zinman conducting, who has a habit of making wonderful music). The orchestra is rehearsing without the vocalists this afternoon. The soloists join them Wednesday afternoon, and the Chorus and The St. Louis Children's Choir that evening.

In Wyatt Mason's fascinating profile of the poet Frederick Seidel in the New York Times Magazine, he reported that the St. Louis native had studied violin with a first violinist of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. For those of you who may have been wondering, that first violinist was Isadore Grossman (I know, because I did the fact check).

The "Talk of the Nation" segment on pinch-hitters, featuring David Robertson talking about the recent Carnegie concerts, is now available as an audio link on NPR.

After talk of the Defense budget was out of the way, "Talk of the Nation" turned to the theme of "pinch hitting": those times when someone came through in the clutch, off the bench, so to speak. David Robertson wasn't exactly on the bench when it became clear HK Gruber was not going to make it to New York in time to perform Frankenstein!! with the SLSO at Carnegie's Zankel Hall last week--he was scheduled to conduct; but he was able to make use of his extraordinary adaptive skills, shifting his perspective from looking at the orchestra to looking at the audience, and becoming chansonnier for an evening.

David Robertson will be on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" Thursday, April 9, beginning at approximately 1:30pm talking about the Adventureland Tour. For locals that's 90.7 FM, or www.kwmu.org.

Clarinetist Tina Ward was the first musician I saw back from tour, and she told me a story about Peter Henderson playing 'A' on the toy piano as the tuning pitch for Frankenstein!! in Zankel Hall on Friday night. She said it set the tone for the whole performance, especially after the wild mishaps of the Adventureland Tour.      

SLSO Director of Communications sent a link to his facebook page of photos from the Ann Arbor/Carnegie tour. Before you get to those, read the rave review from Anthony Tommasini in the NYT.

I made the call to Ray's around midnight NYC time. If things have gone well and the load out is done, as Stage Manager Mike Lynch said in the March Playbill, he's at Ray's by midnight eating some pizza and drinking a Pepsi.

Sometime around 2:30 in the afternoon Friday, I heard from SLSO Director of Communications Adam Crane, who was in the plane on the tarmac in Detroit and going nowhere. Cellist Cathie Lehr gave him an oatmeal cookie to calm his anxieties. Within view of Adam's plane was the plane carrying the orchestra that was supposed to perform at Carnegie Hall that night, also standing motionless on the tarmac. Storms in the Northeast had created one of those air-traffic gridlocks that we all dread, but few of us have an 8:30 curtain to make at the most prestigious performing arts space in the United States.

As the SLSO is in the midst of its Ann Arbor/NYC tour, the California tour, in the spring of 2010, is already in the minds of the California press. In an article from the Sacramento Bee, which reports that the Mondavi Center, on the UC-Davis campus, is decreasing performance offerings next season, one of the arts ensembles it will be presenting is the SLSO: "Classical music performances have a track record of being the strongest sellers at the Mondavi. And in 2009-10, those will include first-ever appearances by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra."

Classical music is one of the strongest sellers? When did that happen?

And here is just a brief snippet from the listings in The New York Times:

ST. LOUIS SYMPHONY (Friday and Saturday) David Robertson leads his superb orchestra in two diverse programs, each packed with music that is not frequently heard.

"Superb orchestra": as a frequent collector of blurbs, this tour is a treasure chest for me.

Here is what The New Yorker said about the orchestra that represents our city in its "Goings on About Town" listings this week:

ST. LOUIS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

The ever-surprising David Robertson brings his gleaming ensemble to Carnegie Hall. April 3 at 8:30: A humorous concert that begins with Mozart's "Musical Joke" quickly moves into more subversive terrain--the overture to Hindemith's opera "News of the Day," HK Gruber's "Frankenstein!!" (a "pandemonium" for orchestra and "chansonnier," which in this case will be the composer himself), and, at the core, a showing of René Clair's 1924 film "Entr'acte," accompanied by Erik Satie's surreal proto-minimalist score. | April 4 at 8: Another bold program mixes modern and classic works from Nordic lands--the "Good Friday Spell," from Wagner's "Parsifal," and Sibelius's vocal tone poem "Luonnotar" (with the soprano Karita Mattila) and the Fifth Symphony, punctuated by Bernd Alois Zimmermann's "Canto di Speranza" and the New York première of Kaija Saariaho's "Mirage for Soprano, Cello, and Orchestra" (with Mattila joined by the cellist Anssi Karttunen). (Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800.)

Please note the adjectives: "ever-surprising," "gleaming," "subversive," "bold"--always nice words to hear when it comes to art, as well as strong words to represent our city. They're there for the taking RCGA.

Special Ops Force Lieutenant Maggie Bailey has sent some photos from the tour, including the view from her hotel room in Ann Arbor. Michigan looks appropriately gloomy for early April. You may contrast Maggie's Ann Arbor view

with my Manhattan view from the last Carnegie tour, click.

Since Mark Swed of the LA Times and Alex Ross of therestisnoise have already provided links to this, I will too: Linda Ronstadt's testimony before Congress supporting funding for the arts, in her case, music education specifically. Go Linda. Click.

The first report from the tour came from Maggie Bailey, Operations Manager of the SLSO, but for the tour blog will be known as Special Ops Force Lieutenant. Via cell phone: "It's 5 a.m. I'm crossing the river into Missouri. Happy tour!"

A colleague asked me, "Why are they playing Guide to Strange Places?" They being the SLSO musicians in rehearsal this morning; Guide being the John Adams' piece that was part of the opening weekend concerts.