Archive for March, 2010

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Be Prepared

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

First of all, we’re back! Thanks to our tireless marketing staff, the whole ItC blog has been migrated over to Wordpress, and we even managed to bring all the reader comments along from the old Blogger site as well. Hopefully, you’ll find this layout a bit more readable, and we’ll find it a lot less annoying to interface with.

One thing we haven’t finished doing yet, however, is to bring along all the embedded video and audio in our archived entries. Basically, we need to re-embed every one of them in order to get them to show up here, so apologies if it takes a while to get to that. Also, if you encounter any other problems with the new site, drop me a line at sbergman[at]mnorch.org, and I’ll pass it along to the experts.

Now, down to business. There were actually a number of big stories in the classical music world this past week, but the story that really caught my eye was this blistering review in yesterday’s New York Times. Not only did Anthony Tommasini declare Leonard Slatkin’s version of a Met Opera classic to be a mess, he also called out the conductor for literally not knowing the score. It seems that Slatkin (a former MN Orch Sommerfest director and current music director of the Detroit Symphony) arrived in New York without having put in a lot of time studying the score to Verdi’s La Traviata, and admitted as much on his personal blog. Rumors had been swirling within the orchestra world that things were not going well in rehearsal as a result, and it sounds from Tommasini’s review as if the comfort level hadn’t improved much by the first performance.

Now, I have no desire to pile on Leonard, who has always been a nice guy and a good friend to our orchestra. But I think this unfortunate story points up two important truths about the duties of a conductor. The first is that conducting opera is a very, very different skill than conducting purely orchestral rep, and there are few conductors who are equally comfortable in both arenas. Also, the Met Opera being one of the world’s premiere opera companies makes it a fairly unsuitable place to be conducting anything for the very first time in one’s career. (In fairness, it also bears mentioning that Traviata was not, in fact, the opera Leonard was originally engaged to conduct.)

The second truth is that not all conductors are in the habit of putting in the kind of intensive preparation time that is necessary to really know a score. In fact, there are some very famous conductors who are notorious for “winging it,” flying by the seat of their pants in rehearsal and counting on the orchestra’s familiarity with the music to get them through it. And since, technically, all we absolutely have to see from the podium to play a symphony is a vaguely discernible beat pattern, the performances can often come off without a technical hitch. (It’s always fun to read reviews of this sort of performance, and see a conductor given credit for all manner of interpretational choices that were actually pure happenstance.)

Conductors like this tend to think of themselves, in my experience, as amiable coaches for the orchestra, rather than stern leaders. They justify their lack of preparation by imagining that they’re tackling the big picture, rather than all the little niggling details that most listeners won’t hear anyway. In rehearsal, they’re given to grand, sweeping statements about the meaning of the music, rather than specific directions on how we should play the next phrase. Which, to me, misses the point of being a conductor. We’re all musicians, and any one of us could make reasonable decisions on the tempo of a slow movement, or how loud a particular fortissimo should be. But there are 95 of us, and we wouldn’t all make the same decision, so it’s the conductor’s job to make those calls and enforce them. And if you don’t come in knowing the score well enough to have an opinion, you’ve just rendered yourself virtually useless to us as a leader.

As I said, underprepared conductors can still lead decent concerts, and certainly, pleasing the musicians of the orchestra is not any conductor’s primary job. But if you ask me, being prepared is about respect: for your musicians, for the composer, and for the audience that’s paying good money to watch you work. And just as the most important work I do as a violist is the preparation I put in at home before the first rehearsal of the week, the most important work a conductor does needs to happen before s/he ever takes the podium. And if you’re not interested in doing that work, you’re really in the wrong line of work.

Posted in conductors and conducting, orchestras not named minnesota | 5 Comments »

Pardon Our Virtual Dust

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

There won’t be anything new going up on the blog this week, as we work to migrate the whole enterprise from Blogger to WordPress. There are a lot of reasons for the change, which we’ve been wanting to make for a while, and with the Inside the Classics concert season done for the spring, and the whole state thinking about spring break, now seemed to be a good time.

You probably won’t see any changes to this page for several days, as we move our archives over to the new system and tweak things in the WP template. And even after the relaunch, which should happen by early next week, things may be a little rough on the front end, as we get used to the new system and prepare for a more wide-reaching redesign of the entire ItC site. But we’ll get things sorted eventually, and the new blog should be a lot more visually pleasing and user-friendly in the end.

As always, thanks for reading, and we’ll see you on the other side…

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You Say Tomato, I Say Rutabaga…

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

As everyone knows, times are tough for the newspaper industry. Most of their traditional revenue streams are drying up fast thanks to the online world’s profit-confounding “information wants to be free” meme; their subscriber rolls are dropping sharply because a new generation of readers (myself included) doesn’t see the point of having a paper version of stories we read online twelve hours earlier dropped on the front steps every morning; and corporate owners seem unwilling to sustain the high overhead costs of maintaining a massive newsroom staff if the huge profit margins the industry is used to continue to erode.

That having been said, it’s somewhat remarkable that the Twin Cities have continued to sustain not one, but two major dailies. Yeah, go ahead and insert your own joke about the current quality of whichever paper you think is too thin, or too liberal, or too whatever, but the fact remains, we have two comparatively huge print newsrooms that continue to be the primary drivers of what gets reported on in Minnesota.

Not only that, both of our dailies continue to cover the arts, and specifically, classical music, at a time when far too many American papers have decided that the culture crowd just isn’t big or spendy enough to be worth their time. Now, true, neither the Star Tribune nor the Pioneer Press employs a full-time classical music critic anymore – those positions were victims of seemingly endless budget cuts that reach into every corner of the newsroom, save sports – but it’s notable that the arts editors at both papers have made a point of not missing many beats in actual coverage. Yes, they now use freelance writers to review our concerts, but both papers make a point of consistently using the same writers week to week, which from a reader’s standpoint, is nearly the same as still having a full-time critic.

The upshot for us is that there is, on any given week, a diversity of opinion available on whether one of our concerts is worth the cost of a ticket. And that’s not something to be taken lightly – I grew up in and around two big East Coast cities where a single critic and paper dominated the classical music scene, and too often, that critic’s opinions were read as the final word on any issue.

That’s a far cry from what a Minnesotan could read about our concerts this week: the Pioneer Press hailed our guest conductor as an exciting new talent, while the Star Tribune, reviewing the same concert on the same day, pretty much hated her. Which is the kind of thing that gets some musicians’ (and concertgoers’) blood boiling, but when you think about it, it’s exactly what’s supposed to happen with arts criticism. Musical taste is a highly personal thing, and on most weeks, you can find a wide diversity of opinion on the conductor’s approach just within the orchestra, let alone in the audience, so why should critics be any different?

Any artist, musician, conductor, etc who chooses to take chances in front of an audience is running the risk that some people might not like the results. Even Osmo, coming off that string of incredible reviews in New York, ran into a critic with a stack of Eugene Ormandy recordings in his head last week, and got taken to task for (as nearly as I could make out) daring to take different tempos than Ormandy did. Personally, you couldn’t pay me enough to play a Sibelius symphony the way Ormandy liked them, but that’s just me.

And whether or not we like the stuff that gets written about our performances on a weekly basis, it’s the sign of a vibrant and healthy arts scene when intelligent people can disagree on something as basic as whether a conductor was “a leader of charisma, confidence and imaginative interpretive ideas,” or “seemed interested in achieving an almost metronomic precision; the result was dry and bloodless.” I’ll take impassioned debate over groupthink any day…

Posted in conductors and conducting, state of the art, the media | 2 Comments »

Take two

Friday, March 19th, 2010

If you thought this was oddly entrancing (not to mention hilarious), well…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ78IlJs5JQ]

Yes, I tend to find the oddest things during my insomniac hotel moments on the road.

But more importantly, this kind of thing reminds me of the way we now interact with music, culture and each other. The original video is of Russian singer Eduard Khil from a TV show broadcast in 1976. His career had faded out by the 90’s and he’s been out of the public eye (and consciousness) for a while – until the video went viral. Interaction #1 – find interesting/humorous/kitschy music. Interaction #2 – make it widely available to your friends via social media (I first encountered this on Facebook).

And now, the above video – a reimagining of the original (I’m especially fond of the “Tonight…bye bye!” moment around 1:26). Interaction #3 – taking ownership and participating in (with) the art (artist).

One could take the “Kids these days…” or “Some people have too much time on their hands” point of view. Which I think is ill-advised. This is what people are doing online in their spare time. And, more to the point, this is how people interact with art – there is a desire to react and participate, which is, after all, the whole point of art. And a good point to be reminded of.

Posted in fun, music and technology, popular music | Comments Off

Music matters

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Sorry for the spotty blogging – it’s been a busy month for me, finishing up our Inside the Classics concerts for the season, and I’m now in the midst of a two week span in 5 cities conducting 8 performances of 5 different programs (plus a recording!). It’s enough to make the mind reel.

Speaking of reels, I’ve just returned from a St. Patrick’s Day concert in Montpelier with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra (full of Irish reels. And Elgar.) The VSO presents an annual program at Statehouse House Chambers in Montpelier as part of a series of mid-week events at the Statehouse called Farmers’ Night (a holdover from the days when state legislators were mostly farmers, many of whom didn’t want to take the long journey home after a session at the Statehouse and devised some entertainment for themselves when they stayed in town.)

Now, there’s a lot to be said about garnering rave review at Carnegie – and don’t get me wrong, leaving a calling card like that in the musical capital of this country is a tremendous achievement (and I sure am proud of my home band).

But tonight, playing in the Vermont Statehouse, I was reminded that the heart of our work as musicians lies not in the accolades of big-city critics, but the delight and devotion of the people we serve.

By the time the doors opened at 6:45 pm for the 7:30 pm concert, hundreds of people were milling about in the entrance hall, and seats were filled long before the concert started. And after an hour of Grainger, Holst, Elgar and the lot, the entire audience stood in ovation. As I was leaving the building some minutes later, a family in classic Vermont wear (fleece pullovers and jeans) piled out of the door, thanking me for the concert.

I asked if they lived in Montpelier, and they said, no, they ran a small organic dairy near Danville, nearly 40 miles away. What a commute for a concert! I remarked. The father looked at me quizzically.

No, we don’t think of it that way, he said. Music matters.

Good stuff.

Posted in all music is local, orchestras not named minnesota | Comments Off

But Enough About Us…

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Okay, people, let’s take a step back here. I’ll be the first to admit that, when we play Carnegie Hall each season, I’m probably the first to run out and buy the Times two days later looking for the review. And when this year’s rather unusual program struck a positive nerve with the New Yorkers, I think we were all thrilled. And this week’s New Yorker article was certainly icing on the cake, coming as it did from one of the most respected voices in the classical music world.

But honestly? When we’ve reached the point that our local press is interviewing the New York press just to ask them to say one more time that the Big Apple thinks we’re awesome, we might all want to take a deep breath.

Don’t get me wrong – the fact that the media capital of the US is paying positive attention to our orchestra is a great thing, and I don’t mean to make light of the pleasure anyone in Minnesota might be taking in that fact. (I can only imagine that our marketing staff is even now preparing to make copious use of the juicier quotes in next season’s brochures, as well they should.) But when I heard Alex Ross talking to MPR’s Tom Crann on All Things Considered this afternoon, the most important thing I heard him say was, “An orchestra is only as good as its last performance.”

I’ll be honest – good reviews can sometimes drive musicians battier than bad ones, just because of the pressure of living up to the hype the next night, next week, next month, etc. In fact, ever since that oh-so-flattering New Yorker piece came out, our rehearsals have been rife with gallows humor. Pretty much every audible mistake that’s been made in rehearsal this week has been followed immediately by someone turning to the person next to him/her and intoning, with mock seriousness, “…greatest orchestra in the world.”

Again, we’re thrilled that we turned in a powerful show in New York, and grateful for the accolades, but we’re back in Minneapolis now, with the home crowd that pays good money to hear us work our tails off week in and week out. Which means only one thing: Carnegie is over, and now, we’re only as good as our next concert.

—————————-

On another note, and in the name of gathering some perspective in this week of laudatory excess, the Minnesota Orchestra will actually have one more turn in the national spotlight tomorrow, when our beloved Associate Concertmaster Roger Frisch is featured on no less august a program than ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer. And this story has nothing to do with Carnegie Hall.

I’ll let the ABC folks bring you the whole story, but suffice to say that Roger recently faced a terrifying and potentially career-ending medical crisis for which there appeared to be no solution, until the doctors at Minnesota’s legendary Mayo Clinic stepped in and performed a miraculous and groundbreaking surgical feat. You know, the kind they seem to perform roughly every other week down there in Rochester.

Roger’s story is scheduled to run during Thursday’s World News broadcast, which airs locally at 5:30pm on KSTP-5. (For you out-of-town readers, that’s 6:30pm E/P on your local ABC-TV affiliate.) I’ll update this post with a link/embed to the online feed once it’s posted.

Updated, 3/18: Okay, so they got the name of the orchestra wrong (honestly, ABC, you showed a close-up of the words “Minnesota Orchestra” seconds after your reporter called us something else,) but the shots of Roger playing the violin while a surgeon pokes sharp objects into his brain? Coolest thing ever. Here’s the link to the online text version of the story (which also calls us the Minneapolis Orchestra,) and here’s the video of the story as it aired tonight on ABC…

http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/4ae8d36a3102598f/4ba396c59aab411b/4ae8d36a3102598f/5e1bbf2f/-cpid/4349038a219c4a32

Posted in inside the orchestra, the media | 1 Comment »

Conductor Hazing

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

It’s been relatively rare in recent seasons that the Minnesota Orchestra has welcomed an unfamiliar guest conductor. This is partly because Osmo has been conducting more concerts each season than most music directors of US orchestras, and partly because we tend to ask conductors we know and like (Gilbert Varga, Yan Pascal Tortelier, etc.) to come back year after year, so there aren’t a great number of weeks available for new faces.

Still, it’s always important to find places in the schedule to slot in conductors we haven’t seen before, because you just never know when lightning will strike, and a conductor and an orchestra will click in a meaningful way. (Osmo was appointed music director after only one guest appearance with us, because the chemistry was just that immediate.) So it’s refreshing that, over the next month, we’ll be working under the batons no fewer than three conductors we know only by reputation.

The first of these is Xian Zhang, who has been building quite a career for herself since winning a major conducting prize in 2002. We had our first rehearsals with her today, and it’s always interesting to jump into a week of major repertoire with a boss you’ve only just met. Our orchestra tends to be somewhat active, sometimes bordering on chaotic, during rehearsals with conductors we know well, but when a new face is on the podium, we quiet down and wait to see how s/he likes things to go.

Xian comes across as very serious and efficient at first blush, which you’d expect from a young conductor leading her first rehearsals with an unfamiliar orchestra. But as we made our way through the finale of Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony, I realized that we were likely about to test the depth of that ultra-serious facade. See, the last movement of Tchaik 5 has this moment where everything builds to a shattering climax, then stops dead before launching into the coda. But because of the huge pause after a loud (albeit dominant, not tonic) chord, audiences have a habit of assuming the piece is over and starting to applaud. So, being the immature twits we are, we have made a habit of clapping and cheering wildly at that same moment the first time we play it in rehearsal.

Naturally, we don’t feel any need to warn conductors about this. We just do it, and see how they react. In fact, how they react often gives us a pretty good indication of whether this is a conductor who we’re going to get along with. If they scowl, or ignore it entirely, or worst of all, fail to get the joke, we’re probably not a great match.

When we got to the big moment today, Xian almost didn’t notice at first, because after cutting off the huge B-major chord, she had already whirled around to start telling the first violins something about the previous passage. But as the cheering, clapping, and stomping drowned her out, she turned back towards us, dropped her guard, and flashed a wide grin. Three seconds later, she was back with the firsts, telling them how she wanted the runup to the climax phrased. Nice moment. I think we’re gonna like working with this one…

Posted in conductors and conducting, fun, inside the orchestra | 1 Comment »

Speaking of superlatives

Monday, March 15th, 2010

The Orchestra and Osmo received a tremendous shout-out in the New Yorker. Read to the very end for the rather incredible payoff.

Posted in osmo, the media | 5 Comments »

Fire Eduard Hanslick*

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

OMG, you guys! It’s finally happened: someone has invented a Fire Joe Morgan for classical music!!!

Okay, that was probably a very confusing opening paragraph for most of you. Let me explain. A few years back, some baseball fans who make their living as Hollywood screenwriters became so disgusted with the low intelligence level and writing skill of many so-called experts on the game that they launched a blog devoted to tearing down the suppositions of these experts, line by line. The blog’s namesake was arguably the greatest second baseman of all time, and is inarguably one of the most consistently nonsensical and pigheaded baseball analysts working today.

Fire Joe Morgan should have been one of the bitterest, boring-est, most unreadable blogs in the universe. Instead, it was utterly hilarious, spawned countless imitators in the sports blogosphere, and turned its creators into the conquering folk heroes of the baseball stat-geek world. Were they mean? Yes. Unfairly nit-picky? Sometimes. But they were also right in almost everything they wrote, and their devoted readership included quite a few of baseball’s more forward-thinking analysts.

Sadly, the authors shut the whole enterprise down some time ago, shortly after shedding their anonymity (no surprise that the hilariously cruel Ken Tremendous turned out to be one of the writers behind The Office,) but their fight against nonsense and bad writing stands as some of the most entertaining content on the web.

From the day I discovered FJM, I wished someone would start just such a blog for classical music. So much of what gets written about our industry in respectable publications falls somewhere between speculative and idiotic that it can be downright infuriating. When you read about musicians or actors who claim not to read reviews, it’s usually not because they think they’re above analysis. It’s because a wrongheaded and badly written review makes you want to scream, and it’s almost never worth actually screaming about, and there’s nothing to be accomplished by the screaming.

There are, of course, plenty of blogs out there offering strong opinions on classical music, and many of them openly disagree with professional critics on a regular basis. But they’re not funny. In fact, they’re usually the opposite of funny, which is to say strident and preachy, and it was the funny that made FJM such an entertaining and readable site, rather than just another shrieking partisan voice in the online void.

As it turns out, though, not only is there a classical music version of FJM, it’s apparently been around for more than two years now! (How it’s taken me this long to notice it is beyond me, but I suppose I should be grateful that I didn’t find it while Googling myself.) It’s called The Detritus Review, it’s written (if the FAQ is to be believed) by a couple of grad students majoring in music who’ve become disgusted with the quality of music writing in the mainstream press, and you guys, it. is. funny.

Please note that I didn’t say that it’s nice. Or respectful. It is neither of those, and I know some of you get upset when Sarah or I seem disrespectful of some corner of the music universe, so fair warning that The Detritus Review may not be your kind of site. (Also, those of you who object to profanity are going to want to stay far, far away.)

But if the piercing of pretentious balloons and wholesale teardown of conventional wisdom is your kind of thing, you’ll love it. Personally, I’ll be spending the next several weeks plowing through their considerable archive…

*Eduard Hanslick, as those of you who’ve been attending Inside the Classics concerts since the beginning will remember, was the German critic who declared Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto to be an unholy mess that “stank to the ear.”

Posted in fun, stirring the pot, the media | 2 Comments »

After Hours: Thursday Edition

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Okay, Thursday crowd, your turn to put in your two cents on this week’s ItC concerts. We covered an awful lot of ground in the first half of the program, and also created a mashed-up, multi-composer performance for the second half, so tell us whether those elements worked for you, or just seemed overwhelming. (We’re also always anxious for feedback on things like the lighting changes that we used to highlight the changing of seasons on the second half…)

If you’re interested in reading and hearing more about all the music we featured in the concert, check out our extensive Cutting Room Floor post, which has everything we didn’t have time to get into from the stage, including a brilliant performance of Piazzolla, and a video interview with composer Angel Lam.

As always, thanks so much for your continued support of this series. We set an all-time attendance record for the Casual Classics/Inside the Classics franchise this season, and exceeded every goal we set, thanks to all of you in the audience. We’re making the big jump to weekends next season, reprising one of our most popular early ItC programs in November, and then featuring some of the greatest repertoire ever written for a symphony orchestra beginning in January 2011. So come on back, and we’ll see you next fall!

Posted in after hours, audience feedback | 3 Comments »

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