Earlier this week, I was having coffee with an old friend, a musician-turned-writer who’s in the process of doing some background research on the orchestral world. As we chatted about the various ups and downs of playing music for a living, she asked a question that I had to stop and think about: “With all the repetition over the course of a career – all the times you’re asked to play the same symphonies over and over again – are there great works, pieces that audiences the world over know and love, that you’d just as soon never play again?”

The question stopped me cold. My gut instinct was that, of course, this must be the case, there must be pieces that I used to love but am now tired of playing. I’ve got twelve years in the business at this point, ten with a single orchestra, so naturally, I’ve played most of the warhorses more times than I can remember. I could definitely name you more than a few pieces I’m none too fond of performing.

But as I considered how to answer, I realized that those pieces I don’t like playing are by and large the same ones that I never liked playing. They haven’t become tiresome through repetition, they just never suited me. And not only that, I told my friend, all the repetition has actually brought me to a deep appreciation of some composers that I didn’t think much of in my younger days. Richard Strauss’s tone poems, for instance, used to do very little for me, until I got to the point that the brutally difficult task of playing them became just routine enough for me to be able to sit back and take in the whole of the music.

There are certainly one or two works that we’ve played so often in recent years that I’m not exactly itching to play them again anytime soon. Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony falls into that category, but not because I don’t still enjoy the piece. It’s just that it’s very, very long, and the viola part is repetitive to the point of being actually physically painful in places. Ditto Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade.

My friend’s question was basically about the difficulty of keeping things sounding fresh over a decades-long career when there’s so much repetition involved, and there again, I often think that orchestral players actually enjoy a considerable advantage over other classical musicians in that area. Whereas a string quartet or other small ensemble usually spends its time touring, playing basically the same repertoire (selected from a list of pieces the group is currently well rehearsed on) from city to city for months or even years on end, we orchestra people stay home and play a new set of repertoire every few days. It’s very rare that we’ll play a single concert more than four times before moving on to the next one, so we’re constantly saying goodbye to whatever we’ve recently been working on. That speed of schedule alone goes a long way towards not allowing the music to become stale.

The bottom line is that no one wants to go hear an orchestra that sounds bored, so it’s our job to play every piece as if it’s our favorite. If you have to fake the enthusiasm every now and then, so be it. (Even Laurence Olivier probably phoned in a few Shakespeare scenes in his time.) But I was pleasantly surprised to realize that, if anything, time and experience have led me to enjoy more of the music I play, not less. Strange that it took a loaded question from a friend to bring it to my attention…

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 10th, 2010 at 1:38 pm and is filed under inside the orchestra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.