Prom Prep

The orchestra is spending this week largely out of public view, but if you were to poke your head into Orchestra Hall, you’d hear plenty of noise coming from the stage. Today began a dizzying schedule of rehearsals – nearly twice as many as we have in an average week – all leading up to what should be an exciting but utterly chaotic tour of some of the top European summer festivals late next week. We’ll be playing two different concerts at the BBC Proms in London (only our second time at the world’s biggest classical music fest, and it’s a great hono(u)r to be asked to play a Friday/Saturday double bill,) and one each at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland and Amsterdam’s glorious Concertgebouw. Oh, and did I mention that these four concerts are happening over four consecutive nights, and that the set list is different for every one? Yah. Thus the extra rehearsals.

Speaking of which, for those of you who like to keep track of such things, here’s the complete list of repertoire we’re carrying for this briefest of hops to the other side of the Atlantic:

BARBER Music for a Scene from Shelley
BERG Violin Concerto
MOZART Violin Concerto No. 5
ELGAR Cello Concerto
SHOSTAKOVICH Cello Concerto No. 1
BRUCKNER Symphony No. 4, Romantic
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9, Choral

Woof. That’s a lot of notes, and adding to the chaos was the news we received only a couple of days ago: our scheduled violin soloist, Lisa Batiashvili, is ill and won’t be able to join us for the Berg and Mozart concertos. (Alisa Weilerstein is the cello soloist, and as far as we know, she’s fine. Please knock some wood now.) This is the kind of thing that can really ruin our artistic staff’s week. But they got on the phones, called in a few favors, and landed us no less august a replacement soloist than…

…Gil Shaham.

I know. Talk about your awesome consolation prizes – and not only did Gil fly straight out to join us in Minneapolis for rehearsals today, he sweated out a canceled flight this morning, made it to Orchestra Hall just in time for the second rehearsal of the day, and proceeded to behave as if there wasn’t anywhere in the world he’d rather be.

Soloists who make a point of connecting warmly with the orchestra really do stand out. It’s not that we run into a whole lot of stand-offish soloists these days, but they live in a different universe than we do. They’re constantly packing up and flying halfway around the world, living out of a suitcase, cramming in practice time wherever they can find it, knowing that they’re expected to be more or less perfect every single night, whereas those of us in the orchestra can probably manage to hide a clunker or two inside the larger ensemble every once in a while. I don’t know about you, but that kind of life would make me awfully cranky.

But not Gil, apparently. I don’t think he stopped smiling from the moment he walked onstage ’til the moment Osmo dismissed us a few minutes after the rehearsal was scheduled to end. Even in the middle of a piece as complicated as the Berg concerto (which he’s playing entirely from memory, by the way, even in rehearsal,) he smiled broadly at whatever instrument group he might be dueting with at the moment, turned with a grin to fully face concertmaster Sarah Kwak when they played a few bars in unison towards the end of the second movement, and made a point of showing us, by gesture, every little nuance he intended to impart to the music a split second before we got there, making the usually arduous task of following a soloist seem almost effortless.

All that having been said, I believe today was the last time we’ll see Gil until we gather at the cavernous Royal Albert Hall for a brief touch-up rehearsal next Saturday morning. (Next, like next next, like the 28th.) There’s just too much rep to be rehearsed for us to spend more than a single afternoon on these two concertos. Tomorrow, we’re all about Beethoven 9 (though we won’t have the full array of sound until we get to London and meet the BBC Chorus on the 27th,) and Thursday and Friday will be a mish-mash of cello concertos, Barber, and touch-up work on anything that needs it. Friday night, we’ll play a semi-private concert for Minnesota Orchestra donors so that we won’t fly off to Europe without having played Barber and Bruckner (the least familiar pieces for us on this tour) in front of a live audience. And after that, our crack stage crew will swing into action, packing up the hundreds of tons of cargo we travel with and shipping off for London. We’ll follow on Tuesday night’s red-eye flight out of MSP, and then the fun begins.

I’ll be blogging the tour, of course. (Sarah’s not coming on this one, sadly, but I promise to be thorough.) I’ll also be making an appearance with Minnesota Public Radio’s Brian Newhouse on BBC Radio 3, which is broadcasting both of our Proms concerts throughout the UK. MPR’s classical stations (KSJN 99.5fm in the Cities, check here for your local affiliate or stream it live from their site) will also be carrying the London performances live back home, and I’ll be sure to give out details about that closer to the date.

But for now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a nasty Beethoven scherzo to take to the woodshed before tomorrow morning’s rehearsal. If there’s anything in particular you know you’d like me to focus on over the next couple of weeks, now’s the time to chime in down in the comments…