Taking ten days off in my native state. Posting will be even spottier that it has been on my end for the next two weeks or so, hope you’re enjoying your late summer!

I read a lot of reviews. And I mean a lot. Not just reviews of concerts I’ve played in, but concerts by other orchestras, by string quartets, by new music ensembles, by pop stars, hip-hop collectives, theater productions, and all manner of other performances. It’s a weird tic I developed while spending eight years being paid to curate such stuff for ArtsJournal.com, that indispensable daily aggregator of arts news. I left ArtsJournal when I added Inside the Classics to my duties, but I’ve never gotten out of the habit of at least scanning every review I come across.

Without going too far down the road of negativity, I’ll just say that music criticism really isn’t what it used to be. Many critics today, battered from all sides by an unfriendly economy, increasingly twitchy musicians and the PR folks who work for them, and a wider American public that doesn’t really see any need for Expert Opinion on anything anymore, seem to have either decided to live on the path of least resistance (praising more or less every concert that isn’t a total debacle,) or lapsed into a perpetually cranky tone that implies that they are the last line of defense against the cultureless barbarians at the gate. It’s kind of sad, especially since those of us who make our living in the arts really do owe a debt of gratitude to the news organizations that still deign to cover us. (Yes, City Pages, I’m still looking at you. Cute head fake and all with having your theater critic write up a couple of blog posts about classical music right after I slammed you, but it’s been nothing but silence since May…)

Anyway. I bring all this up because this past weekend, the orchestra made our annual pilgrimage to Winona, Minnesota’s rather miraculous Minnesota Beethoven Festival, there to close out the summer for them with Osmo conducting the 4th and the 7th, which just happen to be my two favorite Beethoven symphonies. We’ve been doing this for three years running now, and while Winona is quite a haul from the Cities, I’ve always loved making the trip. The people who pack the middle school auditorium for our shows are always so excited to be there, and so gracious to us. They literally treat us like celebrities, and while that kind of unearned adulation normally makes me seriously uncomfortable, the folks in Winona are so sincere that I just want to hug them all.

Most years, after we play Winona, I find myself scanning a few reviews from southern Minnesota papers who sent reporters to the concert. They’re pretty much always unfailingly polite and full of praise for the home state’s biggest band, and almost always indistinguishable from the hundreds of other reviews I read every year. But this year, I’d noticed that there was a violinist from Eau Claire who was posting blog reviews of a number of the Beethoven Festival concerts. And that she could really write, not a skill that many musicians are known to possess. I wondered whether she’d be at our show.

She was, of course. And while I’m pretty much the antithesis of an emotional guy, I have to admit that I teared up while reading her description of the concert we played yesterday…

I’ll try to remember little bits and pieces to give a vague idea of what it was like, but honestly I was rendered rather speechless. There was power suffused with delicacy – extraordinary dynamic range – palpable commitment on the part of everyone onstage, from the strings to the brass to the woodwinds to Maestro Vanska – elegance – earthiness – charm – passion. Passion above all else. These musicians were so excited to share their love of the music with us, and the electricity in the hall proved that the audience was just as excited to hear it as the orchestra was to play it. It was such a special feeling to communicate with these extraordinary virtuosos in that intensely personal way. I wish I could tell you more than that – give you more details about what exactly I loved – but I really can’t. I was too carried away by the joy and power of the sound. There is nothing to say except this is the pinnacle of our art. This is why I love music. This is one of the greatest experiences a human being can have.

Wow. That’s just… that might be the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid in my 30 years of playing an instrument. Not to mention the most eloquent. I’m sort of speechless myself.

Emily wrote that she thought of approaching some of the MN Orchers she saw heading out after the concert, but was afraid that she’d either come across as hopelessly smitten or tongue-tied…

I’ll have to resort to thanking them online. Hopefully some member of the orchestra will read it and understand the profound awe and gratitude I’m trying to convey.

I read it, Emily, and you can bet I’ll make sure everyone else does, too, when we get back to work tomorrow morning. The awe and gratitude runs both ways – as lucky as you and others in the Upper Midwest might feel to have us around, we feel twice as lucky to have you. And please – keep writing. You’re astoundingly good at it.

Over at Slate, Jan Swafford has put together an excellent article on the history of tuning musical instruments. WAIT! Don’t go back to Facebook yet – I promise this will not be anywhere near as boring as that first sentence would suggest. Because as it turns out, there is no such thing as Perfectly In Tune, at least across wide ranges of notes, and over the centuries, musicians and the technicians who service them have basically developed one system after another to make nature’s imperfections as unobtrusive as possible.

This is the kind of topic that can send period music enthusiasts flying into a rant (which, believe me, you really do not want to hear, so consider this fair warning to choose your words carefully around such people. And don’t even consider asking what they think of A-440.) This is mainly because what sort of tuning sounds best to your ear depends in large part on what kind of music you like to listen to. If you’re a big fan of renaissance music, for instance, you absolutely need all the fourths and fifths to be perfectly in tune, which means that some of the thirds won’t be, but that won’t bother you so much, since there aren’t very many of them in renaissance music. On the other hand, if you love big Romantic symphonies, those thirds are just crucial, since triads are the basic building blocks of that era, and your brain won’t even notice the occasional slightly out of tune fifth. Fascinating stuff.

Of course, when we talk about mean-tuning, well-temperament, and other geeky intonation terms, we’re basically talking only about instruments which cannot be tuned on the fly, and have all their pitches fixed in one position – keyboard instruments, harps, and many percussion instruments. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. My viola has only four fixed pitches – my open strings – and I can even change those within a few seconds if I need to. I have no frets, either, to control where my fingers land for any particular pitch, so my intonation is entirely within my control (or lack thereof.) This is the major reason why a pianist who’s only been taking lessons for a few years will almost always sound miles ahead of a violinist with the same amount of training. There’s very little that bothers the ear more than out-of-tune music, and in a particularly cruel twist for parents of young musicians, correct intonation is one of the very hardest things to master on string, wind, and brass instruments.

Even at the Minnesota Orchestra level, intonation is something we all have to work on constantly. Yes, most of us are pretty adept at snapping our personal pitch centers around to keep the larger ensemble sounding in tune, but when there are, say, 48 people involved in a single chord, and some lone interior pitch isn’t quite right, it can be ridiculously difficult to decide whose fault it is, and which direction they need to go to fix it. (God forbid two people are out of tune.) We do try to self-police, for the most part, since no one enjoys the humiliation of having the conductor point out that it’s you – yes, you – ruining the moment, but sometimes you just have to take the whole engine apart to figure out what’s making that dang clicking sound, y’know?

Of course, it could always be worse. We could be in this orchestra…

Our fancy new Wordpress blog interface also comes with a new and improved RSS feed, so if you’re in the habit of keeping track of our posts with an RSS reader, here’s the new address for you to bookmark. Or if you’re like me, and have only the vaguest idea of what an RSS feed is or why you would want one, carry on about your day.

Again, we’re still working on migrating old embedded audio and video, but any new embeds we post should show up just fine. Although, even as I write that sentence, it occurred to me that we haven’t actually tested that notion yet, so purely for technological testing purposes, please enjoy a Finnish timpanist having an extremely bad day at the office…

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…

For those of you coming to our final Inside the Classics concerts of the season this week, here’s the usual trove of links, tidbits, and general info that we won’t have time to get into on stage. To begin with, we’re playing a wider assortment of music on our first half than we ever have before on this series, so here’s a playlist of everything heard during the show:

– For a concert based mainly around Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, we’re actually spending very little time talking about the composer known as the Red Priest. But he was a fascinating man, born into poverty in Venice, trained in the priesthood, and celebrated for bringing a distinctly Italian sensibility to concert music. (His use of stringed instruments in particular revolutionized orchestral music.) There’s an excellent condensed biography of Vivaldi at BaroqueMusic.org, as well as the story of how his music, lost to historians for centuries, came to be rediscovered and popularized in the mid-20th century.

– Both Vivaldi and Raskatov included poems in their scores to describe the feelings intended to be imparted by each movement. Vivaldi’s sonnets, which he wrote himself, evoke each season directly, while Raskatov’s poems, which he takes from various Russian authors including Tolstoy and Pushkin, focus on specific characters or events for each month of the year. There’s no online translation available of Raskatov’s poems, but here’s a translation of the Pushkin poem he uses for January, At The Fireside:

To this, Raskatov adds, “It’s terribly cold outside. An old clock strikes midnight.” (Presumably, the hollow plunking sounds coming from the prepared piano in this movement of the piece represent the clanging of the clock.)

– The March movement of the Raskatov contains a number of decidedly theatrical performance notes, including an indication that members of the violin section should “airbow,” or pretend to play the notes on the page for several bars. This is the composer’s way of bringing the idea of death and loss into the music. The poem he selected for this movement is about a lark, and Raskatov’s notes call the setting “a sad thawing. An old lark, by some miracle still alive, welcomes the death of nature.” As if to commemorate this passing, each violinist is asked to whisper the words “Requiem aeternam” (grant them rest) three times while holding the final note of the movement. So if you heard some whispering going on during the performance, that was it.

– I first became aware of Raskatov’s work when the violinist Gidon Kremer and his excellent ensemble, Kremerata Baltica, recorded The Seasons’ Digest for a CD called The Russian Seasons, which is well worth a listen.

–Speaking of Gidon Kremer, he’s an astoundingly great performer, and his version of Astor Piazzolla’s The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, which was arranged specially for him (more on this below,) is truly awesome. Remarkably, the complete audio is available on YouTube, so here it is, season by season…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f11G-I5icpw]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbL_OCpAnc0]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkGeNd32qks]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCzs644jPXQ]

–The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires was originally written by Piazzolla for his quintet – bandoneon, piano, violin, electric guitar and electric bass. In 1991, Brazilian arranger/composer/conductor Jaques Morelenbaum arranged the work for woodwind quintet, three celli and double bass for an album. Neither the original nor this initial transcription contain any overt references to Vivaldi’s Seasons, although the title pays homage to the idea. It was in 1999 that Russian composer/arranger Leonid Desyatnikov, working with Gidon Kremer, reworked Piazzolla’s originals into the set (featuring solo violin) from which we’ve extracted “Autumn”. Desyatnikov creates virtuoso character pieces out of Piazzolla’s originals, adding cadenzas for the violin and occasionally inserting an overt reference to Vivaldi; in “Autumn”, for instance, towards the end of the of the cadenza there is a brief quote from Vivaldi’s “Spring” – a clever play on the fact that when it’s spring in Italy, it’s autumn in Argentina!

– Finally, Angel Lam, the young alum of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute whose In Search of Seasons we’re featuring towards the end of our first half, has a fantastic website of her own, stuffed with audio clips, biographical info, and other assorted goodies. She’s definitely an artist on the rise, and I’m guessing this week won’t be the last time our orchestra puts her music on a program. Here’s an interview she did while she was with us last fall…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN4q7psewNU]

Sorry for the extremely light blogging this past week, but Sarah and I are scrambling to get this week’s (exceedingly complicated) Inside the Classics concerts ready for prime time, and on top of that, I’ve spent the last seven days in five different cities, conducting various bits of orchestra business.

But I’m home now, and later this week, we’ll be putting up our great big Cutting Room Floor post for this week’s Four Seasons show, where you’ll get all sorts of extra info and musical tidbits that we won’t have room to get into on stage. (By the way, if you’re free this Wednesday or Thursday and haven’t bought tickets yet, by all means, do it – we’ve got a fun night planned, and our soloists, Gina DiBello and Jonathan Magness, are spectacular violinists besides.)

I’m still fighting the jet lag this morning, but to tide you over until I make it back to coherence, here’s an article that popped up in one of Britain’s leading dailies over the weekend, in which various luminaries of the English classical music scene opine on what they think ought to be done to make orchestras more accessible to a wider audience.

To be honest, a lot of the responses are pretty impractical (concerts in a fallout bunker? really?) or backward-looking (stop experimenting with all this new stuff and just play the warhorses,) but there are a few diamonds in the rough. Violinist Nicola Benedetti has some interesting things to say on the way we light concert halls, pianist James Rhodes sounds like he’s gunning for my emcee job on Inside the Classics, and Gillian Moore of London’s Southbank Centre tells an excellent story about some crusty musichead complaining that someone dared to insert dancers into a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Which is a ballet.

I definitely tend to come down more on the side of those who believe that what some classical fans call “tradition” in the concert hall is actually a deliberate effort to make the uninitiated feel unwelcome and stupid, but at the same time, it drives me nuts when someone goes on and on about how we should give up our big fancy halls and just play our concerts at The Fine Line, because that’s where the kids are. (As if the kids are primarily interested in the building and not the music they’re hearing there.)

So what conceits of the concert hall would you dump in the name of making orchestras more welcoming to outsiders? Which would you cling to because to get rid of them would be to cheapen the experience? And if you’re something of a concertgoing traditionalist, do you think those of us in this business are way too focused on the folks who never darken our doors, at the expense of those who loyally buy tickets season after season? Give us your two cents in the comments…