Abu Bratsche

Absolutely nothing to do with orchestras

Every so often the diligent websurfer will come across a site with which he feels an immediate affinity; it's like walking into a small bookstore run by someone who shares your taste in books. I had that experience today, and here's the site.

Here's a link on the site that will make you grateful you live in an era that has satellite technology. And here's one that may put you off Burger King permanently.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. And which Reger work for solo viola were we in the middle of?

(late addition from another website). An amazing re-creation (with actual audio and some video at the end) of unionized workers at work. The overlaying text is from the cockpit voice recorder; the rest is from ATC tapes.

The Germans really did invent music

The New York Times reports that the oldest musical instrument found to date was recently discovered near Ulm in Germany:

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Scientists say that this bone flute, found at Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, is at least 35,000 years old.

Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter.

Archaeologists Wednesday reported the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represented the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

Mozart would have been pleased to learn that the first musical instrument may have been invented within a couple of hundred miles of where he was born. He would have been less pleased to learn that the instrument first invented was a flute.

An unfortunate allusion in Mahler

Perhaps it would be better to say "an unfortunate allusion to Mahler." But I'm having great difficulty with the big triumphant theme in the second movement of the Mahler 8 being the same motif as "Silver bells, silver bells, it's Christmas time in the city." I hate that carol almost as much as I hate the "Carol of the Pogroms Bells."

But the first few minutes of the second movement is pretty cool. I find it very Brucknerian; virtually no melodic material at all, obsessive repetition of the ostinato figure in the bass, and all the action in the slow-moving harmonic changes.

I could wish I liked Mahler. Many people I respect love Mahler; Mahler was Dad's favorite composer. But he just doesn't speak to me. Sibelius, on the other hand - now there's a composer who speaks to me. I guess that places me squarely on the left of the Apollonian - Dionysian divide.

A good week

I’ve not been posting much recently, due mostly to being swamped on multiple fronts. But this week reminded me that being swamped is not necessarily a bad thing. Working backwards, then…

We ended the week with two lovely subscription performances with our music director. The program was Goldmark’s In Springtime, the Grieg piano concerto with Bill Wolfram, and the Brahms second symphony. The Goldmark was a bit of an oddity (and I’m sure I just did the last performance I’ll ever do of it), but a very attractive piece. The Grieg was played compellingly by Bill, who really is one of the best musicians of any kind on the circuit today. (I had the pleasure, years ago, of doing the Brahms songs for alto, viola, and piano with Bill, and it was only strolling through an airport a few days later, singing to myself, that I realized that not once during the performance had I felt constrained by the piano – something that had never happened to me before when playing with anyone except once or twice in quartet. I simply did what I wanted to do, and it was magically and perfectly together with Bill. Pretty clearly it wasn't my fault that it was so together either.)

And the Brahms benefited from the 12 years we’ve spent working with a music director with a particular love and feel for Brahms, as well as from this orchestra’s innate feel for the Germanic romantic literature. It just all came together in the most natural and easy way; ensemble and pitch fell into place, and there was a lovely pacing, intensity, and (paradoxically enough) intensity to the whole effort. I can’t imagine us doing a better Brahms 2, or any orchestra doing one much better than we did last night.

On showing up for the first concert on Friday morning, I saw the program book for March and April. Suffice to say that I was front and center on the cover. Actually it would be more accurate to say I was the entire cover.

Further backwards in time, on Tuesday our principal 2nd violin, Jennifer Startt, and I played the Handel/Halvorsen Passacaglia for the subscription campaign kick-off event, which featured a Q&A between Edo de Waart, our music director designate, and an audience of several hundred subscribers, hosted by our concertmaster Frank Almond. I was surprised to find out that I could still be that nervous. Perhaps spending all that day (and the previous day) listening to auditions with Edo reminded me that, in a sense, one is always auditioning when one plays for the boss. But it went well, or felt as if it did. We had spent a lot of time on the violin/viola repertoire over the past few months, working in real detail, and it seemed to have paid off, in terms of ensemble and pitch in particular.

And I discovered the subscription brochure led off with a quote from me about our music director designate, which of course I had known about (having supplied the quote) but was interested to see in context. A laudatory quote, of course, and an honest one. But it reminded me that there times when the multiple hats I wear sit at odd angles to each other on my head.

Your daily factoid

We have another guest conductor this week; this one a very young and extremely talented Russian by the name of Vasily Petrenko. It’s actually his second round with us; I believe we were his American debut in the fall of 2006 (the performance we did of the Grieg Peer Gynt became our first download for sale with a conductor other than our music director, and our second binaural recording.)

This time, the big piece was supposed to be the Tchaikowsky Manfred, but apparently management got a little nervous about ticket sales and changed it to Scheherazade. As someone who’s salary comes in part from ticket sales, I’m not going to claim it was a bad call, although it would have been fun to do the Manfred.

But I learned something this morning as a result of the program change. We were working on the second movement and Petrenko was coaching the second trombone on how he wanted the big solo to go, when he stopped and told us why Rimsky-Korsakov wrote all those big soli for 2nd trombone. (This is apparently a legendary, but true, story in the musical community of St. Petersburg, where Petrenko did most of his schooling.)

The 2nd trombone of Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestra in St. Petersburg was a member of the Romanov family (although distant enough to avoid meeting the same unfortunate fate as befell the Tsar and his immediate family). This meant that, whenever the 2nd trombone had a solo, and got a solo bow from the conductor at the end of the piece – the entire audience had to stand up as well.

I guess that beats playing Stars and Stripes at the end of every concert (especially for a Russian orchestra, of course). But I hope it’s not an indication that, at our upcoming audition for assistant principal viola, I’m going to have to do some quick online genealogical research on the finalists. I’ll bet that 1st trombonist spent most of his career in a complete snit.

2 Mahler 2s

I was driving to work yesterdat morning when I heard the amateur conductor Gilbert Kaplan interviewed on the BBC before his debut last night conducting Mahler’s Resurrection symphony with the New York Philharmonic. Some of the flavor of that interview comes through a New York Times article yesterday as well.

Xmas Xrap

December is not, for most orchestra musicians, the most wonderful time of the year. For many of us, December involves a kind of musical Groundhog Day – endless performances of Nutcracker or Hansel and Gretel - for the lucky ones, and a Purgatory of bad arrangements of Christmas carols and holiday dreck for everyone else.

McGegan does madness

We're doing a program with Nick McGegan this week. Nick conducts us twice a season and the orchestra has always enjoyed seeing come him back.

This time the program was a little outside his “normal” range with us: Mendelssohn Hebrides overture and the Reformation symphony, followed by Symphonie fantastique. I'm told the program was originally intended for a former music director of ours and that Nick generously took it over when that didn't work out.

Obama bad for classical music?

No, assuming that Leon Wieseltier is an outlier:

I woke up the next morning still under the spell of solidarity and love. I decided to make the spell last. I gave away my tickets to a performance of some late Shostakovich quartets, because for once I was not interested in the despair. Instead I spent the day listening to the Ebonys and the Chi-Lites and the Isley Brothers.

Couldn't he have given his tickets to someone on the Right who had spent the past few months moaning about how Obama was going to be the reincarnation of Stalin? They might have really enjoyed hearing some gloomy music about totalitarianism.

For my part, I'm glad that we will have a president who can credibly narrate Copland's Lincoln Portrait (and apparently has done so with the Chicago Symphony). I could imagine Obama coming close to the classic performance by Adlai Stevenson (also a presidential candidate from Illinois) and Philly under Ormandy. Not the reason I voted for him, of course - but a nice bonus.

United we crumble

I’ve been meaning to write about some important stuff, such as the catastrophe enveloping the Columbus Symphony and Greg Sandow’s comparison of orchestras and museums. But first I’m going to vent about an airline.

I was supposed to go to Rochester tonight for a meeting with the Polyphonic staff tomorrow. Now, on paper, it’s not hard to get from Milwaukee to Rochester. One hops on a plane, flies to a hub somewhere, hops on another plane, and lands in Rochester about 4 hours or so after one started. The actual door-to-door time more like 8 hours, of course. But it’s still faster than driving.