Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

I was so glad to discover this post on Ernest Bloch today at On An Overgrown Path.

Although, especially with the Schubert C Major Quintet (right up there with the Matthew Passion of Bach for greatest achievement of any kind  by any human being in history in my book), I have to express moderate scepticism for Colin Hampton’s comment that “I would put Bloch in front of Schubert and Brahms anytime,” I doubt you’ll find a more pro-Bloch blog than Vftp.

Sadly because his music tends to be little known and less understood, my opportunities to perform his music have been scattered over the years. Most recently, I conducted Schelomo in Glasgow with the fine young cellist Barbara Misciewicz, a piece I first played with orchestra during my studies at the University of Wisconsin. To return after many years to a piece that meant so much to me musically and personally and to take a gifted young soloist through it for the first time seemed to mark a closing of one cycle and the beginning of another. You can read some of my thoughts about the piece and the Glasgow project here and here).

After learning and performing it several times as a cellist, I was so enthralled and inspired by Schelomo, and so excited to have studied it with Parry Karp, whose knowledge of Bloch’s music is unparalleled, that the next year, I begged my colleagues in the Strelow Quartet to make his epic String Quartet No 1 our first project (programmed alongside Mozart’s final quartet in F major). Bloch’s 1^st  is a huge piece, over 40 minutes long, making it one of the major statements in the entire quartet literature, and, having spent so many hours living with it, I can’t help but passionately second the Colin Hampton quote in Pliable’s post today “Bloch’s) string quartet No 1 is to me one of the great works in this world.” To me, it is one of the most powerful documents of its time, full of rage, despair and hope. Our guide through the piece again was Parry, cellist of the Pro Arte Quartet, whose performances and recordings of the Bloch quartets did more to raise awareness of his chamber music than any group since the Grillers. The piece is a voyage through life and the world- a summing up of everything the young Bloch seemed to understand and believe, full of truths both painful and consoling.

Another Bloch work I travelled many miles with was the Three Nocturnes for Piano Trio. What is it about composers and Nocturnes in groups of 3?(I’m conducting the Debussy Nocturnes next week).  I don’t know if Debussy’s set of orchestral nocturnes was an influence or not, but I find it unlikely. Where Schelomo and the First Quartet are huge, epic pieces (I harbour a secret plan to orchestrate the Quartet one day), the Nocturnes are terse and compact. Wonderful examples of the art of the miniature, which always dazzled our audiences. I’m hoping we can get the Nocturnes on the schedule in Ischia next summer.

Next month, I turn to Bloch again- this time to another work in the epic vein, his Suite for Viola (or cello) and Orchestra. By the time we finish the concert, I will have said “no, not Suite Hebraique, but the long one that nobody plays” at least 500 times. Although written for viola, Bloch’s friend Gabor Rejto arranged it for cello and orchestra (or piano), presumably with Bloch’s blessing. In addition to offering a wonderful new piece for cellists, the Rejto arrangement also makes life a little easier for the orchestra and conductor because the cello is a bit more able to project than the viola (the Bartok Viola Concerto also works more easily with cello and orchestra, but we try not to rub these things in. If more violists knew and played the Suite, maybe we’d stay clear of that one for them).

The soloist for the Suite will be none other than Parry Karp- how fun for me that having just completed one Bloch project with a young cellist discovering his music for the first time, I now turn to a collaboration with the musician who took me into Bloch’s world for the first time so many years ago.

Now, hear check out a sample from Parry’s CD of Bloch’s works for cello and piano, reviewed here and available here. The pianist is Francis Karp. Buy the disc! This is the Meditation Hebraique, written for Casals, who, as Pliable pointed out, once said ”The best composer of our times is Ernest Bloch.” The OES and Parry Karp perform the Suite for Cello and Orchestra on Saturday, October 4th.  Come to our concert.

I spent a chunk of my afternoon today looking at the cello part for the Mendelssohn Piano Trio in D minor,  a piece I last played in 1997 (yikes!).

Back in the day, I played in two different piano trios that lasted long enough to feel like groups and not one-offs. Between the two, I worked my way through a good chunk of the repertoire, (although to my bitter disappointment, I’ve never done the Tchaikovsky Trio, which is a piece I love).

Times have changed in the last ten years- back in those days of yore, it felt like the rich piano trio repertoire was rather poorly represented in the record catalogue. In fact, the only group I really loved was the Stern-Istomin-Rose trio, particulary for Rose’s uniquely tangy vocabulary of articulations. On the other hand, and I know this is sacrilidge, but I was never a fan of the Beaux Arts Trio, who were the one group back then who seemed to have recorded everything.

But what really struck me back then was that, considering the repertoire- which is the richest chamber repertoire other than the string quartet, there really weren’t many permanent, professional piano trios.

Then, today, as I was playing the Mendelssohn I remembered our dress rehearsal all those days ago. We had a nearly un-solvable balance problem in the first movement when the violinist and I (neither of us meek players, by any sane measure) couldn’t be heard on the tune over the typically Mendelssohn-ian torrent of running notes in the piano. Finally, although we were all marked ff, our poor pianist (who was not a banger) had to literally tickle the keys as lightly as he could.

As it happens, this is a sensation known to everyone who has played piano trios (some sonatas have the same problems)- having to bend over backwards to hear two solo string players stationed in front of a 9 foot sound cannon designed for playing Prokofiev piano concertos. Yes, that 9 foot canon is a miraculous tool for repertoire from solo Bach, through the Beethoven Piano Sonatas (although some of his una corda markings don’t work on the modern piano), never mind Scriabin, Chopin and solo Brahms, but it doesn’t always play nicely with others. 

On the other hand, imagine how easy the balances in that Mendelssohn trio would be on a piano of that period?!?!? 

And this got me thinking about why there are so few piano trios compared to string quartets- I think that, for lots of us, the string players get fed up playing so damn loud and the pianists get fed up playing so softly.

How cool would it be to play in a trio where you could pull a Krystian Zimerman and tour with your own instrument, or even really pull a KZ and have a forte piano for Haydn trios and an early grand for Brahms.

Actually, just having a small but wonderful Steinway would be great (of course, the longer string length on a concert grand does enable the piano to be tuned more accurately, so there would be a trade off).

So, if anyone out there would like to donate us a miraculous little trio piano and a truck, we’re ready to get the old band together again….  Meanwhile, here’s a little souvenir of trio days past, the Finale from the Brahms B Major Trio- interestingly, recorded on a 7 foot Yahmaha.

Hi everyone

As you can see, we’re having some problems with corruption of this blog’s database. I’m sorry it is giving you all problems.

 Apparently this is a major bug affecting about 100,000 webpages hosted by Yahoo. They hope to have something done about it within a few days.

Meanwhile, I’m sorry, and I’m hoping to move to a new server soon.

 Thanks

K

In today’s New York Times Daniel Wakin weighs in on the Elgar-vibrato “kerfuffle” (by the way, I’m not English, I’m not a traditionalist, and I don’t object to Elgar being played without vibrato, I object to the claim that Elgar should be played without vibrato on the grounds that he would have expected and wanted it played that way, a claim which is both false and not very useful for developing an interesting and exciting take on Elgar’s music because it is as simplistic as it is untrue).

To my delight, I was reminded of my own writing from two days ago (a passage which now bothers me as I had no right to try to guess or assume another musician’s motives)-

…there are problems with the approach that far transcend the use of string vibrato, and point to this being an expression of a musical aesthetic that belongs not to Elgar, but to the conductor himself, who, like Stowkowski before him, seems to have decided he knows better than the author how the the work at hand should sound, that his sound concept is so important as to allow him to diverge from the text anywhere the text would force a divergence from his sound concept.

When I read this in Wakin’s piece- it seemed that Norrington and I have found common ground.

He also acknowledged that early recordings of orchestras playing Elgar’s music under the composer’s own baton revealed a fair bit of vibrato. “In the end it’s an aesthetic question,” he said. “It’s a matter of taste. I love the sound.”

“I like it this way” is a perfectly fine reason for doing things. I would just have hoped that the conductor would have tried to not sacrifice so many wonderful details in the score in pursuit of that sound. (I just think a 52 minute symphony needs more than one sound).

After all, Bach’s harpsichord music works well on the piano, but only if it’s done well. If you can do Bach on a Steinway, and Mozart with the 1960’s Philladelphia Orchestra, why not Messiaen on a fortepiano, or Elgar with a classical orchestra (actually a classical string secion within a modern orchestra). I have a friend who playes Paganini Caprices effortlessly on the diatonic harmonica- I love hearing it, and can’t begin to understand how he does it. I’d certainly rather listen to him than many violinists,and not just for the novelty. I just wouldn’t want to see him declaring that that’s what Paganini had in mind.

Anyway, it’s not surprising the difference in an American writer’s take on this (Wakin’s piece is very pro-Norrington and rather dismissive of doubts about his approach as being rooted more in the insecurity that comes with being British than anything else), as American orchestras have, in general, erred on the side of being too change resistant when they could have bennefited earlier from coming to terms with the many interesting discoveries of performanace practice research.

Then, I found Alan Kozinn’s hilarious article on the difficulties of playing the horn.  I know at least one musician whose breakfast would have been ruined on opening the paper today…..

But surely the most catastrophic horn performance of the season — of many seasons, for that matter — was at the New York Philharmonic in March, when Alan Gilbert, conducting his first concert with the orchestra since having been appointed its next music director, opened his program with Haydn’s Symphony No. 48, a work with two prominent and perilous horn parts.

The Philharmonic has long been action central for horn troubles; its principal player, Philip Myers, is wildly inconsistent, and the rest of the section is also accident-prone. Much of the time Mr. Myers’s playing is squarely on pitch, shapely and warm, and when it is, it’s everything you want in a French horn line. But he cracks, misses or slides into pitches often enough that when the Philharmonic plays a work with a prominent horn line, you brace yourself and wonder if he’ll make it.

The Haydn symphony was a real clambake.

Ouch…..

Interestingly, I’ve found that when I do Haydn symphonies with hand horns the accuracy rate (even with the same players!) goes way up. The balance also improves immeasurably. In this sense, the historical instrument movement has taught us a great deal- what seems like problematic or even bad orchestration on modern instruments might work fine with the original equipment. Elgar 1 would be better off with small bore brass instruments which allow players to play big without obliterating everyone else- brass technology has changed more than string technology in the last 100 years.

Still, as I read this I was reminded of a horn sectional I once watched with a gifted young horn section under the guidance of a legendary London horn principal and professor. When they had some accuracy problems, he took the passage and repeated it mercilessly, each time saying “alright, this time…. .REALLY concentrate…. REALLY CONCERTRATE on not SPLITTING…” In a cruel way, the process and the result were rather funny, but, predictably, accuracy did not improve…. ever… again…. 

Likewise, when one of the world’s most important critics basically calls upon the hornists of the world to stop missing notes in New York, well….. If I were a NY listener, I wouldn’t get my hopes up, especially if I saw that critic in the audience. Talk about exquisite pressure.

Horns- CONCENTRATE….. REALLY CONCENTRATE….. CONCENTRATE on NOT SPLITTING!!!! This is New York, damnit! CONCENTRATE!

By the way, I am so doing Haydn 48 as soon as I can. At the first rehearsal, I’ll look right at the horns and tell them

CONCENTRATE!!!!!!

By the way, Maestro Norrington- I really am a fan of much of your work and am interested in what you have to say. Why not email me at ken@kennethwoods.net   and we can do a podcast interview/discussion/debate? I bet young conductors would learn a lot and really dig it!

Interesting discussion of the Elgar brouhaha brought to my attention at Okayplayer, including this….

Sure, we go back and forth on the merits of demerits of this or that producer, Nas’ terrible choice of beats or the question of novelty vs. talent…

But classical music heads proved they can be just as bitchy as any of us on our worst

The Okayplayer forum is, as the first line of the thread intimates, primarily a pop-oriented forum, which makes the interest in and curiosity about this thread all the more encouraging. I had not intended to write any more on this subject, but this discovery does make me think that this kind of discussion (especially if we can make it a discussion and not a battle of diatribes) is good for classical music.

But bitchy? Well, I wasn’t always a classical music head (at least not exclusively a classical music head, and I did conduct a funk band this summer….), but maybe I was a little bitchy… However, they won me over with this-

And finally, one of the more interesting posts I read, a two-parter:
1) A rebuttal of the idea that Elgar should be played without vibrato:
http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2008/08/07/elgar-butchered-film-at-eleven/

2) A full analysis of the performance, complete with mp3s
http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2008/08/08/elgar-lets-check-the-instant-replay/

Acutally, I’d like to think that this discussion is more akin to the assesment of Nas’ beat selection issues than that of novelty vs talent, and isn’t great that a discussion (argument) about classical aesthetics has other musicians talking? I liked the message “vibrato is like oversinging in soul music.”

when you get rid of it things fall flat. when its over used it becomes a transparent gimmick

I might add that when you get rid of it it also becomes a transparent gimmick….

However, the reason I wanted to mention this thread was this line-

I definitely get the impression that a lot of people may primarily be annoyed by the conductor, as you say, since the responses seem to have a lot of personal stuff in there, implications that he is seeking attention, etc. I can respect the argument that ‘with vibrato’ is probably the intended way, and that the conductor seems to be proposing that the intentions of Elgar were ‘without,’ but shouldn’t there at least be room for a conductor to offer his interpretation?

I recognize that the conductor may be presenting his interpretation as having some special merit, but I see it as a somewhat conservative viewpoint that doesn’t allow for variation in perfomance style, even extreme variation. I like the Kenneth Woods writing, which seems well-reasoned and explained, but why can’t a conductor experiment with “imposing a sound aesthetic?” We do that in popular music, perform a song in different styles. Why verboten here?

My answer is that there’s no reason not to experiment with imposing a sound aesthetic- not verboten at all. However, we should be honest about what we’re doing. Stowkowski’s arrangements of Bach are wonderful pieces in their own right (never mind Webern’s, Cage’s or any of the thousands of transcription and arrangements of Bach, including Elgar’s), but they are not Bach, they’re Bach/Stowkowski. There is a rich and noble tradition of arranging classical works for different kinds of ensembles- Schoenberg’s transcription of Mahler’s Das Lied von Der Erde transforms a work for over 100 players into one for under 20 while staying amazingly true to Mahler’s soundworld. On the other hand, there are dozens of arrangements of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition other than the famous Ravel one, including ones for percussion ensemble or male voice choir. Leonard Slatkin has his own version of the piece with each movement arranged by a different hand. These arrangements, reworkings and rediscoveries all allow us to hear new ideas in pieces we love.

On the other hand, lets look at the Elgar 1 situation in pop terms. Imagine a young producer got lucky enough to be hired to master a new hi-def edition of all the Beatles albums. Now imagine if that producer not only started trying to remix those albums to sound like he always wanted them to. At first he just adds a bit of reverb and changes some EQ settings, but then he starts re-tracking, changing stereo positioning, etc. Maybe he cuts the trumpet solo in Penny Lane and replaces it with a keyboard. Fair enough if he releases it as “Beatles re-imagined and re-mixed by….” But if he lets the record company put it on the shelves as the Beatles albums as they were created by the original team, that’s just a lie.

So, the first thing that got my hackles up was this misrepresentation of a conductor’s experiment as a performance that is not only faithful to Elgar’s conception, but MORE faithful than those of other conductors who do not share this conductor’s aesthetic.

 However, the more I worked on the 2nd post, the more I realized that my larger concern was that as an experiment, it’s prety sloppy and unsuccessful. Yes, the orchestra plays marvellously, but at the end of the day, so much of the detail that is in the piece is lost to sloppy balances and bland articulations. A conductor like Celibidache could be incredibly willful and disrespectful towards certain aspects of the score (notably the tempi), but at his best he does find certain qualities that make it worth putting up with his quirks (though I think he would have been an even greater musician if he could have had that uncanny ear for color and tension without bringing music to a stop so often). 

Part of this is simply due to the fact that this aesthetic seems to be all about what the players aren’t doing- not only are they not vibrating (let alone not varying their vibrato- there are a million ways to vibrate and one way not to), they’re also not playing in the string, they’re not connecting bow strokes, they’re not making differences in contact point, and on the other hand, the marvellous brass section doesn’t seem to be doing much to accomadate the strings.

Perhaps in future performances the conductor in question will be more successful in bringing to life more of what Elgar imagined, or be more creative and daring in remaking the piece as his own….

I’m guessing that the longer an institution stands, the more “stuffy” it stands to get. Which is why despite innovation, classical music still holds on to a number of silly traditions… I think it will be interesting to watch hip hop work over the next two or three decades, and observe how aging (and respected) traditions change the game.

What’s been interesting about this discussion is that both sides of the argument have been claiming to have claim to the true tradition. Although factually it is not hard to determine whether or not constant non-vibrato playing is something Elgar would have wanted, we live in the age of point-counterpoint, so the two “sides” will be debated. Who is being conservative here- are both, or are both trying to be progressive. I’d like to think my own Elgar perspective is progressive- I’ve spent my own time trying to find a historical and honest basis for evolving the way we play this music, but I’m sure other conductors feel the same.

But the right/wrong discussion is the wrong one- to me, the interesting discussion is about what is better, truer, more exciting. I have to think that Elgar’s version of Elgar 1 must have been the best one, and that the closer we get to understanding what he’s written and bringing it to life, the better, more satisfying and more interesting our performances get. Bringing one new idea to a piece as big and rich as this is not enough- at least it shouldn’t be enough. We can’t let ourselves be satisfied with simplistic ways of looking at great music. We shouldn’t be afraid to try doing things differently, as long as we try to still do what we do with imagination, honesty and spark.
 

On to happier thoughts.

I thought it would either be rather interesting or completely, mind-crushingly dull to chart my preparation, in all it’s mundane quirkiness of a specific work or two this year.

So, still moving a bit slow from the long trip to America, I’ve begun to try to get back at music for a couple of hours a day. First up is a piece I’m not doing until November, the Brahms Double Concerto, which I’m playing with Suzanne in Boston.

This will be the second time I’ve played the Brahms- the last time was with a different violinist, though. However, it has been about 6 years, so the first thing I did was hack through the piece (no mean feat considering I hadn’t played in a couple of weeks) to see how things were.

Brahms is hard to play when you’re well prepared and in good shape, and no more need be said of that first play through, except that my wife at least recognized the piece.

After a cold beer and a little cry, I decided to strategize. I’ve decided that this year, I’m going to try to have the discipline to try and make my cello preparation more like my conducting preparation and my conducting preparation more like my cello preparation.

This means that I want to do a lot more cello prep away from the instrument, and that I really want to learn all the scores as if I were conducting them- I’m going to analyze, mark, dissect and bang through on the piano every Beethoven Quartet or Klein Trio as if I were going to conduct them from memory. I’m hoping this will not only enrich my understanding of the pieces, but also help me feel more focused and centred when I play them by sharpening my generative hearing.

With pieces I’m conducting, I want to work on getting the music deeper into my body before rehearsals. So much of my work is under physically disadvantageous situations- whether it is driving 3 hours and pulling up at the door five minutes before conducting a Schumann symphony or waking up after a short nap at the end of a trans-Atlantic flight. That kind of travel schedule means I tend to be even more vulnerable to the dangers of tightening up when the orchestra struggles a bit. I’ve got a lot of tricks for managing that in rehearsals, but I also feel that finding ways of knowing how I want to get the sound of the piece in my arms and posture will help me deal with the bumps and bruises of travel and work.

Fortunately, for once I haven’t started learning the concerto a week before the concert, so there is some reason to hope that I’ll actually finish some of this work. I’ve tracked down a copy of the manuscript at the International Music Score Library, and I’ve ordered the new Urtext score, which seemed a bit of an extravagance as I already own the perfectly useable Dover reprint of the old Complete Works edition. Still, I found the work I did with the manuscript and Urtext of the First Symphony last spring to be really helpful. Interesting, I’m doing the Double six days before I do the Second Symphony, which will make for some interesting mental cross-fertilization.

Meanwhile, as I wait for the new score to arrive, I’ve started in on the cello part. I’m a firm believer in slow practice=fast progress, which makes my practice torture for neighbors, as nothing I do sounds much like music when I’m practicing. Early on, it’s a mixture of practicing in whole notes (practicing in whole notes wins jobs!), both to clear up intonation but more importantly helps to line up my sound production and balance. Then I do some “practicing at 40” (that’s 40 beats per minute on the metronome), gradually working up until I’m just slightly under tempo but unhurried.

Parry Karp gave me the best practice advice I ever heard when I first met him (I was 15), and it’s one of those things you keep learning what it really means as you get older- don’t practice fear into your playing. At this age, that means being patient and letting the piece come to me, rather than racing to make it sound like something to soon.
The other little practice trick I’m doing a lot of is playing a lick, run or phrase just under tempo, but stopping on a different note each time as a fermata to check if I’m arriving in balance and in tune- balance being more important than tuning at this point.

I had been practicing from the solo part (which has both the cello and violin lines on it) but today, I’ve brought the orchestra score down and put it on the stand- makes for more page turns and a lack of continuity but it’s a better way to learn the piece, with all the harmonies and orchestration right in front of you.

After about four days of this stuff, the good news is that I can now definitely tell that I’ve played the piece before….

I am feeling a bit weak today, because I begin this post today knowing that it means that I will have broken my “glass house” rule two days in a row. I’m sure the karmic gods will make me pay….

I’ve been listening to the now notorious performance of Elgar 1. Safely (by my math) within the limitations of fair use (which specifies 10% of a performance as a maximum), perhaps we can listen to and discuss a few excerpts. Surely the one of the goals the conductor must have had is to stimulate debate and discussion. I want to try and really talk about this performance, which I’m glad I got to hear, and not do any name calling.

(more…)

‘Here come the ouches and squirms, the fuss and hubbub,’ he said. ‘I was expecting it, I’m throwing a hand grenade at musicians who simply have to accept they must transform their way of playing if they are to play as composers intended.’  

When a conductor has built a huge career off the free publicity created through a relentless advocacy of a nonsensical but highly controversial musical idea, it is probably not wise to call attention to new press coverage of their latest mistreatments of music.

However, I’m only human, and some statements are simply too, forgive me, asinine to ignore. The conductor in question recently attracted a new level of press attention by performing Elgar’s First Symphony at the Proms completely without vibrato, and plans to attract even more publicity by performing Pomp and Circumstance at the Last Night, also completely without vibrato. 

The conductor in question contends that he is presenting Elgar’s music as the composer intended it to be heard. Were that true, I think his efforts would be considerably less controversial and newsworthy, as Elgar’s many disciples, admirers, former students and devotees would have been performing his music without vibrato for 100 years. I hate to impugn the motives of a colleague, but it even ten minutes research would be enough to disabusive any honest musician of the notion that Elgar intended his music to be played without vibrato- I find it hard to believe that this conductor actually believes what he is saying, and am tempted to assume that this is nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt, although I may be wrong.

In fact, the very notion is so ludicrous that it hardly needs or merits rebutting, but, in haste, let me point out a few things. 

1-       Unlike Mahler, Elgar (who was also a very good conductor) did live to make a number of recordings of his own music in reasonably high fidelity. They are all remarkable documents, and certainly the orchestra playing is of a different time, but they all use vibrato. They also all use a tremendous amount of portamento. 

2-       Elgar wrote his Violin Concerto for none-other than Fritz Kreisler, the violinist most often demonized by the conductor-in-question for perverting the course of music by inventing continuous vibrato. If Elgar found vibrato offensive, he certainly would never have written one of his greatest works for its greatest advocate and most well-known practicioner. 

3-       Elgar later recorded the Violin Concerto with the young Yehudi Menuhin, who, of course, played with vibrato for another 50 years. Menuhin also recorded a great deal of Elgar’s orchestral music as a conductor, and took great pride in his role in passing on what he’d learned from Elgar about his music. To my knowledge, there are no Menuhin recordings played without vibrato. 

4-       Elgar’s closest conducting associate in his later years was Adrian Boult, who lived and recorded into the 1970’s. His many recordings of all of Elgar’s major orchestral works are all played with a judicious and robust use of vibrato. There is no record of Boult ever mentioning that Elgar wanted his music played senza-vib in all his years in the heart of British musical life. 

There is more that could be said, but none of it need be said. The fact is, it seems that the conductor-in-question has figured out that he can advance his career to the highest levels by relentlessly advocating a loony idea. He could just as easily be recommending that we all read our music upside-down and backwards. A critic may very well write that a non-vibrato performance of Elgar reveals new colors, but so would a performance on kazoo choir- both may be entertaining in their way, but neither should be treated as anything more legitmate than an amusing novelty.

I can’t help but feel that in all music the “non-vibrato sempre” method is a weak-minded cop-out, an easy way to avoid thinking about whether, when, why and how to vibrate, a process which demands an awareness of harmony, instrumentation, color and taste. It stops the process of thinking, listening, responding and contemplating sound dead in its tracks.

Of course, the vagaries of the historical record leave room for us to argue about whether any vibrato is ever appropriate in the music of Mozart or Bach until the cows come home… 

But the same is simply not true of Elgar- the historical record is clear, and nothing could be further from Elgar’s aesthetic than the sort of glassy, thin, cold sound-world that is the stock-in-trade of this maestro. 

But, of course, this was never about Elgar- surely it’s more about the heady rush of controversy and press attention. 

I’ve attached a short excerpt from the Elgar Violin Concerto, conducted by Elgar, with Yehudi Menuhin as soloist. Now that’s what I call vibrato- do you think Menuhin would have dared to play like that with Elgar standing 3 feet away if the great man had hated vibrato?

There’s more from Tom Service in the Guardian, here.

Jessica Duchen says it well-

Please pardon my French, but the you-must-not-vibrate-ever-ever-ever movement is a load of utter bollocks. I don’t know how people have been duped by it for so long. Has everyone forgotten that Leopold Mozart in his mid-18th-century treatise provides exercises for practising something that any Grade V violin pupil would recognise as vibrato?

UPDATE- Pliable has some thoughts over at On An Overgrown Path here and here, and some wonderful observations about Adrian Boult, mentioned above, one of the most under-rated and marvellous musicians Britain ever produced. As Pliable rightly points out, it was no accident that Elgar said to Boult “my reputation is safe in your hands.”

UPDATE 2- There are more interesting thoughts at Through These Ears, a very good blog I am just getting to know. Check here and here. The author, David Presier also has many more links for you to follow, including this  and this.

The Oregon East Symphony has announced details of our 2008-9 Season, the orchestra’s 23^rd, and is currently in the midst of a busy season ticket campaign.

Highlights of the year to come include the return of cellist Parry Karp for a rare performance of Bloch’s epic Suite for Cello and Orchestra on the season opener. Born in Switzerland, Bloch eventually settled in Oregon, where he became the state’s greatest musical figure. The opening weekend also includes a performance of Tchaikovsky’s barn-burning Fourth Symphony and  gala chamber concert with Parry Karp, Suzanne Casey, David Yang and me.

In November our newly appointed Assistant Conductor Bruce Walker conducts the OES and the Oregon East Symphony Preparatory Orchestra in a concert featuring the winners of the annual Young Artist Competition. The program includes works by Brahms, Chopin and Schumann.

Then in March, our Redneck Mahler project, generously funded by the Kinsman Foundation, moves forward with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a work of vast and imposing challenges, from the storm Funeral March which opens the work through the tender Adagietto to the rollicking and joyful Finale. 

Our season culminates in the completion of our Beethoven Symphony Cycle with a performance of the 2^nd Symphony, followed by a gather of three of the region’s finest choirs, the Juniper Singers, OES Chorale and Consort Columbia for a performance of Mozart’s Requiem.

Tickets are on sale now through the OES office at info@oregoneastsymphony.org, and there is a wealth of information at our website, http://www.oregoneastsymphony.org/

and there is a wealth of information at our website,

One thing I really liked about yesterday’s Oregonian article on the 2008 RCICW is the masterful way David Stabler captures the complex vibe of the workshop teaching sessions- the intersection of a students abilities and limitations with the instantaneous feedback of three professional conductors. You get a good sense of both the febrile intensity and the generosity (from students, faculty and musicians) of the vibe of a typical teaching session.

I thought it would also be useful to talk a bit about the other major contributing factor to creating that vibe- the role of the orchestra. The RCICW is unique, as far as I know, among all conducting institutes in that it was the brainchild not of a famous teacher but of the musicians of the orchestra itself- Portlands player-run chamber orchestra, the Rose City Chamber Orchestra.

In January 2005, I was conducting a program of Stravinsky, Mendelssohn and Doolittle with the Rose City Chamber Orchestra. It was my second concert with this player-run orchestra, and I had assumed it would be my last because they generally only did one concert with each conductor and then moved on, and because I’d arrived a day and a half late to rehearsals after being trapped in London and Chicago by winter weather.

However, to my surprise and delight, the board approached me after the Friday evening rehearsal and said that they’d always thought it would be interesting and fun to offer a summer conducting workshop, and wondered if I would be interested in developing and running it.

Little did they know…

For some time I had been interested in developing and running a conducting workshop. As it happens, a few years earlier, I had come out of my last workshop as a student thinking that it was time to stop studying at these things and time to start teaching at them (heaven knows, I always had opinions). The only problem with that idea was that most workshop clinicians are very experienced, established and well-known conductors and pedagogues, people who not only had a strong reputation as teachers, but who also could lend a bit of glamour to a resume. I had no such reputation, was 30 years younger than most conducting teachers, and certainly was in no position to help anyone’s career at that stage, so I didn’t think there was any chance that anyone would be crazy enough to hire me.

Little did I know…

In the first few days after accepting RCCO’s offer, I began thinking about what I had liked and disliked about every workshop and masterclass I’d ever been to, and right away I could see that we had one big thing going for us- the RCCO itself.

In America, workshops and conducting institutes tend to either use student or youth orchestras, who may play well but don’t really understand what is needed of them, or pick-up freelance ensembles. These freelance groups are usually made up of very solid players, but, unfortunately, I’ve witnessed many instances in which, for some reason, many players in these situations start to revel in the inverted paradigm and take advantage of the vulnerability of student conductors. Suddenly, in the midst of someone’s precious 12 minutes, a player will offer a lengthy core-dump that was ten years in the making to some poor, inexperienced young conductor. They can be quite cruel, even nasty (not to mention long-winded), which helps no one’s growth.

From the beginning, this was a project the musicians were passionate about, and a project to which they gave of their own time and energies. We talked a lot about their role in the teaching sessions, about creating dialogue between them and the students between sessions, and about creating a welcoming and collaborative environment. Every year, we’ve worked to refine those dynamics, to create more social interaction and more understanding- we’ve discovered it is better to create a social framework where a horn player and conductor can have a 20 minute discussion over dinner than one where the same horn player might use two or three minutes of a conductor’s time trying to explain a fairly complex bit of feedback.

So, when David Stabler calls the orchestra “tireless” he is right on the money- they are so committed to this project that they happily work hours that no ordinary union band would (we had several musicians play triple-service days last week, something very rare in American professional ensembles, just as an example). I’ve written elsewhere about the power of ownership for musicians in orchestras- the more a group of musicians feel in control of their own destiny, whether it is the LSO or the RCCO, the harder they will work.

Unlike some other workshops where you feel that some players are using the occasion to say to a given conductor what they’ve been wanting to say to all conductors for 20 years, I think we’re getting close to an environment where the players are instead able to help guide the student’s growth while also gaining a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship of a conductor and orchestra. That relationship is something we’re aware of every day, but not one we often get to analyze and understand- an orchestra may be aware that this conductor gets a great or horrible sound, but not know why. I can hardly imagine a group of musicians that understands conducting better today than the RCCO.

The strength of player governance can be seen in the range of projects the orchestra has undertaken in recent years- a composer residency with Christopher Thomas and a number  of other premieres, and a focus on underplayed and unusual repertoire like the orchestra version of the Bruckner String Quintet, the Schoenberg version of  Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Mahler’s own orchestration of the Death and the Maiden Quartet are exciting manifestations of their curiosity and creativity, of their willingness to take risks.

Self-governance is not easy- without a board of well connected patrons to lead your fundraising efforts, developing the resources to execute your projects is not easy, and the orchestra has had to narrow its focus in recent years. Still, there are more dreams in the pipeline- a composition competition, an opera festival with our resident singers from the workshop and a variety of outreach and concert projects are all under discussion.

Meanwhile, I just want to go on record as saying thanks to Rose City Chamber Orchestra for entrusting this project to me, something that has been a life-changing opportunity, and also to say thanks for all their hard work this year and every year. I’m very proud of the fact that when they made me Principal Guest Conductor in 2005, they gave me the status of “a member of the orchestra” on the board- what could be cooler?

Conducting schools are relatively scarce so four years ago, Kenneth Woods decided to start a workshop in Portland, where students could continue to acquire the technical and musical skill needed for a conducting career. Some aspects are easily learned, others not. Last week, student conductors came from around the world to Lewis & Clark College for the week-long workshop. Here’s a glimpse…

So begins a nice feature on the 2008 Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop in the Sunday Oregonian by senior music critic, David Stabler. The article can also be viewed in a slightly different format here.

 (Doug Bechtel, The Oregonian)

Accompanying the article on the web version is also this podcast by David Stabler, with clips of the Rose City Chamber Orchestra reading Appalachian Spring with a number of student conductors.

If you’ve been reading my insider’s view of the workshop here, you won’t want to miss Stabler’s piece.

And so, the concert finished, we celebrated our accomplishments with a few rounds of drinks and called it a workshop. The only thing missing is a comment or two from the students- who I knew read this thing….

It’s probably a silly exercise to try and sum up such busy week with such a diverse and talented group in one or two words, but I’ve been trying to. After all, throughout the week, we tried in vane to complete the simple exercise “is it happy or sad? Round or point? One word!”

Perhaps I can suggest that it is a sign that we were  unusually lucky or successful in picking repertoire this year, that I can find a couple of themes that seemed to run through everyone’s work with the orchestra, and to come up prominently in the final discussion and concert- completeness and flexibility.

Of course, the two ideas are intimately intertwined, and both are central to the conductor’s art (it’s no accident that Gunther Schuller called his book the Compleat Conductor). The repertoire was chosen not only to provide a nice variety, but to expose our incompleteness and inflexibility as musicians. The kind of very clear, pattern oriented conducting in music of Stravinsky and Copland, where the phrasing and the bar lines are almost one, is exactly the last thing you need in the Dvorak Wind Serenade. The ability to generate explosive musical impulses and control sudden shifts of mood called for in the Beethoven op 95 is not much help in pacing the huge opening tutti of the Brahms D minor Piano Concerto. Again and again we saw that what you must do in one piece, you must never do in another (which simply highlights the silliness of so-called “conducting methods”!).

Again and again, we saw where our comfort zones were, what repertoire we’d lived in the most. An opera expert might suffer in Copland, while quartet-spieler who thrives on Beethoven might not be so comfortable breathing with winds in the Dvorak.

And of course, it is that repertoire we know least in which our lack of flexibility comes most rapidly into view. This is actually a bit counter-intuitive. Many young musicians think that the mark of knowing a piece really well is in developing rock hard convictions about it, but all too often those convictions are more justifications for our own wish to stay in a safe place on a piece we don’t know well enough. True mastery of a work means that we can effortlessly adapt our beating to the tempi of a soloist, or can switch from showing a phase idea to correcting a balance problem on the fly.

Every once in the while if I feel myself getting a bit rigid in my thinking, I try to re-target my study as if I were preparing for Beethoven or Haydn to come visit the rehearsal of their piece. I want to make absolutely sure that they’re not going to have to tell me anything that is in the score, but also that if they tell me “no, no, no- much, much faster,” I can do it. Each year and each traversal of a piece, I get a little closer to that goal, as will each of this year’s students.

But perhaps the reason this notion of completeness stands out so strongly this year is because it was such a strong class, and that there were so many students who had profoundly interesting and unique skill sets. One may breathe pretty well, but when you see someone who breathes amazingly well, you are reminded of your own incompleteness. You may know an opera work very well, but perhaps a colleague has not only a similar knowledge, but brings a fresher energy, or a more powerful performing presence. Simply knowing something backwards and forwards is not enough- we must bring that knowledge to life.

Throughout the week, we spoke of cultivating changeability and being omnivorous in the quest for changeability. Early in the week, I began spotting the “watchers” in the class- the conductors who managed to keep their eyes out of their own scores and on their colleagues and the musicians while watching the sessions. It seemed no coincidence at all that they were the most complete and changeable musicians. Happily, during the week, we could see that the watchers were themselves being watched- with the pattern so obvious to see, the whole class seemed to become more focused on trying to learn from each other, rather than sitting back contemplating how they might have done it differently.

Rest assured that the faculty were watching, too…..

The last day of the RCICW has a very different rhythm to the rest of the week. Gone are the regular conducting sessions with orchestra, and all the thrills and stress they bring. Instead, we spend the morning doing one-on-one coaching sessions with the students, followed by a brief discussion session to wrap up the week and a final concert.

The coaching sessions are something I always slightly dread as it’s hard to work without sound, but they do offer you the chance to work at a level of speed and intensity you can’t with an orchestra there. One-on-one, the teacher doesn’t have to worry that each time you stop the student they’re thinking that you are wasting their precious conducting time, so you can really put the laser on certain concepts. In my six sessions, I tried to balance preparing the concert excerpts with also using the time, within the context of preparing the concert, to point them in some good directions for the year to come. Some years, I’ve found these sessions to be either impossibly tough going, or, in the case of someone really advanced, a bit redundant. Not so this year- I felt like each session at least offered us chances to talk about and work on some interesting things.

The wrap-up session is exactly the sort of thing I used to dread as a student. This year’s exercise was for each student to given themselves one piece of specific feedback, but it ended up being more of a summary of each student’s experiences of the week (remember what I said about conductors in general not following instructions!). On one level, these kinds of things can feel contrived, but I’ve reluctantly come to realize how valuable they are in sort of codifying the ideas we’ve all been talking about, and they’re incredibly helpful for me in understanding some of what has stuck and what hasn’t throughout the week. Sometimes as a teacher you say something and get no response at all, so you’re tempted to just forget it the next time, but one such remark during the week, after which I could hear the pavement sinking outside the building and nothing else, seemed to get the most discussion in the wrap up…. Anyway, I thought everyone was refreshingly honest and often quite brave in what they said.

I began the final concert with a short chat to the audience, to explain to them what they were about to experience. The unrehearsed concert will always have moments of wide-eyed terror for performers and punters alike, but it also offers the possibility of moments of stunning magic and inspiration. There are bound to be train wrecks that will leave the responsible conductors rubbing their foreheads for months to come, but that’s how you learn. In the early years of the workshop, I used to really try to make the concert, you know, er, good. However, with no rehearsal, that doesn’t happen.  However, take heart, the audience understood the vibe and was passionately supportive throughout the evening.

I now feel that the point of the concert is not to be good, but to be truthful, Everyone has a chance do see what they can do when they conduct well- phrases happen, colors appear, but everyone also finds out what happens when you conduct poorly without the chance to train the orchestra when to ignore you- things fall apart, tempos turn glacial, intonation sours, and people panic. Put another way, the unrehearsed concert is a remarkably precise BS detection and elimination tool.

There were lessons both positive and negative in every piece, as we saw what each musician can do and what they need to learn to do. Every conductor at every level has our list of things we do well, things we do okay and things we haven’t figured out. Rehearsals are partly there to make up for the imperfection of our craft, so the dividing lines between strengths and weaknesses were particularly stark.

Certainly, some performers far exceed the best I had hoped of them, while others had a tough night. It’s always toughest for a teacher when you’ve warned a student “whatever you do, don’t slow down here,” or “you absolutely must look at the violins here” who then falls into the trap you tried to keep them out of. Such warnings are not a matter of aesthetics (although a musically satisfying performance is less likely to crash and burn than a dull one)- you “don’t slow down” because the next section doesn’t hold together at a slow tempo, and you look at the violins because they might not come in otherwise, not just as a social nicety. We know these things at a price- if we’re lucky we saw someone else slow down or not look at the violins, but all too often, we learned those mistakes at a terrible price. Ah well, there must be a reason we say “live and learn” and not “listen and learn.”

Still, there were thrills aplenty- Brennen and Esther were marvelous in Butterfly, in which the conductors all got a powerful (sometimes too powerful) sound out of the band. Each of the other pieces had lovely surprises, but in the end, it was the stunning artistry of Rick Rowley in the Brahms that I’ll remember. At the end of a week in which he gave a seminar on opera direction, filled in for an orchestra on Beethoven 2 and played in the orchestra for Appalachian Spring, Rick sat down at a very average piano and played a poetic, powerful, virtuosic and mature Brahms D minor from memory, while five different conductors marched across the stage. He set the bar high for all of us- to really think about what it means to be a complete musician and a selfless servant of the art, completely free of ego. Even as one is tempted to say its unfair to expect a conductor to get through Appalachian Spring or the Brahms without rehearsal, Rick showed us that a great musician can deliver the goods under the most unusual of circumstances….

Our final full day of teaching at the 2008 RCICW was a rather epic one. We began the day with the Beethoven F minor Quartet, op 95 (the “Serioso”), with which we had started the workshop on Monday. I was altogether happier with the second session, mostly for two related reasons. First, I think those who hadn’t known the piece before came away with a much better sense of what makes it special, which is something I felt we hadn’t quite expressed in our Haydn 86 sessions, for instance. Yes, one has to aim for better conducting, but that can only come when we understand the music we’re dealing with.

As we got more and more in touch with the genius of the work, we got closer to the second reason the session was a good one- discovering just why it is such a uniquely challenging piece for a conductor. On Monday, I had tried and failed to express just why the rhythm of the 3^rd mvt poses such interesting challenges- on Saturday we finally all experienced it and got a good sense of how one might go about meeting the challenge.

The afternoon session gave us a change to revisit the Stravinsky Octet with the Discovery Students, and there had been some notable improvements from earlier in the week. In the second hour, everyone had a chance to conduct a short excerpt from the 2^nd movement. David conducted through the excerpt once at the beginning of the break (he knows this piece better than anyone, I’m sure) just to give everyone some ideas about how to handle it. To my delight, everyone handled the exercise quite well, especially the transition, although nobody really controlled the rushing in the theme itself.

What was interesting was that nobody chose to try David’s exact version. Perhaps at a younger age, I would have also wanted to prove to myself and the faculty that I could do it my own way and make it work. On the other hand, had they succeeded in getting me to do it, I would have copied David’s version exactly, as I think even now that is a much more interesting exercise than simply conducting it like me. We all struggle to let go of our limitations (how many times did I hear “I really struggle with this”) and imitation can be a very effective way of forgetting ourselves in the best way.

Finally, we returned to Brahms for the evening. It was an inspiring session, with Rick playing beautifully. As with the Puccini the previous night, the lesson for me seemed to be that you have to dare to ask for things with your hands, no matter how scary that might be. I think we’ll all remember Edette’s pianissimo- something I had to push her towards and which she later said was “terrifying.”

It gets less terrifying in time, but only if you learn to dare to do it often (in her case, it was daring to give only the most microscopic of gestures. Not only did the band come in together, they did so with the most amazing sound). If you go to work thinking “I’ll conduct a little safe for now, then try to show more dynamics later,” you’re doomed.

Other than that, the other insight for me was David’s work in getting the students conducting the slow movement to really respond to Rick’s rubato. On paper, that looks like the easiest movement of the concerto, and one of the easiest of the week, but to really hold that luminous soft sound aloft takes tremendous skill.

Finally, let’s all remember- Brahms is a round composer, Stravinsky is a pointy composer, but Brahms is NOT a slow composer…. If you’ve got a 50 minute Brahms concerto (in D minor, no less), you needn’t worry that it won’t sound important and profound enough. I’d focus on making sure it sounds coherent enough

Day 5 done, the hour is late…..

Today was all conducting, no talking (no seminars, that is)- three sessions with the orchestra (four musicians played all three services!). I can’t remember any other day in the last four years here during which I thought I saw so many students conduct the best I’d seen them do. The Copland session was good, but I still feel like we’ve mostly only dealt with it as a technical exercise and barely scratched the surface of what it means and expresses. I’m still a bit baffled that a good musician, however busy, would only learn the first half of the piece. Especially a piece that is so organic and integrated. On the positive side, one student drew from David the single most impressive five minutes of conducting teaching I have ever seen- the student in question was, with David’s help, able to leap forward in a matter of minutes to solve, with one concept, a whole mountain of problems. Amazing.

The Dvorak session was more inspiring and satisfying, with some real major steps forward to be seen. We seemed to keep coming back to the ideas of centering, horizontal and circular motions and avoiding impulses that constrict the flow of the musical line.  Finally, we had our second Madame Butterfly session. Tonight’s students had the huge advantage of having seen the session on Wednesday, and forewarned is forearmed, but that is no reason to understate their accomplishements. It’s not a night I’ll soon forget. I even had chills a few times.

We’ve now gone through and organized the final concerts, so the students can begin to narrow their focus in preparation for Sunday. In past years, the process of organizing the final concert has been at best arduous. This year, it went fast, but I’m already sure we made a mistake or two, but that’s okay. If one luck’s into something one is not yet ready for, hopefully they have the self-awareness to know that is the case, and to put in that little bit of extra effort and commitment to earn now what hasn’t been earned in their preparation to date. On the whole, though, I’m looking forward to it.

More soon. Meanwhile, I go to bed hoping that the Beethoven is going to come to life tomorrow as it hasn’t so far….