Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

I’m in Seattle Airport on my way home from the 2007 Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop. It was quite a week- exhausting, exciting, entertaining and really inspiring for all of us on the faculty. I just hope the students got even half as much out of it as we did.

I’ll share some more detailed thoughts and highlights from the week when I have more time, if they still seem interesting to me when I’m next at a computer. Meanwhile, one question stays with me…..

Last night was the final concert. It’s truly baptism by fire- each student conducts a movement of something, but the concert is not rehearsed (although it uses the repertoire we’ve been working on all week). The orchestra and soloists may doing things for the first time, and the conductor might be doing something they’ve never done before.

By and large, everyone did very well, and the soloists were splendid. I think I have the world’s best living Azucena on my hands right now. However, there were a few scary moments- hopefully those who went through them will look at this as a low-key chance to find out what their weaknesses are right now rather than to learn them in a concert that really matters.

My lingering question is this- In the concert I was struck that almost everyone’s conducting at the end of the week looked much the same as at the beginning of the week (with a few huge and interesting exceptions), although generally more specific and refined, and the level of the performances was very high. Even in some instances were there things I really wanted to encourage the student to change visually, some still looked the same in the end. Everyone still looked like themselves.

Does this mean we did a good job teaching them or a bad job?

Hmmm….

My first reaction was to think that somehow the message didn’t get through to some people, but maybe if a young conductor can be bombarded with information, ideas and feedback and go onstage and maintain a sense of their own musical personality and cope with an unrehearsed concert at the end of the week, we’ve done something right? It’ll be interesting to see what stays with them over the next six months, or two years, but it’s ultimately not my business what any of them do from here. I’m just a curious observer from this point on. Readers- any comments? What do you think?

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

Another day at the Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop, and sensory overload is the theme at this point. Four days in everyone’s heard so much music and participated in so many discussions that it would be easy to feel as though we should cancel tomorrow and take a personal day, but it’s been so fun and rewarding and inspiring that I can’t imagine not doing it tomorrow. 

We had some great moments in the conducting sessions- mostly those were one of the conductor’s would finally grok the idea of really tracking the soloist rather than following them. When you’re no longer reacting to the soloist, but anticipating and responding in the moment, great things start to happen. It was all soloists today- a morning session on the Shostakovich 1^st Pno Concerto with Rick Rowley and trumpet soloist Fil Ovando and scenes from Il Trovatore with Brennen Guillory. Brennen at one point cheerfully sang his Act III tenor aria about 7 times in a row- I hope the students know how lucky they are to learn opera conducting working with someone who can and will do that for them 

We had such and extensive group rap session this afternoon that I totally lost my voice by the end of the day. Topics included career development in terms of karma, player relations, methods of score study, talking to audiences and so on. The highlight for me was actually an aside, when David Hoose talked for about 15 minutes about the orchestration of the first chord of Beethoven 7. Absolutely amazing and inspiring. 

I suppose we’re now on the dreaded home stretch, but I’ve got high hopes that we’ll see quite a few more AHA moments from the students. 

Lots more to say, but later…

Day two at the RCICW, and a magical day at that.

If day one was a day of intriguing disappointments, where conductors tip-toed up to doing something great only to not quite make it, day two was a day of wonderful surprises.

We began the day with a unison conducting class. We had all the conductors stand in a circle. Each conductor used their left arm to hold the right elbow of the conductor next to them. Isolating the elbow focuses everyone’s motion into a limited number of joints, and the physical connection helps everyone to feel each others physical sense of pulse. Together, we all went through singing the bass part and melody of some of the nastier bits of L’histoire du Soldat. It was fascinating and hopefully helped everyone feel more connected and collaborative.

Next was a score study class led by David Hoose. It was truly inspirational for everyone with ears to hear. After talking in broad terms about his philosophy, we looked in some detail at the first movement of Haydn 92. Interestingly, David spoke about it for 90 minutes without even getting to pedestrian questions of “in three” or “in six.” Even more interesting, in his 90 minutes he didn’t bring up any of the points I made in my recent essays on the piece or in my rehearsals for the LCO performance of it in June.

Conducting is always likely to be a somewhat disappointing activity (except when your colleagues carry you upward to the impossible and inexplicable)- you never get quite what you hope for, there’s never enough time, and you’re never quite able to perhaps take the work on the piece into as much depth as you’d like. Studying, on the other hand, works best when you take away all the limitations and pressures- there are no limits on what you can put into it or the rewards you get back from it. Forget making decisions, and forget timelines. Don’t worry about “in three,” or how to cue the violins. Just learn the music. Live with the music

A few good points from David’s session1-       Always sit on your hands when you study. Don’t let your evolving aural picture of the work be hamstrung by physicality.

2-       Treat listening to recordings as a separate activity from learning and studying music

3-       Study is observation

4-       Analysis only looks forward in time- don’t assume knowledge of events in the score the audience hasn’t heard so far. Try to understand the rhetoric of the music in terms of what they’ve heard and the expectations that have been developed so far.

We’d been a bit nervous about the Varese Octandre- it’s very difficult for players and conductors, but it went very well, and some of the students really seemed to be in their element with it. It’s such forceful, energized music- the notes themselves seem to move with a sort of hyper-intense vibrancy. Bracing harmonies, wonderfully backward and static rhythms and hyper-bold colors. Fantastic.

Finally, our first chance to see students in the junior program (Discovery) conduct- in their case, the same Haydn 92 David spoke so poetically about this morning. It is the most glorious music- you could sense the joy and wonder of the instrumentalists as they worked on it tirelessly for hours. Also, there were many wonderful surprises in the communicativity and creativity of the conductors tonight- even a few moments of genuine magic. I think there were a couple of moments tonight none of us will miss when a sort of infectious joy in communicating the wonder of the music really took flight. How nice to be reminded of the all-conquering power of the human smile.

The sort of day that makes you remember why you’re a musician, why you study and what conducting really is.

KW

Day one of the RCICW is complete. This year Betsy, one of the cellists in the orchestra, kindly and generously organized a welcome party where players, teachers and conducting students could get a chance to meet and socialize. It’s always a challenge to make a workshop like this feel inclusive and not competitive, and getting to know each other early should help to create more of an atmosphere of trust.

One of the great bonuses of this event for me is the time to talk with my colleagues and the soloists between rehearsals. Learning scores is such a lonely business, and it’s great to have a chance to talk about what we’ve learned and how we’ve learned it in the context of this repertoire and the repertoire that’s currently in our lives.

Mastering the art of accompanying is perhaps the most difficult part of a conductor’s work, so we’ve made concerto repertoire and opera a part of the workshop from day one. We’re very lucky this year that our piano soloist, Rick Rowley, is a real piano soloist, not just a pianist. He’s sufficiently in command of his own work that he can effortlessly adapt to the different conductors and the orchestra, which almost makes their lives too easy. In theory, it should be the conductor who is effortlessly able to adapt to anything the soloist wants to do. The Shostakovich 1^st Pno Concerto has a lot of tricky corners to navigate, but I think tonight’s session bore out my theory, which is that creating the right sound world and phrase structure in the second movement is the most challenging thing in the piece. Everyone got close, but I’m not sure anyone’s quite made that opening happen- it’s not an easy mood to find or show.

We’ve included more time to chat this year, and tomorrow David will lead the first of several sessions about score study. It’s easy to blur the line between score study and practicing conducting- both are important, but it’s also important to engage in those activities in the right order. If you haven’t developed a real understanding of the piece, what is it you’d be practicing showing?

We’ve got a brilliant bunch of students this year, and everyone seems to be bringing a great attitude. Part of what a week like this shows us is just how big the mountain is. We all tend to look pretty small next to the music we conduct. I hope the students don’t ever get the feeling that the faculty are looking down on them this week- we’re frankly in awe of their courage and their passion and their readiness to learn. No, we don’t look down, we simply try to show them what we’re looking up at- to lift and widen the gaze. Our job is to get them to see the whole mountain, to look up and take in the whole challenge. Being a musician is not about reaching the summit, but revealing the summit. The big breakthroughs are all about coming over a rise and getting to see how far there is to go.

Tomorrow morning begins the Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop. This is our third year, and I’ve been so busy dealing with the day-to-day administration of the program and putting out various fires that the actual workshop seems to have snuck up on me a bit. It only occurred to me the day before yesterday that now was the time to be looking forward to the workshop, as opposed to dealing with the latest logistical headache.

Therefore, I just want to take a minute to focus on what I love about the workshop and what I’m looking forward to, as opposed to the many problems we have to solve and the countless challenges we have to face.

I remember when I was a student at Aspen that the orchestra we all worked with and in told an important tale. The conductor’s orchestra was made up of about 90% conductors with the rest of the players on some kind of fellowship support. What was interesting was that there was often, but not always, quite a fall off in that 10% of non-conductor instrumentalists. Conductor’s take a lot of shit because we wave sticks in the air for a living, but most conducting students are sophisticated and accomplished performers long before they try to stand up and conduct. The fact that many can seem to play Brahms’ Violin Concerto without being able to conduct a stead 3 pattern with an orchestra playing should tell us that it’s not actually as easy as it looks to conduct.

So, I’m looking forward to a busy week of working with a group of brilliant and accomplished musical persons. We’ve got students who are stellar instrumentalists, composers, musicologists and vocalists, all of whom are coming to us having studied with other distinguished teachers. I’ve seen some great DVDs and read some awe-inspiring recommendation letters, and am really excited to meet the people behind the resumes.

Still, one of the best things about this workshop is that we all get to be humbled in the end. All of us will come away with insights into how we might have studied better or moved more helpfully. All of us will learn about all of the pieces.

I’m excited about the repertoire. Playing music is cool, but talking about it is also cool, and part of the fun of a workshop is that we the faculty and they the students get to dialogue about the music we’re working on. Conducting is a lonely life, and we often have to accept that a rehearsal is, sadly, not the time to try to explain to an orchestra what you believe about Beethoven 7. A workshop is a place not only to absorb ideas but to share them, in and out of the teaching sessions.

Tomorrow starts with discussions about posture and string bowing followed by masterclasses on Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale the Shostakovich First Piano Concerto, culminating in a welcome party. Shosty and Strav were very different men whose musical lives took them on very different journeys. These two pieces might be, in some ways, as close as they ever got to each other. Both are full of irony and references to vernacular music. Mixed meters, tracking a soloist (or two), sorting out technical challenges for the players….. should be a busy day.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

10:30 PM. Gotterdammerung begins.

We’re at the stage where we begin to look backward to the day’s highlights, such as….

Siegfried captures a guy in a bear suit

Siegfried slays a wall with tentacles (Fafner)

Alberich turns into a six-inch long stuffed toy frog

Siegfried dons a chain-mail cocktail napkin for a hat

Siegfried smashes Wotan’s spear of duct-tape and tinfoil.

Of course, there’s great singing, and tons and tons of amazing music. None of us are bored yet, although the orchestra playing in episode 3 was perhaps not as electrifying as the Bayreuth orchestra in 2 an 4, even if it was of a high standard. Siegfried (the opera) is the toughest nut to crack of the three no matter how you look at things.  

Our biggest danger so far is our lack of judgment in the consumption of junk food. After a long day of fruit and veggies, water and juice, late in Siegfried and early in Gotterdammerung we all stumbled into the dark world of Doritos, Funions and, with particularly orgiastic disregard of consequence, two large bags of Donettes. Did you know the main ingredient in a Donette is sugar, followed by “animal or vegetable fat?” Even flour is only a bit player. There is more fruit, but we’re all too bloated to process it at this point.

And now onto Siegfried. Many consider the toughest nut to crack in the cycle, and it comes at the toughest point in the day, right after we’ve all gone out for Chinese food….

For episode three we’ve turned to the Met and James Levine. After the leather and lasers from Bayreuth, the naturalistic sets and traditional costumes come as a bit of a shock. It’s easy to see how the sunglasses and mullets we’ve had so far date those productions, but then again, the unfortunate resemblance of the great James Morris as the Wanderer to Kenny Rogers circa The Gambler also tells a sad story of the state of makeup in the 1980s.

We’ve girded our loins with a fresh pot of coffee and we’re gradually adjusting to the sound of a different orchestra  and a new look on the screen. I’ve seen this DVD before, but I’m hoping the context will bring some interesting new insights….

As we got to the end of Act II of Walkure, it occurred to me that the moments of unintentional hilarity were getting much harder to find. The despair of Wotan at the loss of his free will, the burden of Brunnhilde to ensure the death of the Walsung, Sieglinde’s shame and Siegmund being told of his imminent death- these are not the stuff of comedy. Part of Wagner’s genius is in setting up such a ludicrous scenario and then making you care passionately for each of the characters (except possibly Froh, who I find to be kind of useless).

Fortunately, this staging offers us the clear alien head helmets of the Valkyries in Act III, which are simply the funniest headgear I’ve ever seen. Good old-fashioned horns would have been way more believable. It’s a little bit of much needed comic relief before the return to high tragedy.

Still, great orchestra work and mostly awesome singing…. First hint of the enormity of our task when we switched discs for Act III and realized it was going to take him an hour and thirteen minutes to put Brunhilde to sleep so we can get lunch.

Act I of Walkure is now done- brother and sister have fallen into each other’s arms in libidinous passion to the words “this sword that I now hold,” which is definitely in the top 20 best unintentional laugh lines in the Ring. All props to DB- the Bayreuth orchestra sounds absolutely first rate. It’s an entirely different standard of playing than the Liceu band, who did sound good.

Some good controversy brewing already about stagings. I’m preferring the starker, simpler style of this Walkure to the busy Rhinegold in spite of the fur-collared Marilyn Manson coats the gods wear in this one, but James prefers the grand opera approach.

So far, fatigue, both physical and musical is not an issue for any of us and we’ve only got about 14 hours to go, so we’re in good shape….

John Tomlinson’s Wotan (he sounds great, as always) is also wearing sunglasses (with one dark eye) instead of an eye-patch, but his 70s-ish pilots glasses are decidedly less hip than the Oakleys from Rhinegold. 

The curtain calls for Das Rheingold are finished, and the genius of our plan is apparent.

While a live Ring would certainly  be cooler, a DVD Ring among friends. In a laid-back setting, all present feel free to heckle or cheer as appropriate. We can rewind for great visual moments, such as the unforgettable moment when Wotan throws the ring at the giants, only to have it break on the stage when it lands (also worth buying the dvd for).

It seems like any Ring staging always needs a balance between genius and madness, between beauty and stupidity. I think that balance has been struck pretty well here in episode one, with some stunning visuals alongside some touches that would make a community theatre production of Carousel cringe for cheese factor.

We’re now having a quick coffee before moving on to Walkure with Barenboim from Bayreuth. High spirits so far. My last Walkure was the Covent Garden prom with Domingo and Terfel two yeras ago. I fear Danny and co won’t quite rise to that standard, but who knows….

The definite visual highlight of Das Rheingold is not the hydraulically-operated world tree, not the transformers-robots-in-disguise giants nor is it the Oakley sunglasses on Wotan. It’s the stuffed frog they throw in the air when Alberich changes shapes. In such a polished and expensive production, you’ve got to love the idea of throwing a two dollar stuffed animal in the air as a special effect. Seriously, it’s worth buying the DVD just for that moment…..

Alberich’s gold lame  leisure suit rocks, too.

Das Rheingold begins…A gang of happily insane musicians today embark upon a quest to view all of Wagner’s Ring on DVD in one day. We’ve procured a projector and our hosts have been baking bread since 3 AM. We’ve got fruit, coffee, juice, junk food, veggies.

Episode one is the Gran Teatre del Opera Liceu conducted by Betrand de Billy.

Insane horn writing sets the tone- an immediate span of  two octaves and a third  begins the whole cycle.

The set looks amazing….

So, you come up for air and……

Alan Gilbert has been appointed Music Director of the New York Freaking Philharmonic.

I’ve played for Alan and assisted him at the Cincinnati Symphony, and, most importantly, he seemed to dig my conducting at Aspen some years back (at least he took the time to tell me in detail how much he liked it, which was much appreciated)- obviously a man of taste and eriudition.

So- congrats Alan. Congrats NYP- they’ve hit the trifecta, by hiring someone who’s young, EXPERIENCED and good.

My apologies to readers who have been patiently waiting for some new posts here. I’m in the midst of the Oregon East Symphony’s annual summer music camp, which has proved particularly all-consuming this year.

The camp draws students from all over the Northwest, but the vast majority of students are local. We have two bands, two choirs and two orchestras, and the senior orchestra, which is the one I’m conducting, is made up largely of students who play in the OES Preparatory Orchestra.

Interestingly, this year we’ve had a huge influx of new string players, which has been great. They get the chance to come into a situation where there is a fairly cohesive group of young players in place who are used to working together, and the long-time players get the chance to play in a proper symphony orchestra as opposed to a chamber orchestra (the prep orchestra’s bread-and-butter repertoire has been Beethoven, Haydn and Schubert.).

We’ve got them doing a nice, short program of the Marriage of Figaro Overture, Glinka’s  Kamarinskya and the overture to Barber of Seville. Of course, Barber and Figaro are closely related pieces (imagine the confidence of Rossini to do Barber after Mozart’s Figaro!), and the Glinka is a wedding dance.

I do like to program for young musicians with a pedagogical agenda in mind, and this week we’re aiming for precision. Precision of articulation, precision of rhythm, precision of intonation. Some pieces live or die by how much poetry and pathos you can bring to them, but these works are more dependent on simply being brought to life with lots of energy and accuracy. I’ve asked for “barnyard articulation” from the strings may dozens of times this week. I hope that makes sense….

It’s hard to imagine a broader cross-section of students than we have here. We have a few students who are really working at the highest level and would excel in big programs, and there are also plenty of little kids for whom this is their first intense musical experience. They’re  all about as tired as I am at this point in the week. OES camp is unlike any other regular gig I do- I get to answer some amazingly basic questions here, but this is also the place I often get to see the great cosmic light go off in a lot of young musician’s heads, and where I’m also asked some amazingly deep and thoughtful musical questions. Predictably, there have been some great surprises this summer- one girl who plays in the preparatory orchestra during the year and was always most conspicuous for her quiet and forgettable nature has been kicking some rather serious instrumental butt this week. That’s one of the joys of teaching- seeing a young person become a young artist.

Tonight was the faculty recital. One of my colleagues pointed out that it was an evening of almost entirely 20^th and 21^st century music, and that even the older works were very much off the beaten path. It’s too easy to underestimate the curiosity and resourcefulness of most performers. The truth is that we love to play new works and discover new musical personalities, and audiences love coming along for the ride. I played the Prokofiev Cello Sonata- one of the closer approaches to the mainstream of the evening.  It was written for Rostropovich, and coming back to it more than 15 years after I last played it (well, maybe more like 20), I was deeply struck by how much his uniquely amazing sound and musicianship seems to have shaped the piece. I can’t speak to how it sounded, but it’s music that feels great to play- those wonderful, leaping tunes with those wide intervals seem to get the whole instrument throbbing like no other composer. I do hope I can play it again soon- fifteen years is too long! (twenty is way too long……)  

UW VIOLINIST MANOOGIAN DIES AT 71
 By Jacob Stockinger The Capital Times
 

Virtuoso violinist and longtime University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Vartan Manoogian died Thursday in Spain. He was 71.
 

Manoogian was also the director of the annual Madeleine Island Chamber Music Festival, held each summer in the Apostle Islands in northern Wisconsin on Lake Superior. He returned each summer to a festival in Spain where he taught and performed and frequently performed at festivals in Germany, Italy and Switzerland.
 

“We are shocked and devastated. This was such a surprise,” said John Schaffer, director of the UW School of Music, who has worked with Manoogian for 20 years. “Yesterday there was a pall over the whole school. Vartan was so alive and vibrant. He was such an elegant and kind man.”
 

According to Schaffer, the cause of death is still not known, although cardiac problems are suspected.
 

“Vartan was one of the most valuable members of the music faculty,” Schaffer said. “He is going to be seriously missed. I think that’s the sentiment all my colleagues feel. It’s a sudden loss, and he left such a legacy. To replace him and move on just won’t be possible. Whatever happens will have to be different.”
 

At the time of his death, Manoogian was working on a multiple-CD recording project of violin trios for students. He wrote a four-volume series of books on violin technique and created a video guide to orchestral bowing. He also recorded the complete solo sonatas and partitas of J.S. Bach, which he performed together for the first time in 2000 in Madison.
 

Manoogian was known for his devotion to both the classical repertoire and new music, and he enjoyed unusual crossover performances, such as playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with the UW Marching Band and doing improvisational performances with UW jazz saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell.
 

Manoogian was born in 1936 in Baghdad to Armenian parents, who had sought political asylum there. At age 16 he went to France to study at the National Conservatory in Paris, where he won top prizes and took master classes from composer and violinist George Enescu. He then came to America and studied under master violin teacher Ivan Galamian at the Juilliard School of Music in New York.
 

He returned to Europe, where he took a post with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra in Switzerland and then became the concertmaster of the renowned Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under famed conductor Ernest Ansermet.
 

Back in the United States, Manoogian taught at the prestigious North Carolina School of the Arts, where he also played in the Claremont String Quartet, and at Indiana University. In 1976 he won an Emmy for a performance of a Mozart violin concerto on educational television.  Many prominent composers dedicated new works to him.
 

He came to the UW-Madison in 1980, where he performed solo, and often wth other faculty members. He quickly established a reputation for teaching top-ranking students who went on to major professional music careers.
 

Manoogian is survived by his wife of 40 years, artist Brigitte Manoogian, and their son, Avedis, a pianist in Minneapolis who often performed with his father.