Critical Praise

“The true stars of the evening followed intermission. Kenneth Woods was
confident on the podium, clear and economical in his gestures and knew when
to actively lead and when to allow his players freedom to phrase. He delivered
a Strauss “Till Eulenspiegel” brimming with personality, affection and freshly
imagined drama. Every moment was alive and engaging, and the riotous
complexity of the score was rendered with admirable coherence.” An “up-and-
coming conductor”
The Washington Post, July 2 2001

Kenneth Woods was conductor of the fine musicians comprising the BBC
National Orchestra of Wales. Solo woodwind fragments against bell-like high
strings set the scene, depth of orchestral sound quality and refined brass pre-
eminent as the performance progressed. These attributes were also evident in
Kodaly’s Hungarian Dances of Galanta alongside subtle integral changes of
tempi and tonality, and solo clarinet episodes. In Copland’s Appalachian
Spring, idiomatic of the vast expanses of Pennsylvania, sparsely spaced
strings gradually developed into a rich combination of exciting harmonies ….
Patricia Rozario was the splendid soprano soloist in Canteloube’s Chants
d’Auvergne. These French songs were sung with immense beauty and given
sensitive accompaniments. ”
Malvern Gazette, Ledbury Reader, thisis.co.uk, July 2 2004

“A classic example of Charles Ives – his Symphony No 3 “The Camp Meeting”
(1904) – deserved the attention Ken Woods gave to balance and ensemble
tuning, allowing all the snippets of melody to come out of the “organized
chaos” that Ives was a master of. Ken Woods’ interpretation of Barber’s
Adagio for Strings was powerful, almost aggressive. A far cry from the bland
“Classic FM” style that this piece so often attracts. The work was underpinned
by some perfect intonation in the ‘cellos and bass section…”
Swann Reviews.co.uk, July 5, 2005

Concert Calendar

April 18, 2009
Oregon East Symphony
Beethoven- Symphony no. 2 in D major
Mozart- Requiem
Esther Mae Moses- soprano, Emily Muller Calendar- mezzo, Nick
Fichter- tenor, Steve Muller- bass

May 9-16 2009
Ischia Chamber Music Festival

Wednesday May 14, 2009
Ischia Festival Orchestra
Elgar- Serendade for Strings
Mozart- Sinfonia Concertane for Violin and Viola
Byron Wallis- violin, David Yang- viola

Thursday May 15, 2009
Trio Concert with Ensemble Epomeo-
Klein- String Trio
Krasa- Tanec for String Trio
Hovhanness- String Trio
Beethoven- Trio in C minor op 9 no. 3
Kodaly- Intermezzo for String Trio
Mozart- Clarinet Quintet

May 24, 2009
Cheltenham Symphony Orchestra
Schumann- Symphony no. 2
Tchaikovsky- Rococo Variations for Cello and Orchestra
Vaughan-Williams- Symphony no. 5

June 1-7, 2009
Ensemble Epomeo
East Coast Tour
Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, Boston
Klein- String Trio
Krasa- String Trio
Hovaness- String Trio
Beethoven- Trio in C minor
Schinittke- String Trio

NEW YORK
Wednesday, June 3 ,2009
Lunchtime broadcast

Well, summer is officially over, as I am officially back in rehearsals beginning tomorrow.

It’s been some weeks since I’ve been on the podium- my last major concert was Bruckner 4 on June 30, and then the OES Camp Honors Orchestra in late July. I’ve not conducted in the month of August- hooray!

I’m glad to be getting back in there, as I’m a happier person when I’m conducting, and certainly a saner one. On the other hand, I could never have believed that the summer would go by so quickly.

I’m often asked by musicians what I do when I’m not rehearsing- it’s the sort of question you expect from audience members, but I get it all the time from players. The fact is, unless I make a point of going away and leaving scores and computers at home, I always have more to do than I could possibly get done.

One of my goals this summer was to get to know the Beethoven Piano Sonatas a bit better. I’ve played or conducted so much of Beethoven’s other major works- I’ve conducted almost all the major orchestral works except for Missa Solemnis, and played all the chamber music with cello that I know of, and even coached several of the violin and piano sonatas. On the other hand, I’ve only known the Piano Sonatas as a fan. I started out in June by putting all of Andras Schif’s wonderful lecture-recital series on my iPod (with apologies to A.C. Douglas- the iPod is a wonderful thing used wisely) and listening to them during my many long commutes. I’ve tried to then get to the piano to play through them as much as possible. I’m a lousy pianist, but one of the good things about being a human being is that you can, if you want, bang through Beethoven sonatas at the piano. A real pianist is a rare thing, but anyone can use a piano as a tool, and you don’t have to work around anyone’s schedule or budget. However, summer’s over and I’ve only achieved a tiny fraction of what I’d hoped for.

Nonetheless, for me, summer projects are a bit like New Year’s resolutions for normal people- a goal you kind of know you’ll never quite live up to. Next year’s summer project is to write an orchestra piece. Yikes….

The fact is, there’s always more to do in the summer than one remembers during the year. The conducting workshop involves tons of planning and administrative duties for  me, and I have to learn all the music well enough to hopefully stay ahead of my students. Then, in the late summer it’s time to really get ready for the coming year. I don’t bow every piece I conduct- it depends on the orchestra and the piece, but I do bow quite a few, and just in the last week I’ve mailed bowings to about ten pieces, which is a huge, huge amount of time-consuming work. (I’ve been meaning to do an entire blog post on bowings, as I think that’s exactly the sort of really exciting stuff Vftp readers are looking for). Along with that, people want blurbs to put on websites and in press releases, new bios, new photos and input on part assignments and auditions. Rehearsal schedules are being set, and that is very time consuming work, as you have to work through each piece in terms of difficulty and orchestration, then factor in problems with player availability, venues, soloists and even composers.

Oh yes, I also have to learn all the music I’m conducting this year….

Well, the clock’s run out, so now I can again get in front of 100 people and wave my arms about for a few months. Tomorrow starts rehearsals for what should be a fun program- Pictures at an Exhibition, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta and Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. All fun and challenging stuff. I’d be curious to hear from readers what you think the best piece on that program is- obviously they’re all pretty great. Of course, nobody took the bait on my question about 10 pieces you should not smile while performing. I think I’d surprise many of you with what I think is the real super-masterpiece ,though…

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

One of the nice things about having done a fair bit of teaching is hearing what your former students are doing, and this morning I had an update on one of my cello students from my days teaching at Eastern Oregon University.

Jacie was already a prize-winning fiddler when she came to me. She’d been studying classical violin alongside fiddle, but decided, rather late in the game, to switch to cello. She turned out to be a very apt cello student, and within a year had auditioned successfully to be a cello major- no mean feat.

She’s got a new band called Celtic Air- their website has lots of great, informal video clips and audio samples. It was nice to hear her play again- I think the classical training was worth it in the end, as she can actually play off the string and in the lower half of the bow, two things that are rather rare in the fiddle world…. J (sorry, I have a running gag going with another fiddle player, wherein I say something snotty about fiddlers only playing in first position or the upper half of the bow, and he makes fun of classical musicians lousy ears).

Eastern Oregon, from Heppner moving East all the way to the state border is a fiddling Mecca, and I’m probably the only conductor I know who’s conducted Shostakovich symphonies with as many as three or four future national and world champion fiddlers in the group at any given time. I had one student at Eastern who played in the orchestra who refused to learn to read music, but could memorize the 2^nd violin part to a Tchaikovsky symphony on two hearings. Funnily enough, his fiddle mentor asked him to write down his body of work for posterity, so he ended up becoming a very fluent reader and notator of music in the end.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

I’m tempted to start a new column here called “things that people state as facts but that aren’t.”

Of course, I won’t because I don’t want this blog to be too much of a downer.

Nevertheless, every once in a while, I hear or read a comment about music that I think needs challenging.

The latest of these came as I was watching a TV broadcast and the commentator said during the applause “of course, the orchestra works without a conductor, which means they listen harder to each other and you can hear the results of that listening.”

Now, it would be a little self-serving as conductor to write an entire blog post explaining that a conductor’s job is to help the musicians to listen harder and better, and that, in many ways, a good and wise conductor makes it possible for the musicians to hear each other better than they possibly could on their own. I could explain that one of the advantages of being the one person onstage not playing an instrument means that you can hear the whole, not just in relation to your own playing. I could explain that the conductor can then use eyes and hands to begin to balance things, creating an environment where the players ears are more focused on the whole than they might be if everyone is hearing only in relation to their own playing. The conductor can give a bit of objectivity, and can also help to direct listening like a good chamber music coach.

All that is true, but at the end of the day it is just as false to say that “of course the orchestra works with a conductor, which means they listen harder to each other, and you can hear the results of that listening.”

I’ve often played in conductor-less orchestras, and always enjoy it, but more as a pleasant exercise and change of pace. There are real limitations to that way of working, but it does also give the orchestra a chance to listen in a different way and to take more ownership of a performance, and the lack of ownership that players often feel working with a conductor is a huge, huge problem for orchestra musicians (and the audience!).

The problem with both statements is that they are symptomatic of a larger fallacy, which is that there is a foolproof way to make music. I call this the “magic formula” mentality.

People love the magic formula mentality. In fact, in our day and age, it has become, far and away, the dominant paradigm in the music world. Here are some popular musical magic formulas….

“Always do the metronome markings in Beethoven”

“Classical and baroque music sounds better on period instruments”

“Mozart should always be played by small orchestras”

“Old school interpreters of classical repertoire understood the music less well than we do”

I’d contend that one needs to study Beethoven’s metronome markings to understand his thinking behind them, what they tell you about phrasing and bowing and style and also to know his tendencies. You can’t just do them all, because some of them are wrong (probably errors of transcription), and you can’t just go by the cliché that his metronome was too fast, because some tempi are slower than most musicians find comfortable.

I’ve heard plenty of ghastly and dull performances of classical and baroque repertoire on period instruments, and plenty of great ones on “modern” instruments. No less credible an early music expert than Anner Bylsma recorded the Bach cello suites on a modern cello (that is a Strad set up in the modern way) with a modern bow, because he thought it was the best and most expressive instrument he had found for that music.

Mozart actually was always looking for bigger orchestras for his orchestral works (as was Beethoven), and was thrilled when he went to Paris for the premiere of his 31^st Symphony and had an enormous orchestra at his disposal. Mozart wrote with the knowledge that he was unlikely to have orchestras as large as he would have liked playing his music, which means the conductor has to think hard about balancing what Mozart wanted with what expected and had already compensated for.

One of the beauties of being a performer is that there is always something new to discover in old music, but your new discovery does not mean that a previous performer necessarily understood the music less well, only differently. There’s no such thing as progress in performance any more than there is progress in composition.

No, there is no magic formula that guarantees a great performance. Even hard work doesn’t count. Even talent. You can hire the trendiest 25 year-old or the wisest grand-old-man, you can rehearse for months or play in the best hall. In the end, a performance is only is good as it is. The only real magic formula is to do a good job. That means the critic has a more difficult task, which is not to see if the performer is using all the trendiest magic formulae currently on the market, but to actually assess the quality of the performance on its own merits. Someone can be doing all the trendy stuff and still not giving a good performance, while another performer might seem terribly out of touch with all that’s in yet give you chills.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods