Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium

If it seems to the regular Vftp reader that I have lavished unprecedented coverage on last week’s CMEW concert, I apologize for any perception of favouritism that may cause. For instance, lost in the all of this was any mention of the fact that I had already begun rehearsals for the next week’s SMP performance in the final concert of the Guildford Spring Music Festival. Our programme includes one genuine rarity (Schumann’s Genoveva Overture as part of our Schumann Cycle) and two very well known favourites- the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Beethoven 5.

One could detect a certain delicious irony in the fact that I was rehearsing the piece most often listed as an over-played warhorse alongside a program of rather esoteric and obscure avant garde works from the 60’s, 90’s and 00’s. However, one man’s delicious irony might be read as another’s betrayal of principles- “playing Beethoven at the same time simply shows Woods to be a phoney who isn’t truly committed to the ideals of the revolution,” I can hear (and have heard) some saying, while others learn of this and say “you see, I knew there was something wrong with his Beethoven. Too much of that modern music kills your sensitivity, deadens your sense of phrasing, and probably turns you into a communist, and Beethoven was no communist!”

To these readers, and to some of my very, very esteemed colleagues, and whose opinions I respect, if not always agree with) who seemed to find nothing of merit whatsoever in my lengthy interview with Gordon, I offer this quote from Paul Mefano’s program note to his piece “Lignes” (1968)

“It is sometimes advisable to extend a warm welcome to one’s taboos and have a party with them.”

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A view from the podium, Nuts and bolts

A quick reminder that today, Sat Mar 22nd is the priority application deadline for the 2008 Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop. You can apply online via the RCICW website.

The RCICW is now the first conducting institute to go post free- applicants may submit their videos via webhosting services (including personal websites, YouTube, etc) or email. If you are sending a DVD, that may be postmarked by March 25th.

This year’s workshop takes place from July 21-27, 2008 in Portland, Oregon- one of the most beautiful and enjoyable cities in the country. Our faculty this year include David Hoose, Christopher Zimmerman and Kenneth Woods, director. Students also have the opportunity to work with professional soloists in concerto accompanying and operatic repertoire.

Repertoire for the Emerging Artist Program is:

Puccini- excerpts from Madame Butterfly
Ponchielli- excerpts from La Gioconda
Beethoven arr. Mahler- String Quartet in
F minor op 95
Brahms- Piano Concerto in D minor
Rick Rowley, piano
Dvorak- Serenade for Winds
Copland- Appalachian Spring (13 Instrument Version) Repertoire for the Discovery Program is:

Stravinsky- Octet for Winds Mvt I
Haydn- Symphony no. 86
Beethoven- Symphony No. 2 in D major
Mvt I (piano reduction with Rick Rowley)

Applications may be considered on a space available basis, but early applicants are given priority in evaluation.

A view from the podium

Hi everyone-

I usually eschew the autobiography here, but wanted to just put the happy word out that Samuel Miles Woods (our first) was born on Monday, the 17^th of March at 5:30 PM. His Irish  grandfather was very proud of him coming on St Patrick’s Day. 

A true conductor’s son, he seemed to happily go 2 weeks past his due date so I could finish all my concerts, and started heading into the world just a few hours after I finished Beethoven 5 on Saturday evening. I’ll always owe him for not choosing to arrive in the middle of Xenakis or Downie last week!  

Blogging may be a bit irregular or non-existent in the coming weeks, but we’ll see.

A view from the podium

I’ve decided to remove the discussion and comments from the individual segments of my interview with Gordon Downie, and to anthologize them all here in a single post. Regrettably, a few comments did not measure up to our house standards of civil discourse and have been deleted completely, but I think readers will agree that what remains still represents a spirited breadth of opinion.

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A view from the podium CMEW, Gordon Downie, Hyper-complexity, Mefano, Modernism, Open Form, serialism, xenakis

It seems a bit of a bum deal to be the first piece on a program. If I was an overture, I would have serious jealousy issues. Often, the overture ends up being the best played piece on the program, and if it is a piece like Leonore 3, it might well be the best piece on the program no matter what you put after it.

Sadly, though, overtures tend to get lost on the audience- everyone is still gabbing away about fining a parking place, or realizing they shouldn’t have guzzled that wine so fast before the downbeat. Ten minutes of music really is rarely enough to get the audience fully engaged, so often you finish the overture thinking “shit, they played that well!” and the audience just gives you a bit of polite applause before they finish their conversations.

On the other hand, not matter how the symphony goes, you’ll always get a nice cheer, because everyone is glad it is over and celebrating the fact that they can race to the parking lot and get home.

This system is fine if you are doing Leonore 3, because everyone knows it is a masterpiece, and its reputation won’t suffer simply because nobody remembers that it was first on the concert when you finish with a Bruckner symphony.

However, when you’re doing something like the Schumann Genoveva Overture, it seems a bit unfair to stick it at the top of the show. Nobody in the audience will have ever heard it, and by the end of B5, they’ll have forgotten we played it. Next time, I’m doing Beethoven 5 first, then after the intermission, Sibelius Violin Concerto and finish with the Schumann. It seems much more fair and reasonable. In fact, maybe I’ll do all my concerts backwards from now on.

On the other hand, if it all goes brilliantly with Beethoven tonight, why not do the Schumann again as an encore????? BTW- I’d forgotten just how hot the Electric is on stage. I suppose it is one of those things you have to block out or you would never come back again. Anyway, it makes it twice as tiring- I’m already shattered and the concert hasn’t started. Thank heavens for espresso bars in the theatre.

A view from the podium

We’re on our break. Not many surprises so far, and most of the surprises are for the good.  B5 is an especially hard piece to rehearse on the day of a concert, because it is very hard to “mark” it at all, especially for the strings- you often really have to go all out or it doesn’t gell. I tried to exhude chilled feelings whenever I could to encourage everyone to find places they could take it easy, but I’m not sure I was successful. Given the modern economics of British orchestras, rehearsals on the day are a neccessary evil, and we just have to be tough and in shape enough to cope with them.

The newcomers all sound good. I’ve written recently about trombone sections and when to use or not use alto trombone. B5 is a no brainer for alto because of the high f (the highest note for trombone in a symphony, I’m told), but the rest of the section is a little trickier to organize these days. Our guys sound great, but a modern tenor is so much heavier and beefier than even a modern alto that balance within the section is a challenge- there’s a tendency for the two voices not to blend and connect in the homophonic writing.

Next up is Genoveva, which is the main reason I don’t want to have to call in a sub. Every conductor knows B5 and Sibelius Vn Con, but not many want to sight read an odd bit of Schumann. However, just talked to Sue and she’s fine, so onward and upward. KW

KW

A view from the podium

Well- I’m here, live-blogging the final concert of the Guildford Spring Music Festival.

It wasn’t by any means a foregone conclusion that I would be here- Suzanne is 11 days past her due date, and looked ready to burst at any moment this morning (more worrying she looks and feels different than she has). It’s a strange feeling being 140 miles from home today of all days, but I’m prepared to make a dash home should she go into labor. Of course, 20 miles from London is a good place to be if you need a professional conductor on 2 hours notice, but I’m still feeling twitchy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.We’re starting in a few minutes with  the Beethoven. It always takes about 10 minutes for the orchestra to adjust to the change from the live, loud room we rehearse in to the rather dead Electric, and the 1^st mvt of the Beethoven is so punishingly difficult for any orchestra under any circumstance (harder than Rite of Spring by miles) that it makes a poor choice for “getting used” to anything, but we’ll manage.

The symphony is a wee bit over 30 minutes long, and I have one hour to rehearse it at the most, which is (or should be) plenty, but since some of the players only come today (the trumpets, trombones and timps) we have to cover everything- topping and tailing is not really an option. This may sound insane to American readers, but it’s quite common here in the UK for budget reasons, if far from ideal. Still, as long as we have the A-team, it works fine. The only time it has been a disaster was in October, when we didn’t get our usual trumpet section and the lads that showed up were unprepared, spacey and late to rehearsal and late after the break (I was NOT impressed). The principal that day obviously hadn’t twigged that there were major solos in the Poulenc we were doing, and was unable to satisfactorily pull those together between 3 pm and 8 pm, although I don’t think the audience noticed the faking.

Fortunately, today we have the A-team.

A view from the podium

For those of you who think that I am just picking on living composers when I stress the importance of easily readable materials (pace Kyle Gann), I thought I would pass along to Vftp readers our experience tonight with Schumann’s Genoveva Overture, which we are playing tomorrow as part of our ongoing Schumann cycle with the SMP.

Genoveva is a beautiful opera, and the overture is stunning and  effective, but very, very rarely played. As far as I know, nobody in the SMP has played it before. Why might such a wonderful piece sit on the shelf decade after decade? Well, Schumann will always sound modern and so his music will never be as widely known as Beethoven, but this piece has another factor working against it- lousy parts for the players. Granted, we’re using a very old set, and the paper is rather yellowed, but the typesetting/engraving is really not good- bars seem squashed in, dynamics are hard to see, and it just doesn’t come off the page very easily.

At least my living friends can fix (or force their publishers to fix) problems with their parts, rather than leaving musicians 200 years later to struggle with illegible music.

Good news for friends and fans who wrote today in despair about tickets for tomorrow- no,  sadly I still don’t have any comps, but the hall has taken out the stage extension (it is going to be awfully cozy on stage), so they have about 30 more tickets available . If you still want to go, call the Electric Theatre box office first thing.

If all goes according to plan tomorrow, I’ll try to live-blog the concert tomorrow from the Electric. I’m quite psyched about this one- we’ll try to make it cosmic.

A view from the podium

Time limits are mitigating against me writing too much this week about B5 preparations with the Surrey Mozart Players, but I am getting excited about the concert and hoping that I’m able to be there for it (more on that next week). There is good news for the orchestra- the concert is sold out (that’s 3 sold-out programs in a row for the SMP), and the rest of the Guildford Spring Music Festival, of which this will be the final concert, has been going really well, so we should have an electric atmosphere.

Earlier this week, I wrote a bit about the band and the edition we’re using. Today, I’ll try to share a few thoughts about how we’re deploying our resources in this performance.

As it happens, I’ll be doing something new (for me) on Saturday, which is to take the controversial repeat of the entire Scherzo and Trio. For most of the last 100 + years, conductors have done the movement as it is published in the old edition, which is in ABA’ form. In the 1970’s musicologist Peter Gulke pointed out that in its original form, Beethoven had written the it in ABABA form (the autograph manuscript is clearly in ABABA)- repeating all the way back to the beginning after the Trio and playing the entire first two sections again before going on to the ghostly return. I suppose my first reaction on hearing a conductor take this extra repeat was a bit of shock- I figured he was being a bit bloody minded and was reading too many articles. Working in the past with Del Mar’s edition also reinforced this conclusion- Del Mar states unequivocally that Beethoven firmly rejected the repeat in later versions of the piece.

However, after the last performance I did with LCO in January, I began to doubt myself and Del Mar. Read more…

A view from the podium

I’m sorry not to have written sooner about my weekend with the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales, something I can only attribute to the combined effects of being very tired from it and very busy since it. In the end, I loved every piece on we did- it was a great and diverse program.

I came away from the weekend with three main thoughts I wanted to share.

First, I have to loudly shout my admiration for the tremendous virtuosity, dedication and goodwill of the musicians. To put together such a difficult program to such a high standard in two days is almost beyond reckoning. To perform it on Sunday night after two 3-hour rehearsals already that day is simply awe-inspiring. I hate to say it, but it’s not something that many elite American instrumentalists would do or allow, which is fair enough, but without CMEW’s  players being so willing to work unreasonably hard, this project would have never happened.

Second, I wanted to pass on to you a conversation I had with Paul Mefano after the concert. When I told him we were doing Interferences on one rehearsal, I think he nearly passed out. However, after the concert, he seemed quite thrilled with the performance, which featured some stunning solo playing from everyone in the ensemble. He told me quite bluntly that “40 years ago, this music was impossible to perform. Everyone struggled with it, no matter how many rehearsals we had, whether it was Bruno Maderna or Michael Gielen or Gibert Amy.” When he recorded the work with his Ensemble 2eM a few years ago, they had several rehearsals before the sessions, even though he had done it with them a number of times. I pass this on, not by means of self congratulating myself for getting through it on one rehearsal, but to remind us all not to be too quick to say “this piece is impossible.” Mefano’s interpreters found Fragment V of Interferences so impossible 40 years ago that he abandoned the idea of “flexible time fields” as “too difficult to implement.” Today’s instrumentalists can give a broadcast worthy performance after one rehearsal and a sound-check.  When a performer complains about an unplayable passage in a brand new piece, perhaps we should ask if it will still be so in 40 years?

Third, and finally, although all four pieces are formidable, I would say that the only problems the players had  with them in the end had to do not with what was written (how difficult, how tiring, how treacherous), but with how it was written down. I don’t to end with a rant, but musicians like the CMEW players will go to the matt for a composer, they will put in a super-human effort, and they can play anything they can read. The parts all four pieces posed challenges of legibility and use-ability, in some cases in spite of hard efforts and good intentions from the composer or publisher. I hate to sound like a broken record, but I’ll put my “Tips” forward again. Sibelius and Finale are wonderful tools, but do you really have the eye of a professional typesetter to make sure your parts are easily read? It may look good to you, but you know what is on the page, so you may not be really reading it as a player would be. I know a professional copyist is expensive, and good ones are hard to find…..

Publishers need to do a better job- the Mefano parts were in horrendous condition. In a piece where the players have to look up more often than usual and see finger signs instead of beats (which are much harder to detect), the musicians need parts that are totally EASY to read. The piece is wonderful, but it needs a critical performing edition. My Xenakis score was completely unreadable- I had it blown up to 3x its size and still couldn’t read parts of it.   One of my colleagues is doing Corigliano 1 this week, and the parts for that, which has been played hundreds of times now, are a nightmare. Ledger lines that aren’t evenly spaced that lead to notes that are higher being written lower on the page than the lower pitches which precede them! Also, if it can be written in 4/4, don’t write it in 4/16 unless you really have to- you’re just asking for counting mistakes (as the composer in question discovered this week). That’s not to say one should ever sacrifice a musical idea to be pragmatic, but sometimes pragmatism can be an ally of the musical idea as well…

Anyway, it was humbling and rewarding.

A view from the podium

After 100 years with pretty much only one option, conductors now have many choices of what edition of the Beethoven symphonies to use. So what parts have my colleageus been looking at, and what scores have I been? Why?

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A view from the podium, Nuts and bolts

I can’t help but smile at the fact that less than 24 hours after finishing my concert with the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales, I was rehearsing Beethoven 5 and the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Surrey Mozart Players.

Preparing the ultimate “warhorse” piece at the same time as a preparing four very little known and “difficult” pieces of modern music can’t help but underline the qualities that music of our time and music of the past share, sometimes in spite of the wishes of the composers!

Anyway, this is my second Beethoven 5 since Christmas, and I thought the hard core conducting fanatics might be interested to know how the two projects stack up. First, we compare the two orchestras and look at assumptions about the “right” orchestra for Beethoven….

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A view from the podium, Nuts and bolts

 In Part Four, Gordon and I turned to a rather well-worn topic, the thorny question of why visual modernism has generally been so much more popular than musical modernism. I have my own ideas about why this is the case, but I was curious to get Gordon’s. You may find it odd that I have ended the interview with a response of mine to a question of Gordon’s, but this is where we got to, and seems like an honest reflection of the unfinishable nature of these conversations, so, like a good performance of the Art of the Fugue (hah!- there’s an unearned comparison) we will simply stop where the author lay down his pen….  KW: I think a lot of people are more comfortable with the visual language of Modernism than the musical one. I think this is partly because it is easy for someone to see the beauty in the simplicity of a glass, steel and concrete box well executed. It is easy for the uninitiated to see the complexity in modern music, but is there a simplicity in this music as well?

I think a lot of people are more comfortable with the visual language of Modernism than the musical one. I think this is partly because it is easy for someone to see the beauty in the simplicity of a glass, steel and concrete box well executed. It is easy for the uninitiated to see the complexity in modern music, but is there a simplicity in this music as well? Read more…

A view from the podium

In part three, we stepped back from a discussion of Downie’s music and I asked Gordon directly whether monderist music is getting a little old-fashioned after 60 years… 

KW: We’ve spoken before about your music’s connection to the ideas and practices of the high modernist movement of the 50’s and 60’s. I’ve also heard you state that modernism is a programme, not a style. The notion of progress seems key to the modernist programme, but there is a perception that the programme itself has been fixed for some time and is therefore reactionary rather than progressive. Fifty years on, how has the modernist programme changed? Are there assumptions or axioms of the programme that have been challenged, changed or reformed in this time?
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A view from the podium

I’ve been putting a lot of work in on Paul Mefano’s Intererences in the run up to this weekends sessions. Because of the open form techniques Gordon described in Part II of our interview, the notation is about as thorny as it gets. The challenge for the conductor is in managing the intersection of events that float in time and those that need to intersect at particularly moments.

The piece is in 3 “Fragments” (numbered IV, V and VI because the piece was originally much longer). It is the middle fragment which poses the most challenges for the conductor…

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A view from the podium, Interactive Program Notes, Nuts and bolts