Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

Friday’s SMP rehearsal was quite encouraging, especially the contributions of our soloists, Oliver Heath and Gary Pomeroy from the Heath Quartet. What a treat to work on the piece with two good musicians who know each other’s playing well and understand the style intimately.

I was also pleased with our progress on the Schumann and Piston, and with the orchestra’s reactions to both pieces. By the end of the night, it seemed as if the Piston was becoming a hit with many of the musicians, which was both a relief and a delight.

After a long drive home I awoke on concert Saturday very tired already, but in a hopeful frame of mind- I was feeling confident about the soloists, confident about the orchestra’s preparation and excited about the prospect of the concert. It’s at times like this where you almost catch yourself saying “after all, what could go wrong.”

On my way to the sound check/dress rehearsal I stopped at Marks and Spencer to buy a bit of lunch, which I took with me to the car. While driving down the A 329, I dipped into my bag and discovered I’d ended up with the wrong sandwich. Instead of the chicken variety I’d intended to buy, I was confronted with a “crayfish, rocket and lemon cream cheese” wrap, or something of that ilk. “What the hell,” I thought, “I like crayfish, perhaps they’re good on sandwiches too…”

Starved, and fast approaching Guildford, I took a nice big bite and thought “ick. This is the worst sandwich I’ve ever eaten.”

Little did I know.

About ten minutes later, I felt a strange abdominal gurgle, and moments later knew with a horrible certainty that I had not only grabbed the wrong sandwich, I had grabbed “THE WRONG SANDWICH.”

I’ll spare delicate readers any hint of the horrors experienced between Bracknell and Guildford. I do remember sitting in my dressing room thinking that I had been more seriously ill before a concert (I got up from a hospital bed in La Grande to do a kiddie concert once, which, in retrospect, was stupid), but that I couldn’t remember feeling more miserable. I started downstairs at 2:28 and the orchestra was already tuning- for once everyone was better than on time and raring to go….

Rehearsing when queasy is a strange feeling- things either look very far away or very near. Sally came to give me a message just before we started and it seemed as though she was right at my nose and I needed reading glasses to make out her expression- I was struck by just how big the faces of everyone on the first desks looked, but the horns seemed like they were across a large parking lot. I just thought- if I can keep my balance, we’ll manage. Whatever you do, don’t fall over.

No matter what happens- act normal. That’s my motto…

Anyway, we made a start- Mozart worked his magic and I gradually started to feel a bit more human. By the break I felt dehydrated and wobbly, but was no longer at death’s door, and by the end of the rehearsal I had improved to just feeling lousy.

I had decided to keep this all to myself, as nobody needed any extra worries with such a challenging program. I couldn’t help wondering, however, if anyone was sitting in the rehearsal thinking “is it just me, or is Ken decidedly green today?” Perhaps my every day pasty skin tone had them fooled. By the end of the afternoon, I was mostly aware of the fact that there was absolutely nothing of any kind in any part of my digestive system, so I braved a light dinner before the concert. No crayfish, though.

The concert was rewarding- I enjoyed the Piston on several levels. I thought the orchestra really tore into it, and I felt like my take on it was much simpler, less fussy and more direct than the last time I did it. What a gem of a piece. Ollie and Gary played beautifully and earned a home-town-hero’s reception from the almost-capacity audience. I hope the crowd knew how lucky they were not to be stuck with a 90 year old Russian violist with a wobbly vibrato and a 34 year old performance practice fascist  with strange ideas about tuning/severe problems with hearing, or something like that.

By the way- here’s something for young musicians to remember (well, all musicians). You can’t get the right tempo without the right sound, and you can’t get the right sound without the right tempo. Yes, you can play with a bad sound at any speed, but when the piece fizzes along, you’ve got a much better chance of making it all work.

We tried something a little crazy with the Schumann- I augmented the usual rap from stage with a few musical examples played by the orchestra, just focusing on the use of quotation in the piece, which is something a few audience members had asked for in the past. Everyone was enthusiastic about it to my face, but we’ll wait for the unfiltered feedback to make its way to the committee before I try it again. Just because someone tells you they loved something doesn’t mean they did.

The orchestra played their hearts out on the Schumann. I’d really worked and struggled with them all week to find the right sound for the opening of the piece, which is by far the hardest part of the symphony. After possibly too much hand-wringing on my part, it was lovely, and set the stage for a fine run through. What a work!

The Electric is a mixed venue- lovely amenities, a good staff and it always seems to be full. However, yesterday was not the ideal time to brave a concert in indescribable heat on stage. I was already so dehydrated that I really felt rough at the end of the show in spite of guzzling water through the intermission.

It’s also a difficult acoustic- we had a great brass team last night, and they played with a lot of control and sensitivity, but a piece like the Schumann needs room for the sound to move around. That opening in particular needs space.

I’m off in five hours to Heathrow and then Texas. We’ll get to Round Top Tuesday morning, and I start rehearsals at 2 PM Tuesday afternoon. I hope the food is still as good as it was back in the day….

Number 104 in D Major, Haydn’s “London Symphony” is the last of Haydn’s “London” symphonies….

I have time for just a few quick thoughts before I head off to Chobham for one last SMP rehearsal before tomorrow night’s concert.

Surrey Mozart Players
Saturday, June 28, 2008
7:30 PM
Electric Theatre
Piston- Sinfonietta
Mozart- Sinfonia Concertante
Oliver Heath- violin, Gary Pomeroy- viola

The first thought is a reminder to local listeners to get your tickets today if you possibly can, as the concert was close to sold out on Wednesday, in spite of the fact that we’re doing a work by Walter Piston (hopefully it is partially because of the fact that we’re doing a work by Walter Piston, as it is an amazing piece).

I voiced concerns here on Wednesday about cycles in general, and mentioned that it felt like the first manifestations of cycle-phobia were appearing in this rehearsal sequence. I needn’t have worried- Bobby (Bobby Schumann) has seen us through. The 2^nd Symphony has proved to be an irresistible force. All 4 of the symphonies are great, but the 2^nd is the greatest. Much as it might be nice to finish the cycle with the best piece, maybe it is good to put such a miraculous piece in the middle to lift us all on to the final stages of the cycle. When one of our bassoonists asked me “are all his symphonies this good” on Wednesday, all I could say is that all his symphonies are pretty damn good, but……

I asked my colleague in the orchestra what she disliked about rehearsing Schumann and we had a good chat. To my delight, she said she was loving rehearsing this piece and that it was just the scrubando writing in the 3^rd she found exhausting.

One can’t rehearse Schumann’s orchestral music without recalling all the many clichés about his problems as an orchestrator. To me, Schumann has one of the great ears for color of any composer. Think of the brass writing in the 4^th movement of the 3^rd symphony, or the slow movement of the cello concerto where the soloist and the principal cellist of the orchestra link hands for one of the most miraculously beautiful passages in any piece.

Where Schumann is most often faulted is in the area of balance, but poor orchestral balance is not a composer’s fault but a conductor’s, especially in music of this period. Symphonies from Haydn to Brahms were expected by their authors to be played by orchestras ranging in size from 30 to 110 players. Any of these composers would have expected a good conductor to make adjustments- Beethoven himself used alternations of full and reduced string sections in performances of his symphonies with large orchestras, but not with small groups where everyone played all the time. Any 18^th or 19^th century composer would have doubled the woodwinds, and in some cases even the brass for a performance with a huge string section, but might have reduced the wind dynamics for performances with a small one.

If you hear a Schumann symphony in a 3000 seat modern hall, you are already hearing something Schumann would not have planned for- halls in his day were much smaller than that. It’s up to a conductor to decide the best balance of forces for that space- if you get the right size band on stage, you can make fewer adjustments throughout a piece.

I don’t think of adjusting dynamics within a texture (such as having the brass release a long chord after an attack, or having the first violins play a sustained high note softer so that an inner voice can come out) as making changes- Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann or Mendelssohn would have all expected the performer to do that, as they wrote what they expected the audience hear, not what they expected the players to do, unlike Mahler, who tells the players what to do in order for the audience to hear what he wanted them to. Having 4 oboes play an ff passage instead of 2 is not re-orchestration, nor is changing a string accompaniment of a wind solo from mf to mp in a performance with a huge string section (or, even only using half the section).

Beyond that, I’ve never been tempted to change a bar of Schumann’s orchestration- his ear for color is too imaginative and inspired, and it has just never been necessary. Even with a passage that seems impossible for balance, the price of taking shortcuts is always high. In the last movement of Schu2 there is a passage at bar 134 where the horns and bassoons alternate bars of triplets in a quite noisy texture. The horns are easily heard, the bassoons usually lost- they’re softer by nature than the modern horn and in a weaker register. I just heard a fine recording where the conductor had brought in 2 extra horn players and given the bassoon part to them to solve the problem, but he created bigger problems than he solved. The triplets became quite overbearing, and the lack of variety in the color was clearly un-Schumannian. He should have hired two extra bassoons to double there and changed them to ff and the horns to mf- that is the adjustment Schumann would have expected, and therefore NOT a change…

Finally- we’re rehearsing Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola tonight, which I just conducted last week with the LCO. It is very unlike me to do this piece 2 times in such close succession, as I try to avoid it. Yes, it is beautiful, especially the slow movement, but it seems one of those pieces that is cursed. Most performances I hear have some HUGE indulgences, flaws and fiascos that you don’t tend to hear in other Mozart concertos.

First, more often than not, the soloists are poorly matched or not matched at all. Think of all those performances by an orchestra’s concertmaster and principal violist that simply hammer home the fact that they were born in different centuries, studied on different continents and don’t like each other. Then there is the “reward for good behavior” soloist pairing- when 2 members of the local youth orchestra get to do it before they head off to college where they would have learned how to play Mozart. Then there is the “it’s really a viola concerto” performance- the violist gets so over-excited that they become a little obsessive about the piece and plays insanely loud, while the violinist, flush with 5 concertos of his own, comes in unprepared and undermotivated, skidding all over the string and playing horrible out of tune. This week, we’re doing it with 2 members of the Heath Quartet, which should be a good match.

Then there are the horrible traditions and performance clichés that have been piled on this poor work, ones that have long since been eradicated from most of the other Mozart concerti. All those annoying, un-Mozartian tempo changes in the first movement…. Yuck!

And then there is the poor slow movement- one of the great ones in the literature. It’s just Andante, which, as we all know, doesn’t mean slow, it means walking. Piu andante in Mozart means go faster!

I once got in terrible trouble over a Mozart Andante. I was doing one of the flute concerti, and the soloist’s teacher gave me the video of Galway playing it with the Mostly Mozart orchestra to study. Aside from the heavenly flute playing, it was pretty dire, and the slow movement was beyond funereal. I was sure he didn’t mean me to copy that tempo. We got to the rehearsal and I started the movement at a normal-ish Andante clip and the teacher barked from the hall that it was too fast. In my best nice-guy voice, I said something like “but it is Andante and not Adagio…” Just that, nothing more…The next morning he called my boss and yelled for 20 minutes about my arrogant attitude. My boss then pulled me in and asked me point blank “so how slow did he want you to go?” I played him the tape and he warned me to be more diplomatic in future…

My revenge came about a year later when Emmanuel Pahud did the same piece in town, with a lovely flowing Andante. Well, he’d become the flutist of the day, surpassing Galway by this point, and the next I’d heard the same voice was telling other conductors- “it’s too slow, Andante and not Adagio….” Just goes to say that who says a thing means more than what gets said.

This scene took place on the steps of a festival concert hall in the US one summer, where an orchestra had just been rehearsing Haydn’s Symphony no. 82…..

“You know, I’m actually enjoying this piece.”
“Yeah, me too. I kind of expected it to be boring ‘cause its Haydn, but it’s really fun to play and quite unpredictable.”

“You know, I think it’s called “The Bear” or “The Bull,” or something like that.”

”The Bear.. That makes sense. You know, I did think it was pretty good for a Haydn symphony.”

“Cycle,” I mean….

I’ve noticed lately that any kind of cycle of works by a single composer is bound to unleash bellyaching from one direction or another.

When they’re well played, I love cycles. I like to experience a composer’s evolution through a series of performances.

Not everyone does, though. I remember a one-concert cycle some of my teachers gave at the UW in the early 90s. It as a performance of Beethoven’s 3 string trios from opus 9 on a single concert. I thought is was fantastic (I’d seen the same thing done with the opus 59 quartets.).

However, the afternoon of that concert, I remember running into another faculty member. I asked if they were going that night and she said “oh god no. What a horrible program. Concerts like that embody everything that people, including me, hate about classical music! I can’t imagine anything more boring.”

Yikes….

We talked a few minutes, and it quickly became clear that what she really didn’t like was the poster saying “Beethoven- Three String Trios, opus 9….” Had they done those same three trios and called it “Beethoven Rocks the Freakin’ House! Hell Yeah!” she would have approved. Anyway, she missed a damn fine concert.

You see, for many people, the key to enjoying a cycle is to not know they are hearing one. We’re finishing a Beethoven cycle this coming season in Pendleton (that’s all of the symphonies and major overtures- we still have the Triple Concerto and the 1^st Piano Concerto to do). Throughout that long project, I’ve heard nobody speak of “Beethoven fatigue” or the “unending” Beethoven cycle.

However, between the OES’s first and second instalments of the Mahler Cycle (that is, having played exactly one work of Mahler so far), I had one musician speak to me at rather great length about “Mahler fatigue,” and “perhaps we need a break from the Mahler Cycle.” Fortunately, this is a minority view, but I have noticed that no matter how many people love a composer’s works, if you announce a cycle, there will always be someone who starts whinging after one piece. The Beethoven Cycle was never announced- we knew we were doing it, but never marketed it as such. On the other hand, once the Kinsman Foundation had underwritten our Mahler project, it seemed like we had to call attention to our efforts to spread the gospel of Redneck Mahler.

Last year, the BBC Philharmonic did an excellent Tchaikovsky Symphony cycle, but by the time I saw them do 1 and 5 on the same program, audiences were staying home in droves, it seemed. Tchaikovsky! What- is he too popular for the cycle treatment? Maybe he’s so popular that cycle heads like me and my friends who would go to a Schnittke cycle won’t go because it is beneath them? I thought that was a wonderful program- enjoyable from beginning to end, it also really made the point that 1 is a miraculous piece and deserves to be as much a staple of the rep as 5. They just did a Brahms Symphony/Schumann Concerto cycle- I wonder how it did? Another UK orchestra is just finishing a Mahler cycle which, if you read the papers, sounds like a catastrophe of historic proportions. Would it have gotten the same reaction if they’d just snuck along and done Mahler after Mahler? There is a Mahler cycle going on Cardiff at the rate of one a year, but they’re not telling anyone.

This week, our Schumann cycle is continuing apace in Surrey. We’ve done some short works, the Piano Concerto, the Cello Concerto and the 3^rd Symphony so far, and right on schedule, we’re starting to hear the first few delicately phrased questions about “just how many Schumann symphonies are there?” (answer- one times two plus three and another 3/4, plus one almost that doesn’t quite count, but we’re only doing 4 and possibly the 3/4)+ Note- we’ve played exactly one Schumann symphony so far. Now, musicians can say what they like- this is challenging music for any orchestra, so they’ve earned the right to vent a little Schumann fatigue. No hard feelings. *

However, I keep thinking that if I’d just kept my bloody mouth shut and programmed one Schumann work after another until the project was done, THEN announced that we had just completed a Schumann cycle, everyone would be happy as could be.

Still- there’s nothing I’d rather do than hunker down and prepare all 6 Bartok quartets in one go, or conduct all the Brahms Symphonies in a weekend, or play all the Bach Cello Suites for the dog on a lazy Tuesday. If only I can avoid telling the damn dog what he’s in for….

* One of my colleagues in the orchestra completely confused me the other night when she said the other day that she loves performing our Schumanns, but absolutely hates rehearsing them. I’ve spent the last 2 rehearsals constantly asking myself- “is this what she hates? Is it the long notes? The short notes? What about that? What about this? I just stopped- did she hate that? Or was it when I didn’t stop before? What is different about rehearsing this than Mozart 41? Am I talking more? Am I talking less? Is the music more tiring to play? Is it any music more tiring than Mozart that is a pain to rehearse, or just Schumann?” Or is it just Schumann in a cycle…..

+ Okay: one times two is the two versions (original and revised- lots of people, including Brahms, prefer the original version in the same way that many film critics prefer the tedious Manhunter to Silence of the Lambs, in spite of the fact that Manhunter is a 2nd rate film, its obscurity gives it street cred that Silence’ popularity costs it. I like the original 4th, but Schumann knew best and the revision is an improvement) of what we call the 4th symphony, really the second, plus three is no’s 1, 2 and 3 (actually 1, 3 and 4), plus 3/4 is the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, a marvel of a piece and almost a symphony, plus one that almost doesn’t count is the G minor Zwickau symphony, which has never quite made it into the canon.

On my desk today is Schumann’s 2^nd Symphony. If you had assembled a panel of experts, including every major composer from 1825 to 1899, at the end of the 19^th century to pick the most important symphony after Beethoven, Schumann 2 would probably have been the one, beating out all the Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohns easily.

One reason the piece was so highly esteemed in its day was that it is what I call a “crafty” piece- that is, it is not only exciting and emotionally shattering music, it is also music that contains an extraordinarily rich array of musical touches of compositional craft.

For instance, the piece is full of ciphers, codes, quotations and references to other music. The master of cipher and quotation is, of course, JS Bach, and, as it turns out, Schumann 2 is the most Bach-ian of the Schumann symphonies, and one of the most Bachian of all symphonies ever written.

(more…)

In the comments to my post on piano tuning, CB’s comment to the effect of–

Have you ever actually tried to tune a piano? I think that would change your mind a bit - if you dont go mad. I spent a great deal of time in HS screwing around on Church pianos late at night when no one else was around - just me a piano key and a couple of wedges and a 440 tuning fork. Its lucky I am still alive and not in hell.

reminded me of another Tim-the-piano-tuner episode.

Somewhere around the altered-inverted-Romanian-well-tempered month or the horizontal-boogiewoogie-magpielampost-meantone month on our piano, Tim arrived one morning looking rather red faced and agitated.

“Have you heard! Have you heard what he did!”

“That man, that madman! Manoogian!”

Manoogian was Vartan Manoogian, long time master teacher of violin at the University of Wisconsin, who passed away much too early last summer. Vartan had a certain genius for winding people up, but I couldn’t imagine what he’d done to get Tim’s knickers in a twist.

“You know, he bought this beautiful piano last year,” Tim told me breathlessly, as if relaying the back story to news of a recent crime.

“Er, I hadn’t heard, but that’s great.”

”No! It’s not great. The man decided to tune it himself! Can you believe that!”

“Oh…” was all I could think to say. Vartan did have rather amazing ears. And nerve.

“He can’t do that,” Time excalimed. “He can’t just start tuning a piano!”

It is a truism that string players think they know more about tuning than piano tuners, and that piano tuners think string players can’t play in tune. Tim clearly thought most piano tuners, with their half-baked, amateurish, unquestioning loyalty to equal temperament, were at best hacks, but at least they were piano tuners.

“Er, no… of course not”

“Good.”

I felt like the lesson was over and I should get up and leave, only it was my house.

“Will he have… messed it up?” I asked in a desperate attempt to fill what was beginning to seem like a long silence.

Tim just looked at me. Had I not been listening?

I started gently, “Er… after all, didn’t you say that back in the day, guys like Brahms and Schubert tuned their pianos?”

“Yes, but those were composers. Composers! And those were different pianos. Just think what he’s done to that poor piano. It was such a beautiful instrument”

“Well, if he’s messed it up, can’t someone just go in and re-tune it?”

”He’d be lucky to find someone who would touch it after it’s been manhandled like that”

It was becoming clear to me- somehow, Vartan’s actions had deflowered the piano. It’s virgin strings had been pulled by unclean hands. The instrument would now sit in his living room, untouchable, as if it wore a scarlet letter “V”…..

“Maybe it sounds okay? I mean, er, he is a great musician”

I might have well told him I’d sold his daughter to a shipload of Vladivostokian smugglers from the look he gave me.

Well, of course, I had to ask Manoogian for his side of the story when I next saw him.

“Hey- I hear you dared to tune your own piano.”

“Yes” he said with his uniquely mischievous half-smile. “I kept getting it worked on and it never sounded in tune, so I did it myself.”

”How’s it sound?”

”It sounds good.” He was smiling broadly.

Now, I’ll never know if he was telling the truth. Perhaps he’d flown in a tuner from the mountains of Tibet who hadn’t heard of the scandal and tried to blame the tuning job on a bunch of roving criminals who had broken into his house and attempted to tune the piano using the modified-Amenian-tone system….

We got a new (old)) piano not long ago, and after a few months I organized our first tuning. The chap worked on it while I was out, so I returned that evening and sat down to play a chord. Ab would be a nice one to start with.

“Don’t start complaining,” cautioned Sue from the next room.

But those thirds…. Surely we can do better than that. I tried G major- same as Ab! They sound so messy, so, er…. hmmm….dirty.

I thought for a moment- I could just get in there  for an afternoon. It’s just an upright. And if I messed it up, I could just get it re-tuned.

And then I remembered Tim’s withering gaze, and thought that I might end up forever on some list somewhere, a list that meant I could never get a piano tuned again, and probably would have to go through extra security every time I flew for the rest of my life, and I decided to stop worrying and learn to love those blurry, dirty thirds.

I’ve held off writing about the Columbus Symphony mostly because my personal connection to the orchestra makes it too painful to do so.

A bit of biography- I played in the CSO for about four years (less in the later years when I was busier conducting) while I was doing my doctorate at CCM. Columbus has never had quite a large enough core of full-time players to do big symphonic repertoire (I think there were 6 full-timers in the cello section when I was there) so the orchestra carried a number of what are now called “associate” members (when I started we were just called “subs”) who played every concert but were only paid per service, hence saving the organization millions every year.

Yes, the system is as sketchy as it sounds (full of inqeuities and double-standards), but it was a boon for many CCM students and recent grads like myself, in spite of the gruelling commute. Unlike the other major bands in the area like Indy or Cincinnati, the fact that Columbus used associates on every concert meant you could get a lot of work if you got on the list. I was already well on my way down the conducting road when I auditioned for them, but I loved playing there and I believe my experience in the band helped me immeasurably as a conductor.

The saddest thing about the current fiasco is that it sounds as if so little has changed in the ten years since I left (as best my memory will serve after so long). Columbus was always an orchestra that musically far, far surpassed its budget or reputation. We regularly had friends in the other “other” CSO (Cincinnati) come up who felt that at that time Columbus was in many ways the more complete band (their words, not mine), and certainly often gave much more exciting concerts. Many of my fellow associates from those days went on to win jobs in supposedly “bigger” A orchestras, only to find that the standards were nowhere near as high as in Columbus. By all accounts, the orchestra has simply continued to improve and improve- the last few things I heard from them were pretty impeccable. I certainly still miss playing for them. I can also not think of any place I’ve worked where there was more of a love affair between an audience and an orchestra and their conductor (Alessandro Sicciliani at that time). Columbus audiences loved the orchestra and responded with a passion and energy I didn’t find in a lot of places in my travels.

Sadly, the other thing that hasn’t changed is the incompetent and weasely faction on the board of directors. I lost count of how many executive directors we went through in my brief time there, but most of them came in as renowned “union busters” or “professional downsizers.” Apparently one ED bragged that she was “a hatchet man, but with tits.” Yikes. Since then, they’ve endured long periods without EDs or MDs. What does that say about the wisdom and competence of the board?

Through it all, the players built a better and better orchestra. No excuses, no backsliding. Robert Levine has an excellent post on the situation there pointing to the absurdity of a situation in which the people who not only did their jobs but excelled above national standards and expectations for their budget lose their jobs and possible their homes and health care while those who failed to live up to their commitments as board members or who utterly and completely failed in their basic responsibilities as executive mangers keep their jobs and their titles.

The usually ultra-diplomatic Drew McManus has been so appalled at the behaviour of the board president as to use the word “idiot.” I think that is unfair to idiots, who can’t help themselves. This whole thing was deliberate- the wilful destruction of the careers and lives of a fine group of many professional musicians who DO have a hugely loyal and passionate local following. It was not an accident. So sad…There is still some hope- a change of board president and executive director followed by a move to external arbitration could resolve this nightmare in a manner of days. The alternative is too awful to consider. I hope some of the city fathers recognize their community is about to become a national disgrace and will take the initiative to chat to some board members at the local club….

My recent posts on KZ and Franz Mohr have left me wanting to follow up with some of my own, rather inexpert, opinions on piano tuning.

This may sound like an outrageous sacrilege, but I really struggle with the intonation of pianos, and I find myself very much at odds with Franz Mohr’s description of equal temperament as perfection. Even at the KZ concert the other day, it took me a good part of the Bach to let go of the fact that none of the chords were in tune, in spite of it being one of the most perfectly maintained pianos in the world.

Sorry, guys, but pianos just are not in tune.

Of course, neither are most orchestras. How do I cope with the varied intonation standards of orchestras? Well, I don’t, really. I get frustrated, I get down, I work at it, I try to let go of it. Talking is not the friend of intonation, so a conductor working on tuning is always a clumsy business. If you really, really want to take a section’s intonation to another level, you need lots of time and patience and goodwill- not something easy to find.  I break down the work of conducting into two areas- 1: painting the picture, which is sorting out all the details of phrasing, color, dynamics, mojo and articulation, and 2: tuning the piano, which includes not only intonation work, but putting the right people on stage, sorting out accuracy issues and so on. Just as some pianos can never be as in tune as others, even in the hands of Franz Mohr, so to some orchestras can only ever be so in tune, but you still have to paint the picture the best you can as a conductor.

I think the thing I enjoyed most about my time in Ischia with Byron and David was their commitment to intonation work. Call me crazy, but I like working on intonation, as long as doing so is not a substitute for individual preparation, but it is so much better done as a team. I could write a book on the tuning issues of playing a chamber music with strings and piano. It is not as simple as the strings simply playing in equal temperament- that actually ends up sounding like crap. On the other hand, you can’t simply go all idealistic and try to tune like a string quartet as some keys and chords wander to far from the fixed reference point of the piano. The Mozart Piano Quartet in Eb we did in Ischia is SO challenging for intonation, and there are no easy answers. A string quartet can play a chord in isolation perfectly in tune, and shape the tuning to suit the mood of the piece, but playing music involves constant compromise and, er, fudging…. You can’t just say that strings can play more in tune than pianists- we’re both dishonest in our own ways.

Ivan Fischer used to have the Budapest Festival Orchestra do Bach Chorales in rehearsal, a marvellous idea, but not something you could try in most orchestras. They also did regular sectionals- much more so than I’d ever seen in American pro bands- where intonation was a prime focus.

But today, I’m talking about piano intonation. Funny that Mr Mohr said that in his entire career, no artist ever asked him to use a historic temperament. I find that a little depressing.

A bit of personal backgound- I grew up with a nice but modest Baldwin upright in the house, but we had a secret weapon- my best friend’s (from the age of about 2 1/2) dad was a semi-legendary piano tuner. That Baldwin punched way out of its weight class when he worked on it. After he moved to Chicago, we actually had a few local tuners come to the house and say that since the humidity in the house was stable, they felt it was better to leave John’s work intact than attempt to tune it.

Eventually, a string broke and I looked long and hard to find someone who could sort the piano out to John’s exacting standards. Finally, I found a friend of John, named Tim, who came round to the house one quiet Saturday morning when everyone was out. Like many good tuners, Tim struck me as extremely, well, eccentric. And opinionated! When he saw the cello and heard a bit about my background, he decided to educate me on his beliefs about piano tuning.

You see, Tim couldn’t have disagreed more with Franz about the merits of equal temperament. Tim actually thinks that equal temperament killed composition and the understanding of and appreciation tonal music. His point was simple- in any of the other temperaments, each key has its own very distinct color. This is because the major third in a C major chord will be a different width than the third in a Db major chord or a B major chord.

The expressive potential of such a system is powerful- the difference in the speed of beats in different keys can be used to create varied tiers of intensity, much as string players can vary the speed of their vibrato.

Tim retuned our piano using a modified mean-tone temperament, but over the next few years he rotated through a few different tunings so I could hear the characteristics of the different tunings. It was quite an education, in spite of the tuning limitations of our piano’s rather short strings (physics dictates that a piano’s tuning potential is limited by the length of the strings, which means a bigger piano can be more perfectly in tune than a small one, which is the main reason for using a 9 foot concert grand, not for volume).

Another of Tim’s points was that composers like Brahms and Schubert tuned their own pianos, and that he felt that modern composers suffered for that lack of training and experience.

More and more, we hear musicians returning to using fortepianos and period instruments for music of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but those smaller instruments have inherent tuning limitations because of their string length. Wouldn’t it be lovely if more major artists were experimenting with the possibilities of tuning? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to hear Brahms’ piano music on a piano tuned as his would have been?

As it happens, one of the commenters (Brian Barone from Wrong End of a Telescope) on my Mohr piece has found a book that seems to speak to this very subject, which I’ve now ordered. What a thing the blogosphere is when it works!

Anyway, to me, equal temperament is an illusion- at first everything sounds out of tune, but since everything is equally out of tune, your ear quickly gives up the fight and can revel in everything the pianist is doing. Maybe this is right, because the piano is the instrument of illusion- what other percussion instrument can convince us it is crescendo-ing on a single note when we know that to be a physical impossibility? Those Horowitz recordings are pretty sublime- would he have sounded any better in modified mean-tone temperament? I’d certainly rather listen to Horowitz in equal temperament than Joe Schmo in well temperament. Which reminds me- I’ve heard from several sources that Mohr’s Christian prosteletyzing used to drive Horowitz up the wall. Mohr must have been a very great technician indeed. I was just reminded this week that Horowitz also once said that there were only three kinds of pianists- Jewish pianists, gay pianists and bad pianists….

Classical Source, the online magazine of classical reviews and features, has an extensive audio interview with the Mahler scholar Henry-Louis de la Grange on their website here. The final volume of his epic Mahler biography (the new volume for is over 1500 pages) has recently been published, and is awaiting my attention on my desk.

Well worth a listen. Listen online, or download to your iPod by right clicking and selecting “save target as…”

While doing the dishes today, I overheard a report on the BBC about this weekend’s four day strike by truck drivers for Shell.

I know it is bad form to pit the interests of unions against each other, but my ears did pick up when I heard that the base salary for the striking drivers is 32,000 pounds/year.

By comparison, in the latest Musician’s Union study, orchestral musicians salaries trailed far, far behind those of lorry drivers. Here are some stat’s for UK regional orchestras (excluding London), courtesy of Hilary Burrage’s blog-

Who gets paid what?

Section Principals: BBC Regional ~ £32,118 per annum  through to CBSO ~ £45,205 p.a.
Principals: RLPO ~ £28,298 pa through to CBSO ~£33,159 p.a.
Tutti: RLPO ~ £24,024 p.a. through to CBSO ~ £27,348 p.a.
In some cases there are increments and / or long service awards which take experienced players above these levels, but these additional sums, usually only a very few thousand per annum, rarely raise salaries significantly above the starting point. Likewise, some, but not all, orchestras pay musicians an additional fee for recordings, media relays etc.

So- British orchestral musicians, among the very best in the world, undergo years of study and make huge investments in instruments and equipment, yet they make less than unskilled workers. That a section principal, having won their position in highly competitive auditions and trials, at a BBC Regional orchestra (that includes the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony and BBC National Orchestra of Wales)  makes less than the starting salary for a Shell lorry driver seems worse than obscene to me. According to the Guardian, Shell claims average pay for lorry drivers is “more than £36,000 and would have increased to around £39,000 under an offer rejected by the union.”

Sadly, I don’t see the situation improving anytime soon, as the Arts Council’s funding has been cut significantly to free up funds for the Olympics. Several well-established UK orchestras have lost their funding altogether, including the London Mozart Players.

Lorry drivers cite long working hours as a reason for needing an increase in compensation, but UK orchestral musicians work the longest and most grueling schedules in the world, often working twice as many services per year as their counterparts in America or Germany.

As a point of comparison, here are some numbers lifted from Drew McManus’ Adaptistration 2008 Compensation Report. Look at the salaries of the top 10 orchestras in the US

1- Boston $112, 840
2- Los Angeles $112,840
3- Philadelphia $109,200
4- San Francisco $107,120
5- Chicago $107,120
6- New York $107,120
7- Cleveland $105,620
8- Pittsburgh $97,101
9- Detroit- $96,850
10- Minnesota- $88,348

Given that the ICSOM pay structure means nobody actually earns base salary in American orchestras, the base salary or the no 10 orchestra in the us is on a par with the principal salary for the no 1 non-London orchestra in the UK ($88,348 for Minnesota compared to $$90,000 for the CBSO). (The concertmaster salary at the San Francisco Symphony at $426,000 is about five times section principal pay at the CBSO). Base salary at the CBSO converts to about $54,000 p.a., which would well out of the top 15 US orchestras.

What strikes one about Drew’s listing of ICSOM salaries is the gap between rich and poor among American musicians. Base salary in Honolulu is only $24,000 or 12,000 pounds, barely more than a third of base salary for Shell lorry drivers in the UK, and we’re talking here about elite orchestral  musicians who have won their jobs through nationally competitive auditions, generally after at least 6 years of conservatory and post-graduate training. Musicians in the Oregon Symphony make less than 2/3rds the base salary of a lorry driver, and even members of the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, the most prestigious chamber orchestra in North America make less than an entry level lorry driver. A musician in the Spokane Symphony, a fine orchestra with a busy schedule, makes $10,000/year if they play everything (most ROPA musicians earn less than base salary)…..

Never mind the thousands of freelancers in the UK and US, who not only make only a tiny fraction of these amounts, but spend their lives on the highways our nations being cut off by truck drivers making many times what they make…..

And then there is Columbus….

Courtesy of Oregon Public Broadcasting, here is a fascinating interview with long-time Steinway chief concert technician, Franz Mohr, who was also the personal piano technician to Horowitz. The program is called “A Life in Tune,” from OPB’s Think Out Loud. It’s a bit of departure from their usual public affairs programming, so listen on line and be counted among their listeners! Great anecdotes about Horowitz, Rubinstein and others. The entire program is about 52 minutes long. Follow the link or right click on “Save target as”

Here is the blurb from the OPB website

Franz Mohr talks about pianos in a different way than you may be accustomed to. He might start with the wood: close-grained Alaskan sitka, Eastern seaboard or European spruce, resinous sugar pine, hard-rock maple. He’ll touch on labor: 400 different craftsmen spending nine months putting 5000 pieces together. There are the serial numbers — some famous, among a certain set — of the finished products: CD 75, or CD 223, or his beloved CD 314 503. And only then might he get to the Who’s Who of concert pianists of the last century: Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn Gould, Rudolf Serkin and Van Cliburn, Artur Rubinstein and André Watts. Franz Mohr worked with all of them.

From 1968 until 1992, Mohr was the “head concert technician” for Steinway and Sons pianos. He traveled the world to tune, tweak, regulate, and repair the pianos of the masters before their major performances and recording sessions. He learned, early on, that Horowitz favored a very light, responsive action (and found it, with Mohr’s help, in CD 314 503), and that Rubinstein sought more resistance in the keys. He learned that pianos, like people, have natural emotional tendencies. Some are big and brash, born for the grand hall. Others shine in small chamber conversation.

Franz Mohr will join us in the studio to talk about all of this, and more. Are you interested in the backstage lives of the pianists he’s worked for? Or perhaps the pianos he’s worked on? Are you a pianist yourself? Have you found the piano of your dreams? If not, what would it feel like? What would it sound like

You can give OPB a shout out for producing such an informative and intelligent program by using the comment function on their website here

Coming up next week on the 22^nd of June, the Lancashire Chamber Orchestra and I will be performing the string orchestra version of a piece called “The Tall-Eared Fox and the Wild-Eyed Man,” by Michigan based composer Evan Chambers. It is a joyous hoot of a work, replete with manic fiddling, bagpipe music and everyone in the orchestra using pencils to imitate the sound of a hammer dulcimer. Evan’s most recent work is a huge song cycle for orchestra called “The Old Burrying Ground” that was performed at Carnegie Hall in February and has now been recorded for Naxos.

TEF&WEM is a much earlier work, originally the finale of a string quartet called Three Memories. I heard the piece at the Sandpoint Festival in about 1992, where both Evan and I were studying and I thought it was a riot. Years later, when I was in the Masala Quartet we decided it was time to do a modern American work, and I suggested Three Memories based on that one hearing. I rang up Evan, and he told me he hard replaced the first two movements of what was originally a three movement work with a single slow movement called Lament. I was a little bummed at first, as I liked the original movements- they were in a nice, thorny, Bartok-ian style which made a nice contrast with the over-the-top humor of the finale.

However, once we got to work on Lament, we quickly recognized that Evan had been right (damn composers, seems like they’re always bloody right about their own music). It’s style connected much more organically with that of TEF&WEM, even though it seemed clearly to be a later work. Even more importantly, I think it is a hugely moving piece.

After our first performance in February of 1998, Gerhard Samuel asked if we would do the piece on the CCM Contemporary Music Ensemble concert at the 100 Days Festival in Portugal that spring as part of our upcoming tour. Funnily enough, we’d had one or two snotty comments from CCM administrators (imagine that, a snotty comment from a school administrator) about Evan’s resolutely tonal style. One associate dean asked why we were “wasting our talent on such trite music.” CCM was always a very New Vienna School school, primarily because of the legacy of the La Salle Quartet (the leading interpreters of the quartets of Berg, Schoenberg and Webern from the 50s through the 80s), who were in residence there for about 40 years. Gerhard was himself a serial composer, albeit much more Berg-ian in his willingness to mix a tonal vocabulary with serial ideas and open to the influence of jazz see his Requiem for Survivors, which you can hear in this podcast on his music and music making). Still, I was surprised and impressed that Gerhard  could so easily and so enthusiastically embrace a work in a style so alien to his own (as I got to know him better over the years, I would not have been surprised at all). He had that rare ability to separate his own tastes and preferences as a composer from his ability to evaluate someone else’s music on its own terms.

Anyway, as we approach the performance of the TEF&WEM next week, I though the LCO musicians would be interested to hear what precedes all the glorious silliness that movement entails. The direct and simple musical language belies a daunting degree of sophistication and craft- it is a hugely challenging movement to put together.

This was the Masala Quartet’s first performance of “Lament” from “Three Memories,” recorded live at Corbett Auditorium in February of 1998. Violins are Kio Seiler and Evan Richey (then Rosenberg), viola is Sheridan Currie (then Kamberger) and cello is me. Sorry for slightly dodgy sound quality, only a cassette copy was available (boy does that date us).

Here is a recent piece from the Western Mail, based mostly on an interview I did with them a few weeks ago. Current Arts Council of Wales guidelines only support funding commissions of new music if it is for dance.

Keith Griffin, of music umbrella body Ty Cerdd, said: “I don’t think we treat our composers as well as they deserve.

“There’s nothing like the same lauding of individual artists as there is in, say, literature or the graphic arts.”

He said the ACW was covering more artistic activities than in decades past, but its funding had not increased to reflect the greater diversity. That left funding for new music at its lowest since the Second World War.

An ACW spokeswoman said: “The ACW’s scheme for commissioning new music is currently conditional on the music accompanying dance.”

Peter Reynolds, artistic director of the Lower Machen Festival, near Caerphilly, said “to have that as the only commissioning scheme seems madness to me.”

 

Rest in peace, Bo Diddley, one of the true inventors of rock ‘n’ roll, an original and ingenious guitarist and about the hardest groovin man ever to walk the earth.   

I saw Bo Diddley in about 1991 at the Madison Rib Fest- not a venue worthy of a living legend, but it was a great, great show. The swagger, the groove, the humor, the machismo- all the qualities one normally associates with Haydn were on show in a blistering set. I met him briefly afterwards- he seemed like nice guy and ready to go another fifteen rounds after a set that had exhausted the young crowd listening.   

The New York Times obit rightly mentions that Bo Diddley was, to say the least, not fairly compensated for his contributions to music history. He was one of many legendary black genius musicians whose ideas, songs and riffs were simply stolen by unscrupulous and racist managers and record company executives who repackaged his, Chuck Berry’s and Little Richard’s music behind a sanitized gang of white performers and raked in the cash while the men who created the sound that change the world were pushed into obscurity. The history of American music in the 20^th century is one of white musicians and businessmen getting rich on the ideas and innovations of black musicians from Scott Joplin to Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington to Miles Davis to Bo Diddley to Jimi Hendrix. Elvis and Pat Boone should have been paying Bo royalties every day of their careers.

On my turntable now is the Super Super Blues band album with Bo, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. RIP Bo- the Bo Diddley beat goes on…. 

A masterclass in rock- Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry show all the crackers who made millions off their work how it’s done… Elvis schmelvis.