I began my third visit to the Kent County Youth Orchestra very aware of how much had changed since I last saw them. I still remember driving in for my first rehearsal at the now-defunct Bedgebury School- a huge, idyllic campus catering to the likes of Peaches Geldof. Ashford School, the ochestra’s new home, is itself a pleasant campus, but one nestled in the heart of busy Ashford. No horses and rolling hills here.

After a few reunions with sectional tutors, Geoff (the orchestra’s general manager) and the admin staff, I made my way around to each of the sectionals, for a quick listen. Starting with a sectional before the first orchestral rehearsal is smart planning- we can get much more out of a read through if a professional coach has prepared the students on the repertoire. I always learn a lot from watching sectionals- sometimes it is the ins and outs of the quirks of bassoon intonation (what a relief to hear a first rate bassoonist explain to the students that: “the bassoon is a sharp instrument. A really sharp instrument.”) to the various strengths and weaknesses of the orchestra. Change was everywhere- lots of new faces in every section, including a completely different set of string principals. One section might be working on a very basic technical issue or negotiating who is going to play a secondary instrument like bass clarinet (which can sometimes amount to drawing the short straw), while another is already doing rather sophisticated intonation work.

Orchestras really run on trust, so most conductors, myself included, like to have familiar colleagues whose skills and leadership we can rely on. There had been very minimal change over in personnel between my first two KCYO trips- virtually the same team of string principals and a largely consistent wind and brass section. Two years on, there were more new faces than I could count- including several completely new sections.

My goal for day one is pretty simple- I want to make sure the musicians have played the entire program. Given two 90 minute sessions with the full orchestra, that is a rather formidable challenge. We began with the Sibelius Fifth, a work barely more than half the length of either of our last two symphonies (Rachmaninoff 2 and Shostakovich 10). First impressions are hugely encouraging- it helps that the first sound in the work is that of the horn section and timpani, which this week is five of the strongest veteran musicians in the orchestra (although one of the horn players was playing cello last time I was here!). However, it is a sobering reminder of the challenge to come that it takes us significantly longer to read through the Sibelius than it had for either the Rachmaninoff or the Shostakovich.

It’s quickly apparent who has listened to or played the piece before- as we finish and are packing up one of the fiddle players is telling the first violin coach and I how she cried through the last page when she played the work a few months back. She knows something about Sibelius 5 that others will learn soon. Many others seem frankly baffled by much of the piece. The strings in particular seem confused- they have less lyrical playing in this symphony than almost any major symphony in the repertoire (but the lyrical playing they do in the symphony is astounding). I think their response is entirely appropriate- so much of the piece is strange and troubling. Part of my job is to help them understand why it is so- why Sibelius gives us so much difficult and abstract music leading to such a strange and uncomfortable ending.

I’d been anticipating this challenge for some time, but hearing a couple of young players saying things like “wow, that’s a very weird piece” as we left for dinner made clear the urgency of the undertaking.

But how? The received wisdom states that with a youth orchestra, one can or should take more time to explain to the players what the music is about, and in the past I might have even preceded that first reading with some words about the piece. This year, however, I’m trying something else- just get on with the job and let them experience the piece in its own terms. I’m sure that if we can play the piece well, they’ll understand it well.

The topic came up this week in another venue of why we don’t hear more of Elgar in the  US than Pomp and Circumstance, the Cello Concerto and the Enigma Variations. As it happens, I’ve been doing quite a bit of Elgar in the US of late, and am doing the First Symphony in a couple of months, so I thought I’d try to unravel the question- is it because he’s too English? Is it because the other pieces aren’t as good? Maybe it is something simpler?

I don’t think it is any accident that his two repertoire works in the US (Enigma and the Cello Concerto) are, by quite a bit, the most technically accessible works in his output. Imagine a conductor who has done the Cello Concerto thinking “wow, that was great, didn’t he write a violin concerto, too? Maybe I should do that next year?”

Then he opens the fiddle concerto score, and instead of the compact, transparent and understated Cello Concerto score, sees something that looks like a Mahler symphony with an impossible violin part, a tempo change or femata in almost every bar. It looks impossible to play and impossible to put together, and the last movement alone is longer than the entire cello concerto, and don’t even get him started on how difficult it is to follow the cadenza… And what is “thrumming?!?” Then, who is going to play the fiddle part? Hillary Hahn and Kennedy are the only A-listers who do it, and you can’t afford them. Do you want to entrust it to the local violin prof? Is someone going to learn it for you then never play it again for the next 10 years?

Likewise, Enigma, challenging as it is, is more or less technically accessible for any amateur orchestra. Now look at the First Symphony- it is orders of magnitude more challenging, and there are all sorts of funny notations- big capital A’s and R’s in the score… What does that mean? The conductor suddenly imagines answer all kinds of questions in rehearsals and not getting anywhere. The second movement is in 1/2- yikes!

As I said, I’m doing Elgar 1 in America this year, and it is going to be an interesting project. It might have been a bad choice, but it was the orchestra’s decision this time! To take the obvious comparison- if I was to go in and do a Mahler symphony, even one the orchestra had never played, most of the musicians would own a recording, have studied the excerpts for auditions, and have played a few of the others. Every time I do Till or Heldenleben or Don Juan, I can count on the fact that even if the orchestra has never played it, most of the players have learned the nastiest excerpts. Not so with the Elgar Symphonies.

Then the 2nd Symphony is twice as hard as the first, and much more difficult interpretively…

We did Cockaigne two years ago and one of our horn players came up to me at the break and said “god, this is the hardest, most tiring piece nobody had ever heard of. ” In the South- even harder, and you need a WORLD CLASS violist in your orchestra…. And Falstaff????? Yikes!

But the interpretive dangers in all of these pieces are significant, and, sadly, many Americans have a very corrupt sense of Elgar’s style. I remember a famous sectional coach who thought he was funny saying “Elgar is like having a roast beef dinner three meals a day, seven days a week.” Well, just think about the idea of the 2nd movement of the Cello Concerto played with this kind of stodgy, heavy approach. Elgar’s own recordings are lean and mean- full of forward motion with brilliant, edgy brass playing. Not lardy or heavy.

And frankly, Elgar’s music suffers from some of the same interpretive excesses as many of his contemporaries from Bloch to Mahler- confronted with a wealth of highly specific performance instructions from the composer, conductor’s take that as license to do whatever they want. They see all the notated tempo nuances and think, “heck, I can change tempo all the time!” The poor music collapses under the weight of their self-indulgence, and audiences come away feeling like they’ve heard something pompous, overblown and boring rather than something coherent, thrilling and focused.

Elgar constructed a public personality to enable him to function as a professional and social entity in Victorian and Edwardian England, but he was not the Colonel Blimp he made himself out to be. Elgar’s own description of Englishness tells us he didn’t see his life’s work as a nationalistic exercise

“An Englishman will take you into a large room, beautifully proportioned, and will point out to you that it is white- all over white- and somebody will say what exquisite taste. You know in your own mind, in your own soul, that it is not taste at all—that is the want of taste—that is mere evasion. English music is white and evades everything.”

Most people know the Violin Concerto through Kennedy- who now takes about an hour to perform it. When we did it with Jorja Fleezanis in February this year, we finished in 46 minutes. Now, Kennedy is a great player and has been developing his own take on the piece for 30 years, but imagine doing the concerto with a young player who has learned the piece from a Kennedy recording….. Yikes!

We’ve been working our way through Elgar’s orchestral music in Pendleton, and the good news is that the audiences LOVE it- they went berserk for the fiddle concerto. I’ve also seen that the technical challenges in Elgar are like those in Strauss- he was too good a musician to write impossible or un-idiomatically. If you put in the work, his music is very playable. I’m sure more of his music can and will catch on in America, it just is going to take some hard work and some good performances….

Here are some thoughts on Elgar from my friend Michael Steinberg. My thoughts on Englishness and Elgar here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi everyone

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

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

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

 Thanks

K

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On to happier thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

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

and there is a wealth of information at our website,

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

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

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

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

Little did they know…

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

Little did I know…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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