From the last OES program
November 5th, 2009
A symphony supporter in Pendleton emailed this morning and asked me to reprint the little farewell essay I wrote for the OES program last week-
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Posts Tagged ‘i’m outta here’
Last of the Redneck Mozart
October 30th, 2009
On the one hand, it may seem like we had a little mini-onslaught of blog posts last week, after a fairly quiet summer. On the other, I continue to feel like there is a huge backlog of things I want to write about, but that I still am working to recapture a sense of freshness in my writing about them. In the meantime, I fear content here may oscillate between silence and mind-numbing and tired re-treading of the same old Vftp clichés
So with all that to look for, I wanted to just try to talk a tiny bit about my last day at the OES from a musical perspective- Mozart first. Read more…
East Oregonian- Swan Song
October 29th, 2009
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Maestro Kenneth Woods’ Swan Song
Seven years after moving to Wales, Kenneth Woods conducts the Oregon East Symphony in his farewell performance
By KATHY ANEY
The East Oregonian
Conductor Kenneth Woods lives for those moments when he and his orchestra slip into a musical realm beyond tempo and timbre into something almost spiritual.
“You can’t make it happen,” Woods said, “but when it does, it’s the ultimate thrill ride.”
Occasionally, he finds himself conducting with tears in his eyes. He’s had plenty of those in-the-zone moments as maestro of the Oregon East Symphony and may find himself in that place again Saturday as he waves his baton in Pendleton one final time.
Woods didn’t quit OES when he resigned as Eastern Oregon University professor and moved to Wales with his wife in 2002. Though his home in Cardiff is 5,000 miles from Pendleton, he returned regularly to Oregon for a flurry of back-to-back rehearsals ending in a performance. He racks up so many thousands of air miles that he knows many airline personnel by name.
The crazy commuting schedule isn’t the reason he’s saying goodbye to OES. Rather, the move stems from the fact his wife, violinist Suzane Casey, gave birth to their first child last year.
“I want something for Sam that more closely resembles a normal life,” Woods said.
Goodbye to- The Coffee Hour
October 23rd, 2009
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“The Coffee Hour.”
It’s a Pendleton institution that needs no further introduction. I suppose most small and medium sized communities have a program with a similar mix of current affairs, cultural news and community discussion. I’ve done radio sit downs all over the country that were similar, but for me, there’s only one Coffee Hour.
I think its iconic status in my imagination is partly due to my first impressions of it. In the week of my first concert here, the orchestra manager asked me to do the show and directed me towards the venue- the local feed store.
Said feed store seemed a vast enterprise- a sprawling center of everything a large-scale wheat rancher could need, certainly more than just feed. Tucked away in this space was a small café, and above that, a little raised platform with a table and chairs, from which Coffee Hour went out into the world. I suppose the ambient noise of the small café helped give it an air of authenticity, while the varied stock announcements in the background gave it an even greater air of sur-reality. I think there were commercials back then, but the interview just carried on- we never stopped talking, so who knows what the audience heard.
The Final Program- Why Bobby 2
October 23rd, 2009
Many folks have raised an eyebrow when I tell them I have chosen the 2nd Symphony of the great Bobby Schumann to end my run at the Oregon East Symphony.
“What,” they say, “no Mahler 9, no Beethoven 9, no Bruckner 9?”
No, no 9ths!
Here are Five Easy Reasons why I’m going out with a bang with Bobby.
1- It is as perfect a symphony as ever written, and as good a candidate for the best symphony ever written as you are going to find.
2- I’ve never done a Schumann symphony in Pendleton, and that cannot be allowed to stand.
3- I ended my tenure with the Grande Ronde Symphony with Schumann 4, so I can make it my policy now to terminate all music directorships in Eastern Oregon with a Schumann Symphony.
4- The piece explores profound themes of hope, redemption and love that I think are somehow relevant to my own life experience during this long chapter of the book of being Ken.
5- It rocks. It will kick you apart. It stands 11 feet tall, weighs 600 pounds, eats whole rhinos for breakfast, smells like roses, drives a thousand miles an hour up hill, pays your taxes for you, changes babies, walks dogs, lifts hearts, destroys prejudice and restores promise.
Here is an earlier blog post that explores just one aspect of this amazing piece.
http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2008/06/20/schumann-and-bach-in-the-2nd-symphony/
I suppose my biggest concern is that this is our first Schumann symphony together. I can’t tell you how far we’ve come at the SMP by working through so much of his music. The learning curve is huge, even though everything you need to know is there in the music. Schumann’s music doesn’t need help, it needs rescuing from those who would help it. People have read so much crap about him, his mental stability, his orchestration and his conducting that they either ignore his markings, which seem to be all perfectly logical and incredibly effective in this piece, or they start changing things without first making an honest effort to realize his intentions. If I can get the band to take his markings just as seriously as they take Mahler’s, I think we’ll have a fine show on our hands.
The Final Program- Gotterdammerung
October 22nd, 2009
Every concert has its drama.
Not long ago, the drama was a plague of flies, which, last I heard, were still annoying the citizens of swish Altrincham.
As I drove into Pendleton yesterday, I was struck by the vast devastation of the outer reaches of the city. The whole network of main roads connecting the interstate to the heart of town were torn up. It looks like a war is on. Huge diggers ripped loose giant slabs of asphalt to be carried away in waiting dump trucks, to be piled on a mountain of rubbish behind the local Wal-Mart.
On arrival at the orchestra’s home, the Vert Auditorium, I was further struck by the precariousness of life in Pendleton. Should I have been surprised? I think not- in years past, our offices have been razed, our libraries reduced to ashes. No random destruction is too great, no pointless injustice to extreme to happen within this cozy burgh.
Now, our Hall was little more than a construction site- some wise engineer had condemned the fly system in the theatre. Our acoustic ceiling above the stage, at best a barely-effective death trap, had been condemned and removed, but the promised reinforcements and repairs had yet to appear, and won’t do so until after my tenure here reaches its grizzly end on Saturday. How much of Bobby Schumann’s genius will be lost when all those timbres are heard only by the timbers of the roof when the sound floats up rather than pours out on Saturday?
Then, there is the plumbing.
It is a time honored tradition, now reaching its end, to save any and all bad news for after Ken’s arrival.
With that in mind, I listened somewhat wearily as I was told of pipes blocked and pipes leaking, of corrosion, leakage (what a vile word!) and collapse. As the waters of the local aquifer threatened to drown our modest concert hall, a fateful decision was made- the City would re-plumb the entire building in time for our final concert. When I arrived on Tuesday afternoon, a team was working feverishly, replacing fixtures, pipes and insulation around sinks, johns and water fountains alike. The steam heating in the office was working for the first time in many weeks.
But, on Wednesday, dark clouds gathered. Nary a hairy man-cleavage was in sight. Hours, and then a day went by without any sign of progress, or, of effort. I finally implored Lisa-Marie to call the City and remind them that destiny awaits us all- there is a concert in this building in 72 hours, and one thing classical fans demand at every concert in every venue is plumbing. Peeing in a field is for rockers. Classical fans don’t do port-a-potties.
Will we have running water? Will those toilets and sinks be re-connected again to the walls that have housed them for so many years? Will the floorboards rot from seepage, or our ceiling collapse? Will our more elderly patrons have a place to answer Nature’s most urgent call?
Anything is possible in Pendleton. Readers often comment on the ambition of our many Mahler concerts, but Carmen was in many ways the biggest project we ever did here- an army of soloists, children’s choirs and grown up singers joined the band that week. The day before the performance, a City engineer, without warning, condemned our stage extension, then in use for 11 years. He threatened to wrap our esteemed venue in yellow “condemned” tape- can you imagine Carnegie in such a predicament?
But Pendleton can rally- in all of fifteen minutes a team of men, none paid nor looking to be, arrived with saws, power drills and lumber. Within one hour, they had rebuilt the extension to code, not because they owed us a favor, nor because we could pay them for their time, but because this is Pendleton, and that’s what you do here. You answer the call. You fix what needs fixin’. Miracles can happen here.
Still, with destruction and delay all around today, I find myself fantasizing about a truly Wagnerian finale to my Pendleton adventure.
We are finishing Schumann 2 in a blaze of glory, when the ceiling finally collapses, the walls of the ancient auditorium crumble and the long-defective plumbing explodes with pent-up rage. Great geysers of tap water and raw sewage explode from half-plastered walls in as-yet-un-re-opened bathrooms.
Meanwhile, the brass section is building a great, raging pyre of violins, pianos, contra-bassons, stage-flooring-saturated –in-the-blood-of-the-conductor and pops charts, and, shrieking the battle cry of the Valkyires, I slide the Ring onto my finger, wave to those sexy Rhinemaidens, don my brass brassiere, mount my noble steed Grane, and ride to my immolation on the shore of the raging river of who-knows-what, as the walls of Valhalla itself fall forever into the raging inferno.
Wouldn’t you want to see that?
7:30 PM this Saturday, Vert Auditorium.
Tickets on sale at Armchair Books and the OES office.
The Final Program- Why K. 488?
October 22nd, 2009
For some strange reason, my blog post “Haydn-More Talented Than Mozart” has left some readers with the impression that I somehow don’t get or don’t like Mozart. Far from it- in fact, those who pay attention to these sorts of things will no doubt have noticed that three of my last four works here in Pendleton are by Mozart.
One of my points in that post was that we ought to do away with the notion that every note Mozart wrote was a heaven-inspired nugget of perfection. Haydn was far closer to achieving infallibility in the sense of always being fresh and inspired on every single page. Pretending that every Mozart wrote was equally wonderful completely obscures just how astounding his greatest pieces are deadens us to a full understanding of who he really was and what his music, at its best, can say.
For all his precociousness and genius, Mozart seemed to often have to struggle far harder than Haydn, which ought to make us all the more in awe of what he achieved at his best. It would have been all too easy for Mozart to be content turn out mountains of attractive but ultimately unimportant music- some of the greatest prodigies and pure geniuses fell into that trap, never quite delivering music worthy of their gifts. Cruel as it is to single them out, and for all that they were fine composers, think of Korngold or Saint-Saens and imagine if Mozart had followed their path, content to turn out pieces that were perfect in their voice-leading and entertaining for the audience, but ultimately, not very deep?
There are certainly works of Mozart that prove he was far from infallible. One of my teachers, now a very famous composer in his own right, spent a week in our analysis class taking apart the poor Mozart Bassoon Concerto so that we would all be able to articulate why it was such a mediocre piece as preparation for spending the rest of the term celebrating the Prague Symphony, which he felt was as close to perfect as music gets (I agree).
A piece like the Mozart Requiem doesn’t just flow from the pen as an effortless expression of divine gifts, it is the result of a genius pushing himself to and beyond the limits of his talent. The Piano Concerto in A Major that we’re playing this week is, in a much quieter and more personal way, a similarly towering achievement.
It might be my favorite Mozart Concerto (the D minor is its only real rival to me). In spite of its major key and the wealth of lovely tunes, I find it a strange and heartbreaking work. It seduces and haunts in equal measures. Of course, the heartbreak in the F# minor slow movement is easy to recognize- I think it is simply the saddest piece of music ever written. But even in the outwardly bucolic first movement there seem to be incredibly powerful undercurrents of longing and uncertainty. I suppose this balance between outward graciousness and inward loneliness has a few distinguished cousins- the first movements of Mahler 4 and Brahms 2 both come to mind, but this movement of Mozart’s seems to be the most perfect and moving expression of nostalgia in the best sense of the word of any piece I know. It is an expression of idealized beauty surrounded by mystery and complexity, of radiant, fragile candlelight in a vast, shadowy night.
Mozart does give us daybreak in the Finale, after we’ve cried our eyes dry in the Andante, and what a bright day it is. Still, he is, by now, too honest and too great a composer to let us completely forget what has come before- there are just enough hints of shadow and sorrow that the ending feels honest and connected to what has come before. Where the great (and similarly heart-wrenching) slow movement of the Sinfonia Concertante is followed by a not-very-distinguished Finale which can come across as a little insipid after such deep music, in this Concerto, Mozart manages to show us the sheer strength of will it takes to be joyful, truly joyful, in a world full of pain.
The Final Program- Why Mozart 31?
October 22nd, 2009
Mozart’s Paris Symphony was the first work I conducted with the Oregon East Symphony. Here is a somewhat pained description of the difficulties of rehearsing what I had thought was a relatively straightforward classical work-
“I was exceedingly anxious at rehearsal, for never in my life have I heard a worse performance. You can have no conception of how they bungled and scrambled through it the first time and the second. Really I was quite frightened and would have liked to rehearse it once more, but there was so much else to rehearse that there was no time left. Accordingly I went to bed with fear in my heart, discontent and anger in my mind. I had decided not to go to the concert at all the next day; but it was a fine evening, and I finally resolved to go with the proviso that if things went as ill as at the rehearsal I would certainly make my way into the orchestra, snatch Herr Lahouse’s instrument from his hand and play myself!”
Reading that vivid and honest account does take me back to that first evening rehearsing in the dark and dingy Little Theater, in the basement beneath the Vert Auditorium, but those are not my words, they’re Mozart’s, describing rehearsals for the premiere.
In my naiveté, I probably hadn’t realized what a challenging piece the “Paris” is, but I quickly found out. I also realized that there were things that I had simply taken for granted with orchestras that I would have to learn how to teach and explain if I wanted to achieve a decent performance. The orchestra back then didn’t have nearly the talent pool it now does, and even many of the regular string principals back then weren’t available for that performance. It sounds funny to say this about a group that has since played four Mahler symphonies quite well, but the night before the concert I was far from sure we’d get through the concert without a disaster.
However, as they would time after time, the orchestra rose to the occasion on the day, and not only made it through, but gave a proper performance. Still, I’ll always remember those rehearsals as some of the most daunting I’ve ever been part of, and a time where I really had to start at the beginning of the beginning in order to even be able to get through the beginning of a piece.
By coming back to this symphony, I hope we can all find some measure of how far we’ve come. For me, I can see how much my understanding of Mozart has evolved. What an astounding piece this is- maybe it was the pressure of trying to win over a foreign audience, but Mozart pulls out all the stops in this piece in an incredible way. It is second only to the Jupiter for the sheer audacity of it’s contrapuntal writing in all his symphonies. Amazing stuff.
I’m doing one thing completely differently from past performances this week. I’ve seen the same famous letter from Mozart to his father quoted in almost every program note about the piece I’ve ever seen (the same letter I quoted from above). His description of the Finale is interesting-
“The andante [the second movement] also found favor, but particularly the last allegro [the final movement] because, having noticed that all last allegri here opened, like the first, with all instruments together and usually in unison, I began with two violins only, piano [softly] for eight bars only, then forte [loudly], so that at the piano (as I had expected) the audience said “Sh!” and when they heard the forte began at once to clap their hands.
Interesting because, I’ve never seen a performance with just two violins playing at the beginning. It’s always done with the two violin sections. I decided to throw caution to the wind and do it as Mozart described it with just solo players. Will the audience burst into applause on Saturday at that moment? Why not.
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