Another day at the Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop, and sensory overload is the theme at this point. Four days in everyone’s heard so much music and participated in so many discussions that it would be easy to feel as though we should cancel tomorrow and take a personal day, but it’s been so fun and rewarding and inspiring that I can’t imagine not doing it tomorrow.
We had some great moments in the conducting sessions- mostly those were one of the conductor’s would finally grok the idea of really tracking the soloist rather than following them. When you’re no longer reacting to the soloist, but anticipating and responding in the moment, great things start to happen. It was all soloists today- a morning session on the Shostakovich 1st Pno Concerto with Rick Rowley and trumpet soloist Fil Ovando and scenes from Il Trovatore with Brennen Guillory. Brennen at one point cheerfully sang his Act III tenor aria about 7 times in a row- I hope the students know how lucky they are to learn opera conducting working with someone who can and will do that for them
We had such and extensive group rap session this afternoon that I totally lost my voice by the end of the day. Topics included career development in terms of karma, player relations, methods of score study, talking to audiences and so on. The highlight for me was actually an aside, when David Hoose talked for about 15 minutes about the orchestration of the first chord of Beethoven 7. Absolutely amazing and inspiring.
I suppose we’re now on the dreaded home stretch, but I’ve got high hopes that we’ll see quite a few more AHA moments from the students.
Lots more to say, but later…
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