Repertoire Report- KW, 2014

Well, it’s nearly time to say “so long” to another year, and as we work our way through Christmas leftovers and brace for the struggles and adventures that lay ahead, it’s navel-gazing season at Vftp, when we look back at the musical year just past.

The Repertoire Report project has been an interesting one (at least to me) over the years- it’s a way to see what people are up to from year to year and to compare various conductors’ workloads and approaches to programming.

A number of things stand out to me in this year’s Report. Looking at the “most popular” KW-composers in 2014, it’s no surprise that Mozart is the winner- he often has been. On the other hand, a few years back one would never have guessed that Vaughan Williams would be in second place on a KW repertoire list. Getting to do more of RVW’s music over the last few years has been a real revelation for me, and I hope to continue to add more of his music to my repertoire this year. I’d done the Fifth Symphony and and the Tallis Fantasia before, but the Fourth Symphony was an incredible project, and my young colleagues from the Kent County Youth Orchestra played it with ferocious commitment in April. I’ve wanted to do RVW’s “On Wenlock Edge” for many years, but as is so often the case, my admiration for the piece deepened greatly as I learned it.

In the midst of my mini-immersion in the music of RVW, I was repeatedly inspired by my conversations about his music with ESO composer-in-association John McCabe, who knows and reveres Vaughan Williams’s music like few others. It was a real honor to have him present in Kent for our performance of the RVW Fourth and to play the Tallis Fantasia alongside John’s “Pilgrim” twice. Fortunately, the year has afforded me a number of opportunities to perform John’s music, and Signum have just released our recording of his trumpet concerto “La Primavera” which is a very important addition to the trumpet literature. For me, the high point of working with John’s music this year was getting to conduct “Pilgrim” for Double String Orchestra twice. It’s a masterpiece- a hugely, hugely important addition to the elite list of the very greatest works for string orchestra. It’s a deeply moving work with a potent mixture of intensity and grandeur, wedded to an astounding depth of craftsmanship. We hope to play it again often.

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Dvorak was a big winner this year- I LOVED doing the Fifth Symphony, a work I’d occasionally found problematic as a listener but grew to admire enormously as I studied it. The fall off in popularity of Dvorak’s music after the five or six big hits is a complete mystery to me. The Fifth should be just as engaging for any audience as the New World- while Dvorak’s later work wins points on craft and economy of means, the earlier astounds for the wealth of ideas and thrilling energy of the Finale. It was a pretty good year for Mahler- three symphonies, including my first full public performance of the Seventh, which was a hoot.

Of course, there were some painful omissions from the repertoire list. Many of my favorite 20th c. composers were absent, including Janacek, Debussy, Stravinsky, Messiaen and Bartók. What a waste of a year of one’s life to miss out on doing anything by these giants for an entire year. The biggest omission, however, must be that of Robert Schumann, whose music was agonizingly absent from my calendar for the first time in well over a decade if not more. This is all the more bizarre given that we just completed our Schumann cycle with the Orchestra of the Swan in December of 2013. Fingers crossed that 2015 brings more Bobby!

(This was literally the last Schumann I conducted- the recording incorporates the last several minutes of our concert performance, the ending of our four-year Bobby and Hans mega-adventure)

On the other hand, it was a good year for the music of living composers- lots of performances, a healthy number of premieres and some very exciting recordings. I hope that’s a trend that will continue next year- there are many exciting things in the pipeline!

This year’s balance of cello to conducting seemed to show a slight shift toward more cello, but no concerti for the first time in a few years. That’s fine with me- the best music for cello is the chamber repertoire, and I got to play many of the greatest things in the literature this year.

So then, without further ado, here are the stats!

[If you would like to contribute to the Repertoire Report project, please send your listing of works performed in the last calendar year in alphabetical order to info@kennethwoods.net]
* Performances in multiple venues/series= 12

# New to KW repertoire= 28

World-premieres= 7

Number of composers= 49

National premieres= 3

Living composers performed= 15

Works by living composers= 19

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