by Kenneth Woods | Sep 19, 2008 | A view from the podium, Performing Life
7:30 AM: Sunday morning and I’m up too freakin’ early- I’ve got a short window to meet my dear old friend, the marvelous horn player Nancy B, for breakfast. I’ve got to walk to Central Park South in time for a 9 AM meetup, then David Y can pick me up at 10:30 to head...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 17, 2008 | A view from the podium
From my sister, the conductor Cynthia Woods, explaining to a board member why it might be better in this instance to start a concert with an overture by Brahms or Wagner than one by Mozart…. Mozart is the string bikini of composers- if you can pull it off,...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 16, 2008 | A view from the podium, Explore the Score
I thought David Yang’s script to accompany our performance of Janacek’s String Quartet no. 2, “Intimate Letters,” would make a great blog post and a wonderful primer on a rarely heard masterpiece, so with his permission I’ve edited and reformatted it to fit these...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 16, 2008 | A view from the podium, Performing Life
Saturday again offers only a short window of rehearsal, shortened by New York traffic to less than two hours. We try to work quickly though the problem spots we’d been unable to touch the day before in Philly, but we’re racing the clock- Yonah has another engagement...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 15, 2008 | A view from the podium
I’m spending my week in Philadelphia and New York to prepare and perform a very special piece of music I’ve been wanting to learn for many years, Janacek’s 2nd String Quartet. My colleagues in this endeavor are violinists David Ehrlich and Yonah Zur, and violist David...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 11, 2008 | A view from the podium
In spite of the significant technical challenges for all the players in Philip Sawyers Gale of Life Overture, rehearsals moved along at a quick pace. The main reason for our smooth progress was the immense care Philip had obviously taken in making his writing as...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 9, 2008 | A view from the podium
It’s hard to accept that the Proms season is nearly over, and that this will be the first year in a long time that I haven’t been to a concert at the Albert Hall in person. I’m doubly sad about that because it seems like it’s been an awfully good year at the Proms. As...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 8, 2008 | A view from the podium, Performing Life
We’re coming to you today from the beautiful island of Procida, off the coast of Naples. This week, our piano trio is performing the first concert of the “Fish and Music” festival in the grande marina. I’ve never played at an occasion named for a food before, although...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 5, 2008 | A view from the podium, Nuts and bolts
As we got to terms quickly with the difficulties on the Sibelius, we also had a lot of work to do on the first half on the concert. The opening of the Tristan Prelude is one of the hardest passages for wind intonation ever written. Many of the recordings I’ve heard...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 4, 2008 | A view from the podium
The Sibelius symphonies are full of difficulties for the conductor, instrumentalists and even the audience. Though the whole of his Fifth Symphony is shorter than the Finale of Mahler 2, it’s just as difficult a work to put together, and in some ways more so. For the...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 2, 2008 | A view from the podium
There’s a great feature over at the Guardian by Tom Service on Pierre Boulez’s annual conducting masterclasses at the Lucerne Festival. It includes a nice video interview with some brief footage of his work at the institute. I’ve been told in the past by some of our...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 2, 2008 | A view from the podium, Performing Life
The second KCYO rehearsal of our 2008 course presented a formidable set of challenges, primarily because of the diversity of those challenges. Each work has not only its own stylistic language, but its own sound world, from the quintissential French perfumed...
by Kenneth Woods | Aug 31, 2008 | A view from the podium
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....
by Kenneth Woods | Aug 23, 2008 | A view from the podium, Performing Life
My late summer staycation (a word I had never heard before this year which is now everywhere, and will no doubt hopelessly date a forgetable blog post) comes to an end this week. Tomorrow morning, we are heady to Kent, where I will be spending my next week conducting...
by Kenneth Woods | Aug 22, 2008 | A view from the podium
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...
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