by Kenneth Woods | Jun 24, 2007 | A view from the podium, Performing Life
1 AM. Bypassed immediate post-concert blog post in favor of a beer with the band. Back home at last, so just a few quick thoughts to end the day. Shostakovich- I think the message got through. No coughing at the end, instead complete silence as the orchestra really...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 23, 2007 | A view from the podium, Performing Life
Intermission. Why am I doing this to myself? Interesting exercise in any case. So hot. I know I sound like I’m just being precious, but it really is hell in there. Nice crowd. Quite tepid applause after the Beethoven, but after a long silence, which means they got it....
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 23, 2007 | A view from the podium, Performing Life
Seven PM. Best thing about the Electric Theatre is that they have a great little café and bar. I had a fantastic mezze plate- lots of lovely homemade hummous, sundried tomatos, asparagus, fresh mozzarella and the like. I normally don’t eat before concerts, but if one...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 23, 2007 | A view from the podium, Nuts and bolts, Performing Life
Just offstage after the second half of SMP dress rehearsal. God its flippin’ hot. It’s so hot that I’m not the only one sweating. Everyone’s sweating. I find it kind of a relief, since I’m always hot. Schumann went well. What a piece- it’s the sort of music that...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 23, 2007 | A view from the podium, Performing Life
This hall has wireless, so this is my first-ever mid-dress rehearsal blog post, which I thought would be an interesting exercise…. We’ve just finished the Shostakovich. We rehearse in a very loud, reverberant room, and this is a very dead, but clear hall. For the...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 23, 2007 | A view from the podium, Music and Media
I’m just flipping through scores before my SMP dress rehearsal this afternoon and realizing what an incredible challenge we have ahead of us tonight. Shostakovich’s Third Quartet is in five movements, and five movement works almost always are built on some concept of...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 21, 2007 | A view from the podium
Rostislav Dubinsky was the founding first violinist of the Borodin Quartet, who worked intimately with Shostakovich in preparing performances and recordings of all of his fifteen string quartets. I studied chamber music with him at Indiana University from 1986-8....
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 19, 2007 | A view from the podium, Music and Media
Okay, I’ve been tagged. Daniel Wolf at Renewable Music has tagged me as he was tagged by Matthew Guerrieri at Soho the Dog. It’s official- I’ve won the Thinking Blogger Award. Here’s how it works 1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 19, 2007 | A view from the podium, Nuts and bolts
So, later this week, I’m conducting, among other things, the Schumann Cello Concerto with the Surrey Mozart Players as part of our ongoing Schumann cycle. I find cello works challenging to accompany in a very specific way, because I’ve played most of them myself and...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 18, 2007 | A view from the podium
Programming is a practice that falls somewhere in the cracks between high art, alchemy and sausage making. There are two kinds of decisions orchestras make that greatly overshadow all other concerns. 1- What are we going to play 2- Who’s going to play it...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 16, 2007 | A view from the podium, News and Reviews
UPCOMING CONCERT- June 23, 2007 7:30 PM Surrey Mozart Players Electric Theatre, Guildford Beethoven- Coriolan Overture Schumann- Cello Concerto in A minor –Gemma Rosefield, cello Shostakovich- Chamber Symphony op. 73 From the SMP website- Beethoven’s overture...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 14, 2007 | A view from the podium
So… how does one identify true musical genius in the 21st Century? Is it a composer with a new harmonic vocabulary? A conductor with photographic memory? A violinist with perfect pitch? A pianist with ten brains for ten fingers? I, for one, look to poetry. Magnetic...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 11, 2007 | A view from the podium
Tell them a passage should sound “not together in exactly the right way….” ...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 11, 2007 | A view from the podium
I was rehearsing the first Shostakovich Piano Concerto yesterday, and it occurred to me that we tend to think of composers careers in a rather naïve way. Almost invariably, we tend to hear about composers “developing” or even “improving” throughout their careers, but...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 9, 2007 | A view from the podium, Explore the Score
Dmitri Shostakovich- Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, op 35 In many ways, Shostakovich was a quintessentially Russian composer. As a symphonist one can certainly hear the influence of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and even, to an extent,...
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