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December 2, 2003
Reviews
SYMPHONY
The Orchestral Kaleidoscope
SYMPHONY
A Peculiar Potpourri
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Responses to Our 11/25/03 Question of the Week
MUSIC NEWS
Belated Thanksgiving to Opera Founders
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Robert Commanday, Senior Editor
For someone whose livelihood is mostly concerned with the making of music, attending concerts as a listener can be a fascinating and peculiar experience: not work, exactly, but not play either. Hearing five different orchestral programs in six days, as I had the privilege of doing last week, was almost disorienting. Once I managed to overcome the reflex to stand up when the conductor came on stage, as if an instrument were in my hand, I eventually settled in to my unaccustomed role as musical consumer. How should I behave, exactly? I remembered not to cough, and definitely not to shift or lean (recalling the excoriating tongue-lashing delivered mid-Brahms-pianissimo to my companion one Tuesday evening not so long ago by a venerable Marin Symphony audience member). When I thought about it, it was not so different from how I was expected to sit on the stage, where — according to the habitual standard of American orchestral decorum, anyway — motion is distracting, and the undue appearance of eagerness in any form is "just not done." Except for the conductor, of course, who, though the one person onstage who doesn't actually produce any music, is invested by our CEO-enamored society with the sole right to flap and flail. (It should be noted here that when I take the podium myself, I too avail myself of this right, almost to the point of orbital velocity at times.) Five programs, four different orchestras, three distinct cultures. Amidst the abundant musical rewards of such a week was a unique opportunity for reflection on the state of the entire orchestral enterprise. The event that really put the question into sharp focus was the visit of the Berlin Philharmonic, under its new Music Director, Sir Simon Rattle, to Davies Hall on Monday and Tuesday. In a refreshingly puff-free article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman framed the upcoming visit in terms of Rattle's non-relationship to the "American subscription system": what American music directorships require from, and offer to, their incumbents. Sir Simon is quoted as saying that the American system affords him "too little time"; Kosman ups the ante by suggesting that European maestros (male plural used advisedly) may lack the inclination to evangelize, to fulfill what he sees as an unceasing need to "sell" American audiences on the "very premise of orchestral music." Perhaps, he opines, Rattle may be one of those maestros who feels he has "other personal priorities than salesmanship." Excuse me? Or should I say, Entschuldigen Sie bitte? I, for one, was thoroughly "sold" by what I saw and heard last Monday and Tuesday. Just what is this "premise of orchestral music" that needs selling? Let's face it: superlative performances sell themselves. Ah, but what about the rest of us mere mortals, you might ask? How do we get the American public to "buy" the current American standard of week-in, week-out orchestral performance? Maybe this is what needs the selling? If so, perhaps we should step back for a moment and look at some, as those in the record business so affectionately call it, "product." What's for sale locally? The rest of my audience week afforded me a few samples. Sunday evening was the Marin Symphony, a well-attended — indeed, well-sold — program featuring a fine young cello soloist, the Korean Min-Ji Kim, and the vigorous guest conductor Leif Bjaland. This program got a lot of things right: an energetic Beethoven Leonore No. 3 to start, a passionate reading of Barber's First Symphony (a work I had not previously had the pleasure of encountering), and the miraculous Dvorák Concerto, performed by Ms. Kim with deftness and assurance. Yet the evening was also a snapshot of the "American system" in other ways. Professionalism is the watch-word here, and it has both positive and negative connotations. Constrained by the exigencies of a brief rehearsal period, the musicians must muster tremendous concentration, terrific discipline, absolute reliability — all qualities that we would call "professional" in a musician. That the orchestra, and those many like it on what we call the "Freeway Philharmonic" circuit, rises to the level of performance it does is a credit to the artistry of these women and men. "Professional" in this context, however, also has a downside, to my mind. To make it all work efficiently, there are a number of tacit understandings among musicians, and between musicians and conductors. The golden rule is often "LIFO" — an acronym for "Last In, First Out." The greatest sin is to stick out. True, everyone could always be playing at peak level, with the maximum of nuance, subtlety, and artistry, and all of those sounds could be made to blend, with the right amount of time and attention. But usually it's a lot safer (also perhaps easier, but I don't think that's the motivation for most musicians) to scale back, to calibrate one's playing towards the middle of every parameter, to fit in. In a string section, the pressure is enormous. If a colleague says she likes your sound, watch out: she's telling you she's not supposed to be hearing your sound. Well, at least there are conductors to weigh in on these issues, you assume. But do they? First of all, conductors don't always see "their" orchestras all that often, as you can't really be a conductor of stature if you work in only one place, now, can you? All this travel means a parade of guest conductors, with no responsibility for orchestra-building; sometimes a Music Director is practically a guest conductor himself at his home orchestra. And guests do not wish to wear out their welcome, of course. Thus mundane matters such as pitch, rhythm, intonation and ensemble are often "off the table" in rehearsal, as if by agreement. Professional musicians can of course be trusted, by virtue of their training, discipline and integrity, to keep these affairs in order to a large extent. But it isn't always possible, and oftentimes the audience hears the result. Not the outright "clam," but a fuzzy edge to a chord, a sour blend among instruments, a sound that just never gets very soft. That the ubiquity of recordings has created a false sound-ideal of technical perfection in the ear of the listening public just makes things worse. Does the higher-end local "product" sell better? Up the salary scale and to the south of the Golden Gate, I took in the San Francisco Symphony on Friday. The "sell" here was no doubt the guest violin soloist, for whom the colloquial nickname musicians give to their instruments — "axe" — seemed unduly appropriate. Efforts from conductor and musicians to coax moments of nuance from the Saint-Saëns Third Concerto fell over and over to the relentless swift strokes of this Paul Bunyan. Yet he received a thundering ovation. As for the rest of the program, it was suffused with the sort of mutual politeness I referred to earlier. One incident in particular set me to thinking about salesmanship from an audience perspective. Before one movement, a last-second outburst of upper-respiratory and electronic-noise activity drew a turn of the conductor's head, followed by some chuckling and even applause from one especially demonstrative individual in the balcony. "Now class, settle down," I thought to myself. Aha! Misbehaving audience not as unsophisticated boors, but as distracted kids! So the question suggested itself: are we seeking "Education" as a way to sell our music, or merely that buzz-phrase of today's teacher training, "Classroom Management?" American audiences can't make it through a concert without misbehaving, apparently, to judge from Sir Simon's thankful encore on Tuesday evening — a reward, he said, for no one having "coughed through all the quiet bits" the previous evening. Why didn't they? Perhaps because the quiet bits were really, really quiet; people were listening so intently they weren't even breathing, let alone swallowing. Friday night's contretemps happened because people were palpably less interested in what they were hearing, I have no doubt. The scolding applauder in the balcony won't fix this. Okay, even if we admit that we can't mesmerize an audience every day of the week (though let's not give up trying), would they perhaps devote more rapt attention if we could just make symphonic music more important to their lives? If so, how do we do it? Here I take the long view. For a lot less than the price of a laptop, a school can purchase a really decent student violin that will last a lot longer (and require a lot less upgrading). There is no amount of mere listening, no form of internet-enabled presentation no matter how artful, that can substitute for the experience provided by putting a musical instrument in a child's hands and making her grapple with it. And yes, I do say "making." Here is where the first of my week's concerts, that of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, comes in. Among the players are doubtless dozens of tomorrow's professional musicians. (Heck, a few of them could well be today's, if they only had their own cars.) But the rest are the core of tomorrow's audience, and they care, and they won't cough, and they won't need the hard sell, except that you'd better play well because they will know the difference. And yet I have just one concern for them: which sort of professional musician are they being trained to be? A member of the Berlin Phil — a band of accomplished, often exuberant, physically demonstrative players? Or a soon-to-be-world-wearied Freeway Phil veteran — sitting still, not sticking out, perhaps with a thick layer of "professional" cynicism to dampen some of the frustration? I found the contrast between two passages played by the Youth Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic (which has a few members who look young enough to play in the other, by the way) most telling in this regard. The Scherzo of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony begins with the famous "pizzicato ostinato" of the strings; mostly very soft but with several good-humored swells and a few sudden outbursts. The second movement of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta also has a long pizzicato passage, but split differently: one side plays with a motoric lack of nuance while the other makes repeated off-beat jabs at perilously irregular intervals. In both cases the respective conductors were at pains not to over-conduct. Rattle sort of hovered over the passage, gently putting a shoulder into the offbeats. These were delivered not just with precision but with the most exquisite sense of the larger phrase. The whole thing was "grooving," everyone bending together with the phrases, and Rattle was grooving along with them, in that confirming, yes-we-were-planning-on-meeting-here-and-so-we-are sort of way to which conductors aspire and for which players are grateful. At the Youth Orchestra, it seemed more as though the conductor were showing that the students didn't need him in order to play together, and so he just checked out. I thought to myself, "That'll be good preparation for when they get a conductor they can't follow, won't it?" It was all a perfect study in poise, and it made my heart sink. Sure, they were together, but there was no wit, and precious little fun. Or rather, I didn't see any, and I didn't hear any. It made me the more grateful at last to hear the cymbal player at the very end of the Symphony who, out of sheer passion and involvement, was utterly incapable of holding back the tempo in those tricky offbeats at the end. Someone who takes a risk, who pushes the LIFO envelope — someone whose enthusiasm needs to be tempered, but not crushed . . . Okay, now I am ready to get back to work. (George Thomson is a conductor, violinist and violist, Director of the Virtuoso Program at San Domenico School, San Anselmo.) ©2003 George Thomson, all rights reserved SFCV is a not-for-profit enterprise supported by foundation grants and individual contributions. 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From September 1, 1998 to October 7, 2003, we have published, in addition to the Music News, feature pieces and weekly editorials 1586 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 47 symphony orchestras (333 reviews), 72 chamber groups (171), 33 new music ensembles and programs (177), 34 opera companies (226), 26 choral groups (97), 15 music festivals (70), 32 early music ensembles (107), 21 chamber orchestras (72), 5 musical theater groups (13), world music (14), recitals (286), youth music (10), Other (10).
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