Gerald Elias's Blog, page 5

Symphonies & Scorpions: PC, or Not PC?

WELCOME! THIS IS THE ELEVENTH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.               

  I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE.

ENJOY!

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PC, or Not PC? Wednesday, April 23

Another reason to play safe tour programs: One of my young colleagues told me of performing with an American youth orchestra that played in China not too long ago. They had planned to play a Shostakovich symphony but weren’t allowed to, as it was considered too revolutionary. Dmitri Shostakovich, during his lifetime, was often criticized by Stalin for being anti-revolutionary. Go figure.

Fantastic fantastique

We have two grueling rehearsals of the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique today, but it’s well worth the effort. Like the Arc de Triomphe, which was coated by soot that accumulated over the decades, Symphonie fantastique is an iconic French monument that benefits from occasional sandblasting. To remove the grime, Dutoit painstakingly rehearses balance and dynamics that often are overlooked. Having performed it more times than I can remember, the symphony is one of those rare pieces that always retains a fresh vitality. Perhaps one reason is that, unlike much of the tried-and-true repertoire, you’ve got to stay on our toes. There are so many rhythmic and ensemble traps, starting from the very first measure in the woodwinds and continuing through the Witches’ Sabbath in the last movement, that attempting to perform it by rote can exact a terrible toll. Like a football team that gets fumblitis after that first contagious bobble, in Symphonie fantastique, a split-second miscalculation can snowball in the blink of an eye.

Next, consider Berlioz’s astonishing creative imagination and confident craftsmanship, amazing for anyone composer. But just think, Berlioz was a mere stripling of twenty-seven when he composed the piece and Josef Haydn had died only two decades earlier! As creative as the Mahler Fifth may be, it seems to me a product of its time. Symphonie fantastique feels as if the ink on the page is still wet.

The most memorable performance I’ve been part of was with Sir Colin Davis, who had a special place in his heart for Berlioz. Davis wrung every drop of fiery passion from the score and the orchestra, and at one performance he almost catapulted himself off the podium as he drove the orchestra through the last four measures of the piece.

Dutoit’s interpretation is in the same league. Though somewhat more measured, his sense of timing, balance, rhythm, and structure evoke a controlled yet powerful narrative. Fortunately for musicians and listeners alike, every conductor brings a different bag of tricks to the podium, from the grand conception down to the smallest detail.

For example, until Dutoit made an explicit point of it at the rehearsal, I had never heard the portentous, low A-flat in the third tympani at the end of the Scène aux champs that clashes dramatically, if subtly, with an F Major chord outlined by the cor anglais. You might chuckle at what seems like such an obscure detail, but believe me, it makes an unsettling difference that you’ll feel, if only subliminally. Literally a stroke of genius by Berlioz, it still took me almost four decades of orchestral playing for this revelation. I eagerly anticipate the possibility—make that the likelihood—of discovering more such gems in the future.

With its vivid musical imagery, from shepherds calling to each other on the mountainside, to the hysteria of the March to the Scaffold and the decapitated head bouncing off the guillotine, Symphonie fantastique translates exceptionally well into anyone’s musical language. And with that diabolically frenzied coda, it’s impossible for listeners anywhere not to be lifted out of their seats.

[image error]Witches’ Sabbath by Louis Boulanger, 1835. Inspired by Symphonie Fantastique?

Face the Music

The tail end of the second rehearsal is devoted to the very popular and very familiar Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla by Mikhail Glinka, which was one of Arthur Fiedler’s favorite Boston Pops program openers. In fact, there’s a big, red BOSTON POPS stamp on the front page of my second violin part. Along with the Rachmaninoff and Night on Bare Mountain we have, in fact, the makings of a full-fledged Fiedler Pops program. All that’s missing is I Wanna Hold Your Hand. And this was for an international tour? Are tastes changing everywhere or is the musical world simply dumbing down? Or am I just getting crotchety? (What do you mean, getting crotchety, my kids would say.)

Typically, repertoire is determined by a meeting of the minds of the conductor, the artistic administrator, and the music director. For a tour, the various presenters’ requests are also considered. Some general considerations are: the merits of a given piece, and how the pieces within a program “fit” together. For example, putting Offenbach and Bruckner on the same program would be an artistic no-no. [Former BSO managing director, Tom Morris, and I used to have a contest trying to come up with the most ridiculous programs imaginable based around a “theme.” One of his was Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, Debussy’s La Mer (The Sea), and Bizet’s Symphony in ‘C’. Another was a program of Bach and Boccherini on the first half, and after intermission, Berio followed by the immortal but nonexistent composer, Beriorini.] Other considerations are how a given program fits into the rest of the season; when the last time, and how often, a particular piece was performed; and the particular strengths of a conductor’s repertoire.

In the case of the Asia tour, the BSO artistic staff had worked on the program along with the Asian presenters who, Tony Fogg conceded, had a better idea of what would work in China, partly because Tony had never been there. Though the “meat and potatoes” programs were not the most adventurous imaginable, they at least satisfied everyone’s needs, and so the BSO gave them its imprimatur.

I was also told that the programs, including the encores, were “Maazel’s programs,” dating back to his days as music director in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and New York, and were consistent with his strengths. That made it all the more impressive there wasn’t a single change in the three concert programs or encores when the baton was passed to Dutoit.

On previous tours we performed encores that were local favorites: Johann Strauss’s Pizzicato Polka in Vienna, and Chinese folk songs for the 1979 tour. But it also can backfire if the orchestra misjudges the style of music that’s part of the indigenous population’s cultural DNA. Personally, I would rather hear the Vienna Phil perform the Blue Danube than Rhapsody in Blue. So, more often than not, the main consideration for programing encores is simply to show off the orchestra with short, virtuoso pieces that don’t need all that much rehearsal time. It’s the maestro’s discretion which encores to play on a given night. For the 2014 Asia tour we had several on tap, including the Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 1 and Bizet’s Farandole, fan favorites anywhere in the world.

Life Isn’t Always Fair

After finishing our arduous rehearsal of the Berlioz, there’s a reshuffling of personnel before diving into the fleeting Glinka overture. The musicians who played both pieces will have rehearsed for four-and-a-half hours, those who played only the Berlioz for four hours and twenty-three minutes, while the lucky handful who play only the Glinka rehearse for a mere seven minutes and don’t even break a sweat. The personnel manager assures us that it all works out evenly in the long run.

The BSO contract permits no more than two rehearsals in a day, but that evening I indulge in a third, of sorts. As a rehearsal for Asia I head for dinner in Chinatown, where I’m joined by my nephew, Danny, and his wife, Jackie. The restaurant’s lobster dishes have come highly recommended by BSO harpist Jessica Zhou and, always taking my colleagues’ opinions very seriously, I give the dinner my full attention. One can never be too prepared.

***

Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It’s available in two paperback editions, one with black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.

NEWS FLASH: MY FIRST POLITICAL THRILLER, THE BEETHOVEN SEQUENCE, IS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE ON SEPTEMBER 8! A MENTALLY UNBALANCED MUSIC TEACHER BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! PREPOSTEROUS? STAY TUNED.

Symphonies & Scorpions: The “Firebird” Strad

WELCOME! THIS IS THE TENTH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.               

  I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE.

ENJOY!

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A Bucolic Respite , Sunday, April 20

Since Sunday (Easter) and Monday are free days, after the concert last night I drove a rental car two hours to the cottage in the Berkshires that Cecily and I have owned since 1976, arriving at about 1:00 a.m. I haven’t been here since Christmas. Everything’s in fine shape, with only a few cobwebs and nary a trace of mouse poop.

In the morning I engage in outdoor manual labor, much needed both for me and the weedy garden beds. The woods echo with an unusual number of woodpeckers, like a chorus of cajonistas. It’s all very therapeutic.

Monday, April 21

Goes with the Territory

I wake at 6:00 a.m., too antsy to stay in bed, and a few hours thereafter I meet Joe McGauley for breakfast at a local eatery. Joe’s a recently retired BSO violinist who has since moved full-time to Lenox, just a couple miles from Tanglewood. More than being my former colleague, he’s my oldest friend. We played in student orchestras on Long Island together when he was nine and I was eight, and raised Cain together ever since. Joe had to retire from the orchestra sooner than he would have chosen due to the effects of focal dystonia, a chronic condition which makes it frustratingly difficult to control the fine motor skills necessary to play an instrument at the level Joe demanded of himself. The ailment became “famous” with the great pianist, Leon Fleisher, who lost the use his right hand for decades, but who heroically continued to perform concertos composed solely for the left hand. Amazingly, his ability to use his right hand returned, but as there is no tried-and-true treatment or cure for the disease, Fleisher has been the rare exception. And unfortunately, there’s never been an effective way developed to play the violin with one hand.

Playing-related injuries have increased to near epidemic proportions among orchestra musicians. Some of those injuries are temporary and treatable. Others can be chronic and permanently debilitating. Part of it may be attributed not only to the hectic schedules, but to the different types of playing the musicians need to do; everything from Baroque music to symphonic works to opera and ballet to pops to backing up rock bands.

Good practice habits, like warming up slowly and practicing scales daily, help but by no means guarantee injuries can be avoided. Even the way musicians set up their instruments and how they sit in their chairs can make a significant difference.

I count my blessings that I avoided playing-related injury throughout my career. That is, until December, 2013, when I broke all the tried-and-true practice rules I had built up for myself over a lifetime. I did have an excuse, though. I was invited to play on the famous “Firebird” Stradivarius for a performance of three virtuoso violin concertos from Antonio Vivaldi’s Opus 4, La Stravaganza. I had the Strad for only one week, and the sound of the instrument was so intoxicating that every morning I greedily attacked the concertos without warming up properly in a room that, on those cold December days, also hadn’t warmed up enough.

[image error]The “Firebird” Strad. Playing on it almost ended my career, but I loved every minute of it.

I managed to make it through the concert, but that was the last I would touch a fiddle for a full month while undergoing weekly massage therapy and daily stretching exercises on my right side from my neck to my fingertips. I began to play again in February. Very, very slowly. I wanted to make sure I would be back in shape by April; otherwise, I might not have been able to go on the tour. By the way, I didn’t mention any of that to the personnel manager. Nor do I regret for a second having had the opportunity to play on one of the world’s great violins.

Tuesday, April 22         

Black & White

I suppose it’s a prerogative of orchestra musicians to be judgmental of music, guest artists, performances…and of conductors. After all, music is our passion. What amazes outsiders, but is something we’re all accustomed to in the biz, is that our opinions about these things could be as radically different from each other as Bernie Sanders’s and Paul Ryan’s take on health care. For example, I have a colleague, a very gentle, thoughtful soul, who offered this nuanced opinion of Dutoit during the first half of our morning rehearsal: “He tries to combine Swiss precision with French charm.  And fails miserably at both.”

“So, what’s your point?” I joke.

Well, there you go. That’s one of the things I love about musicians. No unanimous opinions. But paradoxically, no gray areas, either.

Cultural Exchange

My colleague’s comments notwithstanding, I engage in a very pleasant chat with the maestro during our twenty-minute rehearsal break, swapping China anecdotes. Dutoit had earlier remarked to the orchestra upon one of the positive repercussions of the BSO’s 1979 tour. It seems there was a music festival director in China who, when he was a young boy, had attended one of our Beijing concerts and had been so moved that he decided to become a clarinetist. Though he wasn’t able to attain professional expertise, he became so passionate about music that he dedicated his life to becoming a successful arts administrator. In a similar vein, I mention to Dutoit that as a result of that same Beijing concert, a few of the Chinese conservatory students we met came to Boston to complete their study. They became good friends and I warmly recall one evening at our home in Back Bay when they made the best homemade jiao tse I ever had. Shortly thereafter, they joined the Montreal Symphony when Dutoit was the music director. He remembers them fondly. Those are the kinds of international connections in the music world that, if for no other reason, justify touring. It brings us together.

***

Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It’s available in two paperback editions, one with black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.

NEWS FLASH: MY FIRST POLITICAL THRILLER, THE BEETHOVEN SEQUENCE, IS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE ON SEPTEMBER 8! A MENTALLY UNBALANCED MUSIC TEACHER BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! PREPOSTEROUS? STAY TUNED.

Symphonies & Scorpions: Rap on Rhapsody

WELCOME! THIS IS THE NINTH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.               

  I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE.

ENJOY!

Rap on Rhapsody

Saturday, April 19

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The rehearsal this morning of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini went smoothly enough. The piece, chock full of engaging melodies and dazzling pyrotechnics, has become the standard teeth-cutter for budding piano virtuosi. And when the pianist slides into the immortal eighteenth variation, audiences inevitably emit an audible sigh of recognition and relish, perhaps rekindling nostalgic memories of the figure skating gods Oleg Protopopov and Ludmilla Belausova, the Commies we loved in spite of ourselves, during the golden age of pairs skating in the 1960s. I get why the Rhapsody is so popular but, as with much of Rachmaninoff’s music, there’s a lot of filler and his string writing can be awkward and clumsily unidiomatic. Compare that to a score by Mozart, where the music is uncannily suited to the capabilities of each and every instrument. As my former Utah Symphony colleague, bassist Jamie Allyn, once noted, even Mozart’s pizzicato chords are perfectly registered to suit the instrument.

[image error]The 18th Variation. The Protopopovs, poetry in motion

The young piano soloist, Behzod Abduraimov, hails from somewhere in the former Soviet empire. It’s his first time with the BSO and no one has ever heard of him. I asked Tony Fogg how he ended up on our radar. It turned out that Abduraimov had performed in China and had achieved some popularity there. A surprising number of fine artists find a niche on one continent but are virtually unknown on another. Garrick Ohlsson, for example, is a superlative pianist but his presence in Europe doesn’t match his profile here in the US. With the fine violinist Isabella Faust, who has performed with the BSO on a few occasions, it’s almost the reverse. In Europe she’s a superstar; here, she’s definitely a presence but not a household name. When tours are undertaken on more familiar territory, according to Tony, the BSO would have more input in deciding upon guest artists, but for China they took the recommendation for Abduraimov at face value.

Though it lacks poetry, Abduraimov gives a creditable account of the Rhapsody, but his interaction with the orchestra is sporadic, and he sometimes tends to bolt ahead. He would have benefitted from a lesson in elegance and poise from the Protopopovs, but I’ll chalk that up to youthful exuberance.Dutoit makes his best effort to disguise any impatience.

Trunk-ated

After the rehearsal I descend into the dingy catacombs of Symphony Hall to seek out my wardrobe trunk for the tour. The BSO travels with twenty-five of these behemoths. When aligned backstage, they stand upright like giant, mutant dominoes. I believe they were constructed sometime between the time of King Arthur and King Richard, for they are mighty fortresses. Each six-foot tall, two-hundred-pound metal-clad trunk opens like a book and contains compartments to accommodate four musicians’ gear, including a space to hang tail suits, tuxedos, or dresses, and two drawers for shirts, shoes, and accessories. (Street clothes and anything else musicians take on tour are packed in their own individual luggage.) To prevent the suits from flopping around inside the trunk and getting wrinkled, there’s a removable wooden bar that clamps into the inside of the door. The doors snap shut with large clasps and have a big brass lock. If I am not mistaken, our wardrobe trunks were the predecessors of the iron maiden as an instrument of torture.

As BSO tours typically start at the beginning of the week so as to fit snugly into the orchestra’s Boston concert schedule, the ritual of packing wardrobe trunks takes place after our Saturday night Symphony Hall concert.         

For many years, musicians often packed their wardrobe trunks sparingly in order to be able to stuff as many exotic, generally legal souvenirs into them by the end of the tour. One esteemed colleague, violinist Gerald Gelbloom, who was my teacher, mentor, and close friend until his untimely death in 1982, had a sly MO. (Gerry was the prototype for the character Solomon Goldbloom in my novel, Devil’s Trill.) He would pack only those concert dress shirts that were ripe for the scrap heap, and would toss them in the trash after each concert, one by one, so that by the end of the tour he would have empty drawers to load with booty. Since 9-11, souvenir packing practice has become verboten for security reasons—we’ve had to fill out forms stating precisely, down to the last cufflink, what we’re packing—and also because the already formidable weight of the trunks becomes unmanageable. But I’m not sure all that many people (musicians and customs officials alike) are taking that edict too seriously.

The wardrobe trunk John Demick assigned me for the tour is #11 Upper. When I finally find it and unlock it in order to hang my tails coat, I notice that scrawled on the wooden crossbar, in unmistakable handwriting that I hadn’t seen for decades, is the name Gelbloom.

That I would now occupy Gerry’s old wardrobe trunk, #11 Upper, is nostalgia and ambivalence combined. Many years ago, the BSO was on a New York tour, and Gerry and I went to the Carnegie Deli for brunch. One thing about Gerry—he was always trying to game the system and get the best deal on whatever came his way. Remarkably, he was generally successful at it. So, when we were at the deli he ordered a humongous smoked fish platter. Though he knew he’d never be able to finish it, in those days the Carnegie Deli gave BSO musicians a ten-percent discount and Gerry just couldn’t pass up such a bargain. He figured he’d pack whatever he couldn’t eat into the wardrobe trunk and, since it was the last day of the tour, he’d retrieve it when we got home to Boston. Chalk one up for cunning.

A week later, it was time for our next concerts at Symphony Hall. Gerry and I descended into the basement to fetch our tails from the trunks. When Gerry opened his, we were knocked backwards, like the supporting cast of a cheap exorcist movie, by a God-awful stench. “What the hell?” Gerry said, and with nose pinched, dared to investigate. Had something died in there? Not quite. Gerry had forgotten about his smoked fish.

So, thirty-plus years later as I packed my gear for the tour, I thoroughly sniff the drawers of #11 Upper. Nothing. I exhale.

Getting in the Groove

At the concert tonight, Dutoit really seems to have regained his mojo. The first couple performances were very good, but tonight’s is even better. I had started to think that maybe age had crept up on him a bit, but now I can chalk that up to mere jet lag. Tonight he’s in full swing. The love fest continues.

***

Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It’s available in two paperback editions, one with black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.

NEWS FLASH: MY FIRST POLITICAL THRILLER, THE BEETHOVEN SEQUENCE, IS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE ON SEPTEMBER 8! A MENTALLY UNBALANCED MUSIC TEACHER BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! PREPOSTEROUS? STAY TUNED.

Symphonies & Scorpions: In-Communicado

WELCOME! THIS IS THE EIGHTH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.               

  I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE.

ENJOY!

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April 18: In Communicado

We’ve received a notice from management encouraging all the musicians to join an app called WhatsApp in order to facilitate free and easy text communications about changes in schedule, programs, etc. while we’re overseas. I’ve never heard of WhatsApp—don’t forget, this is 2014—but it seems like a reasonable idea.

In the old days (i.e. before 1990 and the Internet and cellphones), transmitting messages on international tours sometimes presented a challenge. Once when we were in Japan and had an afternoon rehearsal, one of our percussionists, Frank Epstein, was nowhere to be found. So Bill Moyer, the personnel manager at the time, called our hotel and dictated the following message to the front desk to be delivered to Frank in writing, keeping it simple so there could be no mistake: “You have a rehearsal.”

Frank never did show up. When he arrived at the hall for the performance, Bill, a stickler for protocol, demanded an explanation. Unexcused absences were frowned upon and could potentially be cause for discipline. Hadn’t Frank received his message? Yes, Frank said, who until confronted by Bill had been unaware he had missed the rehearsal. But he didn’t know what the hell the message meant. Why not? Bill asked. It was only four words. Frank showed Bill the message he was given: “You able hustle,” and he hadn’t the foggiest idea what to make of it.

[image error]One of the BSO’s Stone Age wardrobe trunks, RIP

Today’s other announcement is from John Demick, the stage manager, who impresses upon us that whatever we pack in our wardrobe and instrument trunks on the way out of Dodge has to be exactly the same on the way back, or else the friendly folks at Customs might hold up the entire cargo.

I sympathize with John. On tour, he and his crew have to get to every concert hall hours in advance of every rehearsal and concert to set up a hundred chairs, stands, and percussion instruments onstage; and wardrobe, instrument, and library trunks backstage. Then he and his crew remain afterwards to do everything in reverse and load it all for shipping to the next venue. After concerts the crew catches overnight flights while the musicians are eating dinner or sleeping or partying, just to get everything set. No wonder he hadn’t been too upset that the tour might have been cancelled.

Good Form(at), at Home and Abroad

It’s easy to forget that this will be the first overseas tour for the newest BSO members. The orchestra used to travel internationally almost every year or so, and probably became a bit jaded. But with the increasing cost of travel compounded with the belt-tightening many orchestras had to undertake during the Great Recession, those days of annual tours were put on hold, at least temporarily. The BSO cancelled a proposed 2010 mid-European tour because of the economic woes starting in ‘08 and the uncertain outlook for the future. BSO had to reduce staff. Sponsors were not secured. As it turned out, Maestro Levine’s health was correspondingly precarious, so it was a double whammy. Then followed the search for a new music director, with the result that there had been no major international tour since 2007.

By 2011, things had begun to swing back to something resembling equilibrium. Thus, the timing was right when concert agent Jasper Parrot, who had represented Lorin Maazel on various projects (but was not his full-time manager), came to the BSO with a proposal to go to Asia.

Besides repertoire and other artistic concerns, financial considerations need to be carefully hashed out. Some cities of lesser size that are not cultural capitals, in central Germany for example, offer substantial fees to attract major orchestras to enhance the city’s cultural profile and to provide its citizens with something of greater quality than that which may be available locally. It is a badge of community honor even though their return on the Euro might not be immediately evident on the bottom line. The opposite can be true, too. A famous cultural center may be able to attract a great orchestra at a reduced fee because the visiting orchestra considers the prestige to be of greater value; a possible example, the BSO’s Symphony Hall celebrity series, which presents foreign orchestras “on the way” to New York and Carnegie. Another example is the Utah Symphony, which has an explicit commitment with the State of Utah to perform in every county over a given number of years. Some of the smaller communities don’t have the means to pay the hefty fee of a professional orchestra—and sometimes don’t even have a stage to fit all the musicians—so the Symphony tries to make accommodations by piggybacking the less affluent towns with those that have the means. Likewise, when the BSO puts together its own touring schedule it has to balance hard financial calculations with less quantifiable considerations like artistry and prestige.

Usually, tour planning takes years, and is an ongoing process in which music director, sponsors, presenters, and tour managers get their collective noggins together. Even before the 2014 Asia tour, the BSO began planning a Europe Festival tour in August 2015 conducted by its dynamic new, “Have Baton, Will Travel” music director, Andris Nelsons, and Fogg was already working on subsequent tours for 2016 and 2017. A tireless development staff works nonstop to nurture relationships with potential tour sponsors, without whose largesse the projects would not be possible. To sweeten the pot, sometimes they make multi-year deals, including overlapping sponsorship of local Boston and tour concerts.

It takes a helluva lot of work just to break even. Why bother? I wonder out loud. Tony Fogg rattles off the three biggest reasons. Clearly, it’s not the first time he’s been asked this question.

“First there’s the competitive edge. It’s important we maintain the brand in the local and world marketplace. Then there’s pride, not only of what we do as an orchestra, but of representing Boston. And third, artistically, tours are when the orchestra really rises to the occasion, so it keeps us playing our best throughout the season.”

As a corporate entity, what about the money aspect? I ask.

Fogg doesn’t bat an eyelash.

“As a nonprofit, the BSO’s goals are mission-based, not financial, so the intangibles take on much greater significance.”

The intangibles take on much greater significance! In this day and age when so many misdirected orchestra boards are trying to impose a corporate business model upon orchestras and end up dismantling them as a result, this was as uplifting a response as I could imagine. Bravo.

In the absence of touring, the question arises how to employ the musicians for a whole season and not over-saturate the local market. Many major orchestras that don’t have substantial summer seasons need touring to fill out what otherwise would be a gap in the schedule. Hence there are some tours that have nothing to commend them other than to keep the musicians working.

According to Fogg, the BSO has the opposite problem: trying to find the time to tour by rearranging an already densely packed schedule: thirty-one or thirty-two weeks of subscription concerts (the “serious” stuff), summer at Tanglewood, a Pops season in the spring, and Christmas Pops concerts are all givens. The BSO’s challenge is deciding what can be chiseled out of the calendar without raising the ire the local audiences. Patriots of New England have been known to make their voices heard when they don’t feel adequately represented.

As a less expensive alternative to touring, some orchestras seeking to fill out their calendars are coming up with novel concert formats in their communities other than the standard classical and pops series. Never an easy task. I’m glad I’m not an artistic administrator.

In an effort to attract a younger and more casual crowd, for example, the BSO has developed a series of concerts that are abbreviated and less formal. Today we’re performing “only” the Mahler Fifth, omitting the Mozart Prague Symphony from the program. The men wear suits (blue for me, black for everyone else) instead of tails, which I gather is supposed to show ‘em what average Joes we are; and one of the BSO musicians is selected to enlighten the audience with down-to-earth introductory remarks, on this occasion by our personable assistant principal violist, Cathy Basrak. Cathy is also a long-distance runner and, on the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, she recounts her experience in the context of how that tragedy brought us together, just as music brings us together.

Considering that attending a symphony concert is a novel experience for many in the audience today, it’s no surprise that concert decorum is a bit unorthodox. There are graphic reports among the musicians of couples making out in the balcony, and a guy in the second row seemingly hit the bottle shortly after breakfast because as we play he conducts the Mahler with even more gusto than Dutoit. I suggest to Caroline that if Dutoit unexpectedly becomes incapacitated as Maazel had, the BSO should have this guy waiting in the wings.

The wild response to the Mahler is, as usual, as over the top as the music. Dutoit, who forgot to give principal trumpet Tom Rolfs the first solo bow at the performance last night, clearly wants to makes amends and escorts Tom to the front of the stage from his trumpet position. That gesture provokes so much enthusiastic applause that Dutoit does the same with principle horn, Jamie Somerville. A love fest ensues, with Dutoit hugging anyone within reach. I wonder how things will be four weeks hence.

***

Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It’s available in two paperback editions, one with black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.

NEWS FLASH: MY FIRST POLITICAL THRILLER, THE BEETHOVEN SEQUENCE, IS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE ON SEPTEMBER 8! A MENTALLY UNBALANCED MUSIC TEACHER BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! PREPOSTEROUS? STAY TUNED.

Symphonies & Scorpions: Filling in the Blanks

WELCOME! THIS IS THE SEVENTH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.               

  I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE.

ENJOY!

 

[image error]Filling in a Couple of Blanks

Thursday, April 17

Lynn Larsen explains something that’s been puzzling me: How is it possible for a conductor of Dutoit’s stature to be available for four weeks of concertizing on such short notice? The answer: He only had to cancel one engagement. The rest of the time was a planned vacation at the end of an arduous concert season. Lynn reaffirms that the tour most likely would have been cancelled had Dutoit not been free to conduct.

I like Lynn. Some personnel managers pretend they’re Marine drill sergeants. Lynn has a much more nuanced approach to regulations. Case in point. I had forgotten that the dress for Friday matinees in Boston is a black suit, and so had neglected to pack one in Salt Lake. I did bring a dark blue one in case I have to spiff up for some tour functions. Knowing that Lynn is a former Utah Mormon, I ask: “Lynn, I gave away my black suit when I returned from my mission. Mind if I wear a dark blue one?” “Why not?” he replied. “I’m color blind.”

Tchaik Five

Thursday, April 17 for yet another Tchaikovsky Fifth, one of the most battle-scarred warhorses in the symphonic stable, can be a test of a professional musician’s professionalism. BSO violinist Slava Uritsky, a Russian refugee from Cold War days, admits the piece has worn thin for him. “That’s probably because you played it too often when you were young,” I offer sympathetically. “Yes,” he replies, “and even when I was old.”

Because this symphony is such a natural crowd pleaser, many conductors just let the orchestra do its thing and stay out of the way. However, Dutoit spends a lot of time adjusting balances and dynamics, and fine-tuning the brass intonation. I think it’s all for the better, but some of my colleagues are a bit impatient with his fussiness, believing they’re already playing up to the extraordinarily high standards they demand of themselves. One might argue that part of a conductor’s job description is to make things better as he sees fit, even if from time to time he’s wrong. On the other hand, since the musicians take such pride in how they play, both individually and as an ensemble, I suppose they feel such criticism—if it should come from anyone—should be the domain of the music director rather than a guest conductor.

There’s a famous moment of dead silence in the finale of the Tchaikovsky after a big chordal climax. Following the pause are three more minutes of triumphant pomp and circumstance. Many novice concertgoers mistake the pause for the end of the piece (even though it’s not the proper key to finish things off) and invade the silence with raucous applause, raising the ire of veteran audience members. Caroline told me she once had a houseguest who attended a performance of the Tchaikovsky and afterwards he told her that while he liked the piece as a whole, “the fifth movement was totally unnecessary.” When the BSO rehearses the piece, the musicians have a humorous tradition of cheering wildly when they get to that spot, in imitation of the audiences. Sometimes guest conductors are taken aback until they realize the joke. At today’s rehearsal we’re not given the chance, as Dutoit stops us at the crucial moment in order to make a comment. Foiled!

The greatest Tchaikovsky Fifth in my experience was with a famously domineering conductor, Kurt Masur. At rehearsals, he often addressed the musicians as “friends.” That’s when you knew to watch out. The Tchaikovsky performances with Masur were exceptionally fine but for one Friday matinee. Former principal flutist, Doriot Anthony Dwyer (descendant of Susan B. Anthony, and the first woman in the BSO) had great musical creativity but in later years could sometimes be a bit scattered. For example, she once left her flute in a phone booth in England. I’m not sure if she ever got it back. At a big flute entrance in the finale of the Tchaikovsky, Doriot forgot to come in. While the rest of the orchestra oom-pahed on, sans flute melody, Masur’s face turned a furious beet red and his bulging eyes threw darts at Doriot. He pointed directly at her, and started singing her part at the top of his lungs until she realized something was missing. Her.

Toward the end of our rehearsal the clouds part and I have a revelation! Listen for this the next time you hear Tchaikovsky Fifth: After having played the piece at least six thousand times, the derivation of the majestically triumphant brass fanfare at the very end of the Finale dawns on me: the soft, quasi-sinister March at the beginning of the first movement Allegro! Even the forte chords the strings play to support the fanfare mirror the pianissimo accompaniment from that tune. I share this tidbit with Caroline. She’s impressed with my perspicacity, but I’m more impressed with Tchaikovsky. There’s a reason composers like Tchaikovsky are popular. They were smart guys. That made my day.

Auditions and Quirky Conduct(ors)

So far, I’ve made some oblique references to full-time orchestra members versus freelancers, subs, and extras. That deserves some clarification. “Full-time” refers to musicians who won a highly competitive audition for their position in the orchestra and who are members of the bargaining unit for the collective bargaining agreement (also called the CBA, or contract; or as the BSO calls it, the Trade Agreement) between the union/musicians and symphony corporation. After a probationary period lasting up to a couple of years, a musician usually receives tenure, which doesn’t necessarily prevent him or her from being fired, but provides a protective grievance process. A sub—short for substitute, not submarine sandwich—is someone hired for a defined number of engagements to replace a full-time musician who is absent. A sub’s temporary contract is governed by conditions laid out in the CBA. An extra is someone likewise hired on a concert by concert basis, but is playing a part not covered by the full-time musicians; for example, if a particular composition requires extra percussionists. By definition, a sub or extra has no job security. If (s)he makes a big blunder during a performance of Brahms Fourth or sneezes on the clarinetist’s head, (s)he might never be rehired. A freelancer is someone who does a variety of gigs to make a living. Most of them covet the opportunity to be hired as a sub or extra with an orchestra like the BSO, and if they think they might sneeze will be sure to bring a handkerchief.

For most of human history, the music director—who is the principal conductor and artistic director of an orchestra—has had sole prerogative for hiring and firing musicians, and has tenaciously protected that authority. The invention of audition committees comprising orchestra members are a result of mid-20th-century labor muscle in an effort to make the hiring process fair, transparent, and standardized. Still, the role that audition committees play is almost always contractually limited to an advisory capacity. Even if it unanimously disagrees with a music director’s judgment in choosing a new member, as sometimes happens, the music director may still take it upon him or herself to make unpopular decisions, because the selection of new musicians is considered so crucial to his artistic vision.

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With Maestro Seiji Ozawa, who hired me in 1975.

Seiji Ozawa took auditions very seriously; so much so that, to the frustration of the committees, his decision that no one who had auditioned merited being hired occurred a little too often for their druthers. A no-decision meant scheduling an entirely new audition, a process that takes six months to a year. And then the audition itself, another several days of the exhausting, sometimes contentious process of listening to upwards of a hundred candidates by the audition committee in addition to the already hectic performance calendar. As musicians continued to retire and their positions went unfilled under Ozawa, vacancies piled up and it became almost impossible to foresee a time when the full complement of musicians would once again grace the stage of Symphony Hall.

Back around 1980 I auditioned for concertmaster of Montreal Symphony when Dutoit was its music director. I was surprised that the audition was not in the concert hall but in a smaller room, and instead of a committee it was just Dutoit himself. (And maybe a couple other people? My memory fails me.) At that time, I was still learning the ins and outs of the profession and later learned that music directors often have the authority to hire concertmasters at their own discretion, the reason being that the relationship between the music director and concertmaster is so unique and crucial that the standard audition procedure becomes somewhat superfluous. Seattle Symphony, for example, doesn’t even give their concertmaster position tenure, under the theory that (s)he is there at the pleasure of the music director, and if there was a change at the helm the new music director should have the right to choose a new concertmaster.

Even though I had practiced assiduously for two months preparing for the Montreal audition, after playing for a little while I knew it just wasn’t going to be my day. There wasn’t enough zip on my fastballs, and my curveball wasn’t breaking. Who can explain why? Maybe too much moules-frites the night before.

Some musicians are born audition-takers. They have the ability to practice the same things over and over again nine hours a day, the ice running in their veins gets even colder when they hear the word “competition,” and they go for the jugular. For me, it has always been tough to replicate the joy and spontaneity of a real performance at auditions, where musicians are playing against each other rather than with each other, and where the audience, such as it is, is compelled to be ultra-critical of technical details and is less focused on a subjective, emotional experience. I count my lucky stars that in my lifetime I’ve won two of the couple dozen auditions I’ve taken, first with Boston and then Utah. Better musicians than me have been far less fortunate.

Though things weren’t going so well, at least in my estimation, Dutoit was courteous enough to listen to me for a good half hour with what appeared to be a great deal of attentiveness, even though I had given him ample grounds to kick me out after ten minutes. I’ve always appreciated his thoughtfulness on that occasion.

Levine, on the other hand, rarely attended auditions, let alone make personnel decisions. According to what I was told, Levine even declined to attend the audition for principal harp, one of the most strategically important positions in the orchestra, though he was present in Symphony Hall.

As great a musician and conductor as I believe Levine is, and as flowing with compliments as he was at rehearsals, I never got a sense of real connection or empathy from him toward the musicians. His smiling face was often buried in the score as he led the orchestra. The music on the page seemed to bring him profound joy, but the manifestation of the score—the actual sound—seemed a secondary byproduct. It was as if the orchestra were a set of replaceable parts, and as long as he got the desired result, he was happy. Personally, I didn’t mind it a bit, as his desired result was often more than sufficient recompense for any perceived lack of connection with the musicians. The production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Tanglewood some years back was incomparably wonderful and memorable. On the other hand, I only played for him on a handful of occasions, and can understand the musicians’ ambivalence to his tenure.

In 1981 I took another audition, for associate concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony, which was supposed to have been a slam-dunk but ended up an unmitigated disaster. At that time Pittsburgh’s music director was Andre Previn, a fine musician with a keen wit and great respect for musicians, who sadly passed away in 2019. Prior to the September audition, Previn guest conducted at Tanglewood, where he appeared regularly. With the associate concertmaster position in mind, Joseph Silverstein, then the BSO’s concertmaster and my former violin teacher at Yale, helped set up a private audition for me with Previn at Tanglewood. After I played for Previn and Marshall Turkin, Pittsburgh’s CEO who was also at Tanglewood for some meetings, they essentially handed me the job. And more.

Pittsburgh’s longtime concertmaster, Fritz Siegal, would soon be retiring, they told me. And though Previn didn’t have the total authority to hire an associate concertmaster, he told me in no uncertain terms that he had the contractual authority to hire the concertmaster. Turkin nodded in agreement. The intimation was clear.

Siegal was going to perform the Ernest Bloch violin concerto on Pittsburgh’s season-opening concert. On the same program was Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov, which has one of the most virtuoso concertmaster solos in the repertoire. Previn invited me to come down to Pittsburgh to be guest concertmaster for the week, and since Siegal would be performing only the concerto, I would be the Scheherazade soloist. He also wanted me to “play for a few of the guys” to formalize what would be my appointment as associate concertmaster. I asked Previn what music I should prepare for “the guys.” Anything you want, he told me.

I decided on the Scherzo Tarentelle by Henri Wieniawski, a well-known 19th-century virtuoso show piece; the Phantasy for Violin and Piano by the famous twelve-tone composer, Arnold Schoenberg; and a couple movements from a solo sonata by Bach. I thought that mix would demonstrate my versatility, and as the first two of those pieces are never on audition repertoire lists, would distinguish my playing from the standard fare.

I arrived in Pittsburgh and had a wonderful time being wined and dined by Previn and assistant conductor, Michael Lancaster. The next morning, I arrived at Heinz Hall, adrenaline pumping, primed to embark my next step to stardom, fame and fortune.

I was approached by one of the musicians. He handed me a list. What’s this? I asked. It’s what we want you to play from the repertoire list, he replied. I was confused. On the list were a dozen orchestra excerpts, including several concertmaster solos, and two concertos. You’re here for the audition, right? he asked. I nodded. You can go into that room, he said, pointing.

I became aware of an army of other violinists warming up for the audition. Something had gone terribly awry. At that point I should have either called timeout and had a discussion with Previn, or packed my bags but, at twenty-nine years old, I was still a bit of a greenhorn. And shell-shocked.

I frantically practiced the excerpts—cramming a month of dedicated practice into an hour—before going onstage to play before a formal audition committee.

Not surprisingly, I totally bombed. Afterwards, Previn called me into his office, offered his condolences and told me if I’d rather not play the opening week he would certainly understand. I suppose I could have made a stink, but diffidence got the better of me, and besides, I didn’t see that bitching would have done any good. I decided to stay and play because I didn’t want the PSO musicians thinking I was as bad as my audition had clearly led them to believe. The Scheherazade went all right, though all week I felt daggers in my back from musicians who thought I had tried to circumvent the audition process. Previn later told Silverstein that I had done a great job leading the orchestra. Kind words, perhaps, but merely a Band-Aid for a wound that left a permanent scar.

One Under the Belt

Though there were a few rough edges to our performance of the Mahler Fifth—forgivable considering the last-minuteness of everything—the first Boston concert with Dutoit went relatively well. Part of the untidiness was the result of the orchestra still getting used to Dutoit’s beat. A conductor’s beat is almost like a fingerprint; they all have characteristics in common, but in detail are very distinctive. With Dutoit, sometimes we played right at the ictus, or point, of his beat. Other times his body language suggested we should play on the rebound, and once in a while it seemed we were about ten seconds behind his beat, as if you were sitting out in the bleachers and only heard the crack of the bat when the ball landed on your head. So everyone just tried to sense the beat at the same time and, amazingly, things almost always worked out because Dutoit was consistent with his gestures and knew precisely what he wanted. Even though figuring out precisely what that was sometimes required a modicum of clairvoyance, one of the things that makes this orchestra so good is its ability to rise to the occasion. Case in point: In this symphony, Mahler wrote some of the most challenging and extensive brass solos in the symphonic repertoire. The BSO’s Principal trumpet, Tom Rolfs, and principal horn, James Summerville, didn’t bat an eyelash and both came out smelling like roses.

I had forgotten how much more boisterous the audiences are in Boston than in Salt Lake City. In Salt Lake, audiences jump to their feet for a standing ovation to everything besides tuning up, but then they’re out the door almost before the conductor’s off the stage. When we finished the Mahler tonight the Boston crowd reacted as if we just beat the Yankees in the 2004 playoffs. (I say “we” as a member of the BSO. As a native New Yorker, I’m actually an ardent Yankees fan and despise the Red Sox. They got lucky.)

***

Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It’s available in two paperback editions, one with black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.

NEWS FLASH: MY FIRST POLITICAL THRILLER, THE BEETHOVEN SEQUENCE, IS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE ON SEPTEMBER 8! A MENTALLY UNBALANCED MUSIC TEACHER BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! PREPOSTEROUS? STAY TUNED.

Symphonies & Scorpions: The First Steps of the Journey

WELCOME! THIS IS THE SIXTH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.               

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Wednesday, April 16

 The First Step of the Journey

[image error]The morning is sunny but unseasonably chilly with a brisk breeze. My kind of day! Rather than take the squealy T, I take the opportunity to walk a serpentine, forty-five-minute route from Brookline to Symphony Hall along the park-like Riverway and Fenway.

I arrive at the hall well before the 10:30 rehearsal start time in order to greet colleagues I haven’t seen since last summer at Tanglewood. We chat about Dutoit replacing Maazel, but the greater buzz is about my “tan.” What tan? I wonder. It’s only April. Upon closer inspection, my confreres indeed appear a wee bit pasty, having suffered through a record cold New England winter. Utah, on the other hand, has been typically balmy for a couple of months and I’ve been enjoying the outdoors, including a recent desert camping trip. I respond by saying that my tan is part and parcel of having become a Utah cowboy.

A Grand Entrance

This isn’t just another day at the office, even for an orchestra as unflappable as the BSO. Customarily, Tony Fogg stands before the orchestra prior to the beginning of the first rehearsal to offer a perfunctory introduction and greeting to the guest conductor du jour. Then, with great humility, the conductor tells the orchestra “what an enormous pleasure it is…blah, blah, blah” while the musicians sort their music, ready their instruments, and discuss where they’d gone to dinner the previous night.

But due to the exceptional nature of the circumstances, managing director Mark Volpe does today’s honors of welcoming Dutoit. He has only just commenced his spiel when Dutoit strolls on stage with finely honed savoir-faire. In recognition of his last-minute rescue of the orchestra from the brink of disaster, the musicians spontaneously erupt into a show of appreciation, including bow tapping and foot stomping. That’s a rare gesture for an orchestra like the BSO, and when it does occur is as a fond farewell after a job well done rather than a hello before the first rehearsal. After the applause dies down, Volpe continues, undeterred, “And now I’ll finish my sentence,” explaining that Dutoit had arrived only hours before from his engagement in Cologne.

Before I had gone onstage, while perusing the seating list affixed to the stage door, Lynn Larsen revealed some of the complexities around Dutoit’s hiring. Both Maazel and Dutoit had the same concert manager, Jasper Parrot, whose office is in London, while the concert presenters were in China and Japan, and Dutoit was in Germany. Simply coordinating communications among all the parties, let alone working out a plan, was an international logistical jigsaw puzzle. The prize for understatement of the day went to Jennifer Chen, Lynn’s assistant, who quipped that Tony and Mark probably hadn’t gotten much sleep over the weekend. On the other hand, stage manager John Demick, who on tour is probably the hardest-working man in show business, fessed up that he might not have been devastated had the tour been canceled. The only thing better about a tour than breaking your leg, he said, is that you’re back home from a tour sooner than you would’ve been out of a cast. Here’s just one sample of what gave his point of view some

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The BSO’s Berlioz Bells

credence: Twenty years or so ago, the BSO had bells made exclusively to be used for the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique, which we’re performing on this tour. The larger of the two bells weighs about two hundred twenty-five pounds. Have fun hauling that around.

If Demick waxed philosophical, principal harpist Jessica Zhou expressed relief the tour would go on. With her seat near the entrance to the stage, and mine just in front of the harp, we greeted each other cordially. Jessica, a Beijing native, had bought fifteen very expensive tickets for her friends and family for the first concert. “I’ve got no money left,” she said, with a resigned smile. “At least you’ve gotten us a full house,” I said, lifting her spirits immeasurably.

I begin to warm up and Caroline Pliszka, my stand partner, joins me shortly thereafter. Because it’s the BSO’s policy to seat the string subs in the back of the second violin section, the two of us have routinely shared a stand in the nosebleed section for the better part of the past ten years at Tanglewood. As a former full-time BSO member and still active as a performer, I’m sometimes the first sub that Lynn calls for Tanglewood engagements, but Caroline’s generally number one in Boston. She’s as solid a violinist as one could ever want, comes to work early to practice, is conscientious, always prepared, and knows precisely when to turn pages. (You scoff, but that’s an art unto itself.) And as I said, she laughs at all my jokes. Poor thing.

Dutoit, still a tad jet-lagged, briefly addresses the orchestra, expresses his sincere pleasure at the opportunity to work together again. He mentions that he has conducted seventeen concert tours to China so he’s not daunted by the last minute arrangements and is confident of a successful tour. With that, the first rehearsal begins.

Mahler on the Go

When a program includes a gargantuan symphony like Mahler Fifth and there are only three rehearsals in two days before the first performance, there’s hardly enough time to actually rehearse. Further, the piece is not part of Dutoit’s core repertoire and he’s had only a day or so of advance notice to review the score.      

The symphony is a seventy-two-minute romp among the usual suspects of Mahler’s neuroses. I truly hope composing it proved therapeutic for him. For me, there are many problems with the piece. One of them is the first five minutes. They’re incredible. The problem is that the next sixty-seven have difficulty rising to that lofty standard. The last movement, especially, which is supposed to be a paean to J.S. Bach, seems to me endless, contrived, and to be brutally frank, trite. (In the interest of fairness, I should say that this is a minority opinion.) Though Mahler’s Fifth was the very first piece I played when I joined the Boston Symphony as a twenty-two-year-old, my affinity to it is limited to that nostalgic moment in time.

One of the many extraneous thoughts that floats in and out of my mind as we rehearse is that in the literary world editors play an integral role creating the final product—concept editors, copy editors, production editors. Authors are part of a larger team effort. Quarterbacks, perhaps, but still one among several essential players. That’s not the case with classical music. It’s essentially all in the composer’s hands. By the sixty-fifth minute of the symphony I’m thinking the world might be a better place if only Mahler had a tough, cigar-chewing editor tell him, “Hey, Gustav, you make a good point, but we’ve already heard it fourteen times.”

My humble opinion is put into even sharper profile by the composition with which the Mahler is paired on the program, Mozart’s Symphony No. 38, the Prague. Now, there is a masterpiece! If Mahler used his Fifth to demonstrate contrapuntal prowess, the Prague puts him to shame in that regard. Yet, at the same time there is a vitalizing clarity and conciseness in Mozart’s writing that is unparalleled, and paradoxically covers a greater and more nuanced emotional range than Mahler, who limits himself to misery or triumph with little in between.

We zip through the whole morass of the Fifth with barely a glitch. Dutoit has very little to say. As we play, one of our more emotive cellists put on his best Pablo-Casals-at-Carnegie-Hall persona. Observing this, one of our equally fine violinists turns around to me and sticks her finger down her throat. One should never underestimate sophistication of symphony musicians. That incident notwithstanding, I suspect most orchestras would have been proud of that run-through had it been the final performance and not just a first rehearsal.

“A Leetle Floof, If You Don’t Mind”

Please don’t tell this to conductors, but one way musicians keep themselves amused and entertained is to impersonate them. Since we have to pay such careful attention to every gesture from the minute curl of the pinkie to the grand two-foot leap; and since musicians are trained to perform, some of the characterizations are quite remarkable, especially as many of the most inimitable conductors are the most imitable. I recall one occasion when Seiji Ozawa was in his balletic prime. After conducting a particularly florid performance, one of my colleagues (who will also remain nameless) did an ingenious Ozawa/kung-fu synthesis and put his foot through the dressing room table.

Dutoit, with an idiosyncratic long-armed, palms-up, pelvic-thrusting conducting style, his French-Swiss accent and debonair demeanor, is a favored subject for imitation. He’s one of the best around with French Impressionist repertoire, especially in creating the shimmering diaphanous color unique to composers like Debussy and Ravel. When he’s not satisfied the orchestra has achieved that transparently radiant sound, he often asks for more floof. “Please make it more floofy,” he’ll say. After many a rehearsal, you can see musicians swinging their arms with hands palms up, down by their hips, saying, “More floofy, please.” Since it’s a rare opportunity to carefully observe a guest conductor for more than a week or two I anticipate some memorable impersonations.

On the serious side, Dutoit has a cannily effective method of getting the orchestra’s attention that other conductors should consider emulating. Usually the conductor waits for complete silence before beginning the rehearsal or after making a comment. The idea is that only when there is silence are the musicians unanimously focused on the task ahead. Good conductors eventually get the silence they wait for. Bad ones sometimes give up because they’ve lost the musicians’ interest and/or respect.

Dutoit on the other hand, begins when he deems he is ready, often while the musicians are still schmoozing with each other, so they have to scramble to get their instruments up and ready. The result—whether intended or not, I don’t know—is that he’s established who’s the boss and we have no choice but to follow him. It also avoids minutes of precious time being wasted.

Tour-ture?

To the general public, tours might appear to be glamorous adventures: the exotic destinations, the music, the semblance of elegance. But many musicians are not thrilled about hitting the road. This particular tour, with the smog in China and the Fukushima radiation in Japan, has heightened their disquiet. To compound the concerns, we received a directive from the physician the BSO is taking on tour (standard operating procedure), cautioning what we should or shouldn’t eat in China, with the latter category including just about everything except poached eggs. Some Internet articles claiming high levels of agricultural soil contamination have been passed around the orchestra like underground political manifestos. And of course one mustn’t forget—how can one?—the hauntingly grisly image of hundreds of rotting pig corpses recently floating down the Huangpu River that supplies water to Shanghai. Rumors abound: “The National Symphony went to China eight years ago and the whole orchestra got sick.” “So-and-so just came back from China, and three-quarters of his group had to go to the doctor.”

Sheesh! Concern, yeah. But the fever pitch of angst about this tour seems a little overcooked to me. I joke to one of my colleagues that I’m bringing along a portable, self-contained plastic full-body enclosure to protect me against germs. He asks me where I purchased it.

Yes, China has rotten pollution and Japan has Fukushima but, after all, we’re only in China for ten days and Tokyo for three! Maybe part of the anxiety is that the orchestra hasn’t toured lately. Some of the younger musicians who joined the BSO after its last international trip in 2007 to Europe have never even been out of the country.

I understand that touring takes one out of one’s comfort zone. In a way, that’s precisely why I enjoy it. Maybe I was born with wanderlust. Maybe that first visit to Europe as a high school student with the Long Island Youth Orchestra set the table. Lodging in youth hostels ten to a room, or with families who spoke only German or Japanese, or in palm-roofed Samoan fales with no walls and no running water. We traveled on bus, train, and boat. A lot of bus. In 1971 I performed the Mozart Symphonie Concertante with my friend Judy Geist, a violist who has been a longtime member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, in the great and not-so-great capitals of Europe. It was also the first time I got drop-dead drunk, downing a bottle of Aalborg Aquavite with Judy and principal oboist, Albee Messing, on an overnight ferry from Copenhagen. I woke up somewhere on a beach in northern Germany.

I loved it. I relish the adventure, the challenges, the novel, the unexpected, the exotic food and, on occasion, of making do on the fly. Even the occasional disasters. And, after all, it’s not as if BSO musicians are being thrown helplessly into the heart of darkness. We’re provided rooms in the best hotels, eat at the best restaurants, get shepherded with kid gloves, have our luggage carried for us, and are solicitously attended to in all respects. As Irving Greene, my brother’s father-in-law, used to say, “I got no complaints.”

***

Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It’s available in two paperback editions, one with black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.

Symphonies & Scorpions: Prequels to Asia in Unlikely Places

WELCOME! THIS IS THE SIXTH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.               

  I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE.

ENJOY!

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Tuesday, April 15

*PROGRAM:  SYM Week 31                                                                                                        Mozart: Symphony No. 38                                                                                                          Mahler: Symphony No. 5
SCHEDULE:                                                                                                                    Rehearsals:                                                                                                                               Tuesday, April 15, 2014 at 10:30 AM — Symphony Hall                                             Wednesday, April 16, 2014 at 10:30 AM — Symphony Hall                                        Wednesday, April 16, 2014 at 2:00 PM — Symphony Hall                                                 Thursday, April 17, 2014 at 10:35 AM — Symphony Hall                                                 Concerts:                                                                                                                                   Thursday, April 17, 2014 at 8:05 PM — Symphony Hall                                                       Friday, April 18, 2014 at 8:05 PM — Symphony Hall                                                        Saturday, April 19, 2014 at 8:05 PM — Symphony Hall       
[*The schedules and programs here and throughout this book are extracted from the Boston Symphony musicians’ official calendar booklet.]

 

Prequels to Asia in Unlikely Places

My last free day before jumping into the breach. Without a car, I’m at the mercy of public transportation and friends to get around. Ronan picks me up at about 10:30 and we drive through squiggly back roads of the Boston suburbs—all the roads in Boston are squiggly back roads—making our way to Dorchester to a pho restaurant that his Vietnamese wife, Chan, recommended. Dorchester has certainly changed from the good old days when I lived in Boston. Like Orson Welles’ magical onscreen transformation to Falstaff, before our very eyes the once unassailable bastion of Irish Catholic tradition now looks more like Saigon than Skibereen. Main streets are lined with businesses and restaurants bearing colorful signs in Vietnamese, and for all I know, Cambodian and Laotian. While there’s nothing I enjoy more than New England boiled dinner—corned beef and cabbage to the rest of the world—ethnic encroachment has certainly made the cuisine more interesting, and probably religion and politics, too. More about that later.

Ronan and I order from a handwritten menu on the wall of our simple restaurant, hardly more ostentatious than a fast food place. As the menu is all in Vietnamese we require the patient assistance of the waiter to figure out what it is we’re ordering. After extensive negotiation we’re rewarded with steaming bowls of pho with seafood, which we slurp contentedly, plus an array of side dishes. That prompts a discussion of Asian cuisine in the context of former tours. I mentioned that one of the best Chinese restaurants in which I ever dined was in Berlin, which reminds Ronan of a comment from one of our former sardonic BSO colleagues: “Within an hour of eating Chinese food in Germany you’re hungry for power.”

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The Goddess Saraswati (not the violinist Sarasate) playing the veena.

After the pho, we return to Coolidge Corner in Brookline, where I spend the rest of the day drinking coffee, food shopping, and getting hold of old Boston friends to arrange get-togethers. I end up having an unexpectedly engaging conversation with a young Indian woman who is in the room next to mine at the B&B and had heard me practicing through our common wall. She’s in Boston for a brief but intensive medical course at Harvard while her husband—a university professor—and child remain in their Kansas City home. She is also a devoted veena player (the veena being a traditional Indian sitar-like instrument).

Our initial desultory introductions quickly turn to the universality of music and its power to affect man and nature. She relates a story of a traditional Indian composition performed by a famous veena player a century ago, whose rendition had such spiritual intensity that candles ignited as he performed. Another story was of her own teacher’s teacher being able to make clouds converge and rain fall by the power of his performance. I have to confess I’ve never achieved that level of expertise, even with Bach, but I take her point. With Salt Lake City in the midst of a drought, having the power to do that would definitely come in handy. I shall endeavor even harder to play my scales in tune.

***

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Symphonies & Scorpions: A Modest Beginning

WELCOME! THIS IS THE FIFTH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.               

  I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE.

ENJOY!

 

A Modest Beginning

[image error]BOSTON, Monday, April 14

I had an inkling it was going to be a long day when I overheard the following exchange at the table next to me while breakfasting at Salt Lake City International Airport, waiting for Delta Flight 1210 to Boston:

Haughty Customer (jabbing at the menu): Excuse me. What’s this number next to the item? Patient Waiter: That would be the price, ma’am.

On the other hand, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re stuck in a plane seat for four hours with no phone, no computer, no nuthin’. I make substantive progress on music I’m composing for the Moab Music Festival. Little do I realize my preoccupation with this project will turn out to be a blessing in disguise, as a half hour before we land in Boston the woman seated next to me tells me she noticed that I had been working and had refrained from “disturbing me” until I was finished. She then proceeded to yack nonstop until the plane parked at the gate, having been released from her vow of silence.

From Logan Airport, I hop on a rush hour subway and take the T to the boarding house in Brookline where I’ll be staying the next two weeks. Somehow, regardless of all the repair and maintenance—I refrain from using the word improvements—the city has made in its subway system over the past forty years since I first lived in Boston, it has somehow miraculously retained the same dingy, creaking, screeching, slower-than-molasses, charmingly-in-decline ambiance. Schlepping my forty-pound suitcase, computer attaché, and violin doesn’t make life any easier, but eventually I arrive unscathed at the mildly disheveled boarding house, which matches the feel of the T, to a T.

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With my BSO buddy, Ronan Lefkowitz (left.) In the old days, we were occasionally referred to as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Rabbit Out of the Hat                                                                                                                    The hectic day ends with some very positive news: My cross-country trip will not have been in vain. Tony Fogg has done it again, engaging Maestro Charles Dutoit to replace Lorin Maazel both in Boston and on tour, with nary a change to the repertoire. There’s a slight rearrangement of the rehearsal schedule in order to accommodate Dutoit, who is polishing off some concerts in Germany. But considering what the collateral damage could’ve been, those changes don’t even register a blip. As I later learned from Lynn, the whole tour might well have been canceled had they not been able to recruit Dutoit.

Un Dutoit                                                                                                                                                I have the good fortune to have worked with Maestro Dutoit many, many times over the years and through most of his hair color changes. Though some years younger than the octogenarian Maazel, Dutoit is no spring chicken, but he has nevertheless managed to retain a vigorous conducting style. The BSO has performed the gamut of the repertoire with him, with memorable performances of the French masterpieces for which he is renowned: Symphonie fantastique, Damnation of Faust, La Mer, La Valse, Mother Goose. The list goes on. He has also conducted thoroughly enjoyable performances of music from Mozart to Stravinsky. Just a few summers ago at Tanglewood he conducted one of the most charming and sensitive performances of the Mozart Symphony No. 29 in A Major that I’ve ever heard or played. In fact, I had the opportunity to conduct it several months later in Salt Lake City in a program of Mozart and his less known contemporaries, Cimarosa and Myslivecek. Dutoit’s approach most assuredly influenced my interpretation—but please don’t tell that to the musicians.

Though Dutoit, a professional in the best sense, always knows precisely what he wants and insists on a very high standard, his relationship with the BSO hasn’t always been warm and fuzzy. (Not that relations between musicians and conductors are ever warm and fuzzy, or even need to be.) Many years ago, Dutoit conducted Stravinky’s Petruoushka, a piece the BSO can play blindfolded, in the dark, with eyes closed. Maybe not with hands behind the back. Nevertheless, Dutoit was in a particularly prickly, picky mood at one of the rehearsals, and with the BSO maybe that wasn’t such a winning combination. At least on that day.

In any event, on several occasions he asked the one of the veteran musicians—one of the world’s sweetest ladies and now long-retired—to play this phrase a little differently and that note a little differently. At one point when he stopped her, she said, in a tone unmistakable for its acerbity, “What do you want now?”

But that wasn’t the end of it.

“Madame, don’t you like this music?” Dutoit asked, a little too sarcastically.

She stood up—in itself a very nervy thing to do—and said, with voice shaking: “I’ve played Petroushka all my life, and have always loved it. But you’ve just ruined it for me.”

You could have cut a knife through the silence. I think Dutoit was more surprised than angry at the outburst, and I believe felt badly that his criticisms had been heavy-handed.

Though it’s almost unheard of for even the most cantankerous musician to unload on any conductor, even the bottom feeders, it’s an example of the ever-present dynamic tension between the musicians and the conductor. Fortunately, the Petroushka incident got ironed out and the performance was terrific. And the audience had no idea.

Conductors don’t need to be, or expect to be liked by everyone in the orchestra. The essential qualification to be called Maestro is the respect for, not necessarily agreement with, a conductor’s musicianship. Though many conductors may not have been successful instrumentalists, the instrument they play with virtuosity is the orchestra itself.

Dutoit fits the bill. There is no question he’s the most accomplished musician on the stage. There are times, however, when like many conductors he can seem a bit pompous. For musicians, who universally take vicarious delight at conductors’ comeuppance, there are a couple of humorous though uncorroborated stories of exchanges between an elderly Jewish Montreal Symphony violinist (whose name I can’t remember) and Dutoit when he was its music director.

The story goes that Dutoit did not like this violinist’s playing. One day they were rehearsing a contemporary piece of great rhythmic complexity. Dutoit stopped the orchestra and, singling out this gentleman who appeared bewildered, said: “Sir, do you know where we are?” To which the violinist replied, “Oh, are you lost, too?”

Their relationship deteriorated to the point that Dutoit called him into his office, possibly with the intent of asking him to step down. He said to the violinist, “I’ve been hearing some very negative things about your playing from some of your colleagues.” To which the violinist immediately replied, “Oh, I wouldn’t listen to them if I were you.” “And why not?” Dutoit asked, surprised at such nonchalance. “Because,” said the violinist, “you should hear some of the things they’ve been saying about you!”

Simple, Foolproof Do’s and Don’ts for When You Rehearse the Orchestra.    Performances are generally a simple affair compared to rehearsals, where all the musical knots get untangled. Many excellent conductors, Dutoit included, are very effective and efficient rehearsers. With Dutoit, it’s ninety-five percent playing, five percent talking. The paradoxical inverse relationship between productivity on one hand and minimal talking on the other is easily explained. Good conductors communicate with their hands, and as much information can be transmitted in a single gesture as can be explained in five minutes of verbalizing. So many mediocre conductors feel compelled to explain orally in infinite detail what they are doing, why and how they are doing it, why it is so important, and “what the composer meant.” The reasons for this verbosity are usually 1) they have little experience conducting great orchestras, for whom these tutorials are superfluous time wasters, 2) they are insecure on the podium, and 3) their baton technique is inadequate. Too much talking wastes valuable and expensive time in which the upcoming performance would be better served by just playing the music or even going home early. It also bores the hell out of the orchestra, adversely affecting its involvement even more. I recall the great Thomas Beecham once discussing his rehearsal technique in an interview. I’ll paraphrase: “First, we play straight through the piece, just to let the musicians know how I want it to go. Then I point out a few things that might not have gone according to plan. Then we play it again, and usually it goes perfectly well.” There’s a story that Sir Thomas was once conducting a rehearsal of Brahms Fourth Symphony. He said to the orchestra, “You all know this piece. I don’t think we need to rehearse it.” To which a first-year horn player exclaimed, “But Maestro, I’ve never played Brahms Fourth.” “You’ll love it,” Beecham replied.

***

Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It’s available in two paperback editions, one with black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.

Symphonies & Scorpions: Tools (and Tricks) of the Trade

WELCOME! THIS IS THE FOURTH DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.                                                                                                                                          I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK, ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE. ENJOY!

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Tools (and Tricks) of the Trade

Sunday, April 13

After breakfast, I call Ronan to see if there are any breaking developments. He tells me the orchestra is still in a holding pattern.

In the meantime, I need to make sure that the fiddle I’ve decided to travel with is good to go, which is not as simple a task as it may seem. My gem of a violin, made by the Neapolitan maker Joseph Gagliano in 1785, is at the moment lying like a patient etherized on a table, dissected into myriad body parts while undergoing painstaking restoration by the Salt Lake City luthier, Peter Prier, and won’t be ready until the end of the summer. (Sadly, Peter passed away in 2015. His restoration of my Gagliano was his final project.) My “second” instrument, which I’ve had since high school, was made by Ansaldo Poggi, one of the greatest 20th-century Italian makers, but is currently on the sales block and unavailable. My modern Cremonese violin, a very fine instrument that I commissioned by the accomplished luthier Niccola Lazzari when I lived in Italy in 1998, has a wonderful sound—yes, the legendary Cremonese sound—but I’ve never gotten totally comfortable with its proportions. Even a fraction of a millimeter here or there can cause a left-hand injury, and I don’t want to risk that, especially on tour. Then I have a terrific “No Name” violin that I found in an antique store and had been restored by Mr. Prier, which various experts have postulated was made in the late 19th century in Germany, Italy, or England—take your pick.

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My Terry Borman violin

After careful consideration I’ve decided to travel with an excellent instrument I commissioned from the American violinmaker Terry Borman in 1992. Terry has become recognized as one of the best contemporary makers, and I’m fully confident it is up to BSO standards. One of its strengths is its adjustability to varying climates with no discernible drop-off in quality or ease of playing. I’ve broken in a new set of strings I put on the Borman a few days ago. We’re good to go.

 

 

A few days prior I had visited Tim Stephenson, yet another fine Salt Lake luthier, and one of a handful in the field who makes both high quality bows and violins. Years ago, he made a bow for me, a beautiful copy of my rare Francois Peccatte, one of the great 19th-century Parisian makers who, unfortunately for future generations of violinists, died while still in his thirties. I needed Tim to rehair the bow, as the hair had worn out over the course of the year and wasn’t grabbing the violin strings with adequate friction. Tim gave me a choice of Siberian or Mongolian stallion—no, this is not the stage name of a Russian male stripper. One type of hair is grittier, the other smoother. And don’t worry. The hair is cut from the tail; the horse feels no pain. I decided upon a little of each.

A second consideration in the rehair was the change of climate. Going from Salt Lake City, a desert climate, to more humid tour destinations tends to make the hair stretch. Bad news. When that happens, it makes the bow feel like a limp noodle. No matter how much you tighten the screw at the end of the bow you can’t get the hair taut enough. The solution was for Tim to cut the hair about a ¼-inch shorter than usual. That should do the trick.

 

Since 9-11, nothing about traveling with instruments bigger than a piccolo is easy, but who wants to hear an orchestra of piccolos? Some airlines won’t let you carry instruments onboard, citing size restrictions, even though federal government regulations require them to do so. Sometimes overzealous TSA and airline gate agents give you a hard time…just because, it seems. There are nightmare stories of priceless instruments being mishandled, confiscated, and broken for no valid reason.

Customs agents are the newest members of the Make Life Difficult for the Musicians club. Because violins and bows used to be made with some substances from plants and animals that are now rare and endangered, and are consequently banned for import or export, special documentation is needed to transport instruments from one country to another. For example, the protective tips of old bows were traditionally made of a fraction of an ounce of elephant ivory. The stick of the bow is made out of pernambucco wood grown in Brazilian rainforests. The eyes on the sides of the frog of the bow are often made from mother-of-pearl. Parts of both the bow and violin are ebony or mahogany.

It all makes for a mammoth obstacle course for official transport of instruments internationally. Speaking of mammoths, believe it or not, mammoth bone is a readily available replacement for elephant ivory on bows. Could mammoths have become extinct because Neanderthals were overzealous violin bow makers?

Whether or not this theory is correct, musicians have been wandering minstrels since time immemorial, and the US government has been working with the AFM (American Federation of Musicians, the national union to which most American symphony musicians belong) to hammer out comprehensible, streamlined regulations. The Boston Symphony has tried to remain ahead of the curve with this ever-evolving work in progress, and notified us that they will take care of the morass of international paper work for any musicians who put their instruments in the orchestra’s traveling instrument trunks (as opposed to carrying them on the plane themselves). As the instrument trunks are as solid and secure as Fort Knox, that sounded good enough for me. Nevertheless, I’m making damn sure I have copies of the certificates of authenticity handy that Terry and Tim provided me when I commissioned the instruments.

With all that foresight and preparation, it seemed the BSO had taken every necessary precaution to avoid any major disasters. Nevertheless, we almost had one.

***

Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It is available in two paperback editions, one with black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.

Symphonies & Scorpions: The Work Begins

WELCOME! THIS IS THE THIRD DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY. I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK , ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE. ENJOY!

T HE W ORK B EGINS

[image error]Salt Lake City

Saturday, April 12, 2014

An Ominous Portent

Should I answer the phone? The previous time I had hauled myself off the couch and away from the living room television, Real Salt Lake—Utah’s Major League Soccer franchise—gave up a 1-0 lead to the Philadelphia Union. RSL regained the lead in the eighty-fifth minute and I don’t want to risk jinxing them again. But with April 15 looming and my tax return not yet finished, the call could be from my CPA. I don’t want to jinx that either.

It’s not my accountant. It’s Ronan Lefkowitz, a Boston Symphony violinist and my closest orchestra buddy. He joined the BSO in 1976, a year after me. We’d both studied with the BSO’s then-concertmaster, Joseph Silverstein; Ronan at Harvard and I at Yale. I’m Uncle Jerry to his kids, and he’s Uncle Ronan to mine. Because I’ll be leaving Salt Lake City for Boston in a couple days, I assume Ronan’s call is to discuss when we’ll get together for dinner.

Wrong. The call is to tell me that the BSO has just been notified by Lorin Maazel that for health reasons he is withdrawing from the Boston concerts and the tour.

I had seen a Facebook post stating that Maazel had recently canceled a couple of engagements, the aftermath of an accident he had late in 2013, but I assumed he was just conserving his energy for the tour. After all, he was in his eighties, but for conductors sometimes that’s when they’re just getting frisky. Besides, Maazel took pride that each of his parents lived about a century and he still felt like a spring chicken.

A Concise Primer of Conductor Anatomy

Like the NBA drafting kids straight out of high school, these days there’s a youth movement for music directors. But the allure of the young conductor is nothing new. Look at Leonard Bernstein, who was twenty-five when he became assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and forty years old (a toddler when measured in conductor years) when he became its music director; and Seiji Ozawa, who was thirty-eight when he took the helm of the BSO. Nevertheless, it seems most orchestras, big and small, are beating the bushes for the next Gustavo Dudamel, who, with his talent, charisma, and enviable hair, has transformed the music culture of Los Angeles. And brought in a lot of money.

In 2014, the BSO, with its deep pockets guaranteeing them a perennially high draft pick, selected Andris Nelsons, a fresh-faced and good-natured thirty-five-year-old out of Latvia, to succeed the great but often infirm James Levine, who was on the disabled list more often than Derrick Rose. The BSO had recently been snake-bitten by conductors’ illnesses and accidents. In the summer of 2013 at its summer festival at Tanglewood, for example, three conductors cancelled at the last minute within a period of two weeks. One of those was the overly-outgoing Nelsons himself, who greeted a door in Germany a bit too enthusiastically and suffered a concussion.

I’ve always maintained that there’s more in common between great conductors and lousy ones than between great conductors and merely good ones. That is because both the great and the lousy have 1) a significant impact upon the performance, and 2) extraordinarily high egos. Good conductors manage affairs rather than control them; they tend to have a high degree of respect for, and confidence in the musicians. In the vernacular of the profession, they “let the orchestra play” and often get excellent, if not memorable, results. I call the combination of talent and ego my TAC index. TAC stands for Talent/Asshole Continuum. (See my mystery novel, Death and Transfiguration, to see the TAC taken to its extreme.) What it means is that the more talented a conductor is, the greater the asshole he can get away with being. Conversely… Well, watch out for conversely.

Conductors come in all shapes, sizes, and attitudes. Great and lousy alike have been known to badger, whine, and humiliate. But they can also cajole and compliment. As Sir Colin Davis once smilingly reminded the increasingly listless BSO musicians at the tail end of an intense, exhausting rehearsal, “Just remember, I’m only here to entertain you.”

Of course, there’s much more to it than that. Great conductors not only know how to beat proper time in their sleep (if you thought that’s something that should be taken for granted, don’t), they also have a concept of a piece of music—from Handel to Harbison—into which every detail snugly and logically conjoins, creating a unified and compelling whole. That makes them easy to follow even if their baton technique—like the late, great Klaus Tennstedt’s, for example—is more akin to a toddler grasping for butterflies. The essential thing is for the conductor to have a comprehensive concept, followed by the conviction and ability to make it clear to the musicians what (s)he wants, and then to insist on it. Lousy conductors pretend to know all this; and when things go awry, as they tend to with such conductors, they then point the finger of blame at the musicians.

Musicians, on the other hand, sometimes fault conductors for having inflated egos. After working with conductors great and small since I was a tot, I’ve conclude that lofty self-esteem not only comes with their territory, but also is a necessary component of being a great conductor. How else could a single individual wielding a tiny stick impose his/her will upon a hundred passionately opinionated musicians who are the ones actually making the sounds? It requires an unbreakable sense of self and of purpose; without it, each musician would go on his/her merry own way and performances would be at best directionless. Like the captain of a ship whose authority is unquestioned, should his leadership falter, the fate of the crew would be imperiled, Captain Bligh notwithstanding.

That’s not to say that a conductor must be an asshole to be great, though some of them undoubtedly are both. (You can put the emphasis on either the word must or asshole, and both would be accurate.) I’m not going to name names in case you’re wondering. And I’ll also say that once in a blue moon there is a truly humble great conductor—Andris Nelsons has turned out to be such a one. I just mean that strength of will, in whatever manifestation, is a prerequisite for success.

Orchestral musicians, trussed up in their monkey suits, look pretty much alike from the audience’s perspective, but they’re all actually quite different. Musicians come from different countries, have different training, different sets of aesthetics and abilities, different interests, different political views, different personalities. One of my Utah Symphony colleagues was a former Marine sharpshooter and liked to hunt big animals. Another was an expert knitter. If the guy on the podium doesn’t have a strong sense of the music and of self, of leading in a way that will gain the musicians’ respect, the performance may well be in for a rocky ride, regardless of each individual musician’s effort. That’s why I’ve postulated it would be better for a great orchestra to play without any conductor whatsoever than with a bad conductor. At least the musicians could fall back to listening to each other, and play the music “the way it goes,” rather than trying to interpret bad information from a central source.

If, on the Asia tour, Lorin Maazel had been replaced by a lesser conductor, the tour would not have been a musical disaster by any means. It still could have been quite good. The repertoire was fairly standard (in fact, a couple of the pieces, the Glinka Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla, and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain, were performed to death by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops way back when), and the BSO musicians have the ability to cruise on automatic pilot at a very respectable level with just about anyone waving a stick. But when concert ticket prices command upwards of $375, the performances need to be more than “quite good.” They need to be memorable, and that’s why the presenters rightly insisted—and the BSO concurred—that Maazel’s replacement had to be someone of equal stature.

Like the New York Yankees, the BSO has traditionally relied on a pitching rotation of heavyweight veterans with proven winning records as their guest conductors. That was especially true during the transition between the BSO’s last two music directors. Kurt Masur, Cristoph von Dohnanyi, Bernard Haitink, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, Sir Colin Davis, and Maazel graced the podium regularly in recent years. The upside of this is that they were all among the world’s greatest maestros and sustained the highest artistic level for the orchestra. The downside is that they as they aged, health issues mounted. Contrary to conductors’ protestations otherwise, they are not immortal. Since 2014, all but Dohnanyi and Haitink have died, and those two have curtailed their activities due to age and infirmity. One wonders who will be the leaders of the next generation of maestros.

 

Time is of the Essence

“So, is the tour cancelled?” I ask Ronan. How would I break the news my friends in Japan who were already making plans to see me? He replies that it’s still up in the air. The orchestra’s artistic administrator, Anthony Fogg, is a magician at unearthing conductors at the last minute. He has certainly had enough practice. One would be correct to assume that the BSO’s exalted reputation would make it tempting for any conductor to jump at the opportunity to conduct it if they are available. But that’s a big if, since most conductors worth their salt are fully booked two to three years in advance, and hiring a conductor not worth his salt is simply not an option.

And this isn’t your typical single-program fill-in. This is a four-week commitment. The two weeks in Boston are slated for performances of the tour repertoire. Would programs have to be altered, rehearsals added, concerts rescheduled? The $64,000 question is whether the entire tour will have to be scrapped. Playing for a sympathetic home crowd is one thing, but would concert presenters in China and Japan be satisfied with a replacement conductor of lesser stature than Lorin Maazel? Even for an ensemble of the caliber of the BSO, an orchestra’s brand or reputation alone may not be sufficient to sell a tour, especially where audiences are accustomed to first-class international music making. The headliners—the conductor and/or guest artists—and the programs all combine to form a package that the presenters hope will justify stratospheric ticket prices.

Ronan says that the BSO management plans to inform the musicians of Maazel’s withdrawal at the concert that night, even though everyone in the orchestra had already heard the news through the grapevine. Management has refrained from making any public announcements until they have a backup plan, which seems sensible. I still plan to head to Boston on Monday. And why not, since Lynn Larsen hasn’t instructed me otherwise? And there’s always Tony Fogg to work his magic. There are lots of questions that need to be answered, and answered quickly. With Maazel’s withdrawal, phones will be ringing all around the world.

I hang up mine and return to the living room. I knew it! In the ninetieth minute—the ninetieth minute!—RSL had a defensive lapse in front of its goal, the Union had scored, and the match ended up in a 2-2 draw. Jinxed again. My wife, Cecily, suggests maybe I shouldn’t pack my bags just yet.

***

Click on the title if you’d like to purchase Symphonies & Scorpions in its entirety. It is available in two paperback editions, one with black-and-white photos, the other with color photos, and in Kindle.