Gerald Elias's Blog, page 6

Symphonies & Scorpions: A Return Engagement

WELCOME! THIS IS THE SECOND 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 BACKSTORY on TWO CONTINENTS

A Return Engagement

[image error]“Lynn,” I discreetly said at the end of the BSO’s 2013 Tanglewood season, “I heard through the grapevine that the BSO’s going to China and Japan next year.”

Lynn Larsen has been the personnel manager of the Boston Symphony since 1987. A native Utahan, he had previously been a horn player in the Utah Symphony. Ironically, the year after he arrived in Boston I departed to become associate concertmaster in Utah. A cultural exchange of sorts. Swapping stories of contrasts between the bluest of the blue states and the reddest of the red established an immediate bond. With Utah’s distinct Mormon culture in mind, Lynn has dubbed me “Brother Elias.”

The Utah Symphony contract allows its musicians to take unpaid leave during its summer concert season, and in 1996 Lynn began hiring me to perform during the BSO’s Tanglewood summer festival whenever he needed a substitute for the violin section. It is my good fortune that the BSO has an impressively large herd of violinists. Given the occasional illnesses, retirements, sabbaticals, unpaid leaves, and—with the remarkable ascendance of female musicians—pregnancies, my pilgrimage to the Mecca of music festivals became an annual event.

So, when I asked Lynn about the Asia tour in his backstage office at the Tanglewood Shed, the BSO’s semi-outdoor summer concert facility that seats 5,000 music lovers, he knew exactly where I was coming from. And as I had retired from the Utah Symphony in 2011, he also knew my schedule was as flexible as a yogi’s knees.

“You want to go?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Love to.”

There were many reasons I hoped to be hired for this tour. For starters, playing great music with a great orchestra conducted by the great maestro, Lorin Maazel, were three pretty great ones. It would also be a way for me to reconnect with BSO colleagues, some of whom have been friends for almost forty years. Add to that my chronic wanderlust, and I was drooling over Lynn’s desk.

When I was a mere whip of a lad, I had the great good fortune enough to have been concertmaster of the Long Island Youth Orchestra. The LIYO’s conductor, Martin Dreiwitz, was a Juilliard-trained musician, but a travel agent by profession. Every summer for four decades Martin took his student orchestra on an overseas concert tour. I was on the first few of those. Most often we stayed with families or in hostels; occasionally in a hotel. By the time I joined the BSO I was a seasoned veteran, having performed in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, England, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Samoa. I had become a touring junkie.

Japan is the country I’ve visited most often. After the LIYO tour in 1976 I concertized there regularly with the BSO and as first violinist of the Abramyan String Quartet. In 1987, while on sabbatical leave from the BSO, I spent four months teaching at the Musashino Ongaku Daigaku (Music Academy), one of the most prestigious conservatories in Tokyo. I have dear friends in Japan whom I hadn’t seen for more than ten years, making the prospect of visiting again especially savory.

But perhaps the most intriguing reason for wanting to go on the 2014 trip is to return to China.

While my feelings about Japan are utterly positive, those involving China are more complicated. Only a decade after the BSO’s initial door-opening tour, the world witnessed that door brutally slammed shut in Tiananmen Square. Despite impressive successes of their economic revolution, the price paid for it in suppression of political dissent and in environmental devastation compels one to consider whether change necessarily means progress. I have qualms about contributing my skills to a country ruled with such a heavy fist, and viewing the transformations of the past thirty-five years through the Beijing smog only dampens my enthusiasm further.

Still.

“If you want to go on the tour,” Lynn replied, “You’ll have to come to Boston in April to play the last two weeks of the season, because that’s when we’re doing the tour rep.”

“I can manage that,” I said.

The tour repertoire was pretty standard stuff. I’d performed it innumerable times over the decades and could have joined the orchestra directly in China literally without missing a beat, but I didn’t argue the point. There were good reasons for Lynn’s proviso: It ensured my familiarity not only with the music but also with the conductor. It enabled Lynn, as personnel manager, to maintain the same seating arrangement on tour as in Boston by being able to hire the same personnel throughout. It was musically appropriate (i.e. there should be a full string section for big symphonies like the Berlioz, Mahler, and Tchaikovsky that comprised the hot ticket items on the tour). Finally, had I, as a freelancer, been granted a special reprieve from those two weeks, it would not have put me in the best of steads with the other musicians, especially the freelance musicians. Besides, Boston audiences deserved a complete orchestra, too.

“OK, Brother Elias, I’ll put you on the list of subs who have ‘volunteered,’” Lynn said. “I’ll know for sure in the fall.”

I wasn’t surprised that such a list existed. The BSO is fortunate to have a battalion of fine freelancers at its disposal. One reason for their abundance is that there’s a lot of music going on in Boston. In addition to the BSO, just a few of the paying gigs include the venerable Handel-Haydn Society, the Boston Philharmonic, Emmanuel Music, A Far Cry (chamber orchestra), Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Ballet, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), Collage New Music, and the Shubert Theater. Some musicians drive south to Providence, Plymouth, and Cape Cod, west to Newton and Waltham, or north to Cape Ann and Portland to play with orchestras in those communities. But the BSO is the freelancers’ plum. Even on a part-time basis, they can make a decent living from the BSO—which pays one of the highest salaries of any orchestra in the country—as part of their employment mix. To go on an international tour with the BSO means not only a couple of weeks of steady, well-paid work during the tour, but also a couple of weeks of rehearsals and performances in Boston in preparation for the tour. In addition, because of the high cost of living in tour cities where major orchestras like the BSO gravitate, there is also a substantial tour per diem above and beyond salary, and if one is thrifty the unused portion can be deposited in one’s bank account. (There was once a BSO musician, who shall remain nameless, who packed cans of tuna and a jar of peanut butter in his wardrobe trunk in order to pocket his per diem, putting “Europe on Five Dollars a Day” to shame.)

Since its inception in 1881, the Boston Symphony has considered touring a prerequisite for a world-class orchestra. Though it has always traveled extensively in the United States, its first European tour was not until after World War II, in 1952. For its second, in 1956, a tag team of Charles Munch and Pierre Monteux conducted twenty-nine concerts in thirty-five days. Orchestra members were given the option to travel to Europe by plane or ocean liner, in 1952 aboard the Ile de France and in 1956 aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam. For the 1956 tour, Pierre Monteux hopped onboard with the orchestra members and they even gave a small concert during the crossing. In 1960 there was a mind-numbing seven-week tour with thirty-six concerts in twenty-six cities from Taiwan to Japan to Australia to New Zealand.

Among the most grueling tours that I personally participated in was in the fall of 1981, which combined Japan and Europe. In twenty-four days, there were thirteen concerts in eight cities, including a nonstop flight from Tokyo to Paris covering more than 6,000 miles and several hundred time zones, more or less. That tour alone would have been exhausting enough, but just a few months earlier we also had a coast-to-coast domestic tour of sixteen concerts in nineteen days. Both of those tours celebrated the BSO’s centennial. By the time we returned from Europe the only thing the musicians were celebrating was its conclusion.

With Maestro Seiji Ozawa, the BSO’s flamboyant former music director from 1973 to 2002, the orchestra had an appealing international profile; especially, of course, in Japan. An annual overseas tour with the BSO was almost a given. If organized well—something the BSO is very good at—an international tour can turn the orchestra a tidy sum, covering not only the daunting expenses involved but also musician and staff salaries for the duration of the tour. In its 2013 annual report the BSO listed touring revenue of $2,239,000. That’s without a major Boston Symphony tour that year; the revenue was likely derived in large part from touring of its other illustrious brand, the Boston Pops. In 2014, total operating tour revenue, including the tour to China and Japan, was over $3.6 million.

After Ozawa departed in 2002 for Vienna, the BSO was without a music director until James Levine’s accession to the BSO throne in 2004. Not long thereafter, the orchestra began to suffer along with Levine through his all-too-frequent bouts of accidents and illness until he departed in 2011. During Levine’s reign there was only one Europe tour, in 2007. After another two-year music director search, Maestro Andris Nelsons was appointed in 2013. Conspiring with the ten-year hiatus between Ozawa and Nelsons, the cost of touring skyrocketed as the national economy tanked, making big tours a high stakes risk on orchestras’ increasingly fragile budgets.

The BSO weathered those economic storms better than most orchestras and was ready to hit the road again. Though the conductor on tour is typically the orchestra’s music director, Nelsons had not yet commenced his tenure, so the tour to China and Japan in May 2014 would be led by one of the BSO’s regular guest conductors, the internationally renowned Maestro Lorin Maazel. Former music director of the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, and Vienna Philharmonic, Maazel had credentials coming out of his podium and was a rock star in China and Japan, so all the tea leaves pointed to a propitious future.

While waiting for Lynn’s verdict whether I’d made the cut, I considered how it had been possible for the present-day Boston Symphony, demographically unrecognizable from the Koussevitsky era (1924-49), to have maintained its world-class status while so much else in the world had changed, especially in the thirty-five years since the 1979 China tour. If you went backwards in time thirty-five years before 1979 you would find yourself at D-Day; Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Party would rule China with an iron fist for four more years before being ousted by Mao’s communist revolution. The changes since 1979 have been equally transformative and dramatic. Former enemies Japan and Germany are now America’s closest allies and China is a capitalist powerhouse.

Maybe the changes in my own life since 1979 haven’t been as earthshaking, but the maxim applies that if you swat a mosquito you change the history of the world, though perhaps in my case a much more modest tremor. When I left Boston for Salt Lake in 1988 many of my BSO colleagues were baffled by my departure, and not without good reason. Utah of all places! Don’t they drive buggies and wear black in Utah? (For the record, the answer is no to both questions. Mormons are totally unrelated to the Amish. But on the other hand, in 2001 the state legislature did resolve to make Jell-O the official snack food of Utah.)

The Boston Symphony is undoubtedly one of the world’s great orchestras, it pays very well indeed, and in these uncertain times for symphony orchestras it is a bulwark of financial stability. In 1988, the Utah Symphony, while a fine orchestra, had the lowest salary of any fulltime orchestra, and (wouldn’t you know it) the musicians went on strike the day I arrived in Salt Lake City.

Yet I had my reasons, not the least of which was that deep-seated wanderlust. More pragmatically, I had the opportunity to be the associate concertmaster of a major orchestra. (Associate concertmaster is the guy who sits next to the first chair violinist—the concertmaster—and occasionally spells him when he decides to vacation in Bermuda.) This added degree of responsibility and public exposure resulted in a cornucopia of fringe benefits I hadn’t predicted. Though I had done my share of private teaching in Boston and had my studio door occasionally graced by the presence of a talented student, in Salt Lake I had the cream of the crop knocking it off its hinges. Within a year I was an esteemed faculty member of the University of Utah music department, now the School of Music. I was sought after to perform on various chamber music series. I started composing and had my music performed by major orchestras. And, like many ambitious young musicians, I got the conducting bug—Ah! The power! —and became the music director of Salt Lake’s popular Vivaldi by Candlelight chamber orchestra series. Maybe I was destined to be that mosquito swatter.

The biggest unexpected twist in the road of my career, however, began to take shape in 1997 when I was in Italy with my family on a sabbatical leave from the Utah Symphony. By that time, I had taught in a slew of countries around the world and decided I wanted to write a book about the universal challenges violin students have in learning to play such a difficult instrument. The book would deal not only with technical concerns, like “keep your thumb relaxed, damnit!” but also with related issues, like how to find the right violin to buy, how to prepare for auditions, how to be a good sight-reader, etc. The stuff they don’t teach you in school. But I also knew that when I was a student I would have keeled over in boredom in five minutes if that book was on my reading list, so I decided to wrap a bit of a mystery about a stolen Stradivarius around it. Poco a poco over a period of ten years, what started out as a violin method morphed into a full-fledged, traditional whodunit called Devil’s Trill, which became the first of six in a series of mysteries that take place in the dark corners of the classical music world.

And now, in 2014, would I come full circle, once again playing second violin in the Boston Symphony on a concert tour to China and Japan? My perspective has changed considerably, and so too have the orchestra and the world, but some questions remain the same: Why do orchestras tour? Is the old axiom that music is the international language still true? Was it ever? What does touring mean for international relations, if anything? Did the historic first BSO tour to China in 1979 have any lasting impact? Given that China is now going gangbusters building concert halls and founding orchestras, is the Boston Symphony carrying symphonic coal to a musical Newcastle?

As one of the few holdovers from the historic ’79 tour, I thought what a unique opportunity to seek answers to those questions. The music, the tour, the societal changes, and to be able to chronicle it all! I can’t say I sat by the phone, but my pump was admittedly primed.

On November 6, 2013, I received a three-word email from Lynn: “You are on.”

***

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: Prologue

WELCOME! THIS IS THE FIRST 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]March 12, 1979.  The musicians of the Boston Symphony gather at an international departure gate at Logan Airport, surrounded not only by the usual gaggle of BSO staff and administrators, but also by family members, the symphony’s deep-pocketed benefactors, corporate sponsors, and a buzzing swarm of local, national, and international media. Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts is here, lending his largesse to the occasion. In front of the cameras, Teddy bids us an impassioned bon voyage, expressing his pride in Boston’s own orchestra, and—though he mispronounces the name of our esteemed music director, Maestro Seiji Ozawa—exhorts us to greatness in inimitable Kennedy style. This is not an ordinary concert tour. This is history-making cultural diplomacy. The Boston Symphony is going to China! 

The unfathomable, churning land of Mao, of Chou En Lai, of the Gang of Four, has only recently proclaimed an end to its tumultuous Cultural Revolution, for the moment sheathing its sword against anything that smacked of Western taint. Relations with the U.S. have theoretically “normalized.” That China is still mopping up from its invasion of Vietnam had been put on our political back-burner, perhaps because it is seen as an indirect strike against the Soviet Union for its support of Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.

But what will normalization mean? How will the BSO be received in this unpredictable political environment? Will we be cheered or booed off the stage? Will there be demonstrations against our decadent Western culture? Will we be confined to our hotel rooms, or followed by security personnel everywhere we go? Can we even take photos? There is a palpable exhilaration tinged with anxiety at the departure gate that chilly, late winter day. 

Fast forward to 2014. I am a musical Rip Van Winkle. As one of the few musicians on that first tour to China in 1979 returning thirty-five years later, I have a unique opportunity to chronicle the striking transformations taking place not only in China’s arts and society, but in the symphonic world as well.

What are the nuts and bolts of a concert tour? How do you finance its staggering costs? And why bother? What are the improbable logistics of getting a hundred musicians onto the stage on time, every time?       

In the summer of 2014, I conducted a rehearsal of seventeen musicians of the string section of the Stockbridge (Massachusetts) Sinfonia, which annually presents a grand total of one program. These amateur musicians, comprising high school students to retirees, work assiduously on their own time, purely for the love of music. The program I drilled them on ranged from Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony to American Salute.

At intermission (which, unlike those of professional orchestras, is of indeterminate length) I chatted with concertmaster Christine Singer, about the recently completed Boston Symphony Asia tour. I recounted a few run-of-the-mill travel tidbits I assumed were common knowledge, but Christine, who in real life is a with-it, team-building consultant for companies and non-profits, was floored.

“The only time we see the musicians is when they’re onstage!” she said. “I’ve never had any idea of how you get there. You should write a book!”

In Symphonies & Scorpions, you’ll glimpse both the glamor and the drudgery of an international concert tour. You’ll sit next to me on the hallowed stage of Symphony Hall in Boston and in concert halls in China and Japan for four weeks of rehearsals and concerts, meeting my congenial and occasionally cantankerous colleagues, listening to the Maestro’s words of debated wisdom. You’ll fly with me nonstop from Boston to Tokyo, dine on succulent Peking duck, squirm through Beijing alleys crowded with scorpion vendors, and be spiritually restored in a Tokyo park floating in tranquility.

But nothing can be taken for granted on a tour, and sometimes disasters do happen. Our 2014 tour was no exception. It was almost cancelled before it even began, and on the final leg our instruments were held up by Japanese Customs officials, challenging even the American ambassador’s diplomatic skills to resolve.

So, pack your bags and get a good night’s sleep, because we’re hitting the road for classic adventure on and off the stage.

***

You have to be ready for anything when you’re on a concert tour. It’s just that “anything” usually doesn’t include wearing a gas mask onstage. Still, at our first rehearsal at the National Centre for the Performing Arts concert hall in Beijing, the Orwellian specter of masked violinists fiddling away on Tchaikovsky Fifth was taken with a grain of salt. Even before the tour began, the Boston Symphony had already traversed rockier bumps on the road to China.

I make a little wager with myself. Which fog will lift first: my jetlagged brain fog that was the result of a twenty-three hour, eight thousand mile voyage from Boston to Beijing that had mercifully ended thirty-six hours before; or the foul fog that somehow has infiltrated the glossy new hall on May Day morn? Personally, I place my bet on the latter.  

Before the rehearsal began the musicians lit up the auditorium with smart phones flashing, taking snapshots for posterity of the empty hall, of the maestro, of each other, of the massive green and white banner, China Orchestra Festival, hanging above our heads, to send to loved ones back home who would see them instantaneously. The previous time I was in Beijing, in 1979, I got 36 shots per roll of film on my Kodak Instamatic, waited until I returned home to have them developed, and considered it miraculous when the photos were ready within twenty-four hours.

The orchestra shakes off its collective fatigue and gets down to business. The rehearsal goes off without a hitch, noxious fumes notwithstanding. Our conductor, Maestro Charles Dutoit, as casually dressed as we were, is in amiable spirits, chatting with my messmates. Prospects for the evening’s performance are promising.   

While Maestro rehearses Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Mussorgsky, my stand partner, Caroline Pliszka, and I compare notes on the fascinating guided walking tours of Beijing’s old hutong neighborhoods each of us had undertaken twenty-four hours earlier on our free day after arrival in China. It was Caroline who had recommended the outfit that organizes the walking tours, and I make a mental note to make her my activity adviser for the rest of our time in Asia. Adding that qualification to her talents as a violinist, Caroline makes the ideal stand partner. I don’t even blink when she dons her gas mask.        

Warming up onstage before Maestro’s grand entrance for our first Boston Symphony concert in China since 1979, with Moses-like equanimity I determine my double-fog wager has ended in a tie, with both sufficiently dispersed. (It turned out that the concert hall fog was not the result of Beijing’s infamous air pollution, but of a truck idling in the cargo bay below the stage.) On the other hand, though the free day between our arrival and first rehearsal had been a convalescent reprieve, my stomach insists that the 7:30 concert we’re about to commence is time for bagels, not Beethoven. Too late to complain, I tell my stomach.

With banks of audience seats alongside and behind the stage, the hall is more reminiscent of European than American design. Surrounded though we are, I sniff the cleansed air and detect nary a trace of anything more noxious than flowery perfume wafting from the upscale audience.  

How times have changed! In 1979 we played for the unadorned proletarian masses in a colossal indoor stadium. Even though the Great Cultural Revolution had run its course by then and decadently bourgeois perfume was no longer officially verboten, it certainly hadn’t been available or affordable. Our 2014 glittery National Centre audience has paid upwards of $150 a seat and doesn’t seem to be sweating it.

The lights dim, the crowd grows quiet. Maestro saunters onstage. Thunderous applause. He gestures for us to stand. We take our bows, resume our seats. Ambassadors of goodwill, we’re good to go for the official start of the Boston Symphony Asia Tour of 2014.

***

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.

 

Child Prodigy, Child Sacrifice

A very well-intentioned friend sent me this Youtube video of a little Japanese girl, Yoshimura Himari, recently performing the first movement of the Paganini Violin Concerto in D Major with the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia, conducted by the great Vladimir Spivakov. This tiny feather of a girl, who looks like she’s about seven, played it almost flawlessly. So heartwarming. So reaffirming. All those hours of practice paying off with something so beautiful. It brings tears to your eyes, right?

Well, it brings tears to my eyes, but not of joy. Here’s why: Like Olympic-destined gymnasts, toddlers like Yoshimura are one of a small, select handful of humans on this planet who have achieved so much in such a short time. But here’s where the comparison to Olympic athletes diverges. When the gymnasts reach the grand old age of twenty, there are even fewer such athletes. They are truly elite. On the other hand, when child prodigies on the violin reach that age, there will literally be thousands of others who can play the Paganini violin concerto. And for most great musicians, that’s when their maturity as artists begins, not ends. It’s the forty or fifty years thereafter that counts, where their legacy is created.

This raises some difficult questions: Is it worth sacrificing one’s childhood for a few years of celebrity? Clearly, the child is too young to have any perspective in this regard. However, the parents and the teachers do. They’re the ones who supposedly provide guidance and wisdom. What can they be thinking?  What is their calculation? That there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that’s worth depriving one’s own child of their childhood? I know, the parents say “my baby loves what she’s doing.” Really. Compared to what? And whose interests are they primarily interested in? The child’s, or their own?

A common question former child prodigies ask when exiting their adolescence is: Where do I go from here? How is it possible to build upon the fame I achieved when I was ten years old? How is it possible to even match it? Hey, I played with Chicago Symphony when I was twelve, and now they want me to play with New Haven? Where am I going to be when I’m fifty? And if I have any expectations of playing with Chicago Symphony ever again, I now have to continue practicing endlessly, sacrificing my adulthood as well as my childhood. What choice to I have, since I’ve never done anything else?

And what of the musical component? After already having ascended to the pinnacle, how is it possible to get better? I’ve played Paganini, Wieniawski, Sarasate, Vieuxtemps, Ernst. Piece of cake. Those took muscular coordination. But Mozart? Bach? What do I do with them? Too often, the answer is, no clue. Because playing Mozart and Bach takes study, insight, world experience, an understanding of history and culture, an understanding of humanity. All the things that were shunned while they locked you in your practice room pursuing the pot of gold in childhood. And after all that adulation, after all those standing ovations, how must it feel to feel clueless?

And the toughest question of all: When all other roads have been cut off at such an early age, what is left in life when the fame fades? For every Itzhak Perlman, there are a hundred prodigies whose career paths led them in the direction of psychological trauma, anonymity, and worse.

Here’s a success story. A qualified success story. Perhaps the greatest child prodigies of all, Yehudi Menuhin, was able to overcome the hurdle, reinventing himself more as a thoughtfully perceptive musician rather than a dazzling virtuoso (he never did regain the technical skills he had as a teenager), but only after breaking down physically and mentally.

The career of Eugene Fodor, a major prize-winner with dazzling technique in his teens and early twenties, went into a permanent tailspin in his thirties, and he battled drug and alcohol addiction for the rest of his life.

Perhaps the most tragic case was of Penny Ambrose, a sweetheart of a young lady and an immensely talented violinist, who, in 1963 at the age of seventeen, took her own life by turning on the engine of her family car in the garage and asphyxiating on carbon monoxide. Everyone thought the world was her oyster. Everyone except, apparently, Penny Ambrose. As a grieving neighbor was quoted as saying in the St. Petersburg Times, “All she ever did was play that violin. She never had dates or did anything else.”

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So, yes, let us encourage achievement and let us open the arts for young people to enjoy. For a music student, there’s nothing more fun than playing a Schubert symphony in a youth orchestra or reading Haydn string quartets with friends. But let’s not lock our children in isolation for hours every day with the misguided notion that we’re enabling them to get a step ahead of the competition. Let’s not enter them in every competition, either, where if you don’t win first prize you’re considered a loser. Life is competitive enough. Music shouldn’t be. If you want your child to become great, let he or she become great gradually and on his or her own terms. And if they don’t become great–as is the case with 99.9% of us–then at least they’ll have a chance to have a childhood. A chance to be happy.

Getting There: Tales of Corona and Community

You try to keep busy. You try to stay positive. But after a period of extended confinement, on any level, it’s easy to become bored and dispirited. No restaurants, no shopping, no sporting events. No work! What to do?

I consider myself lucky. My cupboard is well-stocked and I’m comfortable with a lot of alone time. Writing. Practicing the violin. Watching the news on PBS, mysteries on Netflix. Cooking. I’ve been doing all those things for years. I try to avoid too much thumb twiddling.

I was working on Cloudy With a Chance of Murder, the next book in my Daniel Jacobus mystery series, thinking about how writing keeps me engaged. Kept my mind off the 24-7 coronavirus news cycle and off of strategies to shop at the supermarket without dying. The writing kept me positive.

Light Bulb! That’s when the idea occurred to me to try to encourage others to become similarly occupied.

But how?

In addition to my traditionally published mysteries, I’ve published a bunch of things independently and have developed a bit of facility getting books up and running. So, how about a short story anthology? I thought. Let anyone and everyone become a published author. Within our individual isolation, create a community. And that’s how Getting Through: Tales of Corona and Community was born.

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Subject: Anything, basically. As long as it’s somehow at least tangentially connected to the pandemic. And if it isn’t, that’s okay, too. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, dystopian, essay, memoir, humor, science fiction, children’s stories. Stories faith and hope. Stories of biting satire and of empathy. It’s all good. People are creative in many ways.

Speed was important. I wanted it to be released quickly so that all those who are still confined have something entertaining to keep them distracted. But with so much creativity being churned out on the internet on a daily basis, who would read it? Who would buy it?

Next idea: Send all the profits to a charity that everyone would consider worthwhile, and whose good works will be sorely needed in the months to come. It didn’t take long to think of that one. The American Red Cross.

So that’s it in a nutshell. Within days I received two dozen stories—some from old friends, many from new friends whose faces I’ve never seen; from amateur writers to famous authors; from every corner of the US and from England and Italy; from scientists, musicians, birders, high school students…you name it. Some pieces are deadly serious, others a touch bizarre, and some I hope will give you a chuckle in these difficult times.

Getting Through: Tales of Corona and Community will be available as a paperback and eBook in the next couple of weeks. I’ll give everyone a heads-up when it’s released. By reading it, you’ll become part of our new, expanding community of people who care. Please pass the word, and if you spread the goodwill faster than this damn virus, we’ll have a bestseller in no time!

Earthquake Story #2: Tchaikovsky Rocks

As Salt Lake City continues to be reminded of the recent 5.7 earthquake with a series of disconcerting aftershocks, I’m reminded of a similarly powerful quake almost 20 years ago.

I was with the Utah Symphony on one of its biannual excursions to southern Utah. We typically performed at the colleges in Cedar City and St. George, as there were few other places in that vast region that could hold an entire symphony orchestra on its stage.

The venue for the St. George concerts was the Southern Utah University Centrum, an arena that held everything from concerts to sporting events. The temporary stage for the orchestra was in the middle of the circular arena’s floor, directly above the Jumbotron.

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Yep, that’s where we were.

The featured work on the program was the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5. A popular work the world ’round, it features arguably the most beautiful French horn solo ever written in the second movement, Andante Cantabile. Every horn player lives for that moment, and that night the solo was performed by our wonderful principal horn player at the time, Shelley Showers.

The first movement, Allegro con anima,  went by without incident. But shortly after Shelley began her magnificent solo, the stage began to shake. What was it? A passing truck? Some technical issue? It became clear after about ten seconds that it was indeed an earthquake that was rocking the building.

What to do? Orchestra musicians are trained to follow the conductor. We kept on playing. Shelley didn’t miss a beat even as the Jumbotron above our heads swayed like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. At the point occurred to everyone that it might be prudent to get the hell out of there, the shaking stopped and Shelley and the orchestra simply kept playing.

Talk about professionalism. But I’ve always wondered why Shelley left Utah for the Philadelphia Orchestra not too many years thereafter.

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Seismic waves, not Tchaikovsky overtones.

I hope you enjoyed this blog. I invite you to check out my previous ones, and to visit my Writing page for all kinds of interesting reading.

 

Tales of Corona

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PANDEMIC PRESS! HERE’S YOUR CHANCE TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR!

I’ve been hearing from a lot of people how bored they are with cabin fever as we wait out this pandemic. Here’s the win-win solution: SEND ME YOUR STORY! We’ll edit it together and as soon I have 20 of them, I’ll compile them into a volume, called TALES OF CORONA, which I’ll self-publish ASAP.

100% OF THE ROYALTIES WILL GO TO THE AMERICAN RED CROSS.

Here are the details:

The story should be from 1,000-3,000 words.

It can be fiction, nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, dystopian, didactic, humorous. You name it. Just about anything that touches on the pandemic.

The only thing ineligible are politically strident stories. No personal attacks or name calling.

YOU SEND ME THE STORY, AND IF IT’S IN THE FIRST 20, I GUARANTEE IT WILL BE PUBLISHED!!

LET’S GO FOR IT—ON YOUR MARK, GET SET…WRITE!

Send your story to: noteworthy@geraldelias.com today!

 

Earthquake Story #1: The Magic, Vibrating Bed

 

As you might have heard, this morning the Salt Lake City area experienced a 5.7 earthquake, with several aftershocks. Fortunately, there does not seem to be too much damage or any casualties, but being in any kind of earthquake is disconcerting at the least.

I’ve been in a few of them and would like to share the stories, as they all have an element of humor. Today will be the first one, with the others to come in following days.

In 1986-87 I took a one-year sabbatical from the Boston Symphony. My sabbatical was divided roughly into thirds: Japan, New Zealand, and Australia. In each of those countries I had arranged guest teaching positions and performance engagements.

It made sense to start in Japan because the BSO had a concert tour that finished there. So at the end of the tour I waved goodbye as the bus pulled away from our hotel and headed to the airport. I, on the other hand, headed to the Musashino Conservatory of Music in Ekoda, a suburb of Tokyo, where I was engaged to be a guest professor.

The conservatory was (and still is) very well endowed, and had a lovely two-story apartment in the adjacent charming suburb of Sakuradai (Cherry Hill). As you all know, living space in Japan is at a premium, but the apartment I was given–for free–had three bedrooms, a living room, an ample kitchen, and a balcony. What luxury!

 

Because it was the end of the tour, I was pretty worn out, and so when I was taken to my new lodgings, the first thing I wanted to do was take a nap.

I lay down in my bed, and immediately it started shaking. Wow, I thought, this is incredible. A vibrating massage bed! These Japanese think of everything!

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After about 30 seconds, much to my dismay, the vibrating stopped. I got out of the bed and looked to see if there was somewhere to put money in to get it to start vibrating again. It was only after I examined the bed thoroughly that I said to myself, Boy are you an idiot. You’re in Japan, a major earthquake zone. That was an earthquake!

Fortunately, for the rest of our four months there, my magic massage bed didn’t repeat its trick.

For more fun reading, check out my website for books you might enjoy! geraldeliasmanofmystery.wordpress.com

It’s the Repertoire, Stupid!

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This concert was clearly too long.

One of my esteemed colleagues recently posted on Facebook the suggestion that classical music concerts are too long. Some suggested that 90 minutes, without intermission, should be the maximum. As the sometimes contentious discussion moved along, it turned out that there were many more factors to consider than simply the length of the program.

Here are a few of them:

The Concert Experience.

Seating comfort and hall lighting: Does feeling cramped inhibit your ability to enjoy the performance? If it’s pitch black how can you read the program notes? If it’s too light does the rest of the audience distract you?

Food and drink: Should there be a café or bar where you can dine before and after a concert, and at intermission, to make the event a real evening out? Could you even bring food and drink into the auditorium.

Intermissions: How long should they be? Just enough time to catch your breath before the big symphony on the second half? Enough time for everyone to go to the bathroom? Would that stretch the evening out too long?

Concert Etiquette

Is it stultifying to have to sit in silence for two to two-and-a-half hours? It’s not a funeral after all! Why so somber? Would it be better to be able to express one’s appreciation more frequently on in a greater variety of ways, like they did in prior centuries? Not that throwing tomatoes should be an option…

Or does freedom of expression infringe upon the enjoyment of the person sitting next to me? I think there’s consensus that cellphones and small children should be left at home, but other than that…

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This audience was a bit too rowdy.

The Program

The music on the concert should form a coherent whole rather than just be a scattershot of music. And they need to be in a logical order. You would not want to attack an audience at the beginning of a concert with a Tchaikovsky symphony and finish it with a Rossini overture.

Do longer concerts tax the musicians’ energy to the extent that the performance suffers?

Today’s Society

Have our attention spans be rewired by sound bites and Instagram so that sitting for the length of a traditional concert is no longer desirable? If so, who should change, the listeners or the orchestra? Some of those on the FB thread say that concerts over two hours are too long and so they leave at intermission. Maybe that’s the best solution? Those who wish to leave can. Those who wish to hear the whole concert also can. Everyone gets their wish.

 

I can go either way on concert length. For symphony concerts, two to two-and-a-half hours with an intermission seems ideal. The standard formula—overture, concerto, intermission, major symphony—has worked very well, as have endless variations to it. Yes, I’m tired after playing a long concert. But I should be if I worked hard enough!

I can’t understand why people consider it an ordeal to sit through a concert with a Mozart overture, Mendelssohn concerto, and Brahms symphony. Yes, concerts can be tiring. After all, most concerts are at night. And they can be challenging. Think, Mahler Sixth. But consider what a treasure the music is! What a gift!

On the other hand, I’ve been music director of the Vivaldi by Candlelight series for fifteen years, and those concerts are short: they last from seventy-five to ninety minutes, without intermission. The reason for that is simple. It’s the repertoire, stupid! Most of the compositions we play are from eight to fifteen minutes long. Six or seven of those are more than enough to provide a satisfying evening of great music.

Maybe the solution is for orchestras to provide more variety, with some concerts traditional full length and others shorter. I think what everyone would agree upon is that both the music and the quality of the performance should be the best that can be provided.

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This audience was just right.

Gerald Elias, a former violinist with the Boston Symphony and associate concertmaster of the Utah Symphony, is author of the Daniel Jacobus mystery series that takes place in the dark corners of the classical music world. He has also written Symphonies & Scorpions, a memoir of life as a touring musician. For more of his books, please travel through his website: geraldeliasmanofmystery.wordpress.com

Turning a Page: The “Inside” Story

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The BSO Library on the first-balcony level of Symphony Hall

This article is one of a series by former BSO violinist and former Utah Symphony associate concertmaster Gerald Elias—who continues to play with the BSO at Tanglewood and on tour—examining a variety of on-the-job challenges faced by orchestral violinists.

It is generally acknowledged that the violins, particularly the first violins, play the most notes of any orchestral instrument. This is not intended to disparage the noble efforts of the contrabassoon, piccolo, or triangle. We all have our essential role to play. Nevertheless, it’s true. Even a non-musician can attest to that simply by lifting a first violin part and then, let’s say, a third trombone part, and feel which is heavier. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it will be, you guessed it, the violin. It’s not at all unusual for a first violin part in a big nineteenth- or twentieth-century symphonic work to stretch for twenty or thirty pages, or even a forty page behemoth like Mahler’s Fifth.

Here’s some easy division. Forty pages, eighty minutes—the approximate duration of Mahler Fifth. Twenty page turns, meaning a page turn on an average every four minutes! And when you take away the half-hour Adagietto, which is only a few pages long, it’s almost a page turn a minute. But do you, as an astute audience member, ever even notice that? Smoke and mirrors? Is it magic, right in front of your eyes?

Not really. It’s a combined, concerted effort by the composer, publisher, orchestra library, and finally the page turner to make page turning essentially invisible. Let’s take each of those contributors one at a time.

When you go to a performance of a Mahler symphony you see a massive number of musicians on stage. (His Symphony No. 8, “A Symphony of a Thousand,” really pushes that envelope.) Yet if you look—and listen—closely you’ll notice that much of the time there are only a handful musicians playing. It is very rare indeed when everyone plays at the same time. Those precious moments are usually reserved for the occasional, hall-shaking climax. In fact, one interesting experiment you might want to try as a listener is, at any given moment, to identify every instrument that is being played. The discipline of this experiment might well enhance your experience and appreciation of the music, as it opens the window to the miraculously varied rainbow of orchestral colors a great composer has at his disposal. A side benefit for the musicians as a result of composers’ selective use of instrumentation is that it gives each musician an opportunity to rest from time to time, and although the composer’s objective might have been a purely musical one, it really does provide a moment, albeit usually a brief one, for string players to relax both mentally and physically. The musical term for this rest is, appropriately, a rest.

Since reputable music publishers have an understanding of performers’ needs, whenever possible they format the music to place a rest at the bottom of the right hand page. This enables the musician, who we can safely assume needs both hands to play his/her instrument, to be able to turn the page without interrupting the music. Most of the time, from Bach to Bernstein, this system works effectively.

There are times though, when composers aren’t so cooperative; when, for instance the violin part requires constant playing of eighth notes or sixteenth notes (i.e. the fast stuff) for several minutes without surcease. In this case, for example in some Schubert or Bruckner symphonies, it’s impossible to fit enough notes on a single page in order to get to the next rest. This is where having a great orchestra library staff, such as the one the BSO can boast of, is a blessing. We will often find that the page-turning dilemma has been resolved by the library having photocopied a portion of the next page up to the point there finally is a rest, and appending it onto the page that has all the fast stuff.

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Two well-worn pages from Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé” Suite No. 2

What happens, though, when there are no rests at all on the horizon? When you simply have to keep playing nonstop from the bottom right of one page to the top left of the next? It does happen from time to time, and that’s where the skill of the page turner is paramount. There is no page-turning course in music conservatories, though after having played with countless stand partners over the past forty years I sometimes wish there was. Because even when there is a rest at the bottom of the page, there is an art to knowing the right time to turn it. Some page turners, anxious to jump back into the fray, turn prematurely, leaving their stand partners high and dry, trying to recall the music that everyone else seems to be playing. Other page turners, believing they’re being good Samaritans by enabling you to see every last note before turning, wait for the final split second to turn the page. But unless you’ve memorized the music at the top left of every page, this can be extremely stressful. I had one stand partner many years ago, who shall remain nameless (including the orchestra), who is a sensational violinist and fine musician. For some reason, he gave the distinct impression that turning a page was either a leisure activity (when he was in a good mood) or an imposition on his time (when he was in a bad mood). As we’d approach the bottom of the page, he’d look curiously at the music, as if he’d never seen the bottom of a page before, stretch a bit, put his violin down, take another casual look at the music, consider the options, nonchalantly turn the page, make sure the music was nicely centered on the stand, and resume playing.

The key, obviously, is to know your stand partner’s strengths. For example, I’m much better at being able to “memorize” the music at the bottom of the page while my stand partner turns it than I am at predicting what’s going to appear before me on the next. So, I’m happiest when the page gets turned sooner rather than later. In either case, though, a quick turn of page is almost always a good idea. When I’m the outside player on the stand (i.e. the non-page turner) my only role in all this is to make sure my violin is out of the way in order to give my partner ample elbow room (literally) to turn the page efficiently. I’ve had some stand partners for whom I’ve turned pages who kept the scroll of their violins so close to the music—either because of eyesight or security issues—that I had to become a veritable contortionist in order to reach underneath his violin and across the stand, grab the lower right hand corner of the music in a split second, turn the page, and reestablish my playing position without whacking my stand partner’s fiddle or even interfering with his/her ability to see the music.

Sometimes I envy those triangle players.

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The author demonstrates a page turn.

Gerald Elias is the author of the six-part Daniel Jacobus mystery series (including two audio books) and of “Symphonies & Scorpions,” which relives via stories and photos the BSO’s history-making 1979 concert tour to China and its return in 2014. An expanded version of his 2017 BSO essay, “War & Peace. And Music,” which is included in “Symphonies & Scorpions,” recently served as the basis for a TEDSaltLakeCity2019 performance. He has also recently released a children’s story, “Maestro, the Potbellied Pig,” and “…an eclectic anthology of 28 short mysteries to chill the warmest heart.”

 

Chinese Checkmate

The Boston Symphony is batting .500 historically on its tours to China. That would be a great average for the Red Sox, but cancelling concerts, for whatever reasons, are major disappointments for an orchestra with an otherwise stellar record of achievement.

Ironically, the first tour to China, in 1979, was the one that was the most hastily planned. The opportunity arose quite suddenly out of the rapprochement between the US and China after the demise of Mao Tse Tung. The BSO was the first foreign to perform in China after the Great Cultural Revolution, and ushered in an era of improved relations between the two countries. Though travel to China today is ho hum (excluding the current shutdown over the coronavirus) the 1979 tour was an event of international cultural and political import. To give you an idea of the sea change in the world since then, when the BSO arrived in Beijing, it had flown on the first 747 plane ever to touch down on Chinese soil.

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Premier Deng Xiaoping with Maestro Seiji Ozawa, 1979

A second tour to China was to occur 1999 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking 1979 tour was a done deal. That is, until American forces mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, killing several people. The Chinese government, not surprisingly, did not take a kindly view to the attack. At the State Department’s urging, the concert tour was aborted at the last minute.

A third tour to China, in 2014, turned out to be a great success, but it too was almost cancelled. Maestro Lorin Maazel, the conductor engaged to lead the orchestra on the tour, had been ill for months. Though he was determined to persevere, his doctors finally ordered him to stay in bed. (Sadly, he died just a few months later.) An orchestra can’t perform without a conductor (or so conductors say), but without someone of Maazel’s international stature, concert presenters were reluctant. Literally, with only days before a decision to cancel would have to have been made, the BSO was able to engage the services of Maestro Charles Dutoit. The tour was saved. It is unfortunate that a couple years later, a dark shadow was cast over what was perhaps his greatest moment of glory when serious allegations of sexual misconduct were leveled against him.

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With Maestro Charles Dutoit in Beijing. Later events overshadowed his triumph in China.

And now, here we are in 2020, and yet another tour to China has gone by the boards. Until a few weeks ago, the serious concern was about the demonstrations in Hong Kong, one of the orchestra’s destinations. Would the musicians be safe? What kind of security was being provided? Would demonstrations at the airports disrupt our travel? As recently as one week ago, the musicians received a security briefing from the firm that was to accompany us. Hardly a word was mentioned about health concerns. How quickly things change.

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       One of the many Hong Kong pro-democracy mass protests

So the two-week tour that would have taken the orchestra to Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai has been cancelled. I have not doubt there are already efforts underway to reschedule the tour in a year or two years. One can’t even imagine what Perils of Peking the orchestra might have to confront in the future. In the meantime, they’ll just keep playing.

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The Boston Symphony with Maestro Andris Nelsons

 

To read about all the BSO’s adventures in China on the tours that did take place, you’ll enjoy Symphonies & Scorpions: An International Concert Tour as an Instrument of Citizen Diplomacy.

An excerpt from the book, “War & Peace. And Music,”was the subject for my TED performance.