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.”
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