It's an all Tchaikovsky program, which is fine; I like Tchaikovsky, but in doses. And this is waaaaaaay too much for me. We're doing March Slav, the piano concerto, Francesca da Rimini, and 1812. The horns are always playing, and we have to often go from playing loudly and forcefully to playing high, soft, delicate notes. This is painful.
It's interesting to do 1812 indoors. Normally we're outside amidst crowds of drunk people and screaming children on the 4th of July, so of course the strings have to saw through all of the soft parts just to be heard. Playing it in a concert setting gives us a chance to discover the nuances: "hey, that's actually some really good writing. Who knew?"
Tonight's concert series, Classical Connections, is a very informal format, very chatty and with visual aids. It starts at 7 and is only a bit over an hour, so that the young yuppies can go out and drink their martinis and discuss the concert. It's geared toward the young professionals demographic who might want to catch an earlier, shorter concert after happy hour. Today it took the artistic crew forever to figure out the lighting cues, as in when to dim the lights for the video projector, etc. There was a lot of 90 orchestra musicians sitting around on stage doing nothing while the backstage Einsteins figured things out. Andreas (our music director) said, "No other orchestra would be this patient! I love this orchestra!"
Well, although it's horribly unfashionable for musicians to like their music director (and there are certainly MD's out there who deserve to be disliked), I have to say that I just adore Andreas. And geez, after the lighting fiascos and this week's soloist (more to come about that), I think he deserves to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for patience!
Andreas told a hilarious story tonight to the audience about how he was conducting the 1812 in Pittsburgh to a crowd of over 150,000 people. Apparently one of the sponsors was a brewery that was happily handing out free samples of its product to the masses, and the soldiers that were supposed to be lighting the cannons got drunk off their cabooses. So right at the beginning, which is the lovely and introspective string part, there were huge cannon blasts. The soldiers were having a lovely time. Then the concert producers freaked out and tried to cover up the soldiers' mishaps by broadcasting a cassette tape of Bruce Springstein's "Born in the USA" loudly, unaware that they were in fact making things much worse. It made for a great story. ;)
The guy soloing with us this week, who shall remain nameless, is a decent pianist but man, is he ever a hotdog. During rehearsals he was talking and gesturing directly to the musicians without going through Andreas - a HUGE no-no in the etiquette of soloists and orchestras (you always let the conductor address the orchestra). He kept jumping up onto Andreas' podium and pawing through his score (!?!!), and would play the orchestra parts on the piano while Andreas was trying to talk to the orchestra. Today during the A in rehearsal, he actually gestured to the oboist to move his pitch in a certain direction to match the piano, which I thought took a certain high level of testicular fortitude. The best one: during the concert tonight, he announced to the audience, "I voss vun off da last beeg names in Russia dat Gorbachov allowed to emigrate to America". It's actually fascinating to me, that someone could proudly (and seemingly obliviously) display an ego that huge to so many people at once. I wasn't blown away by his piano playing, either. He was very percussive, never sang the lines, and would hint that he was going to caress a certain suspension and then crash right through it like a bull.
That's all for now. I'm completely exhausted and my face really hurts (in addition to
my lips being sore and swollen, they're also chapped. Lovely...thank god for Burts Beeswax. I get the little tubs and after rehearsals I've been just sticking my face right in them. Good night! :)
XO Darcy
P.S. I'm reading Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain now, and I really love it; it's historical fiction set during the time of the Civil War in the South. I highly recommend it.
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