Now, before you jump to the conclusion that this post is about some classical music blog that will be zapped by your safe-surf software, be assured, The Classical Beaver is quite simply a highly-entertaining and informative blog written by a very enthusiastic Oregon Symphony audience member.  It’s well worth adding to your blogging routine – here’s a sample from the Beaver’s latest posting:

last weekend’s schubert/rossini concert line-up was notable for something it was missing – a modern piece of music.  in fact, after some very simplistic investigative journalism, i discovered it was the only program this classical subscription season not to contain a 20th or 21st century work.  to be very clear, allow me to specifically state that out of the 16 regularly scheduled classical concerts this season, remarkably 15 of them contained at least one 20th or 21st century work.  15 out of 16!  or, since baseball season is thankfully nipping at our heels, that’s a percentage of .937!  one might wonder why i am becoming belligerent about this.  well, let me tell you, when i began regularly attending oregon symphony concerts a few years ago, i just assumed that i’d be constantly listening to the music of mozart, bach, and Beethoven (which ain’t so bad, btw).  i was stoked to discover that the os actually plays a shit-ton of modern music… you know, chock-full of dissonant, politically charged, jazz-infected, pared-down, minimalistic, atonal musings… stuff that was written when jackson pollack was dripping, when martin luther king jr. was preaching, when john coltrane was blowing, and when raymond carver was writing.  if you care about these people and their creations, get your ass to an oregon symphony concert.

[link] – the classical beaver

This Sunday the Oregon Symphony performed a concert consisting of three pieces which it had never before in its history performed. (My apologies for that seemingly Google-translated-to-English-from-German sentence).  The Delius Irmelin Prelude was pleasant fare, and having a couple nice section viola melodic moments (and one big, exposed viola solo at the end, nicely played by Joël Belgique) made it ok for me, but overall, Delius has a long way to go to make it to my top 50 composers list.  So, the entirety of the concert was largely made up of two very different pieces, each a challenge to perform, but both quite rewarding in their own way.

The Sixth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams rounded out the first half of the concert.  It’s a beast of a piece.  Perhaps slightly less bleak than the Fourth, but not by much.  It also presents the performer with the problem of the fact that it starts you right out of the gate at 100 miles an hour.  No slow introduction to allow the sea legs to set in, the adrenalin to subside, and the wits to be gathered about one’s self.  Just right into the fire straight out of the frying pan.  Like Mahler’s symphonies, it’s written for the full capacity of a modern, virtuoso, symphony orchestra.  No matter what part you’re playing, you’re always doing something that matters, like with Mozart, for example, but unlike Mozart’s symphonies, the VW6 is usually demanding that you listen to 10 other lines at once while doing so, and either in a range or at a pace that is nearer the edge of your capabilities as a player, too.

We played the same program Saturday evening out at Bauman Auditorium at George Fox University in Newberg, which is a smaller hall with more reverberant acoustics.  The best thing about Bauman is that it’s much easier to hear across the stage, and also the collective sound of the orchestra comes back to the stage from the hall – giving a psychologically important sense of the ensemble sound – especially in very soft passages for the whole string section.  It was something of a revelation to me.  I never get to go out into the hall to hear the orchestra as an observer, so even getting to really hear the string sound and full ensemble sound in a more lively room provided a lot of good information.  Mainly, I was gratified to hear a real “big orchestra” sheen to the string section’s sound.  In the Schnitz, the highest frequencies are a bit harsh, so you lose some of the soft sheen that really makes a orchestra’s string section sound supple and effortless.  In Newberg the sheen was in full evidence right from the first entrance of the Delius, and the gorgeous Andante theme from the first movement of the VW was wonderful (at least to these ears).  Why am I going on about this? Well, it’s one thing to hear from patrons and the music director and other interested observers that the level of the orchestra’s playing has gone up, up, up, but until one has the chance to really hear that for one’s self, there is no real sense of the nature of the accomplishment.  So the Newberg performance really opened my eyes to the very real, virtuoso instrument that the Oregon Symphony has become over the last six years or so.

The sole work on the second half of the concert was Richard Strauss’ Bourgeois Gentilhomme Suite, with an added narration performed by the actor David Ogden Stiers (who is associate conductor of the Newport Symphony and has a home on the central Oregon coast).  I’ve yet to encounter a work of Richard Strauss that I have not thoroughly enjoyed playing.  His writing for strings really represents the pinnacle of the late-Romantic ethos, and is as melodically and harmonically satisfying as it is technically difficult.  Gentilhomme is a piece in a much lighter vein (both in terms of subject matter and in the purely technical area of orchestration) than this popular tone poems or operas.  There are only 16 strings on stage, many of which have independent solo lines at different points in the proceedings.  There are many more winds, brass, and percussion on stage than strings, but Strauss so cunningly orchestrates the work that ensemble balance is rarely an issue.

Playing this piece is such a delight.  Not only as a performer with one’s own part to play, but in hearing some of the amazing things that one’s colleagues get to play, too.  Jun Iwasaki, our concertmaster, playing the hugely virtuosic solo in the Dance of the Tailors movement, or the Fencing Master featuring principal trumpet Jeffrey Work and pianist Carol Rich; or Nancy Ives, our principal cellist, playing the heart-rending love song in the concluding Dinner movement.  There are too many great things going on to list them all.  And to top it all off, there was this amazing narration that was interspersed between the various movements of the suite, giving the basic elements of Molieré’s diabolically funny and witty plot, all in the guises of the main characters – each brought to life through the virtuoso acting chops by David Ogden Stiers.  It’s a shame we couldn’t get another chance to play it again at least one more time.  I was sad to see the piece go…

Anyone else see the resemblance between John Cage and William H. Macy?

A great article from today’s Washington Post, about the phenomenon that is Yo-Yo Ma – here’s the teaser:

In 1961, Pablo Casals played for John F. Kennedy at the White House. The concert could be seen as a symbol of the importance of the arts to the Kennedy administration, or as a gesture of honor to a great cellist.

But there’s no question, when the concert is re-created next year as part of the Kennedy Center’s tribute to the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s inauguration, about who will represent Casals. When there’s a commemorative event that calls for classical music, Yo-Yo Ma is almost sure to be the person playing it.

[link] – Washington Post

This weekend is a bit of a strange classical week for us, with this program being played only once in Portland, on a Sunday matinee.  On Saturday evening, we bring the show on the road (down Route 99W, to be exact) to Newberg, to the excellent auditorium at George Fox University.  We usually alternate classical and pops in Newberg each time we go, and so this is a classical year.  It’s always usually really hard stuff to play.  Two years ago it was Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Strauss Suite from Der Rosenkavalier.  This year it’s Ralph Vaughan Williams’ harrowing Sixth Symphony and Strauss’ Bourgeois Gentilhomme, with actor David Ogden Stiers narrating the essentials of Molière’s farce (in the guise of several different characters, no less) between movements.  This is a very difficult concert, with two very different pieces.

The Vaughan Williams symphony is a take-you-by-the-throat piece that doesn’t let you go at all – even the slow sections are fraught with tension.  It’s really a reaction to the aftermath of the Second World War, even though RVW protested loudly (methinks too loudly) that it was all about Prospero and the nature of life as a realm of dreams: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded by a sleep”.  I think everyone who heard the work in post-war England was not conviced: this was clearly a symphony affected by the aftermath of the horrors of warfare visited upon the innocents of the world.

Aside from being technically very dense and difficult to play, our jobs are made more difficult by the fact that these RVW symphonies are all old hand-written parts – not the beautifully precise engravings of German publishers – but literally pen and ink hand copies that are then transferred to plates for printing.  No matter how well you know the parts, there will always be quirks of the copying that will make you think twice on the fly, and that is often enough to derail even the most studious performer.  Here’s an example page from the first movement viola part:

It’s not really that diffcult, but it’s pretty easy to mistake one of those quarters or eighths for each other on the second line, and there is one of the worst clef changes ever in the history of music in the middle of the fourth line down – it’s criminal to do that!  It seriously messes with your head – it took me about 15 minutes just to get that straight in my head – valuable preparation time wasted!

Then there’s the Strauss. Great parts, very easy to read.  But… there is a passage in the last section of the piece which is the highest sustained passage I’ve ever encountered in a standard repertoire piece.  It even goes a whole step above the highest note in the Bartók Viola Concerto!  Here it is (and no, this is NOT a violin part!).  I’m thinking about strapping an E string extension onto my viola for this weekend’s concerts…

I was thrilled to discover this vintage documentary of the four DePasquale brothers, all of whom played in the Philadelphia Orchestra – at the same time!  I studied with Joseph, the violist, who was principal violist of the Boston Symphony under Koussevitsky, and then was hired by Eugene Ormandy, later being joined by his brothers in the Philadephia Orchestra.  Classic stuff.

And here’s an article from TIME magazine, May 1966:

Francis: Actually —

Robert: You see, we’ve been playing together since birth and —

William: Oh c’mon. You make it sound like we were playing the violin

in the crib. I was at least six before —

Robert: I mean we can read each other’s minds; we —

Joseph: What it comes down to is a unity of thought.

Francis: However —

William: A unity of sound, really.

Francis: But —

Joseph: And temperament. Lots of Italian temperament.

Francis: Love! That’s what it is. We’re all hardheaded, but we’ve got lots of love.

As any scarred musician will attest, one of the quickest ways to lose friends is to engage in the precarious art of chamber music. With everyone trying to be boss, squabbles over interpretation can become downright nasty. And with the members of the de Pasquale String Quartet — Joseph, 45, viola; Francis, 44, cello; Robert, 37, and William, 32, violins — it’s even more so. They fight constantly. The difference is, they revel in it. But then they are brothers, and this, they explain, is the secret to successful shouting contests.

“With four strangers,” says Joseph, “you couldn’t insult each other the way we do. There is no malice, and we get it all out of our system. It’s very healthy.” All members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the brothers practice 20 hours a week at their old homestead in the Germantown section of the City of Brotherly Love. “When things get too violent,” explains Robert, “Mama has to come in from the kitchen to mediate.” There is nothing, they say, like Mama’s eggs in purgatorio (fried eggs smothered in sautéed tomatoes) and a spot of vino to cool a heated brow.

In Bold Relief. Last week the de Pasquale String Quartet made its Manhattan debut in Town Hall and all was sweet accord. Billed as the FIRST ALL-BROTHER QUARTET IN MUSICAL HISTORY, they were a trifle jittery in the opening Hayden Quartet in D Minor, Op. 76, but soon found their stride. Turning to the contemporary, their readings of Quincy Porter’s Quartet No. 3 and Vin cent Persichetti’s Quartet No. 2 crackled with clean precision. In Dvorák’s Quar tet in F Major, Op. 96, their tempos, if sometimes inflexible, were brisk and lively, their tone as rich and heady as a draught of May wine. Neither muscular nor mushy, their approach was marked by a warmth and intuitive sensitivity that projected the sweep of the music in bold relief.

For the brothers de Pasquale, the concert was the realization of an old man’s dream. Papa de Pasquale, an im migrant violin teacher, had one ideal in life: to raise a professional string quartet. But in Germantown baseball was the thing, and the de Pasquale boys were forever tossing their baseball equipment out of the second-floor window and sneaking off to the diamond. On Sunday afternoons, however, they were held captive in the living room and made to listen to recordings by Kreisler and Casals. “That’s what it should sound like,” Papa would say, and then he would lead the boys through their paces. If a little extra encouragement was needed, Papa administered a smart rap on the head with his violin bow. Gradually, recalls Francis, “we learned to love, chamber music as much as he did.”

Lone Regret. As their careers blossomed, the brothers agreed that each would go his own way until the time was ripe for them to form the quartet. At 21, Francis was accepted by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Joseph went on to distinguish himself as principal violist with the Boston Symphony and to record trios with Heifetz and Piatigorsky. Robert joined the New York Philharmonic, and William, at 25, was appointed concertmaster of the New Orleans Philharmonic. Their father died in 1956, but each summer the brothers returned home for two months of intensive practice. Then, in 1963, William won a position with the Philadelphia and has since been named an associate concertmaster. The time had come. The following year, the two other boys packed up their fiddles and joined the Philadelphia—Joseph as principal violist, Robert as a member of the violin section—and the de Pasquale String Quartet was born.

This season the quartet’s eleven concerts in Philadelphia drew near-sellout crowds. Following their success in Manhattan last week, the de Pasquale brothers had only one regret. Said Joseph: “If only Dad could have heard us. He would have popped his buttons.”

Oregon Symphony music director Carlos Kalmar has been appointed music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de RTVE (Spanish Radio/Television Orchestra), effective September 2011.  The initial contract is for a five year period.  He succeeds British conductor Adrian Leaper, the orchestra’s music director since 2001. It’s not clear what effect this will have on Kalmar’s duties here in Portland, in terms of how many weeks he will conduct with the OSO.

Interestingly enough, it will be possible to view quite a bit of Carlo’s work with the orchestra, as many of its concerts are televised, and archived for streaming on the web via their website.

[link] – rtve.es

Alex Ross, classical music writer at The New Yorker (and author of the acclaimed music history The Rest is Noise), has a great article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper on the role that outdated classical music etiquette plays in discouraging new audiences to the medium.  Highly worth a read – here’s the opening gambit:

Last autumn, Barack Obama hosted an evening of classical music at the White House. Beforehand, he said, “Now, if any of you in the audience are newcomers to classical music, and aren’t sure when to applaud, don’t be nervous. Apparently, President Kennedy had the same problem. He and Jackie held several classical music events here, and more than once he started applauding when he wasn’t supposed to. So the social secretary worked out a system where she’d signal him through a crack in the door. Now, fortunately, I have Michelle to tell me when to applaud. The rest of you are on your own.”

Obama was having fun at the expense of the No Applause Rule, which holds that one must refrain from clapping until all movements of a work have sounded. No aspect of our modern concert ritual causes more bewilderment. The problem is not that the Rule is so arcane that even a law professor turned commander-in-chief cannot master it. Rather, it’s that the etiquette and the music sometimes work at cross-purposes. The noisy codas of the first movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” and the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique demand applause, even beg for it. The word “applause” comes from the instruction plaudite, which appears at the end of Roman comedies. Those climactic chords are the musical equivalent of plaudite: they almost mimic the action of putting one’s hands together.

[link] – Guardian.co.uk

If you thought you needed any additional signs of the impending apocalypse (besides earthquakes and tsunami), then here’s another terrifying portend: the Oregon Symphony viola section has a Facebook fan page!  Click here to check it out.  The photos are worth a look…

This is quite possibly the best Rube Goldberg machine I’ve ever seen (including the famous Honda commercial from a few years back).  Enjoy!

Bob Hicks (a.k.a. Mr. Scatter) has a review of the Oregon Ballet Theater’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which featured the return of the OBT orchestra after being absent due to budget cuts for all of the 2009-2010 season.  Here’s the portion of the review that deals with the orchestra:

Welcome back, orchestra.

After an elegant, crisp interpretation of George Balanchine’s modernist classic “The Four Temperaments” and an intermission break on Saturday night, conductor Niel DePonte’s head poked up for the first time this season from the orchestra pit.

The crowd in Keller Auditorium broke out in applause: At long last, the Oregon Ballet Theatre Orchestra was back. Missing all season because of extreme budget cuts caused by the ballet’s financial near-death experience last year, the musicians – 45 strong, and buttressed by the singers of the Pacific Youth Choir – were back in the pit to perform Felix Mendelssohn’s warm, playful and sometimes deeply moving music for Christopher Stowell’s ballet “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The orchestra’s performance was lively and assured. More important, it was there, back where it ought to be, providing the full sound and anticipatory, in-the-moment partnership that quickens dancers’ responses and brings a ballet fully to life.

Maybe it’s fitting that the orchestra’s first performance of the season came for a ballet set in a forest. OBT is hardly out of the financial woods yet, but it seems to be finding its path. After last spring and summer’s remarkable emergency drive that brought in more than $900,000 to keep the company afloat, donations this season are up sharply. In January alone OBT hauled in $455,000 from three major grants. That doesn’t solve the company’s long-term challenges, but it helps considerably.

And for the run of this “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” at least, it brings the orchestra back.

All was not smooth sailing, however: here’s a posting from OBT’s facebook page:

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, plus 2 p.m. Saturday
Where: Keller Auditorium, 222 S.W. Clay St.
Tickets: $17-$130 (2 p.m. Saturday show, $8.50-$65)
Information: 888-922-5538 or www.obt.org

As promised, here’s a pdf file of the program page from Thursday evening’s Evelyn Nagel Donor Appreciation Concert.

You’ll need either Adobe Reader to view the file, or most Apple computers will open it for you automatically. [endac_prog]

Or, if you prefer, a jpeg version that might be a bit harder to read comfortably (click on image to enlarge).

Color photo: © Peter Schaaf/www.peterschaaf.com

It was with great sadness that I learned of the passing of the great cellist David Soyer today, one day after his 87th birthday.  He was the founding cellist of the legendary Guarneri Quartet, with which he played from 1964 to 2001.  His former student Peter Wiley took over after Soyer’s retirement, the sole personnel change in the history of the ensemble.

Mr. Soyer was a gruff and imposing presence.  I had the great privilege of working with the members of the Guarneri Quartet as part of a graduate fellowship program at the University of Maryland.  We would have a few days of coachings and lessons each month when the quartet came to DC, usually with one open rehearsal and a performance, either at the university or nearby.  Coachings with Mr. Soyer were literally lessons in the “no-spin zone”.  If what you played sucked, he’d tell you, and in no uncertain terms!  Usually, if it was good, nothing was said.  The cellist in our quartet, Beth, had Mr. Soyer wrapped around her little finger.  She came across as all sweetness and light, but was steely tough, and it seemed that Mr. Soyer respected that.  Plus she could charm the socks off of him.  I remember very vividly coaching the Beethoven Op. 130 quartet with him and with the other members of the Guarneri Quartet, and think about what I learned in those precious hours whenever I return to the piece.

If you listen to any of their dozens of recordings (most reissued in both a boxed set and individual digital downloads), you’ll often hear the low grunting of Mr. Soyer as he lays into the vigorous downbeats of the Smetana Quartet “From My Life”, or the solo from Wolf’s Italian Serenade, or Beethoven’s Grosse Fuga.

[link] – New York Times notice
[link] – New York Times obituary
[link] – Alex Ross’ blog @ The New Yorker
[link] – Anthony McGill’s blog (principal clarinet, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra)

I just got back from the post-concert drinks after our annual Evelyn Nagel Donor Appreciation Concert (ENDAC) at the Newmark Theater.  For years, ENDAC was an orchestra concert by the full orchestra, with most all of the orchestra’s donors invited.  Last year, Elaine Calder suggested (I believe) that the concert feature smaller groups of musicians performing chamber works in a more intimate space.  The concert was successful enough that the formula was repeated, but with the donor level extending down to the $100 and above.  We had quite a full house this time around, which was great, and a wide variety for ensembles performing, ranging from the full brass section to just two violins.  Musicians signed up to participate, and the Carlos Kalmar and Gregory Vajda chose which ensembles would perform and what the program order would be.

Just a word about that brass section, by the way, we’re lucky to have an absolutely world-class brass section here, and that was supremely evident at tonight’s event.  In addition, many of our incredible wind section also played, and reminded me of how versatile and musical they all are.  We’re lucky to have them.  The string section was represented by less numbers of musicians, but the performances were all great, we’ve got tremendous depth in our string section, with some real stars, too.

I’ve got a pops rehearsal in the morning, and it isn’t getting any earlier, so that’s all for now.  On Friday I’ll print the complete program and performer list.

I caught this poster and photo campaign over at Inside the Classics, and it’s one of the most simple and brilliant musician-centered media campaigns I’ve seen from any orchestra.  And it’s true. In addition, you can see each of the “rock star” posters for each musician on their own at the orchestra’s Facebook page.

[click image to enlarge]

I’ve been catching up with performances by the Berlin Philharmonic via my web subscription lately, and here’s one of their free preview clips from their performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique – and it’s fantastic, indeed! (You’ll note that, like our recent performance, they use the coronet part in the “Ball” movement).  Enjoy!

If you were at Saturday night’s Oregon Symphony concert, you’ll recall resident conductor Gregory Vajda talking about a setting of a scene from the Andy Griffith Show to music of Anton Webern (his Op. 6 no. 3).  Here’s the clip he was referring to:

If you’re an assistant principal (as opposed to “assistant to the principal” for you UK Office fans), you’ve got a pretty cushy job.  You don’t play any of the solos (unless there are solos for the second chair), you don’t do any of the bowings, and you basically try to help the principal do their job with as little hassle as possible.

Every so often, however, circumstances push you over into the principal chair, and usually there isn’t much or any preparation for that change.

This morning, at the dress rehearsal for this weekend’s classical program, my principal had to leave midway through the rehearsal for personal reasons.  It took place during the middle of the first movement of the Mozart piano concerto, and I just had to slide over to the first chair, the on-call player moved up, and we seamlessly went on as though nothing had happened.  On our stage, however, the difference in sitting three or four feet downstage makes a huge difference in what you can see and/or hear.  Suddenly I could see our concertmaster, but couldn’t hear the first stand of cellos very well, and I was suddenly face-to-face with our soloist (Angela Hewitt) down the length of the interior of the piano, which is always disconcerting to me.  Then, in the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique, there are quite a few divisi sections, where the inside player plays a separate line from the outside player, and it just might have been since I was in grad school that I had last played the top line in that piece!  So, add in the fact that there is now a little bit of sight-reading put on my plate!  And finally, there was the fact that I might have to play the treacherous solos in the Webern Passacaglia, Op. 1, without even having played a rehearsal, which did not make for a fun afternoon of practicing.

I made it through the rehearsal with only a slightly elevated stress profile, but playing in the hot seat reminded me of just how different the demands are on a principal string player than even his stand partner, not to mention the rest of the section.  They earn their extra pay, hands down.

I just got the call that Joël will be playing the concert tonight, so I can put the part away and watch some Olympic coverage before heading to the hall tonight.