New World Odder.

We spent the first couple of days this week, recording some flashy violin stuff by Hubay, with Chloe Hanslip, and as expected, she was great. The cd should be worth buying.
I heard a funny story about Marin Alsop’s latest release of the New World Symphony,  with her new orchestra in Baltimore. It seems that she didn’t want to work with the producer who the record company had booked, so he was bumped off the project, until it turned out that the replacement was hopeless, and the recordings were a mess. The company then had to beg the first guy to take over the editing and try and make something listenable out of them. This he did, but it took him a great deal of jiggery-pokery with the editing software to make the trumpets and horns sound half decent. It goes to show, that you should never trust anything you buy, to bear any resemblance to what has been actually played.
Years ago, my orchestra recorded a Messiah, with a baritone who was so bad, that the recording couldn’t possibly be released. We were told by the conductor, that the producers had tried for months to take the occasional phrase that had been sung correctly, copy and paste them into repeated sections, and salvage something that way, but it turned out to be an impossible task. It would have been a travesty if it had somehow been made to work. Sometimes rubbish should just be thrown away.

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Tags: MarinAlsop, recording, New World, Hubay, Hanslip

Vaughan Williams

It’s been a contrasting week, with both good and bad music to play. The good, was the Five Mystical Songs by Vaughan Williams, that I really had thought was going to be an absolute stinker. The bad more than made up for this though, with Vaughan Williams’ 5th symphony almost making my head fall off with boredom. Page after miserable page goes by with nothing melodic happening at all. My desk partner described the opening as like a cow pat falling onto your head and slowly dribbling down your face, and she was exactly right. I had 11 bars rest at the beginning of the piece, and I was already bored witless by the dreary Double Bass ‘theme’, before us violas even had a chance to come in and spoil it for everyone else.
Needless to say, the place was packed and they all seemed to enjoy it. Next week brings some more recording sessions, with Cloe Hanslip this time, and a Verdi Requiem. God I can’t wait, some proper big tunes to get stuck into…

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Tags: VaughanWilliams, boredom

Back to Work

After a week off, I’m back off to the music-mine, to do a rehearsal for a concert tomorrow. We’re doing Elgar, Parry and Vaughan Williams, so it’s unlikely there are going to be any reasons to break into a sweat. Five Mystical Songs in particular fills my heart with dread. Playing in a cathedral is almost like playing in the shower anyway, once the first burst of music is washing around the place, there’s no way to make any sort of subtlety noticed.

That said, we did a really good performance of Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 there last year, so hope springs eternal.

In one hand and out of the other

This week started off badly, with my monthly pay packet £300 down on what it should be, thanks to having taken off two days of recording session, but as luck would have it, two tracks that I had been on for an Aled Jones cd a couple of years ago, have been bought out, so I got it all back!

This week we were recording two Bax pieces, a piano concerto for left hand (Ravel it was not), and some Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra, which were ok, but not great by any means. The soloist was a guy called Ashley Wass, who seemed pretty good, and the conductor was Janes Judd, who was alright. The producer, however, annoys everyone no end. Rather than just saying “That was too quiet”, we get a flim-flam of ” I wonder whether, perhaps, that note, umm, I wonder if we could maintain the integrity of that note ” etc etc etc. Ugh, it drives me mad.

Because of this inability to just say what needs to be said, the sessions took the form they always do with this guy, which is

• Spend ages doing the first few minutes of music
• Spend ages doing the next few minutes of music
• On the 3rd of 4 sessions, takes ages doing a few minutes of music
• With 3 hours to go, start panicking, and getting narky at the orchestra.
• Finish with a couple of minutes to spare

Anyway, all done for a week. I’m off to Spain now, and there are more recordings when I get back. Hooray.

Being ill is worse than work.

A nasty bout of tonsilitus which the nurse described as being vile, meant I missed the final rehearsal and concert of Mahler 10. One member of the section said it was excruciating, and another said it was quite enjoyable, which just goes to show you can’t trust anyone’s judgement but your own. I wasn’t looking forward to going back to work for a ‘Last night of the proms spectacular’, but bizzarely, I enjoyed it; except, inevitably, for the trumpets’ mistaken attempts at appeggiatic bravado, which uniformly ended in split notes and a mounting sense that ’something must be done’.

Next week brings a couple more days of recordings for Naxos. I can’t remember what it is we’re doing, and the schedule is in the kitchen, so I can’t see, but I’ve heard that the conductor is a reject from the Royal Ballet, which means he must be awful! Wednesday will reveal all, and I don’t mean that in an Addams family way.

Until then…

Waiting for the other shoe to fall.

The orchestra has spent the week waiting for the explosion. Normally, when Marin is in, there is a lot of huffing and puffing, sulking and general bad behaviour, both on and off the rostrum, but this week has been rather nice, She’s let a few things go, for one reason or another, but it has helped the atmosphere no end, and the concerts were not bad at all. The last two days have seen us recording Roy Harris’ symphonies 5 and 6, and another piece called Acceleration. They are utterly rubbish, with no form or tune, or anything. I heard that Marin wants to record all his symphonies. Lord have mercy on us, it’ll be worse than doing the Stamford cycle.

Next week is her final one with us as principal conductor, and despite what many say, I have rather liked her.

Marin, Mahler and Rouse.

Marin is back for her final ‘home’ stint as principal conductor, and she’s on best behaviour. We’ve only had one sarcastic comment, and plenty of opportunities have been overlooked, so that’s a bit of luck, maybe it’s because we’re about an hour short of rehearsal time, which on a programme like this, is a  bit of a blow.

I’d never played or even heard Mahler 9 before monday, and as someone who thought he quite liked Mahler, it came as a bit of a blow to find that this piece is pure madness. Not just the usual self-indulgence of Mahler, but stark staring mad; running down the street in your underwear waving an axe mad. A caustic member of the viola section said that it’s only a short step from writing music like this, to locking your daughter in a cellar for decades and having 7 children by her, and there may be something in what he says.

The first piece is a percussion concerto by Christopher Rouse , and it’s rather good fun. Basically a racket,  but  it seems well written, and  it’s nice to see the  percussion section having to work for a living for once!

The concert is being broadcast on radio 3, but not live I don’t think.

Thank god that’s over.

It’s really rare for me to feel as furious at the end of a concert as I was yesterday. As well as being a very long concert, the acoustics in the Reading Hexagon are dreadful, not even good enough for snooker it seems, because there are plans to knock the place down. It can’t happen soon enough.

The main reason for my fury was, of course, bloody Kreizburg. He conducts like a cross between a rooster, strutting and preening himself, and a cormorant hanging out its wings to dry, but without the clarity that either of those two would bring.

Every conductor is arrogant, and no-one would be able to do the job well, without thinking they had something to bring to the music, but to have the respect of an orchestra, you’ve got to have technique, and Kreizburg has none. Or, rather, I should say, he has an appalling technique, which confuses the orchestra nine times out of ten. At one stage in the rehearsals last week, there was an abrupt tempo change which was falling to pieces every time, thanks to the useless, spasmoid twitching that we were supposed to follow, so what does he do to try and solve it? He shouts at us and tells us to watch him! “It’s all there, you’ve just got to watch” he said.

My desk partner said that when he was the principal conductor for 5 years, she managed to have 3 children, so she’d be able to take the maternity leave off work. Pregnancy and childbirth is preferable to this man’s conducting, it’s official.

Dvorak, Kreizburg and the Glamorous Soloist

This week we’ve got Kreizburg conducting us, and god, I’d forgotten what a weirdo he is on the rostrum. He twitches, and shudders as though he’s being electrified in slow motion. At times, it’s impossible to tell what the bloody hell he’s trying to do, and yet sometimes, well once actually yesterday, I glanced up and saw exactly what I needed.

Plus he sweats like a pig. It takes around 20 bars or so before the first drips make their way to the end of his very pointy nose, plunging into the score, or the front desks, depending on the prevailing wind.

There is an unsettling rumour that he’s knocking off the soloist, Julia Fischer, which if true, is frankly baffling, because she’s gorgeous!  Almost every man in the orchestra is fighting a losing battle with his instinct to stare open-mouthed, and almost every woman is visibly scornful of the weak-willed men they have  to share a stage with.