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.