I’ve been thinking a lot about the artistic progression of my orchestra over the last couple weeks. You can point all you want to how the orchestra sounds under its music director, but to me the real test of the artistic growth of an orchestra is how they sound under a guest conductor.
I’ve noticed that, as an orchestra, we’ve become used to having things told to us: what sort of sound to produce, how to tune wind chords, how to listen across the orchestra, etc. And those are good things to be told – that’s largely what the process of orchestra-building involves: the hammering home of basic concepts that had fallen by the wayside in years past, effectively teaching the orchestra new habits.
But when we’re faced with a conductor who leaves a lot of decisions up to us (for better or worse), we have often times been at a loss as an ensemble. But over these past two weeks especially, there has been a level of cohesion and group-think that has taken me somewhat by surprise. It’s not like the musicians had a meeting and decided to get better. It just sort of happened.
The most striking change that’s started to take place is that the wind section just sounds spectacular. The opening of the slow movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto was played like the wind choir (with lead voice oboe) piece that it is, with stellar contributions from all members of our wind section, lovely phrasing, good balance, and very pure intonation. Five years ago, this would have been nearly impossible to achieve.
The brass continue to sound wonderful, and have been adding a new level of refinement and a burnished tone to already abundant power levels.
There’s still work to be done in the strings, where there has been some turnover in personnel (especially in the cello section), but even with that caveat, the level of playing is simply unrecognizable compared to the string section that I joined in 1995. There have always been some very good, even great string players in the orchestra, but a critical mass has been reached, and the sound and flexibility that we’re able to achieve is improving with each season that passes.
Hopefully in a few years we’ll be able to get our string complements back up to pre-austerity levels – an orchestra shouldn’t play Zarathustra with six cellos, ever! [o.k. – it was actually 8 cellos, as I was reminded tonight before our concert, but there is twelve part divisi in Zarathustra, and a normal complement is usually 10 in a section, and the big major orchestras use 12 violas and 12 cellos]