classical music insights

me, playing, looking dorky | Originally uploaded by nobleviola
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The day’s final glow from Bastyr dormitory.
Photo: © Charles Noble

Tonight was the final faculty chamber concert of the 2009 Max Aronoff Viola Institute, a string camp that I started along with University of Puget Sound viola faculty Joyce Ramée back in 1990.  It was a great concert on three counts:  the quality of the performances, the indefatigable nature of the pianist, and the near-capacity audience. [Read more →]

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Sunset from our dorm room at Bastyr University
Photo: © Charles Noble

It’s about 10:30 pm on Tuesday night – it’s been about a hour or so since the end of our penultimate faculty concert at the Max Aronoff Viola Institute.  There was some major restructuring of the program tonight because our pianist, Duane Hulbert, took a fall while jogging and did some damage to his face and had to go to the ER.  He’s ok, and he’ll be making a heroic effort to rehearse and play tomorrow night, which is amazing in and of itself! [Read more →]

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Just saw this message on Edmonton Symphony music director William Eddins’ facebook page:

ATTN ALL VIOLISTS – The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra is holding International auditions for our Section Viola opening on Monday, 28 September, 2009. Guaranteed clean audition, wonderful orchestra, one of the best halls in North America. Come one, come all!!!! For more information please contact our Personnel Manager, Eric Filpula at EricFilpula@WinspearCentre.com. Please pass this on to every violist you know!

Ok, violists, go to it – it’s a fine orchestra with a great hall, a wonderful music director, and from everything I’ve heard, Edmonton is a great place to live, too.

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Tonight was one of those nights where I was intimately reconnected with why I became a performer in the first place.  It’s about people.  The person the composer, who in their genius rendered their innermost thoughts into sublime music.  The person the performer, who studied for years to be able to recreate and interpret that sublime music.  And the person the listener, without whom there would be no point to the other two – without the energy of a rapt audience, an indifferent audience, or even a hostile audience, there would be no reason to perform, other than a selfish one.

I got to hear some of my dearest friends perform music by Mozart, Palaschko, and a world premiere by Dell Wade, at the first evening of faculty performances at the Max Aronoff Viola Institute.  All performed with feeling and fluency.  After intermission came the great Brahms Clarinet Trio, with viola instead of clarinet.  My wife, Heather, played the cello, and our dear friend and wonderful pianist Sandra Bleiweiss rounded out the trio.  It was, quite simply, and remarkable experience, perhaps one of my most amazing performance experiences ever.  Our rehearsals had been somewhat rocky affairs – none of us was particularly happy with how we were playing our parts.  But we didn’t agonize over it, we just covered what we needed to and moved on to other things (like drinking wine overlooking Puget Sound).  Our dress rehearsal Sunday morning was quite simply awful.  Nothing felt right, the hall seemed alien and strange to us, and we ended on a dejected note.  But the performance was something special.  Everything clicked – the viola and the cello married their sounds together, we played well in-tune.  Sandra felt our nuances of phrasing as if she were a long-lost triplet – it was uncanny!  And Brahms, he gave us some of his most jealously guarded secrets that evening.  His “Ich liebe dich” statements in the slow movement.  The calm, autumnal, haunting stillness of the endings of the first three movements.

And the energy of the audience was something truly special.  They hung on every note, not disturbing the intervals between movements, and feed us every step of the way.  And gave us a wonderful ovation at the end of the performance.

It was a night that every performer hopes for, but rarely gets to experience.

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Guarneri Quartet – Photo © Dorothea von Haeften

I’m out of town this week, and so have missed my chance to hear the Guarneri Quartet for one last time.  I’ve heard some later performances, and sure, the group has succombed to the ravages of age to some extent.  But their musicianship has never faltered.  I would listen to the Guarneri foursome play late Beethoven over any other group, alive or dead.  In my opinion, as a person who was in the Guarneri Graduate Fellowship program at University of Maryland and saw them concertize and rehearse dozens and dozens of times, they are perhaps the finest quartet on the planet, especially at the height of their technical prowess.  In particular, their second cycle of Beethoven string quartets holds so many revelations and moments of breathtaking beauty – the beklemmt passage from the Cavatina of Op. 130 never fails to cause my breath to catch in my throat.  Arnold Steinhardt is a god.  John Dalley is the gold standard by which second violinists in string quartets should be judged – just pushy enough, with a rich, supportive sound, and a sixth-sense about what Arnie was about to do at all times.  Michael Tree, he’ll go down in the pantheon of great quartet violists – of all violists, in fact – and he’s played every piece in the literature on a giant, amazing viola that would have crippled most of the rest of us years ago.  David Soyer, laid down the bass line like no one else in the business, and made the most awkward passages in the repertoire sound effortless and sublime.

It will be hard to imagine a world without the GQ – they’re a national treasure.  Everything they ever recorded is worth listening to, even if you don’t end up agreeing with their interpretive choices.  Because those choices make you think about what you would do, and what the composer intended, and they make the string quartet literature a canon as deep and dramatic as the complete works of Shakespeare.  They will be missed.

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Jun Iwasaki
Photo: Absolute Images

If you’re interested in hearing the performance of Mendelssohn’s great Octet for strings from Chamber Music Northwest last week, you can now hear the performance available online for streaming over the internet at InstantEncore.com.  The performance features Oregon Symphony concertmaster Jun Iwasaki along with an all-star cast of CMNW regulars.  Check it out!

Mendelssohn Octet performance

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Just had my first hack-through of the La Campanella with my wonderful pianist (Sandra Bleiweiss).  What a shock the first run-through often can be!  Carefully thought-out interpretive decisions seem unbelievably stupid and inane.  Tempos seem either naive or hideously self-conscious.  Mainly, after the run-through of the Paganini, my thought was “why?!”  As in, why did I choose to try to play this piece, why can’t I play it, and why do I seem to favor herculean musical labors at the end of a long season, peppered with healthy amounts of public humiliation?

Well, I have a few days to work out the kinks…

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Student performers at the 2008 Max Aronoff Viola Institute
Photo © Charles Noble

On Thursday we venture North to Seattle to begin rehearsals for the faculty performances at the 19th edition of the Max Aronoff Viola Institute.  I co-founded MAVI with my undergrad teacher Joyce Ramée, and it’s been going strong ever since.  The festival runs from June 28 to July 2, and includes master classes, orchestral repertoire classes, technique seminars, chamber music coaching, and faculty and student performances.  It’s a pretty action-packed week for everyone, and a great time of learning and recreation.  Since I’ll have my laptop with me this year for the first time ever, there will be updates on musical topics all during the week, including photos and possibly audio clips as well.

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String players have both the benefit and curse of being able to play more than one note at a time.  This technique is known as double-stopping (i.e. putting fingers down (stopping) two strings at once, and bowing the two strings simultaneously).  Unlike other instruments with strings (the piano or guitar for example), we don’t have either fixed pitches played by keys, or frets on our fingerboards.  So there is much gnashing to teeth and rending of garments when we are forced to fix intonation on two notes that sound at the same time.  It can take on a surprising amount of complexity. [Read more →]

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I’ve been thinking, over the past several days, about the purpose of the arts.  Sure, they stimulate the economy to a greater extent than almost any other entertainment form in proportion to dollars spent.  But, there is much, much more to it than that.

I’ve been working on Kryzstof Penderecki’s Cadenza for solo viola over the last couple weeks, and it’s such a tragic piece of music.  It’s based upon the motivic cell of a descending minor second (two adjacent keys on the piano keyboard), a soft sigh, not of pleasure, but of almost unutterable pain.  I think of what Penderecki lived through in Communist Poland, of Shostakovich and Stalin, of those young students putting their lives on the line in Tehran.  I think of the relatives of Air France flight 447, who may never be able to bring the remains of their loved ones home.  It makes me profoundly sad.  But working on something like the Cadenza helps me.  I know that in my sadness, however far in magnitude it lies from those who are enduring unimaginable pain, I am not alone, and that there are artists sensing the mood of their times and expressing it through their music.  And other artists are recreating their utterances and making them whole again.  And audiences are going to the concert hall and experiencing the collective catharsis that makes mankind ultimately still redeemable.

Then, I turn to the Clarinet Trio of Johannes Brahms.  What sublime, autumnal, easy, profound music this is.  There is melancholy in it, of course, Brahms’ great love was unrequited, and his life was often a lonely one.  But his music is so deep.  I want to fall into it and be lost in his beautiful, long melodic lines on the one hand, and in his sometimes frustrating harmonic figuration posing as melody that still manage to express so much despite their abstract nature.  In late Brahms, I see a man who is looking back and the entirety of his life, taking stock, and saying that in the end, everything is ok.  Beauty conquers all.

If we let it.

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Conductor Bill Eddins has a great post on the issues facing orchestras in the face of massive shrinkage of their endowment principal and subsequent attempts to adapt to what many are referring to has “the new normal”.  Here are two paragraphs that I found particularly interesting: [Read more →]

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In this month’s Atlantic, there is a set of 15 mini articles gathered under the heading “15 Ways to Change the World“.  One of these, by Felix Salmon, is entitled “Pay the Artists”.  Here it is [emphasis mine]:

We’re living in a newly frugal world. But the rediscovered values of thrift and moderation should apply to the government as much as they do to households. No more trillion-dollar misadventures abroad: we need to spend money at home, and we need to get the maximum bang for our buck. If the Obama administration is serious about stimulating the economy and creating as many new jobs as possible, one choice is clear: it should announce a massive increase in federal arts funding. Artists are among the very poorest citizens. When they get cash, they spend it both quickly and carefully. That’s not what most recipients of federal largesse do, but it happens to be exactly what economists look for in any stimulus package. Arts spending is fantastic at creating employment: for every $30,000 or so spent on the arts, one more person gets a job, compared with about $1 million if you’re building a road or hospital. And such spending has a truly lasting benefit: the Works Progress Administration didn’t just create murals, it subsidized enormous leaps in graphic design, in theater (including America’s first all-black production of Macbeth), and in fine art. One painter lived off the WPA’s Federal Art Project for eight years before finally getting his first solo show in 1943. Maybe a similar program today could produce America’s next Jackson Pollock.

Felix Salmon is the finance blogger for Reuters.

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There have been several articles in the local press about the current Oregon Symphony financial situation:

• High/low times for the Oregon Symphony [David Stabler/Oregonian]
• The Oregon Symphony cuts back [David Stabler/Oregonian/video]
• Arts groups in a fiscal thicket [Bob Hicks/ArtScatter.com]

Since we’re about to enter into negotiations between musicians and management, it’s not really time for me to be making any public pronouncements about what should or should not be done.  Therefore, I’m submitting to my own private, media blackout in news pertaining to the upcoming negotiations.  I’ll post any updates that come through other media sources, but without commentary.  After all of the dust settles, I’ll offer my take on the settlement, whatever form that takes.  Thanks for bearing with me.

In other news, the site should be running faster and more smoothly, thanks to the new hosting situation.  It is, however, more expensive, on the order of about $200 more per year.  So check out the offer on the left, where you can get a download of a recent performance of the Shostakovich Viola Sonata from the Max Aronoff Viola Institute concert series with a donation directly to my hosting costs.  That’s all that the funds can be used for, and they go directly to my hosting provider account.  Please give what you can so I can keep blogging through thick and thin.

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