ulterior motives August 26, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, 1 comment so farBeing in an orchestra is much like being in a family. This is the first sentence that I’d use (and most likely will use) when asked what it’s like to play in a professional orchestra. The second sentence that I’d use is: the family can be a happy, functional one, or an unhappy, dysfunctional one. (more…)
first concert of the season August 25, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a commentWe had a great first concert of the year - the weather was great, if a bit chilly and windy - and there was a terrific turnout at the Oregon Symphony’s neighborhood concert in Arbor Lodge Park in north Portland. I’m horrible at estimating the size of crowds, so I won’t bother - but if you were there leave a comment with how many people you think attended. (more…)
back to school quiz August 24, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a commentSoho the Dog has posted his back to school classical music quiz, which I’ll reproduce here (and give my own answers). Remember, there’s no such thing as a dumb answer, just a dumb person!
1. What’s the best quotation of a piece of music within another piece of music?
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in the last movement of Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata
2. Name the best classical crossover album ever made.
Yo-yo Ma’s Soul of the Tango
3. Great piece with a terrible title.
John Adams’ The Wound Dresser
4. If you had to choose: Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett?
Britten all the way, baby.
5. Who’s your favorite spouse of a composer/performer? (Besides your own.)
Richard Strauss’ wife Anna de Ahna, she must have been a piece of work!
6. Terrible piece with a great title.
Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus, I still can’t get over my disappointment upon first hearing this work after being excited by the title.
7. What’s the best use of a classical warhorse in a Hollywood movie?
The Dies Irae of Mozart’s Requiem in Amadeus.
8. Name the worst classical crossover album ever made.
Anything by that artistic abortion Il Divo - ooh, I think I threw up a little in my mouth…
9. If you had to choose: Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye?
If the stars align just right, who needs to choose - shuffle ‘em both in the iPod!
10. Name a creative type in a non-musical medium who would have been a great composer.
Mikhail Baryshnikov - imagine if he did the same for virtuosity and extension of the vocabulary of dance in music!
EXTRA CREDIT:
For opera nerds: If you had to choose:
a) Lawrence Tibbett or Robert Merrill?
b) Amelita Galli-Curci or Lily Pons?
I pass on this one.
For early-music nerds: Name a completely and hopelessly historically uninformed recording that you nevertheless love.
The Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of the Bach/Stokowski Air on the G-string.
periodical roundup August 24, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentOne thing that I like about coming home from a trip of more than a week is the amount of “fun” mail that has piled up in the mailbox. For me fun mail consists of (aside from unexpected cash or checks) magazines and catalogs. I’m a typical liberal in that I subscribe to both the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. The New Yorker is sort of a waste for me since all I usually read are the music listings and reviews and then look at the cartoons - my last stop is trying to guess which of the three finalist entries will win the cartoon caption contest in the next month’s issue.
Of particular interest to me in the September issue of the Atlantic is an article on the lack of morality in the field of gastronomy. I’d never really given it much thought, but it makes sense to me. Given that being a gourmet is perhaps the most selfish of the aesthetic pursuits, it would stand that there would be no small amount of blind eye turning involved in appreciating fois gras, live-boiled lobster and any mass-produced meat products. It’s an excellent article by B.R. Meyers, I recommend it to you most highly, even though he takes author Michael Pollan to task for some oversights in his excellent book (which I loved) The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Today was a stressful day, as all first days of the season tend to be. There was a lot of music on the stand for this first parks concert, and the first order of business (after the long series of announcements of appointments, resignations, and organizational minutiae) was Wagner’s Overture to The Flying Dutchman. It’s a lot of notes for 9:40 in the morning, and the fingers were running slow, I must say. That having been said, the orchestra sounds quite good for the first service of the season, and it was good to hear our wonderful new bass/utility trombonist Charlie Renault laying down the glue between the trombones and the tuba.
To clear out some of the stress, I rode my bike downtown to meet Heather after her track training session at Duniway track (near the Barbur Blvd. YMCA). It was a nice ride, and since I got down there quicker than I expected, I took a spin around the Esplanade, both east and west sides. It’s sort of a Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde path: the east side is stinky, since all of the sewage/storm overflow drains empty on that side, and the noise from I-5 (which is about 10 feet from the east edge of the path) is quite deafening. On the west side it’s quiet and less odoriferous, but there are tons of people clogging the entire path, with dogs pulling every which way and unsupervised children doing kamikaze raids right into your path. Using the bell on the handlebars is akin to trying to change the course of a tornado with a drinking straw. Anyway, 12 miles later, I felt much better and we had a nice dinner and dessert of m&m’s to round out the day. Then we came home and I watched the dvd of the last installment of “Power of Art” on Picasso’s Guernica. Amazing - if you haven’t seen this series (it’s been broadcast on PBS the last couple months) then go rent it on Netflix or at your better video store. It’s a prime example of what art education can be if handled with imagination and good production values.
keep on truckin’ August 22, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, 1 comment so farIt’s amazing what exercise can do for you. After making my Most-depressing-post-ever™, I decided to take the bike out and ride the crap out of it. For me that means doing 11 miles at an average speed of 13.5 miles per hour, with a couple small hills but mostly flat terrain. I feel much better now, and might actually get a good night’s sleep.
A couple of addition thoughts about some news tidbits from the musical world. About the Seattle Symphony’s Four Concertmaster thingamabob: well, my mother told me if I had nothing good to say, then say nothing at all. When I first read the story from the online version of the Seattle P.I., I stared at the computer screen for about 30 seconds with my mouth hanging open and small, high-pitched whimpering sounds coming out every few seconds.
Anyway, are any of you planning on coming to one of our two outdoor parks concerts in the coming week? They’re both free, so you really have no excuse not to come by! The first is a Arbor Lodge Park on Saturday, August 25th at 7:00 p.m. Get more info here. Why not make an evening of it? Stop by the Arbor Lodge New Seasons Market, pick up some fixings for a nice evening’s picnic, and enjoy the show! The second free concert is at Waterfront Park (just south of the Hawthorne Bridge) on Thursday, August 30th at 7:00 p.m. (but come at 5:30 to hear the Portland Youth Philharmonic and claim a good spot on the lawn). If it rains, the concert will take place at the same time, but on the following evening, Friday, August 31st. I hope to see you there, it should be a fun and interesting program, plus it ends with the obligatory 1812 Overture complete with cannons!
depression August 22, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a commentYep, it’s that time of year again. When the schedule starts back up and all the old habits and fears and regrets come out of that hiding place in the back of the closet or under the bed. It’s hard to deal with. We just got back from Sunriver, where we played in a chamber orchestra for two weeks. It’s such a lovely place. We don’t have a laptop, so no email, no web news, nothing to really connect us to the normal demands of day to day living at home. So it’s always a shock to come back and read hundreds of emails (half of which are spam), riffle through the mounds of mail that come avalanching out of the post box, and deal with the fact that the season is starting up in a few short days.
This year there are additional factors that make life more difficult.
My father is having a health crisis and the overall outlook probably isn’t great - he’s in his 80’s and even things that would just set us back have become serious challenges. He spend a few days in the hospital and then a few more in a nursing facility, and now he’s at home but not moving around too much, except with the PT person comes by for a session.
The health of the orchestra continues to worry me. I wish I could go more than a season or two without wondering if it will be the last one with the orchestra in it’s current form. There are so many unknowns, and there are factors which make me more skeptical than usual about the future, so while I’m happy to be going back to work, I’m worried about how long things will remain the same as they have been.
My wife has been one of the first call substitutes in the cello section for nearly a decade, and this year she’s gotten only one call for one series so far. She’s taken work with the opera (Carmen) in September, but it’s not boding well for the amount of work that she’ll get this year, which makes up nearly all of her income. She does some private teaching and work at Pacific University, but she’s a performer at heart and doesn’t want to get trapped into teaching a large studio just to make ends meet.
All this makes me wonder how long we’ll continue to stay in Portland. We love it here, but need to have some stability and enough income to seriously think about buying a place and having some real roots. I’ll keep you posted.
in situ August 20, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a commentI’m once again back in PDX, and pretty tired from a busy two weeks at the Sunriver Music Festival.
There was some early drama as Andre Watts was forced to cancel due to health problems, and a last minute replacement was found in the person of Rachel Barton Pine, the wonderful violinist from Chicago who made her festival debut last summer with us. This year she played the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, with her own cadenzas (wonderfully idiomatic, btw) and followed up with a dizzying set of variations on “Happy Birthday” in honor of the festival’s 30th anniversary.
The major soloist of the second week was the young cellist Alisa Weilerstein, who I was very eager to see and hear. After doing so, I’m a bit less inclined to be as excited. She is a cellist with a formidable technique, but in the Haydn D major Cello Concerto her rhythm was all over the map and her bodily and facial contortions were quite distracting. The Tchaikovsy Pezzo Capriccioso was more suited to her approach, which makes me worry about how her style will wear after a few years’ time. I hope that time will mature her stage manner and interpretive stances - if she settles down she could be the real deal. The end of the festival was especially bittersweet, as long-time concertmaster Philip Ruder was playing his last concerts - period - he intends to no longer play the violin at all after the conclusion of the festival. I admire his courage to put down the fiddle while still playing so well, and will miss his rare brand of music making. Philip is the epitome of class and a true gentleman and scholar. I wish him and his lovely wife Ruth all the best and many happy travels.
As for other activities, I did a hike up Mt. Tumalo with fellow OSO players Jeff Johnson and Mary Grant. It’s a nice hike (once you reach the top), but it covers about 1500 vertical feet in 1.5 miles. Still, it was much easier than Mt. Bachelor last year. I also did a fair amount of riding - I’d say I covered only about 75 miles over two weeks, but it was good to fit in that much with the rehearsal and concert schedule. We also bought a new toy - a Garmin Forerunner 301, which is a GPS-enabled fitness trainer which you wear on your wrist. Very cool and now we’re fighting over it. I may have to just shell out for the cycling-specific model…
miles slowly adding up August 5, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, 1 comment so farOver the past four weeks since coming back from MAVI I’ve decided to really get into the cycling aspect of my life - my hope is to do Team in Training next year with the aim of doing the “Peach of a Century” ride in Salem at the end of the summer (though the “Major Cookie” metric century is appealing!), and perhaps also the Livestrong Challenge century or metric century, too. There’s also an early fall event in Portland, the eponymously named Portland Century. We’ll see.
Anyway, this past week I did about 75 miles, which is well on my way to trying to average 100 miles a week. If I commute to work while the weather is good, it gives me a “free” 18 miles round trip each time, and bonus points for the fact that the trip back home is all uphill (except for the last 2.5 miles on Multnomah Blvd). It will be hard not to jump on the MAX or bus for the trip home, but I think I can manage it…
The fall season this year will be devoted to trying to balance riding time with instrument time - always hard for me - I can do either one or the other, it seems. I need something to be obsessed about, and cycling is something that I love to do - I like its solitary, monastic nature. Riding to better my time on a regular route, or getting up each familiar hill in a higher gear, or finding that hill that’s always scared me too much to try, and then grind up and over it. The nice thing about being an overweight cyclist is that you don’t have to go for the premium equipment - my Specialized Cirrus Comp is not heavy, by any means - it has a carbon fork and seatpost, and a lightweight aluminum alloy frame - but since I can lose a lot more weight a lot more cheaply on my body than on a bike, I don’t feel too tempted by the Trek Madone SSL 6.9 or Orbea Orca, yet!
more robert ludlum titles August 4, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentIf author Robert Ludlum had written novels about 20th century music:
My humble entries:
The Dutilleux Dodecahedron
The Pärt Transubstantiation
The Feldman Parastolsis
The Glass Attenuation
The Eötvös Ziggurat
From Alex Ross:
The Kurtág Codicil
The Szymanowski Desideratum
The Goeyvaerts Predicament
The Danielpour Instantiation
The Gubaidulina Parallelogram
The Pfitzner Funkademonium
classical music czar August 2, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a commentI like the “if I ran the world” game, it has wiled away many an hour with friends as we ponder what we’d do if we had lots of money and/or power to change the way the world works. What follows are what I would do if I had a budget of, say, $1 billion and lots of political connections (which the $1B would surely secure for me!).
Here is what I would do if I were a billionaire, had $1 billion in a foundation to give away (in addition to the principal), in the Portland classical music scene: I’d… (more…)
