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the main event February 28, 2008

Posted by Charles Noble in : fun, 2comments

Thanks to Alex Ross for pointing this out - check out the event listing carefully… (more…)

schubert’s erlkönig February 3, 2008

Posted by Charles Noble in : music, soloists & recitals, video, violin, 2comments

Last night, after his brilliant performance of the Beethoven Second Piano Concerto, Kirill Gerstein played an encore that I’d never heard before, at least on piano alone. It was Erlkönig - originally a song by Schubert, transcribed for solo piano by Liszt. I had heard a similar transcription, by the violinist Max Ernst, for solo violin - and that is even more impressive.

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OSO posts improved numbers December 18, 2007

Posted by Charles Noble in : music, the orchestra world, add a comment

I just received a press release from the Oregon Symphony outlining improved ticket sales (up only slightly from last year, but with six fewer concerts (36 vs. 39) presented it represents greater attendance per concert). Read the complete release below. (more…)

repeal day recital December 6, 2007

Posted by Charles Noble in : music, soloists & recitals, add a comment

Oregon Symphony violinist Greg Ewer gave a recital at the Old Church last night in honor of the 74th anniversary of the repeal of prohibition.  As a way of signaling the importance of the date, Ewer brought a cooler full of tasty beverages for lucky audience members to imbibe during the performance. (more…)

is something wrong with this picture? November 14, 2007

Posted by Charles Noble in : music, 2comments

The irony is that if 83% of people who  earn more than $150,000 studied music in school, why do those of us who chose music as a career make much, much less? I am glad, however, that those people who studied music and then went on to other things were successful in their chosen fields, because they are the ones who largely support the arts in this country these days.

From Reuters today: (more…)

steinway: the movie November 7, 2007

Posted by Charles Noble in : music, add a comment

I just spotted what looks to be a fascinating documentary: Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037. Take a look at the feature in the NY Times here.

OSO president responds to Crosscut article November 6, 2007

Posted by Charles Noble in : appreciation/criticism, music, the orchestra world, add a comment

[This was forwarded to me by OSO president Elaine Calder - a truncated version will be published at Crosscut.com.]

Response to: “Can Anybody fix the Oregon Symphony?”
Stephen Marc Beaudoin
Crosscut Seattle
Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Of course it will take more than an endorsement from Thomas Lauderdale to fix the Oregon Symphony. But Thomas is a subscriber to our full classical series, and a classically trained musician who has appeared with the Oregon Symphony as a guest artist and will again in the future. In performances around the world, he generously credits some of Pink Martini’s success to its early appearances with our Orchestra. He cares passionately about our organization and wants to help. And he’s wonderfully tuned in to Portland and Portland audiences. As Beaudoin points out, he’s the most famous of Portland personalities. Why wouldn’t we accept his offer of help?

Let’s start by geting one simple fact straight: We’ve been losing audiences – but not supporters. Our contributed income is higher than ever, thanks in large part to the Miller match, a three-year challenge by the Miller Foundation to our audiences and donors that has greatly increased our donor base. We have many thousands of contributors including some who make six figure gifts annually. We aren’t Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles, but we do have patrons of means, and patrons with heart, who are determined that this Orchestra must survive and flourish.

And they are determined because this Orchestra is playing for them, week after week, at an exceptionally high standard of performance. No, we aren’t as “hip” as Lauderdale, and not as “unmistakably Portland” – whatever that means. But we are Portland’s local orchestra, and “local” resonates with Portlanders. We are a band of musicians who live and work in this community, providing classical and popular concerts at the Schnitz, education programs in our schools, teaching and adjudicating, and forming the nucleus and artistic leadership of smaller organizations like Fear No Music and Third Angle.

Under Carlos Kalmar our classical programming has broadened greatly. As Assistant Principal Viola, Charles Noble, points out in his blog (nobleviola.com/wordpress) subscriptions were falling even in DePreist’s final seasons, with wall-to-wall Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. In the first years of Carlos’s tenure, the Oregon Symphony has performed music by Benjamin Britten, Steven Mackey, György Ligeti, John Adams, Bohuslav Martinu, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Harrison Birtwistle, Luciano Berio, Henri Dutilleux and Alban Berg, among others.  Many of these composers’ works had never before been performed by the Oregon Symphony in its history. Everyone has an opinion on programming and every orchestra will be too conservative or too adventurous for some of its patrons and critics, all of the time.

Audiences numbers are crucial though, and we’re working to reverse the damage of the past few seasons. I use the word “damage” advisedly. Change is essential for the continued vitality of any organization, but some of the changes in recent seasons were ill-advised or insensitively handled. And at least one of them was turned into a major news story with the kind of headline usually reserved for WAR DECLARED. (Yes, the Symphony’s overall sound has improved dramatically, but that kind of improvement isn’t achieved painlessly.)

As an example: audiences were confused by the change to our classical series, with seventeen programs of two, three of four performances each, instead of the traditional format of fourteen programs each with three performances. We’ve restored the earlier schedule and seen attendance improve significantly at our concerts this fall.

Carlos Kalmar had the unenviable challenge of succeeding a much-loved, long-serving music director, and has wisely concentrated on forming his own relationships with the orchestra, our audiences, our donors and the broader community. He’s a younger man, with a busy international career, and his work with other orchestras has brought us a new and diverse roster of conductors and guest artists like Valentina Lisitsa, who opened our season in that “respectable – if safe – opening-season concert”. I suppose there’s nothing safer than Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, and Dvorak’s Symphonic Variations and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra are certainly “respectable” – but we sold a quarter million dollars worth of tickets to large audiences who roared their approval. We’re trying to close a $2 million structural deficit, and we think the solution lies in having as many people happily paying for our performances as possible. We don’t blame Carlos for the financial problems, and he’s working with us to design programs that will attract bigger audiences and help fix the mess.

And yes, we’ve stopped recording. All those recordings with DePreist were made possible by a one-time, single gift of $1 million, which has now been fully spent. The much-revered “Nerve Endings” concerts with Murray Sidlin were only possible because we had a grant from the Knight Foundation to produce them. Recordings, broadcasts, tours and innovative programs should be part of our overall operations and not special projects, funded by one-time grants. But that’s a statement of principle, not a reality. At present, given our grave financial situation, we are focused on core activities and unable to take on unsustainable additional expenditures.

One of the writers who leaped to our defence suggests that it’s time for us to realize our community just won’t sustain what is needed to operate the Oregon Symphony as it is. Perhaps that is true, but we’re not giving up yet. I’ve been working with the organization for about a year, and I’ve concluded that the Oregon Symphony has been through so many changes in the past decade that it’s a wonder we have as strong a base of support as we still do. Some change was inevitable, and not all change is damaging, of course. A few of the most important changes have achieved a glorious new level of performance. One or two of them have helped to improve attendance and contributions. Most of the other, less successful innovations were the result of inexperience, caution, undue optimism, carelessness, hesitation – small sins, really, but for an organization as fragile as a symphony orchestra, sometimes hugely damaging.

We need a lively conversation about the role of a symphony orchestra in the 21st century, in a city with as vibrant and varied a cultural life as Portland. We need the support of everyone who believes in what we do, and we need to be challenged and goaded, stimulated and prodded into the pursuit of excellence at every level – artistic, financial and institutional. But we need those who despair of our attempts and think they know what is wrong to support their arguments with facts and a realistic assessment of what is possible, in this place and at this time.

Elaine Calder
President
Oregon Symphony Association
921 SW Washington Street, Suite 200
Portland, OR 97205

more reactions to crosscut OSO article November 3, 2007

Posted by Charles Noble in : appreciation/criticism, music, the orchestra world, add a comment

You can read them here.

A couple more things that occurred to me as I was reading the comments: during the last seasons of the DePreist music directorship, the programming became more and more conservative - it was wall-to-wall Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.  Yet the subscription numbers continued to fall.

In the first years of Carlos Kalmar’s tenure, we have performed music by Benjamin Britten, Steven Mackey, György Ligeti, John Adams, Bohuslav Martinu, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Harrison Birtwistle, Luciano Berio, Henri Dutilleux and Alban Berg, among others.  Many of these composers’ works had never before been performed by the Oregon Symphony in its history.  In addition, less often performed works of old masters were also given their due in Portland: the Barber Cello Concerto, Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto, Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, and Dvorak’s Symphonic Variations come immediately to mind.

lachrymae October 21, 2007

Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, 2comments

There are instances where a topic sweeps across the blogosphere, sometimes it’s referred to as a “meme”. I hadn’t heard of this before, so I checked dictionary.com and found that a meme is described thusly:

a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of gene

In this instance, I found a post from a new blog to me: The Omniscient Mussel, who wrote a post based upon a post at Iron Tongue of Midnight about what pieces (or parts of pieces) of music make one cry. Since I’ve been all over the emotional map this month, and much of that territory was in the sad or worse region, this is a timely topic.

So, without further ado, a small selection of the pieces that, if they don’t make me cry they at least move me deeply.

  1. Adams - On the Transmigration of Souls. I really didn’t expect that this piece would get to me, especially as a performer. There’s a lot to do in this piece, and it’s easy to get lost, so there isn’t a ton of time to devote to getting emotionally involved. However, the street sounds and voices of relatives that bookend the work immediately got right to the core of me from the first moment of the first rehearsal. There’s such a sense of time and place, of empathy for those people who were there at Ground Zero, or were just going about their lives, not realizing that they or their loved ones were being irrevocably tied to history.
  2. Mahler - Ninth Symphony, mvt. IV - Adagio. I played this piece in conservatory orchestra, as principal viola, and it was a life changing experience. This last movement of a composition that is essentially a farewell to the world, and a premonition of death, is one of the great valedictory statements in music. Such sweep and intimate grandeur (if that can be made to make sense) - and the entry of the woodwinds after nearly 15 minutes of incredibly moving string passages just makes my heart break every time I hear it.
  3. Puccini - Nessun dorma, from Turandot. This always made me weepy, especially the Pavarotti version. It’s pure emotion for the sake of emotion, and that is something that I’m a bit ashamed to love, but I do.
  4. Bach - Goldberg Variations. It’s such a journey, through the whole range of keyboard possibilities and the final return of the opening Aria is always a moment that brings such relief and feelings of an epic journey brought to a satisfying conclusion.
  5. Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 21, Kv. 467 “Elvira Madigan” - I hate these nicknames derived from films, but you use this one and everyone knows the concerto you’re talking about, so there you go. The Andante from this movement is just so absolutely sublime, it did actually bring me to tears the first time I played it. It was during my first season with the OSO, and Yoël Levi was conducting. I don’t even remember who was playing the piano, but they were terrific whoever they were. We got to the Andante and to the section where the pizzicato accompaniment by the strings doubles in tempo - it’s such a great spot, just absolute perfection - you cannot imagine anyone else writing something this perfect. Man, Wolfie knew how to write a good chart.
  6. Brahms - Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, mvt. 3 - Andante. The stumbling, ruminative, despairing piano solo passage that precedes the return of the opening cello solo in the slow movement of this concerto never fails to move me. I remember the first time I ever heard this piece, it was a recording of Leon Fleisher with the Cleveland Orchestra under Georg Szell, and I knew that Brahms would have pride of place in my musical heart forever.
  7. Beethoven - String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 130 - mvt. 5 - Cavatina. Anyone who loves listening to or performing string quartets must claim this piece, and this movement of this piece as being near the top of their personal best list. For me, the unbelievable passage where the world is shut out and we find ourselves at the very core of Beethoven’s experience is the pinnacle of the art of the quartet. If you haven’t heard the Guarneri Quartet’s performance of this movement in their second cycle of the quartets, then you really owe it to yourself to get hold of the recording and prepare to shed a few tears.
  8. Bach - Partita No. 2 in d minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1004 - Ciaconna. Truly one of the towering works for any solo instrument, or for any instrumental combination for that matter. Mahler liked to describe the symphony as a container which could hold an entire world in its confines. Bach beat him to it by a couple hundred years, and with a single instrument. The maggiore section is one of my favorite places in this piece, a place near the emotional nadir of the work, and then there is the miraculous return to the opening minor sequence, with the violin clawing its way back up from the edge of the abyss only to triumph. Amazing.

There are many more, but this is a good top of the list for me. Have your own nominations? Send a comment along.

quartet for the end of time October 4, 2007

Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a comment

I was watching the last installment of the PBS series “The War” when they came to a segment about the liberation of the death camps across Europe.  The music chosen for this was Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

How appropriate - this music which largely ignores the concept of human time, and goes for the inexpressible language of Eternity.

I’ve been hearing the cello/piano movement in my head - “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus” (Praise to the eternity of Jesus) today.

So ecstatically slow (a metronome marking of 44 to the sixteenth note) that time seems to stop.  Like for those poor souls consigned to the camps, like those of us waiting for news of a desperately ill friend, colleague, loved one, daughter, sister, aunt.

Time is in suspension - we almost dare not draw a breath, for that would move time forward - we will our hearts to stop, for time to really stop.

So the inevitable will be rendered moot.

It is times like this that remind me why personkind invented religion.  We need a way to make the infinite, inevitable, instinctual, ineffable somehow manageable.

Pax tibi in vitam aeternam