new year, old thoughts

This past weekend the Oregon Symphony debuted a new Naked Classics series, which is not a brand new thing here. Back in the late 90’s and early 00’s, then OS Resident Conductor Murry Sidlin created the Nerve Endings series that looked at music through the lens of its historical context, reenactments, and historically informed speculative ‘fiction’. Here’s what Gemini AI dug up about it:

In fact, local composer and emeritus faculty at Reed College David Schiff wrote about the series for The Atlantic in 1997.

The new program was conceived by Paul Rissmann (a Scottish composer and musician) who had created Naked Classics and brought it to audiences across Europe and the UK. OS Music Director David Danzmayr saw one of these productions, was greatly impressed by it, and insisted that it be incorporated into the Oregon Symphony’s concert offerings.

If the audience reaction to this first iteration of the OS Naked Classics is any indication, it’s possible we have a future hit on our hands. It’s a great format. A 6:30pm concert, about 75 minutes in length. Get downtown, see a short concert, get dinner afterwards, and still get home for a weeknight bedtime! The concert starts with a brief opening excerpt of the piece to be discovered – in this case Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in the orchestration by Maurice Ravel – and then Paul takes us by the hand and talks about how the piece came to be, what was happening in the composer and his artistic muse’s lives that colored the music, and how Ravel’s orchestration (along with Rimsky-Korsakov’s unfortunate ‘edition’ of the piano original) affected the final result: a piece that is beloved of audiences the world over. Then there’s a short pause to reset the stage, and then the entire piece is performed without interruption, and with live video of the orchestra displayed on the big screen above the stage.

I have no problem with this concept either in its conception or its practice. It’s a fabulous idea! But it brought up something that increasingly bothers me as a musician who is in his third decade as a player in the same orchestra.

Continuity, and lack of institutional knowledge.

There is not one single member of the OS management who was here when the Nerve Endings series was conceived and produced. Not one! There may be only one or two current members of our Board of Directors attending concerts at that time as well. Within the orchestra, there are probably at least ten of us who were around at that time, and there are retired musicians numbering around the two dozen mark who were around at that time as well. There are hundreds of player-years worth of experience (some good and some bad) that would cover just about any ‘new’ idea that could be come up with in the area of orchestra presentations.

Now, musicians in orchestras exist primarily to do one thing: to play orchestral music. The Artistic Administrator(s) and Music Director pick the programming. The musicians play it. Rinse and repeat. I don’t think that many musicians would want to do that work (though some would be very good at it, I think), but I do think that it would occasionally be a good idea to bounce some ideas off the musicians to see which way the wind is blowing on a particular idea or a particular repertoire gambit. Thankfully, the OS and many other orchestras have Artistic Advisory committees, where the artistic and production staff meet with several musicians on a regular basis to bounce ideas off each other, give feedback, and generally get a sense of how things are being received at all levels of the orchestral management/musician hierarchy.

If you missed the chance to get to this season’s Naked Classics, it’s going to continue next season, and I heard a rumor that it’s going to delve into Elgar’s great Enigma Variations. That should be tremendous fun!