tpter1

TMike- I would agree with your last paragraph in your first post if the conductor had refused the piece when he was told he was going to conduct it.

But that's not the case. He had plenty of time to turn this down and say "Ya know, I don't think it suits the orchestra, me or our artistic objectives. I will not conduct it." Then, the board could contract a guest or take other action as necessary. According to the article, he had been introduced to the piece a year prior to it's scheduled premier.

I think it a bit unprofesisonal and frankly somehwat akin to a by product of male bovine digestion processes.

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"Roses have thorns; shining waters mud. Clouds and eclipses stain the moon and the sun; and history reeks of the wrongs we have done. After today, after today, consider me gone."- Sting

Vulgano Brother

I thought one of the reasons we get paid is to perform: pieces we don't necessarily like with people we don't necessarily like under a conductor we don't necessarily like under playing conditions we don't necessarily like, like it or not.

(On the bright side, some new and fun viola jokes can be found at the same website as the article.)

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Johntpt

As musicians we seem to be taught that the Rite of Spring caused a riot because the music was so offensive and revolutionary, yet if you look into it the riot was almost certainly caused more by the shocking choreography than the music. It seems that the music was barely audible almost from the start from all the whistling, shouting, and screaming going on. Shortly after its ballet premiere Rite was a wild success as a concert piece in Paris, and everywhere else in world ever since. It has to be one of the most popular 20th century pieces and also one of the most recorded, and was the only 20th century piece included in examples of "earth music" sent on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977.

Koussevitsky only commissioned the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra after the suggestion from Fritz Reiner and Jozsek Szigeti. At the end of the day we have Reiner to thank for that one.

JU

Jim Kot

Amen what Vulgana Brother said, as a professional we play the music with energy and make the audience believe that we are enjoying what we are playing. ( have you ever had to play something like "PROUD MARY" 3 TIMES IN A EVENING? yuk, BUT REMEMBER TO ENJOY IT!!!!

Mikey

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Athos

Now, if they could get the WWN space alien to drool and scream "Oh, Wayne!" that would be something!

ilikethetrumpet

Sounds like someone missed one too many 5/8s in the dress rehearsal and panicked.

Man, I'm in a quintet right now with a hornist who is very hostile to serial-type music or what that conductor would call "professional" compositions. A doctoral composition student wrote a very attractive but note-y, challenging, occasionally "ugly" brass quintet that nonetheless has quite a bit of integrity to it, and the hornist is being a sore thumb about the compositional values of this mixed meter, that notation, etc. And I'm thinking, hey, someone's given us a gift, and we ought to do our best with it.

I was thinking about this Tuesday night as I settled in to hear the Guarneri String Quartet, a big shiny Lincoln of a chamber music group. They played a mozart quartet with quite a bit of life, Debussy with subtlety to spare... but the highlight, for me, was a quartet by Lukas Foss. The Guarneri played this piece with so much finesse, humor, grace, charm, and pathos. But if you listened closely (past the wonderful performance), it was the kind of piece that most groups would, at first, roll their eyes towards: pointillistic, apparently disjunct, dissonant, jagged. And here was a very convincing reading of it, not by playing down its peculiarities, but by really mastering it.

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