Sprightly

Francesca da Rimini was on the menu last week. Tchaikovsky's infernal tone poem ranks low on my list of favorites, not only for its predictable harmonies and ear-crushing orchestration, but also because the edition we play from, the only imprint of the piece I've ever seen, is particularly bad. The editor's mistake of combining the cello and bass parts essentially doubles the number of pages, since the two sections play separate parts far more often than not, resulting in one bad page turn after another. The brisk tempo of the Allegro Vivo sections insures that a player barely has time to recover from one page turn before the next arrives. So scarring has been the experience that for me, The Divine Comedy evokes not the work of Dante, but describes the act of sitting on a double bass stool, having to get up to turn another page every thirty six measures, all while  wearing a tailcoat.   In music, the 19 th century is mostly notable for the double bass virtuosi Domeni...

In years past, announcement of the schedule of concerts for a new season has sometimes been cause for great anticipation and optimism, while at other times it has provided motivation for me to double check the status of my retirement portfolio. This year, I decided to take a more dispassionate, data-centered approach to news of the 2018-2019 season 1 by making a list of every work scheduled to be performed, including the year of composition, duration, number of performances, as well as a few details about the composer, and then seeing what the data had to say about it. I made a few choices about what not to include. Tour repertoire tends to be even more repetitive than the season as a whole and, if I had to guess, is also more conservative. Since tour programs don't represent what we offer our hometown audience, I felt justified in leaving those programs out of the data set. I also omitted the so-called Film Nights, although they occupy two full weeks of next season, plus a nu...