Sprightly

Aeneas picked up a rock, a heavy lift, which no two men now alive could do, although he managed it with ease all by himself. -Homer, The Iliad Last week, one of my colleagues retired after 49 years in the orchestra. The feat is something that, the more I think about the particulars of it, the more astonishing it seems. The last time we went to Japan, I met with a rabid fan of our orchestra, and incidentally, a reader of this blog, who ended up taking me out and buying me quite a few drinks. At some time during our evening together, after at least our second bottle of sake, he said, solemnly, “The {redacted} bass section is all very old men.” His English, although better than my Japanese, was not great. Assuming we were suffering from both linguistic and cultural miscommunication, I have no idea if he meant that as a compliment or a not so subtle put-down. One of the first things a new player in the orchestra learns is that talking about age and retirement is a VERY touchy subject for ...

{Not to ignore the elephant in the room, I join my colleagues in wishing for our music director's good health and speedy recovery. The desire to seek an explanation, or at least, information about what happened, while quintessentially human, does nothing to ameliorate the situation, although it may satisfy our own desires for immediate resolution. At the moment, compassion for someone who has suffered misfortune, or at very least the right to privacy, might be the most appropriate response.} Last week, I played an awful lot of Mozart, at the {redacted} SO and with Ars Viva. Two different people reminded me his birthday was coming up (on January 27th) but I forgot, and so enjoyed the sensation of being surprised by the same news twice. Some years ago, overcoming what had been a longstanding aversion, I broke down and attended a double bass convention in a distant city. While there, I encountered a colleague who specialized in music of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Elements of o...

Without keeping statistics, I can't say if this season has had more conductor cancellations than usual or not. After the most famous one back in the fall, we've had two in a row the past couple weeks, so at the moment it feels as if nobody wants to come here and conduct. Perhaps the fact that the high temperature one day last week was 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) had something to do with it. News of a conductor cancellation is not always met with disappointment among musicians. In fact, sometimes it is cause for a minor celebration. This old joke (which I actually heard for the first time told from the podium by a last minute replacement for an ailing conductor) could refer to any number of maestros although it deals with something a bit more permanent than a cancellation. The day after a great maestro died, his widow widow took a phone call from a violinist in the orchestra asking to speak with him. The widow informed the musician the great conductor had recently passed away and hu...

2011 began with something of a bang – the Beyond the Score program devoted to Prokofiev Symphony no. 5. Although I have mixed feelings about the BTS shows, I'm happy any time one of them features music less than a century old. We've got to drag our audience (and probably a number of musicians) kicking and screaming into the 20th century before the next one ends. It came as something of a letdown that the pro Stalin heckler did not make an appearance. I mean the fellow who took extreme umbrage at the Shostakovitch 4 presentation and yelled “Long Live the Third International!”among other things. I suppose he is on some sort of 'do not fly list' at our concert hall, unless of course he is being detained, incommunicado, in the secret warren of interrogation cells beneath the stage. But the disposition of such a rare commodity as an ardent Stalinist in this day an age merits careful consideration. They might consider writing him into the show next time we do another one of t...

[an additional apology is in order here: the first attempt to post this had the second paragraph inexplicably deleted: I guess I'm a bit rusty after all. So if the old bass blog seemed to make even less sense than usual, that is the excuse...] No excuses, but a number of reasons kept me away from the blog. Skipping a few months has left me with a nice backlog of anecdotes to draw on during the lean weeks that are surely coming. The member of the orchestra who brought up the option of breaking my thumbs if I didn't start writing again made the decision easy. Leave it to one of my favorites to provide material to write about. Pierre Boulez seems to have rigorously pared down the art of conducting to its barest essentials – a flick of the wrist here, a curt nod there. Pithy remarks to the orchestra often combine the didactic with the hilarious in masterful fashion. “That was, in fact, horrible...” I believe I heard him say recently – the sort of thing that gets you chuckling until...

My apologies for not writing sooner. I felt the need to get at least a couple of the season opening extravaganzas under my belt first. We have often started seasons with a tour of one sort or another. The itinerary – Wheaton, Pilsen, Millennium Park – did not take us to the Czech Republic and back. I wonder what the folks at Wheaton College thought about a bunch of gringos showing up to play a concert of Mexican/Spanish favorites {along with Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streich } to honor the appointment of their new president. Then again, I've brought guacamole to many a backyard barbeque without giving it a second thought, and I'm about as Mexican as Richard Strauss. We repeated the same program in Pilsen the following day (September, 16 – Mexican Independence Day) with the sensible omission of the Spanish El sombrero de tres picos . For those out of town folks who might be wondering, Pilsen is formerly Czech, currently largely Mexican-American neighborhood in our city. All of ...

Many thanks to those who came to the Gunnelpumpers CD release show. Also, many thanks to those who wrote heartfelt comments about the Ravinia Festival. For those who haven't given up on it entirely, I would encourage you to make your feelings known to someone higher up in the organization (which is just about anybody but me, honestly). Hopefully the opinions of past, present, and possibly future ticket buyers might carry some weight. My apologies for the dearth of posts this summer. I really couldn't bring myself to do what might be taken as the moral equivalent of strolling through a hospital ward and making snarky comments about the patients: “Geez dude, you're looking a little pale there.” However, since today (Saturday, July 31) is my last at the festival this summer (the Operas next week and the Musical the following use small orchestras) I struggled mightily, trying to come up with some sort of closing remarks to put the whole thing in perspective. Last night I woke i...