Sprightly

This is probably as good a time as ever for the Bass Blog to shift back to something lighthearted. The concert on Saturday { actually Thursday - see comments } evening was notable for the return of the audience member (affectionately) dubbed by orchestra members as 'Thesaurus Rex'. I'm referring to the gentleman in the terrace seats who manages to yell out something at the end of a piece, in the split second before the applause or shouts of 'Bravo' emanate from audience members with normal reflex times. 'Thesaurus' refers to the content of his utterances, usually some adjective of praise. I wish I had a record of all the weird things audience members have voiced at the end of pieces over the years. For me, the gold standard still has to be the person at the University of Illinois Krannert Center who sat through an entire lengthy Symphony by Georges Enescu (can't remember which one) and enunciated a perfectly well-formed, loud “BOO!” before anyone else in...

The responses to my last couple of posts were impressive; I truly appreciate the all of the thoughts and their passionate expression. And since I became hopelessly bogged down writing a dull post about Muti's replacements (Slatkin, every-ready, dependable; Sakari Oramo, another talented Finnish conductor? Yes! {Purple bow tie and cummerbund oddly out of character}; Noseda, inspiring, entertaining in rehearsal, world's sweatiest conductor?) I thought it might be interesting to feature some of those reader's thoughts, along with my typically ill-considered replies. As expected, the subject of retirement generated a fair amount of passion. Out concern for my thumbs, kneecaps, and other regions anatomical, I should leave this alone except to reiterate it is a difficult issue on both a personal and on an institutional level. Every player is left to come to terms with it on their own. Some days, instead of counting rests, I find myself counting years to retirement, like the kid w...

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...