Sprightly

Viva il puma! The other day, it struck me as odd that after a trip to Russia (of all places) I'm not supposed to mention what I did upon my return to the good old USA. What a universe we live in... Anyhow, it is probably high time to finish writing about the tour,now that is has been over for more than a week. The St Petersburg passport officers could learn a thing or two from their counterpart in Rome who didn't stop talking on his phone long enough to open my passport before welcoming me to the country with an impatient flick of the wrist. As the name suggests, the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome is an opera house. The hall, a typical opera house design, semicircular with box seats stacked to the ceiling, had dry, if not unpleasant acoustics. Perhaps the miles of crushed velvet and brocade had something to do with it. Quite a change from the the two wonderful, if relatively unadorned shoe-box halls in Russia. The president of Italy (Giorgio Napolitano!) himself attended ...

Goodbye to all that. As mentioned, the hall in Moscow turned out to be a wonderful place to play after all the tripping and slipping on the stairs. St Petersburg also had a magnificent concert hall, although I might not have been in the best spot on the stage to appreciate the acoustics. The earplugs were pushed in so far one of them didn't come out until I sneezed the next morning, if you know what I mean. As with almost every tour, the public transit infrastructure in Russia made what we have back home look pretty shabby. I imagine if more Americans traveled overseas they might approve increased funding for transportation if only to avoid shame and embarrassment. However, the St Petersburg airport needs works, and lots of it. One of my colleagues who dropped off his partner earlier in the day warned of a possible cluster-f#ck when our large group arrived. Sure enough, as our buses pulled up the line was already out the door, although that line turned out only to be a sort of...

Mind the Steps of Central Asia! One of the problems with touring is that eventually the hilarity stops and you have start rehearsing and playing concerts. The Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory is a wonderful auditorium, provided you can make it to the stage uninjured. The place has some infrastructure shortcomings, not the least of which were the slippery, unevenly spaced stone stairs backstage - I saw two players trip and fall there. But all was forgiven once I took my seat on stage and glanced up at the striking composer portraits. From on high, an illustrious collection of composers kept the on-stage proceedings under stern surveillance. Directly in my field of vision when I looked towards the podium (which is to say, several times) an inscrutable Tchaikovsky appeared to have his gaze fixed on something in the back row of the orchestra.  As these concerts were some kind of important cultural-political event with the future of Russian-American relations hinging on how well we...

Red Sauce over Moscow (Sorry for another fast-food themed post - my last on this trip, I hope) The first evening left time for little more than a quick jaunt over to Red Square before dark. I wanted to see if the Kremlin had been Disney-ified yet or not. The folks selling matryoshka dolls and other trinkets were at the Kremlin walls but had not breached the perimeter. Red square looked much as it had before, although now crowded with ice-cream cone eating lollygags and (religious?) fanatics screaming through bullhorns it had lost some of its solemnity. Lenin still lies in his tomb, the body of amazing 'peasant-under-glace' apparently immune to the passage of time. My wife will be glad to know they still deny access to anyone with a camera. With darkness closing in fast, I hurried over to the eternal flame, memorial to the soldiers who died in the Great Patriotic War (aka WW II to us in the west), a moving, human-scaled remembrance, much more effective than the bloated, at ...

Subway!?! No Way! For me, the tour doesn't begin until the wheels hit the runaway, then I'm back on the clock. The warm, almost balmy Moscow air came as something of a surprise, although the fields still dotted with patches of snow made it seem as if this might have been a recent change in the weather. Still, it was much warmer here in Moscow than where I had come from - how many times do you get to say that? Subway (the ubiquitous sandwich chain) wins the gold medal for the glaring first sign of 'our' triumph over socialism; It's right there in the Aeroexpress station beside Sheremetyevo Airport. McDonald’s and Starbucks were not behind for the silver and bronze. The half-hour train ride to the city center proved speedy, cheap (about $10) and efficient. Although we may have given them Subway, they are far ahead of us (at least our hometown) when it comes to actual subways, trains, and the like. It seems my colleagues, arriving a day earlier, had a less than o...

When playing with a 'period' instrument group, or otherwise engaging in 'historically informed performance practice' (an earnest if clunky description), one often encounters parts (AKA sheet music) full of very specific markings - dots, dashes, hairpins, and whatnot - added by the conductor, concertmaster, or leader. Of course almost all the parts we play from in the [redacted] SO are marked up in some way, but the 'early music' parts are generally brought in by guest artists, showing their own, sometimes very specific ideas about phrasing and articulation, while the parts brought up from the orchestra library might have layer upon layer of often contradictory markings from previous performances. A good case in point is the part to the Franck Symphony in D minor  I'm reading from this week, which is full of non vibrato and other penciled markings that have nothing to do with what Maestro Muti seems to want. From my experience, as a general rule the '...

It is difficult to get anything done in the summer, with the infernal temperatures and interminable rehearsals. However, the recording project continues to creep along. The second movement, Allegro, begins with a similar 'theme' to the other sonatas in the minor keys, no.s 2 and 3. It is interesting to see how Mr Marcello took the material and went off in different directions with it. This movement has more legato to it than the others and, rather than ending with a flourish, sort of dissipates with the descending chromatic figure. Perhaps I'm betraying the paucity of my musicianship, but that's about all I have to say about it, other than that the continuo player got an unusual workout in the movement and was not at all happy about having to (try to) play this passage. click below to listen