2007-2008 season – a look back

OK, the holiday weekend is over, a (slight) chance to relax was had, and now it’s time to take a retrospective look back at the 2007-2008 season from the point of view of an on stage musician.

Overall, my major impression from the season is that I had to learn quite a bit of unfamiliar music.  Not only music that I’d never heard before:

Dvorak Variations for Orchestra
MacMillan The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie
Berio Folk Songs
Sibelius Symphony No. 6
Barber Souvenirs
Sibelius En Saga
Martinu The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca
Messiaen L’Ascension

But there were many pieces that I knew well as a listener, but had never learned for performance before:

Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Bartok Miraculous Mandarin (complete)
Elgar In the South “Alassio”
Liszt Piano Concerto No. 2
Bizet Symphony No 1 in C
Stravinsky Violin Concerto

And if this much of the season was unfamiliar to me – how must it have felt to the audiences?  Looking at the audience figures for some of these concerts, it seems that there were some people that simply stayed away from the Classical series.  I’m not sure how much of a factor programming was in their decision to stay away, but it might have played a part.

Many of the programs looked terrific on paper – you could see intellectually why certain pieces would go together – but ultimately, many of them did not coalesce into something more than the sum of their individual parts.  And there were some missed opportunities.  Such as Classical 11, which featured the J.C. Bach Sinfonia for Double Orchestra, and Classical 12 which featured Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.  Both pieces feature a two-part divided string orchestra, and they would have been a natural pairing, yet they were split onto separate programs.  Why?  I’m not sure, and that was a major missed opportunity to point up the divided orchestra feature of both works, and how they were used differently.  That would have been an informative and elegant use for the conductor’s remarks at the top of the concert, and in the program notes.

There was, in my opinion, one concert of the entire series which was a home run.  That would have been Classical 12, which featured the Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sharon Kam playing the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, and the Suite from Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier.  It was a varied program that featured one relatively unfamiliar work (Bartok), a great soloist in core repertoire (Mozart), and a beloved operatic distillation that featured virtuoso writing for the whole orchestra.

The last concert of the season was bothersome for me, because though I liked the concept of going from Heaven to Earth in the programming, the poor Messiaen never had a chance with the audience because it wasn’t given any context in which to thrive.  I know it was probably a matter of rehearsal time and budget for players, but if we’d been able to do any sort of short French impressionist work as a prelude to the Messiaen, it would have given the audience a toe-hold into the extension of that musical language that Messiaen lived in, and enabled a more visceral appreciation of L’Ascension.  A missed opportunity.

Similarly, the opening concert of the season had the appropriate ingredient of a great showpiece for a great soloist (Rach 2 w/ Valentina Lisitsa), but opened with a not-so-great piece (Dvorak Orch Variations) that was obscure to boot, and then ended with one of the great openers of the repertoire (Zarathustra) that also happens to have one of the weakest endings in the literature.  Why not have started with the Strauss, had intermission, then done a shorter work and ended with the Rachmaninoff, a great curtain closer if there ever was one.

My final quibble is with doing complete versions of stage works – in this case, Miraculous Mandarin, The Three-Cornered Hat, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Why?  Though there might be a case for the Bartók, there are still stretches (much longer in the other three works) that just don’t work well without the action they’re supposed to accompany, especially in the De Falla.  I don’t think that we gain as much as we expend in rehearsal time and audience goodwill by doing complete works just for the sake of having done them.  There are excellent suites of each of these pieces which provide the high points, and they were distilled for good reason: audiences love them.

My final peeve: Inside the Score.  Didn’t anyone go over the scripts (if they even existed) for these things before they were done?).  You don’t need a big budget to do this well (look at the Bernstein Young People’s concerts or his Norton lectures), you just need a well-written, well-vetted script with clear logic and a very clear theme.  More work in advance pays off at the concert.  Winging it isn’t acceptable.

The good news: the season was ultimately successful, regardless of what I think, and next season looks to be even better integrated and planned out than the last, and should be more successful still.