context is good

I’ve heard from quite a few audience members that they were perplexed by David Stabler’s pan of the Oregon Symphony’s season opening classical series concert.  There has also been the usual grumbling from within the orchestra about the review – not just in its conclusions, but also its tone and strange grammatical choices.  There’s not much to be gained in rebutting a critic, and here’s why:  it’s just one person’s opinion.  No matter how astute, august or erudite a critic might be, their criticism basically boils down to one thing: it’s their opinion.  They can back it up with all manner of historical insights, theoretical analysis, and what have you, but it’s basically a subjective opinion.

My conclusions from this opening round of concerts are as follows:

• We have fallen down to just about the minimum complement of strings for the repertoire that we play, especially cellos and double basses.  The Schnitz is not a bass-friendly hall, and there’s only so much you can do with reduced string sections.  If you hear the Berlin Philharmonic and think that they’ve got this rich, velvety sonority – it’s not just that they’re a great orchestra: they have 12 cellos and 10 double basses.  You need numbers to achieve a certain sonority (as well as a great hall, which Berlin definitely has) and it cannot be made up for in any other way.
• We’ve become a very flexible orchestra.  We are aware and ready for just about anything that Carlos or our guest soloists can throw at us at this point.  In the encore (Brahms’ Hungarian Dance #5), there was a lot of spontaneity going on on stage, and this just wasn’t as possible to do with a high degree of precision and virtuosity a few years back.
• Our winds are truly world-class.  There were so many moments, especially in the piano concerto, that were breathtaking, both from our solo principal winds, and from the whole wind choir in general.  We’re so lucky to have these great wind players here, and I hope that we can keep them for years to come (and that will require making salaries competitive with peer orchestras).
• The strings are really developing a “big orchestra” sheen.  In the coda of the last movement of the piano concerto Monday night, the violins just sounded exquisite.  There was that sheen to the sound that one only hears from the top rank of orchestras, and it is so gratifying to hear it blooming on a regular basis here.
• The violas succeeded in getting a laugh from the Sunday and Monday night audiences in the last movement of the Bartók Divertimento – the swooping upward glissando in the mock waltz section got open laughs from some of our audience members, and that made all of us smile – it’s the best sort of viola joke!
• We need more butts in seats.  The audience presence Saturday night was depressingly low, and it did pick up (through word of mouth and through the ticket stub exchanges) the next two nights.  We play to a very large hall – too large for what we can sell for all but the biggest soloists – maybe we need to cut from three classical concerts per series to two?  All I know is that when the hall is over 85% sold, there is a tangible change in the atmosphere – it really becomes an “event”.