tough stuff

This weekend is a bit of a strange classical week for us, with this program being played only once in Portland, on a Sunday matinee.  On Saturday evening, we bring the show on the road (down Route 99W, to be exact) to Newberg, to the excellent auditorium at George Fox University.  We usually alternate classical and pops in Newberg each time we go, and so this is a classical year.  It’s always usually really hard stuff to play.  Two years ago it was Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Strauss Suite from Der Rosenkavalier.  This year it’s Ralph Vaughan Williams’ harrowing Sixth Symphony and Strauss’ Bourgeois Gentilhomme, with actor David Ogden Stiers narrating the essentials of Molière’s farce (in the guise of several different characters, no less) between movements.  This is a very difficult concert, with two very different pieces.

The Vaughan Williams symphony is a take-you-by-the-throat piece that doesn’t let you go at all – even the slow sections are fraught with tension.  It’s really a reaction to the aftermath of the Second World War, even though RVW protested loudly (methinks too loudly) that it was all about Prospero and the nature of life as a realm of dreams: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded by a sleep”.  I think everyone who heard the work in post-war England was not conviced: this was clearly a symphony affected by the aftermath of the horrors of warfare visited upon the innocents of the world.

Aside from being technically very dense and difficult to play, our jobs are made more difficult by the fact that these RVW symphonies are all old hand-written parts – not the beautifully precise engravings of German publishers – but literally pen and ink hand copies that are then transferred to plates for printing.  No matter how well you know the parts, there will always be quirks of the copying that will make you think twice on the fly, and that is often enough to derail even the most studious performer.  Here’s an example page from the first movement viola part:

It’s not really that diffcult, but it’s pretty easy to mistake one of those quarters or eighths for each other on the second line, and there is one of the worst clef changes ever in the history of music in the middle of the fourth line down – it’s criminal to do that!  It seriously messes with your head – it took me about 15 minutes just to get that straight in my head – valuable preparation time wasted!

Then there’s the Strauss. Great parts, very easy to read.  But… there is a passage in the last section of the piece which is the highest sustained passage I’ve ever encountered in a standard repertoire piece.  It even goes a whole step above the highest note in the Bartók Viola Concerto!  Here it is (and no, this is NOT a violin part!).  I’m thinking about strapping an E string extension onto my viola for this weekend’s concerts…