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06/24/2006
One concert down, one to go
I've just come back from one of two performances of the OCO's latest concert, which features von Suppé's Poet and Peasant Overture, Wagner's Siegfred Idyll, a modern piece called Akasha by Glenn Buhr, and the Saint-Saëns violin concerto #3. For this last one our soloist is Donnie Deacon, a very talented violinist with the NAC (National Arts Centre) orchestra.
The Poet and Peasant Overture went extremely well, as did the Buhr piece. Actually, most of the Siegfried Idyll was about as good as we've every played it, right up until we hit that one passage that's skull-and-crossbones for the cello section and boy, did we screw up. It kind of sounded like you were listening to a recording, and then all of a sudden, the signal got scrambled for about 4 bars, and then it was fine again. It's a very exposed passage (i.e., nobody's doing much of anything except the cellos, so if we screw up, it's obvious), it's very fast, it's all over the fingerboard, and to top it all off, we have 16 bars rest right before that so we end up in this nervous state where we're trying to make sure we count out 16 bars (and not 15 or 17), and trying to visualize how we're going to hit the ground running and preferably, play the right notes at the right speed while we're at it. I always get the impression it's like standing next to train tracks, seeing a speeding train coming, and trying to somehow get on that train without getting flattened in the process. If you stand there and don't see it coming, you'll get killed. If you're at a standstill and try to just jump on it, you'll still probably get killed. We have to figure out how to catch this "train" in the Wagner piece, and we have til tomorrow to figure it out.
The other eyebrow-raiser was the Saint-Saëns concerto. Until today, our problem as an orchestra has been that we've been dragging our feet. In other words, we're somehow always going slightly slower than what the conductor wants. The other day in dress rehearsal, the conductor asked Donnie what he thought about the orchestra dragging a bit, and Donnie said he didn't mind it, because he could play the piece slower [than the speed the conductor was trying to go], but he couldn't play it faster. We all had a good laugh at the time. (Backgrounder about this concerto: there are some slow, lyrical passages, but there are some downright scary-fast crazy things in there too.) Anyway, today, we had a few problems, but dragging our feet was, apparently, not one of them. I'm not sure if nerves got to people or whatever, but all of a sudden the orchestra was going significantly faster than I've ever heard before, and I felt bad for poor Donnie busting his butt to keep up! (However, his playing was beautiful anyway. As I said before, he's an amazing violinist.) Hopefully tomorrow we won't have the same problem.
On top of it, our principal cellist won't be around for the Saint-Saëns part of tomorrow's concert, so I'm going to move from the back to the front and be the temporary assistant principal cellist for the half hour or so when we do this concerto. I'm pumped! Hopefully all that practicing the B-major stuff and listening to the recording over and over will pay off, and the temporary principal cellist and I can get the cello section through this concerto in one piece. Wish me luck! :-)
Hopefully the concert will be as good tomorrow, if not better, though I tend to find that it's harder to get in the concert "mood" in the middle of the afternoon (as tomorrow's concert will be) than in the evening (like tonight). We'll see how it goes though, and do our best!
23:10 Posted in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this