scraping

With a number of US orchestras undergoing fairly dire labor-relations processes -- the Atlanta Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, among others -- there's been a fair amount of grousing among Oberlin Conservatory graduates on fb. Some are wondering whether it's worth it even to bother auditioning these days. Others point to top-heavy management numbers at some of these institutions. If those numbers are accurate, it's reminiscent of the situation in our state university system, where there's plenty of room in the budget to pay the Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief, but for the actual Educating part of the enterprise they can only afford adjuncts who get paid a dried-peas-and-gravel wage, and one warm body is considered as good as another. Because, you know, money is tight, and the most important thing in a university education is that Management have flexibility.

But as Utah Phillips said about the last baseball strike: "It's the players who create the wealth." Which is to say that in the same way no prospective college student chooses a school because it has a really outstanding Associate Dean of X, nobody buys a ticket to a Yankees game because they love to watch Brian Cashman in action. Neither is anyone drawn to attend a performance of a Beethoven symphony because the back office -- even the Development Office -- has mad administrative skillz. Even though some of those skills are critical to having the event at all, and even though, in this sad privatized system of ours, there is likely no ballgame without the Development Office.

In the end, it's the audiences who get what a given organization pays for. If audiences aren't drawn by what's on offer -- because the top players have of necessity dispersed to other gigs or even professions -- well, the entertainment business (if you'll forgive the term) is a buyer's market. There are plenty of other distractions out there. But more to the point, if there's no way to make a decent living* as an orchestra musician, how many conservatory graduates will even bother to audition?


*in which we include not having to rely on scraping up freelance gigs, which the management of the Minnesota Orchestra, in the spirit of Randian libertarianism and no doubt proudly waving their own 1099's, claim as "one of the benefits of an orchestral career."

BEMF Friday: Newberry @ the movies, Oberlin Baroque, Tallis Scholars

Surely there are worse reasons to skip breakfast than zipping across Boston Common to see a 1912 silent film about Queen Elizabeth I starring Sarah Bernhardt. Anyway if The Newberry Consort is providing a live soundtrack, scones can wait.  David Douglass opened with a detailed (and funny) introduction on the history of the film (the box office rock on which Anton Zukor founded Paramount Pictures) and the careers of the leads.  He didn't need to talk about the music much, at least to this audience, as the tunes they'd chosen were pretty standard period repertoire (Dowland, Holborne, Byrd, et al).  Ellen Hargis opened and closed the film with thematically relevant songs What if a day, Can she excuse my wrongs, Flow my tears, and Eliza is the fairest Queen.  (Can you tell this flick is mostly about the Earl of Essex?) For the record, Hargis sounded great even at the ungodly hour of 10am.

As with everybody else dealing with that weather, the strings got wonkier as the performance progressed, and there was no convenient moment in the film for viol retuning, so by the end pitch-indifferent audience members were a real asset. Huzzah!

Here's a scene we all thought was excellent, for reasons that will be obvious to undertakers and coroners:






Noonish: chai and a blueberry scone. The scone was still warm, moist, more fluffy than brick-like, and made with blueberries of recent provenance rather than the old and desiccated remains thereof. Clearly not made from a mix. Altogether pretty good. Were you dying to know this? Now you may live.

1pm: Oberlin HIP's Trauermusick at First Lutheran Church, which was Telemann's Du aber, Daniel, gehe hin for the first half and Bach's Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (which title reminds me of a commercial jingle, but which?) for the second.  Both of these were excellent overall, and much of the ensemble has only just graduated, so it was fun to catch a bit of the future on the threshold.  The vocalists were particularly outstanding -- my prejudices at work, no doubt, though there is in my notes a notation of devil horns for the recorders, so clearly the vocal soloists weren't the only thing that caught my ear.

Special mention to soprano Sara Casey, who sang her aria in the Telemann beautifully in spite of a far too prolonged cell phone accompaniment.  Bass Elliott Hines was also outstanding, handling the bulk of the solo work with power and presence.  Tenor Miguel Amaguaña sounded fine in the choruses but ran into some trouble in his arioso in the Bach.  He sounded like he was having the same trouble the reeds were having, and I wouldn't mind hearing him again under more favorable conditions.  But it was Nathan Medley, countertenor and Class of 2009, who really made people sit up.  Watch this guy, he's got gorgeous tone and volume to spare (though the sound samples on his website don't quite do him justice). Criminally, he had the same cell phone to deal with in his aria as Ms Casey had in hers, whereupon I had a vision: a large thought balloon formed above the heads of the people, and these words appeared as if descended from divine and ætherial regions: "Oh, WTF!!"  Seriously, whoever you are, you need to get rid of that thing before somebody clubs you in the head and calls it justifiable smiting. 

8pm: I'd like to say The Tallis Scholars lost control of their pyrotechnics and they had to bring in the fire dept

but of course The Tallis Scholars don't lose control of their pyrotechnics, that's what makes them The Tallis Scholars.  Their program was entitled The Genius of Tomás Luis de Victoria.  The good news is it was awesome.  The less good news is that since I'd never heard this music before, and thus was wholly unfamiliar with it, I don't have much more to say about it other than "It was awesome".  If I find a review by an intelligent person, I'll post a link. Because really, it was awesome.