Associated Musings

This coming Friday and Saturday, I’ll be hosting our preconcert event Sound Off at a special time – 6:00pm.  This is because the Honor Orchestra of America will be performing at 7:00pm, before the ISO hits the stage at 8:00pm, for this week’s performances in the Symphonic Hits series.  We invite you to make a full evening of it at the Hilbert Circle Theater with Sound Off and the two performances!

The ISO performance will feature wonderful staples of the repertoire, with guest conductor James Gaffigan leading a program that opens with Rossini’s Semiramide Overture and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2, and then features Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and soloist Stephen Hough on the second half.

As usual, for Sound Off, we’d love for you to send us questions in advance (about orchestral music in general, or the ISO in particular) that we may feature in our segment “The Audience Wants to Know.”  You can submit your questions by commenting on this blog post, posting on the ISO Facebook page, or emailing it to soundoff@indianapolissymphony.org. 

To give you a little taste of what’s in store on this week’s concerts, I’ve collected some YouTube videos of the repertoire – some “standard,” and others not so much :-)

We’ll start with a normal performance – this is Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic with Rossini’s Semiramide Overture.



And now, a much more unusual arrangement – for 16 pianists on 8 pianos!



Here’s a classic performance from 1962 of the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto, with soloist Van Cliburn and conductor Kirill Kondrashin, in Moscow.  This is the beginning of the first movement - the rest of the concerto is easily available on YouTube as well.



And then, I couldn’t resist including musical comedian Victor Borge’s riff on the opening of the concerto:



Finally, here are a couple of videos related to Beethoven’s 2nd Symphony.  First, an introduction to the work, created by Jan Swafford for the Boston Symphony.



And here’s a fine performance of the Beethoven with Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony.



See you at the Symphony!

Happy New Year, everyone – I hope 2010 is off to a terrific start for all of you!

 

This coming Friday and Saturday, the 8^th and 9^th, the ISO’s series of popular classics, Symphonic Hits powered by Lilly, returns to the Hilbert Circle Theater stage, and of course, that also means the return of Sound Off, the preconcert event that I host one hour prior to each concert (AKA 6:30pm).

 

This week’s concert program is full of spectacular music, including a suite of excerpts from my favorite work by Sergei Prokofiev, his ballet music for Romeo and Juliet.  The excerpts for this suite were chosen by this week’s conductor, Andrew Litton, and I believe that these will be the first-ever performances of this particular combination of movements.  The concert also features Tchaikovsky’s warhorse Violin Concerto, with soloist Vadim Gluzman, and Tchaikovsky’s Coronation March.

 

The first couple editions of Sound Off have been a lot of fun, thanks in large part to your terrific participation and questions for me and my guests.  If you have a burning question about orchestras or symphonic music that you’d like to see me answer during our The Audience Wants to Know segment, please submit it by commenting on this blog post, posting it on the ISO Facebook page, or emailing it to soundoff@indianapolissymphony.org.   In the next few days, I think the ISO staff may be even posting a special free concert ticket offer on our Facebook page for the best question submitted, so be sure to check for that.

 

Here are some videos to kindle your interest in this week’s repertoire.  I couldn’t resist starting with what is probably the most novel performance of music from the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto that I’ve ever heard.  This is a young accordion virtuoso from Ukraine, Alexander Hrustevich, performing the 3^rd movement of the concerto, and playing both the solo part and accompaniment himself - it’s quite breathtaking:
 

 

And to balance that, here’s a classic “normal” performance of the first movement with the legendary David Oistrakh as soloist.  (This is only the first part of the movement, but the remainder of the movement, as well as the rest of the concerto, are easily accessible on YouTube).
 

 

Here is a performance by the famous Bolshoi Ballet of the scene ‘Romeo at Juliet’s Tomb’ from Romeo and Juliet.  This scene will not be included in this weekend’s performances, but I thought you would enjoy it.

And finally, here is a concert performance by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic of the devastating ‘Death of Tybalt’, which will conclude the Romeo and Juliet suite in this weekend’s performances.
 

(These last two YouTube videos have "embedding" disabled, which means I can't post them inline here at the blog entry, but be sure to check out the links to view them directly on YouTube - they're both fantastic.)

See you at the symphony!

Every year, the Vienna Philharmonic, one of the world’s most acclaimed orchestras, performs a series of New Year’s Concerts on December 30, 31, and January 1.  These concerts have become beloved around the world through the annual broadcast of the New Year’s Day performance.  These programs feature almost exclusively Austrian music, and in particular, music of the Johann Strauss family:  waltzes, polkas, overtures, and the like.

 

I’m thrilled that this year, for the first time in a number of years, the ISO will be doing an entire New Year’s Eve performance inspired by this wonderful tradition, and I have the privilege of conducting it.  This is music that is very close to my heart – it has an elegance, charm, and nobility matched by little else in the repertoire.  I’ve done individual pieces from this concert on many other occasions in the past, but this will be my first time doing an entire concert of Viennese repertoire, so I’m really looking forward to it.

 

The video productions of the VPO concerts frequently feature dance performances with the musical ones, and so I’m delighted that in that spirit, Indy’s own Dance Kaleidoscope will be joining us on stage for several numbers.  I saw their choreography the other day, and DK Artistic Director David Hochoy has done a great job of capturing the special qualities of this music.  Also in the tradition of the VPO concerts, we will have a wonderful guest soprano, Jacqueline Brecheen, to sing several arias from Viennese operettas.

 

I’ll leave you with a video from the 1987 VPO performance, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the famous “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” waltzes, also featuring dancers from the Vienna State Opera Ballet.

 

See you (New Year’s Eve) at the Symphony!
 

That's the number of people in the audience the ISO and I played for on Sunday night when we performed the Star-Spangled Banner at the Colts-Patriots game at Lucas Oil Stadium - equivalent to almost 38 times the capacity of the Hilbert Circle Theater!  I'm guessing that it was the largest audience the ISO has ever played for, and it was definitely record attendance for Lucas Oil Stadium (they announced that later, during the game).

It was a pretty surreal experience all the way around - before we played, we were hanging out in the end zone (which is where we performed from) as the players were warming up, with practice kicks soaring practically over our heads through the uprights.  The crowd noise was unbelievable down on the field - the roar that went up as we got to the final phrase of the SSB, and as we finished, was overwhelming. 

Check out the video below, which starts as we're waiting for our cue, while the giant flag is being unrolled on the field.  Go Colts!

That was the advice given to me by a friend upon hearing that I would be conducting in front of a live audience of 63,000 people tonight.  Another friend of mine (this one is also a conductor) joked “Don’t screw it up, or your career will be over.”  The ISO and I are hitting the road tonight to perform in what is for us a pretty unusual (but exciting!) venue – Lucas Oil Stadium, about a mile away from our home at the Hilbert Circle Theater.  We’ll be playing the national anthem before the Colts-Patriots game, which is the featured game on Sunday Night Football tonight nationwide.  Go Colts!  Unfortunately, SNF rarely shows the national anthem on their broadcast (they tend to opt for Faith Hill’s prerecorded rendition of the SNF theme song instead).  But we’re all psyched anyway to get to play for such an enormous and passionate live audience, and one that certainly includes many people who have never heard the ISO live before.  This is actually our second performance at Lucas Oil Stadium, though our first at a game – we also performed there in August 2008 as part of the opening ceremonies for the stadium.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite versions of the national anthem.  Glenn Donnellan, a violinist with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., made an electric “violin” out of a baseball bat, and wrote his own arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner to play on it.  Enjoy, and see you at the game!
 

Many thanks to everyone who helped make our first weekend of Sound Off such a great success.  For anyone who wasn’t there, Sound Off is the ISO’s new preconcert event (which I host) for our new concert series, Symphonic Hits powered by Lilly.

I’m hoping to see even more of you at Sound Off this coming weekend (6:30pm both Friday and Saturday nights, AKA one hour before the concert) for our second set of Symphonic Hits performances, which feature Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Jennifer Higdon’s Concerto 4-3, and Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter,” all conducted by Michael Stern, music director of the Kansas City Symphony.  Our soloists for the Higdon concerto are none other than Time for Three (or Tf3 for short), the “classically trained garage band” co-founded by ISO concertmaster Zach de Pue. 

One feature of Sound Off is a segment I call “The Audience Wants to Know” (yes, cribbed from Jay Leno!), where we answer a question from you about orchestral music.   So, please send us your questions – what should we talk about this week?  You can submit your ideas by commenting on this blog post.

One thing we’re definitely going to talk about at Sound Off this week is the amazing last movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, which makes incredible use of what we in the music biz call fugal writing.  That means that it’s not a full-fledged fugue in a formal sense, but it uses the basic technique.  This reminded me of Glenn Gould’s classic vocal fugue, “So You Want to Write a Fugue”:

I also found this clever and funny demonstration of what a fugue is, using the theme from Britney Spears’ “Oops, I did it again”:
 

To further whet your appetite, here are a few more videos related to this week’s concerts.  First, a video that will give you a sense of the fantastic virtuosity and energy of Tf3, as well as a bit about their background, if you’ve never heard them before.



Second, a clip from NBC where Jennifer Higdon’s collaboration with Tf3 is discussed.

Here’s a very fine performance of the Beethoven Leonore Overture No. 3, with Fabio Luisi and the MDR Symphony in Leipzig (note: the video is in 2 parts):
 

And finally, here’s the last movement of the Mozart, performed by Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic (the other movements from this performance are also available on YouTube).

See you at the Symphony!