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One of the highest compliments I ever pay anyone is to call him or her a “pro”. By this I mean that he or she is proficient at his or her job, and performs his or her duties in a way that exceeds the minimum level of competence one typically experiences in any such encounter. That is to say, it is rare enough to encounter someone who is competent, but to meet someone who is highly skilled is rarer still. (The epithet I use to describe the opposite of “pro” is “clown”, though it should be noted that an especially good actual clown could be a pro.)

In my experience, the backstage crew at University of Florida Center for Performing Arts at the University of Florida is made up of individuals I consider pros. During recording sessions for radio broadcast, I have had a number of professional encounters with the UPA folks, and without exception all have been extraordinarily capable, helpful, and friendly. It works like this: I arrive a couple hours before show time with my myriad gear, consisting of a recording device, a small mixing console, a microphone on a large, heavy stand, and an assortment of cables. I have everything I need to make a recording, but I lack some things that the UPA staff are quick to offer: a table on which to put my gear, a chair on which to sit, help locating power supplies, and so on. They have even helped me with the laborious task of laying cable and gaffer’s tape. They have done all this with expertise and good cheer. These sessions require a good deal of waiting around on my part, and it never fails that when a member of the crew walks by me, he or she asks if I need anything.

Last night I had another of these positive experiences. I was invited to attend a live performance by the American violinist Joshua Bell with the English pianist Sam Haywood. The session had been arranged through Mr. Bell’s people with the resulting recording one I hope to use as the gem of my summer concert broadcast series. I arrived at about 4:30 in the afternoon, three hours before the scheduled start of the program. Like most artists, Bell and Haywood would have a brief rehearsal sometime before the concert, and that would be my opportunity to ensure that the microphone was correctly placed, and my levels were safe. The artists are concerned, too, about things like music stands and lighting and whatnot. My chief concerns getting a good recording without interfering with the artists’ performance. To this end I am worried about the placement of the enormous microphone stand we have for these sessions, which is tall and extremely heavy. Its legs span several feet, and, fully-extended, it towers at least ten feet over the performers. I always consider it extremely generous when artists even consent to have this ugly thing cluttering the front of the stage, so I do my best to ensure that it is not more intrusive than it has to be. The stage crew helped me make sure that my stand would not block the view of anyone in the audience. The stereo microphone we use for these recordings has only one cord, which is good, but I still have to run it across some thirty feet of stage. The crew members are helpful in this regard, and help me snake it through an opening in the large shell they put up for such music performances. Though I could sit in the orchestra pit in front of the stage, I prefer to sit backstage, and the crew offers me prime real estate directly next to the stage entrance. Watch this video to see my setup.

Mr. Bell and Mr. Haywood arrived for a brief rehearsal around six o’clock. I had my gear all set up by then and was just hanging out backstage when I heard the huge sound of a Steinway piano. I put my headphones on and began checking levels. I couldn’t see what was happening, but I next heard Joshua Bell’s voice in my headphones. Then, the awesome sound of his Stradivarius. He was just playing scales and double-stops, but, wow, it sounded great in my headphones. I could hear them talking about lighting while I got my levels, then they left the stage and I waited another hour or so for the concert to begin.

Before showtime, Mr. Haywood—who looks and sounds like the very image of a polite British gentleman—approached me. I could tell he had some trepidations about the recording, though he was aware before hand that it would be taking place. I assured him that he and Bell had right of refusal, and I would never broadcast anything they didn’t consent to release. He seemed satisfied, and we chatted about the weather (it was very pleasant in Gainesville, but currently awful in London) and the program. I asked which of the pieces on the bill was his favorite and he answered, “the Brahms”. I agreed completely, since I have long believed that nobody beats Brahms at chamber music. I told him I wished I could hear a recital of all three of Brahms’ violin sonatas. He answered, “that would be a bit like having three steaks”, then paused and asked, “but how would you divide the program?” “Good point”, I answered. “I know”, he shot back, “the first two sonatas before the intermission, and the third sonata and the [Op. 4] Scherzo in the second half with some other little pieces”. He told me he and Bell were going next to Los Angeles. It was very nice of Mr. Haywood to talk me, and he seems like a very nice man. His pianism, of course, is splendid.

Just before showtime Mr. Bell appeared. He had his violin under his chin and walked directly to my small table and put his music down right in front of me while he did a little last-minute tuning and (literally!) fiddled around a bit. I don’t know if you have ever been within two feet of one of the world’s best violinists playing a Stradivarius, but I recommend it. Mr. Bell could probably make a rubber band on a shoebox sound good, but a Stradivarius is like a miracle, and in his hands it sings. As he and Mr. Haywood took the stage I had my typical fears: I hope my microphone placement is good; I hope my recording sounds natural; please, God, don’t let my microphone stand collapse and crush Joshua Bell and his priceless violin.

I met Joshua Bell years before after a recital he gave with another pianist. I had been in the front row for the performance, and when it concluded I stayed in my seat for a long time as the rest of the audience departed. After a while, Mr. Bell reappeared in the now-empty auditorium. He came down from the stage, shook my hand and asked if I enjoyed the performance. He was quite warm and friendly. He even signed my program. As I learned last night, however, backstage during performance, Joshua Bell means business. He was not the least bit rude or obnoxious. Rather, he was highly focused. This is entirely understandable. Playing music night in and night out for a paying audience is one thing, but the classical music world is one in which reputation is huge. Perfection is practically an expected standard. And it isn’t like he’s playing easy stuff. The duo played Mendelssohn, Brahms, Ravel, Ysaÿe, Gershwin, and Sarasate. Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for Solo Violin, Op. 27 are astonishing works, and, like the Bach pieces which surely inspired them, extraordinarily difficult. The D Minor Sonata from that set was first performed by one of Ysaÿe’s former pupils, Josef Gingold, who later became Joshua Bell’s teacher. Bell played the piece splendidly. I don’t much care for Gershwin’s Preludes, and Ravel’s Violin Sonata is probably one of my least favorite of his works. But Brahms’ Sonata in D Minor, Op. 108 was wonderful, as expected. Surprisingly, though, it was the relatively rare Sonata in F Major (1838) by Mendelssohn. The slow middle movement enchanted me, and the credit is due to Sam Haywood’s playing, which was profoundly affecting. Mendelssohn is known as a fairly light-hearted composer, but that adagio was sad and beautiful.

I spoke with Mr. Haywood again after the concert and told him how much I liked his playing. He was very gracious, and even assured me that he thought for sure that they would approve the second half of the program for broadcast. “I hope when you hear the rest you’ll like it as much”, I replied. “It was very nice meeting you,” he said.

By the time all the equipment was packed and ready to go the auditorium was empty. Bell and Haywood were up in the lobby signing autographs, which is something many of the friendlier performers do when they come to Gainesville. The established fans really appreciate it, and the new ones the artists just made are doubly pleased. To me, it’s the mark of a pro. Last night at the UF Center for Performing Arts, everybody was a pro.

Filed under: Music, Musings, Work on February 5th, 2012 | 2 Comments »

In a New York Times blog post yesterday, a fellow named David Lang makes an interesting analogy between two seemingly unrelated things I love dearly: baseball and classical music. He argues, in essence, that many fans of both revere the history of these endeavors. That is, baseball fans pay frequent homage to the great players of yesteryear, while classical fans idolize long-dead musicians. This much is indisputable. Indeed, just this week I watched a program about the best right fielders in history (Roberteo Clemente, obviously, topped the list), and I reguarly listen to recordings of music by composers centuries in the grave.

“It turns out”, writes Lang,

that classical music fans do a lot of the same remembering and measuring as baseball fans. Both baseball and classical music have a great sense of history, a tremendous respect for the past, and a slew of nerdy people like me who want to know all the details. Both are made of people who argue passionately with each other about who was the greatest. We handicap our favorite composers and performers, we buy 20 recordings of the same piece just to be able to argue about interpretations. We want to know as much about where we have been as we can.

The strange thing is that music fans and baseball fans remember the past with very different results; appreciation of the past helps baseball fans enjoy the game in front of them, while sometimes classical music’s illustrious past can keep us from enjoying what is happening right now. Can it be that loving what we have heard before has the potential to make us love what we are hearing now just a little less?

What Lang really argues, then, is that classical music fans, unlike baseball fans, are largely unwilling to go have new experiences—to hear new music—while baseball fans, by and large, embrace the new with the old. Thus, in St. Louis, Albert Pujolz stands side-by-side heroes like Ozzie Smith, Stan Musial, and Rogers Hornsby.

Lang’s logic fails, I am afraid. That is, he has incorrectly framed his analogy. When concertgoers yawn or boo their way through music by new composers, their actions do not correspond to baseball fans rejecting new players or teams. Nor does appreciation of new talent in baseball contrast with rejection of new composers in music. Dyed-in-the-wool fans of classical music might indeed believe that nobody can compare with Toscanini and Furtwängler, Callas and Björling. But those are subjective assesments. Statistics can tell us whether Roy Halladay is better than Walter Johnson based on a variety of criteria, and baseball fans will still argue about it.  The proper analogy is this: concerts and baseball games are the performances; baseball players and musicians are the performers; and baseball itself and music itself are the fundimental elements.

Baseball is essentially the same game it was a hundred years ago. The game your great grandfather watched at Forbes Field was the same one played at Three Rivers Stadium that I watched on television as a child, and it is the same one played at PNC Park today. The stadiums are different, and some say less charming; the uniforms are different, and some say less distinctive; the players are different, and some say less honest; but the game of baseball is the same, and it is the game itself that forms an unbroken line stretching from the present day to the distant past: a national covenant made generations ago, an unbreakable bond with our ancestors, and a legacy that we bequeath to our sons and grandsons.

Classical music today is not the same as it once was. Concertgoers today don’t watch the same “game” they used to. C. Ghallager, recognizing the incongruity in Lang’s argument, puts it far better than I ever could:

Imagine going to baseball games where all the rules changed, to the point where sometimes there were 4 inning games, other times pitchers would throw a square object back and forth to hot dog vendors, there were often no bats or batters, players stood on their heads in the outfield according to their horoscopes, and sometimes there were no players or game at all, just a groundskeeper running from home to first base, over and over and over. Fans would need to be subjected to reams of sports writers’ analysis “explaining” what was and wasn’t happening in complex new terms of basism, playality, and batterificence, with mathematical equations demonstrating why the brand of mustard used at the ballpark was intrinsic to the performance. Oh yeah, and sports critics would deride anyone who actually took the field with a ball and glove as being “derivative.”

As one who loves both baseball and music (including much that would be described as “modern” music), I find Gallagher’s analogy apt.

Filed under: Music, Musings, Sports on May 12th, 2011 | No Comments »

In the last two weeks I have begun to assume some of the recording duties at work.  That is, I have attended live concerts and recorded them for possible future broadcast.  Last Friday it was a Gainesville Chamber Orchestra performance of the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 (which pleasantly surprised me).  Last night it was the University of Florida Wind Symphony performing music by an American composer named John Mackey, including his Trombone Concerto, performed by it dedicatee, Joseph Alessi, the principal trombonist with the New York Philharmonic.  It was a thrilling piece, and our recording came out splendid.  (I hear that they are in the studio today making an official recording, and I will be sure to look out for it when it is released.)  I also loved Mackey’s other piece the band performed, Hymn to a Blue Hour, which was quite cinematic.

Since the composer has not yet given his blessing to our recording of last night’s performance, I will keep said recording under wraps.  But I will keep you posted when and if we broadcast it.  In the meantime I can give you a sample of the final work performed last night: Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber.  This is the end of the March that concludes the whole piece, and the recording sounds fine if I do say so myself.

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Meanwhile, today I am about to burst with happiness, because UF’s baseball season begins tonight.  I have been eagerly awaiting this moment for months.  Aaaahhhhh!

Filed under: Music, Work on February 18th, 2011 | No Comments »

Seven Cromwell Place, a two-story structure with dark shingles and a broad front porch, today seems out of place where it sits between parking garages and office buildings.  Yet, when the house was built in the late nineteenth century, it was surrounded by other fine homes inhabited by White Plains’ wealthiest and most influential citizens.  The mayor once resided at No. 7 Cromwell Place.  Between 1921 and 1961 the house was the home of Percy Grainger.

Grainger was born in Australia in 1882, and even by today’s standards he was an odd fellow.  He ate weird, designed his own clothes, built his own musical instruments, and got married on stage at the Hollywood Bowl.  As a composer, Grainger is certainly not of the highest rank.  His chief skill lay in arranging folk songs of the British Isles.  Those arrangements for band or piano sold countless copies, and in conjunction with live performances of these settings he made a great deal of money.  His skill as a pianist was extraordinary, as demonstrated by his arrangement of Country Gardens:

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He had traveled around with an Edison wax cylinder machine strapped to his back, recording folk songs.  This may be how he encountered An Irish Tune from County Derry:

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I toured No. 7 Cromwell Place on a rainy Monday morning, guided by an old man named Stuart Manville, the president of the International Percy Grainger Society.  Mr. Manville grew up in White Plains, and remembers seeing Grainger around.  A decade after Grainger’s death, Mr. Manville married the composer’s widow Ella, and they lived together at Cromwell Place until her death in 1979.

The fact that Percy Grainger is not among the first rank of composers is both harmful and helpful.  Harmful because, as Mr. Manville explained to me, the Grainger Society has scant resources with which to preserve Cromwell Place.  Verily, as I noticed, wallpaper is peeling from many surfaces, paint is chipped or missing from walls and woodwork, the kitchen has no running water, and so on.  Rock Hill, Aaron Copland’s house in nearby Cortlandt Manor, is better preserved, Mr. Manville said, because, of course, Copland’s music still sells well.   On the other hand, because Grainger is not as well-known, and few people visit it, it remains almost exactly as it was when the composer lived.  Indeed, as I walked around, I could see that many things had clearly not been touched in decades.

As you enter the house, Grainger’s main music room is on the left.  His portrait hangs above his grand piano.  On a shelf nearby, a framed photograph of Edvard Grieg is signed to Grainger.  The composers were friends.  There is another upright piano in the room, too, with a worn out stool beneath it.  Sheet music is everywhere.

To the right of the front entrance is a living room, with a home-made exercise bar strung up by Grainger between two columns.  Through the living room is a dining room with a surprisingly humble table made from sawhorses.  An original Edison wax cylinder machine was nearby.  Books and papers were piled everywhere.  Off the dining room, the kitchen was more primitive than anyone would tolerate today.  The stove was a wood-burning model, and access to bottled  milk deliveries was still possible through a small door at the back designed solely for that purpose.

The Graingers’ bedrooms are on the second floor, and appear exactly as they did while the composer lived.  Though surely the linens have been changed and the furniture dusted, all else looks untouched.  The carpets and furnishings and items are all original.  Mr. Manville explained that he hadn’t even gone through the items in a small cabinet facing the bed.  A small paper heart “to my love” still is pinned to the door.  Ella Grainger’s bedroom appears as more of a monument to her than a time capsule.  That is, one of her dresses lies across the bed, while another–which she wore to the White House to meet the Roosevelts–is hanging from a hat rack.  Her combs and toiletries sit on her vanity, while her portrait and one she painted of Grainger, hang on the wall.

Upstairs in the attic and downstairs in the basement lie the real treasures of Cromwell Place: hundreds, if not thousands, of Percy Grainger’s scores, arranged in boxes on shelves.  Grainger had had two fire-resistant concrete bunkers constructed in the basement, and Mr. Manville told me that when Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams visited Grainger proudly gave them tours of his music archive.  Clearly visible on the shelves are boxes labeled “I’m 17 Come Sunday”, “In a Nutshell”, “Molly”, “Irish Tune Co. Derry”, “Mock Morris”, and “Shepherd’s Hey”:

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These rooms were absolutely fascinating.  These boxes appeared almost completely undisturbed.  Indeed, a suitcase sitting on the floor had likely not been touched in decades. Why this material isn’t at a national library in Canberra is beyond me, but I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to see it with my own eyes, and even touch it with my own hands.

I have known of Percy Grainger for years, mostly as the composer of The Warriors and Lincolnshire Posy:

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He remains Australia’s most important composer, and he lived at No. 7 Cromwell Place in White Plains, New York.

Filed under: Music, Travel on January 11th, 2011 | No Comments »

Day Four

When I left Lincoln Center I was bound for a record store located somewhere in that vast area between midtown and downtown.  Academy Records and CDs is on 18th Street, which was convenient enough, since I could exit the subway only a block or two away from the shop.  But when I got down there I was the thirstiest man in America, and you would not have believed how hard it was to find a drink down there.  I found the store, but I couldn’t find a restaurant, cafe, or any other place where I could eat and get a beverage.  Only block after block of beautiful old buildings.  Finally, near Union Square Park I stumbled upon a burger joint that had a prominent soda fountain in easy reach of every patron.  I ordered lunch, got my cup and sat down directly in front of that machine and drank soda after soda until I was so full I could barely eat.

Eager to shop, I walked briskly back to 18th Street and entered Academy Records.  I could scarcely believe my eyes.  Though not a large store, classical music CDs were stacked almost floor to ceiling.  They were arranged terribly, though: Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner could be found on one wall, but Bach and other baroque composers were in a separate area, and that wasn’t especially substantial.  The Romantics were clearly favored there, but that’s fine.  Within minutes I had my arms full with Abbado’s set of Schubert symphonies, and Karajan’s set of Bruckner symphonies, at what seemed like bargain prices: a nine disc set for around $40.  I was quite pleased, but then I happened to glance behind me to the right.  A narrow corridor I assumed to lead to an employees-only area, or, at best, a room of LPs, in fact led to a whole other room of CDs, and those were the real bargain discs.  They weren’t bargain in the sense of being bargain labels, like Naxos.  On the contrary, the huge, bulging bins were full of Bis, Chandos, EMI, DG, and so on.  They were not arranged in any order at all, but they were $2.99 per disc.  I dropped the big sets I had in my hand and started all over.  I snatched Neeme Järvi’s complete cycle of Gade symphonies; some Vaughan Williams; Britten’s War Requiem; and more that I cannot remember at the moment.  I almost put all of it back, however, when I spied a massive opera wall, which seemed to have almost every recording I could think of.  It didn’t have Kubelík’s set of Mathis der Maler, unfortunately, but it did have Davis’s Benvenuto Cellini, which I need, and almost all of Dorati’s cycle of Haydn operas, which I had not seen in person for almost ten years.  I briefly contemplated putting back all I had and getting six Haydn operas, but those were not cheap, and I thought Miriam would be outraged at my insane spending.  I stuck with my bargains, and left happy with a full bag.

I walked briskly back to the subway, made my way to Grand Central Terminal, and from there caught a Metro North train leaving almost that instant.

The sky was clear and blue as I crossed over the Harlem River into the Bronx en route to White Plains.

Filed under: Food, Music, Travel on January 7th, 2011 | No Comments »