Anne-Sophie's Mozart

Anne-Sophie Mutter's early recordings of the Mozart violin concertos are already legendary, and her recent concert films are just as good. In 2005, Ms. Mutter launched "The Mozart Project Story," in conjunction with the worldwide celebrations of Mozart's 250th birthday; the two-disc DVD set I recently watched, which contains the 5 Mozart concertos with the Camerata Salzburg led by Mutter, is only one element in the project. This music has clearly been a life-long passion for her, and the Camerata Salzburg plays with equal passion and grace. These recordings are a great curative if you've heard (or played) these pieces for too many auditions and grown bored with them -- they sound and feel like much-loved music, made with freshness and spontaneity among friends.

Mozart's Requiem

This week the CPO is performing as pit band for a new Alberta Ballet production of Mozart's Requiem. What an amazing piece, and a wickedly hard bass part. At the beginning of the show, individual orchestra members are to play little passages from famous Mozart instrumental works -- the clarinet concerto, violin sonatas, etc. Maybe someone in our section will feel like tossing off some "Per Questa Bella Mano" (and singing along would be bonus points). I'll probably have my hands full learning that devilish "Domine Jesu" movement. Yikes!

Mozart in a heated tent

"Mozart on the Mountain"
Sunday, August 26th, 2 pm
Roberto Minczuk conducting

Mozart Overture to Don Giovanni
Mozart Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, K. 183 (173dB)
I. Allegro con brio
Mozart Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622
II. Andante
III. Allegro

Beethoven Symphony No.5 in C Minor, op. 67
I. Allegro con brio
"Lord Strathcona Troop Musical Ride"
marches by Sousa and others,
accompanying horse tricks
Rossini Overture to William Tell
Glinka Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla

Yesterday was my first performance with the CPO - I didn't really have time to get nervous though, since I was too busy trying to keep warm. It was an outdoor concert at the Rafter Six Ranch Resort, out towards Banff, and it would have been a spectacular setting, had the weather cooperated.

Instead, we had a muddy field beneath gray, dreary skies, and an incredibly stoic audience. Even before the orchestra buses arrived, they had encamped with folding chairs, enormous umbrellas, and wind-resistant parkas - it was like playing to a climbing expedition on Mt. Everest. (Actually one of the speakers before the concert was a politician who had climbed Everest.) As the speeches went on, and on, we could see them angling their umbrellas and adjusting their tents to keep off the driving rain. These people were prepared.

Moving up here from Florida, this weather issue is hard to dodge - people want to know whether I've ever worn a sweater, if I'm up on my survival and layering skills, do I know how to defrost my car in 20 below temperatures... I try to reassure people that I lived in Chicago and Boston, I'm familiar with snow and numb fingers, I'm prepared to invest in an engine block heater and long underwear. I just didn't expect I'd need them already in August!

This was definitely a tougher breed of classical music listeners than I'm familiar with from Miami, or Chicago or Boston for that matter. There were people yelling up to the stage to ask for people to take down their umbrellas, so the people in the back could see better. You definitely want to put on a great show, when people are subjecting themselves to extreme conditions to see and hear you - we didn't have it nearly so bad, with heaters and a big tent, but I was still shivering and clutching for blowing-away pages. Luckily, we had a fantastic soloist for the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, Steve Amsel. He's the orchestra's principal clarinetist, and he made a gorgeous arc of the slow movement and a playful chase of the 3rd. (He had some help from Tim Rawlings, our percussionist and personnel manager, holding his pages down.)

For an outdoor concert, this had some substantial repertoire - all those ricochet licks in the William Tell, the lightning-fast scales in Glinka, and some meat and potatoes in the Beethoven. And Mozart is always a test of ensemble, intonation, flexibility. Even with rain pounding on the tent, you still feel exposed. It's hard to judge an orchestra from hearing it in a tent and an acoustically dead rehearsal room, but it's nice to play in a section with strong leaders, and the orchestra generally responds well to RM. He challenged the orchestra to find lightness and character in the Mozart and Rossini, and depth and contrast in the Beethoven. So at least we had a focus, besides holding onto our music and maintaining circulation in our extremities.

The orchestra's next services are recording sessions next week, a film score using music by Tchaikovsky. Those will be indoors and climate controlled!

Eine Kleine Vibratomusik

All this week I've been rehearsing Mozart's Serenade in G, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in a string quintet for a chamber music concert this Sunday. I guess it's fitting that in this year of overplayed Mozart, we should finish with one of the most overplayed Mozart pieces of all time. It's quite probable that, should a cell phone go off during the performance, it will play a ring tone from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. It's one of those pieces you can hear so much you stop recognizing it as music. That's not to say it's a bad piece - like any Mozart work, there seem to be endless little surprises and miracles. It's up to us to make them seem that way, not overly familiar drudgery.

One of the things we've been talking about is vibrato. Apparently Sir Roger Norrington left a lot of us thinking about this subject; and while we're not ready to abandon it entirely, we're all trying to use it in a more thoughtful way. Probably this is something musicians alone obsess about - I've been trying to think of a similar conundrum in another profession, but haven't really come up with anything. Are there postal workers who feel a need to shake all the packages, or lawyers who can't stop palpitating their briefcases?

For musicians, the problem of vibrato is sort of the same as the problem of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik: they can both be so great and wonderful, as long as they are not done to death, or done in a perfunctory and boring way. One of the most interesting moments is near the end of the second movement, when the coda begins with a series of surprising modulating chords. We decided that we would make these chords most striking by using no vibrato at all, just playing them with a very fast and emphatic bow stroke. However, the danger is that they could still sound dead and dreadfully out of tune.

At our rehearsal today, coach Scott Nickrenz suggested that we "give those chords some life in the left hand" - which might sound like a euphemism for vibrato, but somehow thinking of it in this way helped. The sound had that shimmering resonant life, without the wobbly preciousness of a wide vibrato. Scott described this kind of active left hand as "salt and pepper", which conveys the size of the movement as well as its effect on the sound - a little can go a long way.

I think maybe semantics is a big part of the problem, since the word vibrato has gotten so loaded with sappy romantic connotations. Obviously we need in an infinite gradation of different vibrato sounds, from the slightest shimmer to the garish cafe vibrato that Sir Roger likes to joke about. Actually in his essay on orchestral vibrato, Sir Roger mentions Fritz Kreisler and the advent of continuous vibrato, writing that "listening to his recordings today one is struck by the delicacy of his vibrato. It is much more a gentle shimmer than the forced pitch-change one often hears today."

So maybe we need a thousand different words for vibrato, as the Eskimos allegedly have for snow. Next time Sir Roger comes around, we can say, "That's not vibrato, that's my vifructo!" And while we're tweaking our semantics, maybe we can call the piece tomorrow "Eine Kleine Nachmittagmusik", since we are playing it in the afternoon (the concert begins at 3 pm). Is there really anything nocturnal about this music? Who knows, it might make people sit up and listen with fresh ears - or at least silence the cell phone jingles!