Klarinet Archive - Posting 000164.txt from 1998/12

From: "Edwin V. Lacy" <el2@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: [kl] Fwd: Do conductors need a union?
Date: Fri, 4 Dec 1998 16:47:01 -0500

On Fri, 4 Dec 1998 KlarBoy@-----.com wrote:

> Michael Tilson Thomas, who in 1995 became the music director of
> the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, draws praise for doing more
> than hanging his hat there. Esa-Pekka Salonen gets high marks for
> his commitment to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as does Leonard
> Slatkin at Washington's National Symphony.

But, a friend who played in St. Louis when Slatkin was still there told me
that Slatkin was in town so seldom that when he did get there, the
orchestra would have a couple of days of intensive rehearsals, and would
rehearse all the music for a month of concerts. That meant that they
couldn't even play through everything, but could only start and stop
movements and rehearse any spots which had fermatas, extreme tempo
changes, etc. My friend said that in one case, a three-hour rehearsal was
all that was allotted for rehearsing all the music for a single concert
series, and that in that three hours, Slatkin stopped only one time to
make a correction or suggestion.

Certainly, the St. Louis orchestra is an excellent one, and Slatkin is
known as a great technician with the baton. But, this procedure hardly
seems conducive to imprinting the conductor's personal interpretation on a
performance. I makes for more "cookie-cutter" performances of standard
works.

This business of the peripatetic conductor has worked its way down into
the middle and lower ranks of conductors and orchestras. Here in the
small city of Evansville, Indiana, with our metropolitan-class orchestra,
we had an English-born conductor, Stewart Kershaw, who split his time
between us and the Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle. Before that, he
had three jobs: conductor of the Paris ballet, the Stuttgart ballet, and
the Kyoto, Japan symphony orchestra. How's that for a commute? Once he
conducted a concert on Saturday night somewhere in Germany, then took the
Concorde SST from Paris to the US, then on to Evansville in time for a
rehearsal at 4:00 on Sunday afternoon. I can't say it was a musical
thrill for him or the orchestra, but it seems to be a part of modern
orchestral life.

Ed Lacy
el2@-----.

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