Author: Liquorice
Date: 2019-05-31 01:09
Opera orchestras are frequently required to execute cuts in the score, usually because of the stage director's "concept". Some of these cuts can be quite painful musically.
But even worse are transpositions sometimes required by singers. Some operas have arias in two different keys printed in the musicians' scores, one higher and one lower. One fateful evening at the Zürich Opera, for some reason only half of the orchestra parts were marked to play the lower version. So at that crucial moment, half of the orchestra were playing in a different key. The experienced opera players quickly realised what was going on, assumed that they were wrong, so jumped to the other key. But so did the other group, so the cacophony continued. In a mad frenzy everyone tried to figure out what was going on, until the conductor finally gave a sign for the lower key. The whole catastrophe lasts less than 20 seconds, but they are possibly the most excruciating 20 seconds of opera ever to make it onto Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUGfUPe8gWw
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The Clarinet BBoard
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