Brief bit of snarkiness

The laudable and endlessly readable Charles Noble - he is, in case his name is new to you, the assistant principal viola of the Oregon Symphony - takes me to task for taking the back-desk players of the Oregon Symphony to task for what I perceived as a true lack of real engagement by those players (among others) in Oregon Symphony performances.

As Noble notes, I wrote this:

"It's about halfway through young Jun Iwasaki's first season as concertmaster, by the way, and he looks always more confident and sounds first-rate: a clarion tone, and utterly committed. Maybe he can get those dead-in-the-face back desk players to join him for the fun."

Noble responds in kind...

"I know that we orchestra players can, could, and should improve our stage deportment, but there’s only so much we can do about how we look when we play our instruments. We sometimes make funny expressions either due to the fact that we buzz our lips into a mouthpiece, or shove a piece of plastic or wood or reed into our mouths and blow through it... It’s easy to look at acts such as Riverdance, John Tesh, or Yanni and see the mugging, aping musicians smiling and prancing around and wonder, why can’t orchestral musicians look so happy and engaged? Well, there are nearly 80 of us on stage at the OSO, and if we all acted like that, the staff of the Oregon Psychiatric Hospital would be waiting for us at the stage door with a form-fitting jacket with extra long sleeves."

Yikes... Yanni!

I'm pretty comfortable and familiar with the range of physical manifestations of engagement and expressivity by classical players and singers: Noble's right when he writes, "to each his/her own." But it's hard for me to listen past seeing players or singers clearly not engaged in the music being made. Those back-desk players at the Symphony were not just "dead in the face," they also communicated (to me at least) - through the slump in their seat, the limp handling of the bow and the instrument, the shifty eyes and shiftless demeanor - a disengagement with the performance at hand.

Just last night, at Ian Bostridge's superlative Schubert recital, what was all the intermission hubbub among local singers and choral directors about?... Bostridge's wondrous vocal colors and his stitching together of so many seemingly disparate voices, yes, but also the singer's curious and particular physical tics and tensions. Bostridge sings, at various times, out of the corner of his mouth, hunched over and turned away from the audience or peering down at the stage. But even though he may not always be - as we learn in singer's parlance - "with the audience" in terms of his pure physical engagement (really, he makes some bizarre gestures and physicalizations), he is most certainly visibly engaged in the performance, no question.

It's not even about smiling, per se (Noble knows this), or the sense of graciousness that great performers communicate to the audience. It's about being there, being in the moment, being fully engaged.

Here's one place I see it...



Obviously that's an unfair comparison. They're kids and young adults, of course they're bursting with enthusiasm! They're playing the Bernstein "Mambo!" from West Side Story, of course it's exciting! It's Gustavo freakin' Dudamel, like, duh!?!?!

(I hope, more than anything else, that those kids never lose that electricity and sheer joy in playing so evident here... but I also know, as a working musician, how brutally difficult it can be to sustain that, day after day, especially in the face of mounting stresses in the world of the working professional classical musician.)

Meanwhile, I'm off shortly to meet Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed at his hotel - he's made the trek to Portland to cover this weekend's Carter-Messiaen + TASHI feast. UPDATE: San Fran weather sucks, Swed's delayed. Argh. Sunday, 1/27/08 UPDATE: Swed's here, arrived Saturday midday. Will be interesting to read his take on the Festival (Friday night when TASHI took the stage together for the first time in 30 years, there was a generous and long ovation from the crowd, which included fans like Matt Haimovitz and Amy Schwartz-Moretti)