*High Definition. Or *Happy Dog. Depending on where we play.
Hear us here, talking about the next adventure on WCPN's Around Noon.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Artistic Choice
Do you watch PBS regularly enough to have seen "Arts in Cleveland... Artistic Choice"? This PBS mini-doc, made by Tom Ball, is an interesting look at the funding of the really rich arts scene in Cleveland. Featuring The Cleveland Orchestra, The Happy Dog (and our crew), Groundworks, and many others.
Watch it here.
Watch it here.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Playing with love (and yearning) for PCMS
JS: This program plays with love. Romanticism as a movement (with its corresponding expressions of turbulence, its manic energy, and its embrace of the awareness of the life cycle) and romance as a journey (and the corresponding life-affirmations that come from yearning, loving, hoping, resigning, and maybe eventually finding peace) are the philosophical currents that unite all of these pieces. Curating programs is one of my great joys, and these themes intersect here on so many levels that it's hard to talk about it briefly, but I'll try:
Schumann epitomized the role of the tortured lovelorn artist so completely that most all of his music seems autobiographical. While Three Romances has no specifically ascribed program, it embodies all of the above tendencies: it's tempestuous and yet calm, pushes and then pulls, feels simple but complicated. It's a soulful and spontaneous journey.
Debussy's use of Greek mythology reflected the Belle Epoque's fascination with exoticism. In Syrinx and Faun, Pan suffers the frustration of pining after elusive wood nymphs. They're intricately beautiful pieces, both connected not only to myth, but to French poetry, and both impressionistic and expressive. I've always thought of Syrinx not only as a tale of unrequited love, but as an exploration of creativity: Syrinx, the nymph, is transformed into riverside reeds, which Pan uses to create a flute, thus giving himself a way to express his love through music.
Schubert's songs explore boundaries between classicism and romanticism, using music and poetry to express love and loss. Die schöne Müllerin focuses on the unrequited love of a young man for a miller's daughter. In Trockne Blümen ("Dried Flowers"), the emotional turning point of the song cycle, the man considers suicide, equating his awareness of the seasonal cycle- that withering flowers may bloom again- with his reconciliation with death. Schubert, maybe more than anyone I can think of, played with harmony to create instantaneously shifting expressions of emotion, and the song captures psychological complexities in a very narrative way. Schubert, who had his own psychological struggles, expanded on this song's arc in his remarkably virtuosic variations for flute, so that each variation carries with it the narrator's internal struggle with yearning, his acceptance of winter/solace in death, and his vision of spring/hope for rebirth. The piece, being a set of variations, maps this psychological journey over and over, and, interestingly, manages to be more uplifting at its conclusion than the original song.
No one would think of Elliott Carter as a Romanticist, but I would, at least on the basis of Scrivo in Vento ("I Write in Air"), call him an Expressionist. The source of inspiration for Carter was Petrarch's Rime Sparse 212 ("Blessed with sleep, and content with languor.... I'm paid with tears and grief...") Again, unrequited love tortures the narrator of the poem, and the flutist/protagonist explores his manic struggles to find peace.
Carl Reinecke captures these struggles, too, in his "Undine" sonata. Undine, a water sprite, yearns for connection to the human world so that she may have a soul. Abandoning the water, she is raised by foster parents and falls in love with a knight, but must eventually choose between this love and her natural world in the sea. Water, here, paradoxically symbolizes both consciousness and rebirth as well as subliminal yearnings, again affirming life and its crazy mysteries.
JW: You have worked with pianist Christina Dahl before. Tell me a little more about what it’s like to work with her.
JS: Tina is brilliant and fun and funny. The creative process is a great adventure for us. I think she remembers anything she has ever heard, so she draws on a great wealth of anecdotes and allusions when we experiment with atmospheres and colors. She's greatly responsive, too, so even when we plan things, they don't always need to work exactly the same way twice-- there's a fantastically spontaneous feeling when we play together. And maybe the most inspiring thing I've taken from her is a sense that playing can be uncomplicated in many ways: "just get out of the way and sing" is a place that's easy to go with her.
JW: Not only are you the Principal Flute in The Cleveland Orchestra, you regularly appear as a soloist and as part of chamber ensembles. I am a violinist and the prospect of juggling that many commitments seems overwhelming to me, yet you seem to manage with such skill and ease. How do you balance all these different pursuits and still have time to practice?JS: I try to convince myself that all of the pieces of my puzzle are not so different from one another. If I learn how to satisfy some aspect of orchestral playing, in other words, I can usually somehow apply that to chamber playing, and vice versa. And I'm pretty much always practicing, I've noticed, whether it's in front of an audience, or in my imagination when I take my dogs out. I find that all this juggling doesn't really become easier with experience (though I'm glad it appears that way!) But it does become more and more fun.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Playing Beethoven for Beer, part 3
The Happy Dog hosted OMD 3 in 3D(ays) last night.
I have to say that my group of colleagues (from The Cleveland Orchestra: Amy Lee and Alica Koelz, violins, Joanna Patterson and Mark Jackobs, violas, Charles Bernard and Tanya Ell, cellos, Frank Rosenwein, oboe, and Richard Stout, trombone, and non-TCO guest pianist Tina Dahl) is a group that creates pure working and playing pleasure for me. The audience loves them all, too.
The bar is fantastic, welcoming, utterly relaxed, fun.
Rick mentioned that what we do there is just strange enough, just undefinable enough to be slightly uncomfortable for everyone involved. (One of our audience members echoed these thoughts in her blog, A Terror Musical, this morning.)
And I think that's what makes it fun. Is it a concert? Is it a bar hang? Are we socializing? Are we doing outreach? Are people there to eat? To listen? We exist in a non-category there: we're not rockers, certainly, but we're also not tuxedoed maestros. I found myself hearing our music in this context in a completely new way: Ravel rocks, and so does Bach. I love imagining someone else enjoying this thought for the first time.
Anyway, our set lists included music from:
1.
Beethoven E-flat Major Piano Trio, op. 1, #1
Thea Musgrave Impromptu No. 1 for flute and oboe
Schumann Fantasiestücke for trombone and piano
Ravel String Quartet
Bach Double Concerto (oboe and violin)
2.
Janacek String Quartet ("Kreutzer Sonata")
Rebecca Clarke Sonata for viola and piano
Beethoven Serenade, op. 25, for flute, violin, and viola
Delibes Flower Song from Lakmé, arranged for flute, oboe, and piano
Doppler "Souvenir de Prague" flute, oboe, and piano
Tchaikovsky "Souvenir de Florence" string sextet
3.
Brahms B Major Piano Trio, op. 8
Elizabeth Raum Fantasy for trombone and piano
Poulenc Sonata for oboe and piano
Boismortier Duos for 2 cellos
Arthur Foote A Night Piece for flute and string quartet
Monday, May 23, 2011
It's Widmann Time!
Jörg finished the piece, "Flute en suite" three weeks ago now? (I started getting it in installments two days after my last post, and haven't posted again because I've spent pretty much all my energy learning it.)
I love it. Aside from feeling a bit freaked about how the first rehearsal is going to feel tomorrow, especially with trying to assimilate the sound information that will finally be coming from all around me onstage, I'm very excited about this.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Veering Towards A New Flute Concerto
It's been a while. And it's not that nothing interesting has been happening. Just that life has moved along faster than I've had a chance to blog about it. When people ask me how I'm doing lately, I have come to realize that there's a cloud hanging over the answer: fluteconcertofluteconcertofluteconcertofluteconcertofluteconcerto....
A few years ago, The Cleveland Orchestra approached me with the news that they'd commission a piece for me. Great. Fabulous, actually. I worked on listening to a lot of possible composers for a while. And I fell in love with the music of Jörg Widmann. He was commissioned. He was asked to be the orchestra's Dan Lewis Young Composer Fellow for 9/10 and 10/11. The concerto became the new work he would create during his fellowship. So, Dan Lewis, in effect, has become the major supporter of this concerto. I think that when Jörg's fellowship was announced, which was probably sometime in 2008, the date of performance was set: sometime in the 10/11 season. Officially, it's Memorial Day weekend, the last concerts of our main season. All Great. All Fabulous. All backstory.
More catching up with history: in the summer of 2008, Jörg and I crossed paths at Marlboro and Salzburg festivals. In Salzburg, we had a great sort of jam session, talking about ideas, moods, possibilities for the new piece. We saw each other next in fall, 2009, in Vienna. The orchestra played his "Chor" on tour. We had dinner with Dan Lewis and others in Vienna, we talked about how excited we were about the project.
The next time I saw him was about three weeks ago, in New York. TCO was on tour, Jörg was a guest at The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. At this point, the concerto premiere date was four months away. He's still excited about the project. And the way he talks about his ideas makes me excited, too. I'm beyond excited, though: his ideas are still "in his head."
That means not down on paper yet.
Almost a month later, I haven't heard anything from him. I hope he's feeling better- he was pretty sick in New York, which set back his composing schedule. He's one of those rare guys who doesn't have email, so getting in touch with him to check in is complicated.
I don't think I'm complaining yet. I'm beyond excited, though, like I said earlier. (Read: "pretty freaked".) Of course, I want adequate time to learn the piece before an audience hears it. Usually, for me, that means longer than I now have for this one. It's not like I have nothing else to do in the meantime but learn a concerto, either. Concerts will keep coming and going as usual, all the way up until the Widmann finish line.
I can only imagine what he's going through, too. He knows there's a deadline. How would it be to have to create a piece, with all the pressure for it to be astonishingly successful and well-regarded by performers and audiences (and most importantly, by yourself) and know that you were running out of time to do that?
So I'm blogging about it. Don't know why, really. Maybe it'll end up being interesting to someone out there. The process between now and then, if the piece doesn't end up being postponed or canceled, will be, like Widmann's rep at Schott, Norman Ryan, said, "a roller coaster ride." Maybe I'll keep you posted on the ups and downs, if I can catch my breath on the way.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Beethoven for Beer: Orchestral Manoeuvres at the Dog
A few months ago, I met Sean Watterson, co-owner of The Happy Dog, in the Gordon Square Arts District in Cleveland at a party thrown to raise awareness of the district. We chatted, and I realized that he presents musicians at the bar regularly. How about classical? He was game, and, thus, OMD was born.
I galvanized some colleagues from the orchestra: Frank Rosenwein, principal oboe, Amy Lee, associate concertmaster, Joanna Patterson, viola, and Charles Bernard, assistant principal cello to join me in an evening of chamber music at The Happy Dog. We called it an experiment. And it worked: there was a line out the door and up the block for most of our first set, there were lighters waved above heads, there was raucous cheering, there was an invitation to come back. And, there was a great article a few days later in The Plain Dealer.
On October 13, we did "The Second Mouvement." We were joined by a wonderful pianist, Christina Dahl. And this time, surprisingly, we had a preview featured dead center on The Plain Dealer's front page a couple of days before, coverage on NPR and in the New York Times, and a whole lot of classical-music-blogging. (There are a lot of these. See below for links.)
I wonder what has generated all of this excitement. As some of the writers have indicated, the idea's not really new: ClassicalRevolution chapters are popping up around the country, cellist Matt Haimovitz has been playing Bach to Penderecki in bars for a long time, and musicians used to do this sort of thing all the time in the 1800s. I'd be very interested in hearing any theories on where all this buzz is coming from...
Here's what's exciting for me: I think that people are more than ever eager to be engaged in process, not just product. Just think about the popularity of reality shows focused on behind-the-scenes, from Top Chef to Top Model. Or the ramping up of the slow food movement, which fosters an interest in where our food comes from- how it's grown, cared for, transported to us- and which, in turn, celebrates the experience of eating.
I love sharing what I do with people. And I love that I can do this in many ways. The concert hall experience is wonderful, and our orchestra is one of the best in the world. But bringing intimacy, connection, and, especially, awareness of how spontaneous and vital and alive classical music can be off the stage and into places where people least expect to engage with it might serve to draw people into the experience in a different way.
Thankfully, we've been very well received. And very well hosted. The staff at The Happy Dog is exemplary in making us (and their crowds of excited patrons) very comfortable. I'd love to do more of these. And I'd love to explore how and when and where to do others. In even more unusual places. Any ideas?
October 13 sets included selections from:
Ernst Dohnanyi String Trio
Shostakovich Second Piano Trio
Bartok/Arma Hungarian Peasant Suite for flute and piano
van Appledorn Incantations for oboe and piano
Brahms G Minor Piano Quartet
Ravel Tzigane
Corigliano Violin Sonata
Piazzola Le Grand Tango for viola and piano
Copland Duo for flute and piano
Bolcom Old Adam Rag
Hetu Trio for oboe, violin, and piano
Villa Lobos Jet Whistle for flute and cello
Casadesus Oboe Sonata
Fauré Aprés un Reve for viola and piano
Shostakovich Cello Sonata
Debussy/Samuzlieh Afternoon of a Faun for flute and piano
Handel/Halvorsen Passacaglia for violin and viola
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