The Shreveport Symphony is in financial trouble – again.

The orchestra’s deficit is up to $500,000. After reviewing reports from two consultants, the board recently announced its decision to eliminate all full-time musician positions, and to revert to a wholly “per-service” orchestra. Predictably, the distraught musicians are fighting back.

We have seen this scenario before – several times – the last in 2001 when this writer, executive director of the Shreveport Symphony from 2000-2001, was the one doing the recommending.

After studying its troubled financial history, I came to the conclusion that the Shreveport Symphony was operating not only way beyond its means but also beyond the means of the community it served, and that if it was to survive at all, its budget would have to be drastically cut to reflect reality. Having made the most obvious cuts, the only area left to prune was the cost of musicians, by far the largest item in the budget.

I presented the board with the choice of eliminating the orchestra core (full-time contracts) or drastically reducing its size. My recommendations were approved in the summer of 2001, but after I left, the musicians persuaded the board to ignore them.

It comes as no surprise to me that the Shreveport Symphony is in trouble again. I hope the board members have finally come to their senses, but I doubt it. Everyone sympathizes with musicians wanting to earn a decent living, but there is a limit to how many concerts can be given and how much money can be raised in a community such as Shreveport-Bossier City; surely by now, history has shown that its demographics are simply not favorable to the maintenance of a large symphony orchestra.

Paul E. Robinson

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The major work was Mahler’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic. Rattle is without a doubt one of the great conductors and one of the great animateurs of our time. The Mahler was a finely prepared and inspired performance. The orchestra was superb.

In this Karajan 100^th anniversary year one might ask if the orchestra is as good as it was under Karajan. My guess is that man for man or woman it is probably better. I would go further to suggest that in Claudio Abbado his immediate successor and in Simon Rattle, Abbado’s successor in turn, the BPO musicians have made the wisest possible choices of music directors. Abbado suffered only because at the time he took over the classical record market all but collapsed and the profile of both orchestra and conductor suffered as a result. Illness also overtook Abbado and forced him to cut back his conducting activities. But he remains along with Rattle among the few conductors who can truly galvanize orchestras and audiences the way Karajan did in his era.

By the way, the Berlin Philharmonic we saw and heard last night has only a handful of musicians in the ranks who played under Karajan, and none of the principal players. It has been almost nineteen years since Karajan’s death and the present Berlin Philharmonic is vastly different. Its members are younger and there are now almost as many women as men, especially in the strings.

Music lovers with long memories will recall that in Karajan’s later years he and the musicians of the BPO had a number of acrimonious disputes. One of them concerned Karajan’s support for Sabine Meyer as a new addition to the orchestra as principal clarinet. She was to be the first woman to join the band. But like their colleagues in the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin players were bitter end chauvinists and Meyer was kept out. Only years later, as new and younger musicians joined the orchestra did attitudes change. In Vienna they have hardly changed at all. The Vienna Philharmonic still has only one or two female players.

In addition to the Mahler Ninth we had excerpts from a remarkable Le sacre du printemps with Rattle and the BPO in the pit in New York and on stage young people from a variety of area schools dancing their hearts out. Rattle as thinker out of the box.

Finally, we had a tantalizing look at the latest conducting sensation, the young Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel. He led his Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. The playing was remarkable from musicians so young and Dudamel showed both technique and charisma. No wonder the Los Angeles Philharmonic hired him to succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen. The Berlin connection? Rattle has become something of a mentor for Dudamel and he and members of the BPO have been traveling regularly to Caracas to work with the Venezuelan students.

We hear a lot about President Chavez, his anti-American posturing and his friendship with Fidel Castro. We need to hear more about the vast system (El Sistema) of music education that has produced Dudamel and the members of his orchestra. And Dudamel has another mentor too: Claudio Abbado. With the serious health problems of the past ten years Abbado has cut back his activities but he has also been advised by his doctors to avoid cold weather. So he spends the winter in Caracas and during that period often works with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra.

The Berlin in Lights festival was a fiasco as a television broadcast, even if some of the content was wonderful, and something must be done about the awful sound quality of these broadcasts. In some parts of the country I understand that PBS is broadcasting in HD. But in Austin, Texas on Direct TV (satellite) the audio is horrible, especially so in classical music telecasts because the dynamic range is so much greater than in talk programs or in such standard PBS fare as The Lawrence Welk Show.

In brief, the problem is this. In order to make the station’s signal available to as large a geographical area as possible – the more people who can receive the station, the more donors during fundraising programs – the station’s engineers set the transmitter’s limiters in such a way that 1) there is no excessive volume to cause the signal to bleed into signals from other stations, and 2) there are no times when the music gets so quiet that it disappears into static and interference, or gives the channel-surfing listener the impression there is no signal at all.

What this means for classical music broadcasts is that there will never be any powerful climaxes nor will there be any ethereal and breathtaking pianissimos. Worse than that, during fortissimos the brass will be audibly scaled back and during quiet solos instruments will suddenly jump out at you. The Berlin Philharmonic Mahler performance was full of such moments, especially in the fragmented final bars, and to my ears effectively destroyed the performance Rattle and his musicians had worked so hard to create. And again, this was not a matter of a poor feed from PBS headquarters or incompetent engineering; it was a matter of policy and that policy has been eviscerating classical music events on PBS (and other networks) for decades.

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I do love NPR but there are times when I have to agree with James Wolcott. He confessed he could not listen to NPR in the morning:

I’m just not a good enough person to be the receptacle for all that homogenized reasonableness lightly laced with whimsy and vitamin-enriched with valuable life lessons. (11/20/07)

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In view of Ross’s well-known admiration for both rock and classical music, I had expected him to explore the relation between popular and classical music throughout the century as part of a sociological examination of why music developed the way it did. But there is little of that in The Rest is Noise. I learned some things about some composers and some pieces but nothing about why the century started with Mahler and Strauss and ended with Adams and an assortment of mid-level composers. In 2008 there are no giants whose latest work is eagerly anticipated all over the world. Why? Ross gives no opinion.

He is also not very discriminating about composers. Cage, Stockhausen and La Monte Young were clearly charlatans if not certifiable lunatics, and Philip Glass has been writing the same music over and over for years. He’s probably as surprised as anyone that people continue to pay him for it. In The Rest is Noise these composers are all wonderful.

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Marita and I flew into Philadelphia the week of November 12th to hear some great music-making, visit the Stokowski Collection at the University of Pennsylvania, and to spend a few days with friends Laura and Jack in legendary Bucks County.

As everyone knows by now, Christoph Eschenbach’s tenure as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra is coming to an end next spring. From the start many musicians in the band resented not being properly consulted about the Maestro’s appointment and things deteriorated from there.

A sensational tour to the Midwest and West Coast earlier this year, however, has prompted some second thoughts. Over the course of the tour, critics were falling over themselves to praise the wonderful results produced by the Eschenbach-Philadelphia Orchestra collaboration. Then came the announcement that Eschenbach would have an ongoing relationship with the orchestra after all. Indeed, Eschenbach will continue to make recordings (for Ondine) in Philadelphia and he is leading the orchestra on its tour of China in June, 2008 and on its European tour in 2009.

At the time of our arrival in Philadelphia, Eschenbach had just returned from a tour of China, Japan and South Korea with his other ensemble, the Orchestre de Paris. Several of the China (Beijing Music Festival) concerts featured Lang Lang as soloist. Whereas Lang Lang is a superstar around the world, in China he is virtually Mr. Music. Over a span of several weeks during the festival he appeared not only with the Orchestre de Paris but also with two other orchestras.

But back to Eschenbach. No sooner had he landed back in Philadelphia than he was seated at the keyboard taking part in a special concert at the Curtis Institute. Billed as “Richard Woodhams and Friends”, the concert featured the distinguished principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra along with some of his orchestra colleagues – all of them also Curtis graduates. Eschenbach and Woodhams played the Schumann Romances just about as exquisitely as they could be played. I never cease to marvel at the degrees of softness Eschenbach can coax out of a Steinway, not to mention his uncanny ability to breathe and phrase with singers and soloists.

The next morning we were in Verizon Hall listening to the last rehearsal for that week’s Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. The program included two works by Stravinsky – the Circus Polka and the Violin Concerto – Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.

The unstated theme linking all these works was Neoclassicism. The two Stravinsky works are from his neoclassical period in which he incorporated elements of the classical style (Mozart and Haydn, etc) into his music. Brahms, in his Haydn Variations, also looks back to the classical period at least for his theme. And finally, Tchaikovsky greatly admired Mozart and in several works including the Serenade he used classical elements.

Eschenbach was strictly business in rehearsal. He began by reading a list of notes to the players on passages to be corrected. These were mostly in the nature of a little softer here or louder there, a longer note here or a shorter note there. Then he played through the piece without stopping. At the end of each piece he went back to replay passages which needed improvement, usually where there was a tempo change or a pickup note that might have caused uncertainty. David Kim, the orchestra’s concertmaster was the soloist in the Stravinsky and he was terrific. The Brahms had been prepared and played in concert about a month earlier in the season so it needed little attention. But the Tchaikovsky was being recorded live by Ondine. Not surprisingly, Eschenbach was particularly detailed in his preparation of this piece.

In the evening we returned to Verizon Hall for the concert. It was excellent. The Stravinsky pieces were crisp and stylish and David Kim played with passion and authority. After intermission, the Brahms was beautifully balanced and graceful with great nobility in the peroration. The Tchaikovsky demonstrated that the Philadelphians still have one of the finest string sections of any orchestra. Critics still rave about the wonders of the Stokowski and Ormandy eras but the technical standard and the depth of tone were peerless on this night too. Eschenbach led an intense performance that sustained the long line through pauses and rests in the Elegie. As is customary, Ondine is recording all three performances of the Serenade and will pick the best of them for release.

Later this season Eschenbach will conduct performances of Mahler’s massive Eighth Symphony in Philadelphia, New York and Paris. The Paris performances will be recorded for later release on DVD, part of a complete Mahler DVD cycle with Eschenbach and the Orchestre de Paris. For more about Maestro Eschenbach, check out his website.

While in Philadelphia, I spent some time checking out the Stokowski Collection at the University of Pennsylvania. I am completing revisions to my Stokowski book for publication in the Spring of 2008. I had some questions I thought might find answers to there. Most of the Stokowski material had been given to the Curtis Institute, but they could barely store all the boxes of scores and other items let alone catalogue it. It was transferred to the university across town in 1997 and 1999 and catalogued a few years later with the assistance of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Virtually all of Stokowski’s scores (and parts) are here and they are a treasure trove for anyone interested in how Stokowski achieved what he did. He was notorious for making changes in the scores he conducted but while he was alive it was impossible to know exactly what he did. I will include some detailed analysis in my book.

Before returning to Austin we spent a few days with our friends Laura and Jack in Bucks County. This was our first visit and we were enchanted by what we discovered. To drive through Bucks is to go back in time, perhaps even back to rural England. Bucks is short for Buckinghamshire, by the way – William Penn’s home county in England. One travels on seemingly endless winding roads past scattered stone houses, some of them more than 200 years old. The main road is highway 32 or River Road which follows the Delaware River. One of the historic sites is Washington Crossing where America’s first president crossed the Delaware with his troops to defeat the British in a crucial battle in the revolutionary war.

One of the most famous residents of Bucks County was Pearl Buck. We have an abiding interest in China going back to our Hong Kong years and we greatly enjoyed our visit to Pearl Buck’s house in Perkasie. She grew up in China and lived there for years in the early twentieth century, wrote numerous popular novels about China – she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 – and worked tirelessly to help Chinese orphans.

Another famous resident of Bucks was James Michener, also a popular novelist, and the museum in Doylestown which bears his name is a great place to see some of the best work of American impressionists such as Redfield and Garber. The Garber House is also one of the landmarks of Bucks County.

Bucks became known over the years as a kind of artists colony, partly because of its special character and also because it was located midway between New York and Philadelphia, and so attracted many luminaries looking for a place in the country within driving distance. Among the literary figures who lived here were Nathanael West, S.J. Perelman, Moss Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker. For a pretty thorough look at all the big names who lived and worked in Bucks in years past read The Genius Belt: the Story of the Arts in Bucks County, edited by George S. Bush and published in 1996 by the Michener Arts Museum.

Bucks is still a favorite retreat for artists and writers and we met several during our visit. One of them is concert violinist Elizabeth Pitcairn, proud owner of the Red Violin. Another is the well-known writer of 89 (and still counting!) children’s books, Steven Kroll. Finally, I must mention the artist and painter Arthur Ritter who surprised us by presenting us with one of his own drawings of the CNE in Toronto when we met him in Bucks County.  Bucks is a magical and inspiring place and we expect to return.

It was less than two months ago that I heard Bernard Haitink conduct Wagner and Mahler in Chicago. Now he is in London about to conduct Parsifal at Covent Garden. As he grows older he seems to be becoming an ever more profound conductor, but also wiser and funnier as a man. It made my day to read an interview with Haitink by Richard Morrison in the Times. Rarely if ever does one expect to hear a “great” conductor mock a venerated piece he is about to conduct. In the interview Haitink quotes Boulez recounting a conversation with Klemperer on the subject of Parsifal. Klemperer once said to him, “How on earth can you conduct Parsifal, it has such an idiotic story? Boulez’ answer: “I don’t care. I just love the music.” To which Haitink adds, “This half-Christian, half God-knows what thing in Parsifal is very suspicious, I think. Yet I have to admit that, as I rehearse it, I find it terribly moving. When you read the text, it’s horrible! But then Wagner transforms it with music that is fantastic.” Amen.

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