I know that Mary has been including updates and reviews of the musical events we’ve been able to catch while in Germany, but I thought I would chime in with a few words. Some of you may know that I have three loves in my life – Mary, baseball, and classical music. Thankfully, these three loves are able to coexist peacefully 99.99999% of the time. Since the general population of Germany seems to rather preoccupied with the upcoming World Cup soccer games and doesn’t seem to have much of an appreciation for America’s pastime and a blog post about Mary wouldn’t do her justice, I thought I would share some of my thoughts regarding the classical music scene and its history here in Germany.
This is my first trip to Germany and ever since I found out I was going to be here, all I could think about was how much classical music I was going to be able to experience. As a musician, a rather large segment of our repertoire came from this country. J.S. Bach and Franz Liszt both composed and performed here in Weimar. We were able to travel to Leipzig a couple of weekends ago and spent time in the Mendelssohn house and the churches where some of Bach’s greatest works were first performed. I walked on Herbert von Karajan Street in Berlin outside of the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert hall and sat among hundreds of Berliners to watch the Berlin State Opera give a live outdoor performance on a hot Sunday afternoon (pictures below). I could go on and on. This place is just dripping with history and its countrymen and women seem to have an intense appreciation and knowledge of classical music and the role it plays in their culture.
We have also seen several performances from the most prestigious orchestras in the world (Berlin Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus) as well as regional and student orchestras. I have been consistently impressed by one aspect of each of these performances, no matter how professional or amateur the musicians, EVERYONE MOVES ALL OF THE TIME! You may be wondering why this matters and why I would be impressed by it. I think I am so impressed by it because of how little it happens in American orchestras. To put it VERY generally, American musicians are not encouraged to move while playing and are sometimes even discouraged from it. Moving is left up to the principal players in each string section and a few key wind players. Everyone else generally sits still and executes his or her part. Here in Germany, the entire orchestra is engaged and moving in coordination with what the music calls for. If a certain note needs special emphasis, the entire group leans into it. As an audience member, it makes for a more entertaining experience and you feel like you are a part of it. I find myself having to restrain myself from doing too much moving of my own when in my seat out of respect for the other people around me. If I feel this energy from the audience, I can’t imagine what it would feel like from the podium.
This afternoon I took my SMU conducting students on a field trip to the Franz Liszt Music Conservatory to observe their student orchestra sight read Mendelssohn’s “Scottish Symphony.” We walked in as they were wrapping up the first movement. I did not tell my students that the orchestra was sight reading, and they didn’t find out until the conductor came over to us during their rehearsal break and “apologized” for their performance. My students were floored; they couldn’t believe what they had heard was the orchestra’s first attempt at this piece. There were certainly moments where the ensemble needed some work and polish (which the conductor did an excellent job of pointing out and fixing), but again I was impressed by the passion and enthusiasm coming from the group. The orchestra was doing much more than playing the correct notes at the correct time; they were making music and creating something very special in spite of the fact that they would not be performing this piece and there were only 10-15 people observing their rehearsal. They were giving it their all because that is how they are trained and that is the tradition of orchestral playing that they know. Luckily, I was able to lead a reading like this once before in Breckenridge, Colorado during my summer with the National Repertory Orchestra. After an exhausting Sunday afternoon concert, the NRO musicians reconvened after a short pizza dinner to read through Brahms Symphony No. 4. It was an amazing experience to be in front of that ensemble that summer and despite their exhaustion we really made something of that reading.
I know that my time here has refreshed me as a musician and as a conductor. I feel like I am getting a much deeper knowledge of Beethoven while sitting in a park or outside a café studying his music. That’s all for now…auf Wiedersehen!
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