I am back in Regina as of today! My first port of call for this holiday break, immediately following the Messiah, was Calgary, where Mike and I spent the first part of the holiday with his parents. For the past few years we’ve been there just before Christmas, so they usually pick a date to call “Christmas” and celebrate Christmas Eve and morning accordingly. I was introduced to The Shepherd radio play, which I hadn’t heard before, as well as the supposedly French-Canadian tradition of tortiere as a Christmas Eve dish.
Then, on actual Christmas Eve, we went to see my parents, just in time for a family meal. After a few days in Toronto, we headed back to Kitchener for the rest of the break (we’ll, break for me, Nutcracker for Mike.)
I have two Masterworks concerts left with Regina before heading back to Ontario for Five Sacred Trees. I’ve been debating the best way to deal with the issue of music for the performance. I have memorized it, and have been doing memorized runs of the entire work almost every day for about a month already. However, pretty much everyone who has played it has advised me to play it with the music onstage. As a wind player, I don’t have a lot of experience with playing solo repertoire, well, at all, compared to string and piano players; and memorization isn’t expected of wind players the way it is of other families of instruments. So I will have the part onstage with me.
However, it’s complicated to arrange the page turns so that they work out well; and even once photocopied, the pages require folding over and under each other in a way that would look awkward to do between movements. I don’t want to have to be shuffling around with pages between every movement, especially if I have it memorized anyway. I even, if it turns out to be possible for all relevant parties in the orchestra, would like to do almost all of it attaca from movement to movement— excepting the break between Tortan and Eo Rossa, which requires vigorous tone hole-blowing and prayers to the gods of gurgling water incidents :P
I considered getting a foot pedal and playing it off of tablet; but that then adds in the potential for technological malfunction; and since there are electronic components in concert halls that could interfere with the Bluetooth that connects the pedal to the tablet, a successful run at home doesn’t guarantee success in concert.
I still have a little bit of time to figure something out…
One of the things I decided to accomplish this winter (or rather, have someone else accomplish while I sat around and watched) was having my bassoon tuned up. Since there are, shockingly, no dedicated bassoon repair professionals in Saskatchewan, I made an appointment to go see Frank Marcus in Wasaga Beach while I was in Ontario for the holidays.
I was mainly concerned about my wing joint; I had been having more trouble than I thought was entirely fair with my high B and C. Both reassuringly and somewhat disappointingly, there was nothing massively wrong with the area that, once fixed, could cause the entire high range of the bassoon to suddenly become easy. (How unfair!) However he did adjust the B resonance so that there is no delay in it coming up, which should remove some uncertainty. He also added some (clear) paint to some parts, explaining that the wood of a bassoon is also sometimes a source of leaks, which I had had no idea of.
When he got to the long joint, though, he stared at the pressure gauge in surprise, and said, “maybe it’s wrong.” It wasn’t sealing at all, and when he removed the keywork, it was obvious why: one of the holes underneath was neither uniformly flush with the pad, nor even circular. “It looks like a beaver gnawed on it,” Frank commented. “Benson didn’t do this.”
I am pleased to report that it is indeed much easier to play low notes… an inability I seem to have not noticed too much during the past few months. Whoops!
Yep! It’s on the internet, even. With my picture and everything. So that you, too, can be puzzled at the sight of a reed player holding their instrument with a reed on the bocal and also wearing red lipstick for some reason. When Bradley Thachuk, the music director in Niagara, first suggested that I play John Williams’ Five Sacred Trees and I agreed, to be perfectly honest I couldn’t have hummed you a single bar of it. I sent off an email saying yes, that sounds like a good choice, then hopped over to youtube to listen to it. And thought, oh, this sounds kinda hard. Uh-oh. That was about a year and a half ago. That initial listen put the fear of God in me, and I immediately ordered a part and started working on it. Finally, about two weeks ago, I could at last say that I was able to play all the right notes, in the right order, at more or less the right tempo. (Actually, if I had said that two weeks ago, I would have been technically incorrect– I only noticed yesterday that I learned a run in the fourth movement– luckily only a single bar– in the wrong clef. WHOOPS. Fixed now.) Not-so-coincidentally, last week I traveled to Ottawa to have a lesson with Christopher Millard, principal bassoon in NACO, on the piece. Usually, I would prefer to be farther along in the preparation process than just “able to play correct pitches” before traveling for a lesson. But in this instance, I didn’t really have choice. I knew I wanted to play it for someone who had performed it recently, and Chris gave the Canadian premiere of the work. And it needed to be before he left for summer festival work in mid-July, because on August 12th, I’m getting in the car and beginning the drive to Regina for the season. So, that’s just the way it was. And honestly? I needed the deadline of a lesson to make me put my butt in a chair and finish learning the thing. In a sense, the time, expense and general inconvenience involved in going to Ottawa was the whole point. As they say in my current home city of Kitchener-Waterloo: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. As the vast legions of ABD graduate students of the world can tell you, human psychology is uniquely poorly equipped to deal with large projects with definite endpoints but no immediate pressures driving them forward. So, creating a short-term deadline that had meaning and importance suddenly became a much higher priority for me when I won the Regina audition. Prior to that audition, I had been planning on attending the Glenn Gould School for next year. I had decided it was a good time to go back to school because I wanted the structure of school to help me achieve my goals. And mostly what structure is, is small but strategically placed deadlines. Lessons every week, studio recitals every few months, final recital at the end of your degree. (Or something similar to that schedule.) I wasn’t at all worried about learning this enormous concerto, because I would have all the right kinds of pressure to keep me on track with it. I might even have other performance opportunities (recital, concerto competition, etc.) to get it ready. As soon as I got the Regina job, all of that assurance vanished. Not only would I not have any of those same small deadlines looming for the concerto, suddenly I had a whole lot of new deadlines, of a sort I have never really encountered before: namely, preparing and performing an entire, full-time season as a principal player in a professional orchestra. Considering that this time last year I had just been accepted to paramedic college and was seriously considering how relaxing and fun it would be to just play music as an amateur, uh, a principal job and a concerto in the same season is a little bit of a change of pace. (Spoiler alert: I did not end up attending paramedic college this year. I like having hobbies, but I’m not quite at the win-a-bassoon-job-while-in-school-for-a-completely-different-discipline kind of level.) So, that’s what the next six months are going to be about for me: manufacturing deadlines, as well as managing the ones I already have. I’m grateful for my time as a freelancer/underemployed musician (let’s be real here) because it taught me that manufacturing deadlines is a huge part of a life in music. Woohoo! Let’s all make up some arbitrary dates to freak out over!
It’s a bit difficult, as a freelancer, to separate “season” and “summer” in the way that someone with a job, or even a student, can. However, it’s probably safe to say that it’s now the summer for me: I played my last concert with the Niagara Symphony for the time being two weeks ago– I am going to be on leave from the NSO next year as I start my new job as principal of the Regina Symphony, and couldn’t have asked for a better ending to my time with the NSO than playing Mahler’s 2nd symphony, with my partner playing beside me.
The week after, we were going to work together again as I came to visit him at his job, and I played 3rd and contra on– I am not making this up– Mahler 1. Yes, two Mahler symphonies in as many weeks: I’m pretty sure this is what I imagined being a professional musician would be like in my first year of music school.
That concert was particularly special because it was Music Director Edwin Outwater’s final farewell to the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. During the many bars of rests I had the privilege and pleasure of counting during that concert, I also had the opportunity to reflect on this crazy profession; after ten years– a decent amount of time, in MD terms– here’s a guy choosing to move on from his job in part because that’s simply what’s done, not to mention the fact that he also lives and works in a different country. This is normal for a conductor. And to a lesser extent it’s normal for musicians, too.
In the past two years of “being a freelancer,” I’ve worked in three of the four farthest practicable corners of the province– Windsor in the west, Niagara in the south, and Thunder Bay in the north. (The farthest east I’ve been is Oshawa with the Ontario Philharmonic, and while I hear the Kingston Symphony is a nice band, I don’t exactly regret missing the opportunity to have driven the three and a half hours it would take to get to a gig in Kingston from Kitchener…) There are really great, fun things about doing this. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I have a decent understanding of the geography and transportation systems of the entire province. And, by and large, I’ve been lucky that so many of the places I work are beautiful. St. Catharine’s is one of the most astoundingly quick-growing cities I’ve ever been in – it seems like every concert cycle, there are three or four new businesses on St. Paul street alone. Thunder Bay has some of the most stunning views from inside any city, ever. I’ve played pops tunes beside Niagara Falls underneath fireworks displays, I’ve stood on the bank of the Detroit River and listened to a Creedence Clearwater Revival reunion concert being played in another country, I’ve gotten to live and work in places like Dundas and Ancaster which, as a Torontonian, would have remained in the category of “places vaguely near here that aren’t” if I hadn’t discovered how gorgeous and special they were. I’ve played on the rooftop of a condo in downtown Toronto while being filmed by a helicopter. My job, such as it is, for the past few years has been really exciting, and when I attempt to describe what I do to people, they invariably seem intrigued and somewhat envious. But also confused.
Because it’s hard to explain to people in other industries why this– where by “this,” I really mean this much gorram driving-- seems like a reasonable thing to do as some semblance of a regular job. And to a large extent, it’s not. It’s a totally ridiculous way to make a living that is wearing on me after only two years, and while there are some people who manage to sustain it long-term, I suspect I would opt-out if it started to seem like I might have to be one of them.
But at the moment, the pendulum is swinging the other way: In mid-August, I’ll load the car up and drive for four days, to Regina, where for the first time in my life I’ll be making all (or most) of my income from a single source, an employer who provides me with benefits and, following the tenure process, the guarantee of a job to come back to.
So, that’s different. It’s also eerily familiar: get in the car, drive, play. The timelines are just extended.
In all seriousness, though, I am really looking forward to this drive in the way that I don’t look forward to driving, say, in rush hour on the 403. I’ve done about half of it before– the bit between Toronto and Sault St. Marie, and then the Soo to Thunder Bay– and then the next two legs (Thunder Bay to Winnipeg, Winnipeg to Regina) are new to me (except I have been a passenger in a bus going Thunder Bay to Kenora… so yes, I will probably stop at Egli’s on my way by.)
I’m spending the summer, in chronological order: coaching gymnastics, going to Ottawa to have a lesson on Five Sacred Trees with Chris Millard, having a pre-party in Toronto for my wedding, going to ADULT GYMNASTICS CAMP WITH MY ADULT GYMNASTICS FRIENDS OMG THIS IS A REAL THING THAT EXISTS AND I AM GOING, getting married in Calgary, going on a honeymoon-type hiking adventure, possibly coaching some more gymnastics, and then… leaving.
I was waitlisted for Rice. Considering I started the process resigned to the idea of not even getting past the prescreening, I feel A-OK about that!
I participated in my very first concerto competition! A few weeks ago I flew to Toronto for a day to play in the finals of the Orchestra Toronto concerto competition. The winner ended up being a flutist that I went to McGill with (3/4 of the finalists were McGill people, interestingly…) but I was still very happy with how I played. Because of the competition, I ended up pulling out of the opera audition I was going to do around the same time after realizing that the job sounded good in theory but would actually be extremely inconvenient in practice. Plus, I could do the competition without missing out on any services in Thunder Bay, whereas for the audition I would have lost a few days worth of pay for an audition that didn’t serve my interests anyway.
I went to a barn dance at a farm in Neebing the other night with some symphony friends! Merrie, our principal trumpet, is also a Ceilidh dance caller, and her husband is a celtic fiddler who was playing with a guitar player visiting from Quebec. It was awwweeesome.
The symphony season ends on the 3rd of May, but I am staying an extra week to play a show with my wind quintet! It will be at 3 PM on May 9th at the Foundry. The title of the show is “Music of the Americas,” despite my mostly-joking suggestion of “Nothing European.” Entrance is by donation.
I guess I technically have two symphony seasons to play the ends of– I haven’t been in St. Catharine’s very much this year, but I’ll be with the Niagara Symphony for the last concert of the season on May 17, in which, bizarrely, we are playing one of the same pieces that we played in my first concert in Thunder Bay– Christos Hatzis’ Lamento, sung by Sarah Slean. This will be our last concert in Sean O’Sullivan theatre at Brock– next season, we will be moving into the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, the new PAC in downtown St. Catherine’s. (FirstOntario is apparently a credit union that made a major donation, but it’s kind of a snazzy name for it, isn’t it?)
The first time I saw Into The Woods was at the very first production put on by Music Theatre Montreal. It was late 2011 and a strike of the unionized support workers at McGill meant that all of the campus groups that had bookings at Moyse Hall– the main theatre in the Arts building– were out in the cold as far as spaces for their shows went. Since I was on the executive of such a group– The McGill Savoy Society, which usually books Moyse for a two-week run of Gilbert and Sullivan in February– this was obviously concerning. MTM was the first theatre group to have to face the problem, and despite every expectation that the show would be canceled, everyone involved in the production pulled together and managed to book a different venue and put on the show, a great success. I remember wishing that I was playing it, but since I was doing both Sweeney Todd and The Gondoliers that year, I wasn’t too deprived on the musical theatre front. The second time I saw Into The Woods was a few days ago, a Disney blockbuster with actors so famous, even I had heard of some of them! Okay, two– Anna Kendrick, who might as well have been filming an audition for the role of Cinderella with the music video for “Cups” (aka the Carter Family’s “When I’m Gone”), and, of course, Johnny Depp. My dad said that he thought Johnny Depp was becoming a caricature of himself: possibly true, but I don’t know what else can be expected of him from the role of pedophilic forest animal. The best thing about this movie, I think, is that it exists. Although it might seems a little bit pessimistic to say, I think it’s true that a lot of people who would never buy a ticket to a production of a Sondheim musical will see this movie. And that’s not necessarily because of any antipathy in modern culture for live music; it could be just price. Pretty much the only way to mount a top-notch production of a show and sell the vast majority (IDK, possibly excepting IMAX or whatever premium movie theatre tickets some people might buy) of the tickets for $10 or less is to make it a movie. There were some parts of the movie, too, that not only did the musical justice but actually improved on anything that could be done in a theatre: probably the highlight of the entire movie for me was the song “Agony,” in which Cinderella’s and Rapunzel’s princes compare their hardships as the true loves and saviors of their respective difficult women. The song is over-the-top and ridiculous, and the ability to make it ridiculous in a cinematic way only improved on the humour. (They splash around in a waterfall overlooking the kingdom, striking poses and ignoring the water damage to their presumably expensive riding boots.) The main problem with Into The Woods as a movie, then, was that it was just too damn long. Or rather, too damn long to not have an intermission. The structure of the acts in the show basically demands an intermission: at the end of the first act the characters all get their wishes and everyone lives happily ever after. Applaud, go buy a $6 Häagen-Dazs bar from the concession stand, and rally for the next act, which has a lot more weirdness and body count (which was diminished by one for the movie: Rapunzel lives.) With both acts run together, I was wishing it was over about 45 minutes before it actually was. With both Into the Woods and Mr. Turner-- a movie about British artist J. M. W. Turner– in theatres now, I eagerly await Hollywood’s take on Sunday in the Park with George.
Right now I am in the middle of getting familiar with some music that comes in chunks larger than I’ve ever played before. The first one is the Nutcracker, which the TBSO is performing with the Minnesota Ballet soon; 34 pages, all of it… well, written by Tchaikovsky. I went back and read Barry Stees’ post on the subject, where he says:
This juggernaut of a piece for the orchestra confronts many musicians at this time of year. If it were played just occasionally it would be universally hailed by musicians as one of the greatest pieces of ballet music. Instead, many musicians look upon it as a chore.
This strikes me as incredibly true. This performance will be my first time paying the piece, so I don’t feel any of the “ugh, this again” that lots of people seem to feel. That response seems to be pretty much the standard from musicians to the Nutcracker, which objectively doesn’t make a lot of sense. This is a piece that demands to be taken seriously; it’s difficult, long, written by a famous and well-loved composer, and performed every single year– what other piece of music gets to be performed on that kind of a schedule? But familiarity breeds contempt, of course, and for people with permanent positions in ballet orchestras… well, I would imagine they get pretty darn familiar with it. I’m also working slowly but steadily on an entirely new set of repertoire: my first opera audition! Opera, and opera auditions, seem to occupy a somewhat unusual space in the lives of orchestral musicians, especially younger ones. For some reason, the orchestral excerpts one is expected to learn at music school rarely include opera excerpts. Thus, whereas at this point in my life I generally expect one or two new-to-me excerpts on a list for a major orchestra, this, my first opera audition, features a whopping nine new excerpts to learn (and a few more that I’m only vaguely familiar with.) Then, of course, there’s the issue of listening to recordings of the excerpts. Thus far, the only way I’ve found to reliably locate an excerpt in the middle of a recording is to listen to the whole opera with a score. So, I figured that as long as I’m doing that, I might as well be organized about it. For each opera, I am going to choose a video reference and an online score (oh god, I hope I can find scores online for all of them) and take notes on the recording; where various landmarks in the score happen, and so on, so that I can easily come back to the excerpts later, and also locate other parts in the opera more easily, if I ever need to play an excerpt from the same opera, but in a different place. Ideally, I will end up with a collection of easily navigable video references for operas with common bassoon excerpts, that will also be useful to me if I have to actually learn the whole opera. So far, I am almost done with Cavalleria Rusticana. As well as timing notes, my document on it also contains a lot of notes about cuts the recording takes (which takes an extreeeemely long time to figure out, when you’re going along merrily and all of a sudden the recording is somewhere else…) and also errors in the score, such as pages being omitted or uploaded twice. So, a large part of the difficulty is dealing with the pedagogical shortcomings of the available materials. But, since The Orchestral Bassoon website doesn’t have most of these opera excerpts yet, someone’s gotta do it! Of course, it will also pay off in that I’ll be better prepared for an opera audition the more thoroughly I know the repertoire. And, of course, better prepared should I get an actual opera job! Basically, it seems like opera auditions have a higher barrier to entry than symphony auditions, because not all of the people who are familiar with symphony lists are familiar with opera lists. So I want to use this audition as an opportunity to break into the “people who can comfortably do opera auditions” club, and after having done the huge amount of initial work on this one, every opera list after this will have fewer and fewer new excerpts to learn from scratch. Perhaps after this I should get familiar with some ballet excerpts too… although, it seems like I’m doing that now– the only list turned up through a google search for “ballet bassoon audition” is all standard symphony stuff, plus generous helpings of the Nutcracker!
I just got back from Chicago!
I was in Chicago for the same reason every other bassoonist was– to audition for principal bassoon spot of the Chicago Symphony. This was something I decided to do during the Brott festival, more as a scheduling decision than anything else. I had all of September free, the audition was at the end of the month, and I figured I needed something motivating to do for the month after Brott ended and before Thunder Bay started. So, that was it. I booked a plane ticket from the computer at camp, once I decided I didn’t want to give myself the option of not doing it. (Sure enough the week before the audition I was cursing/thanking my past self for not giving my pre-audition self the option of backing out…)
My audition was on the 29th. There were, I believe, 80 people who played on that day, and there had also been two other days of preliminaries. They worked in groups of 8 people, announcing after every 8 who was invited back for the next round in January. Nobody in my group advanced, and I only know the name of the one person who advanced from the group before me, so I don’t really have any idea of how many people might be invited to the finals.
However, as we all know (do we all know this? Gabe Radford said this at NYO, and I think it’s true. You’ll know now!) the most important part of an audition is what you write and reflect upon afterwards.
(An aside, a quotation from Gabe’s audition seminar handout:
“Simply going to the audition is often the biggest hurdle. What will keep you going back to auditions with a happy and balanced approach is how you react to success and failure.
Start writing down some thoughts. You will never have greater clarity on the level of your performing than in the days after an audition. Refer to your notes before your next audition.
Whether it is a certain technical concern that keeps cropping up, or something specific that phases you on the day, if you jot it down after an audition, it will help you immensely for the next one.”)
For me, this audition had an element that I had never encountered before (besides, you know, being for an orchestra so famous that it feels ridiculous even to say you’re auditioning for.) Instead of giving you the excerpts that have been chosen shortly before you go onstage, and letting you put your music in order and warm up accordingly, they just told us that the first item would be the Mozart concerto, and we were to take only that on stage. All of the excerpts were then the CSO’s copies placed on the stand by the proctor during the audition.
This outlined a fairly serious flaw in my audition procedure: I rely way too much on visual cues! On one hand this can be a strength. Usually what I do is write a set of instructions on the music or on a sticky note on the page, which I read before beginning an excerpt every time. This has the advantage of a) reminding me of what I need to do to play the excerpt successfully, and b) providing a mandatory “downtime” between excerpts, where I can get into the mood of the next one. This is technically known as a “process cue” in sports psychology, although often mine also involve instructions that aren’t necessarily process cues (for instance, reminders to check the status of my whisper lock, Ab-Bb trill mechanism, or blow out my bocal.) So, these little notes I believe generally do me good. However… what happens when I can’t see them?
Usually, at auditions, I am very deliberate about the time in between excerpts being a good preparation for the next excerpt. But somehow, with the whole routine of my excerpt binder/process cue note thrown off, I suddenly became very bad at using my time in between excerpts. When the proctor placed the first movement of Tchaik 6 on the stand after Figaro, instead of calmly moving to switch reeds I felt sudden shock and panic: “oh god I have to use a different reed now shit my water container isn’t open oh god what if I drop it I wonder if it’s still soaked from the warmup room, better dunk it just in case oh god I’m taking too long they think I’m a moron, they’re wondering what the hell I’m doing that’s taking so long, look at this place I can’t believe I’m even here, hmm I wonder what it would be like to actually play Tchaik 6 in this hall, okay jam that baby on I need to start this damn excerpt right now let’s go…” Needless to say the first note of Tchaik 6 was not all that I hoped it would be.
So, based on that experience: writing stuff down is great, and if I were advising a young student on how to prepare for an audition with known repertoire I would probably advise them to give my note system a try for a while. However, after a certain point– say, maybe the point where you start auditioning for the Chicago Symphony– maybe a process cue needs to be able to be solely internal. The key to internalizing the process cue, however, will need to be doing it every time. There can be no skipping of steps in practice, because if I do, I might forget the step in performance. As an example, my process cue note for Rite of Spring looks something like:
-Lock off, Knob off (“Knob” is how I refer to by Ab-Bb trill mechanism. Because that’s what it is.)
-Blow out bocal and reed
-Hear first 2 bars in head for tempo
-Breathe 2 beats out, 2 beats in, begin note with no tongue but distinct beginning.
(When I actually played Rite of Spring, my instructions to myself got a little out of control, to the point that the 2nd bassoonist commented on the “novel” appearing at the top of the page. I erased the whole mess, simplified and re-wrote it, recognizing his important (if perhaps unintentional) point: if your process cue is too long or complicated, when you get to the performance, your adrenaline is going to prevent you from actually reading/internalizing the instructions. At least personally, I know that Performance Me doesn’t have a lot of intellectual power, so simpler is better.)
The first instruction– “lock off, knob off” is something that appears at the beginning of all excerpts: these two things I always check. (Obviously, it doesn’t always say “off”; sometimes it says “on”, for the ones where, well, I want one or both on.) That’s easy to internalize: before beginning any excerpt, at any time, practice or performance, I will always check the status of these to “presets” of my instrument. No exceptions, or I’m training myself to forget.
“Blow out bocal and reed” are similarly generic instructions, although might not be necessary for every excerpt (more planning and reflection needed on this count!)
The third instruction is different for every excerpt, but similar in form; I always choose a set number of bars to hear, so in this case I just need to remember how many bars of what I want to hear in my head. I don’t always choose the beginning of the excerpt; if it’s more appropriate I’ll choose to hear another instrument’s line, or a section from later in the piece (for instance, for the sixteenth notes in the last movement of Symphonie Fantastique, I hear the theme starting at 64 to get the tempo, instead of trying to pull the tempo of the bassoon part from thin air.) So, that element is different for every excerpt but memorizing what to hear in my head before I start playing can be made part of the process of learning the excerpt.
The last instruction is similar, in that it’s different for each excerpt but I always decide in advance the number of beats I will breathe out and then in.
When I’m practicing excerpts, though– and here’s the challenge with internalizing the process cue– I don’t always go through the whole process. Most often, I skimp on the “hearing” step; after all, I reason, if I just want to practice being able to play the excerpt, it doesn’t matter if I don’t hear it first to the exact extent that I’m planning on doing so in the audition– right?
BZZZZZT. Wrong!
Like I said– Performance Me is dumb. All she knows how to do is mindlessly reproduce whatever happened over and over in the practice room. And hey, that’s fine! As long as she can do that reproduction accurately, Practice Room Me can take care of the rest. Which means giving meticulous instructions to Performance Me by doing it the same way, every single time. (Unless the first way sucked, in which case she has to change the way, and then do the better way the same every… blah, blah, blah, you get the idea.)
So, that was one of the things that I took away from this audition! Obviously there were many other thoughts I had, which I recorded in my physical notebook immediately after the audition ended. This was the first time that I had been to an audition of this size, which is of course normal since there aren’t that many auditions of this size– which is partly why I felt compelled to go, and see what the real world is like.
In Canada, we are both privileged and in some ways hampered by our system of national/international auditions. On one hand, national auditions are great, and overall I think a positive force for music in Canada: they give orchestras the chance to find a qualified person in Canada first, which is awesome! Often people are frustrated when orchestras don’t hire from the national audition, but I prefer to think of it this way: National audition went nowhere? Cool! All the Canadians just got the advantage of having not just a mock audition, but a whole practice audition before the real audition, complete with the real performance space, list, and panel. How sweet is that? And then, of course, sometimes they do hire from the nationals, and that’s awesome.
The downside of the system, for me and people my age, is that it gives young Canadian musicians starting out in the audition scene an unrealistic idea of what the competition is like outside of the country. Canada has fewer people in it than the US, and thus proportionally fewer musicians on any given instrument competing for a job. Which is sometimes great! But then, it can be a bit of a shock to the system to go from Canadian national auditions for major orchestras that pull in maybe 20 bassoonists– all of whom probably know each other– to a big American orchestra like the CSO, which based on the number of people were on my day of preliminaries, I would guess had between 200 and 250 bassoonists audition. This is probably why there’s a strong tradition of Canadian musicians (and probably people in in other professional, merit-based fields) doing undergrads in Canada and graduate degrees in the US: it’s good to see what’s out there. Because it seems like mostly what’s out there is… a hell of a lot of other people.
Three days ago I played principal on both the Firebird and the Rite of Spring in the final Brott Festival concert– did I do that? hey cool, I actually did!– and then the next day my house began the slow process of de-Hamilton-izing.
This week I’m reading some quintets with some old friends from the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra days, playing in the orchestra for TaiwanFest at the Harbourfront Centre, and then going up to teach at the Interprovincial Music Camp for the last week of August!
Last week we had two shows at the Brott festival. On Friday we played The Poulenc double piano concerto, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Beethoven 5, and a premiere of a piece written by one of the professors at the college we were performing at for that concert, Redeemer University College. I played 1st on the two Beethoven pieces and 2nd on the Poulenc and the new work. I had never played or heard the Choral Fantasy before this concert cycle… it’s a very strange piece, which starts with an extended piano solo which then goes into the “Finale” which constitutes most of the piece. About 3/4 of the way through the work, the choir finally comes in, and the main theme is a kind of prototype of Ode to Joy. Verrry strange… also a scary 16th note passage near the beginning for 1st bassoon! It all went great, though, and the concert seemed well-received overall. Here is a review of that show.
Then on Sunday, we played Bruch’s Violin Concerto, a piece called Martlet’s Muse written by the Maestro’s father, Alexander Brott– which, strangely enough, is about McGill University– Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, and Pines of Rome. I played principal for Pines and second for everything else. I’m pretty sure I nailed the opening lick :P but it’s kind of hard to actually tell! That concert was especially fun because the orchestra had to bring in extra musicians, so there were plenty of new people. I had recommended my friend Kevin, who was in NYO for the past 2 years with me, so he came in to play contra and did a great job. The soloists for the night were Martin Beaver on violin and Nicolò Eugelmi on viola, and they both did masterclasses the next day for the strings. During that same time the brass had a masterclass with horn player Chris Gongos, and the winds had a masterclass with flutist Leslie Newman.
Today we have a day off, and my housemates and I went to this crazy produce place! It’s called Fiddles Wholesale Produce, and it’s operated in this warehouse out back of a residential house. They just have a warehouse floor and two giant walk-in freezers, and you fill a cart and a guy with a calculator figures out how much you owe (cash only). It’s way better quality than the supermarket and about half the price– I didn’t tabulate everything that I got but my housemate Lara did, and for $30 she got: 5 peppers, a bunch of bananas, an avocado, sweet potato, onion, 5 nectarines, an orange, 2 pints of baby tomatoes, basil, grapes, green beans, a kiwi, a pint of blueberries and a big container of raspberries. I got a similar haul, including a giant thing of lettuce that will keep our six-person house well-fed, salad-wise, for quite a while.
For the next week we have a bit of a break on the repertoire, since it’s two pops shows. The first one is Frank Sinatra, and the second is a SECRET. I’m not kidding, I actually can’t tell you. I can tell you to come to the show after that, though, which is Broadway, and the one after that, which is three different versions of the Romeo and Juliet story– Prokofiev’s, Tchaikovsky’s, and the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. You can browse the concerts here.
