Conducting an orchestra is like orchestrating a great meal. Will it be meat and potatoes tonight? Or are we pulling out all the stops with the caviar of performers meant to dazzle? To find out what works best in the classical kitchen, three conductors are taking us behind the scenes and into the back room, where their concerts are cooked up.
Bramwell Tovey of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Roberto Minczuk of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and Alexander Mickelthwate of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra are our chefs, ready to share their recipes for what goes into the making of a successful symphony concert.
Orchestras start their prep one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half years in advance. While conductors do have their own wish lists, seasons are generally programmed by an artistic team, usually consisting of the conductor, staff members and selected musicians from the orchestra.
“It’s a bit like baking a cake,” explains Tovey. His team starts with lists of what the orchestra has played in the past. They identify works that are due to be brought forward again (around every five years). “It’s also a lot of fun to try and find something the orchestra hasn’t played before, or something that they really need to play and have never done. I also take my own list of favourites."
“You stick that part of the programming on one side of the kitchen, then you go over to the other side of the kitchen and, doing a similar kind of thing, you look at the guest artists," Tovey continues. They make lists of favourite soloists from the past and young up-and-comers. Then it’s time to put those two preparations from either side of the kitchen together.
Since Minczuk arrived in Calgary six years ago, the orchestra has featured a big festival in each season that becomes the centrepiece of the season’s programming. “Then we look for repertoire that really excites the musicians,” he explains.
For Mickelthwate, it’s a matter of finding connections. He begins with the big pillars — the major composers and big pieces the orchestra wants to do. “Then it gets more and more interesting," he says. "The dynamics of the team is fun. People bring lists and everyone chimes in.”
Mickelthwate likes to choose a piece of music and find different ways to match it up and build a program. So when he chose a work by Beethoven, a revolutionary composer, he wondered what revolutionary composers we have today. “Then you create relations,” he says. “There is a constant back and forth, constant weighing of the saleability of the season and artistic integrity of the season, that there are new things for the city and for the orchestra, that it’s not only old hats.”
It all comes down to balance
All three conductors agree their goal is to strike a balance, in terms of repertoire and artists. For example, they try to include all periods of music, from baroque to contemporary.
They try to represent music from a variety of traditions (Germanic, French, South American, etc.) and link with various groups in their own centres. Since Mickelthwate has been in Winnipeg, he's been making connections with different communities, going where the people are. This year, for example, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra will feature Victor Davies’s Mennonite Piano Concerto and present a concert celebrating the 200th anniversary of the arrival of the Scottish settlers to Manitoba.
Another challenge is to balance the masterworks with less familiar and new music. Tovey says he tries to keep tried and true classics in every series, but he curates them in different ways. So more challenging repertoire is appropriate in different series.
Minczuk is also very committed to performing unfamiliar and contemporary pieces. “Every year in Calgary we have been playing works that have never been done,” he says.
This year’s festival in Calgary was called War and Peace, and featured the orchestra’s very first performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, Leningrad, and the world premiere of Afghanistan: Requiem for a Generation by Canadian composer Jeffrey Ryan.
“It’s important that we also have composers that are writing music that is relevant and has a connection with our generation and our time,” Minczuk says. “We have to have a balance between the great masterpieces and new great masterpieces.”
Anniversaries are also important to mark. Tovey says “we’re foolish to turn down anniversaries because there’s always some kind of serendipitous media coverage of the same event. For example, there has already been a lot of coverage of the 100th anniversary of the Rite of Spring. And we’re doing a big Stravinsky festival. There will be a lot of coverage in 2014 about the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. These kinds of big events are very important to programming.”
When it comes to soloists, there’s no denying the draw of star power. But because of expense, orchestras are able to hire only a few a year. And like foie gras, it’s best enjoyed as an occasional splurge. “It’s always exciting to have great soloists because they will attract a lot of people to the hall,” says Minczuk. “It’s exciting to work with great artists — people who inspire us onstage.” But he says he was also thrilled to work with the five young finalists of the Esther Honens Competition recently.
So how do you measure the success of a concert?
How do you know if you’ve satisfied the tastes of your guests?
“The longer I do it the less I know,” admits Mickelthwate. “There are pieces that are performed really well and programs that are really colourful but the audiences didn’t buy into so much.”
But he remembers being surprised at the end of a concert featuring a work by Silvestre Revueltas. “It was a fairly 'out there' concert but I distinctly remember people — like older ladies — literally lilting out of the concert hall completely excited. We didn’t expect that so it was a really successful program in the end.”
“There’s a warm and fuzzy feeling which emerges at the end of a concert on an anecdotal basis — I know it’s not very scientific,” says Tovey. “I suppose technically the way we measure it is on two levels. Did it make budget and did we advertise aggressively enough? And secondly, did the audience enjoy it? Was it an artistic success? It’s easier to guarantee artistic success than it is to guarantee a full house. It’s a constant game of checks and balances. So when you have those kinds of moments when there’s a sort of epiphany experience for the listener, that is always terrific. It’s hard to legislate for those, but we always try.”
Minczuk couldn’t agree more. “I measure it by the level of the performance — of excellence that you bring to the stage," he says. "It’s so great when you finish a Brahms symphony and you feel, yes, we did justice to this great work of music. And you feel it onstage in the musicians’ eyes and you grab your audience."
“So the greatest success — to really touch people’s lives with the message and the power of music," he continues. "And you can feel that. And when people come back to you and say that they were moved and touched, that’s exactly what we’re there for — to inspire people, to touch their lives."
I guess you could say, that’s the icing on the cake.
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